Turncoat

by Deborah Chester

  “Aye.”

  Noel whirled around to fend them off, and found himself facing two young men who were hardly more than boys. Their faces were grimed, blood-splattered, and stubbled with beard growth. One wore his hair tied back in a queue; the other’s was unbound and stringy. Noel stared in fresh astonishment. What was this? Either he was experiencing time distortions or he wasn’t. Either he was out of sync or he wasn’t. Maybe he was just going crazy.

  His head went round and round; perhaps for an instant he fainted. A sturdy shoulder went beneath his arm, and he found himself supported by a strong arm.

  He shuddered, but the man assisting him was no walking skeleton.

  “Come on,” muttered the man. “You’re heavier than you look.”

  Noel stumbled along, his senses swimming, his mind awash with confused questions. As his vision cleared, he glanced back at the battlefield, half-fearing to see more ghosts rising from the bodies. But all he saw were the searchers moving from form to form, trying to sort the living from the dead.

  A bridle jingled. A horse and rider were approaching. The man supporting Noel muttered beneath his breath and straightened, juggling Noel enough to free one arm for a salute.

  The horse drew up and stopped, snorting. Noel squinted through the twilight. Silhouetted against the inky sky sat a tall man with a heavy, expressionless face. He was wrapped in a dark blue cloak, and wore a tricorne hat pulled low to protect him from the frosty cold. Condensed air blew from the nostrils of his gray horse.

  Ghost horse? wondered Noel.

  He recognized the rider, whose face he’d known since his earliest school days.

  “Washington,” he whispered.

  The soldier holding him gave him a dig in the ribs. “That’s General Washington to the likes of you!”

  “Gently, Sergeant, gently,” admonished the general. “Put him in the ranks of walking wounded.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The sergeant saluted again, and Washington rode on, followed by his dejected officers and adjutants. Noel stared after them, his historian’s soul touched to the core by this encounter.

  “Walking wounded,” muttered the sergeant. “Walking disaster is more like it. The name of Germantown will hang over our heads in shame for the rest of our lives, not that we’re likely to have them much longer, what with the way this bloody war is going. Come on, come on, move your feet, you!”

  He shuffled Noel forward to the band of silent soldiers. Many sported such terrible wounds Noel could not believe they were able to stand up, much less walk. Their makeshift bandages were less than adequate. The night air was growing very cold indeed and few men wore a complete uniform. Some were in civilian clothing, like Noel. Others were walking bundles of rags.

  No wonder, he thought, then couldn’t remember the rest of what he’d been thinking.

  He sagged, but the sergeant hoisted him up again and thrust him at a gaunt fellow with an arm in a sling.

  “Here, you! Got one good arm left, don’t you? Use it to help your mate. Line! Keep moving!”

  They stumbled forward. There was no talking, no jokes, no grumbling. Noel pulled himself together, trying to walk steadily although his legs remained weak. His pride gouged him. These men had serious injuries; all he suffered from was a little distortion sickness. He had to do at least as well as they. Germantown, he thought, longing to access his LOC for information. Germantown had been an important battle. Pennsylvania? Close to Philadelphia? They’d lost, badly, from the looks of things. Why they weren’t prisoners Noel had no idea. His specialty was not American history. But wasn’t this defeat the last major battle Washington attempted before withdrawing to Valley Forge?

  An involuntary shiver that had nothing to do with the cold air ran along Noel’s spine.

  He glanced at his companion and again found himself in the company of a walking skeleton. The bandage covering half of the man’s face was now swathed over a bare skull. A bony arm rested in the bloodied sling. Through the trees other skeletons walked with them in grim silence, punctuated now and then by a low moan. The hairs stood up on the back of Noel’s neck. He wanted to break away, to run, but he hadn’t the strength.

  Maybe he was just hallucinating, he told himself. Skeletons didn’t walk. They didn’t wear clothes and bandages. They didn’t carry muskets. He decided this distortion sickness was playing games with his mind.

