Last Year

by Robert Charles Wilson

  She couldn’t get air enough to give him an answer. He seemed not to expect one. The tip of the knife was in her, and now it went a little deeper. Her eyes clouded, some combination of hypoxia and tears, and she thought again of Gabriella, so impossibly far away.

  Then the tongue of the knife touched bone, her bottommost rib, sending an electric arc of pain through her body, and her spine arched, driving the knife deeper.

  Then, suddenly, the pain relented.

  “Come inside,” Roscoe Candy said, “where we can talk.”

  * * *

  Jesse stayed in the lower turret room with his eye to the door after the shooting stopped. Elizabeth, he thought, but there was no way of knowing what she was up to, and although he could charge down the big staircase with guns blazing—he gave it some thought—such a move would likely leave him dead and the hostages in danger. So he bit his lip and watched the corridor for several long, futile minutes, trying to make sense of the agitated voices drifting up from down below.

  After a few interminable minutes more, he heard the sound of multiple footsteps on the stairs.

  A crowd came up to the second-floor landing. Jesse counted seven people all together. Five of them were Candy’s henchmen, all cut from the same cloth: men with the upper-body strength of miners, all dressed in flashy clothing and all conspicuously armed. They varied in the details—younger, older, bearded, clean-shaven—but they were uniformly unhappy, snarling and gritting their teeth at whatever had just happened.

  After them came Roscoe Candy himself. It had been years since Jesse had set eyes on him, and Candy had diminished in the interval. Part of that was surely an illusion: The memory was larger than the man. Some of it was a genuine physical diminishment. Candy had not died of the wound Jesse had inflicted on him, but the wings of death had brushed him. He wasn’t the bean-shaped, muscular force of nature he once had been. His belly had shrunk and looked lopsided. His face was scrawnier. But his wide, deceptively gentle eyes—like the glass eyes they put in porcelain dolls, Jesse thought—had not changed. Nor had his taste in clothing: He wore a red-and-white-striped jersey, like a sailor’s jersey, and a striped schoolboy cap. Nor had he lost his love of honed blades. He carried a long-bladed knife, like a flensing knife, in his hand. He was holding it at Elizabeth’s throat.

  Elizabeth was the seventh person on the landing, and she was Roscoe Candy’s captive. Her dress was soiled and stained with blood. The blood came from her left flank, just under the ribs. The wound was messy but apparently not disabling—and a deep cut in that place would have taken her down quickly. She was pale and seemed frightened but not panicked. Her eyes repeatedly strayed to the knife in Candy’s hand, as if she were wondering how best to take it from him. Which, for all Jesse knew, she had been trained to do. But she didn’t know Roscoe Candy. How famously fast he was with a blade. How difficult to deceive or surprise.

  Candy’s men were arguing fiercely. Jesse caught the name Wheeler, the name of the lookout on the widow’s walk. Wheeler had been remiss in his duties was the gist of it; Wheeler had failed to warn them of something, presumably Elizabeth’s approach. Candy nodded at one of the five men and said, “Wake up that dog and send him down—tell him I want a word with him. And you stay up there and keep your damned eyes open. If this one’s come for us,”—meaning Elizabeth—“the other won’t be far behind.”

  The designated man headed down the hallway, straight toward Jesse’s hiding place in the turret room. The others approached Phoebe’s room, inside of which they would find one of their men dead—testimony to the fact that Jesse was already in the house and prepared to fight. But he could do nothing about that right now.

  He hurried up the iron staircase to the upper room and out onto the widow’s walk, stepping over the body of Mr. Wheeler, whose open eyes had gone cloudy. The moon shone down through a red, smoky haze. Jesse put his back to the wall and waited.

  Candy’s henchman came up the staircase as subtly as a buffalo, every footfall a bell-like clank. He came through the door onto the widow’s walk and looked at the corpse of Wheeler at his feet and blinked as if he thought Wheeler might only be asleep, at which point Jesse shot him through the head. Unpleasant residue flew between the struts of the iron railing to the shadowy garden below.

  By now Candy must have discovered the body in Phoebe’s room. Had he also heard Jesse’s gunshot? Maybe, maybe not. Jesse didn’t want to be cornered, so some misdirection was called for.

