by John Barnes
I crept forward and found a complete set of clothes at the rail—clothes that would have fit me perfectly.
I stared at them for a long second. Had he stolen a uniform and boldly dressed in it right here, was he naked for some reason—
I looked over the rail to the dark, brooding bulk of Long Island, still farm country where it wasn’t outright wilderness, and my thoughts came together with terrible speed. I leaped to the engine room, found it locked, beat on the door, and shouted for a moment without any response.
There could be no more than a minute to spare. I yanked the Model 1911A1 from its holster, thought, Don’t jam now! and laid it against the lock and bolt. I wanted to make sure a single round would do the job—I had only the round in the chamber, one fresh magazine in the Colt, and two magazines in my pockets; when you’re trying to change all of history it’s a good idea to make sure you have enough ammunition.
I pressed the muzzle hard against the surface, to get the round angled to shatter the lock and, with a little luck, then cut the bolt as well. The trigger squeeze was slow and smooth, the kick against my hand was ferocious as a little pressure backed up into the barrel (and amazingly, it didn’t jam as I’d half expected it to).
There was more shouting behind me now, and they’d be here in seconds; I kicked the door open—it bounced a foot or so open and then bounced back. I shoved hard with my shoulder, against some resistance on the other side.
It was what I might have expected. The engineer was in there, and both stokers, and all had rolled against the door from where the bodies had been piled on an overhead fuel bunker. All three of them had round holes in their faces, the size hole a pencil might make if you jabbed it hard into a watermelon, and all three of them had baseball-sized chunks torn from the backs of their heads and sprayed on the walls; there was a smell of cooking meat where one such chunk had smeared across the hot face of the boiler.
Apparently my Closer doppelganger also liked the Colt Model 1911A1.
All that I saw in a short glance, in the vivid red light pouring from the firebox, so that even now in my memory I see it all in reds and blacks, the shadows deep and hard and everything else stained shades of red and orange in the flaring, dancing light. It was a scene out of hell, and yet none of it was interesting, at least not compared to what I was looking for, not at that moment. I was looking for something in particular, and unfortunately there were twenty or thirty things it could look like … a lump of clay, a black box, an irregular package, an old barrel, but it would be—
There. On the side of the boiler there was a silvery cylinder, about the size of a can of tomato juice or a two-pound can of coffee, stuck onto the iron surface with what looked for all the world like black roofing tar. It did not look like it belonged there.
I had seconds to work, and chances were I was dead anyway. Since that other Mark Strang had gone over the side like that, into water cold enough to kill you in minutes—even if he had a wet suit and scuba gear at his disposal, he was in a hurry. And if he was in a hurry, he hadn’t set the timer for very long.
So, with no time for anything better, I did something I really don’t recommend if you find a bomb—I grabbed it with my bare hands, braced a foot for an instant on the burning-hot surface of the boiler, and yanked that silver cylinder with all my strength.
There was a sucking, tearing noise, and it came off as if it had been stuck on with very old bubble gum. I pivoted on my remaining foot, put my other foot down, and was about halfway through a crude pitch-out when I realized there were two big goons with pistols in the doorway. They raised the pistols, staring at me; I held the bomb in front of me, and said, “Dynamite,” with as much control in my voice as I could manage.
Their eyes got wider, but their pistols didn’t move. I began to walk very slowly toward them, and said, still keeping my voice level and slow so that they would understand what I was saying, “I don’t understand the fuse on this thing. It may have a clock inside, or go off when it is bumped.” On my third step I was pushing the bomb toward the point where their shoulders overlapped. If they had wanted to take it from me, I’d have let them, but they backed out the doorway.
