The Company of the Dead (23 page)

“What happened then?” I asked.

Gershon was pale. He had the two gowns bundled around him and was lying down. I’d elevated his legs on a mound of sand.

“The screen went black for a moment. I felt this weird rocking sensation, so I climbed into one of the chairs next to yours. A message flashed on the HUD, and there was this sound, like an eggshell cracking, but loud. The hammering stopped. I looked out the viewscreen and saw Jenkins’ men, caught in freeze-frame.” He seemed to be looking past me as he recalled the events. “That silence was so total, so complete. It was as if I’d gone deaf. It’s...” He was shaking his head, confounded.

“I’m not sure how much time passed. That rocking sensation returned a couple of times and that cracking, two, maybe three times. Like we were passing through a series of barriers. Barriers that should never be crossed, yet the machine went through them like tissue paper. That was when I realized I’d been hit. You were out but you were breathing. The red disk on your armrest was glowing. On the screen there was a new message: “COMPLETE INSERTION IN PROGRESS: STAGING COMPLETE: QUERY ABORT?” There was that rocking feeling again and suddenly a new image appeared on the screen.”

He leaned his head forwards. He was unable to move his arm. “And this is what I saw. All of this.”

A thought struck me. “Where’s the carapace now?”

He said that as soon as the carapace had settled, a new series of messages rapidly scrolled up the screen. One message repeated itself, to the accompaniment of a faint beeping noise: “AUTO-RECALL IMMINENT: STAGING CONFIRMED: QUERY ABORT?”

Gershon told me a countdown began flashing along the HUD. He pushed the lever forwards to its original position and the plastic sheaths slipped back over the disks. He dragged me from my seat, opened the hatch and pushed me out into the desert. When we were about ten feet from the vehicle, he turned to look back at it.

“It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.” His eyes blazed momentarily with the fervor of an ecstatic.

“When I was learning my bar mitzvah they had this book there, a kid’s version of the Bible. There was this picture of Abraham on the cover and...” He smiled. “Anyway,
Exodus
was my favorite. Plagues, rivers of blood, the departure from Egypt. There was this bit about how they followed a pillar of fire by night and a pillar of cloud by day, through the desert. That’s what it looked like.”

“Which one?”

“Both. The body of the carapace was barely visible, but I couldn’t make out the legs. It seemed to just float on this cushion of fire and cloud. The air crackled and that portal I’d dragged you out of, it blinked at me once, like God’s great eye, and the carapace sank into the cloud.

“All at once there was a tremendous rush of wind, and the whole thing, the clouds, the flame, all seemed to fall in on itself. It was like watching an explosion played backwards. And then it vanished.”

I felt a sudden surge of new panic.

“How long have we been here? Aren’t they going to come after us?”

“Relax.” Gershon coughed. “No one’s coming after us. If they had any means of following us, they would have been here by now. Hell, they would have been waiting for us.”

Gershon said again that the base wouldn’t be built for forty years. He knew that because a digital readout had displayed the date: March 10, 1911.

We had been here, in 1911, for about two hours already. I had been unconscious for little over an hour.

Gershon believed that, somehow, our very presence in this time negated the possibility of pursuit. Perhaps the future was already being altered in some way. The flutter that had been created by our arrival evolving into a hurricane of change over the years.

We remained undisturbed that night and nothing has happened since then to suggest that we were ever followed. Perhaps it is something I have already done, or something I am going to do. I plan on keeping my eyes open.

I wonder what I’m going to do.

What do I ever do?

Gershon was dying. Shutting down. His hands were cold and pale. His pulse, thready beneath my fingertips.

I got up to stretch my legs and followed the trail that marked where I’d been dragged from the carapace. It led to a flat, hard-packed layer of ground. Starlight reflected dimly from thin patches of glass that had been burnt into the sand by the vehicle’s passage. Shards of frozen time.

Lying on its side was a pack of some sort. Gershon hadn’t mentioned it. I rushed to it, hoping it might contain some medical supplies. Something I could use to help him. I spilled its contents onto the ground. There was a torch, a knife, a compass, chocolate, a ground sheet, a packet of cigarettes, and a pair of binoculars. Within the pack’s lining was a thick belt with numerous pockets, each of which held a slender, malformed ingot of solid gold. I replaced the bag’s contents and walked back over to Gershon.

