He laughed at my Revos and dismissed them as puny things. “You look like a bug,” he said. “Don’t forget to keep the robe’s hood up.” The borrowed burnoose covered me from head to toe, and now Teagun had finally furnished a reason for its rather cumbersome folds, I felt more appreciative of his efforts on my behalf. I learned, by reading between the lines, how much he’d risked himself yesterday in bringing the garment to me.
In addition, we each carried a single bottle of water, which in my opinion, seemed woefully inadequate. “I need more water than this just to take a pill,” I complained, worrying now, since it was he who’d mentioned dehydration.
“Sorry.” He gave me one of those looks. “You can have mine if you need more. The farm is only about four miles from here. I won’t need a drink until I get there.” Over the years, he said with a hint of superiority, evolution—and a little genetic tinkering—had not only provided his protective coloration, hair and skin, but also enabled the people who lived in this land to get by on less water than I needed. My mouth went dry thinking about it.
Yesterday, when I’d staggered away from our spying expedition at the hotel, I’d been suffering the effects of too much heat and sun. I hadn’t been capable, or cared enough, to pay much attention to my surroundings.
When I’d set out this morning, carelessly leaving Teagun asleep in camp, it had still been dark. On the return trip, I believe the experience had put me into a kind of quasi-shock. Backtracking the route for this, the third time, I opened my perceptions, allowing the predictions of my own century to catch up with the reality of the next.
In the spring of the year 2000, I remembered from school history lessons, a huge chunk of the polar ice cap broke off—the first of many such bergs—and the floe set adrift in the Arctic Ocean. The World Watch Institute reported alpine glaciers to be retreating at an alarming rate every season. The Institute was issuing early warnings of a sudden rise in sea level with high tides, and with it, threats to urban water supplies and plant and animal habitat. Global warming is—was—changing the world as we knew it.
Evidence of this environmental damage surrounded us, literally, considering the way we had to garb ourselves in protective gear. In the year 2120, the world continued, but at what price? When I return to my own time, I wondered, will there be anything I can do to change the progression of history? Or would any attempt, given my meeting here with a man named Teagun Dill, be a morally correct thing to try?
“What are you thinking?” Teagun asked later, after several sideways glances. “I can’t tell. You’re being awfully quiet for you.”
I gathered he thought I talked too much. I didn’t know whether I should be offended by his remark or amused. Amused, I decided, as my thoughts were sad enough already. We needed a little levity.
“We joke—well, not joke precisely. We Spokanites speculate about Seattle moving east when the city gets washed away by the rising ocean. Has . . . did that happen?”
He shot me an oblique look I read as being accusatory. “It happened all right,” he said shortly. If I’d wanted levity, I wasn’t going to get any from him.
“How far did the city have to move?”
“Inland forty miles. Something like that. What there was left of it. The city, the whole coast was taken by surprise, you see. Months of bad weather brought high tides, the dikes the government erected failed. There was a 7.9 earthquake offshore. Swoosh!” His arm flung wide in explosive demonstration though he did not break his stride.
My chest tightened, my feet faltered. “What do you mean, swoosh?”
“I mean, swoosh. Washed out into the middle of Puget Sound in Seattle’s case. Into the Pacific for most the rest of the coast. Or if not washed out, the tides completely washed over.”
I gasped. “Oh, my Lord, the loss of life must have been horrendous.”
“Yes,” he said simply. “I believe so.”
But the way he said it led me to believe the incident didn’t particularly disturb him. Not anymore, if ever.
“How long ago did this happen?” I asked.
“I don’t remember. In the mid-21st century, I guess. Somewhere along in there. I’m not a historian. What difference does it make? What’s done is done.”
I guess he had a point
“Hush, now,” he admonished. “Be quiet. Here’s the hotel. I want to do a quick reconnaissance to see if there’s any disturbance stirred up over Villanova’s disappearance.”
