"Oh." Justin didn't think he'd ever made a gloomier noise.
"They're working on it," Mom said. "I don't know the details—they haven't told me. But they don't want to leave us here. That wouldn't look good, either."
"Well, hooray." Getting saved because it helped Crosstime Traffic's image wasn't exactly what Justin had in mind, either.
"You ought to be glad they've got some reason to want to bring us back," Mom said. "Otherwise, they wouldn't try so hard."
"How hard are they trying now?"
"I think something is happening. I hope so, anyway."
"It had better be," Justin said, though he had no idea what he could do if it weren't.
A car pulled up in front of the shop. Justin wasn't very surprised when Mr. Brooks got out. If he'd managed to get down to Charleston himself, that had to be the boot in the behind the coin and stamp dealer needed. Justin opened the door for him. Mr. Brooks greeted him with, "You dummy."
"I made it," Justin said.
"Oh, boy." He didn't impress the older man. Mr. Brooks pointed to the assault rifle leaning against the wall. "Did you have to use that?"
"Yeah," Justin admitted in a small voice.
"How did you like it?"
Justin didn't say anything. His face must have said it all, though, because Mr. Brooks set a hand on his shoulder. Justin managed a shaky nod. "Thanks," he muttered.
"It's okay," Mr. Brooks answered. "If you did like it, that would worry me. It's not a game out there. Whoever you shot, he was real. You always need to remember that. Sometimes it happens. If he's gonna shoot you, you take care of yourself and worry about it later. But you always have to take it seriously, because the other fellow wants to live just as much as you do."
"I... found that out." Justin wondered if finding it out would set him apart from everybody he knew back in the home timeline. Knowing things your friends didn't couldn't help but isolate you from them . . . could it?
"You've joined a club nobody wants to belong to." Mr. Brooks was scarily good at thinking along with him. The older man went on, "Chances are you'll meet more members than you know about, because the others won't talk about it any more than you will." He turned to Justin's mother. "What's going on here?"
"I'm still alive. Nobody's robbed the place," she answered. Then she filled him in on the bigger picture, the way she had with Justin.
He nodded. "Okay. Thanks. It could be worse. It could be better, too, but it could always be better."
He was asking Mom more questions when Justin went into the back room. He got out of Adrian's uniform as fast as he could and put on the clothes he had in the pack. They were wrinkled as anything, but he didn't care. He didn't care about going upstairs for a different outfit, either. He wanted to turn into himself again, as fast as he could, not a Virginia soldier any more. Anything but a Virginia soldier, in fact.
When he came out again, Mr. Brooks nodded to him. "Took the whammy off, did you?"
"Yeah!" Justin said.
"Don't blame you a bit."
Justin nodded now. He was glad the coin and stamp dealer didn't blame him. But, all things considered, how much difference did that make? He'd blame himself for the rest of his life. If he hadn't put on the uniform . . . what?
He started to think, That African-American kid would still be alive then. But was that true? Was it even likely? Wouldn't Smitty or one of the other real Virginia soldiers have shot him instead? Or, if they hadn't, wouldn't the self-propelled guns have killed him? How could you know? You couldn't, not for sure. He wondered if he was looking for an excuse to feel less guilty. He hoped not. He would stay a member of Mr. Brooks' unhappy club no matter what. He'd just have to figure out how to live with it, and that wouldn't happen overnight, either.
He had the rest of his life to worry about it. The kid he'd shot didn't, not anymore. And that was exactly the point.
"I don't feel good." Gran said it in a surprisingly matter-of-fact way. Most of the time, she was proud of her aches and pains. She used them to outdo other people around her who might have the nerve not to be well. But coming out and announcing something like this wasn't her usual style.
Because it wasn't, Beckie paid more attention than she would have otherwise. "What's the matter?" she asked.
"The light seems too bright. And I'm warm, even though I know the air conditioner is running," Gran said.
Beckie walked over to her and put a hand on her forehead. She almost jerked it back in alarm. Her grandmother wasn't just warm. She was hot, much too hot. It could have been a lot of things. Beckie feared she knew what it was.
"Can you get me some water?" Gran usually milked her symptoms for all they were worth, too.
This time, Beckie didn't mind. As she went to the sink, she wondered what to do. Call the local emergency number? With fighting still going on in the city, would anybody pay attention? A long burst of machine-gun fire underscored her fears. Somebody screamed—not a short, frightened scream like the ones in the movies, but a shriek that went on and on and on. Anybody who screamed that way was dying as fast as he could, but not fast enough.
But with people in Charleston making noises like that, how long would the emergency people take to get here if they came at all? What would they do when they did? Will they stick me in quarantine somewhere? Will I ever get out again? She and Gran were foreigners here. Did California even have a consulate in Charleston? She looked in the phone book and didn't find one. Especially during a rebellion, the Virginians could do anything they wanted.
"Let me have some more," Gran said, so Beckie did.
Then she looked in the phone book again. Sure enough, there it was: CHARLESTON COINS AND STAMP COMPANY. It gave an address along with the phone number. Beckie didn't know where that address was. She'd never expected to come to Charleston. But the room had a computer terminal. It was slow and clunky by California standards, but it worked.
As she'd hoped, the coin and stamp shop was just a few blocks away. She'd figured Mr. Brooks would put her and Gran somewhere close to his shop. He and Justin were the only people she knew here. They could tell her what to do.
Whatever it was, she needed to do it in a hurry. Gran was sitting there, sort of staring at the TV. She often watched without really knowing what was going on, but this was different. Her brain wasn't working right. She would have stared the same way if she were pointed in some other direction.
Beckie tried using her cell phone to call the coin and stamp shop. No luck—all she got was static. The hotel room had no phone, any more than one in California would have. Land lines were dead, dead, dead. She wished she were in some backward part of the world where they still used them—Russia, maybe, or central Africa. She'd never imagined low tech could be better than high, but she'd never been in a war before, either. Phone service was probably out all over western Virginia and eastern Ohio. What a mess.
If she couldn't call, she had to go. She didn't like leaving Gran by herself, but she couldn't see that she had much choice. Gran wasn't likely to wander off. If she got sicker . . . Beckie gnawed on the inside of her lower lip. She didn't like to think about that.
I'm going to get help, she told herself. / won't be gone long. I hope I won't, anyway.
Then she told Gran the same thing. Gran nodded vaguely. "I think the muffins are spoiled," she said, which meant she didn't hear or she was out of her head with fever or all of the above.
Three blocks over and two blocks down toward the river. That was what the terminal said. It didn't say anything about what might be going on between here and there. Beckie wished it would have. She wasn't brave—not even close. But she knew she had to go, and so she left the hotel room before she gave herself much of a chance to think about it.