The Golden Minute Read online

  He gestured with his chin, up the hill in front of them, and Cady realized the shouts were coming from there.

  Smith held a hand out for his pistol and she gladly returned it to him. He holstered the Colt and they advanced upslope, carefully, in a crouch. The swish of wet grass, the occasional cracking of a twig, her breathing, it all sounded impossibly loud. She was reminded of their arrival with Georgia in the meadowlands outside the gladiator school. That had not gone well at all.

  Approaching the crest, Smith gestured with his hand, patting the air beside him. He lowered himself to the damp ground and Cady followed, grimacing at getting wet and dirty before they’d even been in the past for a minute.

  The past was almost always wet and dirty.

  It had rained, or maybe even sleeted here recently, she thought, and cold moisture began to soak through her jeans as Smith snaked forward to the ridge line. Cady tried to follow, imitating his actions, recalling the stealth mode animations from her favorite Hitman and Splinter Cell levels. But the ground cover kept snagging on her clothes and backpack, holding her up, while Smith seemed to glide forward on an air mat. He paused short of the top and waited for her.

  “Ease off that pack,” he mouthed, barely audible.

  Cady did as he told her. It was easier to fix on the direction of the shouting up here. Individual voices floated up to her.

  “Confess!”

  “Confess your sin!”

  Smith pointed to Cady, and then to the ground where she lay.

  Stay put.

  He jerked a thumb at his chest then made a crawling gesture with the same hand. Before she could object, he’d dropped his own pack and moved on, snaking up the last ten feet of elevation with improbable speed and silence for a man of his size.

  Cady tried to do as Smith had said, but the increasing volume and tenor of the uproar drew her forward. Unlike him, she had no long-range weapons. She’d thought about packing a taser, but had settled for her trusty can of mace.

  She did have some really bitchin’ binoculars, though. And it looked like Smith was going to try to get away with using his old fold-out telescope, which was a piece of crap when he’d bought it back in 1873. He wasn’t even using the modern rifle scope—with night vision!—she’d bought for him.

  Cady narrowed her eyes.

  In fact, she wasn’t even sure he’d packed that Gen3+ night vision scope.

  That was all the reason she needed.

  Her binoculars, a compact pair of waterproof Bushnells, were easily accessible in one of the front pockets of her pack, along with a bar of emergency chocolate which Cady also took out because, with all the shouting and guns and binoculars and shit, she was pretty sure they’d smashed the KPIs for a genuine emergency situation.

  She ignored the cold dampness creeping into her clothing, and tapped Smith lightly on his boot, which was thankfully free of cow poop. She’d seen that in a movie once. You tap the guy’s shoe as you’re coming up behind him to let him know you’re on the way.

  “What?” Smith muttered. “Is there something on my boot? Snake or something?”

  “No,” Cady whispered. “I’m just letting you know I’m coming up behind you.”

  “Oh, don’t worry, I already figured on that just as soon as I heard you rummagin’ around in your possibles bag like a small tornado throwin’ a party inside a barn full of cowbells.”

  Cady bristled at the rebuke but handed him the binoculars anyway.

  “You forgot these.”

  “No I didn’t,” Smith replied and raised the antique folding telescope to his eye.

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” Cady whispered.

  “Stop whisperin’,” Smith said. “And cussin’.” His voice was low and quiet but pitched directly at her in such a way that she could easily make out every word. “All the hissin’ and breathy dramatics don’t help none. It’s a consarn certain way of drawin’ attention. And you don’t want none of this attention. Look.”

  Blushing, and not a little hurt, Cady raised the binoculars to her eyes, trying to take some satisfaction in knowing that her view would be far superior to Smith’s.

  She dropped the binoculars from her eyes immediately.

  “What the fuck did I just see?”

  Smith was still scoping out the scene with his ancient folding telescope.

