by Pete Hautman
It was no warmer inside than it had been on the roof. He descended the four flights of stairs to the main floor. The front door was nailed shut from the outside, but one of the windows had been pried open. Tucker climbed through and jumped down into the snow. The tracks led out to the street, then disappeared in a mass of tire tracks. Where would Lahlia go? It was cold out. The bar, Red’s Roost, was the closest source of heat. As he crossed the street, Tucker noticed something odd: a motorcycle parked at the curb. A motorcycle? On a snowy street, in the middle of winter? Tucker performed a mental shrug and pushed through the doorway into the bar.
He almost backed straight out — the building was on fire — then he realized that it was just cigarette smoke. This was definitely the past, when people still smoked in bars and restaurants.
It took him a moment to see through the haze. A younger and much thinner version of Henry Hall, Hopewell’s most notorious drunk, sat hunched over the bar, nursing a mug of beer and a cigar. Tucker didn’t recognize the other two men sitting at the bar or the couple at the small table against the opposite wall. A lanky young man with long black hair wearing a black motorcycle jacket was leaning against the bar, smoking a cigarette and talking to Red Grauber, the owner. Red looked younger, too.
“Aw, c’mon, Red. It’s cold as witch spit out there. Just gimme a beer,” the young man said.
“You ain’t twenty-one.” Red laughed. “You ain’t even old enough to smoke, last I checked.”
Henry raised his head. “Give the kid a beer, Red. We won’t tell nobody.”
“Shut up, Henry,” Red said. “How about a root beer, Curtis?”
The young man grinned — and Tucker recognized him.
His uncle Kosh! Kosh at, maybe, seventeen. That had to be his bike out front. Tucker stood frozen in place. He watched Red pop open a bottle of root beer and set it on the bar in front of the young Kosh, who scowled at the bottle, shrugged, and took a swig.
Red noticed Tucker standing inside the doorway.
“Something I can do for you, son?”
“I just . . . I just came in to warm up,” Tucker said. Everybody in the bar was looking at him.
Henry Hall said, “I think I’m seeing double again.”
Tucker took a few tentative steps toward the bar.
“You lose your coat, son?” Red asked.
“Uh, yeah. I guess. Was there a girl just here?”
“Nope.” Red laughed. “Unless you’re talking about Mavis.” He pointed at the elderly woman sitting alone in a booth, drinking something from a wineglass.
The young Kosh was staring at Tucker intently. “Do I know you?” he asked.
“Not yet,” Tucker said.
The front door banged open; a gust of cold air swept through the room. Kosh looked toward the entrance and blanched. “Adrian,” he said.
A young version of Tucker’s father stood inside the entryway, his face hard and brittle. Tucker stared at him openmouthed.
Adrian Feye walked past Tucker without seeming to notice him, completely focused on Kosh.
Kosh slid off his stool and held out his arms.
“Welcome back, bro,” he said.
Adrian Feye punched Kosh in the jaw. Kosh staggered back, grabbed at the bar for support, and knocked Henry’s mug of beer into Henry’s lap.
“Hey!” Henry yelled.
“What was that for?” Kosh asked, putting a hand to his jaw.
“You know what it’s for!” Adrian advanced on him. “And you wrecked my car, you godless backstabbing piece of trash!” He swung again. Kosh dodged the punch and scrambled back, tripping on a chair and knocking over a table. He jumped to his feet, fists clenched, and braced himself. Adrian came at him again, his face a mask of fury. Red ran around the end of the bar and grabbed Adrian from behind.
“Take it outside, boys,” he said. He frog-marched Adrian to the door, planted one foot in the small of his back, and propelled him out onto the sidewalk.
“You too, Curtis. Out!”
Kosh glared at him, then walked stiff-legged to the door and followed his brother outside. The door slammed.
For a moment, Tucker just stood there trying to take in what he had seen. Was that really his father? And Kosh?
“Damn fool Feyes,” Red muttered as he picked up the table and chair.
“What about me?” Henry whined, looking in dismay at his sodden pants.