  Twilight darkened to night. The chilly wind died down, and in the woods surrounding them there lay an unnatural hush. Stumbling over uneven ground, his cheek smarting from where limbs had whipped it, Noel drew in a ragged breath and then another as he struggled to keep his sanity.

  I will close my eyes, and these creatures will return to their normal appearance, he told himself. I am not really walking with the dead.

  “Are we going to Valley Forge?” he forced himself to ask.

  “Where?” replied his companion. “Never heard of it.”

  “Quiet!” said the skeleton ahead of them, twisting its skull around to glare at Noel with empty sockets. “No talking.”

  “Damned old Howe,” muttered Noel’s companion. “I hope he rots this winter. I hope he gets food poisoning at one of them fancy parties thrown in his honor by the fine citizens of Philadelphia. I hope he gets gout and they have to cut his foot off.”

  “It’s cannonballs what takes off yer foot,” whispered the man behind Noel, “not gout.”

  “Shush!” said someone else.

  And they were men again, their faces restored, their breath fogging from their nostrils. They walked with pain and courage, afraid to linger behind and be captured, following a general they loved into the unknown of the darkness.

  They did not stop to rest. They found no shelter, although more than once they crept past snug farmsteads, where golden light shone from the windows and cattle lowed within the barns. There was no medical assistance, no food, no fire. Noel’s fingers and toes grew numb. He ceased to be aware of his body as it lurched and struggled, yet somehow he kept going.

  If he slept at all during that long, horrible night of marching, he did so in snatches of unconsciousness caught between one footstep and the next. His sense of disorientation grew, although the hallucinations did not return. His brain felt disjointed, if an organ without joints could be in such a condition. But even his wandering wits found no answers to the half-formed questions that worried him.

  He had stopped shifting, but was he now in a stable location? Would he shift again? Would the hallucinations grow worse? If he tried to travel again, where would the distortion field throw him? Had the future been wiped out by now? Had he failed? What should he do next?

  He tried to reason out a plan and was unable to concentrate long enough to form one. He tried to keep going, but he couldn’t.

  He fell to his knees, dragging his companion halfway down with him.

  The man tugged at him. “Get up! You want to be shot?”

  Noel coughed violently. His chest ached from the cold air he was breathing. What had happened to climate control? he wondered. Who had let drizzle fall at this hour? The shuttle traffic across Lake Michigan was going to be snarled up forever. He’d be late for work again, and Rugle would slap more demerits on his record. The old hag didn’t allow excuses.

  “Institute,” he said aloud.

  His mind cleared momentarily. He remembered his training, his coworkers, his friends, and those he disliked. He realized he needed to break away from this army and access his LOC. As long as the distortions were happening, the time stream was still active. That meant he had a slight chance to get back before…

  “Come on. Get up!”

  Dragged to his feet, Noel staggered forward. His headache returned, driving away memory and clarity. Frustrated, he grimaced against the pain pounding through his left temple. What had he been trying to remember? What was he going to do? There was urgency, yet how could he act if he didn’t understand?

  The more he walked the worse he felt. He began to he
ar bones rattling together around him. He shivered, trying to draw away from his companion. The more he moved about, the greater the distortion effect. That meant he should remain still.

  Noel stumbled to a halt.

  The skeleton at his side tugged at him. “Come on.”

  “I’m not going.”

  “You will, or you’ll die.”

  “I’m not going.” Already his headache was lessening. His mind grew sharper in the relief. He turned aside but took no step.

  “Deserters are shot.”

  The men staggered around them, parting like a stream around a rock. One was whimpering. Another whispered prayers to himself.

  “Don’t you care about anything ’sides yourself?” asked Noel’s companion angrily. “Hell, you ain’t even bleeding and already you want to go home. That’s the trouble with you militia. No sense of discipline. No sense of being an army. Go ahead and desert us, then. We don’t need any yellow-livered belly crawlers like you.”

  Noel drew breath, but a sound was whispering down the line, passed along like hope from one man to the next.