  “Don’t rightly know,” he said, never looking away from the scene. “But it looks… official. There’s a feller down there; I’ll lay money on the barrelhead that he’s some sort of sheriff. And a couple of justices, all dressed in black and wigged up from court it looks like. They got books and paper and such with them. Go on, now. You insisted on comin’ up here. Best apply your thinkin’ apparatus to what occasions all that hollerin’ and carry on.”

  Cady took in the widescreen view first.

  They were nowhere near old Boston, not as Smith had described it, but they had landed on the outskirts of a small seaside village. From the elevated position atop a hill, they commanded a view for many miles about. The ocean, the Atlantic she supposed, lay gray and brooding far away to the east. It reached inland through the dark waters of an inlet that raked at the edge of the land like an unfurled claw, with three long talons sunk deeply into the coastal plain. The rude, wooden huts of a fishing village, or something like it, clustered around the southernmost talon. Storm cells, huge, mute and unreadable, floated over the sea, blurring the ocean beneath them to a gray haze, and over the land, turning huge swathes of forest and pasture into green-brown smears.

  The handful of people in this vast panorama looked minuscule and immaterial.

  Cady raised the binoculars to her eyes again.

  And one of those people was naked.

  She gritted her teeth against the sight of the old man, white haired and spindle-limbed. Her binoculars were excellent—thanks geekprepper.org—and she could not wish away the vision of the old man’s dangly bits now burned into her retinas. That wasn’t the worst of it, though.

  A big man in a waistcoat, armed with a cudgel, directed two others to tie up the old wrinkly and lower him into a pit. As Cady watched and the crowd of thirty or forty onlookers shouted and jeered, the man in the waistcoat, Smith’s pick for the sheriff she’d bet, ordered his deputies to lower a thick plank of wood onto the old man. It looked big enough to have been a door.

  “What the…” Cady breathed.

  “Yep. Watch them big rocks they got piled up.”

  She did.

  The sheriff ordered his men to carry one of the rocks—it looked to be about as big as an old-school ghetto blaster—and to lower it onto the board. A deep lowing moan rose up from the onlookers. It drifted away on wet scraps of wind.

  They all waited. The crowd. The sheriff. The judges in their black robes and Tom Turkey hats. How long were they gonna leave that poor old bastard stuck under there? Cady wondered. And why even do it? Was this some sort of olden days Jackass stunt?

  They answered her by lowering another large, heavy rock onto him. Shouts and demands to repent and confess rolled upslope toward them.

  “Jesus, Smith, what are they doing?”

  “I would not hazard more than a plug nickel on the wager,” Smith answered quietly, “but I do believe that to be an old form of judicial punishment known as pressing.”

  “What the hell is that?” she asked, and instantly dropped her head, because she’d forgotten all her stealth technique and blurted the question out loudly.

  Smith did not move at all.

  Lying beside him, it felt as though he’d looked upon Medusa and been turned to stone. He did not move again until Cady’s heartbeat had enough time to slow down just a little.

  “S’okay,” Smith said. “Nobody heard you. I read a few words about it once. When I was applyin’ to become a deputy US Marshal. Judge Stoner had us read all manner of crazy books afore he’d swear us in. The Lives of the Martyrs was one. I think I read it in there.”

  Cady swept the binoculars over the crowd, rat
her than focusing on the ugly old naked guy slowly being crushed to death. The women wore long, plain dresses and covered their heads with shawls and simple bonnets. The men seemed to shake out into three or four groups. Laborers in from the fields, a better-dressed class of merchants or professional types, and those two judges who looked like they were cosplaying the Inquisition.

  The groundwater had leeched right through her jeans, chilling Cady to the point of shivering when Smith laid a hand on her arm.

  The deputies were about to lay another boulder on the old guy.

  “Best we be gettin’ gone,” he said quietly. “I think I know where we are. Tain’t far from old Boston. We need to be ready to go again in a day’s time, and we don’t want to be doin’ that from here. It’s a good fifteen mile or so as the crow flies to our next departure. We jump from here we could end up at the South Pole.”

