A Girl in Time

by John Birmingham

  He saw an attractive young woman, dark hair, olive skin, a few inches shorter than Cady, her face a shifting mask of irritation, confusion, and finally, of shock. Then it looked as though someone had pulled her bath plug, draining her completely.

  She swore softly, and her eyes rolled back into her head as she started to faint away and collapse toward the wall.

  “Whoa. Down she goes!”

  Smith pushed past, managing to catch the falling woman before she could hit the ground and crack her head. He almost knocked Cady off her feet in doing so, but she had the good grace not to chastise him for it.

  “Oh, my God, she fainted! Georgia never faints. She could drop acid and watch a slasher flick marathon without batting an eyelid.”

  She was babbling. Letting her feelings gush out of her in words that weren't really meant to be attended on. They were just a blast of steam she was letting off. Smith carried the unconscious woman down a short, narrow corridor into an airy sitting room. Morning sunshine poured in through giant windows, taller even than he, throwing long shadows across the wooden floorboards. He laid her gently on a couch that was bigger than some beds he'd slept in. She was already stirring.

  Cady appeared with a glass of water, familiar enough with the apartment to have fetched it without delay. Georgia's eyelids flickered open, and Smith stood back, allowing the young lady to see her friend first. She did not need to come to and be confronted by the sight of a giant stranger in her home. If she didn't faint away again, she would probably start screaming.

  She almost did just that.

  The poor girl drew in a sharp breath, gave out an involuntary moan, and actually scuttled into the corner of the couch, away from Cady.

  Smith could not blame her. After all, she had just seen a ghost.

  “Georgia, It's me. It's just me.”

  “Omigod, Cady. What the…? Who? No.” And then she started hitting her friend, and crying, and then the two women were both crying and hugging, and Smith frowned, feeling uncomfortable at intruding on what should have been a private moment. He quietly slipped away to stand by the window, taking the opportunity to spy out the land. The streets below were unchanged. Perhaps a few more people were out, making their way into the day.

  He wanted to give the young women some space and privacy, but did not feel comfortable removing himself from the room. He was certain Miss Georgia would not want some strange feller prowling through her apartment. And so he was required to stand vigil while they embraced and blubbered and said nothing of any note other than a condensed babble of apologies and recriminations and the peculiarly feminine nonsense of talking in circles.

  “Where have you been? Where have you been, Cady? We thought you were gone. Your parents. Oh, my God, your parents thought you were dead. They prayed you were alive. Where did you go? Where?”

  Cady wore another cuffing for the thoughtlessness of not letting everyone know she was alive, but it was a half-hearted kitten slap of a thing and she wore it without requital.

  “Oh, this is Smith,” she said, without warning, as though the little tap had only just shook free the memory of his being there.

  “This guy?”

  He felt obliged then to reintroduce himself into their circle.

  “Titanic Smith, ma'am. Deputy US Marshal.”

  “My God, Cady, are you in witness protection or something? Wait. What? Titanic? Is that a real name?”

  He had already turned out his lapel to show her his badge, and was about to crank up the same old explanation he always seemed required to provide anywhere but home, when Cady stepped in to forestall him.

  “Yes. It's his name. He is a US Marshal, and we will get to all of that, I promise, Georgia. But I need to know what's going on with you. What's that creepy message on your phone about and what's this thing and … and what the actual fuck is up with everything. Seriously?”

  That last was as much an exclamation as a question.

  Smith watched as Miss Georgia gently fended off Cady, who was trying to touch her necklace. He had thought nothing of it at first, having seen so many wildly various types of adornment in his recent excursions that only the most unusual were like to catch his eye now. But there was something about how she touched it …

  “Where have you been?” the young woman asked a third time, with frank incredulity. She was holding the thing around her neck in a way that caused a dread sensation to steal over Titanic Smith. He had seen men and women carefully worry at bands around their necks in just that fashion more than once: in the South, during the war, when his cavalry unit had come upon and liberated a band of negro slaves, of late absconded from their masters' plantation; and once during his enforced travels in a hot desert place, where brown-skinned men made slaves of their black-skinned brothers. He had not even attempted to liberate those poor souls, and his conscious failure to do so still gnawed at him.

  Cady reached for the necklace again. For the collar, he corrected himself. Given the expression of shame and loathing that twisted Miss Georgia's face Smith had no doubt now that it was no lady's fancy, but rather a mark of punishment.

  “Cady,” she asked in a soft and shaking voice, “God, where have you been?”

  It was her fourth attempt at having the answer from her. Cady turned to him, her face as marked by hesitation as was her friend's by humiliation.

  “Ms. Eliadis,” Smith ventured carefully, “Ms. McCall has been helping me with a delicate and dangerous matter. I'm afraid I'm not yet at liberty to explain further.”

  A second passed, and then another.

  Smith did not know if the ruse would hold. He searched for a phrase he'd heard Cady use just that morning, appending it quickly when the words came back to him. “We had to go dark.”

  The young woman regarded him with suspicion, if not open hostility.

  “Well, why don't you tell her what I did, Marshal? I'm sure you've got all the details at your fingertips. You people always do.”

