“Murrell still using you to send people to heaven while he prays for their souls?”
Crenshaw’s smile vanished. “Murrell’s dead. He died last night, coughin’ up blood. So much for his God. As for me, I don’t care one way or the other. I just like killin’ people.” Crenshaw looked over at Jane, who was standing, frozen, watching them. “And you better run, little girl, or I’ll do the same to you. But not before I’ve had some other kind of fun with you first.” He straddled Darren, placing his knees on his arms, and put his hands around his neck. Two dirty thumbs pressed against his Adam’s apple. “Say goodbye, schoolmaster.” He squeezed. Black starbursts exploded in front of Darren’s eyes.
With a furious shriek, Jane leaped on Crenshaw. She grabbed him by his torn ear, and pulled. Crenshaw howled, and the pressure on Darren’s throat suddenly lessened, and he was able to pull one hand free. He reached up and jammed the base of his hand into Crenshaw’s nose.
The injured highwayman gave an inarticulate cry of pain, and fell to one side, and Darren was able to slither out from underneath him. He turned, and looked toward Jane—still fighting Crenshaw with a fury he would never have expected—and he said, “Jane, get yourself out of here!” And for the first time in his life, he leapt into a fight.
He expected the punches to hurt more. A couple of them made solid contact—one with his face, another with his upper chest—but he found himself grinning, even laughing, and fighting the harder as he realized with some amazement that he was actually winning the fight. Crenshaw was falling back, the look on his face changing from gleeful savagery to astonishment as he realized that he was being beaten by someone he had derided as a weakling. Finally, Crenshaw stopped throwing punches, and put his hands up to ward off Darren’s.
He let his fists drop to his side. His chest was heaving, and he hurt in a hundred different places, but at the moment all he felt was exhilaration. “Now,” he panted out, and was amazed at how tough, how completely badass his own voice sounded, “get the fuck out of here, and you’d better not even think of trying to bother Jane Bell or me again. Or anyone else.”
But Crenshaw had probably been a dirty fighter since he was little. Without warning he kicked out a leg, hooked it around Darren’s, and swept him off his feet. Then he leaped on top of him, and the two rolled off into the underbrush.
But here fate took a hand. A branch slapped Crenshaw across the face, catching him squarely in the right eye, the one already bruised and blackening from his earlier fight with Murrell’s men. He screamed an obscenity, and clapped a hand to his face, and Darren knocked him sprawling and in a moment had him pinned him to the ground.
Now what? Darren thought desperately, looking down at Crenshaw’s bloodied face. He was going to strangle me slowly, but there’s no way I can do the same to him.
He glanced around, but didn’t see Jane. Perhaps she’d obeyed his command to run. Then he looked down at his adversary, who was still struggling, but feebly. Crenshaw’s eye was bleeding from a tear in the eyelid, and he seemed to know he was done.
I can’t just let him go. I won’t get caught out that way a second time. And with some horror, his thoughts added, and that means I have to kill him.
He had no weapon, but he saw, within reach, a large rock. He picked it up, holding it tentatively. Could he take a rock, and smash someone’s head with it? Was it in him? He looked down at Crenshaw, now completely inert, looking up at him with his one good eye. One lip curled back, exposing yellowed, crooked teeth. With all of his injuries, and scars, and his black thatch of hair soaking wet and matted with mud, he barely looked human.
“If you do it,” Crenshaw croaked, “you better make a good job of it. Because if you don’t, I’ll hunt you down, you and the girl both. I’ll find you. I’ll cut your throat clean across. But before that, I’ll tie you up and make you watch while I’ll have my use of the girl until I tire of it, then I’ll…”
And Darren struck Crenshaw in the head with the rock.
The voice cut off like someone had flipped a switch. But then, he felt a pull, as if he was attached to a giant rubber band, and the whole scene—Crenshaw’s body lying in the muddy patch in the woods, the bare trees, the tangled underbrush—was yanked away from him. He had a momentary glimpse of the whole scene, viewed from above. He could see the road, with Jane’s small form jogging down it—She ran away, she’s safe, thank heaven she’s safe—and in the distance the roofs of the town of Concord and the river, glittering in the vague gray light. Then his consciousness flew upwards and away, and everything went black.
