Island in the Sea of Time (17 page)

“Do you?” the man—Donald, Cofflin supposed—said thickly. “Do you understand this?”

Donald Mansfield,
he remembered.
Up on assault charges for attacking Angelica Brand a couple of weeks ago.
Sentenced to extra hard labor and reduced rations; his wife had left him shortly after that. Evidently he hadn’t been adjusting to the Event as well as she had. There was a fair amount of that. Men seemed to be slightly less psychologically flexible, on average.

All that took just long enough for the expression on Martha’s face to freeze and her eyes widen as they slid sideways toward the man with the gun. Cofflin’s hand dropped toward his, and found only an empty belt holding up a pair of blue jeans. George Swain was head of the police these days.
Maybe I should have kept the gun.
He began to surge forward, cursing the decades that had slowed him down.

The woman’s face had gone fluid with shock; her hands came up in a pushing gesture in front of her and she turned her head aside. That left it facing toward Cofflin. He could see the features twist, not so much with pain as incredulous shock as the bullets punched into her torso. Blood leaked from mouth and nose. She toppled backward and the man grabbed at her. He caught her with one arm around her body and staggered backward himself, to rest with his shoulders against the rear wall of the restaurant, sliding down to sit on the built-in couch. The dying woman slid across him, lying in his lap in a parody of affection. Somewhere in the room a scream tailed off into a choking, retching sound.
Ricochet,
Cofflin thought. No time to turn around and check who.

“You wouldn’t listen to me, Michelle,” the gunman crooned. “It’ll be better now. We’re together again. I’m sorry I had to hurt you. . . .”

The gun came up and trained on Cofflin. He stepped slightly sideways, putting himself between it and most of the people in the room; those to the side were moving away on their own.

Now, what do you say to someone who’s utterly, completely, incontestably bugfuck?
Cofflin thought.

“Mr. Mansfield, why don’t you put the gun down before anyone else gets hurt?” he said, his voice calm and controlled.
High pucker factor here.
“You can’t hold on to it forever.”

“Michelle will be with me forever!” he said. “You’ll never take her away from me!”

He was a little over twice arm’s length away. Cofflin was quite close enough to see his hand begin to clench on the gun, much too far to cover the distance needed to stop the 9mm bullet punching into him.

Whack.
Something struck the wall near Mansfield.
Whack.
This time it hit him in the body, bringing a grunt of surprise and pain. The gun roared, loud in the confined space of the restaurant, and the bullet went by with an ugly flat crack. Then they were swaying chest to chest, grappling. Even then Cofflin had time to notice the man’s sour stink. The frenzied wiry strength was inescapable, wrenching and twisting at his hand where it held the automatic by the slide and strove to force it upward. Then blackened fingernails clawed for his eyes. He ducked under them and jammed his head into the filthy cloth of Mansfield’s coat.
Can’t let go
. Too many people behind him,
Martha
behind him. He hooked an ankle behind the madman’s and pushed. They fell, toppling bruisingly through chairs and marble-topped tables and rolling about.

Whump.
This time the gun’s discharge was muffled by the press of their bodies. Cofflin felt hot gases burn his skin, and waited for the battering pain of ripped flesh. Nothing happened except a fresh set of stinks. The body locked against his began to thrash convulsively, and blood spurted into his face. He rolled free, spitting and wiping at his face, his hands coming away red as crimson gloves. One look told him that Mansfield was dying, his body jerking as he drowned in the blood pouring into his lungs. The messy, undignified process would be over in less than a minute. His wife—ex-wife—was already limp beside him, in the crimson pool that was spreading around them; Cofflin put fingers to her throat to check for a pulse, knowing it was futile. Blood was splashed everywhere, walls, the mirrored pillars, even droplets on the pressed steel flowers of the ceiling. More on Martha, where she stood with the teenager’s Y-fork slingshot in her hand. He moved toward her.

“None of it mine,” she said, in a voice like ash.

One of the teenagers lay at her feet, with his companion and another islander giving him first aid; from the way he clutched at his lower stomach, he’d need it to survive until the ambulance got here.
And there should be a helicopter to take him to a hospital on the mainland. This shouldn’t have happened at all.

