A Girl in Time

by John Birmingham

  Probably best not to take her word for what made sense at that moment.

  The cowboy was holding a knife that looked big enough to carve up a bison. She wondered why he didn't just shoot the two men, and then the entirely rational thought occurred to her that she wasn't actually in a video game, and you couldn't just go around shooting people.

  Apparently sticking twelve inches of sharpened steel into them was perfectly acceptable, however, because she had no doubt this guy would do exactly that if he got the chance.

  “No, don't,” she said weakly.

  They all ignored her.

  Her would-be muggers—

  If that's all they were, Cady.

  "I don't like you walking the streets at night the way you do, Cady."

  —whatever they were. Mad fans. Muggers. Rapists. Whatever. They looked like they'd be cool putting a few holes into young Rooster Cogburn here with their own knives.

  With their stilettos.

  An assassin's blade. Not like his.

  She'd worked freelance on enough Ubisoft titles to know the difference.

  They tried to circle around him, and she realized with renewed horror that they were still intent on getting to her. He seemed equally intent on not letting them.

  Desperate to know what she'd got herself into, Cady asked in a high, keening voice, “Who are you? Why are you doing this?”

  But nobody answered.

  It wasn't like the movies. There was no banter. No witty back-and-forth. Just three men with knives intent on killing each other.

  She tried to scramble away from them on her butt.

  Water soaked through the seat of her jeans.

  It was weird that she noticed, but she did.

  There was a quiet, drifting moment where the three men were obviously attempting to maneuver into the best position to attack or defend, and then the cowboy attacked.

  She was so surprised she gave out a little, “Oh!”

  He bellowed.

  He roared.

  Roared like a bear.

  And he charged the man closest to Cady, slashing wildly at the air with that crazy, big-ass knife of his. Her eyes bulged, and then she scrunched them shut because everything was wrong. The knife wasn't just cutting through the air; it was cutting through the man. It was inside the man.

  Inside him!

  Oh, God.

  And the other guy was coming at her.

  She scrambled to her feet, or tried to, but something slammed into her, driving her back down. Knocking all the air from her body. Cracking her head on the pavement.

  Putting out the little diamond lights of the stars, but filling her head with hundreds more.

  Just before the world turned black.

  4

  She awoke in a bed, but Cady knew she hadn't dreamed it. She knew that before she knew where she was. Cady slipped from a nightmare, where tongueless dead men sliced at her with knives, into a waking panic. In a bed not her own.

  Not a hospital bed either.

  She opened her eyes and wanted, more than expected, to see her room, even though everything was wrong. Because everything was wrong.

  And he was there. The cowboy.

  The bed was an old single-size with a lumpy mattress, a thin, filthy blanket, and his coat for a pillow.

  It smelled even worse than the blanket.

  Her panic forced her upright, but nausea and dizziness dropped her right back down. A headache came riding in on the back end of that, a huge pain, sharp and dull all at the same time.

  “Whoa there, missy. You took a mighty crack on that purdy little head of yours. Best you be lying still for a ways down the trail yet.”

  He stood and took a small bowl from a wooden table.

  “For if'n you need to be sick.”

  Cady realized it was nearly as big as a punch bowl. It just looked small in his hands. She flinched away, and he nodded and set the porcelain bowl down carefully on the bed, where she could reach it. He stood over her—loomed over her, really—like a giant redwood, but made no other move in her direction.

  “Had m'self knocked acock like that more'n once,” he said. “If'n yer eggs ain’t scrambled fer good by it, best thing is a sip of old Adam's Ale and some gentle time in your roll.”

  Cady stared at him, uncertain that she was hearing him clearly. He had a well-modulated voice, with an accent that sounded like a smooth blend of two or three old whiskies. But the whole effect was archaic, rather than charming.

  He had not slept. She recognized the watery, red-rimmed eyes and the dark smudges beneath them as the badges worn by the all-night crew.

  Her crew.

  She recognized worry in those eyes, even fear. But there was no obvious threat to her in them. They seemed to look in on a kind, if troubled soul. His shirt cuffs, though, were stained with dried blood. He wore a waistcoat in a dark paisley design, and she thought she could make out a few drops of dried blood in the swirling patterns there, too. The knife was still at his hip, the giant blade he had slashed at and pushed into that other guy.

  Cady had seen him run a man through with it.

  And he wore a gun, and an old-fashioned belt strung with bullets like Chinese firecrackers.

  And a hat.

  Still with the hat.

  “Oh, my pardon,” he said when he saw she was staring at it. He whipped off the Stetson—she supposed it was a Stetson because weren't they all?—and held it to his heart as he sketched a small bow that reminded her of the way they had bowed to their instructor before those worthless self-defense classes.

  The smug asshole taught them that at least, if nothing else of any use: how to bow.

  The cowboy came up out of his bow and introduced himself.

  “Deputy US Marshal Titanic Smith, ma'am.”

  She was still staring at him. He was handsome under the grime, the unruly mustache, and three days' worth of unshaven stubble, but the relief that flooded through her like a cool mountain stream when she heard the magic words, “Deputy US Marshal”, washed every other thought out of her head. Except for one.