Part 4: The City By Night
“Jesus Christ,” came Fischer’s awestruck voice, “every time you come back, you look worse than the time before.”
Darren looked up from his position—face down on the floor in Fischer’s office—and decided that on the whole, he was happier face down.
“Are you badly injured, Mister Ault?” Maggie asked.
“Can you die of bruises?” he asked, his voice muffled from having his mouth pressed into the carpet.
“I would imagine you could,” she said.
“Then I think that’s what I’m going to do. Just drag me away when I’m done.”
“Come on,” Fischer said. “You can’t die without telling us what happened in Kentucky.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s not fair to leave us hanging. Get up, you’ll feel better. Maggie, is there any coffee left?”
“I believe there is.”
“Can you get him a cup? Oh, and bring a towel. I don’t want him sitting on any of the furniture in his current state.”
Maggie’s steps receded. Darren decided that however appealing it was, he couldn’t stay on the floor indefinitely. He slowly moved himself into an upright position, emitting a good many groans in the process.
“Jesus,” Fischer breathed again, looking him up and down. “I believe… yes, I really do think. You’ve been in a fight, haven’t you?”
“Yes.”
“You poor guy. I feel almost guilty.” Fischer frowned. “Wait… it wasn’t the Whackers who did this to you, was it?”
He shook his head. “No. They turned out to be pretty harmless. The guy I got in the fight with was a highwayman named Crenshaw.”
“Wow. He looks like he really worked you over. What did you do to piss him off?”
“It’s a long story.”
Fischer shook his head. “Okay, dude, that did it. I really do feel guilty. I didn’t mean for you to get the shit beat out of you by some nineteenth century wanker. I hate unfair fights.”
“Oh, it wasn’t an unfair fight. I won. In fact, I think…” He swallowed, and his eyebrows drew together. “I think I killed him.”
Fischer’s bright blue eyes opened wide. “You… you killed him?”
“I think so. I had him pinned to the ground, and he was saying all kinds of… you know, nasty talk. Threats. Like how he was going to hunt Jane and me down, and rape her and make me watch, and then kill us both. So I hit him in the head with a rock.” He gave an apologetic shrug. “It seemed like the only thing to do at the time.”
“What happened to this being a reconnaissance mission? You’re not supposed to go into the past and change things. That’s what caused all of this in the first place.” He brushed his hair back, and it immediately fell across his eyes again. “And you’re especially not supposed to kill anyone.”
Maggie came back into the office with a steaming mug of black coffee and a large towel. He accepted the former gratefully, and she draped the latter across a chair, and indicated that he should sit, which he did.
“So,” she said, in a conversational tone, “did I hear correctly that Mister Ault may have killed someone?”
“That’s what he said.” Fischer’s eyes still registered incredulity.
“Perhaps he should tell us the entire story. One isolated fact may not be of much consequence, however alarming it may seem.”
He took a sip of the coffee, and then t
old them what had happened in Kentucky, from his meeting with Josiah McCaskill, his subsequent kidnapping by Murrell’s cronies and meeting with Jane Bell, their escape, arrival in Concord, and confrontation with Brother Zebulon, and Brother Zebulon’s miraculous conversion of almost the entire ruffian gang to Whackerism.
“Murrell apparently died,” he said, “or he’d probably have stopped them from joining Brother Zebulon somehow. Murrell was one seriously scary guy. He had an absolutely convincing way about him. Listening to him, you found yourself believing what he said even while you knew it was false. If he were alive today, he’d be a major cult leader. He had something, that’s for sure.” He took another sip of coffee. “But once he was dead, and the rest of the gang abandoned ship, Crenshaw was left to his own devices. He wasn’t going to fall for Brother Zebulon’s religious message, and without accomplices, he couldn’t very well have continued his career as a highwayman. But he could take revenge on Jane and me, and that’s what he tried to do.”