Out of the blazing heat and red light of the boiler room, the air rushing out around us making yet more fog, we must have looked like three shadows in a complex dance. I had lost my night vision from my time in the boiler room, and I was stumbling just a little, taking short steps and trying not to fall in the sudden dim, blue fog. My hands were hurting incredibly, and I knew that the cylinder was burning them; if that had been a modern high-pressure boiler, I’d have had third-degree burns if I didn’t just lose my hands, but fortunately a wood-fired low-pressure boiler doesn’t get much above the boiling point. It was merely like grabbing a pot of boiling water off a stove with your bare hands and then slowly walking twenty feet with it.
I knew I wasn’t far from the aft rail, anyway, and as I continued toward the two big guys, they parted before me, and when they slid sideways to be out of my way, that told me about where the rail had to be.
This time there was nothing to prevent my pitch-out; the cylinder rose over the railing in the smeary, gray-red light, etched against the fog, faded and blurred in outline, and was gone into the fog; an instant later there was a splash.
I turned to face my captors, holding my hands over my head. I could feel my hands stinging in the salt spray, and I didn’t want to think about what that indicated; I would have to give myself one of my two remaining injections of nanos to heal that, and I wasn’t at all sure, offhand, whether the kit with those was in my pocket, where I hoped it was, or in my bag—which was god knows where.
The two men closed in gingerly, and one said, “You would be the Mark Strang wanted in Boston for wanton murder?”
“I am in fact his twin brother, Ajax Strang,” I said, “but I know how much like a lie that sounds, and you might as well take me in, for I’m sure I’ll have to prove it in front of a judge sooner or later.”
“And was it your brother who murdered Dr. Warren and Steward Little?”
“It was.”
“And the engineers?”
“Yes.”
“And where is he now?”
“His clothes are beside the railing back there,” I said, “and I can only assume that he has gone over the side and swum for Long Island. It’s very cold, but if he has confederates ashore—and I am all but certain that he does—he can probably live to tell of it.”
“Mr. Strang,” the shorter one said, “since you have already said you don’t expect us to believe you, I will only say that of course we don’t. If you’ll please keep your hands up, sir, then we can—”
The light was so bright, even through the fog, that my first thought was that lightning had hit, and my second was of a nuclear bomb. I was facing away from it when suddenly the fog flashed in my eyes, and it made my eyes hurt and my head ache; the men facing me were facing the light, and they were temporarily blinded.
I guess that was why they didn’t shoot me when I flung myself to the deck on my stomach, ignoring the agony of my burned hands slamming onto the hard surface. The truth was that I wasn’t thinking at all; I just knew something really bad was about to happen.
In the time we had been talking, the John Locke had gotten more than a mile from the point in the Long Island Sound where I had heaved the bomb overboard. Sound travels at twelve miles per minute, or about a mile every five seconds; I had a long breath or so, there on the deck, to listen to the screams of fear and pain from those who had been awake and looking the wrong way, to watch the boots of the men who had arrested me take a few aimless pain-filled steps around on the deck, and to feel the swollen agony of my hands on the rough, cold, salty deck. I even had time to say to myself that at any moment the sound would come and that I had better get my hands over my ears to prevent ruptured eardrums.
I felt my elbows begin to press on the deck to move my hands to my ears—
I had forgotten that so
und travels much faster in water, the concussive effect from an explosion is nothing but a giant shock wave. The deck below me slammed up into me with terrible force; it felt like being pressed against a door that was being taken down with a headache ball, like being a mouse flung into the air by some sadistic kid and then hit like a ball with a baseball bat.
There was a long dark second of knowing nothing, and then it was terribly, unbelievably cold, and I couldn’t breathe. With all my strength I lashed out in all directions, but things were holding me, my movements were dreadfully slow, and—
My hand broke out of the water over my head, and I realized I was floating, with a big bubble of air between my shoulder blades trapped under my coat. I stroked down with my arms and raised my head, just like they teach you in Boy Scout swimming classes, and sucked in a big gulp of icy air. It was wonderful stuff, even though it set me coughing, so that it was three or four more bobs upward before I got my breath for good.