  “Halt.”

  “Halt the line.”

  The soldiers stopped and stood like dumb cattle. Some of them sagged down with groans. Officers on horseback rode by, checking and questioning. Others walked among the men, voices quiet and low, approaching, pausing, moving on. Lantern light flickered fairy quick, was shuttered, then appeared again.

  Noel crouched against a tree trunk, drawing in deep breaths, hoping to be forgotten in the darkness. Staying still was his only hope.

  Lantern light blinded him. “This man lacks a cloak,” said a voice.

  Someone moved between him and the light to drape a blanket over his shoulders. Hands probed at him, checking for injuries.

  “Nothing wrong here but exhaustion.”

  “Not a wagon candidate,” said the voice behind the lantern. “He’ll do. Feed him.”

  The footsteps went to the next man. Noel didn’t bother to watch them. He was afraid he’d see one skeleton ministering to another. A shadow approached him through the darkness and a measure of water was pressed to his lips. He gasped at how cold it was, then drank thirstily.

  The shadow pressed something round and fist-sized into his hand. “Eat it sharp now. Sorry it ain’t hot, but it’s the best we got.”

  “Coffee?” asked the next man.

  The shadow moved away from Noel. “Sorry, there’s no coffee tonight. Just water.”

  “Hell! How’re we to march without nothing to warm our bellies?”

  Noel tuned out the argument and turned the object around in his fingers. It had the shape and heft of an irregular-shaped ball. He sniffed it, and it smelled earthy. He bit into it cautiously and discovered it was a raw turnip.

  He nearly spat it out.

  But it was food, and he was hungry. He forced himself to eat the unpleasant thing.

  By the time he finished choking it down, his mouth was puckered from the taste, and his stomach ached in protest. The order was passed for the men to go on.

  Noel pressed himself deeper into the shadows, pulling the blanket over his face to keep his skin from gleaming in any stray beam of lantern light. He crouched there, listening to them pass, struggling, biting back sounds of pain. His heart went out to them, but he was not part of their history. He could not help them. He dared not join them.

  At long last they were gone. He waited still longer, until his muscles grew cramped and tired and his impatience could not be contained. Pulling down the blanket, he listened for any sounds of marching. All was silent.

  Shivering, he said, “LOC, activate.”

  He felt the slightest pulse of response from his computer, then there came a weird blaze of light overhead as though the sun had suddenly risen. The darkness flowed back, fleeing a rosy gold illumination that spread across the treetops. Dazzled by it, Noel squinted and looked around.

  The land looked bloody in the pinkish light. The trees began to shrink as though a fold had appeared in the earth itself and all things were being drawn into it.

  “LOC!” said Noel in alarm. “Activate now. Initiate—”

  He never finished his sentence. There was a surge of blackness through his head, and the strange pink light vanished. The whole world vanished, and he fell into the blackness as though he had never been.

  Chapter 4

  Reality shift:

  Weightlessness…formlessness…Noel drifted in small eddies of nowhere, lost in the moist darkness of sound and shape without meaning.

  His thoughts eventually took cohesion. His brain called forth memories of the original time anomaly, when shifts and rips had threatened to destroy the Institute. Then he had been caught in the nightmare, a part of it, a cause of it, until time itself reached into reality for him and flung him back into the past.

  Now it was happening again…

  “No.”

  The voice startled him. He tried to look around, but he was still floating in darkness, lacking reference point, lacking body.

  “Leon?” he asked uncertainly.

  “No.”

  That flat reply startled him. How could anyone else be here between dimensions? It was a physical law that two travelers could not enter the time stream at the same time. Two travelers could not visit the same coordinates in the past at the same time. What, then, had happened to change physics?

  “Who?” he asked in bewilderment.

  “What.”

  Noel hesitated, trying to understand this odd communication.

  “I am what,” said the voice impatiently.

  Still Noel did not understand. Lacking reference points, his wits seemed to be gone too. “You are what,” he said stupidly. “I don’t understand.”

