The Sheriff of Yrnameer (20 page)

“I think,” he said, “I’m going to faint now.”

They waited. After a few moments Cole looked around.

“Did I faint?”

“No,” said Nora.

“Okay,” said Cole. “Then I’m going to go take another mist.”

˙  ˙  ˙

Joshua took Aleela back to the children’s cabin. Nora insisted on escorting Cole back to his, a hand on his arm to help him along. She was silent, her brow knitted, glancing at him every so often.

When they arrived at his door she said, “You sure you’re all right?”

“Yeah, Ima rai,” approximated Cole.

“Heal patch. Three heal patches.”

“Mm.”

“Hot mist.”

“Mm.”

“Then we bend.”

“Mm.”

It was almost a relief when the next interruption materialized. It arrived at the appropriate moment, Nora’s voice blaring from the intercom just as the heal patches and the whiskey were kicking in and the shampoo was hitting peak foaminess.

“Cole!” she said. “Come quick!”

He still had shampoo in his hair when he dragged himself into the cockpit of the escape craft.

“Look!” said Nora.

He looked.

“Why?” he said exhaustedly. “Why can’t any of this just be easy?”

The holo-monitor showed them clearly. A few were still popping out of bendspace near where the Success!Sat was crumpling into a fireball. Cole didn’t need to count them. There would be a total of fourteen, a standard space marine task force.

“Are they here for us?”

“No,” said Cole, “for the satellite. But we have to bend now or they’ll spot us, want to talk. You ready?”

“Yes.”

Cole fumbled with the intercom button.

“Uh …,” he said.

“I’ll do it.” She took the handset from him, giving him the smallest of pats on the arm. He watched her, too tired to protest.

“Everyone, this is Nora. We have to bend, and do it now. Hold on.” She put the handset back and smiled at Cole. “Let’s do it.”

He nodded, flipping back the safety cover over the bend button. “Next stop, Yrnameer.”

It wasn’t, of course. Not for them.

Space Marine Flight Colonel Farley Keane, formerly of one of the minor agriculture planets of the Cargillon-Archer system, surveyed the plummeting satellite from the bridge of the lead vessel.

“Well, ain’t that a shame,” he said. “Seems we’ve arrived a bit too late.”

“Yessir,” said his lieutenant.

“Sir!” said a young space marine, running up to the colonel. “We spotted another ship in the vicinity, but they bent before we could get a fix on them!”

“Roger that. Thank you, Space Marine. That will be all.”

The young soldier saluted and marched off.

“Funny,” said Colonel Keane to his lieutenant. “Have you ever really thought about the term
space marine?
I mean,
marine
, by definition, connotes the ocean, while …”

Next to him, his lieutenant stifled a yawn and thought, Oh, God, here we go again.

Bendspace was as uncomfortable as always, with the impression that one was observing one’s own cells from the inside out. Cole was suffering through the particularly disagreeable experience of being a balloon intersecting another balloon wrapped in a multifaceted somethingahedron, when there was a jarring sensation, followed by the feeling of being in free fall, a free fall striped and interrupted by random bands of nothingness. And then he landed.

He was in the cargo hold, although it was strangely distorted and
off-kilter, as if the walls didn’t quite line up. It was perfectly silent and still.

He scrunched up his eyes and shook his head, wondering if he was dreaming, but the room was still there. He looked down at his hands, his bloody knuckles, then felt for the heal patches on his side and his shoulder and his temple. His hair was still plastered stickily to his scalp, the shampoo starting to congeal. This was real. He turned to his left to survey the room and froze, feeling his heart start to thump and his skin prickle with goose bumps.

The first coherent thought that passed through his mind was, So this is how I die.

“Cole?”

The voice was very quiet, almost a whisper. He turned further to his left. It was Nora. She was sitting against the wall, hugging her knees to her chest.

“Nora.”

He went to her, kneeling next to her.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“What’s happening, Cole? What is that?”

He didn’t want to look at it again, but he did. What he was seeing was nothing—literally nothing. The Big Nothing. The purest, darkest black, growing from the upper left-hand corner of the room, as if that portion were being slowly dipped into a mirror-flat lake.

There was something fundamentally wrong about it, repulsive, a desecration. A negation of all life, all warmth, all being, of all history and all that would come to pass. A negation of All. Even if there were a heaven, you wouldn’t go there, because this was worse than dying. This was Nothing.

Even as he watched, hypnotized, the clean borders of the darkness crept slightly outward, consuming more of existence. And he knew that plane of nothingness would continue to grow, continue to encroach on them until it consumed him, and consumed Nora, and their bright little pocket of time and space would cease forever.

“We’ve fallen into an anomaly,” said Cole hoarsely.

They said that the anomalies were happening more often now, that it was linked to universal widening, that it was everyone’s fault for using too much dark-matter fuel. If they didn’t stop, they said, the universe would expand at a higher rate than was natural, faster and faster, until someday it tore itself asunder. Cole didn’t know
which side he was on. He just knew that he didn’t have to worry about it anymore.

It took an effort, but he wrenched his eyes away from the approaching doom. Nora’s gaze was still fixed on it, her expression full of dread.

“It’s horrible,” she whispered.

“Don’t look at it, Nora.”