  “Titanic? Seriously?”

  He seemed a little put out that she would ask.

  “Christened John Titanic Smith, ma'am,” he said, “by the holy hand of Reverend Nolan in Purdue County. But I have found, as I made my way through the world, that many folks don't cotton to dickering with a John Smith, so Titanic I am by reason of convenience.”

  She shook her head … very … slowly. Her neck was stiff and the pain behind her eyeballs was ballooning out to fill her skull. She took in the room, but it gave her no reason to feel any better. A small, mean space, it was dark, with only one window, obscured by a curtain that looked to have been fashioned from a hessian sack. It filtered what little daylight could get through the grimy window glass. At first she thought the window had been painted over, like back at her apartment. But, no, it was just dirty.

  Really, really dirty.

  She could hear the city outside and wondered where she was and why she wasn't in hospital. The whole deal was starting to creep her out; the peeling wallpaper, the smell of mold and damp and unwashed feet.

  “Do you mind showing me your badge?” she asked and regretted it as soon as she spoke. If Smith was a psycho, she had just put him on the spot.

  “You're lying on it, ma'am,” he said.

  What?

  She didn't understand.

  “My jacket,” he nodded at her. “Your pillow, such as it would be.”

  “Oh, sorry,” she said, and reached around behind her, being careful not to turn her head too fast or to strain her neck muscles.

  The coat was heavy and fashioned from brown suede. It would have been an oddly stylish choice for a cop, were it not for the stains and the stink. She heaved it around from behind her with some difficulty. Smith stepped forward to help.

  “You're all tangled up, ma'am,” he said. “Here, allow me.”

  He took the coat and held it in front of her. Cady
expected him to search the pockets for his wallet, but instead he pinched the shoulders as though he was a tailor displaying a dinner jacket for sale. She saw a large, slightly tarnished metal star pinned to a lapel. When she squinted, Smith held it so she could read the old fashioned typeface.

  DEPUTY US MARSHAL.

  He gently folded the jacket and gave it back to her. Cady wasn't sure she wanted to lie on that thing again. It smelled like the animal it had been cut from. But it was the only place to rest her head.

  She gave up, replaced the coat behind her, and leaned back against the iron bedhead.

  Time for a cut scene and some exposition.

  “So, those guys. Who were they? And where are we? And why here? I should get to the ER. Get scans. I need to call my parents. And my publicist.”

  She was starting to babble, her words running over each other. The marshal held up one giant hand and shook his head.

  “Hang fire, there, missy.”

  “My name is Cady, not Missy. Cady McCall.”

  “All right, Miss McCall.”

  She sighed forcefully, but let it go. The headache was getting worse.

  “You're safe,” Smith assured her. “That's the first thing you need to know. And those varmints? I can't rightly say who they were, although I am sadly familiar with the type. I will testify they meant to ventilate you with them Arkansas toothpicks.”

  She started to WTF him, but Smith had already turned away and shuffled back to his chair by the window. It was more of small wooden stool, really, and it looked like it might collapse under his weight. The guy had to be six-and-a-half feet tall—he had to stoop to avoid scraping his head on the ceiling—and he was built like something out of Gears of War. But he also looked exhausted and … what?

  Uncomfortable, she thought, with a glimmer of insight. He was reluctant to tell her something because he was embarrassed or self-conscious about it. Intuiting the source of his unease was enough to confirm it for her.

  Marshal Smith was in some sort of trouble, and now, maybe, he'd dragged her into it.

  Awesome.

  “You could have shot those guys last night,” she said. “Raylan Givens would've shot them. They were armed. You're a marshal.”

  “Can't say as I know this Givens feller, but I can set with that,” he replied in that weird, archaic way of his. “I'd have dug for my cannon, Miss McCall, 'cepting that you were in my line of fire.”

  He said it like “larn o' far.”

  “No sense to be putting a bad plum in you, were there?” he finished.

  Wa thar?

  “Are you from some backasswards part of Arkansas,” she said, “because man, your dialogue.”

  “Purdue County, ma'am, as I did tell.”

  Quiet fell between them, but it was not a companionable silence. Cady was waiting for him to explain what the hell was going on, and Smith seemed less inclined to explain anything the longer he went without doing so.

  “You should take a sip or two of water,” he said, nodding at a chipped, ceramic mug on the small table next to her bed.

  “You should tell me what the actual fuck is happening,” she replied.

  Smith reared back as if struck.

  “Don't know that there's a call for such language, young lady.”

  She almost laughed then.

  “Don't “young lady” me, pardner. Under all that grime you're not that much older than I am. But I'm getting older, fast, every minute I lie here listening to you. So give it up, Raylan. What've you got me into?”

  He sucked at his mustache as if pained by the very question. It was a hell of a mustache. Some hipster barber probably toiled over the thing for an hour getting it just so. It seemed pretentious, even a little bizarre for a police officer, but then so was the hat and gun belt and even the silver star pinned so ostentatiously to his lapel.

  Ooh, look at me, I'm a Federal Marshal.