  Her surprising animus forced Smith to move even further away from the literal truth of things.

  “Ma'am, I can honestly assure you, I have no interest in your case. I do not know what alleged offense has brought you to this pass, or what circumstances might be raised in mitigation, but I am sure you must have had good cause for whatever it was you done. Your friend here assures me of your integrity,” he nodded at Cady, “and for what it's worth, I am not blind to the faults of the law. I see them every working day.”

  It was not a speech he'd have wasted breath on for ruffians like the Buford twins. For them and their ilk, Marshal Smith had a short rope and a high branch. But Miss Georgia was not of his day, and whatever conviction had seen that odd collar snapped around her neck was no concern of his.

  Her demeanor was defiant, right up until the moment when her face cracked and she started crying again. More feminine exchanges of hugs and embracement ensued, but this time Smith did not feel as though it was necessary to absent himself. He was, after all, the cause of her distress. He had to stand there and sup his medicine.

  It took some time for the squall to pass, as it can with the lady folk, but when Miss Georgia was done a-wailing, she wiped the tears from her eyes and visibly gathered the reins of her emotions in hand.

  She took a deep breath.

  “Thank you, Marshal,” she sniffled.

  Cady squeezed her shoulder.

  “Tell me what happened. What I can do?”

  “I … I don't even know where to start. Everyone lost their shit when you went missing. You were on the news. You were trending on Twitter for like two days.”

  Cady interrupted her, but gently. “Yeah. I figured. It must have sold a lot of games. But tell us what happened to you.”

  “Well … they're sort of connected,” she said haltingly.

  “How?”

  “It was Matt. He was … he is such a great guy, Cady. He never gave up looking for you. He kept your story running for months, but then they sent him to the wall, because
he was writing things, and the government was getting angrier and angrier, and even Trump was tweeting at him at, like, three in morning, so you know he had his crazy on, and saying they were coming for him and—”

  “Whoa,” said Cady, as though trying to calm a bolting horse. “Just back up. What wall and what the hell does Trump—you mean that Trump, right?—What does…”

  But her friend was staring at her as though she was genuinely crazy.

  “Cady. Where have …”

  Miss Georgia caught herself before she could ask the same thing a fifth time. Instead she turned to Smith.

  “You went dark? How far off the grid did you go? How can she even be asking these things?”

  “Ms. McCall has not been in correspondence with anyone for some time,” Smith answered carefully. “She may not be as well informed of current doings or a-goings-on as you would rightly think.”

  Georgia stared at both of them then, looking as though she had awoken at last to discover mental patients loose in her home.

  “Who is this guy? What's going on here? Is this a joke, Cady? Because you've pulled some pretty sick shit over the years, but this is not cool.”

  Cady leaned over as though to hug her friend in reassurance again, but this time Georgia pulled away. Cady made a face.

  “Georgia, you would not believe me if I told you.”

  “Try me.”

  Smith wondered if they were about to get chased out into the street with a broom, but Cady surprised him by lying with all the polished sincerity of a New York carpetbagger.

  “You remember the hacks on the Democrats? The Russian hack on Hillary Clinton's campaign? I got caught up in that. That's why I've been missing. They had to hide me from the KGB or FSB or whatever it's called now.”

  The extravagant lie—not even sprinkled with a light dusting of truth—served only to confuse the other woman. It did not do much for Smith's ability to follow along, either.

  “But why would the marshals do that? Clinton's in jail. Both of them. Trump's not interested in getting to the truth of that.”

  Smith had been but a short while in the company of Cady, but he could tell she was reeling under invisible hammer blows. Although he understood in a literal sense what Miss Georgia was saying, he did not share a history with these two young women and could not say why this conversation should be so distressing.

  “Trump?” Cady said carefully. “Trump is president?”

  Georgia regarded her with frank disbelief.

  “Well, duh.”

  “And the wall? He built his stupid wall?”

  Georgia's face betrayed very real confusion and frustration at having to explain. Smith felt he should step in before this got out of hand. Cady, who had proved herself so much better at understanding the mechanics of the watch than he, was nonetheless having a harder time adjusting to the reality of what it did.

  “He tried to build it,” Miss Georgia went on, “but you know, that was always a …”

  Somebody hammered at the door and a harsh voice yelled out, “Homeland. Open up! Now!”

  Miss Georgia let out a terrible cry.

  “Oh, no! I forgot. I forgot.”

  Smith reached for his pistol, and lunged for the pink valise where his rifle was wrapped up.

  “No! Smith, don't,” Cady shouted. “They'll kill you.”

  The door of Miss Georgia's apartment crashed inwards, and at least six or seven men charged in, all of them dressed in black overalls and helmets, their faces hidden by goggles. They were armed with weapons Marshal Smith knew to be far more deadly than his own, and they were all shouting at the three of them to get down and place their hands behind their heads.

  He had kicked in a few doors himself over the years, and he knew he had a good chance of getting shot in the next two seconds.

  20

  Smith dropped to the floor, adding his own voice to those of the raiders.

  “Get down,” he called out.

