“The tide had the last word.” Krysty readied herself to start paddling again. “I got the feeling we’re not far from the redoubt now.”
“Then let’s go for it.”
Resuming paddling caused him a lot of serious pain. He had been wounded with an arrow through the lower back. The shaft had been withdrawn, but there’d been no time to rest, and he was aware that he’d lost a fair drop of blood.
He looked at J.B., who’d taken a musket ball through the fleshy part of his upper left arm in the same firefight. The skinny figure was doing sterling work, working his paddle right-handed. He’d taken off his glasses to protect them from the ceaseless spray, putting them safely in one of his capacious pockets. His battered fedora was pulled down over his forehead.
Jak Lauren had also been wounded, his right calf being peppered with jagged splinters of rock from a near miss. But the albino teenager was as blank-faced as ever, sitting astride one of the longer logs that made up the raft, his stark white hair pasted flat to his angular skull, his red eyes smoldering like backlit rubies. Every now and again Jak would stop working at rowing, looking carefully around him for any sign of hostile life beneath the heaving waters.
The other two people battling the ocean sat close together near what was, notionally, the bow of the raft.
One was a stockily built black woman in her middle thirties, working away at her paddle with an inexorable sense of purpose, the beads in her plaited hair rattling at every stroke. Dr. Mildred Wyeth had been born a week before Christmas in 1964. On December 28, in the year 2000, she was in hospital in her hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska, to undergo a surgical procedure for a suspected minor abdominal problem.
Things had gone wrong, and she had been taken unconscious from the operating room to be medically frozen-cryogenics, ironically her own particular specialty.
She had slept on, untouched, during the horrific nuclear holocaust that had wiped out ninety-nine hundredths of the world’s population, strike and counterstrike from both sides of the political walls, beginning only three weeks after she had been hermetically sealed into her capsule.
Nearly one hundred years passed before Ryan and his companions had come along and revived her. Mildred’s story was truly amazing. But the life of the tall gray-haired man paddling hard next to her, his antiquated frock coat blackened with seawater, was even more astounding.
Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner, answering most commonly to plain old Doc, had earned a science degree from Harvard, then the doctorate of philosophy from Oxford University in England.
Doc had been born in the beautiful hamlet of South Stratford, Vermont, on a cold and snowy Saint Valentine’s Day in 1868, which by one way of counting, made him somewhere around two hundred years and a few decades old.
He’d married Emily Chandler in June of 1891. There’d been two children, Rachel and little Jolyon, and five and a half years of transcendental happiness for the family, with a future as bright as a newly minted silver dollar. But a time trawling experiment wrenched him from everything near and dear, a victim of Operation Chronos, devised by men of science with no thought for consequences.
“Rocks ahead,” Jak called. “Hear them. Bit right.” He pointed with his bleached, long-fingered hand.
Those on the left of the raft paddled a little harder, while the other rested, feeling the tangled bulk of ill-matched wood swing ponderously in the right direction.
Now Ryan could hear the whispering of waves. He risked standing, and saw a jagged crest of rock a couple of hundred feet above the low-lying fog. On an impulse he glanced behind him, but all he could see was a solid wall of gray-white fog, the stink of sulfur filling his nostrils.
There was no going back.
THEY HIT A SHELVING BANK of granite, grinding onto it, in the middle of a bank of glittering brown weed.
“Watch out for crabs,” Dean said, remembering their departure from the island.
But they saw no sort of marine life as they all scrambled wetly and safely into eighteen inches of water, and walked up onto dry rock. Above them, black-headed gulls dived and shrieked at the seven invaders.