The Golden Minute

by John Birmingham

  These fellers did not like each other at all, he surmised. Perhaps the brownshirts were just jealous of Hausser and his chums’ much nattier uniforms.

  The colonel of this ‘SS’ outfit, smiled again.

  “Still here, Sturmführer?”

  The moment hung in the balance for a second before the gang members seemed to collectively deflate. Five dull brown balloons farting out their stale hot air all at once.

  The storm leader—such a stupid name—glared at Smith before turning and stalking away.

  6

  “Mary, would you like some chocolate?”

  Cady spoke quietly, looking around to check that they weren’t being observed. She still had the bar of Swiss Army emergency chocolate, and she didn’t want that asshole sheriff or one of his guards coming in and scarfing it down for themselves.

  She gently tapped the old woman’s ankle with the toe of her Doc Martens. Cady didn’t have big feet, but her boots looked huge and heavy enough to crush Mary Bradbury’s tiny ankles, wrapped in thin and filthy cotton leggings.

  “Mary, wake up,” she whispered. “I got chocolate,” she added in an even smaller voice.

  Did this old biddy even know what chocolate was?

  Her idea of a Hershey Bar was probably a big old dollop of honeyed cow dung wrapped up in cheesecloth. Had real chocolate been invented yet? Or stolen from the Aztecs or Zulus or whoever the fuck had the original patent? If Cady had her phone or one of the iPods she could check Wikipedia, but she’d lost the phone diving through the fence, and the iPod was in her backpack.

  And fucked if she knew where that was.

  Mary Bradbury had drifted off to sleep hours earlier. Cady had learned a little of their situation in a slow, halting fashion before exhaustion carried the old woman away. Halfway through mumbling about getting blamed for somebody’s butter going maggoty, Mary’s head drooped, her face disappeared behind greasy, unwashed strands of gray hair, and she started to snore. It was impressive in a way. There was no bed to lie on. Not even a stool to spare them sitting in the fecal slop on the floor of the cell. Cady’s legs and lower back ached from standing and pacing all night. She’d resisted opening the chocolate bar for as long as possible. She hadn’t been able to wash her hands and all of her sanitary supplies were, natch, in the backpack.

  Eventually, however, with the wan, gray light of a watery dawn leaking into the basement, and with her head spinning from exhaustion and stress, she had succumbed. Cady spat on her fingers to clean them off as best she could. There were a few patches on her sheepskin jacket that were slightly less muddy than the rest, and she wiped her hands on them. The chocolate bar—it came in a red and white wrapper that really was labelled EMERGENCY CHOCOLATE—had broken into pieces, and she carefully teased open the paper and foil wrapping with the very tips of her fingers. It was awkward, trying to avoid contamination in these squalid surrounds, and she almost dropped everything when the gum seal resisted her first tentative efforts.

  “Consarn it,” she muttered, before smiling sourly at the memory of Smith. She had to shake off the feeling of teetering on the edge of a high cliff, resisting the urge to give up and simply fall onto the fangs of waiting rock far below.

  “Fuck that for an unsatisfactory denouement,” she said quietly. She was getting out of this shit and granny over here was going to help her. “Mary, wake up.”

  Cady shook her by one shoulder, but gently. Bradbury looked like she’d been about three hundred years old when they threw her into this crappy Dark Souls budget dungeon, and it hadn’t exactly been a revitalizing health spa for the old girl. She snored loudly, gargled and drooled on Cady’s hand.

  “Oh, gross!”

  Cady checked again that they weren’t being watched. The other prisoners were curled up in their cells, snoring and coughing and grinding their teeth. She heard the fall of horse hooves somewhere outside, but it was a slurping, gloopy sound, as though horse and rider had to struggle through thick mud. A rooster crowed, and she heard a dull and distant chopping sound. An axeman splitting wood for the fireplace probably.

  Mary, who had been sitting in the filth of the ground, with her back against the hardwood bars of their improvised cell, fell slightly sideways, until her head leaned against Cady’s shoulder. Her sheep’s wool jacket was soft, if dirty, and she didn’t want Mary getting comfortable there. Pushing her upright, Cady softly tapped the old woman’s cheeks with the back of her fingers, no harder than a golf clap to begin with, but eventually giving up, seizing her jaw and shaking it until Mary snorted and her eyes flew open.

