A Bridge of Years (31 page)

And
continued to watch.

A
little after four o'clock the counterman at the deli approached
his table. "You can't just sit here. This is for paying
customers."

The
place was nearly empty. Billy slid a ten-dollar bill across the table
and said, "I'd like another coffee. Keep the change."
Thinking,
If
I wanted to kill you I could do it right now.

The
counterman looked at the money, looked at Billy. He frowned and came
back with the coffee. Cold coffee in a greasy cup.

"Thank
you," Billy said. "You're welcome. I think."

The
last customer left Lindner's at five-fifteen; the store was scheduled
to close at six. Billy divided his attention between the storefront
and the clock on the deli wall. By six, his focus was intense and
feverish.

He
watched as the old man—the proprietor, Billy guessed —ambled to
the door with a key ring in his hand and turned the sign around to
show the word
closed.

Billy
left his table at the deli and moved into the street.

Warm,
sunny afternoon. He shielded his eyes.

At
Lindner's, the proprietor—gray-haired, balding, fat— stepped
through the door and pawed at his keys. Then paused, turned back,
pronounced some word into the shadow of the store, closed the door,
and walked off.

Billy's
interest was immediate: the old man had
left
someone inside.

It
was hardly likely the fat proprietor was his target, in any case. He
looked too much at home here: too bored, too mindlessly
familiar. Bide your time, Billy thought. Wait, watch.

He
stood at a newsstand and pretended to examine a copy of
Life.

The
second man stepped through the door a moment later and locked it with
his own key.

This
man,
Billy
thought. His heart speeded up in his chest.

Billy
followed at a discreet distance.

He
was working on intuition, but he didn't really doubt this was his
prey. Here was a reasonably young man in pale blue jeans, cotton
shirt, a pair of sneakers that looked suspiciously
anachronistic. Dust in the tread of those shoes, Billy thought. Some
dust, maybe, still trapped in the weave of his pants. In the dark,
this man would light up like a neon tube. Billy was sure of it.

He
lagged back a block or two, following.

The
man sensed Billy's presence. Sometimes this happened with prey.
Sometimes it didn't; there were people who simply didn't pick up the
clues. You could sit next to them on the subway, follow them up an
escalator, read over their shoulders; they didn't notice. More often,
a victim would feel some warning instinct; he would walk a little
faster, cast a nervous glance over his shoulder. In the end, of
course, it didn't matter; prey was prey. But Billy wanted to be
careful now. He couldn't use the armor too conspicuously and he
didn't want to lose this trail.

He
crossed the street, came parallel with his prey, then ducked into a
liquor store and paid for a bottle—a squat fifth of whiskey, but
any bottle would have done; it was only a prop. He put the paper bag
under his arm and hurried out. He spotted his target a block away,
heading into a seedy neighborhood on the border of the warehouse
district.

The
target paused once, turned, and gazed back at Billy.

And
what do
you
see,
Billy wondered. Not what Mr. Shank had seen, certainly. Not naked
death, not on a sunny afternoon. Billy crossed at the corner and
examined his own reflection in a window. Here was a gray-haired
man in a dirty gray overcoat carrying a bottle in a brown paper bag.
Ugly but hardly conspicuous. He smiled a little.

The
prey—the time traveler—nearly walked into the path of a taxi
(Billy contemplated this possibility with a mixture of regret and
relief); stepped back at the last minute (Billy felt a different
mixture of relief, regret); then hurried into the lobby of a tenement
building.

Billy
noted the address.

Follow
him,
was
Billy's next thought.
Follow
him into whatever shabby little room he occupies. Kill him
there. Finish with this.
His
armor wanted a killing.

Then
Billy hesitated—

And
the world
dimmed.

Dimming
was
how he thought of it later. It
felt
like
a
dimming —literally, as if someone had switched off a lightbulb in
his head.

He
was suddenly Billy Gargullo, farmboy, standing on a dirty street on
the Lower East Side in the antiquated past, the words
kill
him
still
echoing in his head like the chorus of an obscene song. He thought of
the man he had followed and felt a hot rush of guilt.

Suddenly
Billy wasn't a killer. He wasn't a hunter; his senses weren't keen.
He felt opaque, thick, frightened, leaden-footed. His clothes were
too heavy; he started to sweat.

His
armor had malfunctioned.

Billy
fled.

It
wasn't a problem he could run away from. But running was his first
instinct. He ran until he was breathless, bent double and gasping for
air, then walked in a cold daze until the streetlights blinked on.

He
sought shelter in a movie theater on Forty-second Street, where
lonely men masturbated in the balconies or gratified each other in
the toilet stalls. Other nights, he had come here looking for
victims. But that irony was lost on him now. Billy huddled into a
torn seat, terrified in the flickering movie light.

His
life might be over.

Maybe
it had been a bad bargain all along. Billy had seized the opportunity
when it was offered: leap back into the fabulous past, out of
the Storm Zone, battle zone, Infantry, mortal fear; seal the
exits and check them; live a modest, concealed life with his
armor a private and occasional indulgence.

