The Library at Mount Char

by Scott Hawkins

  IV

  Time was short now. The bullet had caught David a little bit high of perfect, half an inch or so too far up the cheekbone—a small miscalculation. The left half of his face was mostly gone. She could see his brains. Even taking his training into account, David would die quickly, one or two more heartbeats at most.

  But both of his eyes worked, and he still had an ear. Any one of those would have been enough. Carolyn wrapped her hands around the back of his neck and pulled herself up. She examined the gaping hole in his head, reached up with the tip of one finger, and touched him, very gently, in a deep part of his brain. A small spark flashed at her touch. Then, in the second heartbeat, she leaned in close and whispered in David’s ear, speaking the word that Father whispered to Mithraganhi so very long ago when he called up the dawn of the fourth age.

  For David, hearing this…

  …time…

  …stopped.

  Carolyn slumped back onto the asphalt. Her breath puffed white under the streetlamp. She smiled a little, but couldn’t bring herself to do much more. I did it, she thought. I really did. She felt no real triumph, not even relief. She was numb.

  It was a pleasant species of numbness, though.

  As a side effect of being outside of time, David was now weightless. She pushed him off her with the barest touch. He hung frozen in the night air, bobbing slightly, like a deflating balloon.

  Carolyn heard footsteps behind her. “Hello, Erwin.” Her voice was very hoarse. She sat up, coughing, and wrapped her arms around her knees. “Can you help me up?”

  “Err…” Erwin said, speaking through lips that were split and swollen, “I ain’t for sure. I’ll try.” He limped toward her a little quicker. He was holding his left hand over a bleeding hole in his leg. In his right was the HK with which he had shot David. Smoke curled up out of the barrel.

  Erwin reached down with one thick hand. Carolyn took it. He lifted her easily.

  “What’s wrong with him?” He poked David with a finger. He spun easily, a foot or two off the ground.

  “Don’t do that,” she said. “Let me in there for a second, would you?”

  Erwin looked at her, then shrugged and stepped back.

  She stopped David’s spinning, then turned him so she could examine the wound. It would certainly have been fatal, even for one such as David. The left side of his head was missing. “Good shot,” she said, “almost perfect, really.” She flicked her eyes at Erwin. “The angle was a little off, but that was my fault. We were supposed to be at a seven degree angle to you, but it was more like nine. It was tough to focus with that darn spear hole in my leg.”

  “Yeah,” Erwin said slowly. “I ’spect it was. How’d you know I’d—”

  “Command Sergeant Major Erwin Charles Leffington, US Army, retired. Born April 8, 1965, late of the Eighty-Second Airborne. Before that, two years in US Army Marksmanship Unit. When was the last time you missed a shot, Erwin?”

  “Before tonight, you mean?” David had allowed Erwin to empty the pistol at him before they arrived, for sport. “I don’t remember exactly,” he said. “It’s been a while.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up about it. You couldn’t have hit him earlier. No one could. Come over here; let me take a look at that leg.” She squatted down to examine the cut in Erwin’s thigh. “You’re OK. No arterial bleeding. He was going to play with you for a while.” She lay back on the street. “I’m sorry about that. I had to wait until you were pretty beaten down. That way he wouldn’t consider you a threat.”

  “ ’Saright. Don’t mind takin’ some licks in a good cause.” Erwin spat. “And that guy was a real asshole.”

  “You have no idea.” Carolyn closed her eyes, collecting herself. I did it, she thought again. I really, actually did.

  “So…what did I miss?” Steve asked. He and Naga were walking down the road from the direction of the Library. “What happened here?”

  “Dammit, Steve!” Carolyn said. “I told you to wait in the Library. Don’t you ever listen?”

  “You’re not the boss of me.”

  Erwin looked over his shoulder. “Hey, kid. How ya doin’?”

  Steve gave him a little wave. “C’mon, don’t keep me in suspense. What happened?”

  “Well,” Erwin said, “basically that asshole there was all strangling her, so I kinda shot him a little. In the face, like.”

  “Thanks, by the way,” Carolyn said.

