She started to say something, but just swallowed.
“I enjoy it that you’re scared, as you may know. You will live a little longer for that.”
“But not very long?”
“No.” He tested the blade with his thumb. “Would you like for me to be kind, and end it quickly?”
“I want to live.”
He smiled condescendingly. “I have a news flash for you: The universe doesn’t care. Neither do I. But even if you were to survive this… little meeting, you would die very soon. A half century? That’s nothing to me.”
“How… how old are you?”
“I remember Pompeii. And a flood before that. I may be immortal.”
“Or insane,” she whispered.
He nodded. “Or insane. Maybe both.” He picked up a sharpening stone, and drew the blade over it slowly. “Maybe I was sane, a couple of thousand years ago. And it wore off.”
7.
There was a light on in the motel office, so I went in and printed out the chapter while a black kid about high-school age watched me. Making conversation, I explained about what a pain it was to try to do work on this dime store computer, not being able to just push a button and send it to my agent. He understood, and volunteered that they had a scanner, if I’d like to make an electronic copy and send it.
It felt kind of funny, switching between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I sent copies to myself and my agent, as well as Duquest.
Perversely, writing the nightmarish chapter helped me get to sleep. And when dawn showed through the drapes, Kit kissed me awake and slowly had her way with me, a quiet and dreamy kind of sex.
There was a message slipped under the door, evidently printed on the office computer:
This is fucking fantastic. Keep the girl alive, stretch it out, like the old Silence of the Lambs… maybe a POV shift with some cops who can’t figure out the craziness. You got a fucking movie here, man.
It might be real money. I’ll talk to some people.
We took showers, laughing and chatting over the noise. Celebrate our good fortune and go back up to Bradley Road for breakfast.
But when I braced the door open and started maneuvering the bikes out, a kid, younger than the one who’d helped me, opened the office door and jogged over.
“Mister… guy said not to wake you up, but give this to you ’fore you leave.” He handed me a heavy padded mailing envelope with no address. On the back of it, a crayon scrawl in green block letters: SOMEONE THOT YOU SHD HAVE MORE FUN.
We went back inside and sat on the bed.
I tore open the envelope, causing a blizzard of gray shreds. There was a thick hardcover book inside—Dexter Filkins’s old history of the Gulf War—but most of the text was missing. Someone had hollowed out a large enough volume for two thick packages of hundred-dollar bills, banded $25,000 each, and one big bullet heat-sealed into a plastic bag.
And the key to room 15, next door, and a car key.
We stepped around the bikes and opened the door to 15. On the bed, no surprise, a long rectangular box.
“He was in here,” the boy said from behind us, “the one who give me the envelope. Musta left before the sun come up. Left his car, too.”
“What kind of man was he?”
“Old guy.”
“Old like me?”
“No… way old. Old white guy with a white ’stash.”
I picked up one end of the box and let it fall, heavy. “What exactly did he say?”
“He say give you the thing.”
“Nothing else?”
“Huh–uh. He don’t say nothin’!”
“Come on. What did he say?”
“Nothin’!” The kid bolted. I got to the door just in time to see him run behind the motel.
“Did he threaten you?” Kit called out. “We could help.” We could hear him crashing through the woods in back.
“Sure we could.” I sat back down on the bed and tried to open the tough plastic bag. Finally punched a hole through it with the door key and widened the hole enough to get the bullet out.
“What is it?” It was heavier than a normal cartridge and had a small crystal lens on its tip.
“Smart round,” I said. “Like a little guided missile. You fire it at the target and little fins snap out for steering. Self-propelled, slow.” I pointed at the tip, painted light red. “It’s an incendiary, for good measure. I’m supposed to shoot some poor dick with this and hope the ensuing fire will dispose of the evidence?”
“Or cause confusion,” she said. “Would it be a big fire?”
“Don’t know; I never used one except on the range. It doesn’t look like it could be a big fire, unless you hit a gas tank or something.” I turned it around in my hand, looking for clues. “Of course the red paint doesn’t really mean anything; they could paint it baby blue if they wanted.”
“Does it shoot like a regular bullet?”
“Yes and no.” I opened the end of the cardboard box and slid out yet another M2010. This was a civilian one, the Remington Model 700, with a heavy blond wooden stock sporting expensive grain, and a big heavy finderscope. I eased the bolt back slightly; it wasn’t loaded.
I pushed a tab on the side and a three-by-three-inch screen popped out beside the fat Leupold finderscope. It had a blurry picture with bright crosshairs and a faint bull’s-eye. Hadn’t seen one since the desert.
“Watch this.” I slipped the cartridge into the receiver and pointed the rifle out the door; the picture on the screen snapped into focus, a bright picture inside a dark circle, like looking through a keyhole. The parking lot.
“So it shows where the bullet is going?”
“Exactly.” I set it down and reached inside the carton. Taped into a square of Bubble Wrap, a little box with a joystick. “That’s weird.”
“How so?”
I set it down carefully. “I did spend a week training with things like this. But that was like ten years ago, twelve. They expect me to squeeze the trigger and then guide this thing into a target, with no practice? I couldn’t do it even if I wanted to, not with any certainty.”
She picked it up and studied it. “Maybe they don’t know that? They seem to think you’re one of the people you write about.”
Odd but true. Maybe there were people with the combination of power and ignorance required for that kind of mistaken identity. The only thing I was sure of, though, was the ignorance on our side. “Let’s think. We should just go to the cops. Homeland Security.”
“Where they’d have your file open on the desk before you sit down.”
“Granted. But the Enemy has way upped the ante now. Or again, rather. And I still haven’t broken any law.”
I eased the cartridge out and held it in my hand. “You can’t buy this shit in a store, not anywhere. I don’t think they let hunters take deer with incendiaries—Smokey the Bear and all. It’s a plain terror weapon.” The weight of it was both repellent and fascinating. In training we had fired off a box of these, one for each of us, aiming at old paint cans, each with a spoonful of gasoline inside. Boom, fireball. Better than winning a Kewpie doll.
“Pretty expensive?”
I nodded. “The sergeant made a point of that. The round was worth more to the United States Army than we were. So aim. Or you might have to be the target next week.”
“They wouldn’t do that.” She was serious.