  Disoriented, frightened, she tried to back away and smacked her head on the bars.

  “It’s cool. Be cool,” Cady urged her, before remembering she had no handy universal translator anymore. Smith had both watches with him.

  “Er, calm yourself, madam,” she ad-libbed. “It is I, Goody Cadence, with chocolate to break your fast.”

  Mary’s rheumy, age-misted eyes wandered over Cady’s face, never fixing on any one spot, seeming in fact to look through her to some faraway place. Cady held up the chocolate bar for her to see and smell.

  “Eat,” she said, miming the action by raising her free hand to her lips.

  She could see Mary gathering her wits, slowly at first then all at once. She reached for the chocolate, but stopped before taking it.

  “What manner of bread is this?” she asked, wary.

  “It’s not bread,” Cady said. “It’s much better than that. It’s even better than manna from Heaven,” she added in a moment of inspiration.

  Unfortunately it inspired Mary to panic. She tried to push the offering away.

  “With what inducements do you tempt me? Will I feast at the price of my soul?”

  “Oh for f…” Cady caught herself just before the curse left her lips. “… for the love of God,” she improvised. She was crouched awkwardly on her haunches next to Mary. Now she stood up, taking the chocolate bar with her. It was tempting to simply scarf it down, but she needed this woman’s help.

  “It is not bread,” she explained again. “It is called chocolate, and it comes from the hot lands of the… the Old Testament, that’s right, where… oompah-loompahs harvest cocoa beans from the blessed Hershey tree and it’s… Look, it’s just really good food, okay. I traveled a long way to get here, and I brought this with me. I’m sharing it because that’s what, er, the Bible says to do.”

  She had a real flash of inspiration then, recalling the words her father said over dinner every night. Cady held up the chocolate bar, as though in an attitude of prayer, and said, “Bless us, O Lord, and these your gifts, which we are about to receive from your bounty. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.”

  The words affected the other woman like an overpowered healing potion. Her defensive posture relaxed.

  Really gonna have to try to remember some more prayers and stuff, thought Cady. If it’s gonna play so well out here in the sticks.

  She offered the bar to Mary again. Cady had been holding the chocolate for a few minutes, and it was soft from the warmth of her hands. The first taste was, as she expected, a revelation. The whites of Mary Bradbury’s eyes grew large in her face and Cady snorted with delight.

  “It’s good, isn’t it?” she said.

  Mary was too busy shoveling the rest of the packet into her mouth to answer immediately. It wasn’t the best chocolate Cady had ever tasted. Hard and flaky and not as sweet as she was used to, she’d bet it was still the closest thing to a mouthgasm this poor old hag had ever experienced. She didn’t know what the rations were like in this place. They hadn’t been fed, hadn’t even seen a guard since she woke up a prisoner. Chances were, though, they’d serve actual gruel here.

  “I thank you for your kindness,” Mary said when she was done. Her hands were shaking and her red-rimmed eyes, puffy and watery before, now freely spilled tears down the lines and crags of her ancient face.

  “We girls have to hang together,” Cady said, quickly searching
her memory for the rest of the old Ben Franklin quote, “or most assuredly we will hang apart.”

  That didn’t sound quite right, but Mary got the point. She leaned forward as though to impart a dangerous secret.

  “These are dark circumstances we find ourselves o’erthwart in Salem Farms,” she said. “Bridget Bishop hanged at Gallows Hill. Roger Toothaker dead in prison. Sarah Good, Susannah Martin, Rebecca Nurse, Elizabeth Howe, and Sarah Wildes all hanged from the same tree. Even the Reverend Burroughs. A minister of the Lord himself, Goody Cadence. And a more worshipful servant of God you would not find. Still they stretched his neck for him even as he did spake the Lord’s prayer!”

  She spat at the ground, and her saliva was dark with emergency chocolate. A thin tendril fell on her cheek as Mary leaned in conspiratorially.