  Steve furrowed his brow, confused. “How’d you manage that? When we rolled up you had just run out of bullets.”

  “I wondered about that myself,” Erwin said. “It was the damnedest thing. So, like, when you guys showed up the big dude just dropped me. I was too punchy to fight. I was gonna fall back to that house over there”—he pointed at the only house on the street with lights on—“and call for backup. In training, they drilled it into us never to leave a weapon on the field—I used to beat the shit out of guys for that—so on the way I grabbed my pistol, even though it was empty. Kind of by reflex, like.

  “Then, when I was circling around the streetlight, I happened to look down. And, y’know, fuck me if there wadn’t a full magazine right there in front of the sewer. Not the cleanest I’ve ever seen, but after I wiped it off on my shirt it worked just fine. I couldn’t believe it. It was like magic.”

  “No such thing.” Carolyn blew twin columns of smoke out her nostrils.

  “Whoa,” Steve said. “I bet I know where it came from. Can I see that?”

  Erwin held up the pistol but didn’t hand it over.

  “Is that the same gun I took when I went out running?” Steve asked. “The one you gave him earlier?”

  “It is, yeah,” Carolyn said.

  “Then the magazine you found must have been the same one I dropped when the dogs jumped me.”

  “Hey, I bet it is!” Carolyn said. She laughed. “Imagine that!”

  Both the men were looking at her now. “So…” Steve said slowly. “You set this whole thing up? Me running yesterday…the dogs…so I would drop the magazine, where Erwin could find it? Right then, when David was grabbing you?”

  “Yes.” Carolyn’s eyes blazed out like searchlights in the night. “Yes. I did.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, David was kind of a jerk.”

  “No, I mean why go to all that trouble? Couldn’t you just—”

  “There’s no ‘just.’ ” She stepped around David’s floating body, examining him as she spoke. “Not with one like David. He’s too skilled. He was the master of his catalog in all but name. Once I watched him kill a hundred Israeli soldiers—armed men—with that knife of his. That was just an exercise, part of his training. If you didn’t take measures to stop it, he could hear your thoughts. There’s no one on Earth who could have beaten him in a fair fight. But here, inside the reissak—”

  “The what?” Erwin said.

  “Reissak ayrial,” Steve chimed in. “It’s kind of a perimeter-defense system. It’s very advanced!”

  Erwin gave him a look.

  “Nothing to do with microwaves, though. That part was bullshit.”

  “You’re kind of a smartass, ain’t you, kid?”

  Steve nodded modestly, scuffing his feet in the dirt like John Wayne talking to the pretty schoolmarm. “Yeah.”

  “Well, couldn’t you have—”

  “Sent in the Army, maybe? A shitload of professionals—big, burly fellows, well trained, with a lot of guns? Mmmmaybe—just maybe—I could figure out a way to get someone like Delta Force involved. Surely that would do it?” She made a show of sniffing the air. The breeze still carried a hint of burning oil from the crashed helicopters. “Oh, wait…” She laughed again.

  “OK,” Erwin said. “But how’d you know I’d be—”

  “Do you like that job with Homeland Security? Interesting work, I bet. Right up your alley.”

  “Yeah…”

  “How’d you end up there?”

  “Kind of an accid
ent,” Erwin said. “I went out to lunch and—”

  “Ran into an old buddy of yours? Someone you knew in high school? Just a chance thing? A real long shot?”

  Erwin didn’t answer, only looked at her. Understanding dawned in his eyes.

  Steve got it too. “Holy friggin’ crap.”

  “I’ve been working on this for a long time,” Carolyn said. “I like to plan. It’s something I’m good at. You’ve seen those guys who do trick shots in pool? Make the cue ball jump, or roll backwards or whatever? This was my trick shot.”

  Erwin and Steve looked at each other. After a moment, Erwin nodded. “Ah-ite. If you say so, I guess I believe ya. But why’s he all floaty like that?”

  “That was me too.”

  “Yeah, I figured,” Erwin said. “What I mean is, how?”

  “I put him outside of time.”

  “Come again?”

