33

Mad Dash

Am I ugly?” Claire asked Ben as she pulled him along ahead of the others, Agent Harris a step behind them keeping an eagle eye on their surrounds with the others in turn behind him. They managed a swift walk without running, since that might arouse the suspicions of an already-alert local police force.

“What? Claire, I’m not sure I get what—”

“Because I’ve been sending signals since that first train ride. Or don’t you people from the future know how to read people anymore? No, it’s gotta be the fact that you’re an academic; no other explanation. Emotionally blind, the lot of them.”

“Claire, are you s-saying that—”

“It’s like you purposefully hold back from being more affectionate. Is that because of the importance of this mission of yours, or because you know you’re just going to have to leave me behind? Of course, now that we both know I’m dying, that should change something. Does it change anything, Ben? At the least it means I’m running out of time.”

“C-Claire, I’m not sure what to say.”

“It’s not what you’re supposed to say,” she replied.

They briskly rounded a corner, nearly bumping into a tipsy man coming out of a local bar as Ben stammered. The tipsy man took one look at the two of them and grinned. “Kiss her, you fool.” The man then staggered away, leaving Ben for a moment confused before Claire once again pulled him along.

“I’m a reporter, and that means I have some skills at reading people. You’ve had more than a passing interest in me, but I couldn’t understand why you wouldn’t say anything. I assumed it was because you were trying to keep your mind on this important mission of yours, and that afterward I might have a chance to get to know you a lot better. But then I find out when you’re really from, and that puts a new angle to the situation. You didn’t want to get involved with someone who was a part of history. I get that; didn’t want to mess up the timeline. But now we know that I’m not about to be a part of history because I have no future. So where’s that put us now?”

They stopped for a moment, somewhere far behind them a huffing Dr. Weiss struggling to catch up. As Claire had led the one-sided discussion, the pace of not only her words but also her footsteps had increased until her walk had bordered on a fast jog. Agent Harris had managed to keep up with them, Ernst not too far behind her, but Captain Beck was helping along a fatigued Dr. Weiss with his one good arm, while Agent Hessman found himself uncomfortably alone midway between the two extremes. Now Professor Stein found himself on a street corner with Claire glaring at him.

What he wasn’t sure of, and what made him most uncomfortable, was whether the person looking at him was the determined reporter or the pretty young woman. “Claire,” he began, “you are . . . even for my century, you are a rare woman. A very outspoken and determined woman, particularly for‍—how old are you again?”

“Twenty-four.”

“Only twenty-four?” He gasped. “And you’re already‍—I think the standards of my century have definitely slipped a little.”

For that he earned a brief smirk, Claire was back to her same determined mask.

“I’m not sure what to say.”

“Not used to forward women in your century? I admit it’s rare and considered unseemly in this century.”

“No, it’s not that. It’s just that . . . I don’t know.”

For a moment they simply stared at one another. He saw the fire in her eyes, the passion waiting to boil. She saw the longing in his, held in check by restraint, duty, and uncertainty. She saw his intelligence, his pleasant features and good physical shape, but something else as well. “Oh my God,” she said quietly. “You’re a virgin.”

Ben could do little more than stutter in reply. Then the moment was interrupted by the intrusion of another, several others in fact. Agent Hessman came up, leading the captain and Dr. Weiss, while Agent Harris and Ernst held the middle ground until the gap between them closed.

“I definitely wasn’t expecting this much running for this mission,” Dr. Weiss remarked as he joined the rest.

“Sue,” Agent Hessman asked, “where are we?”

“Bridge and waterfront straight ahead,” she replied. “We just have to get across the street.”

They stood at a corner, ahead of them a wide stretch of pavement crossed by Model Ts and similar old-styled cars, the occasional horse-drawn taxi, a scattering of pedestrians going on about their evening’s enjoyment, and a skyline that was already sporting the rise of several taller buildings. Beyond the highway, though, was a park, and beyond the park a stretch of water that ran almost as far across as it seemed to go from side to side. What loomed before them, however, held their interest.

The Brooklyn Bridge was fully lit up, its tall towers stabbing like Roman candles high into the sky, cables like gleaming webs for some giant mechanized spider. A bridge to the heavens, it seemed, or perhaps crossing into Asgard itself. Even in this bygone era, the bridge was a wonder to behold; more so when you considered how far advanced more modern construction methods might be than those available when it was built.

“Miss Hill, best way across?”

“Oh, uh, that way.” She pointed across the highway to a walkway that began at another street corner and led away along the bridge onto a paved length parallel to the main highway crossing. “That’s the pedestrian crossing, but the delegates will be in cars, which will mean the main road. Will your explosives be able to take one out from the other?”