He stooped to pick up the Glock, ejecting the magazine. Three cartridges left, out of twelve. “Damn,” he said hoarsely. “We’ve got to do something about this.”

The vehicle arrived, sirens wailing; someone must have heard the gunshots. The paramedics leaped into action, injecting a painkiller, cutting away cloth, and rigging a plasma drip. One swore softly as he exposed the wound in the youngster’s stomach. They moved the torso quickly, slapping a pressure bandage on the larger exit wound and lifting the victim onto the stretcher. Another was already calling instructions into her radiophone from behind the wheel of the ambulance.

Martha dropped the slingshot, shuddering. Cofflin slipped an arm around her. “You saved my life,” he said quietly.

“Had to,” she said. “Wasn’t anyone else. You saved us all. Take me out of here, please.”

He did.
We’ve got to do something about this,
he thought grimly. People were just too near the edge.
Get the guns and explosives under control for a while.

 

“Thought so,” Cofflin said to himself, as the phone in his jacket buzzed.

They were sitting side by side in the chair swing on the front porch, holding hands. The grin he’d been suppressing—he’d never live this down, and several people had passed by close enough to see him in the light of the whale-oil lanterns—slid away unnoticed. The expression left behind was one generations of Cofflins had shown to the sea in its wilder moods, or to a boatload of Papuans trying to storm a whaler cast aground in the South Seas. Charles I’s troops might have recognized it, coming at them behind a three-barred lobster-tail helmet at Marston Moor.

He pulled the phone out and listened. “Go ahead with it,” he replied briefly, then rose and tucked it away. He checked the action of his pistol and reholstered it.

“What’s wrong?” Martha said sharply.

“You weren’t wrong the other day, about Deubel,” Cofflin said shortly. “I couldn’t arrest him before he did anything . . . but that didn’t mean I couldn’t have him watched. Now he’s doing something. I’m a cop again, for a little while.”

“Setting fires?” she asked.

He looked at her sharply. “Deduction,” she replied. “The town was nearly wiped out by fires in the 1830s, and he knows it. And it’ll serve his crazy purpose if we’re just damaged enough to die off. The history he’s interested in protecting ends after 30 A.D., and he doesn’t care about what Europeans will find in the Americas.”

That is one hell of a woman,
he thought. The grin threatened to come back for a second.

“We do think alike, Martha,” he said. “Have to go. See you at the Council meeting tomorrow. Thanks for the dinner.”

 

The man fumbled with the oil-soaked rag. One match went out, then another. At last the cloth caught, flames running up it in sullen yellow and red. It dropped to the ground as the yard-long club made solid contact with the back of the arsonist’s head.

“That’s enough,” Cofflin said sharply, stamping on the torch. The flame sputtered alive again and again, until he kicked dirt over it.

The militiaman—volunteer police reserve sworn in last week, technically—was winding up, wild-eyed, ready for a solid blow that would have cracked the arsonist’s skull. The man on the ground was moaning and trying to crawl; abruptly he began to vomit. It wasn’t as easy to knock a man out as the movies could make you think, and when you did he didn’t wake up a little later as if he’d taken a nap. A member of the TV generation with no training or practical experience was all too likely to hammer a skull into mush and expect the recipient to get up and fight again like Jean Claude Van Whatsisname.

“Watch him,” he said. “The rest of you, follow me.”

The volunteers lined up with their shields and wooddowel clubs. No guns tonight, thank God. The island had turned out to have an appalling amount of firepower, but it was all safely under lock and key now. Cofflin led his party of volunteers up Main Street. A few of Deubel’s fanatics fled before them. None had had enough time to do much mischief, although he could hear the wail of the fire engine from the station off to his right rear. At the head of the street he met George Swain. He could barely recognize him in the gloom. Speaking of which . . .

He took out the phone. “Ready?”

“Ready.”

“Throw the switch.”

He squeezed his eyes to slits as the streetlights came on for the first time since the second night after the Event.
Amazing
how bright it looked, after a few weeks without electric light.