“Shut your hole, Henry. I’ll get you a fresh beer.”
From outside came the sound of angry, muffled shouting. Tucker ran to the door and opened it. His father and Kosh were rolling around on the sidewalk, grunting, cursing, and trading punches.
“In or out, kid,” Red said. “Don’t stand there letting the weather in.”
Tucker stepped outside just as the two men broke apart. Kosh jumped to his feet first. Adrian dove at Kosh and grabbed his leg. Kosh punched him on the forehead, jerked his leg loose, staggered over to his motorcycle, climbed on, and kick-started it. He sat revving it for a few seconds, watching as Adrian stood up unsteadily, blood streaming from a cut on his brow.
“I’m sorry, bro,” Kosh said.
In answer, Adrian charged at him with clenched fists.
Kosh dropped the bike into gear. The bike spun around, and Kosh took off down Main Street, snow and ice spitting from the back tire.
Adrian Feye chased after him for a few yards, then stopped in the middle of the street. He wiped the blood from his eyes, turned, and noticed Tucker standing on the sidewalk.
“Are you okay?” Tucker asked.
His father — no, not his father, but rather the man who would one day become his father — stared back at him, squeezed his eyes shut, then looked again.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I’m nobody,” Tucker said after a moment.
Adrian Feye held his eyes for a second, then shook his head in resignation.
“I must be losing my mind.” He turned his back on Tucker and walked unsteadily down the sidewalk to a 1980s-era Ford Mustang with a bashed-in rear fender. He got in the car and drove off after Kosh, leaving Tucker alone on the sidewalk.
Tucker watched until the single taillight disappeared into the night. He knew that his dad and Kosh had a big fight when they were young, before he was born. He’d heard the story from Tom Krause, who had heard it from his father. Was this the fight that had driven them apart and made Kosh leave Hopewell? Because Kosh had dented his brother’s precious Mustang? Was that why they went all those years without speaking? It seemed embarrassingly trivial — after all, they were brothers. It was just a car.
Tucker was getting cold again. He started back for Red’s, thinking he might borrow a coat from someone, then walk home and try to find out what had happened.
“Tucker?”
Tucker turned toward the voice. A boy was standing in the entrance to the alley, wearing a pair of gray coveralls exactly like Tucker’s. He stepped out into the light. His feet were bright blue, and his face . . .
“Tom?” Tucker said.
“Yeah.” Tom Krause took a few tentative steps toward Tucker. “You . . . you don’t look like before,” he said. “Did you get taller?”
“Are you okay?” Tucker asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t know how I got here. How it got to be winter, and . . .” He looked around. “Everything’s different. Those two guys fighting . . . Was that your dad?”
“I think so. I’m pretty sure. You were in a hospital, right?”
“I guess. I mean, I was at the park to see Father September —”
“Wait. You mean the same day — at the revival? During Pigeon Daze?”
“Yeah. And one of the guys in yellow robes came up to me and said I was chosen or something, and he brought me up on the stage, and . . .” Tom hugged himself. “It’s really cold out here.”
“We can go inside in a second. First, tell me what happened.”
“It was really confusing. They put a hood on my head, then they had
me lie down on this table, then something hit me really hard in the chest, and it hurt. There was blood and then . . . then I woke up in this weird hospital place with people wearing masks and stuff.”
“A Medicant hospital,” Tucker said. “Gheen must have shoved you into the maggot after they stabbed you. It was supposed to be me.”
Tom stared at Tucker with an utter lack of comprehension.
“I’ll explain later,” Tucker said. “What did they do to you at the hospital?”
“They wouldn’t talk to me. After I woke up, they just took me to this big round misty thing and shoved me into it. Next thing I knew, I was here. I mean, up on the roof.” He pointed across the street at Hopewell House.
“So those were your tracks,” said Tucker. “I thought maybe —” Sensing something behind him, Tucker turned. Two bearded men, one large and one small, both wearing black hats and long dark coats, were standing at the entrance to the alley. The smaller of the two men was carrying a suitcase in one hand and holding an object that looked like a TV remote in the other. Tucker had just enough time to recognize Yonnie-Dav and Albers when the small device crackled. All his muscles went slack, and he crumpled to the wet, snowy sidewalk.