  “TERMINATION RECOMMENDED,” boomed over him.

  Noel cringed, his consciousness bobbing in the eddies and currents of nondimension.

  “Focus,” said the voice curtly to him. “You seek reference. You ask who in an effort at identification. What is more precise.”

  Noel frowned. This voice sounded like a computer. “LOC?” he asked with caution.

  “Your crude device is not operational in these coordinates.”

  “I still don’t understand. What has happened to me? Why am I back between dimensions?”

  “TERMINATION RECOMMENDED,” boomed again.

  Rattled by it, Noel cried out, “What is that?”

  “Termination.”

  “Termina—You mean death?”

  “Communication has failed,” said the voice with a sigh. “Accede to recommenda—”

  “Wait!” said Noel. “Why am I to be terminated? What have I done?”

  “Violation of our dimension is not permitted.”

  “Vio—” Noel cut himself off and thought hard. “You mean, you’re from another—”

  “You have entered an alternate dimension. Your technology is limited, but you should be cognitive of the theory.”

  “Yes, of course,” said Noel. His mind reeled at the implications. It seemed he had made contact across time. Not down the time stream, not along the time stream, but across the time stream. Alternate dimensions, parallel universes. Perhaps he was talking to himself from another—

  “No,” said the voice. “Do not speculate about matters you cannot comprehend.”

  “You’re telepathic?” asked Noel. He was beginning to recover from his initial shock. His powers of observation, limited though they were by being able to see and feel nothing, stretched acutely.

  “Explanations are beyond your limited abilities to comprehend.”

  “Aw, come on,” said Noel, goaded. “Try to say it in simple terms. I bet I could get at least some of it.”

  “TERMINATION RECOMMENDED.”

  That pronouncement seemed louder and more forceful than ever. Angry, Noel said, “Can’t you turn that off? I don’t want to be terminated. If I’ve done something wrong or trespassed somehow, I apologize. We’ve been having some troub
le with rips in time.”

  “Anomalies,” said the voice.

  “Yeah. It has to do with—”

  “Explanations are not necessary. We have monitored this intrusion.”

  Noel blinked, thinking about another dimension aware of his. Possibly even watching his. It was a chilling thought.

  “I’ve been trying to repair it,” he said. “It’s been messing up my, uh, dimension. I guess it’s played some havoc with yours.”

  “Yes.”

  “Sorry,” said Noel. “It’s a long story, but due to sabotage I was trapped in the past, uh, my past—”

  “Dimensions do not cross,” broke in the voice impatiently. “Awkward delineations are not necessary.”

  “Right. Anyway, I was trapped. While I was in the time stream, something else went wrong and I was duplicated. Later on, when my people rescued me, we somehow left the duplicate behind. That separation caused the anomaly. I traveled back to get him, but I guess I failed. I should have returned to the Institute by now. Instead…” Noel’s voice trailed off.

  “Instead you are here, intruding.”

  “TERMINATION RECOMMENDED.”

  “Can’t you do something about that?” asked Noel.

  “What is your intent?”

  “My what?”

  “What is your intent?”

  “To return,” said Noel. “Uh, to return recombined with Leon, my duplicate.”

  “Subject Two is not available.”

  Noel struggled to understand. “Subject Two…that’s Leon?”

  “The designations match.”

  Fresh alarm rose in Noel. “What’s happened to him? Where is he?”

  “Coordinates would not be comprehensible to you.”

  “Thanks a lot,” muttered Noel, then remembered that this entity could hear every word, every thought.

  “Your passage through the time stream failed.”

  “No kidding,” said Noel bitterly.

  “Subject Two was successful.”

  The alarm in Noel intensified. “You mean, he’s back in the twenty-sixth century?”

  The idea of Leon in the future, no doubt masquerading as Noel, sickened him. Leon would trick them into shutting the time portal, closing Noel off forever. He would be trapped here in nothingness for all eternity, unless the recommended termination occurred first.