Surcease of Sorrow
Page 4
"Let's go!"
This time he listened. They ran around the back of an intact building and stopped at a set of cellar doors. Martha slid open the hasp and pulled them open. A cool rush of air came out of the darkened cellar and Martha motioned Nathan to go in. It was the cellar of a dry goods store and once their eyes adjusted to the dark they could see rows and rows of shelving that had been stripped bare of anything useful before the siege of Washington began. Martha tugged his arm to move on but Nathan held firm.
"Martha, we should hide," he said. "That man could be out there looking for us. He’ll have to join up with his company sooner or later so let's wait for him to move on. We can hold up here, catch our breath and leave after dark, it will be safer then."
She stared hard at him as she considered his logic. Finally she relented and they began to search for a dark corner to hide. As he began to settle in for a long wait he opened his hand that was still tightly clutching his watch. He knew that he could never explain to Martha why he had risked their lives to find it. But it gave him comfort to have it because he felt that as long as the thing existed then it meant that his future was still out there waiting for him to come home. And that somehow he would be able to set things right again. As his finger moved along the edge his nail caught the clasp and the case flipped open. Out of habit he glanced down at it.
LINKING
The illuminated blue letters flashed for a moment until the virtual watch face reappeared. Nathan had all to do to keep himself from leaping to his feet. But he mustn't get ahead of himself. He glanced over at Martha whose head was resting on her knees that were gathered up in front of her. It HAS to work, his mind screamed as he carefully placed his thumb over the stem and pressed. Though his eyes were closed there was something about the way the mechanism clicked that told him it had worked. When he finally looked he saw the display as it drew a figure 8 pattern then displayed the words:
ACQUIRE - EXTRACT
Emotion welled up in him. The nightmare was about to end. He touched the display with his thumb and a counter appeared that started counting down from00:04:00. In four minutes he would vanish from this world in a blue flash, and then he would finally be able to make everything right again. He looked over at Martha who hadn't moved. Should he tell her? Very soon all of this would be over and she would no more know Nathan Hawkins than she did the man in the moon. Nathanput his hand on her shoulder as the counter had reached00:03:37. At that exact moment the cellar doors were thrown open.
"You down here, niggers?"
Martha stiffened and peered out from behind the broken crate that hid them from view.
"Yeah, you're down here," he laughed, "I can smell your nigger sweat. It's worst than cat piss."
The soldier began rummaging around the debris. Nathan could barely swallow as he looked down at the watch,00:03:14. Never in his life had three minutes seemed like an eternity.
"Y'all show yourselves now and I might go easy on ya," the man snorted loudly then spit. "If you make me find ya, I'm gonna open up a whole new world of pain on ya both. Hey, buck! You hear me? I know'd you do. When I getta hol' of you I'm gonna tie your hands together across the top o' one of these beams and I'm gonna slice your belly open with my knife and watch you dance around in your guts. How you like the sound of that, buck?"
The soldier laughed. He made a turn and they could hear his footsteps coming toward them.
00:02:37
"And you, little girl," he hummed as if someone held a tray of freshly baked biscuits under his nose. "Well let's just say my prick gets hard jus' thinkin' about what I'm gonna do to you. I'll jus' say that when I'm done you're gonna be split open from your asshole to your black cunny."
The soldier was no more than five feet from them. Nathan hunched down, there was still more than two minutes remaining. Just leave, just leave, just leave, he muttered under his breath. But the man kept coming. There was a sudden rustling beside him and when he looked he saw that Martha had sprang to her feet and had taken aim with the Colt revolver. The soldier, taken by surprise, choked out a feeble "whoa," just as Martha pulled the trigger. The hammer snapped down on the blasting cap but nothing happened, the gun misfired.
"Run, Nathan," she screamed. "Get outta here!"
Everything that happened next seemed to take place with sickening slowness. Nathan moved to get out of the way and his feet slid out from under him and he landed on his side. It gave him a view of the soldier who had drawn his own revolver from its holster. As Nathan fell the watch slipped from his hand and skipped along the stone floor just as the counter reached00:01:57. He reached out to grab it as Martha pulled back the hammer on her revolver. Both she and the soldier were aiming point blank at each other when Martha pulled the trigger again. This time the gun discharged and the bullet struck the soldier in the jaw. He staggered backwards and fell over a row of shelving just as Nathan gathered up the watch off the floor.
00:01:39
A jubilant scream escaped Martha's throat and she cocked the hammer again. At the same instant the soldier, still alive, took aim at her. They both fired simultaneously. The twin reports reverberated mercilessly in the smoky cellar. Martha's aim was on the mark. The bullet from her gun caught the soldier just above his Adam’s apple and entered his brain, his death was instant. However there would be no celebration as Martha crumpled to the floor. Nathan rushed to her. She had been struck in the abdomen where the bullet pierced her liver and nicked an artery. By the time it was over the counter had reached00:01:31.
She was still alive when Nathan reached her but wouldn’t be for long. He knew what he had to do. He removed the small silver case from his pocket and entered the pass code releasing a small curved device. Then he felt Martha's hand touch his. He looked over at her and she was shaking her head.
"But it will help," he said. "It can fix you."
"It's caused enough trouble already," she replied.
She pushed his hand away. He was about to plead with her but then he remembered that in less than 90 seconds this chain of events will be erased. Nathan leaned down and kissed her. She smiled as tears spilled from her beautiful dark eyes. He wanted to say that he was sorry. Sorry that he had been so foolishly sure of himself. Sorry that he had gotten things so terribly wrong. He wanted to say all that and much more in the remaining seconds he had but he was cut short by the sound of men stomping down the cellar stairs.
"Who's down here?"
Nathanlooked up. Five Confederate soldiers were standing between him and the exit. The counter read00:00:38. But this was his exit; he closed his hand around the watch. The soldiers saw their dead comrade and pointed their fingers at Nathan. They were on him almost immediately. One of them struck him on the face with his fist. As Nathan reeled from the punch he watched in disbelief as the watch slipped from his grasp. He lunged toward it, but they were grabbing and pulling him away by his jacket. He managed to free one arm from his jacket sleeve, then the other. He lunged at the watch and had it in his hand before he was pulled to his feet. But his grip wasn't good enough and it slipped through his fingers. The watch was less than one inch from his fingertips when the counter reached00:00:00 and it vanished in a pale blue flash.
Nathan screamed as he held his hands out in vain. The blue light left a tiny gray smudge imprinted on his vision. And from that gray smudge a soldier stepped forward and drove the butt of his rifle into his forehead. As unconsciousness swallowed him up he felt the sensation of being in a house of infinite rooms and infinite doorways that opened up into more rooms with more doorways. A maze with no beginning and no end.
%); filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share