A shape rose out of the dense foliage as if formed from it. Arms flailing, knees high. The man was sopping, his loose wet uniform hanging off him like animal pelts, his balding head slick and his white eyes wild.

He was coming right for Lett. Lett saw he had a gun—a Kraut luger.

Lett froze. The man kept coming.

“Run! Run for your fugging lives!” the man screamed. “They’re everywhere, see, in the trees, the caves—those deep dark caves, everywhere we go!”

Lett crouched. “Hands up,” he ordered.

But the man still kept coming. Saliva squirted from between his front teeth. “You gotta help me, Mac, you gotta. They’re coming and we gotta run, me and you!”

The gears inside Lett launched and found their cogs and meshed, the torque steeling him. Mechanically he stood, becoming twice as large as he was, his muscles like stones. He lunged, kicked at a knee and chopped at the man’s neck and kept coming. The man slipped, landing on his back. Lett grabbed the Luger. The man held up his hands. Lett brought the Luger down on the man’s forehead, clunking on bone.

The man wheezed underneath him, blood leaking out his nostrils, streaming over his face.

“Do it,” he muttered to Lett, “just go and do it, why don’t you? Do me the goddamn favor.”

Lett eased off.

The people came outside, rushing from doorways, turning his way.

“Get inside! Find cover!” Lett shouted at them. The man below him was crying now. Lett shot up, pressed onward. He felt the people stopping to watch him, many lining up like it was a gauntlet he had to run in a witch-burning medieval hamlet at the height of the Inquisition, but these people wore khaki and prints instead of rags and vestments, had clipboards instead of scrolls, all the judgers that ever were now. All of time was combining, the cruelest centuries blending, piling on him to halt him right here. But he kept moving. Gotta keep moving.

As he ran, he saw the white helmets of MPs and their black armbands. They had batons, pistols, rifles. “Hey! There he is.”

He looked like a deserter. He was a deserter.

He saw more of the tree line ahead and kept sprinting, he was going to make it.

“Ow . . .”

He felt a twinge in his back, then a prick, then it was red hot and spreading, flowing through him like lava itself, hotter, heavier. He kept running but his legs were concrete, and his lungs wouldn’t pump, and he was staggering, stomping his feet like some drunken bandleader, the world spinning and he spinning in the other direction. The double spinning locked the world in place, two gears synchronizing, a brake slamming. A trap door opened. Lett was falling, plummeting, deep into the earth and more hot lava found him, submerging him, scorching and suffocating him at once.

All went black.

6.