  He took from his pocket one of the two flash-bang grenades he had brought with him. The flash-bang, also called a stun grenade, was a simple device: a black canister about the size of a can of beans, with a bright metal ring hanging out of it. Like the Taser he had sold to Little Tom, it was one of a class of weapons the City people called “nonlethal.” The concept of a nonlethal weapon had sounded idiotic to Jesse when he had first been introduced to it—what was a nonlethal weapon supposed to do, annoy your enemies?

  No. In the case of the flash-bang, it was supposed to render your enemy temporarily blind, deaf, and disoriented—for thirty seconds or so, maybe longer if you factored in surprise and lingering confusion. But this particular flash-bang didn’t need to do any of that. It just needed to be loud.

  Jesse depressed the safety lever, pulled the ring, and dropped the grenade over the railing of the widow’s walk.

  He didn’t wait for the concussion but hustled into the turret and began to take the stairs two rungs at a time, no longer worried about the noise he was making. Plenty more noise to come, he thought. The grenade was on a two-second delay. It detonated as he was halfway between the upper and lower turret rooms. The stone walls of the house were impervious to anything short of artillery fire, but the concussion was audible even here. With any luck, it might have broken a window or two.

  He reached the door to the hallway in time to watch from hiding as Candy’s men reacted. Three men boiled out of Phoebe’s bedroom with Roscoe Candy’s curses following them: “Find that son of a bitch before the whole of California Street comes crowding in to see what blew up,” which was a real possibility, Jesse hoped, though the city’s fire brigades and police were almost certainly busy in the Chinese quarter.

  The three men headed downstairs, guns drawn. Which left Candy and one other man in the room with the hostages. Which sounded to Jesse like tolerable odds. Unfortunately, his only option was a frontal assault. Phoebe’s room had but a single door, and Candy was more than shrewd enough to have anticipated a hostile approach.

  But the time for subtlety was past. Jesse took a Glock in each hand and ran down the hallway. At Phoebe’s door he slowed and swerved and hit the door, which wheeled inward, revealing one of Candy’s gunmen braced against the opposite wall with a revolver aimed and ready. The gunman fired first, and Jesse felt the bullet as a sharp blow to his right arm, but it only turned him a little and he was able to get off a shot that passed through his opponent’s throat. The gunman gawked blankly and slumped down the wall, leaving a smeary trail of blood. Jesse ducked to make himself a smaller target and swiveled to survey the room, and here was Roscoe Candy himself, a gleam in his eye and a smile on his face and his flensing knife still pressed to Elizabeth’s throat. “Put your pistols down,” he said.

  * * *

  Jesse hesitated. But he had no real choice but to obey. And he didn’t have to ask what Candy’s next move would be. Candy would cut Elizabeth’s throat and force Jesse to watch her die.

  “Now,” Candy said.

  Jesse held the pistols by their grips and bent at the knee, keeping his eyes locked on Candy’s. Peripheral vision told him a few interesting things. Including the fact that Phoebe, Abbie, and Soo Yee seemed not to be present.

  “They’re in the closet,” Candy said. “Your sister, the old lady, the slant-eyed girl. But are they alive or are they dead? That’s the question!”

  It was not a question Jesse wanted to consider. He placed the City pistols on the carpet and straightened up.

 
“Now empty your pockets.”

  Jesse’s pockets were full to bursting. He had Wheeler’s pistol, spare clips for the Glocks, another flash-bang, and his iPod. He removed these items, taking as much time as he guessed Candy would tolerate, and spared a glance at Phoebe’s closet.

  It was a big space, he knew. Unless her habits had changed over the last five years, Phoebe didn’t keep much in it. Three people could stand in there and feel only moderately crowded. Or it could hold three corpses, stacked like cordwood. Jesse sensed no motion from inside. Heard no sound of movement.

  “You can’t help them,” Candy said.

  Jesse was careful about where he put his weapons as he arrayed them at his feet. Wheeler’s pistol behind the two City pistols. The stun grenade behind that, almost at his heels. He touched the power button of the iPod as he set it down at the front of this collection. The screen lit up as he straightened, icons arranging themselves in a grid of Easter-egg-colored squares. Candy frowned and took a sidelong step, pulling Elizabeth along with him, as if the device might fire a bullet at him. “What is that?”