“Depends how much they brought with them,” Agent Harris answered. “If they go for the area underneath it, they’d just have to rig it for as far out as it would take for the whole caravan to be on the bridge. Say, about a hundred feet out over the water.”

“We aim for that then,” Agent Hessman decided. “I doubt if their entire team would be any more equipped for long-distance climbing than we are. But they have the jump on us and may have already started. Sue, take lead.”

Agent Harris took a cautious look around before she led the way across the busy intersection using a designated crosswalk. Cars paused to let them pass, then rushed past before the pedestrians had barely moved on. A cacophony of honking horns, choking car fumes, and the occasional cussing voice woke up the night. They were midway across when a taxi leaped out from the line of pausing cars and stopped directly in front of them, straddling the crosswalk completely. Agent Harris didn’t wait for anything else to happen. “Duck!”

She tackled Professor Stein and Claire to the ground, Agent Hessman slamming into Dr. Weiss on the way down. Ernst quickly flattened himself, while Captain Beck dropped as best as one arm would allow. From the window of the taxi emerged the barrel of a gun, and from it a rapid series of shots barely missed their heads.

Agent Harris rolled from her stomach to her back while whipping out her futuristic pistol. From her back, with arms outstretched past her head, head and neck arched back to see behind her, she pulled off a shot, kept rolling, then pulled off another one while returning to a prone position.

The first shot glanced off the side of the vehicle, while the second crashed through a window, narrowly missing the driver. She caught sight of a figure leaping out the far side of the car, leaving the vehicle parked in the way as an obstacle.

The surrounding crowd erupted in a furor. People screamed, cars rushed to get away, and a horse spooked by the sound of the gunshots bolted into a run, carrying a taxi along behind him. A police whistle was nearly drowned out by the rising ruckus, but that was only the start of it.

Agent Harris darted to the stalled taxi, sticking an arm through the broken window to fire a shot through to the other side. The gunshot shattered the opposing window, and from the resulting cry came evidence of at least a partial hit. That and the brief view of a mop of blond hair before it ducked away into the pedestrian walkway was all she needed to know.

“Germans,” she shouted back.

“We’re sitting ducks out here,” Agent Hessman called out. “Everyone, run for it; Sue in the lead!”

As the others sprang into a crouching run, Agent Harris fired off a couple of shots into the crowd across the street. Her shots appeared random at first, designed to spook the people into fleeing, but when one seemingly random person in the crowd shot back, the crowd turned into an all-out stampede. Then, when two other different sets of guns fired from other unseen directions, the crowd turned into a confused mob. People abandoned their vehicles, trying to gain some element of presumed safety. Others raced their engines to get away, only to end in a pileup farther down the road. Soon the highway was little more than an obstacle course of abandoned cars and spraying bullets.

Agent Harris decided to make use of said obstacle course. She waited until the next gun fired off, then ran out from behind the taxi to another abandoned car away from the intersection to the right, pulling off another shot herself.

“One by the waterfront,” she announced in as loud a voice as she could manage. “One on the bridge entry, and it looks like the third just found himself some cover. No sign of their gang-member friends.”

Agent Hessman reached the taxi straddling the crosswalk, taking cover behind it while Professor Stein hurried up with Claire. Captain Beck had found his way over to the side behind another abandoned car a couple of lanes behind where Agent Harris was, while Dr. Weiss dove behind one of the vehicles that had been waiting behind the crosswalk, inside of which a young couple hovered in fearful cover.

“Don’t mind me,” he apologized to them. “I’m just passing through.”

Ernst, the German, snuck his way through the fleeing crowd to another vehicle abandoned in the middle of the intersection, the better from which to get another vantage point.

“They probably thought things were getting too messy for them,” the professor remarked.

“It’s getting too messy for us,” Agent Hessman said. “There’s no telling who in these crowds may be someone of historical importance. We’ve got to take the modern teams out fast.”

“There may be another way,” Professor Stein added. “We now know something that they don’t‍—that their Major Greber’s gone rogue. All we have to do is tell them that.”

“Ben, the world doesn’t work that way. They won’t simply—”

“I’ve got to try,” he insisted.

With that, he spied an opening in the dispersing crowd and made a run for it, Claire calling after him, “Ben, no!”

He ran as fast as he could, weaving between fleeing men and woman, leaping behind one stopped car then another, narrowly getting hit by a spooked horse and the equally spooked taxi passengers it was dragging along with it, then ending up crouched behind another car nearly at the other side of the street. He waited there until the bulk of the crowd had fled, the mob having become a roadblock for the police trying to get on-site.