Even in that short time I had become so cold that my arms and legs were numb, but I managed to tread water and, using my stiff, burned hands, get my pants off. Fortunately they were just knee breeches and two hard yanks were enough to tear out the buttons near the knees, though it skinned my already burned hands under the salt water, and I came close to fainting. With one more yank I got the belt off, and with another the pants came down. It took forever to knot the legs into a loop—maybe a whole minute or so—but then I was able, with a hard kick in my treading water, to whip the tied breeches over my head, filling them with air, pull the open waist down into the water, and stick my head between the tied legs. The pants inflated beautifully, another thing that worked just like in Boy Scout camp, and now besides the air in my coat I was being held up by the air-filled “collar” formed by my pants.
That meant it no longer took any muscular effort to keep my head out of the water. I began to kick, slowly, looking up often, trying to make for the black bulk of Long Island by the shortest way I could, though in truth from my position, with my eyes only inches above the water, I could only see that some parts of the horizon had a dark band of land above them, and not which of those was closer. I had not kept any sense of direction between the explosion and finding myself in the water.
I figured that two thousand strokes of my legs ought to bring me to land if I kept pointed in the right direction, and so I started kicking, resolving to count to three thousand before pausing to take stock. This was not a good time to start the kind of thinking that leads to seeing the world as futile, let alone for noticing that if there are billions of timelines and hundreds of millions of galaxies in every one of them, one life doesn’t matter much, and I was cold and tired, and that my hands really hurt. Pain kills endurance—that’s why in collision and combat sports you try to land some blows on your opponent even if those blows couldn’t be effective enough to win, just so that the poor bastard gets tired faster.
Two hundred and fifty strokes later the shore was about where it had been, my hands hurt more, and my legs were beginning to ache. I shifted to a sidestroke kick and kept going. Do this twelve more times and then think about it. Jeez, the water was cold … good thing I was in shape, but even so I could easily have had a heart attack hitting this stuff at this time of year. …
The night had finally turned clear, or maybe the shore breeze was tearing the fog away. The moon was incredibly bright, with no competition from the ground, and the stars seemed to blaze rather than twinkle. It was dark enough so that I could see the colors of the stars easily … so nice and dark, and now that I was keeping a steady beat going with the sidestroke, I was warming up quite a bit. I could almost just go to sleep in the nice water for a bit.
What was the count? I thought I had counted six hundred a while back, but maybe it was only five, or then again perhaps I’d missed a hundred a couple of times and it might be a thousand. How could you keep track when it was so boring? At least it was …
Warm.
There are three major warning signs for hypothermia. You stop feeling cold. You stop being able to concentrate on even simple, important tasks. And you have an overpowering desire to sleep.
And once you do, you never wake up.
Really, I was doing pretty well; during World War II a lot of men died of hypothermia in less than ten minutes in the cold water of the North Atlantic, and I’d probably hung on for half an hour or so, so far, and I wasn’t really beaten yet, just tired—
Back when I was a kid my brother Jerry and I used to go see movies about World War II every chance we got. That was before Jerry was killed, of course, but then he’d been out of college a year or two before …
He was killed with Mom and my wife Marie. I remembered it vividly; I was so tired, and if I dreamed of that, I’d have nightmares, I knew I would even though I was so comfortable … so comfortable even in the cold water of the North Atlantic where my ship had gone down but Humphrey Bogart would be coming along any minute in the rubber raft with some hot soup for me … or was it Katharine Hepburn? Or would he have Katharine Hepburn for me?
That made me laugh so hard that I sucked in what felt like half a lungful of water, which set me to retching and coughing. The blast of pain in my chest and the heaving of my guts brought me back to consciousness enough to realize how much I had drifted. I was back in the real world, even if not very coherent. There’s something about getting close to dying, and realizing it, that brings you right around, if you’re not completely gone.
