Thirty-two
Evie grieved in her tiny stainless-steel room. A
part of her refused to believe it was possible, that the entire house
above them was gone. Maybe somewhere in the wreckage she could salvage
something of her wardrobe. The dressers, after all, had been made of
solid oak. Although the explosion had been deafening and she had been
left with a ringing in her ears and superficial skin burns, the equivalent
of a bad sunburn, it was hard to believe it had been blown entirely away.
Corin showed her. He invited her to go along to
check on the extent of the damage topside. Evie went along despite her
paranoid suspicion that Corin himself was somehow responsible for what had
happened. The idea of a mysterious adversary struck her as far-fetched.
They exited through a tunnel that emerged halfway down the back slope of
the hill.
Evie paused in the open air. It was a warm afternoon
with the sun low on one horizon and a few stars already shining through
the purple twilight. She saw in an instant what she had not wanted to
believe. The ground at her feet should have been covered in a tangle of
weeds and dense stands of saplings. She turned slowly, apprehensively,
looking over her shoulder and upward to the summit of the hill upon which
stood the three-story house and several large trees.
They were gone. Charred vegetation, ash and
unidentifiable debris the consistency of fine gravel covered the ground.
The crest of the hill was otherwise a smooth arc silhouetted against the
dying light of the evening sky.
“How?” she said, her voice hardly more than a whisper
in the silence.
“My adversary has borrowed his tools from decades
that lie, from your perspective, in your future.”
Evie turned away and retreated to her Spartan bedroom
in the bunker, her eyes dry, her thoughts numbed to a kind of peace born
of total defeat. Later in the evening, her bedroom door opened. Billy’s
wheelchair cast a shadow from the lights in the hall. The chair’s motor
hummed in the darkness.
Only Billy would bother with the wheelchair. He
parked alongside the bed. “Evie, can I talk to you?”
She lay flat on her stomach facing away from the
door. She sat up and crossed her legs.
“Has Corin told you how he feels about you?”
“He’s not trying to take me away from you, Billy.”
“Maybe he won’t have to try. Maybe it’ll just
happen.”
She shook her head. “He’s too much for me. He’s too
much for both of us.”
Billy pulled himself onto the mattress. He gathered
her into his arms and Evie sobbed shamelessly against his chest for a
time, but she felt his own hot tears on the back of her neck as well.
Through it all, Billy remained rigid and silent.
“Are you okay?” she said, hoping he could hold his
own against Corin and the terrible consequences of his intervention.
“No,” he said, his voice muffled in her hair. “But
at least I know why he’s here now. There’s someone else in Silver Ridge
just like him.”
“Someone else from the future? In Silver Ridge?”
“The adversary,” Billy said. “Corin never told me
why he was here, except that the world was in terrible danger. I had no
idea it would come to this.”
She held him protectively, but without any inkling of
what it was like to share one’s mind and body with another person. Except
that Corin claimed not to be another person entirely.
“He says you and me met in Silver Ridge three hundred
years ago,” Billy said. “That’s from his perspective. He. . . I took you
to Boston and married you and we died three days apart at the age of
eighty-two. We had great grandchildren. And even then we went on
together in some kind of afterlife environment that he no longer
remembers, except that we were separated there and shared no other lives
beyond this one.”
“Do you believe him?”
“No. I know he isn’t lying. It isn’t that I don’t
believe him. I just can’t.”
“I know. It sounds like something from a story
book. What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“But he says we have to defeat the adversary!”
Billy shrugged. “I don’t see how much good we can
be.”
Evie decided that now was a good time to broach the
subject. “How is it possible that Corin can walk and you can’t?”
“Hysterical paralysis, it’s called. I never believed
it for a moment. I guess I have no choice now. Corin’s always
psychoanalyzing me. I think even he knows that it doesn’t do any good.
I’m sure there are reasons, but it doesn’t seem to help knowing what they
are.”
“Do you trust him?”
Billy thought about it and nodded with a heavy sigh.
“I didn’t before. I do now. If crossing swords with this adversary of
his is a good guy/bad guy sort of thing, he’s not the bad guy. Sometimes
I wonder why he doesn’t just take over entirely until it’s over.
Sometimes I wish he would. I can’t imagine why I’m important to him. I’m
afraid that you’re everything he came for.”
“Because of you and me,” she said. “Because our
future lives together have been threatened.”
Billy frowned and nodded. “I can’t keep it straight
in my head.”
“I can,” Evie said. “I’m not having a problem with
that part of it.”
He nodded and lay at her side. “Good. I guess
that’s what I wanted to hear.”
She held him until he drifted to sleep. In time, she
lay at his side.
Waiting.
The shifting of her bed awoke her. She opened her
eyes in time to see him slipping out the door of her room.
He left his wheelchair at her bedside. He paused
before leaving.
“Evie?”
She tried to sound nonchalant. “Yes, Corin?”
“I need your help. I want a look inside the
die-casting plant where your brothers worked. I have to find out why the
adversary is here and what his intentions are.”
“Can’t you use the little machines?”
“We will use our mechanical allies, but I want to be
seen, and I will be more easily identifiable if you are seen with me.”
“I don’t understand.”
“My adversary may think he killed me. I want him to
know that he failed. A face to face challenge of resolve is the only way
we have to stop him.”
“Resolve. That’s a funny word.”
“Think of it as a test of courage.”
Evie’s heart fluttered in her chest. She had been a
victim and a witness to domestic violence for as far back as she could
remember. She didn’t want to see more fighting. She had never imagined
conflict of this magnitude.
“Billy can’t do it without you, Evie.”
“I don’t understand how you think we can help.”
“You must first understand the adversary.”
He left her alone to think. If nothing else, he had
piqued her curiosity. After a time, she got up and went in search of him.