  Rather than answering her, Smith took out a pocket watch—another prop, another affectation—frowned at whatever he found there, and put it away. It struck Cady that she had no idea of the time. Could be early morning or late afternoon. She might have been out of it for a whole day and night. She looked at her watch. 12:40 p.m.

  Matt!

  She was going to miss her BuzzFeed guy. He was probably looking for her right now, ringing her phone again and again.

  Her broken phone, she remembered, and started casting around, searching anxiously under the covers, her eyes quickly scanning the small room. All of her shit was on that phone. She was an unperson without it.

  Man, she hoped Smith had picked the thing up.

  “My phone,” she said, a statement that was a question, too. His frown grew cavernous for a second, a deep rift valley between his eyes.

  “Your … phone,” he said, as though trying out the word for the first time. “You dropped it.”

  “Well, duh! Did you get it? All my contacts, my appointments. Fuck, my banking apps! I don't have a PIN code on it.”

  Again, the frown.

  “Look,” she said, “my Touch ID was flakey 'cause of a salsa incident, so I turned it off. I know I should have put the PIN back on, but I'm only ever at home because I work all the time and …”

  His head tilted to the side and nodded slowly like somebody who understood, but thought her an idiot. It was like talking with an especially slow child, except she was the slow one, and she was having trouble making herself understood.

  “I'm sorry, Miss McCall. We didn't have time. More of them came.”

  “It's Ms. Not Miss. And back the fuck up. More of them? More… of… them?”

  “Afraid so, ma'am. We had to get gone quick.”

  Her head was really pounding now, and she could feel a nervous twitch tugging at the corner of one eye.

  “Enough,” she said harshly. Raising her voice sharpened the spike in her head, but it also felt so good on an existential level that she raised it some more. “You better start talking, Marshal, or I'll be talking to your bosses when we get out of here, and to my Congressman, or woman, or whatever, and to the press right after that. Maybe even before. I know a guy at BuzzFeed you know. He's doing a story on me right now, in fact. Do you even know who I am?”

  She knew how much of a superdouche she sounded, but it felt good to let go, to lash out at this guy, even if he had saved her ass last night, because he hadn't done much for her since, and to be honest, she was starting to freak the hell out.

  “So, you tell me right now, mister. Where am I? And what time is it? I have places to be.”

  Marshal Smith did a fair imitation of man backed into a corner. He blew out his stubbled cheeks, scuffed his boots on the bare wooden floor, and nervously reached for the stupid fob watch again.

  He swallowed.

  Amazingly, he looked a little like a man too frightened to speak. Instead, he reached into his back pocket, and took out a few thin sheets of folded newsprint. He unfolded the paper and appeared to read the front page, searching for something.

  “You're in London, Miss McCall. It's a little before ten in the morning on November 9th, in the year of our Lord, 1888.”

  5

  She might have screamed if she hadn't swooned. That's how Smith described it when she regained consciousness a few minutes later.

  “You swooned for a moment there, ma'am.”

  “I don't swoon,” she said, pushing away the cup of water he offered. Half of the contents splashed on the bed. She didn't care. “Nobody swoons. This isn't Downton Abbey,” she said in a shaky voice.

  She really was frightened now.

  This lunatic was no law officer. He had kidnapped her. Killed those other men. And now he had her in his little murder box where he was looking to play out some whack-job, swoon-lady fantasy.

  She had to get out of there. She moved quickly, without thought.

  Cady leapt for the far side of the bed. The door was just a few feet away. She wasn't restrained, so there was that. But she was still handicapped
by concussion or shock or whatever, and as soon as her feet touched the ground, the room started spinning, and she pitched over, crying out in alarm as she fell to the floor.

  “Oh, hell fire,” said Smith, but he made no effort to pursue her. “Watch out there, or you'll do yourself a mischief, woman.”

  Cady was surprised to find she was still wearing her jeans. Figured he'd have stripped them off her. Probably would have given them a good sniffing, too. The hairy pervert. But her jeans were exactly where they should have been. Her leather jacket hung on the back of the door, her scarf draped over it. Her boots were lined up underneath.

  Ignoring Smith, or whatever his name was, she launched herself forward again, scrabbling across the floor on her hands and knees. The dizziness wasn't as bad this time. The pounding of her heart was flushing the fog from her brain, but she didn't make it much further.

  “Look,” said Smith, in a loud voice. “Just look.”

  By some magician's trick she didn't understand, he whipped away the dimness of the room. She looked over her shoulder to find he'd simply pulled aside the hessian sack covering the window. The wooden sash rumbled up in its frame as Smith pulled at a small handle, and the weak, grey light of day poured in, fixing her in place like an animal caught in the headlights of a car.

  “Look,” he said again, not unkindly this time. His tone seemed almost apologetic. “If you can walk, you'll need to see this.”

  Squinting a little into the light, she could already see that something was terribly wrong with the roofline across the street. Everything was misshapen, crooked. Wrong. From what little she could see from her perspective on the floor, there wasn't a straight line or a good right angle anywhere out there. She could make out sagging gutters, crooked windows, and slumping chimneys. Thick black smoke poured out of half the chimney stacks. The roof tiles, many of them broken, were thick with bird shit.

  But it was the chimney smoke that undid her. No way the EPA was letting that happen.