Stonewall Hinkleman and the Battle of Bull Run (16 page)

“No,” I groan. “Frankly, I'm having a sucky day and right now someone's shoving a bayonet in my stomach!”

“Who
are
you?” he roars.

“I'm from the future too. I'm not a real soldier, just a reenactor. Just like you. You don't have to kill me.”

Now his face is inches from mine. Sweat drips from his nose.

“But maybe I will,” he says. “You have no idea what I've done to get here.” He gives a little smile and pushes the bayonet in a little farther. Now I can feel the metal on my skin. It's more pressure than pain, but I can't breathe too deep or the point pricks my ribs.

“I came here to set things right, boy,” he whispers. “What about you?”

I snatch a quick breath. “No—I mean, yes!”

“You know who's up on that hill?”

I nod.

“You know what he's going to do? He's going to burn the whole Southland!”

I nod again.

“Davis was an idiot for letting them go. He doesn't know what's going to happen. But we do. Don't we, boy? Victory for the North. Reconstruction. The loss of our heritage. C'mon, we can go save it!”

“But—” I gasp.

“Listen, boy,” he says, and his face is almost purple. There's spit at the corners of his mouth and tears stream from his eyes. “Right here, right now, we
are
somebody! We have status! Authority! My great-grandfather is a state senator, for Christ's sake! He has a plantation not fifty miles from here and all of it—the land, the fortune, the
power
will one day be mine! Except he's going to lose it all by the end of this war. Our heritage gone. Leaving us whites as nothing more than slaves.”

“But what about the real slaves? What about their freedom?”

Dupree spits into the dirt. “Look at all the trouble they've caused. Integration. Affirmative action. Michael Jackson. Hip-hop music, for God's sake. I got a chance to erase all that. To make the South strong again. Imagine what I—no, what we could do here today. We can change the history books. And that would change the world.”

I don't say anything. I figure as long as he wants to talk, that's better than him impaling me.

“Say Sherman was to somehow die today and he never gets a chance to torch our land. Say we pick off a couple other big shots and they never get a chance to fight our boys. Say we take care of Lincoln too . . . the war is then ours, and the South is free.”

His eyes are wide now like he's the one in a trance. But slowly they narrow, and a smile cracks his face. “Who knows,” he says, “maybe a stray bullet also kills our fair President Davis. Then an aspiring politician full of ideas for the future could come along . . . why, he could end up president of the Confederacy. I . . . I mean, he . . . could do it right.”

His voice is a whisper now and he leans closer to me. “Think of all the battles that won't be fought. Think of all the men—from North and South alike—who don't need to die. The wives who will know their husbands, the children who will know their fathers. A few simple actions today will bring peace to this land. You can help me end this war.”

After seeing a real battle today, seeing men die all around me, peace sounds pretty good. It's hard to argue with peace. But, I tell myself, it won't be peace for everybody.

“But you could end up making it all worse,” I say. “You don't know—”

I gasp as the bayonet jabs deeper. I feel my shirt get clammy from my blood. “I'll take that chance,” Dupree snarls. He glances over his shoulder at the retreating Yankees. “Sherman's halfway back to Washington. I've wasted too much time on you, boy. If you aren't going to help me, I can't have you around to hurt me. Are you with me? Last chance?”

You know how it is when somebody makes you so mad that your brain shuts off and you try to do something brave and fearless and Bruce Willis-like but you actually just do something stupid?

I grab the bayonet and shove upward with everything I've got. It does catch him by surprise and he does stagger backward and I do have a chance to jump to my feet. But, duh, the bayonet slashes through my hands like a Ginsu knife. I see blood all over his bayonet, and my palms are just gushing. My right hand got it a lot worse somehow. I clamp them both together real tight, but that doesn't help at all and just makes it hurt worse.

I was going to say something like “No way, buttmunch,” but all I can do is squeak. So much for Bruce Willis.

“So I guess that was your answer, boy.” He moves in closer, with the bayonet pointing right in my face. And just above the bayonet, the gun's muzzle looks as big as a cannon. Farther up the barrel, I see his index finger wrapping around the trigger like a snake and starting to squeeze.

I close my eyes, brace for the shot. Suddenly out of nowhere comes a sound—
fffffffft!
Dupree screams and drops the rifle. I open my eyes. Dupree is on his knees, a knife embedded in his neck. Blood pulses down the blade.

I whirl around to see where it came from. And there is Cyrus, his other Joshua knife in his hand, his arm cocked and ready to throw again.

“Thus always to tyrants,” Cyrus says.

Shoot. That's the Bruce Willis line I was looking for.

Dupree grabs the knife's hilt and pulls the blade from his neck. Blood spurts out. Man, I thought my hands were gross. This is worse.

I stumble toward Cyrus.

“Cyrus, Cyrus, how—”

“Get down!” he yells. He jumps, grabs me, and we fall to the ground.

Dupree's musket explodes behind us. But I don't feel anything. I jump back to my feet.

But Cyrus doesn't get up. He doesn't move at all. He just lies there, facedown in the grass.

I reach down to grab him under the arm and help him up. This makes my hand go berserk with pain, but I only notice that for a second because that's when I see it. His pants and shirttail begin to turn a blackish red. Blood oozes up his white shirt.

Oh my God! He finally got that shot in the butt . . . while trying to save me.

I look up at Dupree. He's bleeding badly too. His left hand is clamped on his neck, trying to stop the blood. He falls over and lies still.

For a second we just all sit there bleeding. I'm having trouble thinking of what to do next. I'm going to have to do something about my hands, I know, because I'm getting dizzy and nauseous. But what exactly am I going to do?

“Stonewall!”

