When he heard the Explorer’s engine start, he pulled the string just hard enough to engage the timer switch. Now he had one minute.

He didn’t want to give Nanette and Anna enough time to get to the tote and zipper it open and jerk the bare wires out of the brick of plastic explosive. The moment he felt the switch click, he began to count the seconds in his head—one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three—praying that he might be at least ninety percent as accurate as a Rolex.

If clocks in this house could not display time properly, that didn’t mean the seconds weren’t passing. This was apparently some kind of eddy in the river of time; the river rushed forward; but here, the currents circled in a side pool. This wasn’t a pocket of stasis; events still proceeded here in a familiar linear fashion. Therefore, the timer in the bag should count down to detonation. The fact that Nanette and Anna seemed to respect the threat indicated that the device would work. Nevertheless, he broke into a sweat as he considered that he might leave the bomb behind to no effect.

Ten seconds. Twenty. Thirty. Forty. Forty-five.

David put down the tote, stepped out of the house, pulled shut the door, and ran to the nearby Explorer, splashing across the sodden lawn. Emily had left the driver’s door open, the headlights blazing. He swung in behind the steering wheel, slammed the door. She hadn’t engaged the emergency brake. He needed only to shift the vehicle into drive and tramp on the accelerator.

As they rocketed away from the house, a thousand knuckles of rain rapped the windshield, the safety system loudly warned him that he had not engaged his harness, and he expected bullets. When he glanced at the rearview mirror, it filled with a roiling mass of reflected fire. An instant later, a concussion wave rocked the Explorer on its tires, and the steering wheel stuttered in his hands.

Before they reached Highway 101, another blast wave rattled the tall Monterey pines that flanked the long driveway, shaking loose a whirling mass of dead needles. Sleeping birds, waking from sheltered branches, swooped in front of the racing Explorer and seemed to blow away into the storm, as if they were swatches of celestial fabric torn from the starless night sky.

Third and fourth concussions, each greater than the one before, were not the work of the bomb, but perhaps signified the collapse of whatever elemental power sustained the bridge that linked this troubled century to one more troubled in the future.

| 96 |

The night, the rain, the southbound blacktop glistening in the headlights like some magical highway leading to an enchanted land. Emily beside him, untouched by time and by those tormented creatures who had conquered it. She was an impossibility, but real.

She said, “A man . . . he stabbed me.”

“Yes.”

“I . . . I died.”