The Golden Minute

by John Birmingham

  “By your order, sir,” one of the soldiers replied.

  They left the cellar as a group. Mather leading the way, muttering some prayer or other, the creepy executioner heavy-breathing into her ear from behind, and Granville at the rear behind the redcoat escort. Cady had not attended to much when they’d dragged her in the previous night. Now she perceived everything as though rendered on an ultra hi-def VR display. The fine grain of the hardwood on the staircase. The way the flecks and granules of the granite in the walls reflected the light of burning torches as a tiny universe of golden starbursts. The snowy drifts of dandruff on the dark woollen weave of Reverend Mather’s cloak. The dust that drifted down upon them from the wooden boards overhead.

  Her legs felt both numb and tingly with pins and needles, and she stumbled on the steps.

  The hooded man grabbed a handful of her hair and yanked her up onto her toes.

  She cried out, but nobody said anything to stop him.

  There were other prisoners here, she saw now. Many of them. A line of cells appeared to be crammed full of men and women, but mostly women. Their arms and hands reached out through the bars and they called to the guards for food and water.

  Cady started shaking.

  She searched desperately for a way out, for some tool or weapon she could use, some ally she might enlist. But nothing suggested itself, and then they were out of the fortified bunker and she was being lifted into an open cart. It reminded her of the wagon Mary had ridden away in.

  God, how much did she wish she’d taken up the old girl’s offer of traveling north with her.

  She would be free now. She would live.

  Reverend Mather started reading from a small black book.

  “For he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. He is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer…”

  The wagon rocked and squeaked on its axles as the men joined her in the rear.

  A few soldiers stood around, smoking and laughing with each other. One even appeared to drink deeply from a jug of rum. He belched loudly in satisfaction.

  Breakfast of fucking champions.

  Cady didn’t know where that thought had come from. It couldn’t have been her, because she was being hauled off in a wagon to be murdered and she would never have wasted her last few moments of existence with such ridiculous banality.

  That’d be like tweeting your own death.

  She wondered what was happening back in the era of Twitter and best-selling iPhone games and her parents and brunch with Georgia and her dad’s watch; she wasn’t wearing her dad’s watch anymore, but she could feel the naked space on her wrist where it had been. She wanted more than anything else in the world to just took at that watch one more time. The watch her dad had worn to the factory every day for forty years. Her dad. If she could just see his watch, maybe touch it, that totem of another time where she was safe and he was always there and…

  A whip cracked and the wagon lurched forward and she lost her balance and with it the thread of free-falling memories.

  Cady dropped back into reality.

  These assholes were going to kill her. The streets were almost empty of pedestrians, which Cady found perversely annoying. She expected crowds… because these assholes were going to kill her. But the wagon rumbled away from the jailhouse and nobody seemed to care. There were no witnesses, no onlookers. She saw only a handful of people in the next few minutes, and they paid no attention at all to Cady and her murderers. They were busy. They had lives to get on with.

  But so did she!

  Cady tried to leap up and out of the wagon, but the executioner slammed a heavy hand down on her shoulder. It was a painful blow, which was odd, because she soon would feel nothing.

  See nothing. Be nothing.

  The driver cracked his whip.

  The hooded killer gripped her shoulder with sudden strength; such strength that for a moment Cady thought he might shatter and crush the bones within his grip. But he let go.

  And he tumbled to one side.

  And the wagon driver cracked his whip again.

  And his head came apart in a surreal eruption of blood and bone.

  The same whipcrack exploded in her ears…

  But how?

  The wagon driver was dead. The executioner was dead.

  Just as the night before her hanging had both stretched and compressed its component minutes into hours which afterward seemed like nanoseconds… in the space of her next three heartbeats Cady felt the world stop turning and everyone upon it frozen into place, a stasis from which they only very gradually escaped, as though trapped in slo-mo until, abruptly, everything accelerated. The soldiers slowly-slowly-slowly rose from the bench seat opposite, their pale faces caught in expressions of startled puzzlement, which they would surely wear for eternity as tiny fountains of blood sprayed from their chests. Reverend Mather’s mouth was a perfect ‘O’ of surprise, which he wore even as some unknown impact tipped the wagon at such an angle that he toppled backwards over the side. Cady felt herself going over after him.