With the crowd mostly gone, cowering behind a bridge pylon, or ducking deep into their vehicles, he had a better glimpse of where the opposition was located. He verified what Agent Harris had announced: one on his belly by the waterfront with a sniper’s rifle in hand, another taking cover on the entry to the pedestrian bridge crossing, and another behind the wall of the main bridge roadway.

“I can’t let this go on,” he said to himself. “I just have to make them believe. We know the truth; now they will as well.” Steeling himself, he slowly raised both arms high and rose from his crouched position. After taking a deep breath, he carefully slid out from behind the car.

“I just want to talk,” he called out. “We found out something that you don’t know. Your plan will not come out as you expect. This will not lead to a better world. What’s more, your man Major Greber has gone rogue. He’s already killed one of your teammates that we can confirm, possibly another who was chasing us earlier. He has plans of his own. Even your man Ernst Fischer knows this. Please, just put down the weapons and let us talk. There is great danger in what you do here.”

He took one slow step at a time as he talked, coming farther out into the open, while a streetful of enraptured spectators a block away looked on, holding their breaths. He tried to catch the eye of each of the three German gunmen and saw what he hoped was doubt in two of them, but then he saw the one on his belly by the waterfront with the sniper’s rifle. From that one he saw quite the opposite of mercy.

“Stop your man Greber and talk. History is not as easily manipulated as you think. There are too many‍—‍”

From the one on his belly came a cry in German; then the other two Germans stepped out just long enough to aim loaded firearms straight at him. By this point Professor Stein was a good twenty feet from any sort of cover. Three assassins pulled their triggers, and one woman’s voice cried out, “Ben!”

Someone tackled Ben to the ground from behind just as the shots were fired. The bullets from two handguns and one sniper rifle all passed through the space where his head had been a split second earlier. He hit the pavement with one hand to brace him, barely avoiding getting his face scratched up, though the wind was certainly knocked out of him. At the same time, Agent Harris popped up from behind another car, both hands on her pistol from the future as she aimed true. With a single shot, the one by the walkway entry was slammed back against the concrete wall, along with most of his head. Two other shots now fired in her direction, but by that time she had ducked back out of the way. The shots continued now as the remaining two shooters tried to target the lean black woman with the short hair as she dashed from behind one car to another.

Ben let out a moan and turned carefully onto his back.

“Ben, that has got to be the most insane stunt I have ever seen anyone do. Are you sure you’ve never been in a war before?”

Claire was lying on top of him, hugging close to him and the ground, while gunfire passed through the air above them.

“Claire, what? Did you just save my life?”

“Well, someone had to. You’re cute, you’re smart, but also about as naïve as they come.”

“Claire, I don’t . . . for a woman of this era, shouldn’t this be a fairly compromising position?”

“I wasn’t born in the right century, just leave it at that. Now, do you want to stay out here waiting for the guy with the weird rifle to hit us, or do you want to start crawling back to safety?”

“I’ll take safety. Let’s get going.”

From her position, Agent Harris saw Claire slip off the professor. Ben rolled onto his stomach, and the two of them crawled their way back across the street. From a little deeper into the intersection but a couple of car lengths behind them, Ernst rolled out from under cover to fire a couple of shots at the one on the grass by the waterfront before rolling back under cover. Alternating with him, Agent Harris let off another shot, ducked as another set of bullets made short work of the front window of the car she hid behind, then dove toward another abandoned vehicle.

Meanwhile, Dr. Weiss had joined Agent Hessman behind another car midway between where the two had been hiding. Captain Beck was slowly making his way through the maze of abandoned and stalled vehicles while the focus remained on Agent Harris and the German Ernst.

“Ben, over here!” Agent Hessman shouted.

He dared not even look up for fear of getting his head blown off, but continued to quickly crawl in the direction from which he’d heard Agent Hessman’s voice. Beside him Claire crawled as well, though it was no accident on his part that he found himself between her and possible targeting by enemy fire.

Captain Beck crouched low as he dashed over to the next car, ducking out of sight as another volley of gunfire passed through the air, then made another run. He was now one lane away from Agent Harris and a car length behind her.

“Sue! That gun you got from the Japanese in Steeplechase. Toss it to me.”

She glanced back to see Captain Beck motioning to her from behind the other vehicle, so risking another shot to keep the Germans down, she ducked and pulled out the other gun while Ernst kept the other guys pinned. Captain Beck caught the gun she threw at him and resumed the attack-and-duck strategy.