Sure enough, as I stepped out of his shadow, I saw we’d arrived at the same stone outcropping we’d used for concealment yesterday morning. The scene before our eyes differed considerably from the previous day. It had been placid then with only a brief glimpse of Adainette Plover and her followers when they came to the gates to greet the rest of the arriving gang.
At this time of day, the parking lot was full of silent hover truck and trailer rigs. Bike-like personal craft lined up beside private cars. I had no idea how many rooms the hotel boasted, although I figured it must be filled to capacity with drivers taking shelter against the daytime heat. A man patrolled outside the gates; a new twist of events.
I tugged at Teagun’s arm, drawing his attention to the man.
Teagun lifted his goggles, squinting against the sunlight. “I see him.” He pointed off to our right, whispering, “Look there.”
I looked where he indicated and with a sickened jolt, spied the jumble of boulders where the bald man and I had fought. Worse, the short, compact man I’d seen yesterday with Adainette and Baldy, aka Kurt Villanova, was poking among the rocks with meticulous care.
“What will he do if he tracks us and finds Villanova?” I asked, whispering, too.
Teagun’s lips tightened. “Question Petra, I suppose. If she’s still alive.”
“Have you heard from her?” I tapped his watch—chronocom, he called it.
“Last night. Not this morning.”
The short man, who must have discovered something to arouse his suspicion, though not enough to prove conclusive, shouted from across the highway to the man at the gates. With a peremptory gesture, he called the man to come over. He headed back toward the hotel. The two met at the edge of the road, pausing momentarily to confer. Neither of them wore a burnoose or a head covering.
“What’s he doing?” I asked, as if Teagun should know.
Teagun shrugged.
“Is there a kind of technology that will let them see our footprints or check for bloodstains or something?” Vaguely, I remembered hearing of such a device in existence, a special kind of powerful light, though I didn’t believe anyone except law enforcement people utilized it. Too expensive unless taxpayers footed the bill.
“I wouldn’t think they’d have that kind of equipment available,” he said slowly. “That’s more sophisticated than their kind generally uses. We were careful. You brushed all of our tracks, didn’t you?”
“I think so. I tried,” I corrected myself. “It was dark. I could have missed one or two.”
“Damn,” he said, biting his lip. “I wanted them to think Villanova had hitched a ride out of here.”
“Better yet, space aliens came and got him.”
The corner of his mouth hitched up. “I guess that old story’s been going the rounds for a few years, hasn’t it?”
“Uh-huh.” I watched as the man from the gate scrambled in among the rocks and sat down facing the highway. Faced that way, but I figured he must be at least half-hidden from view by a group of taller rocks, for he’d sought the available shade.
“Teagun!” I tugged his arm again, excited by a wayward thought.
He started. “What? What’s wrong?” He threw a wary glance around, and seeing nothing, frowned at me. “Keep your voice down, Boothenay. Sound carries easily and far in the desert.”
While I begged leave to doubt that, considering I hadn’t been able to hear a thing the outlaws said to each other, I didn’t bother to argue.
“Nothing is wrong. I just wondered, what if we got
rid of him, too? In broad daylight. Now that would reinforce the space alien theory, wouldn’t it? The uncertainty might throw a scare into them.”
“Are you having a sunstroke?” His hand came out, touching my faintly moist and sweating forehead. I was perfectly all right as he could tell. My temperature regulator was doing the job it was designed to do. “Nope. No fever. You must be having a simple case of the crazies.”
I brushed his hand, which showed a slight tendency to linger, away from my face. “I am not. Listen, now, and tell me the truth. When you brought the Weatherby to the shop for me to work on, you changed time, didn’t you? A little bit. More precisely, you changed time within time, beginning by locking the door and making it seem you hadn’t moved. I thought at first I was going crazy, but then I decided you’re just very good at manipulating the power.”
After a moment, his head jerked, short and fast. “So?”
“So, do it again. Right now. Take us back in time to a minute before those two men traded places. We can be hiding in the rocks. You did see that the gate-guard didn’t look for anything amiss, didn’t you, because he’d been watching this other guy search the area and knew nothing could be wrong? I’ll bet we can take him out without anyone the wiser. It’ll drive everyone nuts wondering what happened to him.”