  “So where are we?” Cady asked.

  Smith seemed to ponder the question, not so much looking for an answer, but wondering whether he should share it with her.

  “Salem,” he said at last. “Massachusetts.”

  “Salem?” Cady whispered urgently. “Like witch hunts and shit?” She glanced back at the scene below. The judges who were supervising the crushing of the old man now looked like they were praying over him; praying for more crushing, because another big ass rock was on its way.

  “Alrighty then,” Cady said. “Let’s bounce.”

  The musket ball plowed up the soft earth between them a split second before the crack of the shot reached her ears.

  3

  Smith fired three rounds from his Winchester before Cady had a chance to react at all. She stared at a fresh furrow, gouged out of the rich brown earth between them, imagining the same raw, steaming trench raked out of her body.

  “Move,” Smith yelled, giving her a shove as another shot punched into the ground a few inches away. The world which had presented itself as a vast widescreen display just moments before, now contracted to a small, distorted circle of light at the foot of the hill. A group of men hesitated there, clustered around the bodies of two fallen comrades.

  Smith shot the legs out from under one of them while they wavered. Cady heard the man’s scream as something far away and tinny, like an AM radio show, drifting back to her from across the centuries by some mad quirk of atmospherics. Her own legs refused to cooperate when she tried to stand up. For a terrifying moment she imagined she’d been shot, but Smith gave her another shove and she recovered her gross motor skills.

  Emphasis on gross.

  Her limbs felt numb and clumsy as she teetered away from the ridge line. Hands that had mysteriously fallen asleep fumbled and dropped her binoculars. She stopped and turned in slow motion to pick them up. Her pack—When had she picked that up again? Had she ever dropped it?—her pack slid off one shoulder and dangled awkwardly from the other strap as she stood staring at the ground, looking for the binoculars.

  The Winchester roared twice and then she heard the flat, cracking report of Smith’s pistol.

  Cady wondered if that crowd of colonial re-enactors would stop crushing the shit out of that old guy to grab their pitchforks and burning branches and come chasing after her. There would surely be burning branches.

  She felt herself lifted up into the sky and sort of lost track of what was happening. The small but angry group of men who’d been firing old timey muskets at them seemed to be nowhere she could see. The big angry mob she’d been spying on with her binoculars—She had to get her binoculars!—were streaming away from the pit where they’d been crushing the old man. They were running across the fields and up the hill.

  Towards her.

  And Smith.

  Smith wasn’t shooting anymore. He was just running. And carrying her. Cady lay across his massive shoulders, bouncing up and down as he sprinted along the line of the hill crest, making for the edge of the woods she could see ahead of them.

  Reality came back in a rush. The slo-mo tunnel vision through which she’d been watching everything happen to her suddenly expanded outward to let the whole world pour back. She saw her backpack, lying on the grass, receding as Smith charged away. She saw a group of four men who looked like hunters gathering themselves and coming after their quarry with muskets and long knives. The muskets erupted in sparks and dirty gray billows of smoke, obscuring the men for a few seconds. She glimpsed a dozen or more men, including the sheriff and his deputies, closing from the east.

  “I’m fine!” she cried out. “Put me down, Smith, I can run!”

  He lowered her in one smooth movement, never breaking stride.

  “Make for the tree line,” he said. “We get in there and I can hold them off. Out here in the open, we’re done for.”

  Cady hit the ground running, fighting the urge to glance back over her shoulder to where her precious backpack and all of its carefully chosen time traveler survival swag lay waiting to be scooped up by a bunch of yahoos barely out of the Dark Ages. Smith still had all of his gear, including the spare tent she’d insisted they bring. Cady put her head into the wind and sucked one deep draft of breath after another into her lungs. She’d traded a lot of fitness for productivity back up in the Twenty-First, where she’d spent most of the past four months on a coding crunch to finish her game.

  But she had to be fitter than these guys, right?

