Once he had seen Death in the street outside. A sudden dread possessed him that if he looked he would see that apparition again. He had, in fact, kept vigil for several consecutive nights—ruining his sleep to no good effect. He was torn between temptations: oblivion, vision.
He slatted the blinds open and peered into the street.
Empty street.
Amos Shank pulled his desk chair to the window and nestled his bony rear end into it.
The older he got the more his bones seemed to protrude from his body. Everything uncomfortable. Nowhere to rest. He whistled out a long breath of midnight air and put his head on the windowsill, pillowed on his hands.
Without meaning to, he slept again …
And woke, aching and stiff. He moaned and peered into the street where—perhaps—the sound of footsteps had roused him: because here he was again, Death.
No mistaking him.
Amos felt his heart speed up.
Death walked down the empty sidewalk in a dirty gray overcoat; paused and smiled up at Amos.
Smiled through his leathery snout and the hood of his shirt.
Then Death did a remarkable thing: he began to undress.
He shrugged off the overcoat and dropped it in the gutter like a shed skin. Pulled the NYU sweatshirt over his head and threw it away. Stepped out of the pants.
Death was quite golden underneath.
Death shone very brightly under the streetlights.
“I know you!” Amos Shank said. He was only dimly aware that he had said it aloud. “I know you—!”
He had seen the picture. Which old book?
Wars of Antiquity. The Court of the Sun King. Campaigns of Napoleon. Some ancient soldier in bright armor and cheap lithography.
“Agamemnon,” Amos Shank breathed.
Agamemnon, Death, the soldier, masked and armored, entered the building, still smiling.
Ashamed, Amos Shank double-checked the lock on the door, extinguished the lights for the first time in a month, and hid under the blankets of his bed.
Nineteen
Billy entered the tunnel with his armor fully powered and most of his fears behind him.
He had lived too long with fear. He’d been running from things he couldn’t escape. This visitation from the future was punishment, Billy thought, for a life lived in exile.
After he killed Lawrence Millstein, after a failed attempt on his legitimate prey, Billy had retired for two days to his apartment; had powered down, hidden his armor, retreated to the shadows. Two days had been enough. He didn’t feel safe. There was no security anymore, no anonymity … and the Need was deep and intense.
So he took the armor out of its box and wore it with all its armaments and accessories here, to the source of his trouble, this unpatrolled border with the future.
Where his prey had retreated—he knew that by the tangle of footprints amid the rubble.
Here we begin some reckoning, Billy thought. The beginning or the end of something.
He stepped through fallen masonry into the bright and sourceless light of the time machine.
Fear had kept him out of this tunnel for years: fear of what he’d seen here.
The memory was vivid of that apparition, huge and luminous. It had moved slowly but Billy felt its capacity for speed; had seemed immaterial but Billy felt its power. He had escaped it by a hairbreadth and was left with the impression that it had allowed him to escape; that he had been evaluated and passed over by something as potent and irresistible as time itself.
Now—under the bravado of his armor, the courage pumped out by the artificial gland in the elytra—that fear remained fresh and intact.
Billy pressed on regardless. The corridor was empty. Here in the depth of it, both exits out of sight, he felt suspended in a pure geometry, a curvature without meaningful dimension.
Beyond these walls, Billy thought, years were tumbling like leaves in a windstorm. Age devoured youth, spines curved, eyes dimmed, coffins leapt into the earth. Wars flashed past, as brief and violent as thunderstorms. Here, Billy was sheltered from all that.
Wasn’t that all he had ever really wanted?
Shelter. A way home.
But these were vagrant, treasonous thoughts. Billy suppressed them and hurried ahead.
The cybernetics had entered the tunnel as a fine dust of polymers and metal and long, fragile molecules. They began to infiltrate Billy almost at once.
Billy was unaware of it. Billy simply breathed. The nanomechanisms, small as viruses, were absorbed into his bloodstream through the moist fabric of his lungs. As their numbers increased to critical levels, they commenced their work.
To the cybernetics Billy was a vast and intricate territory, a continent. They were isolated at first, a few pioneers colonizing this perilous hinterland along rivers of blood. They read the chemical language of Billy’s hormones and responded with faint chemical messages of their own. They crossed the difficult barrier between blood and brain. They clustered, increasingly numerous, at the interface of flesh and armor.
Billy inhaled a thousand machines with every breath.
The exit loomed ahead of him now, an open doorway into the year 1989.
Billy hurried toward it. He had already begun to sense that something was wrong.
Twenty
Tom was out of bed as soon as the alarm registered. Joyce reached the door ahead of him.
The machine bugs had assembled these alarms from a trio of hardware-store smoke detectors. The noise was shrill, penetrating. Tom and Joyce had slept in their clothes in anticipation of this; but the actual event, like a fire or an air raid, seemed unanticipated and utterly unreal. Tom stopped to fumble for his watch, working to recall what Ben had told him: If the alarm sounds, take your weapon and go to the perimeter of the property, but mainly he followed Joyce, who was waving impatiently from the door.
They hurried through the dark of the living room, through the kitchen and out into a blaze of light: fifteen sodium-vapor security lights installed in the back yard, also courtesy of Home Hardware.
Beyond the lights, in the high brush and damp ferns at the verge of the forest, he crouched with Joyce—and Doug and Catherine, who had beaten them out of the house.
The alarms ceased abruptly. Cricket calls revived in the dark of the woods. Tom felt the racing of his own pulse.
The house was starkly bright among pine silhouettes and a scatter of stars. A night breeze moved in the treetops. Tom flexed his toes among the loamy, damp pine needles: his feet were bare.
He looked around. “Where’s Ben?”
“Inside,” Archer said. “Listen, we should spread out a little bit … cover more territory.”
Archer playing space soldier. But it wasn’t a game. “This is it, isn’t it?”
Archer flashed him a nervous grin. “The main event.” Tom turned to the house in time to see the windows explode.
Glass showered over the lawn, a glittering arc in the glare of the lights.
He took a step back into the shelter of the woods. He felt Joyce do the same.
But there was no real retreating.
Here was the axis of events, the absolute present, Tom thought, and nothing to do but embrace it.
Twenty-One
Ben stood calmly in the concussion of the grenade. It was an EM pulse grenade, less useful to the marauder than it had been; the cybernetics were hardened against it. The blast traveled up the stairway from the basement and exploded the windows behind him. Ben felt the concussion as a rush of warm air and a pressure in his ears. He stood with his back to the door, braced on his one good leg, watching the stairs.
He didn’t doubt that the marauder could kill him. The marauder had killed him once and was quite capable of doing so again—perhaps irreparably. But he wasn’t afraid of death. He had experienced, at least, its peripheries: a cold place, lonesome, deep, but not especially frightening. He was afraid of leaving his life behind … but even that fear was less profound than he’d expected.