“I not sure that’s a good idea,” Teagun warned. “The shot will make too much noise, spill more blood, and leave us with too little time to clean up and dispose of the body. We’re apt to bring the whole bunch down on us, and frankly, we’d have to be awfully lucky to take on all of them at once and win.”
“Why do we have to kill him?” I turned cold at the concept of putting a man in a trap to be murdered. Even a dyed-in-the-wool, certified creep like this one. And that’s what it would be, murder. I couldn’t make any excuse that it was not. “Can’t we take him prisoner?”
Teagun gave me another of those doubtful looks. He was getting good at them. “And do what with him? There’s a prisoner holding cell in the hotel, but in case you haven’t been paying attention, I don’t have free run of the facility.”
“Use your imagination,” I said. Snapped really. The eminently logical way around this had already occurred to me, and I didn’t like the way it set up. Teagun would probably think of the solution himself in a second; meaning, the easiest way to get around the problem was to take the man prisoner now, and kill him later, at our leisure.
“What kind of drug did Baldy have on him?” I put my own imagination to work before he got a word in. “Is it stuff that’ll put this guy to sleep? Or we could knock him out for a bit, gag him, and make him walk out of here on his own two feet. Or what about this farm of yours? Isn’t there any place we could tie him up and stash him there? Or . . . or . . . what do you do with the other outlaws you’ve captured? Can’t you do the same with this guy? Might as well collect your bounty money while you’re at it.”
Something I’d said must have made sense for Teagun’s expression changed to one of narrow-eyed contemplation. “Crazy as it sounds, your idea might work at that,” he conceded.
“Which one?”
“All of them. Put together, they only make one.”
I grubbed a pointy little rock out from under my belly and pitched it at him. All of them, huh? Sounded like overkill to me. But, no, I corrected myself. There would be no killing this way, although for the life of me, I didn’t know if that was good or bad. In the final analysis, I was only trying to cover my own ass.
CHAPTER 9
I swear to God, I don’t know how Teagun does it. Seamlessly shifting two full-grown people from point A to point B has never been easy for me. I well remember the first time I intentionally accomplished that oh-so-incredible feat. When I’d taken Caleb backward almost 200 years in time, I’d begun to think we would be lost. Feared that somehow we’d be caught betwixt and between and never find our way home.
So drastic a happening never occurred, of course. The trouble is, there is always a cost. Blood is the required payment. So far, the blood has always been my own. I’m starting to look like a scarred-up, old street fighter. The remnants of a bayonet wound through my left hand and a small, circular thickening of tissue on both sides of my torso from a bullet are reminders of the dues I’ve paid.
No such effort or payment seemed required of Teagun, although he did break out in a thin rime of sweat. I felt nothing during the time shift, except perhaps a slight case of dizziness, a middle-ear disturbance.
He timed us well. For himself, he found concealment between two stone columns where his burnoose helped camouflage him. Motionless, he settled in place.
Meanwhile, I took up my position, crouched on the blind side of a large, flat-topped boulder directly opposite of where Teagun stood. Spared only a second in which to suck in, and hold a single breath, there came another shift, and the gate-guard man reappeared, lowering himself to take a seat on the rock. Incredibly, he sensed nothing out of place. With his back to me, he faced both the hotel and Teagun who was apparently invisible to him.
Before I could set myself, the disembodied feeling struck again, harder this time. Rocks shifted beneath my feet. I felt as though I were about to faint, to topple right over onto my face. Hoping to stave off such an awkward move, somewhat desperately I arose, standing straight upward.
My burnoose whispered against the rocks. A soft, blowing sound involuntarily came from my mouth as I tried to control a rack of nausea and a racing pulse. I could feel the blood draining from my face, leaving me as pale as the silvery-gray foliage on the sagebrush.
Hearing the slight noise I made, the man, still seated on the rock, whirled around to confront me.
