“Huh?” Albert looked at Nick as though he had spoken in a foreign language.
“The stretcher,” Nick repeated patiently as they walked toward the open Airport Services door.
“We found it,” Albert said.
“Did you? Super!”
Albert stopped just inside the door. “Wait a minute,” he muttered, then squatted and felt around for Don’s lighter. He found it after a moment or two. It was still warm. He stood up again. “Mr Gaffney’s on the other side of the desk, I think.”
They walked around, stepping over the tumbled stacks of paper and the IN/OUT basket. Albert held the lighter and flicked the wheel. On the fifth try the wick caught and burned feebly for three or four seconds. It was enough. Nick had actually seen enough in the spark-flashes the lighter’s wheel had struck, but he hadn’t liked to say so to Albert. Don Gaffney lay sprawled on his back, eyes open, a look of terrible surprise still fixed on his face. He hadn’t gotten off lucky after all.
“How was it that Toomy didn’t get you as well?” Nick asked after a moment. “I knew he was in here,” Albert said. “Even before he struck Mr Gaffney, I knew.” His voice was still dry and shaky, but he felt a little better. Now that he had actually faced poor Mr Gaffney — looked him in the eye, so to speak — he felt a little better.
“Did you hear him?”
“No — I saw those. On the desk.” Albert pointed to the little heap of torn strips.
“Lucky you did.” Nick put his hand on Albert’s shoulder in the dark. “You deserve to be alive, mate. You earned the privilege. All right?”
“I’ll try,” Albert said.
“You do that, old son. It saves a lot of nightmares. You’re looking at a man who knows.”
Albert nodded.
“Keep it together, Ace. That’s all there is to it — just keep things together and you’ll be fine.”
“Mr Hopewell?”
“Yes?”
“Would you mind not calling me that? I—” His voice clogged, and Albert cleared his throat violently. “I don’t think I like it anymore.”
16
They emerged from the dark cave which was Airport Services thirty seconds later, Nick carrying the folded stretcher by the handle. When they reached the bank of phones, Nick handed the stretcher to Albert, who accepted it wordlessly. The tablecloth lay on the floor about five feet away from Toomy, who was snoring now in great rhythmless snatches of air.
Time was short, time was very fucking short, but Nick had to see this. He had to.
He picked up the tablecloth and pulled the toaster out. One of the heating elements caught in a bread slot; the other tumbled out onto the floor. The timer-dial and the handle you used to push the bread down fell off. One corner of the toaster was crumpled inward. The left side was bashed into a deep circular dent.
That’s the part that collided with Friend Toomy’s sniffer, Nick thought. Amazing. He shook the toaster and listened to the loose rattle of broken parts inside.
“A toaster,” he marvelled. “I have friends, Albert — professional friends — who wouldn’t believe it. I hardly believe it myself. I mean... a toaster.”
Albert had turned his head. “Throw it away,” he said hoarsely. “I don’t want to look at it.”
Nick did as the boy asked, then clapped him on the shoulder. “Take the stretcher upstairs. I’ll join you directly.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I want to see if there’s anything else we can use in that office.”
Albert looked at him for a moment, but he couldn’t make out Nick’s features in the dark. At last he said, “I don’t believe you.”
“Nor do you have to,” Nick said in an oddly gentle voice. “Go on, Ace. Albert, I mean. I’ll join you soon. And don’t look back.”
Albert stared at him a moment longer, then began to trudge up the frozen escalator, his head down, the stretcher dangling like a suitcase from his right hand. He didn’t look back.
17
Nick waited until the boy had disappeared into the gloom. Then he walked back over to where Craig Toomy lay and squatted beside him. Toomy was still out, but his breathing seemed a little more regular. Nick supposed it was not impossible, given a week or two of constant-care treatment in hospital, that Toomy might recover. He had proved at least one thing: he had an awesomely hard head.
Shame the brains underneath are so soft, mate, Nick thought. He reached out, meaning to put one hand over Toomy’s mouth and the other over his nose — or what remained of it. It would take less than a minute, and they would not have to worry about Mr Craig Toomy anymore. The others would have recoiled in horror at the act — would have called it cold-blooded murder — but Nick saw it as an insurance policy, no more and no less. Toomy had arisen once from what appeared to be total unconsciousness and now one of their number was dead and another was badly, perhaps mortally, wounded. There was no sense taking the same chance again.
And there was something else. If he left Toomy alive, what, exactly, would he be leaving him alive for? A short, haunted existence in a dead world? A chance to breathe dying air under a moveless sky in which all weather patterns appeared to have ceased? An opportunity to meet whatever was approaching from the east... approaching with a sound like that of a colony of giant, marauding ants?
No. Best to see him out of it. It would be painless, and that would have to be good enough.
“Better than the bastard deserves,” Nick said, but still he hesitated.
He remembered the little girl looking up at him with her dark, unseeing eyes.
Don’t you kill him! Not a plea; that had been a command. She had summoned up a little strength from some hidden last reserve in order to give him that command. All I know is that we need him.
Why is she so bloody protective of him?
He squatted a moment longer, looking into Craig Toomy’s ruined face. And when Rudy Warwick spoke from the head of the escalator, he jumped as if it had been the devil himself.
“Mr Hopewell? Nick? Are you coming?”
“In a jiffy!” he called back over his shoulder. He reached toward Toomy’s face again and stopped again, remembering her dark eyes.
We need him.
Abruptly he stood up, leaving Craig Toomy to his tortured struggle for breath. “Coming now,” he called, and ran lightly up the escalator.
Chapter 8
Refuelling. Dawn’s Early Light. The Approach of the Langoliers. Angel of the Morning. The Time-Keepers of Eternity. Take-off.
1
Bethany had cast away her almost tasteless cigarette and was halfway up the ladder again when Bob Jenkins shouted: “I think they’re coming out!”
She turned and ran back down the stairs. A series of dark blobs was emerging from the luggage bay and crawling along the conveyor belt. Bob and Bethany ran to meet them.
Dinah was strapped to the stretcher. Rudy had one end, Nick the other. They were walking on their knees, and Bethany could hear the bald man breathing in harsh, out-of-breath gasps.
“Let me help,” she told him, and Rudy gave up his end of the stretcher willingly.
“Try not to jiggle her,” Nick said, swinging his legs off the conveyor belt. “Albert, get on Bethany’s end and help us take her up the stairs. We want this thing to stay as level as possible.”
“How bad is she?” Bethany asked Albert.
“Not good,” he said grimly. “Unconscious but still alive. That’s all I know.”
“Where are Gaffney and Toomy?” Bob asked as they crossed to the plane. He had to raise his voice slightly to be heard; the crunching sound was louder now, and that shrieking wounded-transmission undertone was becoming a dominant, maddening note.