  “They hung John Proctor that day too, and I will testify that his sin was not being a witch but being adoubted that any of them who hanged were but rivals to their quarrelsome neighbors.”

  The words came faster and her accent thicker as she spoke, and Cady had trouble parsing the precise meaning of it all. Seemed like some bitch-trivial neighborhood disputes had turned deadly. Again, if she just had a few minutes’ access to her backpack, she could research all of this, figure out the motivations of the main players and whether there might be some hack or cheat she could use to beat the level.

  That was how to think of this, she told herself. It was just a level in a game, and she would beat it like a freckled stepchild.

  “Mary,” she asked, all deep concern and sympathy, “did they call you a witch too?”

  She held the old woman’s forearm, giving it a reassuring squeeze.

  “Who have they not laid that charge upon? Upon my oath there will soon come a day when the last two souls of this accursed village hang each other for witches because there are none others left to tighten the rope.”

  “Well, I don’t think you’re a witch, if that helps?”

  “Nought can help us,” the old woman said, sadly. “Five score and eighteen witnesses did attest to my good faith, and my husband Thomas a deputy of the colonial court! The agent of Sir Ferdinando Gorges himself! Yet here I wait on a hangman’s pleasure.”

  “Okay,” Cady said. “So we gotta get out of here.”

  She saw Mary’s confusion at the odd turn of phrase.

  “Er, we must, you know, removeth ourselves from this dark and terrible place and hasten away to safe harbor where… Diablo and his minions hold no sway. So… ideas?”

  “My husband…” Mary started, but she fell silent as the sound of a heavy iron bolt shooting a lock echoed around the hard walls of the cellar. A door scraped open, and dim light from a flickering candle cast shadows down the length of the room. Cady heard voices, deep and masculine, but too low to make out individual words. Boot heels clocked on hard stone, and one of the men laughed, a braying noise that sounded much crueler than it did amused.

  Mary stiffened and hurriedly hid the wrapper from which she’d been picking the last melted flecks of emergency chocolate. Three figures in the cell directly across from them stirred awake. Cady had thought there were only two prisoners over there, but they had been huddled so close together for warmth, and camouflaged by the filth of their ragged clothes, that she’d completely missed the smaller woman lying in between the other two.

  She was pregnant.

  “What cheer, Goody Faulkner?” Grandma Bradbury called out across the space separating them, ignoring the guard. “How lays the blessing of the day upon you?”

  The pregnant girl smiled weakly at them.

  “The sickness of the morn is not so great today, Goody Bradbury.”

  Cady saw with creeping horror that she really was just a girl, a thin, hollow-cheeked waif who hardly looked strong enough to carry herself through a whole day, let alone the baby that lay within her bulging womb. One of the other women, looking even worse than this Faulkner chick, dragged herself to the bars of their cage.

  “How now, Goodwife Bradbury? I see you have a new friend, but I fear we have poor pottage indeed for guests at this inn.”

  “Quiet, WITCHES,” a large, barrel-chested man barked at them. He seemed familiar, and for the briefest moment Cady feared that the Apprentices had found her and this was some time-traveling Gestapo narc sent back to make sure she was hanged from a tree and buried in an unmarked grave.

  Then she recognized him as the sheriff from yesterday’s ceremonial torture session. What had Smith called it?

  The pressing.

  He wore the same clothes; baggy, earth-colored pants and a simple cotton shirt beneath a vest that was about two sizes too small for his ample belly. He carried a stick, or maybe a club of some sort. A straight length of hardwood, weighed down at one end with a bulbous knot of wood about the size of a baseball. Dude looked like he could break your skull open with just one swing.

  Cady found herself wishing that Georgia was here.

  Her friend wouldn’t be intimidated by this asshole. As soon as he made the mistake of opening the cage door she’d have that stick off him and shoved so far up his ass the knob end would knock out his front teeth. But Georgia wasn’t here. Cady had promised Smith, and more importantly herself, that she wouldn’t drag anybody else into this mess.

  The sheriff smashed his club into the wooden bars of their cages.

  “Where is the witch who murdered John Indian, and the men of the Essex militia?”