Had I been kicking? I didn’t know and began to kick harder to try to make back the time—that wasn’t right, I knew it wasn’t right, I’d tire myself out but I couldn’t think—
I churned onward; maybe the effort could raise enough heat to ward off the last stages of hypothermia, and at least this way if I sank, I would go down fighting. I avoided thinking about Dad, Carrie, Porter . … about Chrys … about warm beds and big bowls of hot cereal and soup … there were an awful lot of thoughts to fight off, when you came right down to it.
My left foot felt like it burst into flames, so much so that I yelled, and it set me to coughing again, and in the convulsion whatever had gotten my left foot promptly got my right, and now both of them were in agony. I doubled over an instant, putting my head all the way underwater, and the diving reflex cut in and panicked me, groggy as I was, so that I lurched wildly, thrashed frantically, and then stood up to get a breath …
I had coughed and spewed half a dozen times, getting the last of all that out of myself, before I realized. I was standing in chest-deep water, and only two hundred yards off there was a stony beach with pine trees behind it. I lurched forward in the water, stumbling over submerged logs and boulders, and finally staggered up onto the gravel, my pants deflating around my neck as I came out of the water. I made myself keep going—I needed food, shelter, something—and just beyond the trees I found a winding wagon track, probably leading to some farm or small town.
It was a warm night, and now that I was out of the water, shivering and walking were doing some good.
How long I staggered, I don’t know, but the sun was up when I finally came around a bend and found myself looking at a fallen-in barn and an empty house. There was at least a roof on the house, and I staggered in and found a corner with a big pile of leaves in it, reasonably dry.
Finally I allowed my burned, peeled, bloody hands to fight into the pocket of the breeches and find one of my two remaining ampoules of nanos. I jammed it in my arm and lay back, panting; they would rebuild me, but they took so much energy from the body that I had been afraid that while I was moving they might make me collapse, and even now I was afraid they would be the final push into hypothermia and death.
Something came into the room; my vision was getting dark though there was bright sunlight pouring in through the door. It got closer and I leaned down to see. …
I was down on my chest, I realized, face-to-face with a live chicken. It had black feathers and a red comb, and it was turning its head from side to side and
clucking a little, now and then, wondering if it remembered people or not, and perhaps thinking that people used to put out corn for it. I reached very slowly forward—I doubt I could have done anything quickly—and it came a step closer to see if maybe I was about to throw the corn. The expression of stupid curiosity, of being focused only on the hand as maybe something to feed it, might have made me laugh if I’d had the energy.
There was a practical difficulty or two to consider, I realized, as I grabbed the chicken by the neck. I could make a fire but not trust myself to tend one, and the field-butchering lessons from training school were kind of hazy in my mind, and anyway I didn’t have hours to pluck it—
And then the one important thing I needed to remember from training school kicked in. The nanos in my bloodstream would last about twenty hours. During that time if I were cut, the wound would close up within hours, and if I became infected with anything, the infection would quickly the out. It was like having a superñimmune system, though paid for at a huge cost in body energy. But right now, with the nanos fresh in my bloodstream, I could drink out of sewers, eat roadkill, and lick every used bedpan in a hospital, and nothing would happen to me—
The thought is father to the deed. My hands clenched once and broke its neck, and after that I don’t remember much, or at least I prefer not to remember much. I woke up late in the afternoon with the sun going down, blood and feathers all over my face, and an amazing mess of discarded bones, feathers, beak, and feet scattered around. I seemed to have lost five pounds, which I figured was probably the body consuming whatever it didn’t get from the chicken. I yanked the now half-dry breeches on and staggered out into the yard.
There was still a bucket in the well, so I cranked it down and up—it was work but not difficult. My hands were covered with new pink skin and quite a few other places seemed to be fresh and healthy new flesh as well; I noticed that some of my fingernails had grown an inch during the night, probably the places where I’d hurt a fingertip or cuticle, and when I looked down at my feet I saw that not only were all my toenails really long, but apparently the nanos had sensed that I needed calluses there, and I had the kind of hard, horny feet you get from going barefoot in all weather, though again all the flesh was pink and new.