  And then somebody hit fast-forward as she slammed into Granville, who sprawled on the floor of their carriage, and punched feebly at her head while scowling savagely and crying out to God to preserve his dear life. More whipcracks, which she now knew to be gunshots, broke the morning stillness, and the wagon lurched forward with a great bound that rolled her away from the Apprentice. Two great booms sounded in close succession, and the sky went dark, as though giant thunderheads had rolled over them.

  But the sudden disappearance of the morning sun was not caused by some titanic storm.

  The light of day was dimmed because Marshal John Titanic Smith stood athwart the wagon, a pistol in one hand, and musket in the other. He looked even larger than she remembered him. A towering giant of a man, a force of nature, vengeance and deliverance manifest in human form.

  And he’d brought a friend.

  But the other man’s back was turned to Cady and he was busy kicking Granville in the face.

  So that was good. Whoever he was, she liked that guy already.

  “Ms Cady,” Smith said, tossing away his old flintlock weapons and reaching down with one enormous hand to gently lift her from the bottom of the wagon, up into his arms, “Best we get gone.”

  He somehow kept his balance even as the frightened horses bolted and the wagon tried to shake itself apart on the rutted, potholed surface of the street. The dark wooden buildings of colonial Boston flashed by at dangerous speed.

  “Omigodsmith!” Cady cried out. “You came back! You came back!”

  “And now we gotta go.” He smiled.

  He had his arm around her waist and held her so closely to his body that it felt as though nothing could ever separate them again. In his free hand he held a watch. His thumb on the crown.

  “But what about your friend?” Cady cried out.

  Smith shook his head.

  “He ain’t no friend o’ mine,” he said.

  And with two clicks on the watch mechanism, they vanished into time.

  32

  The transition was instant. As always.

  Cady stood precariously in the bed of a runaway carriage, Smith’s embrace the only thing between her and a broken neck.

  Cady stood in a rainforest clearing on a hot, humid day, a thousand sunbeams reaching down through the jungle canopy to paint the forest floor with dancing points of light.

  She heard birdsong and other creature sounds she could never hope to identify. Within seconds she was sweating in the heat.

  She hugged Smith, but he pushed her away.

  “What…?” she started to cry out, then, “What?” again as she saw Mary Bradbury’s creepy little manservant step out of the space between two sunbeams.

  “De Klerk?”

  He raised a pistol, but not at her.

  He was aiming at Smith.

  “Do not move,
” he cried out, and his voice sounded different in a way she could not quite identify.

  Smith moved, throwing himself in front of Cady.

  Before he blocked her view completely, Cady saw the flash of gunpowder igniting, and the blue-gray cloud of smoke, a fraction of a second before she heard the report of the single shot.

  Like the crack of a wagon driver’s whip.

  She heard Smith grunt, heard the impact of the lead ball on his body, an instant before this fucking homicidal Amish pygmy loosed a second shot from another antiquated pistol.

  What’d this fucking guy bring, his own gun museum?

  Too shocked to dive for cover, her rational mind was so completely borked by the violent hairpin turn that she could only stand mute and watch as Smith raised a Luger he pulled out of his buttcrack, took careful aim at de Klerk, and pulled the trigger.

  Once.

  Twice.

  Three times.

  The German pistol discharged with a very different noise from the older weapons. But it was familiar to Cady. Turned out those sound engineers on Call of Duty really knew their shit.

  A quick peek.

  De Klerk looked surprised that Smith would fire back at him.

  His surprise was even greater when at least two bullets struck him in the center mass. The expression on his face was almost comically dumbfounded, and then it was gone.

  He dropped to the ground and lay there.

  Smith grunted and Cady realized with a sick, sinking horror that he was dropping, too.

  “Smith,” she cried out. “No! You’re hit.”