  They’d never seen a fucking StairMaster between them.

  Smith gave her a little shove in the back to hurry her on.

  His breathing was deep but regular and apparently untroubled by the explosive exertions of the last minute.

  “You think you can make this jump?” he shouted.

  Cady realized with a small surge of horror that they were running directly at a wooden fence. Three rails high, it would come up to her chest at the very least. Smith was sprinting at the thing as though he intended to smash through it like an enraged bull.

  “Sure,” she gasped.

  The big cowboy accelerated away from her. He timed his final steps before reaching the obstacle to put him in just the right position to vault over the top rail with his hand resting ever so lightly for balance on the gray, roughhewn hardwood. For the longest time his body seemed to hang in the air, perfectly parallel with the fence, muddied boots flying over the top with an easy clearance of a foot or more.

  He swung down on the other side with a thump, and his eyes widened noticeably as he took in their predicament and, Cady assumed, the growing number of people pursuing them. She also decided there was no way she was going over that fence. It was just too high for her to rely on the three weeks of basic gymnastics she’d done in junior high. Instead, she dived at the gap between the bottom and the center rail, praying she didn’t crack her skull open, or smash up a shoulder or collarbone by misjudging the leap.

  As she launched herself into the dive, she watched Smith in a curiously suspended instant of time. Slowly, carefully, reloading his pistol from the bullet belt on his hip. He would slot one or two rounds in, take aim and fire. Then repeat the process.

  All of this Cady took in over the space of two racing heartbeats.

  Then she was airborne, slipping through the gap between the middle and topmost rail, having decided for no rational reason to switch her trajectory at the very last moment. She didn’t question her preconscious mind making the change. She just went with it, holding her breath, fighting hard not to close her eyes in fear as the heavy, iron gray lengths of hardwood raced towards her.

  She threaded through the gap without touching a splinter.

  And landed like a sack of shit on the far side, driving the breath from her lungs and opening a dwarf galaxy of stars inside her head when she thumped down on the soft earth.

  “Oof!”

  “GET THE OTHER WATCH,” Smith roared.

  Half-insensate with shock or concussion, she stared at him dumbly.

  * * *

  “The watch, Cady, the other watch,” Smith yelled at her before snapping off
two more shots from his Colt. She heard a strangled scream and the muffled thump of a body tumbling to the ground very close by. But the crack of the gunshots jolted her out of the fugue state she’d knocked herself into and she fumbled for the second watch, the one they’d taken from Chumley before he died. She couldn’t use Mister Wu’s watch until it recharged again. Twenty-four hours from now.

  Chumley’s was a different model from the piece Smith had been given by the old Chinese man back in his own time. The two crowns and the minute hand were the most obvious points of difference, but Cady knew there had to be even more to the timepiece than those simple hardware changes. Chumley was an Apprentice and he had stepped in and out of the years with the same sort of ease that Smith might pass through the swinging doors of a saloon.

  Cady’s hands were shaking. The closest of their pursuers were only a long stone’s throw away now, and Smith was more carefully loading, aiming and firing for effect.

  The effect was chilling.

  He had felled the bodies of dead men like sheaves of wheat all along the line of their retreat from the hilltop. Nobody was shooting at them now. Smith had killed anybody with a musket, and anybody foolish enough to try to retrieve one from the bodies of fallen.

  She had no idea what would happen when she pressed the crown on this watch. Would it even work? Would they jump forwards or back if it did? And to where and when? Presumably somewhere within the long arc of Chumley’s journey; although of course he had been tracking them. Perhaps, Cady thought with an absurd and sudden hope, she might end up back in Seattle, with Georgia, and her parents, and her number one game on the app store and all of those millions of Apple bucks due to drop into her account.

  “Best you get a mosey on, Cady,” Smith said, and the fact that he did so without shouting, without urgency, almost as an afterthought to the methodical business of loading and firing, freaked her the hell out. She looked up.