Lightning

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?"

"He might be, yes."

The boy freed himself from his safety harness, scrambled onto his knees on the seat, and looked back at the man lying in the compartment behind them. "Holy shit."

"Given the unusual circumstances," she said, "I'll overlook the foul language."

He glanced at her sheepishly. "Sorry. But a time traveler!" If she had been angry with him, the anger would not have held, ' for she now saw in him a sudden rush of that boyish excitement and a capacity for wonder that he had not exhibited in a year, not even at Christmas when he had enjoyed himself immensely with Jason Gaines. The prospect of an encounter with a time traveler instantly filled him with a sense of adventure and joy. That was the splendid thing about life: Though it was cruel, it was also mysterious, filled with wonder and surprise: sometimes the surprises were so amazing that they qualified as miraculous, and by witnessing those miracles, a despondent person could discover a reason to live, a cynic could obtain unexpected relief from ennui, and a profoundly wounded boy could find the will to heal himself and medicine for melancholy.

She said, "Okay, suppose that when he wants to leave our time and return to his own, he presses a button on the special belt he wears."

"Can I see the belt?"

"Later. Remember, you promised not to ask a lot of questions just now."

"Okay." He looked again at the guardian, then turned and sat down, focusing his attention on his mother. "When he presses the button — what happens?"

"He just vanishes."

"Wow! And when he arrives from the future, does he just appear out of thin air?"

"I don't know. I've never seen him arrive. Though I think for some reason there's lightning and thunder—"

"The lightning tonight!"

"Yes, but there's not always lightning. All right. Suppose that he came back in time to help us, to protect us from certain dangers—"

"Like the runaway pickup."

"We don't know why he wants to protect us, can't know why until he tells us. Anyway, suppose other people from the future don't want us to be protected. We can't understand their motivations, either. But one of them was Kokoschka, the man who shot your father—"

"And the guys who showed up tonight at the house," Chris said, they're from the future, too."

"I think so. They were planning to kill my guardian, you, and me. But we killed some of them instead and left two of them stranded in the Mercedes. So… what are they going to do next, kiddo? You're the resident expert on the weird. Do you have any ideas?"

"Let me think."

Moonlight gleamed dully on the dirty hood of the Jeep. The interior of the station wagon was growing cold; their breath issued in frosty plumes, and the windows were beginning to fog Laura switched on the engine, heater, defroster, but not the lights.

Chris said, "Well, see, their mission failed, so they won't hang around. They'll go back to the future where they came from." "Those two guys in our car?"

"Yeah. They probably already pushed the buttons on the belts of the guys you killed, sent the bodies back to the future, so there're no dead men at the house, no proof time travelers were ever there. Except maybe some blood. So when the last two or three guys got stuck in the ditch, they probably gave up and went home."

"So they aren't back there any more? They wouldn't walk back to Big Bear maybe, steal a car, and try to find us?"

"Nope. That would be too hard. I mean, they have an easier way to find us than to just drive around looking for us like regular bad guys would have to do." "What way?"