I look to the bridge and there is Ashby running to us. She runs straight toward me at first, but then she sees Dupree lying on the ground. She pauses and kneels down next to him. A couple of days ago, she probably would have panicked if she had seen her father with a wound like that. But after today, she knows what to do. She dumps out her nurse's bag and pulls several long strips from a big wad of vaguely clean linen.

“I've been so busy fighting him, I never even thought about him getting hurt,” she says as she wraps up the knife wound on his neck. It's really messy. “I need to get him out of here.”

For the first time she looks at me and at Cyrus.

She ties off her dad's bandage, checks out my hands, and starts wrapping them up. She looks over at Cyrus and grimaces.

“Did Dad do that? Jesus, I should just leave him here, but . . .”

“But you can't do that,” I finish. “You can get his gun now. Take him back, I bet.”

“You've got to come back too,” she says.

I pull out the bugle. Yes, it's warm to the touch. Ready to go. This must be my time juncture. Time to get the heck out of here at last.

“But I can't leave Cyrus like this.”

“Bring him too!” Ash says. “I mean, he'll die if you leave him here, so taking him to the future won't change history if that's what you're worried about. But we don't have time to worry about that now anyway. We gotta get them to a hospital.” As she's saying this, she goes back over to her father to get the little silver gun. The Weapon. The Tempest Device that will take her and her father back.

I look down at the bugle. The Instrument. Can it really get me out of here and save Cyrus?

No, I remember, it can't.

I pull out Tom's letter and the instructions. It feels like a month since I looked at them, but it was only this morning. And, yes, I did remember correctly:

The bugle and the gun can take me and Ash and Dupree back to our own proper times, but we'll vanish and Cyrus will be stuck here. Because those Tempests can't take him into his future. I can't decide if somebody made up these rules just to be a pain in my ass or if there's some real reason why people shouldn't go into the future.

Whatever. Like Ash said, there's no time to worry about this now. And there's no time to explain it all to her and to convince her to go without me.

“Yep, it looks like it's got one bullet left,” she says, messing with the gun. “You ready?”

“Yes,” I say, and I put the bugle to my lips.

But she grabs my arm for the second time today and pulls the bugle away. She leans forward and gives me a kiss—real quick, but a real kiss. Right on the lips.

“We did it, Stonewall,” she says, almost smiling. “I'll see you in a second.”

She puts her left hand on her father's shoulder and with the right she points the gun in the air.

“I hope this works,” she says, and squeezes the trigger.

“I HOPE it works too,” I say, dropping the bugle and turning back to Cyrus.

My mouth feels like it's on fire as I look at the spot where she and Dupree were just a second ago. My first kiss and I can't even savor it. I've got Cyrus to deal with.

Ash said he was going to die if he stayed here. Well, that's what was supposed to happen, I guess, in a footnote in a history book. But I don't care anymore about how things were
supposed
to be.

These Tempests are tools to let us change history, right? But the truth is that I've been running around all day nearly getting killed just to unchange history. That's good when it means keeping the South from winning the Civil War, but it stinks when it means killing Cyrus.

In the real history—before either me or Dupree did anything—Cyrus was supposed to get shot and die. But when we came back we changed the flow of the battle and Cyrus didn't die. Maybe it was when Dupree sent Cyrus charging for those Parrott guns. Or maybe it was when Cyrus saved me from that Yankee lunatic at the start of the battle. Or maybe it was something even smaller that just moved Cyrus an inch or two out of the way of the fatal bullet.

Whatever it was, Cyrus somehow was saved. He made it through that whole battle without getting shot in his backside.

And if I hadn't been running around trying to stop Dupree, Cyrus would be back there with his buddies smoking his pipe, celebrating victory, and yakking away in his crazy Shakespeare-talk.

Really, I wouldn't be here if Dupree wasn't here. So in a crazy way Dupree saved Cyrus even though Dupree was the one who pulled the trigger, and I was the one who got Cyrus killed. Without even meaning to, I made history turn out the way it was supposed to turn out—and Cyrus has to pay for that by a painful death from his infected wound.

That's how it's supposed to be.

Well, the way things are supposed to be sucks.

Cyrus was
supposed
to get shot in the butt and lay here a couple of hours, maybe, until someone finds him and brings him to some pathetic makeshift hospital. There he was going to be put in front of a doctor who has probably never treated a bullet wound before today. But today he's already treated a couple of hundred. The doctor won't know about bacteria or germs or all the other crap that can happen to you. He will simply wash off a scalpel in a bucket of water already contaminated with the blood of a dozen other soldiers. His hands are also bloodied from these other soldiers as he cuts a hole and digs around in the wound to remove the bullet. The doctor won't know to give medicine or antibiotics to Cyrus. Antibiotics won't be invented for sixty more years. All he'll do is wrap some nasty rags around Cyrus's wounds and send him on his way.

Any wonder Cyrus's wound gets infected and he dies?

All right, that's it. I've made a decision. I'm going to do something—something that's not supposed to happen. Something that's going to at least make things better for Cyrus.

I'm just not sure what.

Man, I've watched enough movies, I should be able to do something.

I pick up some of the linen strips that Ash dumped out. At least maybe I can wrap up Cyrus's wound.

But as soon as I put them over the wound, Cyrus suddenly gasps, tries to sit up, and collapses again.

“Oh God!” he cries out and tries to grab his backside. I grab his arm to stop him from sticking his hand in the wound.

“Stonewall, you didn't run off this time, huh?”

“No, I—”

“Could you shut up for a second and do something! I think my ass is on fire.”

“It's a bullet, Cyrus. Dupree, that crazy guy, shot you.”

“Where is he, I'd like a chance to throw my other knife at him,” says Cyrus, and for a second I see that crazy grin of his.

The grin is gone in a flash as another wave of pain shoots through his body.