  “I changed some physical constants inside his body. For him, time isn’t passing anymore.” Her throat felt ragged, torn. She coughed, then spat blood into the snow. “David won’t fall because, falling, you see, that’s a process. But if time doesn’t pass, there really can’t be a process, as such, can there?”

  Erwin chewed on this, then filed it away for later consideration. “Yeah, OK. Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why’d you, uh, do it? He woulda been dead in just a second or two, I figure.”

  She nodded. “Yes. He would have. That’s why.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Have you ever died?”

  Erwin gave her a look. “Can’t say as I have.”

  “I have, a couple of times. It’s not as bad as you might think. Not nearly bad enough for him.”

  “But this is?”

  “I’m not sure. But he thinks it’s worse. That’s what matters.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, David died a good bit. It was part of his training. Not as much as Margaret, but enough that he was used to it. A few years ago I overheard the two of them talking about it. By then Margaret didn’t care. She’d kill herself if dinner was late. But she said that there was one part that still bothered her. Not the pain—they could deal with pain. Any of us could. But she hated the realization.”

  Carolyn paused. “Well, no. That’s my word, not hers. How did she put it? She said she still felt it, even now, in her stomach and the soles of her feet. When the wound was struck and no one could save her, her body knew. Margaret’s died every way you could think of, but she said that part was the worst thing she knew. And David agreed with her.”

  “That’s where David is now.” She smiled. “That moment when he feels it in his stomach and the soles of his feet. Wazin nyata—the moment when the last hope dies. He’ll be there forever.”

  At the sight of her smile Steve fell back half a step. Even Erwin flinched a little.

  Her instinct was to make her expression neutral. But why? There’s no reason to hide. Not anymore. She looked down at her hand. Her fingertips no longer trembled.

  “He pissed you off too, huh?”

  “A bit. Yeah. Got a smoke, Steve?”

  “Right before you did…whatever…before you froze him, you touched him,” Erwin said. “Inside the wound, like. Why’d you do that?”

  Steve handed her a Marlboro, then lit another for himself.

  “You saw that, huh? Yeah, I gave him a little shock. Static electricity, right in the parieto-insular cortex.”

  “The what?” Steve asked.

  “The pain center of his brain,” Erwin said.

  “Exactly. It wasn’t much—barely more than you’d get from touching a doorknob after you’d rubbed your feet across the carpet. But of course you don’t need much, not when the anatomy is laid out in front of you like that.”

  “They did experiments,” Erwin said. “Cheney’s guys, trying to figure out what to do with bin Laden. I heard stories. You give somebody a shock like that, it’d be the sum of—well not just every pain you felt, but every pain you possibly could feel. All at once, like.”

  “Yes.”

  “And then you froze him? In that moment, exactly?” Steve thought about it for a second, then gave a low whistle. “Why?”

  Carolyn remembered how the rain ran warm, remembered the salty, coppery taste of Asha’s blood. “Because wazin nyata isn’t enough. Not for him. This, though…I’m pretty sure that it’s the worst thing that ever happened to anyone, anywhere. Ever. I think it’s the worst thing that can happen, the theoretical upper limit of suffering. Despair and agony,” she said. “Absolute. Unending.”

  “Damn,” Erwin said. “That’s some fucked-up shit.”

  “Thanks, Erwin. That means a lot, coming from you.” She blew smoke up into the night sky. “I wanted to do it by impaling him on that spear of his, or maybe to nail him to a desk. But I couldn’t figure out a way to make that work. This will have to do.” She examined David with a surgeon’s eye and a malice that had no bottom. “And I think it will. Yes. It’s working already.”

  “What is?”

  “Look in his eyes and tell me what you see.”

  Steve and Erwin leaned in. “They’re black,” Steve said. “I mean, not like he got bruised. The whites of his eyes are black. And…are they glowing, a little?”

  “Yes.” She saw it too. “I thought so, but it could have been the light.” Carolyn spun David to face her.

  It was very dark out now—no moon, no stars. The snow that fell on her did not melt. Her brow was in shadow, but when she took a drag from her cigarette, twin reflections blazed orange in the dark pools of her eyes. “Scream.” She spoke softly, in Pelapi. “Try to scream. If you scream for me, I’ll stop.” Smiling now. “If you scream for me, I’ll let you go. Going once…going twice…no?”

