A Bridge of Years (18 page)

He
rinsed his face and shook off a little sleep. Three forty-five in the
morning, according to the digital watch he'd bought at a Kresge's a
quarter century or so in the future. He leaned against the tiled wall
and listened to the rain beat against a narrow window. He was full of
thoughts he hadn't allowed himself for a long, long time.

How
much he missed sharing his home with a woman, for instance.

He
liked Joyce and he liked the sensation of being in her apartment, of
seeing—for the first time in nearly a year—a bathroom shelf
stocked with Midol and a tampon box; seeing her hairbrush, her
toothpaste (neatly rolled from the bottom), a Sloan Wilson novel
splayed open on the back of the toilet tank. Sharing these small,
quotidian intimacies reminded him how thirsty he had been for
intimacy in general. This tiny oasis. Such a dry and formidable
desert.

"Thank
you, Joyce," he said—aloud, but not loud enough that she might
hear him in her bedroom. "Shelter from the storm. That's really
nice."

Cold
rain spattered against the window. The radiator clanked and moaned.
Outside, in the dark, the wind was picking up.

In
the morning he found his way home.

"I
might be back," he told Joyce. It wasn't a promise, but it
startled him when he said it.
Would
he
be back? This was a miracle; but was it possible to
inhabit
a
miracle? Miracles, like Brigadoon, had a way of disappearing.

Later,
he would think that perhaps it
had
been
a promise, if only to himself . . . that he had known the answer to
these questions all along.

_{□ □}

^{□ □}

His
last day in Belltower. His last day in the 1980s.

He
drove to work prepared to quit, but Klein finessed that by handing
him a pink slip. "You're a fuck-up in general," Klein
informed him, "but what made up my mind was that deal you wrote
on Wednesday."

The
Wednesday deal had been a retired County Court judge. The customer
might have had an illustrious career on the bench, but he suffered
from what Tom had learned to recognize as a common malady:
big-purchase panic. The judge regarded the offer form as if it were a
writ of execution and offered full sticker price for a car he'd
barely looked at. "Let's write up a lower offer," Tom said,
"and see what the sales manager has to say."

He
told Klein, "We made money on that deal."

"I
know the son of a bitch," Klein said. "He comes in every
other year. He just toddles in and pays list."

"Nobody
pays list"

"If
they're giving away money," Klein said, "it's not your job
to turn it down. But I don't want to argue with you. I just want you
off the lot." He added, "I cleared this with your brother,
so don't go running off to him and expect any help. He told me, 'Hey,
if Tom fucked up, he's history. That's all there is to it.' "

Tom
couldn't help smiling. "I guess that's right," he said. "I
guess I'm history."

He
phoned Tony and said he was going away for a while. Tony wanted to
talk—about the job, about the future. Tom said, "I have to get
things sorted out by myself. Thank you for everything, though, Tony.
Don't expect to hear from me for a while."

"You're
acting crazy," Tony said.

"This
is something I have to do."

He
packed a change of clothes into his knapsack. Money was a problem,
but he was bringing along some items he thought he might be able to
pawn: the guitar he'd owned since college (bulky but potentially
valuable, a Gibson); a set of silver spoons. By Friday noon he was
ready to go.

He
hesitated when he noticed the TV had been plugged in again. It seemed
to sense his presence; as he watched, it flickered to life.

"You're
too late," he said. "I'm leaving."

tom
winter, we don't think you should go.

Their
punctuation had improved. He considered the statement,
considered its source. "You can't stop me," he said.
Probably this was true.

it's
not safe where you're going.

"It's
not safe where I am."

you
want it too badly. it isn't what you think.

"You
don't know what I want. You don't know what I think."

Of
course, maybe they
did
—
it
was entirely possible. But they didn't contradict him.

you
can help us.

"We
talked about that."

we
need proteins.

"I
don't know what you mean by that."

meat.

"Meat?"
Here
was an unforeseen development. "Ordinary meat? Grocery store
meat?"

yes,
tom.

"What
are you building out in the woods that needs
meat?"

we're
building us.

He
wanted to dismiss the whole disturbing notion; but it occurred to him
that he owed these creatures something. It was their territory he was
about to trespass through. And more than that: he'd been in their
power for a long time. They had implied that they could have changed
him; if they'd wanted a slave they could have made him one. They
hadn't. He owed them.

Nevertheless—"building
us"? And they wanted
meat?

He
said, "I have some steaks in the freezer—"

that
would be fine, tom.

"Maybe
I can leave them on the counter."

thank
you.

"How
come you can talk so much better now?"

we're
almost repaired. things are much clearer.

the
end of the work is very close.

Something
ominous about that, Tom thought. When the sleeping giant woke, this
might not be a safe place to be. The implication?
Get
out now.

