The Library at Mount Char Part 37

As a side effect of being outside of time, David was now weightless. She pushed him off her with the barest touch. He hung frozen in the night air, bobbing slightly, like a deflating balloon.

Carolyn heard footsteps behind her. "h.e.l.lo, Erwin." Her voice was very hoa.r.s.e. She sat up, coughing, and wrapped her arms around her knees. "Can you help me up?"

"Err..." Erwin said, speaking through lips that were split and swollen, "I ain't for sure. I'll try." He limped toward her a little quicker. He was holding his left hand over a bleeding hole in his leg. In his right was the HK with which he had shot David. Smoke curled up out of the barrel.

Erwin reached down with one thick hand. Carolyn took it. He lifted her easily.

"What's wrong with him?" He poked David with a finger. He spun easily, a foot or two off the ground.

"Don't do that," she said. "Let me in there for a second, would you?"

Erwin looked at her, then shrugged and stepped back.

She stopped David's spinning, then turned him so she could examine the wound. It would certainly have been fatal, even for one such as David. The left side of his head was missing. "Good shot," she said, "almost perfect, really." She flicked her eyes at Erwin. "The angle was a little off, but that was my fault. We were supposed to be at a seven degree angle to you, but it was more like nine. It was tough to focus with that darn spear hole in my leg."

"Yeah," Erwin said slowly. "I 'spect it was. How'd you know I'd-"

"Command Sergeant Major Erwin Charles Leffington, US Army, retired. Born April 8, 1965, late of the Eighty-Second Airborne. Before that, two years in US Army Marksmanship Unit. When was the last time you missed a shot, Erwin?"

"Before tonight, you mean?" David had allowed Erwin to empty the pistol at him before they arrived, for sport. "I don't remember exactly," he said. "It's been a while."

"Don't beat yourself up about it. You couldn't have hit him earlier. No one could. Come over here; let me take a look at that leg." She squatted down to examine the cut in Erwin's thigh. "You're OK. No arterial bleeding. He was going to play with you for a while." She lay back on the street. "I'm sorry about that. I had to wait until you were pretty beaten down. That way he wouldn't consider you a threat."

"'Saright. Don't mind takin' some licks in a good cause." Erwin spat. "And that guy was a real a.s.shole."

"You have no idea." Carolyn closed her eyes, collecting herself. I did it, she thought again. I really, actually did.

"So...what did I miss?" Steve asked. He and Naga were walking down the road from the direction of the Library. "What happened here?"

"Dammit, Steve!" Carolyn said. "I told you to wait in the Library. Don't you ever listen?"

"You're not the boss of me."

Erwin looked over his shoulder. "Hey, kid. How ya doin'?"

Steve gave him a little wave. "C'mon, don't keep me in suspense. What happened?"

"Well," Erwin said, "basically that a.s.shole there was all strangling her, so I kinda shot him a little. In the face, like."

"Thanks, by the way," Carolyn said.

Steve furrowed his brow, confused. "How'd you manage that? When we rolled up you had just run out of bullets."

"I wondered about that myself," Erwin said. "It was the d.a.m.nedest thing. So, like, when you guys showed up the big dude just dropped me. I was too punchy to fight. I was gonna fall back to that house over there"-he pointed at the only house on the street with lights on-"and call for backup. In training, they drilled it into us never to leave a weapon on the field-I used to beat the s.h.i.t out of guys for that-so on the way I grabbed my pistol, even though it was empty. Kind of by reflex, like.

"Then, when I was circling around the streetlight, I happened to look down. And, y'know, f.u.c.k me if there wadn't a full magazine right there in front of the sewer. Not the cleanest I've ever seen, but after I wiped it off on my shirt it worked just fine. I couldn't believe it. It was like magic."

"No such thing." Carolyn blew twin columns of smoke out her nostrils.

"Whoa," Steve said. "I bet I know where it came from. Can I see that?"

Erwin held up the pistol but didn't hand it over.

"Is that the same gun I took when I went out running?" Steve asked. "The one you gave him earlier?"

"It is, yeah," Carolyn said.

"Then the magazine you found must have been the same one I dropped when the dogs jumped me."

"Hey, I bet it is!" Carolyn said. She laughed. "Imagine that!"

Both the men were looking at her now. "So..." Steve said slowly. "You set this whole thing up? Me running yesterday...the dogs...so I would drop the magazine, where Erwin could find it? Right then, when David was grabbing you?"

"Yes." Carolyn's eyes blazed out like searchlights in the night. "Yes. I did."

"Why?"

"Well, David was kind of a jerk."

"No, I mean why go to all that trouble? Couldn't you just-"

"There's no 'just.'" She stepped around David's floating body, examining him as she spoke. "Not with one like David. He's too skilled. He was the master of his catalog in all but name. Once I watched him kill a hundred Israeli soldiers-armed men-with that knife of his. That was just an exercise, part of his training. If you didn't take measures to stop it, he could hear your thoughts. There's no one on Earth who could have beaten him in a fair fight. But here, inside the reissak-"

"The what?" Erwin said.

"Reissak ayrial," Steve chimed in. "It's kind of a perimeter-defense system. It's very advanced!"

Erwin gave him a look.

"Nothing to do with microwaves, though. That part was bulls.h.i.t."

"You're kind of a smarta.s.s, ain't you, kid?"

Steve nodded modestly, scuffing his feet in the dirt like John Wayne talking to the pretty schoolmarm. "Yeah."

