She broke all of the remaining glass out of the tailgate window and out of the smaller rear window on the driver’s side. With the glass missing completely, the damage was less conspicuous and less likely to draw the attention of a cop or anyone else.
For a while she stood in the cold air beside the wagon, staring out at the lightless wilderness, trying to force a connection between instinct and reason. Why was she so sure that she was heading for trouble and that the night’s violence was not yet at an end?
The clouds were shredding in a high-altitude wind that harried them eastward, a wind that had not yet reached the ground, where the air was almost peculiarly still. Moonlight found its way through those ragged holes and eerily illuminated the snow-cloaked landscape of rising and falling hills, evergreens leeched of their color by the night, and clustered rock formations.
Laura looked south where in a few miles the ridge road led to state route 38, and everything in that direction seemed serene. She looked east, west, then back to the north from which they had come, and on all sides the San Bernardino Mountains were without a sign of human habitation, without a single light, and seemed to exist in primeval purity and peace.
She asked herself the same questions and gave the same answers that had been part of an interior dialogue for the past year. Where did the men with the belts come from? Another planet, another galaxy? No. They were as human as she was. So maybe they came from Russia. Maybe the belts acted like matter transmitters, devices akin to the teleportation chamber in that old movie, The Fly. That might explain her guardian’s accent—if he’d teleported from Russia—but it didn’t explain why he had not aged in a quarter of a century; besides, she did not seriously believe that the Soviet Union or anyone else had been perfecting matter transmitters since she was eight years old. Which left time travel.
She had been considering that possibility for some months, though she’d not even felt confident enough about her analysis to mention it to Thelma. But if her guardian had been entering her life at crucial points by time travel, he could have made all of his journeys in the space of a single month or week in his own era while many years had passed for her, so he would have appeared not to have aged. Until she could question him and learn the truth, the time-travel theory was the only one on which she could operate: Her guardian had traveled to her from some future world; and evidently it was an unpleasant future, because when speaking of the belt had said, “You don’t want to go where it’ll take you,” and there had been a bleak, haunted look in his eyes. She had no idea why a time traveler would come back from the future to protect her, of all people, from armed junkies and runaway pickup trucks, and
she had no time to ponder the possibilities.
The night was quiet, dark, and cold .
They were heading straight into trouble.
She knew it, but she didn’t know what it was or where it would come from. When she got back into the Jeep, Chris said, “What’s wrong now?”
“You’re crazy about Star Trek, Star Wars, Batteries Not Included, all that stuff, so maybe what I’ve got here is the kind of background expert I seek out when I’m writing a novel. You’re my resident expert in the weird.”
The engine was switched off, and the interior of the Jeep was brightened only by the cloud-cloaked moonlight. But she was able to see Chris’s face reasonably well because, during the few minutes she had been outside, her eyes had adapted to the night. He blinked at her and looked puzzled. “What’re you talking about?”
“Chris, like I said earlier, I’m going to tell you all about the man lying back there, about the other strange appearances he’s made in my life, but we don’t have time for that now. So don’t snow me under with lots of questions, okay? But just suppose my guardian— that’s how I think of him, because he’s protected me from terrible things when he could—suppose he was a time traveler from the future. Suppose he doesn’t come in a big clumsy time machine. Suppose the whole machine is in a belt that he wears around his waist. under his clothes, and he just materializes out of thin air when he arrives here from the future. Are you with me so far?” Chris was staring wide-eyed. “Is that what he is?”