He
tried to pull the plug on the TV set but it wouldn't come out of the
wall—they must have welded it there. But the screen remained blank.
He hurried to the kitchen, left a stack of frozen steaks and ground
beef on the countertop—a little queasy at the thought of them
wanting it—then gathered up his baggage.

The
phone rang once more. He debated letting it ring, then relented and
picked up the handset. He expected Tony with some last-minute
badgering, but it was Doug Archer's voice he heard.

"I
heard you got fired."

"News
travels fast," Tom said.

"It's
a small town. I've done business with a lot of these people. Yeah,
everybody talks." "Keeping tabs on me?"

"Hell,
no. If I had been, I would have noticed you aren't looking for
another job. So are you taking a vacation, Tom, or just bugging out?"

"The
property's not for sale."

"I'm
not calling as your fucking realtor. Are things okay up there?"

"Things
are okay."

"You
know what I'm talking about."

He
sighed. He liked Doug, he didn't want to hurt Doug's feelings—but
he didn't want Doug involved, not at this stage. "I'll be out of
town for a while."

"Son
of a bitch," Archer said.
"You
found
something,
didn't you? You don't want to talk about it, but you found
something."

Or
something found me.
"You're
right ...
I
don't want to talk about it." "How long are you gone for?"
"I honestly don't know."

"The
guy who lived there before—you're going where
he
went,
right?" "No, I don't think so."

"When
you come back," Archer said, "will you talk to me about
this?"

Tom
relented a little. "Maybe I will."

"Maybe
I should drive by while you're gone—make sure the place is in
reasonable shape."

"I
don't think that's necessary." A thought occurred. "Doug,
promise me you won't try to get in." He lied, "I had the
locks changed."

"I
promise I won't try to get in if you promise you'll explain this one
day."

"Deal,"
Tom said. "When I get back."
If
I get hack.

"I
mean to hold you to that," Archer said. There was a pause. He
added, "Well, good luck. If you need luck."

"I
might need a little," Tom admitted.

He
hung up the phone, pulled the shades, turned off the lights, and left
the world behind.

For
a long, lost span of years, the time traveler was dead.

Ben
Corner's death was not absolute, but it was nothing less than death.
The marauder's weapon had opened his skull and scattered much of his
brain matter in a bloody rain across the lawn. His heart had given
one final, convulsive pump, fibrillated for thirty seconds as wild
impulses radiated from his traumatized brainstem, then fallen silent,
a lump of static tissue in the cooling cavern of his chest.

Throughout
his body emergency repair systems stuttered and shut down. Auxiliary
circulatory pumps responded to his failing heart, then failed in turn
as blood pressure dropped below maintainable levels. He continued to
take huge, ratcheting breaths—like yawns—for nearly a
minute. The lungs were the last major system to give up their
independent life, and they did so with a final sigh of resignation.
By then the body had begun to cool.

Nanomechanisms
were trapped in his arteries by clotting blood. Oxygen-starved, they
radiated emergency signals and shut themselves off one by one.

Billy
Gargullo dragged the body into the woods and left it in an abandoned
woodshed under a scatter of mildewed newspaper. Decay organisms—thick
in the rainy forest—began to attack the corpse at once.

Billy
hurried back to the house. When he arrived here he had disoriented
the cybernetics with a pulse of electromagnetic radiation; now
he triggered a second burst to keep them out of his way. He paused a
moment in the kitchen and consulted his auxiliary memories for a
rough estimate of his whereabouts. America, the Pacific
Northwest—distinguished by the fiercely dense biomass of the
forest, which appalled and frightened him—sometime after 1970: too
close to the nightmare he'd left behind. He wanted a more effective
buffer, even if it meant greater risk. He moved back to the basement
and operated the tunnel's hidden controls the way the dying woman had
taught him. Destination was relatively unimportant: he wanted a place
to hide. He would run, he would hide, he would never be found and he
would never go back.

That
was all of his plan. His only plan. The only plan he needed.

Billy's
EM pulses interrupted TV and radio reception throughout the town of
Belltower and two neighboring counties. Along the Post Road the
effect was most violent and startling. Peggy Simmons, the widow who
lived a quarter mile from the house Tom Winter would eventually
inhabit, was astonished to see her Zenith color television emit a
vivid blue spark while the picture tube turned an ominous, fractured
gray. Repairs, that summer of 1979, cost her almost three hundred
dollars—the set was just out of warranty. She paid the repair bill
but reminded the man at Belltower Audio-Video that the Crosley set
she'd bought in 1960 lasted her fifteen years with only a tube to
replace now and then, and perhaps standards of manufacture had fallen
while the price of repairs had zoomed up, which was precisely the
sort of thing you'd
expect
to
happen, wouldn't you—the world being what it was. The repairman
nodded and shrugged. Maybe she was right: he'd been out on a lot of
calls just recently.