The Golden Minute

by John Birmingham

  Both Cady and de Klerk spoke at once.

  “How?” they said in unison. But she was much louder than the dude with a mouth full of blood and lung bits.

  “I took off my jacket while we spoke in the forest, if’n you will recall. Both of the watches were in my pocket. I moved a good distance away from them, even though experience has learned me I need only lose direct contact with the consarn things to lose the services of my translator. Of course you couldn’t know that. You kept yammering away in German. I could hear it as German, but I understood it perfectly as English. Only way that could happen is…”

  “If de Klerk had a watch too!” Cady cried out.

  She threw her arms around Smith to hug him and cried out, “Oh, you used deductive reasoning instead of bullets and punching, I’m so proud of you!”

  But she had to ease up when he stiffened in pain.

  “Oh, right, sorry,” she said. “My bad. Hey, are you going to be okay? Cos we should really talk.”

  “I’ll live. My treacherous little friend here, however…”

  He waved the gun at the Apprentice.

  Cady knew that he was an Apprentice now. Or…

  “What did you call yourself? A Regulator?” she asked.

  He nodded weakly.

  “My function… I make fine timekeeping adjustments… A Regulator is an artificer of balancing mechanisms throughout the entire movement… I was to effect a complete rebalancing.”

  “I don’t rightly know what you were attemptin’, Professor,” Smith said over him. “But it seemed as clear as the spots on a speckled pup you had some reason for gettin' to Salem with me, since any old Chumley could get there without me. I was content to ride along with you. But weren’t no way you was comin’ any further down this trail with us.”

  He placed a boot on one of de Klerk’s gunshot wounds and pressed in lightly. The wounded man cried out in pain, and Smith took the pressure off.

  “Now you tell me,” he said. “What was your intent?”

  “I told you!” de Klerk cried out. “To take her home. Before you. Before all of this.”

  Cady drew in a sharp gasp.

  She realized what he had been meaning to do.

  “He was going to reset my level,” she cried out. “He was going to get us back there somehow, or me at least, and kill us both. Resetting everything. It would be as if none of this had ever happened. Not me and you. Not London or Rome. None of it.”

  She shuddered.

  There was something so weird about the idea of being… not killed, but… erased.

  “He was going to disappear me,” she said, looking at Smith. “The me that you know. Leaving the old me behind in that shitty sushi restaurant, fighting with Georgia because I was a jerk, and… and… we would never meet. He’s not a Regulator. He’s a fucking Terminator.”

  A tremor surfaced from deep within her and she threw her arms around Smith. This time he let her, all the while keeping his gun trained on the other man.

  “You… you cannot be erased,” de Klerk coughed.

  “Say what now?”

  Cady let go of her man—yeah, that’s right bitches, he was her man—and dialed in on the Regulator again.

  “You, Cadence McCall. You are…”

  Koffler was really struggling now.

  “Your world, your time. It is the universal constant. Smith is a complication, an error introduced by the fugitive. Wu.”

  Cady’s skin prickled hot and cold.

  “What are you saying?”

  De Klerk grinned, a hideous, bloodstained grimace.

  “You had not considered this? Even though you deduced the nature of the many complications he has created, you did not carry through your logic. For if he was creating whole worlds every time he…”

  “What’s he yammerin’ about, Cady?” Smith asked.

  De Klerk’s eyes held her.

  “Tell him,” he said, seeming to relish the prospect.

  “Fuck you.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “You, Smith,” de Klerk said. “You are the result of a complication. A tiny shaving from Wu’s tourbillon, the escapement he designed to reduce positional timing errors due to the effects of the friction he caused in the—”

  “He’s saying you shouldn’t exist, Smith!” Cady blurted out at last, losing patience with the Regulator. “He’s saying you’re a mistake. The world you came from was made in error. By Mister Wu, with his watch.”

  “It was not his,” de Klerk insisted, seeming to regain some of his strength just to make this case. “He stole it. But yes …” He lost his unexpected spell of vigor and collapsed in on himself again, “… that is what I mean.”

  Smith said nothing at first.

  Cady linked her arm through his, squeezing at his bicep. It felt as massive and hard as a bowling ball.

  “I don’t much care for your chin music, Professor,” Smith said, seemingly spurred into motion by her touch. “What I care about is my little girl. Both of my girls.”

  He removed his free hand from the wound in his side, put his arm around Cady, and pulled her in closer.

  She had not once swooned in 1692, but she almost fucking lost it then.

  Omigod, I’m his girl!

  “I should plug you here and leave you for the buzzards,” Smith continued. “But I won’t.”

  “Seriously?” Cady said, suddenly confused. “That sounds like a pretty good plan.”

  He squeezed her shoulder.

  “Nope. I want you to git on back to where you came from and you tell ’em, I am going home. That’s where you want me, right?”

  De Klerk regarded him warily. His face was gray and slicked with sweat, but he nodded.

  “That is where you should be. Before you encountered Wu.”

  “Well that’s where we’re headed, asshole!” Cady shouted at him. “But you and your dumbass Traveler Teams keep getting in our way.”