“But you stopped him?” Fischer still seemed unable to believe what he was hearing.
He nodded. “I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right. I’m not a fighter. I’d never been in a fight before, in fact, unless you count getting beat up by bullies in middle school. But I couldn’t let him win, you know? If I’d let him go, he’d have found Jane and hurt her. I had to stop him. I know you’re going to say it was the wrong thing to do, that I shouldn’t have interfered with what was supposed to happen, but I had to stop him. Jane Bell—she’s a good person. She didn’t deserve how her life went, and if I could prevent anything else bad from happening to her… well, I just had to.” A flash of defiance flared inside him. “So, when I had a chance, I hit Crenshaw in the head with a rock. Yes, I’m pretty sure it killed him. And I don’t care what you’re going to say. If I had it to do over, I’d do it again.”
Fischer held up both hands, palms outward. “Whoa, sport. I’m not going to argue with you, not while you’re in this mood. I’m not a fighter, either.”
“And remember,” Maggie said, “just as with the unfortunate events that concluded your visit to Norway, it may not make any real difference in the long run. What happened to Per Olafsson was the result of his being in the wrong track. The same, we must suppose, is true of Miss Bell and Mister Crenshaw. If I am correct, then once we reestablish proper tracking, Mister Ault’s actions may right themselves, along with everything else.”
“We’ll have to hope that you’re correct.” Fischer regarded him with one eyebrow raised. “Still,” he said, “I have to admit that I’m impressed. There’s more to you than I’d thought. Saving the damsel in distress, and all. That’s badass.”
“I don’t know if I’m a badass,” he said, “but Jane Bell is about as far from a damsel in distress as you could get. A hundred years later, she’d be part of the women’s rights movement. She landed a few good punches on Crenshaw herself.”
“If I may make a suggestion,” Maggie said, “I think we should focus on the information Mister Ault gathered. In my opinion, there is one fact that stands out as being important—the rest is, as far as I can see, ancillary. And that is that the first person you met in Kentucky was named McCaskill.”
Fischer nodded. “I agree. That can’t be a coincidence. It’s not like he was named Smith, or something else common. There can’t be many McCaskills around. The name has to mean something.”
“Is there a way to check to see if he was one of Lee’s ancestors?” he asked. “Or, was supposed to be? I know everything’s all screwed up, but you know what I mean.”
“Of course.” Fischer swiveled to face his computer. “We have the genealogy of every human on Earth in the database.”
“Don’t tell the people at Ancestry dot com,” Maggie said. “Nor the Mormons. They’d be battering down the door.”
“Fortunately, they don’t know where we live.” Fischer typed a few commands, moved the mouse around and clicked, typed again and hit “Enter,” and then said, “What was Lee’s middle name again?”
“Allen.”
“Born in Spokane, Washington, as I recall?”
“Yes.”
Fischer typed a bit more, and then moused over and clicked twice. Then he leaned back and cupped his hands behind his head.
A moment later, he brought his chair back to an upright position with a loud thunk. “What the hell?” He frowned at the screen.
“What?” Darren and Maggie said simultaneously.
“Well, it looks like we’ve isolated the problem.” He turned the computer monitor around to face Darren and Maggie. On it was a branching family tree, starting on the left with “Lee Allen McCaskill” (a red notation under his name said, “CAUTION: No Valid Actual Track: Alternate Tracks Only! Use This Data For Speculative Track Analysis Only!”). The tree split, and split again, showing Lee’s parents, and grandparents. But at generation five there was another message written in bright scarlet. The spaces for the parents of Lee’s great-great grandfather, Stephen Patrick McCaskill, were filled in, “ERROR TYPE 2033-B. Data unavailable.”
“My word,” Maggie said softly.
“Another thing that isn’t supposed to happen?” he asked.
“Yup.” Fischer looked up. “Even if you never existed, you have to have ancestors.”