ON HIS BACK, STARING UP AT THE SNOWFLAKES DRIFTING through the glow from the streetlamp, Tucker felt completely disconnected from his body. Strangely, he was not afraid. Whatever Yonnie-Dav had hit him with, it had relaxed not only his muscles but his mind as well. Whatever was to happen next, there was nothing he could do about it. No decisions to make.
Yonnie-Dav and Albers were speaking in their rapid, incomprehensible language. Tucker felt his feet being lifted, and then his whole body came up off the sidewalk. Albers threw him over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. Tucker’s head flopped to the side. He saw Tom lying senseless a few feet away. Yonnie-Dav set the suitcase on Tom’s belly, grabbed him by the legs, and dragged him into the alley. Albers, carrying Tucker, followed. They proceeded down the alley to an alcove at the back of the building where they were out of sight of the street. Albers lowered Tucker to the ground, none too gently. Yonnie-Dav bent over him and looked into his eyes.
“Apologies,” he said. “This is not your time. Our equipment has been unreliable of late.”
Tucker tried to speak, but his mouth and tongue would not move.
“The effect of the paralytic is temporary,” said Yonnie-Dav. He opened the suitcase and backed away. Inside was a pinkish ball the size of his fist. The ball began to grow. Within seconds, it was bigger than the suitcase, taking on the elongated, segmented shape of a maggot. Yonnie-Dav, his face lit by the glow from his handheld device, looked from the screen to the maggot and back again several times until the maggot had reached its full size. He bent over Tom and looked into his eyes.
Albers spoke; Yonnie-Dav responded irritably. Albers threw up his hands and walked off a few paces, muttering to himself. Yonnie-Dav touched his device to Tom’s neck. Tom twitched and moaned.
“Are you able to move?” Yonnie-Dav asked.
Tom’s arms flapped weakly. Yonnie-Dav pressed his thumb to his device. The maggot’s front end began to enlarge and flatten. Tucker heard a familiar crackle and hum. The orange-gray light of the forming disko reflected off the rough brick wall of the building. Yonnie-Dav said something to Albers. The big man grunted and lifted Tom, carried him to the front end of the maggot, and threw him into it. The disko flashed orange, and Tom was gone.
The two men turned their attention to Tucker. Once again, Yonnie-Dav consulted his device. He frowned. Albers spoke. Yonnie-Dav shook his head. Albers, clearly angry, rattled off a long reply. Tucker understood almost nothing of what they were saying, but he thought he heard the word Terminus.
Yonnie-Dav manipulated something on the side of his device; the maggot’s disko closed, then reopened.
“You are an anachronism,” he said to Tucker. “It is no wonder the Gnomon are perturbed. We will let the old woman deal with you.” He pressed his device to Tucker’s neck. Tucker felt sensation flooding back into his body, but before he could act, Albers lifted him and hurled him into the disko.
Tucker landed on something wet. He lay there staring up at the pale yellow-green foliage of a tamarack, waiting for his muscles to start working again. The smell of the place was familiar, as were the sounds of the birds and the hum of a nearby disko. After several seconds, the effects of the stun device wore off enough for him to sit up. He was in a tamarack bog, as he had suspected. This was Awn’s woods. The Terminus.
He had landed in a soggy depression between two hummocks. The low sun and a moist chill in the air indicated that it was early morning. He stood and looked around. The disko was a few feet behind him. His feet were ankle deep in the peaty muck; he pulled them free with a sucking sound and climbed onto the larger hummock. His arms and legs still felt a bit rubbery and weak. The yellowing of the tamarack needles suggested autumn. The last time he had been here, it had also been fall, and he had seen Awn murdered by Master Gheen.
The disko hissed and sputtered. Tucker took a careful look around, fixing the location in his mind. He had no desire to return to the Hopewell that had existed before he was born, but there might come a time when his other options would be even less desirable.