  “You cannot go there, Cadence McCall. It is not your time.”

  “I’m not staying,” she said. “I’m only helping Smith get home. Then, pinkie promise, I will get myself home.”

  She felt Smith stiffen at that, but she squeezed his arm again, hoping it would convey all the things she couldn’t say in front of de Klerk.

  “You would do this?” the Regulator asked.

  She shrugged, and hoped it looked convincing.

  “He saved me from those two assholes of yours who got all stabby and shit back in Seattle. I owe him a solid for that. And you got to admit, he wasn’t doing much good getting home without me.”

  She was starting to see a faint glimmer of light at the end of this dark fucking tunnel.

  “Can you get yourself back to your secret lair?” Cady asked de Klerk. “Before, you know, you bleed out?”

  He hesitated, but only for a second.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Then leave us alone. Leave me to get Smith home. Tell your boss to back the fuck off. It doesn’t matter what happens in the alternate timelines. They’re just complications, right? As long as we only go backwards towards Smith’s originating point, as long as we don’t open any more worlds, you don’t need to fuck around with us. We just want to go home. Both of us. What happens then… happens. That’s probably like your mission statement, right?”

  De Klerk nodded. He was sweating like a wheel of cheese and shaking all over.

  “I can… I will put your case to the Watchmaker.”

  He reached for something within his jacket and Smith pointed the Luger at his head.

  “Easy there, Professor.”

  Cady whispered, “He’s not a real professor.”

  Smith whispered back, “I know. But it feels darned odd calling him Mr Regulator.”

  De Klerk moved slowly, indicating that he meant no harm. That he was no threat.

  He removed a piece of paper from inside his jacket and tossed it to Cady. It fell short. He produced a watch from the same pocket. It looked even more com
plicated than Chumley’s.

  He bit his lip, swallowing a wave of pain.

  “I do not imagine you will return the Apprentice… Chumley’s chronometer?”

  “When we’re done with it,” Smith said.

  De Klerk sighed.

  “I thought as much. I must go now. I am wounded.”

  “Don’t let the TARDIS door hit in the ass on the way out,” Cady said.

  De Klerk looked them over, as if considering their futures.

  “Thank you,” he said, surprising them both.

  Seeing their puzzled expressions, the Regulator managed a weak smile.

  “This is not my place either. I would not wish to die here.”

  And with that he tossed a small steel flask at Smith and executed a rapid and complicated series of button presses on his watch.

  He vanished with a slight, almost comical popping sound as the air he had displaced rushed in to fill the void of his disappearance.

  Smith slumped and Cady panicked, but he was only bending down to pick up the piece of paper de Klerk had left behind. It was covered in bloody fingerprints, and Smith was making it worse with his own.

  He gave it to Cady to handle.

  She knew what it was before she opened it. She recognized the paper. Stationery from the Marriot Hotel in Seattle.

  It was the list they had made of Smith’s previous stops up and down the timeline. De Klerk had made notes next to Cady’s. She saw the initials UC against half-a-dozen times and places, including ‘Seattle – Cady McCall’. Every entry was time-stamped. All of the locales they’d had to guess at, de Klerk had explicitly identified for himself.

  “Holy shit,” she said quietly.

  “What is it?” Smith asked, his voice tight with pain. “What does it mean?”

  “It means we have a map, Smith. A map to get you home.”

  He did fall then, finally crashing to his knees and pulling Cady down with him.

  “I’ll be all right,” he said. “I just need to get patched up. See if’n you can find some moss to jam into this wound. It was a rakin’ shot. I don’t think Koffler meant to kill me, just set me back on my boot heels. But it needs packin’ and disinfectin’. That bottle of schnapps he left behind over there would be a mercy, too.”

  “Okay,” she said, dropping to one knee next to him. Their eyes were level and she greedily drank in the sight of him.

  “I thought I’d lost you,” she said quietly.

  “No. It was I who lost you,” he said, and Cady could not miss the way he silently lashed at himself for it. Smith dropped his face and shook his head, “I am so sorry, Cady. So sorry.”

  She reached out with both hands, laying them on his stubbled cheeks to still the shaking of his head.

  “I can forgive you on one condition,” she said quietly, rubbing one thumb along the bunched muscles of his jaw.

  Smith looked up. Surprised. Hopeful. Disbelieving. All at once. He looked as though he had stopped breathing and that he might never draw breath again unless it was through her.

  “What?” he said, his voice thick with uncertainty, with self-reproach and the desperate longing of a man about to let go of something he has held onto for far too long. “What can I do?” he said almost despairingly.

  “Just kiss me, you fucking fool.”