“Good, you found it.” He gave a weak laugh. “Wouldn’t you know it, I grabbed the wrong pack. Medical supplies went back with the carapace, I guess.”

“Tell me, how the hell did you manage to avoid the gas?”

He looked at me, sighed, then grinned. “You know that swimming pool near the rec room?”

I nodded.

“I used to dive in that pool and sink to the bottom. Pretend I was anywhere but here, and see how long I could hold my breath. My record was three minutes.”

He was slipping in and out of consciousness. We lay close together and I did my best to keep the both of us warm. Whenever he woke, he wanted to talk. He talked about women. He talked about God.

“What happens now?” he asked at one point. “Have we put God on rewind? Taken him back eighty years? Sent him spinning? Was He expecting this? Is it part of the Grand Plan?”

I asked if he was religious. His pale, drawn face locked in a grimace.

He talked about the people who’d lived here and passed on. The Shoshone and the Paiute, the Bannock and the Washoe. He talked about the ocean, about how much he missed the open water. He asked me what I was going to do. Where I was planning on going. As if we were just separating for a while.

I was already surveying the packed sands for a place to bury him.

“I’d be heading to New York,” he said.

“Why New York?”

“Why not?” He smiled as if he’d made a wonderful joke. “Do me a favor, Jon. Next time you see the open sea, wade on in a few steps and spare me a thought.”

He seemed so calm and serene and I asked him that most meaningless of questions.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m okay.” And then, somehow reading my thoughts, he added, “I’m not scared.

“When you had Jenkins by the balls and those goons had lowered their guns, I thought I had a chance of surviving and I was as scared as I have ever been.” He shrugged. “Now I know I’m going to die.”

I told him how sorry I was and he shrugged it off.

“Hell,” he replied, “I was dead these last ten years. Just didn’t know it.”

June 18, 1911

It was deathly cold that night. The sweat froze on my back as I dug his grave. I don’t plan on being that cold again.

I’ve resolved to head north. Back to New York. Back to my home and Gershon’s destination. I’ll go to Coney Island and wade on in. Sparing him a thought won’t be an issue. I’m hoping it might make it a little easier for me to think less often of him, actually.

It’s easier to recall things now: dates and times and facts I’d read in that world I’ve left behind. I plan on putting the knowledge to good use, a little bit at a time.

There’s an archduke in Europe who could do with living beyond 1914, and an Austrian painter with nasty ideas who could do with a more valid, if brief, reason for hating Jews. I’ll be dealing with him shortly.

There’s no rush.

Jenkins showed me what I’m capable of. There are investments to be made and interventions to consider.

But first I have a boat to catch. “Change or die” is my new creed. “What if” becomes “why not”, and everything old is new again.

Morgan spied their car a block down from the bar. A Yamamoto Kobe had procured for them earlier in the week. The plates identified it as a medical officer’s transport—ideal for parking, unlikely to be pulled over for a random search. There were two suitcases in the boot. Shine had packed light. He’d also found time to go clean out Lightholler’s suite. Everything they needed was crammed into the back.

Morgan climbed in, squeezing his legs beneath the dash. The car’s narrow confines made him feel oafish. He leaned back in his seat and waited. Kennedy had said that the flight wouldn’t be leaving for another few hours.

Something had gone seriously wrong. Morgan was certain of it. Why else would the major have started Lightholler’s re-education so prematurely? The arrangement had been to take him south first. Tell him what they knew a little at a time and then finish the job in Nevada. That was the way they’d recruited Doc.

That was the way they’d recruited him.

He let his mind replay those events. The things he’d said, the things he should have said. But he couldn’t dwell on it for long—not if he wanted to retain any vestige of his sanity. He found it easier to dwell on his companions.

He thought about Shine and wondered how the role of lackey sat with him. Kennedy had needed someone undercover in the Waldorf, and where else was a negro going to hide in New York City, much less the Union?