“Let’s get the rest of them rounded up,” he said. “Then we can figure out what the hell to do with them.”

The volunteers trotted down the street after him. He could hear the other squads, but such of his attention as could be spared was on the houses around him. Wood, mostly. They couldn’t keep the pumping system going all the time. The last time a real fire had broken loose here back in the nineteenth century, half the town had been leveled. If it happened now, there would be no aid from the mainland. His stomach clenched at what it would be like, trying to survive with most of the town in ashes.

The circle closed in on the little church. A few fights broke out, and ended with more stunned or weeping men and women sitting on the curbsides, handcuffed or hugging bruises. More and more ordinary townsfolk were following along behind, drawn by the noise and the appearance of the streetlights. Deubel’s congregation were hammering on the door and calling on their leader, but the door was locked against them, and the church’s windows showed empty and dark. A last surge of pushing and shoving, and the would-be aronists let themselves be led down between the ranks of club-bearing volunteers and regular police.

“You’re all under arrest, under the emergency powers invested in me by the Town Meeting,” Cofflin said harshly, when they’d been gathered together. “You’ll get a fair hearing. Now sit down and be quiet, will you?”

It was less formal than the pre-Event procedures, but it’d serve. “Hell of a thing, George,” he said. “Better than twenty of them.”

“Just glad you called it ahead of time, Chief,” the younger man replied.

“So am I—but this’s as far as I thought. Get the doorknocker, would you?” A piece of law enforcement equipment rarely used on the island before, but they did have one in stock.

It came up with four of his old officers staggering up the stairs under its weight, a steel forging with handles; shooting the lock out of a door was also something that looked a lot easier—and safer—in the movies. In real life the ricochets and flying metal made it a last resort.

“Pastor Deubel, please open this door. We don’t want to damage your church.” True in the literal sense; in the metaphorical, he wanted to get
rid
of Deubel’s church and congregation, and get the people in it acting sane again. “Pastor Deubel, this is your last warning.”

Cofflin sighed. It had been years since he had had to break down a door, and he’d never liked it. There ought to be a place where a man could go and lock the world away; on the other hand, people ought to be able to sleep secure in their beds without fear of a lunatic burning the roof over their heads.

Suddenly a sound cut through the murmur of voices and the distant wail of fire-truck sirens. A huge thudding
boom,
coming from the east, down toward the harbor. A cloud of smoke rose skyward, shot with sparks of firelight.

“Uh-oh,” Cofflin said. “That was—”

George Swain took the phone from his ear. “—the warehouse with the guns and stuff, Chief.”

Cofflin winced.
Maybe that wasn’t such a bright idea after all,
he thought. Then:
No, goddammit. Think what Deubel might have done with some firepower.

“Get some more volunteers down there,” he said. “All right, Ted, Caitlin, Matt, Henry. Go for it.”

He signed everyone else back from the steps and drew his pistol, holding it up in the two-handed grip that made it more difficult to grab. Only the second time he’d drawn iron as a policeman, other than to clean the piece.
Deubel’s crazy enough for anything.
Sometimes he wondered what God thought of the number of people who claimed to act in His name. What had that old book said?
A fanatic is someone who does what he knows God would do if only the Almighty knew the facts of the case.

Boom.
The police officers staggered back as the steel rebounded from the stout doors, but there had been splintering as well. Stronger than a house door—those gave in at once.
Boom.
This time the splintering was louder.
Boom.
The doors swung open, and the team staggered a few steps into the aisle, drawn by the momentum of their ram. It was nearly pitch-dark in there, only a few gleams from the streetlamp up the road penetrating. Cofflin unhitched the L-shaped flashlight from his waist and shone it within.

“Christ,” he whispered.

Deubel was there, all right—swinging from an iron light bracket, the cord that had once fed the light deep in his swollen neck. Matter dripped from his feet to the floor below, the usual release of bowels and bladder, and the stink was heavy inside the musty closeness of the church. He’d made a hash of hanging himself, too. Not enough drop, and his hands were still fastened to the cord where they’d scrabbled to stop his slow choking.