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None of this affected Billy’s resolve. Sensing his panic, Billy’s armor flushed potent new molecules into his blood. The killing urge, which had seemed so powerful in the past, blossomed into something new and even more intense: an agony of necessity.
At the top of the stairs he faced a man he had killed once before, a time traveler. Billy didn’t question this resurrection, merely resolved to kill the man again, to kill him as often as necessary. Some momentary fluctuation caused him to topple forward; he fell, looked up, and the time traveler asked him his name. Billy answered without thinking, startled by the sound of his own voice.
Then he raised his wrist weapon. But the chaos inside him had made him slow and the time traveler was able to aim and fire his own weapon, a beam device that seemed to lock Billy’s armor into a momentary rictus, so that Billy toppled forward in a parody of movement, like a statue tumbling off a pedestal.
He didn’t waste time regretting his vulnerability; only waited for it to pass. As soon as his arm was mobile he brought it up and forward with all the precision his failing neural augmentation was able to calculate and burned open the time traveler’s belly.
The result was impressive. The walls seemed to crumble. Machine bugs rivered across the carpet. A stab of primitive revulsion made Billy leap to his feet and back away. He detonated another pulse grenade—his last—and it slowed the bugs but didn’t stop them.
Detonated aboveground, the pulse did have a profound effect on the local electrical grid. The houselights flickered and dimmed, brightened and flickered again. Down the length of the Post Road, three different families would wake to find their television sets fused and useless. In a dozen homes in the east end of Belltower groggy individuals stumbled but of bed to pick up ringing telephones, nothing on the other end but an ominous basso hum.
The cybernetics churned around the body of the fallen time traveler—healing him or devouring him. Billy didn’t know which, didn’t care.
Dying, Billy hurried for the door.
Twenty-three
Tom had circled to the front of the house when the last intact window—north wall, master bedroom—was blown out by a second concussion.
The floodlights dimmed, brightened, dimmed again. So did the streetlights down along the Post Road.
He cut through the front yard and across the open width of the road to the gully on the far side. Ben was supposed to be covering the front door of the house; but it had occurred to Tom that Ben was not an impenetrable barrier and that the front door was handy to the basement stairs. He left Doug out back with Joyce and Catherine and prayed the three of them would be safe there.
The shock of being roused out of a deep sleep had nearly worn off. He was as awake now as he had ever been, clearheaded and frightened and acutely aware of his own peculiar position: barefoot and carrying a SPACE SOLDIER ray gun from K-mart, modified. Every window in his house had been blown out and he was tempted to reconsider the logic of this adventure. What kept him moving was Joyce—her vulnerability overriding his own—and the single glimpse he had caught of the marauder in an empty street in Manhattan. Those eyes had contained too many deaths, including Lawrence Millstein’s. Eyes not vengeful or even passionate, Tom thought; the look had been passive, the distracted stare of a bus passenger on a long ride through familiar territory. Tom had not especially liked Lawrence Millstein, but it hurt to think that Millstein’s last sight had been that leathery muzzle, those thousand-mile eyes.
He’s already dying, Tom thought. Dying or being dismantled from inside. All we have to do is slow him down.
He was thinking this when the front door opened, spilling light down the gravel driveway and across the road.
Tom ducked into the roadside ditch opposite his front yard.
For the space of three breaths he pressed his face into the wet grass and dewy spiderwebs, no thought possible beyond the panicky need not to be seen, to make himself small among the Queen A
Then he took a fourth and deeper breath and raised his head.
The marauder walked out of the house with the queasy deliberation of a drunk. One step, two step, three step. Then he tottered and fell.
Tom rose into a crouch with the zap gun ready. The marauder was obviously disabled but probably still dangerous. But Ben: where was Ben? A thread of blue smoke rose from the open doorway past the moth-cluttered light … Something bad had happened in there.
He chose a Douglas fir growing in the wild lot south of his property as good cover and began a spring back across the Post Road, still crouched, a posture he’d seen on TV: supposed to make him a smaller target though that didn’t seem likely under the circumstances. He had just cleared the gravel margin of the road and felt blacktop under the soles of his feet when the marauder began to move and Tom did a stupid thing in response: turned to watch. He didn’t stop ru
Even in the starlight, the dim glow of a streetlight down the Post Road, dear God, he thought, those eyes! Maybe not even the eyes, Tom thought, just some reflection or refraction in the goggles, the illusion of eyes, but he felt pi
The marauder raised his hand, a casual gesture.
Tom remembered his own weapon. He raised it, felt himself raising it, and it was like hoisting an anchor from the bottom of the sea, cranking it up through the weight of the water link by agonizing link. Why was everything so slow? He realized he’d never fired this device, not even once, as an experiment; that he had thumbed back the little switch marked Safety without being absolutely sure it was part of the weapon and not part of the toy. There were questions he had neglected to ask: questions about range, for instance; was the weapon effective from this distance?
But there was only time to commit an approximation of aim and pull the trigger. Showdown on the Post Road. Some part of him insisted that the whole thing was too ludicrous to take seriously. Only dreams were conducted like this.
He was hit before he could finish. His shot went wide.
The marauder’s shot had gone a little wide, too, a stitch of flame from Tom’s hip to his armpit and across the biceps of his left arm. There was no impact, only a sudden numbness and the alarming realization that his clothes were on fire. He fell down without meaning to. Rolled like a dog in the dirt at the verge of the Post Road until the flames were extinguished, though this provoked the first stab of a deep, paralyzing pain.
What kind of burns? First degree? Third degree? He looked down at himself. Under the ashen shirt was a peninsula of charred and blackened skin. He closed his eyes and decided he wouldn’t look at the wound again because the sight of that blistered flesh was too scary, not useful.
He felt a little drunk now, a little dizzy.
He hauled himself up with his good arm and looked for the marauder. The marauder had fallen down, too. Tom’s shot had missed but the encounter had slowed him. That’s why I’m here, Tom recalled. Slow him down so the machine bugs can work inside him. Maybe he was already dead.
It was a faint hope, extinguished at once.
The marauder stood up.