A Bridge of Years

They didn’t waste any time. They arrived too late, anyhow.

There was a crowd in the stairwell, a siren in the distance —and blood, blood in the hallway and blood spilling from the door of Millstein’s apartment, an astonishing amount of blood. Tom tried to hold Joyce back but she broke away from him, calling out Lawrence’s name in a voice that was already mournful.

Fifteen

Armored, alert, and fully powered, Billy identified the scatter of blue luminescence on the apartment door and adjusted his eyepiece to wideband operation. His heart was beating inside him like a glorious machine and his thoughts were subtle and swift.

The corridor was empty. The keen apparatus of Billy’s senses catalogued the smell of cabbage, roach powder, mildewed linoleum; the dim floral pattern of the wallpaper; the delicate tread and pressure of his feet along the floor.

He burned open the lock with a finger laser and moved through the doorway with a speed that caused the hinges to emit a squeal, as of surprise.

He closed the door behind him.

The apartment was long and rectangular, with a door open into what appeared to be the kitchen and another door, closed, on what was probably a bedroom. A window at the far end of the rectangle showed the night silhouette of the Fourteenth Street Con Edison stacks through a burlap curtain tied back to a nail. The wall on the left was lined with bookshelves.

The room was empty.

Billy stood for a silent moment, listening.

This room and the kitchen were empty … but he heard a faint scuffle from the bedroom.

He smiled and moved through that door as efficiently as he had moved through the first.

This room was smaller and even shabbier. The walls were dirty white and bare except for a crudely framed magazine print of an abstract painting. The bed was a mattress on the floor. There was a man in the bed.

Billy ceased smiling, because this wasn’t the man he had followed from Lindner’s.

This was some other man. This was a tall, pigeon-chested, naked man snatching a cotton sheet over himself and squinting at Billy in the darkness with gap-jawed astonishment.

The man on the mattress said, “Who the fuck are you?”

“Get up,” Billy said.

The man didn’t get up.

He doesn’t know what I am, Billy realized. He thinks I’m an old man in a pair of goggles. It’s dark; he can’t see very well. Maybe he thinks I’m a thief.

Billy corrected this impression by burning a hole in the mattress beside the naked man’s outstretched left arm. The hole was wide and deep. It stank of charred kapok and cotton and the waxy smoke of the wood floor underneath. The hole was black and began immediately to burn at the edges; the naked man yelped and smothered the flames with his blanket. Then he looked up at Billy, and Billy was pleased to recognize the fear in his eyes. This was the kind of fear that would make him abject, malleable; not yet a panicked fear that would make him unpredictable.

“Stand up,” Billy repeated.

Standing, the man was tall but too thin. Billy disliked his fringe of beard, the bump of his ribs, the visible flare of his hip bones. His penis and shriveled scrotum dangled pathetically between his legs.

Billy imagined burning away that sack of flesh, altering this man in something like the way the Infantry doctors had altered Billy himself … but that wasn’t good strategy.

Billy said, “Where’s the man who lives here?”

The naked man swallowed twice and said, “I’m the man who lives here.”

Billy walked to the wall and switched on the light. The light was a sixty-watt bulb hanging on a knotted cord, smoke from the charred mattress swimming around it. Billy’s eyepiece adapted at once to this new light, damping its amplification. The naked man blinked and squinted.

He stared at Billy. “My God,” he said finally. “What are you?

Billy knew the question was involuntary and didn’t require an answer. He said, “Tell me your name.”

“Lawrence Millstein,” the naked man said. “Do you work at a shop called Lindner’s Radio Supply?”

“No.”

This was true. Billy heard its trueness in the quaver of the man’s voice; in the overtones of his terror. “Do you live here alone?”

“Yes.”

This was true, also.

“A man came here from Lindner’s,” Billy said. “Do you know a man who works at Lindner’s?”

“No,” Lawrence Millstein said.

But this was a lie, and Billy responded to it instantly: he narrowed the beam of his wrist weapon and used it to slice off the tip of Lawrence Millstein’s left-hand index finger at the top knuckle. Millstein stood a moment in dumb incomprehension until the pain and the stink of his own charred flesh registered in his brain. He looked down at his wounded hand.

His knees folded and he sank back to the ruined mattress. Billy said reproachfully, “You know the man I mean.”

“Yes,” Millstein gasped.

“Tell me about him,” Billy said.

All this reminded Billy of that time long ago, in the future, in Florida, and of the woman who had died there.

Those memories welled up in him while he extracted Lawrence Millstein s confession.

Billy remembered the shard of glass and the woman’s name, A

He had come northwest from the ruins of Miami with his comrades Hallo well and Piper, a fierce storm on their heels. Cut out of their platoon in an ambush, they had retreated in the face of superior fire through a maze of suburban plexes and windowless pillbox dwellings whipped by a torrent of wild ocean air, the barometer low and falling. The night was illuminated by arcs of lightning along the eastern horizon, where a wall of cloud rotated around the fierce vacuum of its core. They ran and didn’t much speak. They had given up hope of finding friendly territory—they wanted only some space between themselves and the insurgency before they were driven to shelter.

Billy had grown used to the wind like a fist at his back by the time they saw the house.

It was a house much like all the other houses on this littered empty street, a low bunker of the type advertised as “weatherproof” after the first disasters in the Zone. Of course, it wasn’t. But its roof was intact and the walls seemed secure and defensible and it must have survived a great many storms relatively intact. It was whole; that was what drew Billy’s attention.

Most of these buildings were empty, but there was always the possibility of squatters; so Brother Hallowell, a tall man and thick-chested under his armor, vaulted a chain fence and circled to the back while Billy and Brother Piper launched a concussion weapon through the narrow watch slot next to the door. Billy gri