“It’s
horrible
.”

“Nora. Nora! Don’t look at it!”

“Oh, God.”

“Nora!”

He reached out and tried to turn her head toward him. She resisted for a moment, rigid, and then suddenly relented. When she focused on him, her eyes were wild.

“Nora,” he said again.

Then she grabbed him, roughly, pulling him in and clinging to him in a frantic embrace.

He wasn’t sure how long he held her, feeling her tremble, her heartbeat, her breath coming in ragged gasps and exhalations.

“I’m sorry,” she said after a while, releasing him. She kept her eyes fixed at the floor, one hand up like a blinder to block her view of the corner. “Is it still there?”

Cole risked another look. It was still there, or not there, depending. It was still growing. “Yes,” he said.

“How did this happen?”

“Bad bend calcs, I guess,” said Cole.

“What about the others? The children?”

“I don’t know. I don’t really know how these things are supposed to work.”

“It’s going to keep closing in, isn’t it,” she said.

“That’s what they say.”

“Has anyone ever survived?”

“They say it’s … rare.”

“How rare?”

“I guess … they’re not even sure if the people who say they’ve survived an anomaly are telling the truth.”

“What do you think?”

He glanced up again at it and immediately looked away.

“Under the present circumstances, I’m gonna go with believing them.”

She started to laugh.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, me, too.”

“Maybe we should move to that far corner, that one over there.”

“Right.”

Cole held her hand and led her across the room, while she kept her other hand up to block her view. They sat in the corner, facing it, their backs to the Nothing.

“You think the others are okay?” she said.

“Yes.”

“You think it’s getting closer?”

“No.”

“Liar.”

“Yes.”

She looked over at him.

“How are you, your wounds?”

“It’s funny, I was just worrying about whether or not they were going to scar. I guess that’s not my biggest concern now.”

She laughed again, then sighed.

“You think it will hurt?” she said.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“I don’t want to die like this,” she said.

“I don’t want to die like anything,” he said.

She put her hand on his back. It felt warm. “You were really brave back there. Thank you.”

He dropped his head, smiling. “You’re welcome,” he said quietly.

“What, are you all shy and modest now?”

He nodded, still smiling.

“That must be a first for you,” she said.

“Don’t tell anyone.”

He twisted to look over his shoulder, caught his breath, then turned back quickly. Their eyes met. She nodded, understanding.

“You know when I said that thing, about you and me, and even if you were the last man in existence?” she said.

He glanced at her. “Yes.”

“Well, here you are, the last man in existence. And you know what? I would.”

He chuckled, dropping his gaze again.

“You’re shy again!”

“Yes.”

Her hand moved to his knee.

“It would be a good way to go out,” she said.

He looked at her hand for a moment, then took it in his own. “How about,” he said, “if we just hold on to each other?”

So they did. They leaned against each other, knees up, heads touching, arms around each other’s shoulders, their other hands intertwined in front of them, while behind them the Big Nothing closed in.

“If you’re just joining us on Intergalactic Public Radio, the standoff continues here on the outskirts of Yrnameer,” said MaryAnn. She was speaking in a low but clear voice into a tiny microphone, her live broadcast going out to over a hundred worlds and nearly half as many listeners.

Around her were the citizens of the village of Yrnameer, a tense and fearful gathering just outside the broad gate that straddled Main Street. Hanging above and behind them was the sign welcoming visitors to the community.

Their current visitors were not at all welcome.

The surviving six Bad Men had finally arrived.

They rode through the center of town, shooting out lights and windows, smashing things that could be smashed, and clubbing those unlucky enough to be within reach.

They killed the chicken.

Then they grabbed Mayor Kimber and dragged him outside the gate, ordering the townspeople to assemble.

“But if we give you all our crops,” said Mayor Kimber, “we’ll starve.”

“If you don’t,” said Yguba, “we’ll kill you.”

“We helped you before! We fed you, we saved your lives!”

“Well, that was pretty stupid then, wasn’t it?” said Yguba.

“You can’t do this!” said the mayor.

“Really? Who’s gonna stop us? No one,” said Yguba. “We can do anything we like. Anything! For example, if I want to shoot that sign? I shoot it!”

He shot the town sign. The bang was very loud. People screamed and ducked. The sign swung violently on its hinges, a smoking hole in it from the Firestick 4 (“a good, basic model for those who want an economical but still effective weapon for threatening their enemies”).

“The sound you just heard was that of a gunshot. One of the bandits just shot the town sign,” whispered MaryAnn into her microphone.

“Here,” said Yguba, “I’ll do it again.”

He did it again. More screams.

“He did it again,” said MaryAnn. Her heart was pounding but she held her voice steady.

“Farg,” said Yguba. “This is fun.”

In the end Cole and Nora were huddled together on their sides, spooning, still facing the corner. They existed in a small, inverted pyramid of somethingness, while the wall of annihilation moved implacably toward them.

Cole opened his eyes and shut them again immediately. The black wall was just inches away. Very soon now. He hugged Nora tighter and she responded, squeezing his arms.

“Is it close?” she said.

“It’s close,” he said.

“I’m keeping my eyes shut.”

“Me, too.”

She pressed against him, and he against her. His left hand was touching her face and he could feel the warmth of her tears.