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Billy was the youngest but he read a lot; Piper and Hallowell always asked him questions like that. This time he was stumped. “Sir, I don’t,” Billy said.
Brother Hallowell shrugged and said, “Well, we walked into something peculiar for sure. You know there’s a lady in the next room?”
Billy was reluctant to take a step forward; he didn’t relish the sound of the machine bugs crunching under his feet. “A lady?”
“That’s right,” Brother Hallowell said, “but your concussion grenade just about took her out, Brother Billy. She has a wedge of plate glass in her head. She’s not dead, and her eyes are open, but—well, come look.”
Billy was dazed but his armor kept him functioning. Even Brother Piper was begi
He followed Brother Hallowell to the next room, where the woman lay slumped in a corner between two boxes. The concussion grenade had slivered a glass dividing wall and driven one long green-tinted wedge into the woman’s head between her right ear and her right eye. There was blood, but not as much as Billy had expected. The sight of this young woman with the shank of plate glass projecting from her cranium like a ghastly party hat took Billy strangely; he reached down to touch the glass—a gesture of awe—and as he touched it the woman blinked and gasped … not in pain, Billy thought, but as if the tremor of his touch had ignited some pleasant memory, long forgotten. She looked up at Billy with one eye, the left. The right eye, bloodshot, gazed indifferently at some vision not physically present.
“What’s your name?” Billy asked.
“A
“Back off now.” Billy stepped away as Brother Hallowell took a medical package out of his pack and selected a cardiovascular unit. He tore away the woman’s shirt, then clamped the wound unit between her breasts. When he switched it on Billy heard the hemotropic tubes crunch into A
Brother Hallowell gave the machine a moment to stabilize, then bent down over A
A
“A time machine,” she said.
Brother Hallowell looked almost comically perplexed. “A what?”
“A time machine,” A
Brother Hallowell sighed. “She’s scrambled,” he said.
“She’s brain dead.” He straightened and flexed his back.
“Brother Billy, will you interrogate the prisoner? See if you can get anything coherent out of her. Meanwhile Brother Piper and I will reco
Wind rocked the building. Billy sat down next to the injured woman and pretended not to see the wedge of green glass in her head. He waited until Brother Hallowell and Brother Piper had left the room.
A
He said, “Is this building really a time machine?”
“There’s a tu
“Tell me about it,” Billy said.
The storm pe
What A
Late on the third night of their occupation, while the storm plucked at the edges of the house and Brother Hallowell and Brother Piper dozed in the placid heat of their armor, Billy took A
He paused to bend over A
The cardiovascular machine faltered as her blood volume dropped. Billy turned off the machine before he left.
He remembered that bleak room, sitting in this one with Lawrence Millstein.