  And Cady pulled him to her and took his lips in hers, biting and kissing him hard and deep with an avid hunger and needful urgency she had never before known. He groaned, possibly from the pain of his wound, but not for long. Smith kissed her back and he was soon all over her, one arm around her neck, the other hand pressing firmly into the small of her back, pressing her in close to him. His scent was in her throat, his strength and certainty swept everything away like a great wave on a dark beach. Cady tumbled through helplessness, and yearning, and a plummeting headlong passage into hot craving and intoxication. A lustful heat surged through her as Smith gathered her hair in one strong hand, pulled her head back onto his shoulder and took her insistent lips in his with a soft gentleness that quickly deepened into a powerful and overwhelming kiss. He left her wrung out and gasping, her heart hammering and her shaking arms and legs clinging to his body as the only fixed point in a transfigured world that had suddenly come loose from every mooring. Cady touched his mouth. His neck. His back. She raked at him with fingers turned to claws, parting his lips with her tongue, moaning as carnal shudders left her limp and breathless. Her body and soul exploded with animal sensations she had not known of in her waking or her dream life.

  All he did was kiss her, but with her pulse pounding in her ears this moment suddenly felt so much more real than any trauma of the last few days.

  He’s here… he’s alive… hecamebackhecamebackhecame...

  And then she started crying, because Smith held her safe within his embrace and he was real and alive and she’d survived terrible things without him, and done even worse all on her own, but he’d come for her, and she could not contain the emo-storm of super-feels blowing through her heart and soul. The tiny, struggling rational part of her mind surrendered, and Cady gave in to all the hysterics that she had totally fucking earned. She howled out all the terror and abandonment she’d been bottling up for days, clutching Smith in a stranglehold around his neck and snotting all over the shoulder of his suede coat. He only held her tighter, rubbing her back with one hand and murmuring soothing noises in her ear while she sobbed, punctuating this with gentle kisses in her hair as he rocked her slowly.

  When she was done with her derangement she lay in Smith’s embrace on the floor of the jungle clearing and looked into his eyes. He had been crying too, but quietly.

  He smiled.

  “Ain’t nothing for a man to show the woman he loves that he does dearly love her.”

  That set her off again, but the tears were sweet this time, not scalding.

  “I love you too,” she said.

  They hugged for a long time and when she came up for air, Smith was stroking her head and sipping from the liquor flask.

  She reached for the stainless-steel flask with a trembling hand. But then she stopped.

  The rainforest clearing in which they lay entwined was elevated. It dipped gently to the edge of a plateau that fell dramatically away, affording them a view over a vast panorama. The jungle swept down from their lofty vantage point, a verdant green splendor, exotic and raw, that morphed into the tropical garden suburbs of a coastal settlement just a mile or so to the east. The buildings were all low-rise constructions, apparently made of stone and wood, but there was nothing primitive about the settlement. Giant windpower turbines tracked the onshore breeze from a hillside to the north, and the sun glinted fiercely off hundreds of blue-black solar panels on the roof of every structure.

  “My darlin’?” Smith asked quietly while he stroked Cady’s hair.

  “Oh my god,” she breathed, and for once Smith did not object to her taking the Lord’s name in vain. “Where are we?”

  Cady’s heart lifted and her head reeled just a little from the sight below, where silent, impossibly agile aircraft swooped and looped and hovered in the airspace above the township. They had no wings, or rotors, or engines of any sort that she could make out. In the distance, the far distance, a spire shrouded with sea mist climbed away into the heavens, disappearing miles above them in the outer atmosphere.

  “Where?” Cady repeated, her voice softened by wonder.

  “I do not know where we are,” Smith said just as quietly as she. “But I do know that I am no longer lost.”

  Cady bit him lightly on the shoulder and pulled his face down to hers again. Hungrily. Needfully.

  She felt him flinch from the pain of his wound, however, and she did not allow her appetites to carry her away this time.

  “Can you walk?” she asked when her lips let go of his.

  “If wrestlin’ with a starving tigress did not finish me, a short stroll down yonder slope will not either,” he replied.

  Cady smiled, slo
wly.

  “Then we should go. We can get you patched up down there, I’m sure of it. And when you’re properly healed, I’m gonna tear you apart all over again.”

  Smith blushed, but he did not object.

  Cady helped him to his feet and they gathered up everything they had brought with them. Smith took her hand in his bloodstained paw, gently entwining his strong fingers through her own. She squeezed him back and kissed him once more, fully and passionately, but only for a moment.

  Then, hand in hand, they walked out of the forest and into the bright and shining sunlight of the future.

  Afterword

  The Golden Minute is over, but Cady McCall and Marshal John Titanic Smith will return in The Regulated Heart. If you’d like to know when (and score a tasty discount) you can join JB’s bookclub at jbismymasternow.com

  You’ll be his favourite if you do. And there’s freebies.

  You’ll be his favourite forever if you go drop a review somewhere. You have no idea how much that helps. Seriously, you don’t. Nobody cares what The New York Times thinks of a book anymore. But Amazon and iBooks and all the others do care about you and your opinion.

  So go on. Drop that review.

  Don’t git the Marshal all riled up by forgettin’ now.

  About the Author

  JB’s written lots of books, you know.

  You can join his bookclub for freebies and mad discounts at jbismymasternow.com.

  Oh, and he blogs at cheeseburgergothic.com.

  Acknowledgments

  The usual suspects all showed up and I thank them. My hard, pipe-hittin’ beta readers. Copy editor Deonie Fiford. Proofing biatch Alicia Wanstall-Burke. And dark master of the cover arts, William Heavey.