None of this I tell him, however. I simply say, “If you let me see the chaser, I can figure it out.”
He clutches the device against his chest, panicked. “I’m not that stupid.”
Taking a step toward him, I say, “Then just show me the display and I can—”
He points his gun at my chest. “Get back!”
“You won’t hurt me,” I say. “The chaser is useless without me.”
I take another step.
“I said get back!”
A gust of wind suddenly blows past us, making the already chilly air feel like ice. We are all dressed for a warm summer day in Southern California, not for the freezing night we’ve ended up in.
“You tricked me, didn’t you?” he says, his gun hand shaking, from fear or the cold or likely both.
Fighting hard to keep my teeth from chattering, I take another step. “I didn’t trick you. I don’t know where we are. You said Los Angeles. Is that where we were supposed to arrive?
“When is this?” he asks as if he hasn’t heard me. “When?”
Another step takes me to just a couple feet from the outstretched weapon. “When is it supposed to be?”
I’m close enough now that I can see his eyes narrow. “She warned me you couldn’t be trusted.”
I have a terrible feeling that despite the fact that he can’t use the chaser without me, he’s about to shoot me anyway. Knowing I need to act first, I dip down and lunge forward, then slam upward into his wrist. As my shoulder connects, the gun fires into the night sky, the boom of the weapon temporarily destroying the hearing in my right ear. My left isn’t doing much better, and picks up only a muffled yell as Kane screams in anger.
I barrel forward, intending to knock him to the ground, but he twists to the side, and instead of connecting with his chest, I glance off his ribs and stumble past him.
“Denny! Watch out!”
Iffy’s voice is barely discernible above the ringing in my head, but I heed the warning and whirl around. Kane has heard her, too, and has abandoned whatever he was about to do and has started running toward her.
She’s my weakness. I can’t let him get control of Iffy again, so I push off the crumbling earth and thrust myself after him.
Glancing at me over his shoulder, he shouts, “Stop or I’ll kill her!”
His words might be tough, but the fear in his eyes tells me his threats are just bluster.
I cover the last few feet in an angled leap that crashes me into his side. Down we go, hard to the ground, but in a direction that keeps him from landing on the chaser. Any hope that the fall stunned him quickly dissolves as he scrambles out from under me and tries to get back up.
I reach out to grab him, but only manage to snag the strap of my satchel. I expect to see the muzzle of his gun at any second, but while Kane stills hold the chaser to his chest with one hand, the other is now empty. At least the fall has done some good and jarred the weapon loose.
He grabs the strap a few inches above my hand and pulls at the bag, trying to break loose my grip. I see something peeking out around the edge of the small flap that covers the side pocket and then remember the knife.
I rip it out and flick the blade open. As soon as Kane sees it, he jerks back as if expecting me to stab him. I lunge a few inches forward like that’s exactly what I’m going to do, but instead yank the knife back and slice through the satchel’s strap.
Kane tries to pull the bag with him as he scrambles to his feet, but I’ve got too good a hold on it. He kicks out, hitting my knife hand, but ultimately the satchel slips from his grasp. Apparently unwilling to fight for it any longer, he starts to run.
I push myself to my feet to chase after him but immediately fall back down from unexpected pain radiating up from my right thigh. I think at first I pulled a muscle when we fell, but when I touch the spot, it’s sticky and wet.
The cut is not much more than a quarter inch deep, but it is long and painful. I was so focused on Kane that I didn’t feel the knife slice through my skin after he’d kicked it.
I look in the direction he’s gone and can barely make him out in the distance. In my current condition, there’s no way I can catch him.
Iffy stumbles over, still wincing. “Did you get the chaser?”
I shake my head and try to keep the pain from my face, but fail.
“What’s wrong?” she asks, suddenly concerned. When she spots the gash in my jeans, she kneels and leans in for a closer look. “We need to get you to a hospital. You need stitches.”
“No hospitals,” I say. I don’t know where we are in time — in fact, there may not be any hospitals here — but whether there are or not, minimizing the chances of being remembered by the locals is basic training, so automatic for me. “You’ll have to do it.”
She looks at me as if I’ve gone insane. “You mean the stitches?”
“Yes.”
“I, I can’t do that.”
“Sure you can.”
It would be easier to just cut through my pants, but it’s the only pair I have with me, so with Iffy’s help, I pull them down to my knees, gritting away as much of the hurt as I can. I then remove the med-kit from my satchel. Once I clean out the wound with a packet of disinfectant, I give Iffy the suture kit.
Looking dubious, she says, “I’m not even good at putting a button on a shirt.
“You have to do it and fast. If you don’t, Kane gets away, and we’re stuck here forever.”
The potential of being abandoned in time turns out to be just the motivation she needs. I clench my teeth and try to think about anything else — a task at which I’m only partially successful — as she sews up my wound. When she’s done, she coats her handiwork with more disinfectant and then covers everything with a couple of gauze bandages and tape.
After she puts away the med-kit, I hold out my hand. “Help me up.”
Iffy is considerably smaller than I am, and it’s a bit of a circus act getting me back on my feet. Keeping most of my weight on my left leg, I tie together the cut ends of my satchel’s strap and then swing it over my head, draping it so that it falls on my left hip instead of my usual right.
“Maybe you should rest a little first,” Iffy suggests.
“He’s already got ten minutes on us. We can’t waste any more.”
I point in the direction Kane had been headed, and take the first step. The pain from my newly stitched wound is so acute I nearly stumble back to the ground, but I force myself to stay upright, and with each successive step the discomfort eases a little.
“Where are we?” Iffy asks.
“I have no idea.”
“Do you at least know when?”
I shake my head.
After a while the ground under our feet stops crunching and becomes packed dirt. My eyes have adjusted enough that I can see the dark shapes of vegetation not too far ahead, but there is still nothing but the flat surface in the area we’re passing through.
Another breeze blows by, and Iffy presses herself against me, shivering. I put my arm around her and rub my hand over the exposed skin below the sleeve of her T-shirt. We need to find someplace out of the cold, but given how empty the area seems to be, the chances of that aren’t great.
By the time we reach the brush, I’m walking almost normally. I’ll pay for this later, I’m sure, but I can’t worry about pain yet to come.
“This is sagebrush,” Iffy says, touching one of the plants. “We’re either in a desert or close to one.” She looks back the way we’ve come. “I think we were on a dry lake.”
I look back, too, and can see that the area we’ve just left is lighter than that which surrounds it, much like the lake bed where we saw the space shuttle land. I wonder for a moment if we’ve somehow ended up back there, but the silhouettes of the tall mountains both ahead and behind us are definitely different. We’re in a valley, not the edge of the desert plain where Edwards Air Force Base is located.