Slick tossed him the rope and Beck, feeling foolish, hooked it to the safety harness at his waist.
Nye said: “I’m coming with you.”
Beck shrugged.
Slick said: “Hold onto his line, then, fella—two heroes is more than I was prepared for.”
Ashmead slapped the buttstock of his Ingram so that it unfolded and nestled the weapon, muzzle heavenward, in the crook of his arm. Then he gestured with it: “Gentlemen, be our guests.”
Beck was already moving, not up the crazed walkway, but across the littered yard with Nye beside him.
When he stepped carefully over something and Nye gulped in a sharp breath as if he’d been struck, Beck realized that it was the handlebars of a tricycle.
He remembered asking Nye, back in Dugout, if this trip was just to collect the ashes.
Moments later, he was down on his knees and wishing that ashes were all there was to collect.
In the imploded window’s frame was a hand. It was impossible to tell if an arm was still attached to it because it disappeared into blackness and the hand itself was blackened. In places charred bones showed through crispy skin, not white bones, but gray-brown like those of a well-cooked chicken.
On the hand’s third finger was a single ring, a square-cut two-carat ruby that Beck had given Muffy because he’d not wanted a double-ring ceremony and the very idea of wedding bands distressed him. It was from Harry Winston’s and there certainly wasn’t another like it on this street in Georgetown.
He was on his knees, peering at it, unwilling to touch the dried and wizened finger for fear it would come off in his hand and he’d vomit all over himself inside the radiation helmet.
He just knelt there, his palms pressed against his knees, conscious that Nye, beside him, was breathing heavily.
After a time, Ashmead snapped: “What the fuck’s going on over there?”
“I… found her.”
“Damned convenient,” Slick said. “You’re sure?” And then, to Ashmead: “Here, hold the rope. If I don’t get them out of there, they’ll sit there till sundown.”
He felt rather than heard Slick’s footsteps and when he could see the toe of Slick’s combat boot he reached out to take his wife’s ring, eyes slitted almost closed.
“Aw, shit,” Slick whispered as the entire hand came free in Beck’s grasp and he sat back, holding it, face averted, so that he didn’t see the dog, fangs bared, lips curled, come barreling out of the hole.
He first realized what was happening when Slick pushed him out of the way and he sprawled across some jagged brick.
The dog had its teeth in Slick’s wrist and Slick was trying to lift it off the ground and shoot it with his free hand without shooting himself.
Beck’s training reasserted itself: he had the Ingram by its pistol-grip, safety disengaged, the bolt already slamming home before he knew it.
The.45 caliber report was so loud that he could hear it through his helmet. What he couldn’t hear was the howl of the shot and dying dog and the growls of its three compatriots—shepherd mixtures—who were leaping through the window after the leader of the pack.
Beck yelled to Nye to run but Ashmead countered: “Hit the dirt, fool,” and then there was time only to shoot the dog leaping for his throat and roll out from under it, fully aware that Ashmead’s bullets must be whizzing above his head and ricocheting off the rubble.
“Clear,” came Ashmead’s voice in his ears again. “Everybody out of there, now.”
Beck was watching Slick, who was looking at his torn, bleeding wrist and the tatters of radiation suit around it.
“Well, fuck,” said Ashmead’s deputy, “that’s that, I guess.” His breathing was labored.
Tuning out Nye’s sudden burst of hysterical non sequiturs, Beck said, “No—it doesn’t have to be.” He got up and went to Slick, who was staring doubtfully at his freely bleeding wrist. “The blood’s washing it. We’ll get you right back to the chopper and scrub it down, tape the suit…. Worst case, it’ll cut a year off your life, and if you’re going with us into Langley, you ought not to be too worried about that.”
Nye toed one dog: “It’s rabies, not radiation he’s worried about,” Nye said. “You can’t always tell from looking at a dog whether or not it’s rabid.”
Slick retorted: “I’m not worried, Nye; I’m dead on my feet, like Beck says, one way or the other. But come on, let’s go. I want to see you guys safe to Langley—that’s what I’m here for.”
Ashmead had a hand on one hip and his Mac-10 on the other. Even from a distance, Beck could tell he was shaking his head in disgust while he covered their retreat from the building.
When Slick reached him, Ashmead lowered the gun, grabbed Slick’s wrist, and then put an arm around Slick’s shoulders. “After you two.” Ashmead motioned with the weapon in his other hand and his voice was metallic: “Let’s go; on the double.”
Thoreau was already preparing to lift off as they scrambled aboard and Ashmead slammed the slider shut.
Only Nye strapped in. Wordlessly, Beck exchanged his M-10 for the medikit and they went through the motions of scrubbing Slick’s exposed and bitten skin and then taping up the rents in his suit.
Slick, despite his protestations and even logic, looked worried, as white as a sheet.
While Ashmead fussed over Slick with the obsessiveness of a mother, Slick said: “Okay, Beck, maybe now you’ll tell me just what it is in Langley that’s worth all this.” Sweat glittered among the stubble on the deputy’s jaw.
“He can’t…” Nye said.
“He’s got a right to know, Sam,” Beck interrupted, and was shocked to hear his own calm, decisive tone.
“I just meant that he wouldn’t understand it,” Nye said thickly.
“Try me,” Slick challenged.
“We’re going to try to get a message upstairs to Langley—the operational Langley of sixteen days ago: that’s about all we can expect to handle, somewhere in the vicinity of a sixteen-day temporal skew. Nye says they managed a two-week send from computer to computer in the building during test—”
“They’re not cleared for this….”
“Nye, shut up.” Then, to Slick: “The basement computers have gallium arsenide circuitry; that gives us a better chance that they’ll have survived the pulse… that and the fact that they were probably shut down. But there are problems: it’s going to be hot in there. Even if the emergency generators are all working, we won’t be able to spare power for air conditioning, so we’ve got to do it right the first time, before the heat starts affecting the computers and we begin getting garbage or outright equipment failure. Which means lots of sitting around while we get everything up and running and do systems checks in a red zone which is going to read off the scale on that belt Geiger counter of yours. So it doesn’t matter about the dog bite, unless you were going to sit outside in the chopper.”
“I wasn’t,” Slick said easily. “But what about paradoxes—time travel, I mean… What’s going to happen to us if it works?”
“Good question. This isn’t a test signal we’re sending—it’ll change things if it works. Rafic, got a scratchpad?”
Ashmead did and when he handed it to him, Beck saw that Ashmead’s eyes were bright and their lower lids flame-red. Slick was his favorite and bandaging Slick’s wounds had brought ghosts of too many others out where Ashmead had to deal with them. Fighters will tell you that in their occupation they become inured to death, that your first kill is the one that haunts you and all the rest line up faceless behind, but that’s the way it is only with enemies. With friends, and especially with a team like Ashmead’s, losses cut as deep as in any family.