“I don’t even want to think about all the ways that doesn’t make sense.”
“Look, even for people who were never born, who are on alternate tracks, there are the parents they would have had if they’d been born. You see? There are different kinds of nonexistent. People who only exist in alternate tracks are nonexistent, yes, but it’s a circumstantial sort of nonexistence. It’s contingent. This,”—he gestured at the screen—“this is really nonexistent. This is the real deal.”
“Of course,” Maggie said, “you do realize this forces us to a reevaluation of the problem.”
“Oh, yeah,” Fischer said. “Because we’ve been working from the wrong angle. We’d thought it was your ancestry that Lee wiped out. It looks like it was his own.”
“How can that be?” he asked. “I mean, the same thing occurred to me when I met Josiah McCaskill, but I couldn’t see how what Lee did would have any effect on his own family tree. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Not on the surface,” Maggie said. “But I think that’s the only explanation. Now, we have to determine why.”
“But wait,” he said. “When you started out on this whole thing, you began with my grandmother’s name, and tried to figure out where the divergences in her family tree were. You didn’t start with Lee.”
“No, you’re right,” Fischer said. “And if we had, we might have figured this out a lot quicker. But just because there are divergences in Lee’s family doesn’t mean there are none in yours. The fact is, you and Lee probably share a good many ancestors, so any divergences would show up in both lineages. And the farther back you go, the more likely that is to be true. In fact, most anthropologists believe that if you go back before about 1200 AD everyone currently alive in Europe descends, multiple times, from every single individual who left descendants.”
“No one is currently alive in Europe,” Maggie observed. “Nor anywhere else, for that matter.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Of course. I was being flippant, sir.”
“So my point stands. If Lee was supposed to descend from Per Olafsson and Maíre Gillacomgain, chances are you do, too.”
“So Lee and I are cousins?”
“Everyone’s a cousin, Ault. It’s impossible for it to work any other way. You can’t keep on having everyone’s family tree double at each generation farther back. Eventually a person’s number of ancestors would exceed the population of the Earth at the time. At some point in the past, there were only two groups of people—the ones who are the ancestors of everyone on the planet, and the ones who were the ancestors of no one.”
“Weird.”
“So, you’re a distant cousin of Maggie an
d me, too. We’re all one big happy family.”
“Well, that’s just awesome, but it doesn’t get us any closer to figuring out what caused all of this.”
“He has a point, Fischer,” Maggie said. “And it may not be the best time, but I should remind you that we’re under a bit of time pressure.”
“Time pressure?” Darren said.
Fischer shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “She’s referring to the fact that the Board of Directors has issued us an ultimatum. While you were off cutting it up rough in nineteenth century Kentucky, Maggie and I and the other department heads were called into a meeting, where we were basically handed our asses by the Chair.”
“In fact, we’d only just come back when you arrived here,” Maggie said.
“The Chair isn’t a happy woman,” Fischer said. “She evidently considers the loss of the entire human race a bit of a… misstep.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Darren protested.
“No, but she’s not seeing it that way. It was only some fast talking by Maggie that kept us all from being shown the door right then and there. She said, ‘Perhaps it might alter your perception of the situation, Missus Holcombe, if you knew that we have an operative on assignment as we speak, working to rectify this situation.’” Fischer’s imitation of Maggie’s rolling Scottish accent was eerily accurate, and the corners of Maggie’s mouth turned upward a little.
“And what did she say?”
“That we have twenty-four hours. No more, no less. In her words, ‘at twenty-four hours, this situation will be resolved. If not, it will be under sixty seconds later that you and your entire administrative staff will be packing up their belongings and looking for employment elsewhere.’”
“Elsewhere?” Darren said. “Is there an ‘elsewhere’ at the moment?”
“I don’t expect she cares,” Maggie said.
“So I think we have only one choice. To send you on one last reconnaissance mission.”
He winced. “Another one? Where to now? I thought that there were only three divergences?”
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