The reservations were all in the Midwest and they were full. The only negroes permitted in the North were in major cities, and they had to be registered in the employ of a landowner or some company. Ironically, things weren’t as bad in the South. You could be self-employed if you were black, perhaps even run your own business, thanks to the major. But the best prospects, for both negroes and indians, remained in the army.

Shine’s father had served in Kennedy’s unit. Had fought with him at the Battle of San Juan. He was among the soldiers Kennedy had petitioned to receive land rights after the last Ranger War. Soldiers who’d sworn to follow Kennedy into hell itself, and then did so at Mazatlan.

Land rights for the disenfranchised. There was a precedent for Kennedy’s actions, but you had to look back. To Rome. To Marius, Sulla and, of course, Julius Caesar. Men who had inspired armies to follow them rather than the state. Men who had brought down a republic.

Hot on the heels of his military victories and backed by the fervent support of key public figures, Kennedy’s proposals had been tolerated as one would endure the wishes of a favoured child. Once he ran for public office, however, turning his own indulgences into party politics, he encountered an immovable wall of resistance. Suggestions of a secret agenda. That he wanted civil rights extended to
all
blacks in the South, and indians too. What had been perceived as eccentricity began being interpreted as folly by his supporters and rabble-rousing by his opponents. The election results shouldn’t have surprised anyone.

The men and families of Kennedy’s unit, the 4th Mech-Cavalry Division, got their land and Kennedy was parcelled laterally into the CBI. A polite shift out of the political arena.

Considering it now, Morgan had to wonder. For a brief moment Kennedy had enjoyed the support of the people and the army. What had held him back, stopped him from seizing what he might have considered his birthright? Was it the same thing that appeared to drive him now?

Joseph Patrick Kennedy I, the patriarch of the Kennedy clan and the major’s great-grandfather, had started off as a bootlegger during Prohibition and ended up as Union ambassador to the German Empire after the Secession. Old Joseph had four sons: Joseph Junior, John, Robert and Edward.

Reconciliation. It could have happened. It almost did happen. But at what price?

In 1963, the Kennedys were well established in the North and the South. They had money. They had power. But of course there had always been the rumours. Rumours that old Pat the Patriarch had never quite broken his ties with organised crime, that he in fact merely represented its legitimate face to the watching world. Nothing was ever proved, but somewhere along the line Pat must have let some of his colleagues down. He was given a reprimand that neither he nor America would soon forget.

November 22, the last leg of the fundraiser for the United America Project. The crowd had greeted John and Bobbie with flag-waving enthusiasm as the brothers received recognition for their contributions to the city, their motorcade winding through downtown Dallas.

The Warren Commission never found a specific motive linking the assassins, though suspects ranged from Southern separatists to Mediterranean-based cartels. They never determined why Oswald, Ellroy and Stone, three senior members of a Dallas crime outfit, had decided to spend that day catching up on their reading in the book depository.

Zapruder had captured it all, his camera panning across Dealey Plaza. John, with his arm around Norma Jean. Robert’s dazzling smile. Spouts of asphalt. John’s head snapping back and forth as the Continental screeched to a halt. The street full of the dead and dying. Final tally: eleven dead and twenty-three wounded. Amongst the dead, the Kennedy boys and their spouses, an assortment of bodyguards and local count-sheet thugs. The remainder, a bunch of tourists and well-wishers.

Major Joseph Robard Kennedy had inherited a name forever linked with infamy and violence. Initially, he’d shunned the path chosen for him. He took the low road and joined the Confederate Army. Assigned to a third-rate unit of Buffalo soldiers and reservation rejects, he turned them into a force that had helped save Texas.

They gave him a shot at public office, and when he came close to success they smeared him with the detritus of his family history. They gave him a shitty little portfolio in the back office of the Bureau and he dished them back Camelot. What might he craft from the red sands of Nevada? What could he do about something he actually
believed
in?

Morgan surveyed the quiet street, and felt the fear steal upon him. He’d known it all of his life: the suspicion that the pieces of his world did not quite mesh. The feeling that a swift sideways glance at the occasional flicker that danced on the periphery, once pinioned and held in freeze-frame, might reveal the world as it truly was—or as it truly should be. The only difference was that now he knew why.