"Well, couldn't you have-"

"Sent in the Army, maybe? A s.h.i.tload of professionals-big, burly fellows, well trained, with a lot of guns? Mmmmaybe-just maybe-I could figure out a way to get someone like Delta Force involved. Surely that would do it?" She made a show of sniffing the air. The breeze still carried a hint of burning oil from the crashed helicopters. "Oh, wait..." She laughed again.

"OK," Erwin said. "But how'd you know I'd be-"

"Do you like that job with Homeland Security? Interesting work, I bet. Right up your alley."

"Yeah..."

"How'd you end up there?"

"Kind of an accident," Erwin said. "I went out to lunch and-"

"Ran into an old buddy of yours? Someone you knew in high school? Just a chance thing? A real long shot?"

Erwin didn't answer, only looked at her. Understanding dawned in his eyes.

Steve got it too. "Holy friggin' c.r.a.p."

"I've been working on this for a long time," Carolyn said. "I like to plan. It's something I'm good at. You've seen those guys who do trick shots in pool? Make the cue ball jump, or roll backwards or whatever? This was my trick shot."

Erwin and Steve looked at each other. After a moment, Erwin nodded. "Ah-ite. If you say so, I guess I believe ya. But why's he all floaty like that?"

"That was me too."

"Yeah, I figured," Erwin said. "What I mean is, how?"

"I put him outside of time."

"Come again?"

"I changed some physical constants inside his body. For him, time isn't pa.s.sing anymore." Her throat felt ragged, torn. She coughed, then spat blood into the snow. "David won't fall because, falling, you see, that's a process. But if time doesn't pa.s.s, there really can't be a process, as such, can there?"

Erwin chewed on this, then filed it away for later consideration. "Yeah, OK. Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why'd you, uh, do it? He woulda been dead in just a second or two, I figure."

She nodded. "Yes. He would have. That's why."

"I don't follow."

"Have you ever died?"

Erwin gave her a look. "Can't say as I have."

"I have, a couple of times. It's not as bad as you might think. Not nearly bad enough for him."

"But this is?"

"I'm not sure. But he thinks it's worse. That's what matters."

"How do you mean?"

"Well, David died a good bit. It was part of his training. Not as much as Margaret, but enough that he was used to it. A few years ago I overheard the two of them talking about it. By then Margaret didn't care. She'd kill herself if dinner was late. But she said that there was one part that still bothered her. Not the pain-they could deal with pain. Any of us could. But she hated the realization."

Carolyn paused. "Well, no. That's my word, not hers. How did she put it? She said she still felt it, even now, in her stomach and the soles of her feet. When the wound was struck and no one could save her, her body knew. Margaret's died every way you could think of, but she said that part was the worst thing she knew. And David agreed with her."

"That's where David is now." She smiled. "That moment when he feels it in his stomach and the soles of his feet. Wazin nyata-the moment when the last hope dies. He'll be there forever."

At the sight of her smile Steve fell back half a step. Even Erwin flinched a little.

Her instinct was to make her expression neutral. But why? There's no reason to hide. Not anymore. She looked down at her hand. Her fingertips no longer trembled.

"He p.i.s.sed you off too, huh?"

"A bit. Yeah. Got a smoke, Steve?"

"Right before you did...whatever...before you froze him, you touched him," Erwin said. "Inside the wound, like. Why'd you do that?"

Steve handed her a Marlboro, then lit another for himself.

"You saw that, huh? Yeah, I gave him a little shock. Static electricity, right in the parieto-insular cortex."

"The what?" Steve asked.

"The pain center of his brain," Erwin said.

"Exactly. It wasn't much-barely more than you'd get from touching a doork.n.o.b after you'd rubbed your feet across the carpet. But of course you don't need much, not when the anatomy is laid out in front of you like that."

"They did experiments," Erwin said. "Cheney's guys, trying to figure out what to do with bin Laden. I heard stories. You give somebody a shock like that, it'd be the sum of-well not just every pain you felt, but every pain you possibly could feel. All at once, like."

"Yes."

"And then you froze him? In that moment, exactly?" Steve thought about it for a second, then gave a low whistle. "Why?"

Carolyn remembered how the rain ran warm, remembered the salty, coppery taste of Asha's blood. "Because wazin nyata isn't enough. Not for him. This, though...I'm pretty sure that it's the worst thing that ever happened to anyone, anywhere. Ever. I think it's the worst thing that can happen, the theoretical upper limit of suffering. Despair and agony," she said. "Absolute. Unending."

"d.a.m.n," Erwin said. "That's some f.u.c.ked-up s.h.i.t."

"Thanks, Erwin. That means a lot, coming from you." She blew smoke up into the night sky. "I wanted to do it by impaling him on that spear of his, or maybe to nail him to a desk. But I couldn't figure out a way to make that work. This will have to do." She examined David with a surgeon's eye and a malice that had no bottom. "And I think it will. Yes. It's working already."

"What is?"

"Look in his eyes and tell me what you see."

Steve and Erwin leaned in. "They're black," Steve said. "I mean, not like he got bruised. The whites of his eyes are black. And...are they glowing, a little?"

"Yes." She saw it too. "I thought so, but it could have been the light." Carolyn spun David to face her.

It was very dark out now-no moon, no stars. The snow that fell on her did not melt. Her brow was in shadow, but when she took a drag from her cigarette, twin reflections blazed orange in the dark pools of her eyes. "Scream." She spoke softly, in Pelapi. "Try to scream. If you scream for me, I'll stop." Smiling now. "If you scream for me, I'll let you go. Going once...going twice...no?"

V.