He chose a direction at random and walked.
A SHARP KNOCK ON THE DOOR INTERRUPTED TUCKER’S story. Dr. Arnay opened the door and exchanged a few words with the man outside. He closed the door and turned back to Tucker.
“Captain Calvert says we’ll be under way in fifty minutes. You think you can wrap up this story you’re telling?”
“It’s not a story,” Tucker said.
Arnay sat in his chair and crossed his legs. “Well, whatever it is, you’re running out of time to tell it.”
I’m running out of time, period, Tucker thought. But he didn’t say it out loud.
“LIA! LOOK! A KING JAMES BIBLE IN PERFECT condition!” If Yar Jonis had not been on crutches, she would have been jumping up and down.
Lia regarded the plump librarian with amusement. “When I was in Hopewell, Arnold and Maria had a Bible in every room.”
“Yes, but that was eight hundred years ago. This is a true rarity! Who knows what else the priests have hidden away?”
The underground room, illuminated by Boggsian lamps, was one of several book caches they had discovered in the catacombs beneath the priests’ temple. Books were stacked against the walls in haphazard array, some piled higher than Lia was tall.
“We may even find A Wrinkle in Time,” Lia said. She was wearing loose linen trousers and a pullover shirt that Severs had found for her and the crude rubber-and-rope sandals for which she had traded her Nikes.
Only once had Lia revisited the Palace of the Pure Girls — an empty, echoey space filled with memories. It seemed like years since she had lived the trivial, profoundly ignorant life of a Pure Girl. Her clothing was still in her dressing room — all silks and vicuna and fine cotton. She could not imagine wearing such garments now that she was a librarian. A scar-faced, murdering librarian.
Jonis nestled the Bible carefully in her cart. Most of the books in this room had been irreparably damaged by moisture, mold, insects, and time. More than once, Lia had opened a book only to have the brittle pages crumble in her hands. But the books near the tops of the stacks remained in readable condition. They had been collecting and cataloging for weeks.
“So far we have saved one thousand six hundred seven volumes,” Jonis said. “A lifetime of reading!”
Lia had grown accustomed to Jonis’s constant use of numbers. She had even allowed herself to learn some simple calculations, and found herself using some of the smaller numbers in everyday speech. Jonis was right — it did come in handy at times, and so far she had experienced no symptoms of Plague.
When Jonis had first discovered the books in the temple catacombs, she had nearly fainted from pure joy. She had spent her life protecting the armful of books previously acquired by the Yars, but this
wealth of literature was beyond anything she had dared to imagine.
“The Digital Age ended the era of the paper book,” Jonis had told Lia. “As the northern forests died back from the warming, paper became very expensive, and people came to prefer reading on imaging machines. When the Medicants were overthrown and their technology destroyed, the digital books disappeared with them. Then, to protect the people from digital influences, the priests destroyed every paper book in Romelas except for copies of The Book of September — or so they claimed.”
But in the cellars deep beneath the temple, the priests had kept thousands of ancient paper books, jealously guarding the secrets contained therein.
Hidalgo had assigned Lia to help Jonis. “Since you refuse to fight,” she said, “you can be a librarian. Try to keep Jonis focused on her job, lest she do nothing but sit on her overlarge buttocks and read her life away.”
Lia’s wounds had nearly healed. The scar on her face still showed scabs and bruising, and her ribs ached when she moved, but she was capable of performing tasks such as moving books from the priests’ catacombs to the Palace of the Yars. Jonis’s ankle was healing as well. She was able to move about with crutches, although only with difficulty, since she was always trying to do so with her voluminous coat pockets stuffed full of books.
Lia was not unhappy with the work. Jonis was pleasant, and the books themselves made for good company. The darker hours, however, were not so easy. Not a night passed when she didn’t wake up in an icy sweat from nightmares of priests and knives and Gates. Tucker Feye was always a part of those dreams, always in peril, always beyond her reach. Again and again, he died because of her, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.