  Then she felt like an idiot because he obviously didn’t need telling.

  “Consarn it, that does hurt a pinch.”

  He didn’t fall like de Klerk, however. Smith kept the Luger pointed at him, and clamped his free hand over a bleeding wound in his side.

  “I do apologize for my tardiness, Ms Cady, and for losin’ hold of you back in that field afore. But right now if’n you’d be pleased to git behind me again, I don’t want Professor Koffler gettin’ a clear shot at you. I believe him to be an Apprentice so durn mean he would steal the coins off’n a dead man’s eyes, and so cunning and twisted he could swaller nails ’n’ spit out corkscrews.”

  “Oh, Smith…” Cady started, her voice caught in a thick knot of tangled feelings. Relief, anger, affection, perhaps even… “Wait, Professor what now?”

  “Professor Koffler,” Smith said, advancing cautiously on the wounded man. “This here untrustworthy German feller.”

  Cady, sheltering behind Smith’s massive bulk, peeked out around his gun arm again.

  “His name’s de Klerk,” she said. “He’s like a fixer for Mary, this old chick I was locked up with. You say he’s an Apprentice? I thought Granville was the Apprentice.”

  “Don’t rightly know this Granville,” Smith said. “But the professor knew all about you and Salem and Boston and your friend Mrs. Bradbury. Gave me a cock-n-bull story about secret societies and journals and such like. He’s another Chumley for sure.”

  They had inched most of the way forward to where the man lay. He still lived, although for how long Cady wouldn’t care to guess. When Titanic Smith shot you, you stayed shot. De Klerk was bleeding out where he had fallen on the bright green grass and bed of tropical flowers.

  It was him. She’d know the little rodent anywhere.

  But Smith apparently knew him even better than she did. He kicked away the pistol that had fallen to the ground and used another kick to fix de Klerk’s attention on the questions that were coming next.

  “Were any of it true, Professor?” he asked. “The diaries, the Historical Society? Any of it?”

  De Klerk groaned and Cady felt confident enough to emerge completely from behind cover. There was obviously a shitload of backstory she needed catching up on.

  “Hey, asshole, are you an Apprentice?” she asked, getting to her main priority. “I thought Granville was your butt boy in Salem.”

  He seemed to laugh, and the laugh turned into a cough which became a gurgling spasm of blood vomit.

  “No,” he said, surprising them both. “Granville was your fault. Another complication. Not an Apprentice. And I am no Apprentice either. I… I am the Regulator… I could have… helped you.”

  “By killing Smith?” Cady demanded, lining up to kick him herself. The big cowboy eased her out of range with his empty hand, the one painted with his own blood. He clamped it back over his wound when she was safely out of the midget-stomping zone.

  “He… he… should not have left me behind.”

  “Looks like he made a good call to me,” Cady said, answering before Smith could.

  De Klerk moaned. More blood bubbled out from between his lips and Cady feared he was going to bleed out and die before they could get any information from him.

  “How’d you follow us here so quickly?” she asked. “Smith had the watch.”

  “He’s got his own watch,” Smith said. “And I reckon it’s like Chumley’s. A darn sight more complicated than Mr. Wu’s.”

  Cady had a brief moment of intuition.

  “Your watch, is it a tracking device?” she asked de Klerk. “Does it sync with any other devices?”

  She could see Smith trying to follow the line of questioning, but also his lack of comprehension. Tracking technologies, synced devices, none of them were of his time, and for whatever reason the watch did not offer translation services between the two of them. It seemed to think they understood each other just fine, which implied the watch was a bit of a dim fucking bulb when you got right down to it.

  De Klerk did not answer her.

  “You should not have…”

  He coughed. It sounded worse. Wetter and deeper and somehow more painful than before, as if something was tearing inside him.

  “You have to go home,” he said, looking directly into Cady’s eyes. De Klerk’s own eyes were filling with tears and he had trouble focusing on her. “I was sent to take you home. To your own time and place.”

  “And to kill Smith?”

  “Not here. He must go home too. He has broken fundamental laws. Done great damage.”

