Part of the numbing roar in the air was the ominous rumble of thunder. Charlie slowed his footsteps, tilted his head to stare up at the black sky. Ash and grit rained down onto his upturned face. Without conscious thought, he guarded Lucania's little head with one hand. Overhead the blackness which choked the air seemed to boil. Pink lightning flashed...
Pink lightning?
An abrupt, wild stab of hope tore at him, left his pulse shuddering as raggedly as it did after sex.
A time storm?
Lightning slammed into the beach eight feet away. Thunder stunned them. Lucania sobbed in new terror. Charlie turned in circles, looking for it. Surely he wasn't wrong? The descriptions were so similar—
A sliver of white light opened out of thin air.
It was at least twenty feet away. Lightning blasted out of it, struck the sand and the waves, arced upward and outward into the clouds. Charlie stood immobilized and watched the white light grow larger. The unearthly blaze bathed Lucania's face with its unnatural glow.
Charlie's heart pounded so hard he couldn't hear anything else. His whole awareness shrank and centered on that crack through time itself. Wherever it led, it had to be better than a volcanic eruption in ancient Stabiae. Could he force his flagging body and crippled leg twenty feet across the sand before the portal disappeared again?
He cupped one hand behind Lucania's head, narrowed down his eyes against the hurtful brightness, and ran—
A familiar snarling sound roared out of the brilliance. Charlie yelled. A flash of metallic grill and glass impacted on his awareness.
Truck!
They were right in its path.
"What's that?" Joey asked.
Francisco stopped breathing. The cold gun muzzle remained locked against the back of his neck. Nelson's fingers stayed twisted through his hair, but Nelson didn't squeeze the trigger.
Rough ice underfoot had cut through Francisco's parka and uniform pants. Packed snow was red where his knees and his nose had bled into it. He knelt in the snow and shook while his executioners stared off into the distance. Don't let them shoot me first and go look later. Please, God, don't let them shoot first... .
A rumble of thunder allowed him to guess what they stared at.
"Nobody's due to come though, are they?" Nelson muttered. "You didn't mash the recall too soon, did you?" he asked Joey suspiciously.
"I haven't touched it! Jeez, Nelson, I'm not that stupid!"
"We better find out what's going on over there. I don't like this."
They seemed momentarily to have forgotten Francisco. He prayed with all his strength, hardly daring to hope. Nelson let go of his hair. Then pulled the gun barrel away from his neck. Francisco's breath shuddered out reflexively. Please...
Nelson paused a moment longer. "Bring the doc along, Joey. We'd better find out what this is before we do him. If it's trouble, we might need him again."
The bitter air seemed momentarily sweeter as Francisco drew it into his lungs. Tears froze against his eyelashes. Then Joey yanked him to his feet. He followed wordlessly on rubberized legs. The imprint of the steel gun muzzle lingered along the back of his neck. He had to scrub at his eyelids to wipe away the crust of ice that had formed.
I'm not out of this yet; it's just a reprieve... .
But he was still alive.
They set off across the ice field toward a lowering thunderstorm. Nelson led. Joey followed suspiciously behind Francisco. They were still two hundred yards away when the air split open with a deafening roar. A surge of glowing gas belched out of the rumbling sky. Incandescent gas and ash—the whole mass glowing brilliant yellow, even white—scalded at least a mile along the snow field, melting everything in its path.
All three of them dropped flat to the ice. Francisco shielded his face. He coughed as a stench of sulfur and other noxious fumes reached them. Joey began to swear monotonously. Nelson's vocabulary was more creative.
The explosion of hot gasses cut off abruptly as the now visible time portal shrank and closed. Nelson coughed and cautiously regained his feet. Joey followed, dragging Francisco. The snow was black a hundred yards away from the path of destruction. Francisco stooped curiously and gathered up a mittenful. It was ash. And pumice.
"What is it?" Joey asked suspiciously.
"Volcanic debris," Francisco said slowly. "Somebody punched open one of these crazy holes in time during a volcanic eruption."
Nelson began to swear. He ran forward.
What—?
"Bring the doc!" he yelled over his shoulder.
They ran after him, slipping and sliding across slushy black ice, until they hit steaming mud. Francisco saw movement out in the middle of the mess. Nelson had bent down across something alive. Dear God, something lived through that? Francisco caught a glimpse of something else moving, farther away, clear of the mud. A lone figure struggled to crawl farther away still.
He moved instinctively toward that person. The person who'd been caught squarely in the center of that blast might be alive, but not for long. Even the best medical care couldn't do much for a victim of that. Joey, however, hauled him back. Nelson was yelling for him.
They waded out into steaming muck. Nelson had crouched beside a dead horse and a horribly burned man. Nelson was practically gibbering.
"Keep him alive! It's Tony—oh, Christ, Carreras will have our heads if he dies—"
Francisco knelt beside the dying man. There was absolutely nothing he could do to keep this person alive. Tony's skin was black and crusted. If Francisco even tried to move him, that skin would slough off, probably in one piece. His mouth and nostrils were choked with ash. There were at least two stab wounds visible in his torso.
"Even if we had the best burn unit in the world, I couldn't do anything," Francisco protested.
As he spoke, the man died.
Nelson went nuts. First he kicked the corpse and screamed at it, not noticing how skin slid off and the abdomen burst like a fried melon. Then Nelson hit Joey and turned toward Francisco, belting him across the mouth. "You didn't even try!" He pulled the pistol from his belt and pointed it unsteadily at Francisco's head.
"What was I supposed to do? He died before I could even do a tracheotomy! Look at those burns! My God, half his skin slid off when you kicked him! And somebody stabbed him before the volcano blew!"
"What? Who?" Nelson demanded unreasonably.
Mother of God...
"I don't know who! Why don't you ask the other person who came through with him?"
Nelson stared around wildly. He spotted the sprawled figure lying inert on mushy ice just clear of the mud and stared uncomprehendingly at it. Without warning, Nelson grabbed Francisco by the lapels. His pistol caught Francisco's jaw. The big man shook him, hard. "You'd better keep this one alive, doc! Or so help me, I'll take a whole week killing you!"
Francisco didn't bother to reply, grateful for any reason they had to keep him alive. He already dreaded finding the type of injuries he expected. Francisco led the way, half running through slippery, melted muck, then knelt above the other survivor. She was dressed in what appeared to be a genuine ancient Egyptian gown. Whoever she was, she wore a fortune in gold jewelry that could only have been made deep in antiquity. Hair streamed wildly across her face, obscuring bruised features. But he didn't see any burns.
Francisco shucked out of his parka and wrapped her in his coat. He shuddered violently and steeled himself to ignore the fatal cold for as long as he could. Francisco checked rapidly for her vitals, for broken bones. She was relatively unscathed, having crawled sideways from the volcanic blast when she came through. They couldn't keep her out in this cold, though. Francisco was already numb.