The Chronoliths

But this was beyond the bounds of Hitch Paley’s patience.

Let me say, in defense of Hitch, that he knew Adam Mills. He knew what was waiting for us out there in the relentless sunlight. He was not about to surrender Sue and I think he would have died rather than surrender himself.

He shot Ray in the right shoulder — at this proximity, a killing wound.

I believe I heard the bullet pass through Ray and strike the stone wall behind him, a sound like a hammerblow on granite. Or it might have been the echo of the gunshot itself, deafening in this enclosed space. Dust rose up around us. I was frozen in my own incredulity.

There was a cough of answering shots from outside and a bullet chinked the cinderblocks near the western window. Sue, suddenly pi

Tears stood in her eyes. There was blood on her tattered yellow blouse and blood on the wall behind her.

Ray wasn’t breathing. The wound or the shock had stopped his heart. A blood-bubble formed on his lips and sat there, inert.

He had loved Sue hopelessly and selflessly for many years. But once she had stepped across his motionless legs Sue didn’t look back.

She walked toward the door — staggered, but didn’t fall.

The air stank of blood and cordite. Outside, Adam Mills was shouting something, but I couldn’t make out the words over the ringing in my ears.

The Kuin of Wyoming watched all this from the western horizon. I could see the monument framed in the window behind Hitch, blue on blue, drowsy in the rising heat.

“Stop,” Hitch said bluntly.

Sue shuddered at the sound of his voice but took another step.

“I won’t warn you again. You know I won’t.”

And I heard myself say, “No, Hitch, let her go.”

Our secret, Sue had said.

And: It isn’t a secret if you tell someone.

So why had she shared it with me?

At that moment, I thought I knew.

The understanding was bitter and awful.

Sue took yet another step toward the door.

In the sunlight beyond her a swallow rose out of the dry grass, suspended in the air like a piano note.

“Keep out of it,” Hitch told me.

But I was more familiar with handguns now than I had been at Portillo.

When Hitch saw my pistol aimed at him, he said, “This is fucking insane.”

“She needs to do this.”

Hitch kept his own gun trained on Sue. Sue nodded and approached the door as if each step drew down a failing reserve of strength and courage. “Thank you, Scotty,” she whispered.

“I will shoot you,” Hitch said, “if you do not stop where you are.”

“No,” I said, “you won’t.”

He growled — it was precisely that sound, like a cornered animal. “Scotty, you cowardly fuck, I’ll shoot you, too, if I have to. Put your weapon down and you, Sue, I said stop right there.”

Sue hunched her shoulders as if against the impact of a bullet, but she was already in the frame of the door. She took another step.

For a moment Hitch’s weapon wavered — toward me, toward Sue. Then, suddenly resolute, he took aim at her back, the arch of her spine, her big bowed head.

He began — and I know how absurd it seems, to claim to have witnessed this, but in the overweening stillness of the moment, in the shadow of this bright benevolent afternoon and all of us balanced on the fulcrum of time, I swear I saw his meaty, dark finger begin to close on the trigger of the gun.

But I was faster.

The recoil threw back my hand.

Did I kill Hitch Paley?

I’m not an objective witness. I’m testifying in my own defense. But I am, finally, here at the end of my life, honest. I have no more secrets to keep.

The gun recoiled. The bullet was in the air, at least, and then—

And then everything was in the air.

Brick, mortar, wood, tin, the dust of ages. My own body, a projectile. Hitch, and the corpse of Ray Mosely. Ray, who had loved Sue far too much to allow her to do what she had to do; and Hitch, who did not love anyone at all.

Did I see (people have asked me) the destruction of the Chronolith? Was I a witness to the fiery collapse of the Kuin of Wyoming? Did I see the bright light and did I feel the heat?

No. But when I opened my eyes again pieces of the Chronolith were falling from the sky, falling all around me. Pieces the size of pebbles, rendered now as conventional matter and fused by the heat of their extinction into glassy blue teardrops.

Twenty-six

In the great release of energy as the Chronolith collapsed, a shockwave swept outward from its perimeter — more wind than heat, but a great deal of heat; more heat than light, but it had been bright enough to blind.

The cinderblock shelter lost its roof and its northern and western walls. I was blown free of it and woke a few yards from the standing fragments.

For some period of time I was not quite coherent or fully conscious. My first thought was for Sue, but Sue was nowhere visible. Gone as well was Adam Mills, and so were his men and their motorcycles, though I did find (later) one overturned Daimler motorbike abandoned in the scrub, its fuel tank cracked, and a single helmet, and a tattered copy of The Fifth Horseman.

Do I believe Sue gave herself up to the Kuinists in the aftermath of the explosion? Yes, I do. The shockwave would likely not have been deadly to anyone in the open. It was the collapse of the stone shed that had caused my concussion and dislocated my shoulder, not the shockwave itself. Sue had been in the doorway, which was still standing.

I found Hitch and Ray partially buried in the nibble, plainly dead.

I spent a few hours trying to dig them out, working with my good hand, until it became obvious that the effort was futile as well as exhausting. Then I rescued some dried rations from the overturned van and ate a little, choking over the food but keeping at least some of it down.

When I tried my phone there was only a clatter of noise, a distorted “no signal” message drifting across the screen as if through an obscuring tide.

The sun went down. The sky turned indigo and then dark. On the western horizon, where the Chronolith had been, brushfires burned brightly.

I turned and walked the other way.

Twenty-seven

Lately I have visited two significant places: the Wyoming Crater and the Shipworks at Boca Raton. One a lake polluted with memory, the other a gateway to a greater sea.

And I thought—

But no, I’ll get to that.

Ashlee had been released from the hospital by the time I made it back to Mi

I had been in the hospital myself, or at least a little overnight emergency-care clinic in Pine Ridge. Three days wandering with a head injury in the Wyoming backlands had left me sunburned, hungry, and too weak to climb stairs at any speed. My left arm was in a sling.

Ashlee was less fortunate.

She had warned me, of course, but I wasn’t prepared for what I found when I let myself into the apartment and she called my name from the bedroom.

The hurt to her body — the burns, the contusions — were invisible under the snowy white linen of the bed. But I winced at the sight of her face.

I won’t catalog the damage. I reminded myself that it would heal, that the blood pooled in these bruises would fade away, that the broken skin would mend around the sutures and that one day soon she would be able to open her eyes all the way.

She looked at me through purple slits. “That bad?” she said.

Some of her teeth were missing.

“Ashlee,” I said, “I’m so sorry.”