Final impact

As Denny rhythmically dipped his oar into the water in time with his men, he recalled with real wonder some of the things he’d seen in the Zone. They had three-dimensional images, like the ones he’d seen of his target island, for tens of thousands of other places all over the world. The uptimers had warned him that the imagery might not match up with reality. The Tokyo of his day was a hell of a lot different from the Tokyo of the future, for instance. But Denny knew that mountains and rivers and stuff like that didn’t move much in just eighty years.

Not in backwaters like this, at any rate.

There’d been some other stuff he’d seen out there, too. Stuff that woulda turned his shit white a few years earlier, before he got into the corps and saw a bit of the world. The little coal-mining town where he grew up didn’t run to strip joints or porno houses or “dope cafйs.” And you never ever saw white folks mixing with anyone other than their own kind. Or ladies walking around with their asses hanging out of such short skirts and their tits bursting out of such tight tops.

He’d really wanted to write his brother about it, but he knew the old man would rip up the letter as soon as he saw it. His dad was a much more formidable censor than the corps. Small-town preachers tended to be a little judgmental and censorious like that.

A slight breeze picked up, bringing with it the unmistakable smell of landfall ahead of them. His nostrils twitched at the stench of rotting vegetation, of smoke, and-he was certain-of cooking.

Denny brought his low-light amplification up to max and scanned the approaching shoreline. Coming in from leeward the surf was low, two feet at most, and its hissing crunch would smother the sound of their final run in. He couldn’t see anything unusual until he switched to infrared view, and suddenly two heat blossoms appeared a couple of hundred feet up the headland that dominated this side of the island.

He turned around to face his men and used a series of hand signals to tell them that the island was occupied.

23

D-DAY + 37. 9 JUNE 1944. 0903 HOURS.

ARDENNES PLATEAU.

In the seconds before the bullet struck her, Julia Duffy relived whole arcs of her life. The field in which she stood, lined up with about thirty or so muddy, ragged GIs, bled into a memory of the field she played in behind her childhood home in Excelsior Springs, outside Kansas City.

She was an only child, but she lived next door to a couple of little girls, aged twelve months on either side of her, and they’d been friends all the way through school. Even when she’d moved to France, and later lived in New York, they kept in contact via e-mail and Christmas cards. Rebecca and Susie had stayed in Missouri. Bec married a cosmetic dentist who kept offices down on the Plaza and out in Johnson County, while her sister snagged the owner of a chain of Krispy Kreme franchises. Apart from her dad, they were the only friends she cared to hold on to after leaving town.

As the German machine gunners primed their weapons she had a flash-back so vivid it almost seemed as though she’d not only crossed back through the Transition, but returned to her five-year-old form, as well.

She was having a sleepover at Bec and Susie’s place, but not much sleep was happening. At about two in the morning she and Bec had convinced the younger Susie to go in to the girls’ parents and ask for a drink. All that yakking under the bedcovers had made them mighty thirsty. Susie had woken her dad, telling him in a singsong voice that she needed a drink. Even though Julia hadn’t been there in the bedroom, her memory put her right there next to Susie as her father grunted something about getting a drink from the refrigerator by herself. He probably meant milk, but the girls found a two-liter bottle of Coke in the crisper and, miracle of miracles, managed to unscrew it, pour themselves three glasses full, and continue doing so until it was all gone, without spilling as much as a single drop. They were very proud of themselves.

The caffeine and sugar then kept them awake until sunrise, playing with the sisters’ army of Barbies in front of a TV set that was turned down and tuned to a local station running a continual loop of infomercials.

As one of the soldiers next to her began babbling, and crying for his mother, Julia flashed forward to the last moments of her first serious relationship, with a photographer she’d met in college, a narcissist whose self-regard she mistook for sensitivity. They’d dated for three months, an intensely dislocated period in her life when she missed almost every class at school, nearly flunking out before cracking up when this idiot came back from a shoot in the Caribbean to blithely inform her that he’d gotten a Russian swimsuit model pregnant and was going to spend a year or two in Asia figuring out what this meant for him. Neither she nor the model was invited on this epic journey of self-discovery.