Time Storm

21

The world came back to me, little by little. I was conscious of a warm wind blowing across me. I could feel it on my face and hands; I could feel it tugging at my clothes. It was stiff, but no hurricane. I opened my eyes and saw streamers of cloud torn to bits scudding across the canvas of a blue sky, moving visibly as I watched. I felt the hard and pebbled ground under my body and head; and a pressure, like a weight, on the upper part of my right thigh.

I sat up. I was alive—and unhurt. Before me, out beyond the cliff-edge where the experimentals had appeared, there was no more mistwall—only sky and distant, very distant landscape. I looked down and saw the four black bodies on the ground, strung out almost in a line. None of them moved; and when I looked closer I saw clearly how badly they had been torn by teeth and claws. I looked further down, yet, at the weight on my thigh, and saw Sunday.

He lay with his head stretched forward to rest on my leg, and one of the leaf-shaped knives was stuck, half-buried in the big muscle behind his left shoulder. Behind him, there was perhaps fifteen feet of bloody trail where he had half-crawled, half-dragged himself to me. His jaws were partly open, the teeth and gums red-stained with blood that was not his own. His eyes were closed. The lids did not stir, nor his jaws move. He lay still.

“Sunday?” I said. But he was not there to hear me.

There was nothing I could do. I picked up his torn head, somehow, in my arms and held it to me. There was just nothing I could do. I closed my own eyes and sat there holding him for quite a while. Finally, there were sounds around me; I opened my eyes again and looked up to see that the others, released now that the gestalt was ended, had come out of the roundhouse and were standing around looking at the new world. Marie was standing over me.

Tek and Ellen were off by themselves some thirty yards from the roundhouse. He had turned the jeep around and evidently pulled it off a short distance in a start back down the side of the peak. But for some reason he had stopped again and was now getting back out of the driver’s seat, holding one of the rifles, probably the one I had thrown into the roundhouse, tucked loosely in the crook of his right elbow, barrel down. Ellen was already out of the jeep and standing facing him a few steps off.

“You go,” she was saying to him. “I can’t now. He doesn’t even have Sunday now.”

I remembered how much Sunday had meant to her in those first days after I had found her. And how he had put up with her more than I ever would have expected. But she had always been fond of him. And I—I had taken him for granted. Because he was mad. Crazy, crazy, insane cat. But what difference does it make why the love’s there, as long as it is? Only I’d never known how much of my own heart I’d given back to him until this day and hour.

Ellen was walking away from Tek and the jeep now.

“Come back,” Tek said to her.

She did not answer. She walked past me and into the roundhouse through the door that was once more propped open. In the relative shadow of the artificially lit interior, she seemed to vanish.

Tek’s face twisted and went savage.

“Don’t try anything,” said Bill’s voice, tightly.

I looked to the other side of me and saw him there. He was pale-faced, but steady, holding one of the shotguns. The range was a little long for accuracy with a shotgun; but Bill held it purposefully.

“Get out if you want,” he told Tek. “But don’t try anything.”

Tek seemed to sag all over. His shoulders drooped; the rifle barrel sagged downward. All the savageness leaked out of him, leaving him looking defenseless.

“All right,” he said, in an empty voice.

He started to turn away toward the jeep. Bill sighed and let the shotgun drop butt-downward to the earth; so that he held it, almost leaning on the barrel of it, wearily. Tek turned back, suddenly, the rifle barrel coming up to point at me.

Bill snatched up the shotgun, too slowly. But in the same second, there was the yammer of the machine pistol from inside the roundhouse, and Ellen walked out again holding the weapon and firing as she advanced. Tek, flung backward by the impact of the slugs, bounced off the side of the jeep and slid to the ground, the rifle tumbling from his hands.

Ellen walked a good dozen steps beyond me. But then she slowed and stopped. Tek was plainly dead. She dropped the machine pistol as if her hands had forgotten they held it; and she turned to come back to me.

Marie had been standing unmoving, close to me all this time. But when Ellen was only a step or two away, Marie moved back and away out of my line of vision. Ellen knelt beside me and put her arms around both me and the silent head I was still holding.

“It’ll be all right,” she said. “It’s all going to be all right. You wait and see.”