Oh,
but Billy
(some
fraction of himself had objected even then),
the
armor won't last forever, there are no replacements where you're
going, no parts no labor no repair.
He
envisioned a searing, unquenchable, and ultimately deadly Need.

But
that might not come (Billy had told himself). Who could tell how long
the golden armor might last? Out of combat, preserved, groomed,
polished, maintained, diagnosed, coddled—maybe it would last
forever. Or as long as Billy lived. The power packs were good for
that.

So
he told himself.

It
hadn't seemed like a fairy tale, then.

It
was a calculated risk. Maybe this optimism was a flaw in his mental
equipment; maybe some slip of the scalpel at the military hospital
had left him too independent of mind or too vulnerable to
imagination. Billy had huddled against the noise and fury of the
combat zone and told himself,
You
don't have to stay here
—
and
that meant a great deal, with the wind outside, the constant
lightning, furtive combat in ruined buildings, in this nightmare
wasteland a thousand miles from Ohio.

He
remembered that time without wanting to.

Three
of them had discovered the time traveler.

Billy
killed the two infantrymen while they slept. Then he killed the time
traveler herself, the so-called custodian, whose name was Ann Heath.

And
journeyed back. And sealed his exits. And checked them.

Exhausted
and afraid, Billy fell asleep in the movie theater.

The
film—an "art film," mainly of people fucking—droned on
around him.

In
his dream he unreeled private movies.

Billy
didn't know much history.

After
his conscription, in the tedious hours at training camp, he sometimes
picked up the popular novels his buddies read—illustrated
historicals about the wild days of the twentieth century. Billy
enjoyed these books. There was always a pointed moral about the
sins of gluttony or pride; but Billy could tell the writers took as
much prurient pleasure in their stories as he did. Some of these
books had been banned in California for their frank depiction of
tree-burning forest barons, of greedy politicians zooming around the
world in gasoline-powered aircraft. As a conscript Billy relished the
promiscuity of his ancestors. They had danced on their cliff-edge, he
thought, with great style.

These
were his first coherent thoughts about the past.

The
rest of Billy's knowledge was commonplace. The climate had begun
to change long before he was born. In school they'd made him sing
pious songs about it.
Sun
and water, wind and tree, what have these to do with me? Sun and
water, tree and wind, against these, Father, I have sinned.
But
climate was Billy's destiny. Long before his birth, a fierce curl of
tropical air had formed and stabilized over the waters of the
Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. The Storm Zone ebbed and
strengthened; some years it was hardly more than a knot in the
Jetstream, some years it generated hurricane after hurricane,
battering coastlines already devastated by the rising of the world's
oceans and the melting of the poles. And every decade—as the
atmosphere warmed another degree or two— the trend was
unmistakable: the Storm Zone had become a stable new climatic
feature.

By
the time Billy was five anyone who could afford to had migrated out
of the southeastern coastal states. But the poor stayed behind,
joined by refugees from the Caribbean and Central America seeking the
relative safety of these ruined American cities. There were food
riots, secession riots. Washington dispatched troops.

By
the time he was conscripted the war had been going on for nearly a
decade. It had turned into one of those festering conflicts all but
ignored by the prestigious European news cartels. A senseless effort,
some said, to preserve as American territory a swath of land rapidly
growing uninhabitable. But the war went on. Billy didn't much care
about it, not at first. Recruited at the age of twelve, he was
shipped around to various training and indoctrination bases, mainly
out west. He spent a couple of years guarding the transcontinental
railway tracks where they passed through insurgent territory in
Nevada, where water-poor locals had tried to dynamite the trains a
couple of times. Billy didn't see any action, but he loved to watch
the trains go by. Big silver bullets shimmering in the sun haze,
loaded with grain, ingots, armaments, liquid hydrogen. The trains
levitated soundlessly from horizon to horizon and left dust-devils
dancing in their wake. Billy imagined himself riding one of
those trains to Ohio. But it was impossible. He'd be AWOL; there were
travel restrictions. He'd be shot. But it was a lovely thing to think
about.

He
was lonely in Nevada. He lived in a stone barracks with three other
recruits and an aging, armored CO named Skolnik. Billy wondered
whether he would ever see a woman, hold a woman, marry a woman, have
children with a woman. Billy was technically assigned to an armored
division of the 17th Infantry, but he hadn't been issued his armor
yet; privately, he hoped he never would. Some recruits did a
term of menial labor and were released back into their communities.
Maybe that would happen to him. Billy was careful to do everything he
was asked to do—but slowly, ploddingly. It was a form of silent
rebellion.

It
didn't work. On his seventeenth birthday, Billy was shipped east for
treatment.

They
gave him his armor and they posted him to the Zone.

He
woke in the movie theater on Forty-second Street and shuffled outside
into a miserably humid night.