  “It’s harmless,” Jesse said.

  “Step away from it.”

  “It can’t hurt you.”

  “Step back, you dog! I know better than to trust you.”

  Blood had begun to flow down Jesse’s arm from the place where Candy’s henchman had shot him. His right hand was slick with it. The pain, radiating from a place between his elbow and the ball of his shoulder, wasn’t unbearable. But three of his fingers had gone numb, a bad sign.

  Misdirection, he thought. Something his father had once said, teaching him larcenous card shuffles. Misdirection, the invisible weapon. He took a step back, just as Candy had ordered him to. The heel of his left foot came to rest on the pin of the flash-bang. Candy was troubled and distracted by the eerie glow of the iPod and failed to notice.

  But Elizabeth noticed. Even with Candy’s knife at her throat, she managed to cant her jaw in a shadow of a nod.

  Footfalls sounded on the stairway beyond the door, Candy’s men coming back to report on the situation downstairs. Maybe Candy wanted them here to see what happened next, beginning with the death of Elizabeth. Jesse’s margin of time had run out. He held his empty hands before him in an imploring gesture. “Please,” he said.

  Candy’s madly joyous expression grew even more gleeful. “If you mean to beg, Jesse Cullum, go right ahead! I won’t stop you!”

  “Please,” Jesse repeated. The heel of his right foot trapped the pin of the stun grenade and he stepped on the barrel of it with his left, compressing the safety lever as he kicked it away from the pin. The flash-bang rolled behind him, toward Phoebe’s bed and perhaps under it—he dared not look to see where it had gone.

  “Please what?” Candy demanded.

  One second. Two seconds.

  “Please go to hell,” Jesse said.

  Elizabeth jammed her hands between her throat and Candy’s wrist. She squeezed her eyes shut, and Jesse did the same.

  Shutting his eyes gave him a little protection from the flash, a fiery red starburst, but not from the bang. The bang did what it was designed to do—it boxed his ears, disabled his sense of hearing, induced dizziness and confusion, and interfered with rational thought.

  When Jesse opened his eyes, the room was reeling around him. Smoke gusted up from the floor in a sickening chemical reek. He was deaf, but it wasn’t a silent deafness, it was a deafness made out of the ringing of a hundred church bells and the roaring of a thousand dynamos. He saw, in a rolling succession of lightning-flash images:

  Elizabeth, who had stumbled out of Candy’s embrace, tugging frantically at the Velcro seam of her trick dress (an angry red line on her throat where Candy’s knife had touched her, but only a drop or so of blood)—

  Roscoe Candy, his schoolboy cap askew and both hands empty, his flensing knife on the floor where he had dropped it, weaving in place—

  And the door of the room, the knob of which began to rotate as one of Candy’s remaining henchmen turned it from the hallway.

  Jesse lurched toward Candy, leaving an open line of sight toward the door for Elizabeth. Elizabeth was peeling off the dress, revealing a cotton undershirt, a pair of ill-fitting men’s trousers, and a small arsenal strapped to her body.

  Jesse recovered fully functional vision and a degree of muscular control at about the same time Roscoe Candy did. The murderer locked eyes with him, and Jesse sensed the furious calculation going on behind that reptile stare. He’ll go for the knife or one of the guns, Jesse thought. But which?

  Candy was a knife man. Always had been. The knife, Jesse thought. He dived for it himself, hoping to turn it on its owner.

  But he had miscalculated. Candy went for the nearest pistol, dropping to the floor with his right arm outstretched and fingers scrabbling at the grip.

  Elizabeth had managed to raise her own pistol just as the door flew open. She squeezed off multiple shots, sounds fainter than a parson’s farts to Jesse’s tortured ears, but he felt the concussions in the air like a series of blows.

  Jesse took the flensing knife in his hand. The handle was still warm where Candy had been holding it. Candy had got his hand on the grip of the pistol and his finger inside the trigger guard, but before he could raise it Jesse rolled on top of him, kneeling on Candy’s gun arm and pinning him in place with the weight of his body. He brought his other knee hard up against the place Jesse had hurt him once before, that old but still vulnerable wound, and Candy howled loudly enough for Jesse to hear him above the sound of phantom bells.

  Elizabeth fired two more shots, perhaps needlessly. The door wheeled fully open, revealing two men dead and another clearly dying—and no one else in sight.