  “So have I, you know!”

  “Your disruptions can still be negated. His… I don’t… I…”

  The dying man suddenly focused fiercely on Smith.

  “How did you know?” he hissed.

  Smith shrugged. He kept the gun trained on de Klerk.

  “Varmints a whole lot more cunning than you have tried dealin’ from the bottom of the deck to me, Professor.”

  Cady really wanted to know why de Klerk had passed himself off to Smith as a German professor, and what the hell they’d been up to while she was having a worse time than Samsung’s hottest booth bunny at E3.

  “But how…” de Klerk gurgled.

  Smith actually chuckled.

  “Heh. Very first time I spoke to you, Professor. I called the number you left for me in Berlin. You answered in English. Hello, you said. My watch didn’t translate nothin’ ’cause it didn’t need to. You had a thick German accent for sure, but you answered in English. Like you knew it would be me, and not any one of a million other fellers who might be callin’ you in Berlin. All of them speakin’ German. Got my hackles up right away, that did. I figure now you must have been waitin’ on that telegram call a good long time. Maybe years. Excitement got the better of you when it rang.”

  De Klerk seemed to regard Smith with great skepticism, and Cady had to admit she was a bit surprised that he was willing to shoot somebody on the basis of their phone manner.

  He went on. “That same conversation on the speakin’ telegram, you buttered me up like a Sunday biscuit, when I asked how you knew to leave correspondence at my hotel.”

  De Klerk struggled to speak, but he managed between the wheezing and the blood bubbles.

  “And I told you… I left copies… the same letter at… other hotels. I could not know… exactly where you might be.”


  “Indeed you did, sir, but you said I could not know you would be at the Esplanade. I had not told you of my locale at that point. But you already knew it. If’n that didn’t sound like a rattler in my bunk roll, I don’t know what would.”

  The German looked deflated, realizing his mistake and perhaps for the first time realizing he wasn’t dealing with some redneck yahoo in Marshal John Titanic Smith.

  “There were plenty of other signs, sir. You returned from your all-night adventure in Berlin, freshly shaved and clear of eye. You had obviously slept and attended to your toilette, even if you still wore the same clothes. A man who could step in and out of the years would easily find time for a hot bath and a shave. And you insisted that I had to get rid of all the equipage in my possibles bag ’cause Ms Cady had made it clear they should never fall into the hands of the Nazis. But that was your concern, Koffler. Not hers. To be honest, Cady is many things, but selfless ain’t one of them…”

  “Hey!”

  “It’s true.” Smith kept the gun on de Klerk or Koffler or whatever this asshole’s name was, but he turned slightly toward Cady. He looked to be suffering from his wound, and he’d taken a few more beatings while they’d been apart, but whatever pain he felt seemed salved by her presence. She saw him relax when his eyes met hers, confirming they were together again. “I confess I do have a fondness for you, Cadence McCall, but you ain’t no saint.”

  Smith turned back to de Klerk. Cady tried to focus on the interrogation, but her head was spinning.

  Omigod! He likes me. He really likes me.

  “Anyways. Ms Cady wouldn’t care none if I messed around a little with the sequence of events, long as it meant my chances of getting back to her were improved. She’d want me to play that game with as many cards tucked up my sleeve as I could fit in there.”

  “That’s true,” Cady confirmed. “That sounds just like me.”

  “An Apprentice, however…”

  De Klerk was struggling. His breath sounded as though it was gurgling up through heavy swamp mud.

  “You slipped up a few times like that. But the clincher was in the forest outside of Salem. You were tryin’ to keep me out of the village. You said you had the testimony of Ms Cadence and the public alterations to the historical record that our arrival did occasion. That were surely how an Apprentice would put it. Nobody else, not even a member of your Historical Society, would even think of such a thing. They wouldn’t know to think of it. Cady couldn’t tell them. Still, I suppose I coulda put that down to your being generally mindful of such things because of Cady’s diaries. So I proved your perfidy and connection to the Apprentices beyond reasonable doubt.”