“Nobody pays list”
“If they’re giving away money,” Klein said, “it’s not your job to turn it down. But I don’t want to argue with you. I just want you off the lot.” He added, “I cleared this with your brother, so don’t go running off to him and expect any help. He told me, ‘Hey, if Tom fucked up, he’s history. That’s all there is to it.’ ”
Tom couldn’t help smiling. “I guess that’s right,” he said. “I guess I’m history.”
He phoned Tony and said he was going away for a while. Tony wanted to talk—about the job, about the future. Tom said, “I have to get things sorted out by myself. Thank you for everything, though, Tony. Don’t expect to hear from me for a while.”
“You’re acting crazy,” Tony said.
“This is something I have to do.”
He packed a change of clothes into his knapsack. Money was a problem, but he was bringing along some items he thought he might be able to pawn: the guitar he’d owned since college (bulky but potentially valuable, a Gibson); a set of silver spoons. By Friday noon he was ready to go.
He hesitated when he noticed the TV had been plugged in again. It seemed to sense his presence; as he watched, it flickered to life.
“You’re too late,” he said. “I’m leaving.”
TOM WINTER, WE DON’T THINK YOU SHOULD GO.
Their punctuation had improved. He considered the statement, considered its source. “You can’t stop me,” he said. Probably this was true.
IT’S NOT SAFE WHERE YOU’RE GOING.
“It’s not safe where I am.”
YOU WANT IT TOO BADLY. IT ISN’T WHAT YOU THINK.
“You don’t know what I want. You don’t know what I think.”
Of course, maybe they did—it was entirely possible. But they didn’t contradict him.
YOU CAN HELP US.
“We talked about that.”
WE NEED PROTEINS.
“I don’t know what you mean by that.”
MEAT.
“Meat?” Here was an unforeseen development. “Ordinary meat? Grocery store meat?”
YES, TOM.
“What are you building out in the woods that needs meat?”
WE’RE BUILDING US.
He wanted to dismiss the whole disturbing notion; but it occurred to him that he owed these creatures something. It was their territory he was about to trespass through. And more than that: he’d been in their power for a long time. They had implied that they could have changed him; if they’d wanted a slave they could have made him one. They hadn’t. He owed them.
Nevertheless—“building us”? And they wanted meat?
He said, “I have some steaks in the freezer—”
THAT WOULD BE FINE, TOM.
“Maybe I can leave them on the counter.”
THANK YOU.
“How come you can talk so much better now?”
WE’RE ALMOST REPAIRED. THINGS ARE MUCH CLEARER.
THE END OF THE WORK IS VERY CLOSE.
Something ominous about that, Tom thought. When the sleeping giant woke, this might not be a safe place to be. The implication? Get out now.
He tried to pull the plug on the TV set but it wouldn’t come out of the wall—they must have welded it there. But the screen remained blank. He hurried to the kitchen, left a stack of frozen steaks and ground beef on the countertop—a little queasy at the thought of them wanting it—then gathered up his baggage.
The phone rang once more. He debated letting it ring, then relented and picked up the handset. He expected Tony with some last-minute badgering, but it was Doug Archer’s voice he heard.
“I heard you got fired.”
“News travels fast,” Tom said.
“It’s a small town. I’ve done business with a lot of these people. Yeah, everybody talks.”
“Keeping tabs on me?”
“Hell, no. If I had been, I would have noticed you aren’t looking for another job. So are you taking a vacation, Tom, or just bugging out?”
“The property’s not for sale.”
“I’m not calling as your fucking realtor. Are things okay up there?”
“Things are okay.”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
He sighed. He liked Doug, he didn’t want to hurt Doug’s feelings—but he didn’t want Doug involved, not at this stage. “I’ll be out of town for a while.”
“Son of a bitch,” Archer said. “You found something, didn’t you? You don’t want to talk about it, but you found something.”
Or something found me. “You’re right … I don’t want to talk about it.”
“How long are you gone for?”
“I honestly don’t know.”
“The guy who lived there before—you’re going where he went, right?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“When you come back,” Archer said, “will you talk to me about this?”
Tom relented a little. “Maybe I will.”
“Maybe I should drive by while you’re gone—make sure the place is in reasonable shape.”
“I don’t think that’s necessary.” A thought occurred. “Doug, promise me you won’t try to get in.” He lied, “I had the locks changed.”
“I promise I won’t try to get in if you promise you’ll explain this one day.”
“Deal,” Tom said. “When I get back.” If I get hack.
“I mean to hold you to that,” Archer said. There was a pause. He added, “Well, good luck. If you need luck.”
“I might need a little,” Tom admitted.
He hung up the phone, pulled the shades, turned off the lights, and left the world behind.
PART TWO — Ghosts
Seven
For a long, lost span of years, the time traveler was dead.
Ben Corner’s death was not absolute, but it was nothing less than death. The marauder’s weapon had opened his skull and scattered much of his brain matter in a bloody rain across the lawn. His heart had given one final, convulsive pump, fibrillated for thirty seconds as wild impulses radiated from his traumatized brainstem, then fallen silent, a lump of static tissue in the cooling cavern of his chest.
Throughout his body emergency repair systems stuttered and shut down. Auxiliary circulatory pumps responded to his failing heart, then failed in turn as blood pressure dropped below maintainable levels. He continued to take huge, ratcheting breaths—like yawns—for nearly a minute. The lungs were the last major system to give up their independent life, and they did so with a final sigh of resignation. By then the body had begun to cool.
Nanomechanisms were trapped in his arteries by clotting blood. Oxygen-starved, they radiated emergency signals and shut themselves off one by one.
Billy Gargullo dragged the body into the woods and left it in an abandoned woodshed under a scatter of mildewed newspaper. Decay organisms—thick in the rainy forest—began to attack the corpse at once.
Billy hurried back to the house. When he arrived here he had disoriented the cybernetics with a pulse of electromagnetic radiation; now he triggered a second burst to keep them out of his way. He paused a moment in the kitchen and consulted his auxiliary memories for a rough estimate of his whereabouts. America, the Pacific Northwest—distinguished by the fiercely dense biomass of the forest, which appalled and frightened him—sometime after 1970: too close to the nightmare he’d left behind. He wanted a more effective buffer, even if it meant greater risk. He moved back to the basement and operated the tunnel’s hidden controls the way the dying woman had taught him. Destination was relatively unimportant: he wanted a place to hide. He would run, he would hide, he would never be found and he would never go back.