  Jesse put the knife to Candy where the point could pass between the slats of his ribs to his heart. No mistake this time. No hesitation. He punched the blade past bone and gristle and the glutinous resistance of dense flesh. He leaned into it, using his weight to keep Candy’s right arm immobilized. Candy flailed fiercely, his heels kicked the carpet, his body bucked like a bull at a Wild West show, but Jesse pushed and kept pushing, surprisingly hard work, like butchering some leathery old hog, until the knife was buried right up to the guard.

  It had found a vital point. Roscoe Candy died screaming, but not before he managed to squeeze off a few shots from the pistol, in the only direction he could point it: at the door of Phoebe’s closet.

  17

  Mercy Kemp wasn’t frightened until she heard the detonations from the California Street mansion.

  Well, that wasn’t strictly true. She had spent much of the last two years in a generalized state of anxiety, bordering on fear. Living as a runner, with a man who might as well have had a target painted on his back, had conditioned her to it. But the idea that she could actually be left behind, that she might be permanently stranded in this instantiation of 1877, had only recently begun to feel real. And it felt particularly terrifying now that she was cuffed to Theo Stromberg, in a closed coach on a street above a burning city.

  Theo hadn’t taken any of this gracefully, but that wasn’t surprising. Mercy’s infatuation with him had long ago shriveled into an abstract admiration for the work he was doing. From the beginning of their journey into this tranche of Hilbert space, Theo had proved himself to be dogmatic, narcissistic, and arrogant, a textbook pain in the ass. And she was resigned to that. Fact: Important work was often done by unpleasant people. “Can you see anything?” he asked for the third time.

  Mercy peered around the edge of the isinglass shade, but nothing had changed. She could see the spectacularly ugly Italianate mansion into which Jesse Cullum and Elizabeth DePaul had apparently vanished, she could see the glow of the distant fires, and she could see the gathering crowd. “No.”

  The flex-tie handcuff chafed her wrist. Theo kept tugging at it, pointlessly—even gnawing at it with his teeth at one point—though this only made the irritation worse. Mercy had stopped sleeping with Th
eo (that is to say, fucking him; they still shared a bed when it was necessary) three months into their sojourn here. Despite that, the collegial aspects of their relationship had remained more or less intact. She had composed more than one of his famous letters for him, and she knew why they had to be written. Though she had always been uneasy about the guns.

  “The guns are tokens,” he used to say. “To prove we’re who we say we are. The progressive papers might be satisfied with a few fulfilled prophecies, but what does that mean to Chief Joseph or a black family in Grant Parish?” He had never included more than a single clip of ammunition with any of the Glocks he shipped to endangered communities. “It’s a way of saying, expect violence. Of saying, we have seen the future, and it fucks you over, and some of us aren’t okay with that.”

  The part about expecting violence was undeniably true. That violence was erupting all around them, in the repeal of Reconstruction, the murders in the South, war between workers and the railroads—in the mob attack on Chinatown, maybe even in this Nob Hill mansion. She had heard two detonations in the last few minutes, the first and louder of them accompanied by a burst of light. She remembered, two summers ago in Paris, a seminar for activists that had taught her the basics of noise cannons, kettling, tear gas, and concussion grenades. Bright light, big noise, no flame—was it actually possible that Jesse or Elizabeth had detonated a flash-bang?

  She wasn’t sure what to make of Elizabeth DePaul, who worked for Mercy’s father but who seemed a little more thoughtful than the job description would suggest. Jesse Cullum was even more enigmatic, a local hire whose term of employment was obviously coming to an end and whose loyalty to August Kemp had probably reached its best-before date. Which was maybe why they had come here to do whatever they were doing, rather than taking Mercy and Theo to the docks as had been arranged. Some urgent and violent errand of Jesse’s, Mercy guessed, which must have gone bad in a big way, if grenades were being deployed.

  But on a purely intuitive level, for no defensible logical reason, she wanted to trust Jesse Cullum. Elizabeth, on the other hand … had Elizabeth really learned that this slice of Hilbert space was not Frontierland? Or was she still clinging to the illusion the City fostered, of the past as a kind of disposable virtual reality, a dream that vanished as soon as you took the goggles off?