  The women recoiled visibly from Cady and she knew she had about one second to turn this around or they’d be cheering her to the gallows as well. She strode over to the bars, letting the other prisoners get a good look at her, and giving the sheriff her best fuck-you face.

  “I’m no more a witch than any of these women, and I didn’t murder anyone,” she said calmly. “They were shot by…” Cady faltered for half a second, almost naming Smith as a Deputy US Marshal. But of course the United States did not yet exist. None of these people, and possibly none of their children, would live long enough to see it born.

  “… my husband, John Titanic Smith. And he fired on them by right of self-defense and to secure my life and soul from the depredations of a war party who engaged us with muskets and…”

  “Your husband is a demon.”

  She had not been able to see the second man. He was hidden behind the lawman’s bulk. He stepped out into plain view now and fixed Cady with a glare of such venom that she couldn’t help but recall the homicidal intensity of Chumley’s expression when he emerged from the pea soup of the London fog with a carving knife in his fist. Cady’s skin flushed hot then cold, and she had to steady herself against a sudden tilting of the stone floor.

  This asshole was totally an Apprentice. She just knew it.

  He was dressed like the guys Smith had called magistrates, the ones who supervised the crushing of the old naked guy yesterday. But he didn’t look like either of them. He was taller, and built like a quarterback. His hair was cut short, although it could be that he’d just taken off his stupid wig.

  No, she decided. Just looking at this guy he reeked of whatever deep-cover Time Crisis special ops outfit had been chasing Smith up and down the centuries.

  Cady clenched her jaw and forced her runaway fears to just calm the fuck down. She couldn’t call him out for what he was. It would mark her as a crazy woman, and she might as well put the noose around her own neck and find the nearest tree. Instead she fixed him with her own stone face.

  “He is but a man,” she said through gritted teeth. She’d heard Smith say that more than once, in just those words too. I am but a man, Ms Cadence. “And he is a better man than you can ever hope to be, sir.”

  Peeps in the olden days, she’d noted more than once, were really into calling each other ‘Sir’ but loading it up with heaps of radioactive snark when what they actually meant was ‘Asshole’.

  “You can make up…” she almost said a bunch of shit, “… whatever lies you wish, but you know that war band f
ired on us first, while our backs were turned to them, and we didst but defend ourselves.”

  She may have pushed it a little too hard with the ‘didst but’. Both men frowned at her, and their confusion was shared by the women who had witnessed the exchange. Even Mary was kind of gape-mouthed and staring.

  “She has a serpent’s tongue in her head,” said the judge or magistrate or whatever he was pretending to be.

  “The fallen one himself speaks through her,” the sheriff agreed.

  “No. I speak for myself,” she said.

  “You speak too much,” the magistrate hissed. “Sheriff Corwin, fetch the women. You witches, turn your faces away lest your deviltry afflict these poor women anew.”

  Cady’s fellow inmates demurely complied, shuffling into the rearmost corners of their cages and turning their faces to the walls.

  Sheriff Corwin turned on his boot heels and trotted back out of the door through which he had come. The magistrate narrowed his eyes and considered Cady as if she were a snake which had slithered into his path.

  Here it comes, she thought. She kept her hands by her side, even though they seemed to will themselves into the pocket of her coat where she knew the can of mace was waiting.

  “I am ridden overnight from Boston,” he said at last. “Summoned by the direful nature of these allegations against you.”

  “Oh, really,” Cady deadpanned. “So you’re not from around here then? Mary, you ever seen this guy? D’oh. Sorry. Mary, is this man known to you?”

  Mary had taken herself off to the naughty corner and she looked sorry that she’d ever accepted the chocolate from Cady, but she also looked as frightened of her cellmate as she did of the magistrate.

  “I know him not,” she said in a shaking voice. “Justices Corwin and Hathorne sit with Chief Magistrate Stoughton on the Court of Oyer and Terminer.”

  Cady had no idea of what an Oyer or a Terminer might be, but this goon had turned up looking for her a few hours after she and Smith had dropped out of the sky. Chances were he was a time traveler, not a witch finder.