  V

  Now Steve and Erwin were both giving her looks. Anyway, David can’t hear me. She let her hand drop. When she spoke next she made an effort to sound normal. “Yeah, that’s a good, strong connection. I must have timed it just right.”

  Naga sniffed David, then yowled.

  “You fed that lion lately?” Erwin asked.

  “She’ll be fine.” Steve patted Naga on her back. She shoulder-dived against his hip. “She’s just a big ol’ sweetie. Ain’t ya, girl?”

  Carolyn smiled and crushed out the Marlboro under her bare foot. “Got another?”

  Steve fished out the pack. The two of them lit up. Steve held out the pack to Erwin.

  Erwin waved it off. “That shit’ll kill ya.” He put in a dip instead.

  “You’re bleeding,” Steve said. There was real concern in his voice.

  She looked down. Blood was dribbling out of the hole in her thigh—it didn’t squirt the way it would have if an artery was nicked, but it was bad enough. “Oh, right. That. Steve, could I get you to run and get something for me?”

  “Sure. What do you need?”

  “I need to patch my leg up. Erwin’s too. Remember that pile of stuff I left for you in the living room of that white house?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “There’s a big canvas bag tied with twine. Get that, some bandages, and as much water as you can carry. Pressure bandages, if there’s any left.”

  “Will do.” Steve took off.

  “Erwin, can I have one of your shoelaces?”

  “Er…yeah. If you want.” He took off his Reebok and extracted the lace, then handed it to her. “What do you need it for?”

  She tied one end of the lace to David’s hairy big toe, and the other to a mailbox. “We’ve got one more thing to take care of, and I don’t want him bobbing off.”

  —

  CAROLYN WASN’T AS skilled as Jennifer, but their wounds weren’t all that bad. She packed the hole in her foot and leg with a gray powder, then poured water on it. As she worked on Erwin, the powder knitted itself into flesh, pink and new.

  They found Margaret just outside the gate, still playing with the president’s head.

 
; “You killed David,” Margaret said. She didn’t look up. “How could you kill David?”

  “Not exactly.” Carolyn felt ferocious, triumphant…but she was wary as well. It was hard to tell what went on in Margaret’s head. “That would have been too good for him. I found something worse.”

  “Worse than the forgotten lands?”

  Carolyn’s smile was streaked with blood. “Much.”

  Margaret looked up, interested for the first time. “Really?” She searched Carolyn’s face. “It is true. You did. You are a horror, then. I did not know.” She smiled. “We are sisters.” Then, to the head, “David said she might be reading outside her catalog, but I didn’t beeee-leeeeeeeve him. She seems so pink and mousy.” She punctuated “pink” and “mousy” by poking the president in his cheeks. The head tried to moan, but it had no air.

  Margaret moaned for it, weaving her head back and forth in the night. Then something occurred to her. “Father will be upset.” She made the head poke out its bottom lip.

  “Father is gone too. I killed him.”

  “He’ll be back. He always comes back.”

  “Not this time.”

  Margaret wavered. She spoke softly. “You have ended Father? Ended him forever?”

  Carolyn thought she saw the faintest, tiniest flicker of expression in Margaret’s face. Hope, perhaps? She couldn’t tell. “Yes. He’s gone.”

  “Forever?”

  “Forever.”

  “Oh.” Again that little flicker of expression, hard to read. “I believe you.” She looked back down at the head, then back up, as something new occurred to her. “Then you are horror and death. Yes?” She looked at Carolyn seriously, waiting for an answer.

  Carolyn blinked. “I guess you could put it that way.”

  “Then I suppose that makes you my mistress.” She set the president’s head on the ground, stood up, and curtsied. “What would you have of me, madam?”

  Carolyn didn’t know what she had expected, but this wasn’t it. “Only one thing.” She looked at Erwin, nodded. Erwin raised his pistol.

  “Oh,” Margaret said, bored again. “You are sending me home?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hmm.” She paused. “May I ask one thing? Madam? A favor, please?”