by Paul McAuley
He counted, he thought, in the way that everyone counted. Every individual was only a single drop in an infinite ocean, but every drop sparkled with particularity. This moment was never quite the same as any moment before or since, in any of the multitude of sheaves. He was the sum of millions of such unique moments.
Stone remembered the Harvest Home dance at the Ellison place, two weeks before he’d lit out from New Amsterdam and the First Foot sheaf with David Welch. Tables set up in the yard behind the house had been crowded with bowls and platters of food Jars and bottles of homemade apple cider and beer cooled in clay pots brimful with water. Neighbours talked with neighbours; blue smoke boiled up above the men around the barbecue pit; small children chased each other around the tables. After sunset, a fiddler and an accordionist had struck up and people had moved onto the floor as white-haired Ben Shepherd called out dance steps, beating time with a tambourine, beating time with his hands. That was when Susan had dragged Stone from his chair. Mischief in her eyes and her dirty-blonde hair loose about her flushed face as she told him where to put his feet, when to turn, when to turn her, when to clap, both of them laughing as they capered to ‘Dogs in the Ashcan’, caught up in the music and the moment, caught up in each other, dancers inseparable from the dance.
Stone snapped out of his reverie when he saw a scrap of light move away from the cabin - one of the men was using a flashlight to navigate to the outhouse. Stone covered the four hundred yards quickly and quietly and grabbed the man as he left the outhouse, clamping a hand over his mouth, dispatching him with a single thrust of the hunting knife. He lowered the dead man to the ground and drew the Colt .45 that he’d stolen from the gun shop and crossed to the cabin, took a quick peek at the window, then walked straight in. The second man was sitting at the table in his shirtsleeves, spooning peaches from a can. He stared at Stone, reached for the pistol on the table, and Stone shot him twice in the chest, a quick double tap that knocked him out of his chair.
There was a fresh grave behind the cabin. Stone laid the bodies of Knightly’s men beside it and covered them with a tarpaulin sheet and shovelled dirt over it. He allowed himself a few hours’ sleep, woke at dawn, and worked through a set of exercises in the clean cold air, his muscles loosening sweetly and easily, his mind absolutely centred on the task ahead of him.
He made coffee and scrambled a couple of eggs and ate them with the ham he found in a coolbox, then circled the cabin and found a good spot near the top of a ridge three hundred yards to the south, where two boulders leaned together like the heads of lovers, leaving a wide notch beneath. He rigged a hide with a couple of chair legs and a blanket and plenty of cut brush, swallowed an upper to stay sharp, and sat in the shade of one of the boulders. With shoes planted in gravelly sand and his elbows resting on his knees, he used the binoculars to track every vehicle that moved along the highway cut across the bleached plain. Knightly’s people would be pushing it, driving non-stop across America. A ragged army in retreat, anxious to cross back to the Real and start over, make another attempt to change history. Stone figured that they would arrive by the end of the day, early tomorrow morning at the latest.
They came just after five in the afternoon. Three vans materialising out of the shimmering compression of dust and heat haze, small black bullets running close together, appearing and disappearing as they rode through inversion layers shimmering in dips in the highway. No doubt about it.
Stone wriggled inside the hide, settled the stock of the hunting rifle against his shoulder, and laid its heavy barrel on the dirt-filled pillow behind the screen of thorny branches. It was a good rifle, a heavy-barrelled .50 on a Ruger bolt action, with a chequered walnut stock and a twelve-power telescopic sight. One of its 660-grain rounds could smash an engine block or kill a man by hydraulic shock if it hit him anywhere in the body. He’d tested it that morning, working out the drop of rounds over hundred-yard intervals, marking off distances and memorising landmarks in a killing zone spread either side of the track to the cabin. He was confident that he could hit a target no bigger than a man’s head at five hundred yards.
The three vans came on fast, making the turn onto the track to the cabin one after the other, two miles away and closing, moving in a storm of dust as they roared up the slope. Stone pushed off the rifle’s safety with his thumb, tracked the vans through the cross-hairs of the sight. His mouth was dry, but that was only the amphetamine. He felt cool and clear-headed.
The lead van was in range now. Stone could see its driver behind a flare of sunlight on the windshield. He curled his forefinger around the trigger. He was ready. Anything was possible. Anything at all.
Universes waited to be born.