“I’m assuming the guy on the grass with the rifle is Greber,” she called back. “If we can outflank him‍—‍”

“Then the other guy will surrender,” he finished. “Got it.”

While Captain Beck scrambled to find a better position, Ben and Claire finally finished crawling their way over toward Agent Hessman’s voice and got up into a squat to join him and Dr. Weiss.

“I know, foolish,” the professor admitted before any more could be said, “but I had to try.”

“Foolish only because we don’t have the time to convince them, and Greber’s a lost cause,” Agent Hessman told him. “Even with Ernst to back us up, we have at most a couple of days to finish the mission, and maybe under an hour before that convoy passes across that bridge. We’re out of time for talking.”

“I know,” Professor Stein said with a sigh, “but I had to try. All things considered, it was worth the risk.”

That’s when Claire made a realization, and a new look of admiration evolved across her face. “It’s not getting killed that you’re afraid of but the killing of others.”

“A little of both, actually,” he admitted. “But death is the one option you can never take back. It’s permanent and irrevocable. Right now I have a grandmother who is soon to be born into an unimaginable world of hate and forced to raise herself without a mother because some maniac thought that killing six million Jews was a good solution. It wasn’t; death never is.”

For a long, pregnant moment she stared at him, and hugged herself close to his side as the shots once again rang out.

Captain Beck checked the chamber of the gun. “Two shots. Have to make them count.” Readying himself, he waited until Ernst had shot his load. Then Agent Harris made a running dash across the remainder of the road for a car parked by the edge of the park, aiming the pistol for the guy with the sniper rifle. One shot was a clear miss, tossing up a small mound of grass in front of the man on his belly, but the other shot found its mark.

Unfortunately, the other shot was not Captain Beck’s.

The remaining German by the bridge stepped out to pull off a shot directly at the captain, the bullet slamming into him and tossing him to the ground. In that same instant, both Ernst and Agent Harris sprang out and filled the other man’s body with bullets. The German fell back onto the street, unmoving, and Ernst ducked back for cover before the sniper could get his next shot off.

“Robert!” Agent Harris dashed out, grabbing on to the captain’s shoulder to drag him back under cover. A red stain grew rapidly around his midsection.

“No,” he gasped. “The beacon.”

“But you need medical attention; you’re about to die.”

“This body’s about to die,” he reminded her with a feeble grin, “but my original’s waiting for me back home. Now activate it while I’ve time.”

With no time to argue, she reached into his jacket and pulled out the round beacon, slapped it on his chest, and pressed the button before diving back for her cover. She watched as the captain dissolved away in a rainbow shower of sparks until nothing was left behind. “Here’s hoping that actually works as expected,” she said to herself.

Once he was gone, she took a quick survey of her surroundings. Only the man with the sniper rifle remained. He aimed one last shot in Ernst’s direction, then ran straight for the underside of the famed bridge, lost to sight. She waited a second more to be sure he was gone and then ran back to where the rest were gathered, soon to be joined by Ernst as well.

“The captain?” Agent Hessman asked.

“I sent him back before he expired,” she reported.

“Well, that’s something,” Agent Hessman remarked.

“I saw the big hole that guy blew in him,” Claire objected. “Surely even in your time a wound like that is fatal.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Dr. Weiss explained. “While he may have some residual mental trauma from the experience, as long as he was still alive when his recall button was activated, his mental essence should be jerked back into his still-healthy original body back in the temporal chamber. Remember, what you see of us right now is mere projection via a time-space wormhole. He should be okay. Now, if one of us were to die back in this time, then I’m afraid that would be a real death.”

“Uh . . . yeah,” she replied uncertainly. “I’ll take your word for it.”

“Same as the rest of us.” Ben grinned. “Lou, Greber’s still on the loose.”

“As are the Japanese,” he replied. “We have maybe minutes left to get over there and stop everyone before that convoy arrives. Sue, in the lead; Sam, try not to hold us up. Let’s move it!”

No need or time for cover anymore, Sue led the charge across the open avenue straight for the park and the area beneath the bridge where Major Greber had run. Desperation now fueled them as they tore across the landscape, leaving behind a puzzled populace and some confused police who had finally arrived on the scene.

Claire Hill did not know what further dangers lay ahead of her, but she could not now be away from Ben’s side for any reason. “Ben,” she asked as she ran, “what’s your last name?”

“Stein,” he said after a moment’s hesitation. “Why?”

“No reason.”

She said nothing more as they ran beneath the first girders of the great bridge, but silently she mouthed something to herself: “Stein . . . Claire Stein.”