From the depths of the burnoose’s hood, I stared back at him. I knew my eyes, masked behind the opaque blue-lensed glasses, had gone wide and wild, staring out of a stark, white face.
His arm raised, weaponless, as though to fend me off
“Aaiii,” he said, in what sounded like a subdued scream
Teagun’s hand slapped out in a well-placed blow alongside the man’s neck. Like a lightening-struck tree, the outlaw fell toward me, sliding across the top of the boulder as if riding on oiled skids. Teagun caught the back of the man’s suit at the last possible instant in which to stop him from toppling all the way over.
“Have you killed him?” I asked, aghast at the silent ferocity of the assault. I felt fine again as Teagun let loose of the time thingy he was doing. Weird!
The man’s eyelids drooped, not fully closed, not fully open. His mouth sagged. A runnel of spit drooled out one side.
“No.” Teagun said, plainly unconcerned. “That particular blow disrupts the supply of blood to the brain, if he has one. He’ll soon be awake. Let’s get him gagged and bound before he comes to.”
He sounded odd. Suspicious, I looked up at him. “Are you laughing?”
“No,” he said, searching his pockets for cord and tape. But he was. I could feel the peculiar, misplaced merriment he was trying to hide.
“It’s not funny,” I said.
“I’m not laughing,” he insisted, his dimple bouncing in and out as his muscles jumped. He slapped tape over the outlaw’s mouth, spit and all. “If you could have seen your face, Boothenay! Those blue lenses over your eyes were perfect. And him! He thought for sure he was seeing a ghost or a bruja.” He sobered suddenly. “Or a mutant.”
“Bruja?” I repeated. “That’s a witch, isn’t it, in Spanish? And what do you mean—mutant? Me?”
He measured and cut a length of cord, whipping it around the man’s wrists in a self-tightening shackle. Pulling the bound man fully across the rock to where I stood, Teagun paused to repack the cord and tape in his pockets.
“Yes, you. Which means you scared him even worse than he scared you.” He spoke in a choked voice. “Hurry. Let’s get out of here. Grab him by his other arm and we’ll drag him until he wakes up.”
I was just as glad that didn’t become necessary. True to Teagun’s word, the outlaw awok
e while we were talking. He took off walking alongside Teagun without much protest, anxious, judging from his wild-eyed stare, to get away from me. I followed, sweeping away our tracks with another of the sage switches.
As for Teagun Dill, well, he saw entirely too much. I would have preferred for him to never see me frightened. Of course, I did have a good excuse for being afraid, seeing that only about four hours had passed from the time one of these outlaws had tried to kill me.
Still, me, a mutant? Why? Bruja, whether I liked it or not, fit me better. After a bit, I began to smile, too. Not laugh, not yet. But smile.
TEAGUN LED us on such a rambling walk across country that I knew he must be deliberately confusing our trail. He kept a tight hold on our captive’s arm, seeing the man showed a tendency to want to escape. Having me follow him must have been disturbing to him, for every time the outlaw twisted around and saw me there, he’d lurch forward again, futilely seeking flight. Teagun kept having to rein him in.
Mind you, I’d have liked to investigate the outlaw’s superstitious fear of me as his attitude had me baffled. I didn’t, of course, because my continued silence proved a great way to keep him under control. Only Teagun found any of this amusing, except he wasn’t talking either. He signed to me to remain silent, so I did.
After a hundred yards or so, I was allowed to leave off sweeping our tracks. Since the ground was hard-packed, I couldn’t see where we were leaving much evidence of our passage. When once the outlaw stumbled to his knees, there was nothing to show of his accident, unless it was the dirt clinging to his pant legs. His tailor should have used some of Petra’s self-cleaning cloth, I thought.
Our walk was like a trek through a mini-hell. The air was so hot and dry, it seemed as though the moisture was sucked right out of me. I didn’t remember, ever, being in weather like this. Not even on a trip through Death Valley one summer. Everywhere where I looked, heat mirages shimmered and swam on glassy lakes of uncertain hue.
Crossroad (The Gunsmith Book 3) Page 10