  He could not see whether Cady and Georgia did as they were told. One heavy boot came down on the back of his neck, crushing his face into the hard wooden floor.

  “Armed. This one is armed,” a man's voice yelled, just behind his head. Smith felt his arms expertly locked up, and his wrists shackled. The metal handcuffs bit deeply into his skin and more than one fist pounded into his ribs and lower back while somebody removed his gun from its holster. It was like being caught under the hoofs of a stampede.

  He could hear the women screaming and men yelling abuse at them, swearing with unbridled profanity. He felt the heat of the angry offence he took at that burning through him, wanting to explode outwards, but he forced himself to lay still under the blows and the abuse. There weren't no call for using language like that against these women, but there weren't no point in getting killed over it neither.

  He was pulled painfully to his feet. Somebody gave him a couple of kicks as incentive on the way up.

  “Christ, this one is huge,” somebody said.

  Smith was no sooner to his feet when he felt the back of his knee kicked out. A solid blow propelled him toward the couch where Cady and Georgia were also trussed up like tiny Thanksgiving turkeys. Of the two, Georgia probably looked the more frightened and Cady the more furious, but her eyes were also wide with fear and shock. They were both shaking.

  The violence of the break-in receded as the raiders assured themselves they had their quarry under control. Smith rolled his shoulders to work out some of the tension and impacted rage, and he flexed his wrists within the steel restraints that secured them behind his back. There would be no breaking out of the cuffs.

  Half a dozen long guns were still pointed at them, mostly at him, and mostly at his face. A tall man, solidly built, removed his helmet and pushed the unusual-looking eye protectors up onto his forehead. They left a mark around the top half of his face.

  He handed his weapon to another man.

  No, it was a woman, Smith realized.

  Now that he had some time to inspect the party at his leisure he could see that there were seven of them, two of whom were ladies. Not so long ago he would have been astounded by such a thing. Now, he mused, it was not even the second or third most surprising development he had encountered of late. Smith expected the boss man to address him, and was mildly taken aback when he directed his first comments to Miss Georgia.

  “Ms. Eliadis, you are in violation of your detention agreement. You are not entitled to receive visitors without authorization from either the local police department or from your Homeland Security caseworker. Do you have a legitimate reason for breaching this condition?”

  Georgia began to babble.

  “I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. I didn't … I forgot. I just … I'm sorry, I forgot. It's just my friend … she's been gone, and I forgot …”

  The official cut her off with a chopping gesture of his hand.

  “Not good enough. You enjoy a lot of privileges under your sponsored detention agreement. Not the least of which is the ability to earn a living and remain in your own home. I am afraid you will be breached for this, and if it turns out you have been harboring other fugitives, your agreement will be revoked.”

  His words had a galvanic effect on the young woman. She let out a terrible, animalistic sort of sound that cycled up into a high-pitched screech. The officer winced and directed the other female in his posse, the one who wasn't carrying his weapon, to escort Georgia out of the room.

  “I can't even hear myself think,” he said. “If you can't keep her quiet, at least keep her out of here while I interrogate this pair.”

  He turned his attention back to Smith and Cady.

  “ID cards,” he said holding out his hand and snapping his fingers.

  Cady jutted her chin at him defiantly.

  “You handcuffed us, you idiot,” she said, shrugging extravagantly to emphasize her inability to comply with his order.

  The man stepped in and calmly backhanded her across the face. It was not a knockout blo
w, but it sounded like a stinger. Cady cried out as her head snapped back. Without thinking Smith launched himself up out of the couch. Or at least he tried to. He didn't have much leverage with his hands secured behind him, and the female officer who was holding her commander's rifle moved with much greater speed than he could manage.

  She kicked him in the chest, fair driving him back into the depths of the couch, which scraped back a few inches on the wooden floor.

  One of the other raiders—they had heretofore only identified themselves by the unusual name of Homeland—moved to unshackle Cady, presumably so she could produce these so-called cards. Smith had no idea what sort of document they wanted. None of this struck him as being regular or reasonable. Since when did lawmen go around demanding the personal documents of citizens who had been doing nothing but visiting company in the privacy of their own homes?

  Since sometime between his own day and this present one, he supposed.

  Cady took her wallet from a back pocket and passed it to the commander with an unsteady hand. He looked at it, his face rearranging itself to convey an even greater measure of unhappiness at the offering, before he said, “What the hell is this?”

  “My driver's license.”

  “I can see that,” he shot back. “That's not what I asked for. Where's your liberty card? You know? The one with the chip?”

  He spoke as if to an idiot child.

  Cady caught Smith's eye. There was more fear and incertitude in that brief glance than he had seen from her in all of the previous day. She looked even more distressed, if that were possible, than when they had landed here with Chumley's murderous visage still dancing in their memory. The man turned to Smith.

  “What about you?”

  “Ain't got no card nor paper or nothing,” he answered honestly. His marshal's badge, pinned to the underside of his coat lapel, seemed to be growing heavier by the second. Smith did not fancy having to account for it to this tyrant and his lackeys.

  Cady tried to interpose herself between the two men.

  “Georgia is my friend,” she said. “I've been away. I just wanted to see her, is all.”