Eversman heard himself making a low mewling sound, doglike. He still had the .45, but it hung low at his side. He turned his head and scanned the trees, and then he felt an impact like a nightstick smashing into his right forearm. He felt the bone snap, and a split second later he heard the gunshot from the woods.
He looked down. He had dropped the .45 in the dirt. He was bleeding all over it from the wound in his arm. By the time he looked back up, Dryden was there, rushing in on him, shouting for him to get down flat, arms and legs out.
Dryden didn’t appear to have suffered any gunshot wound. He looked just fine. He had his Beretta in one hand and some kind of bunched-up rag in the other.
Eversman dropped to his knees, then went flat, hands outstretched. Dryden dropped the rag in the dirt, and Eversman saw what it was: somebody’s shirt, saturated with blood, but twisted now like a wrung-out washcloth.
He felt Dryden drop onto him, ramming a knee into his lower back. Felt his arms wrenched painfully behind him. Then Dryden grabbed the bloody shirt again, and Eversman heard him tear off one of its sleeves. A moment later the length of cloth was looping around his wrists in a figure eight, over and over, before Dryden tied it off tight.
“You could have just gotten away,” Eversman said.
“I didn’t want to get away,” Dryden said. “I wanted to talk to you.”
For another moment he left Eversman lying there while he searched the pockets of the dead men nearby. On the third man in the line, he found the keys to the other Suburban, the one that was parked at the southeast edge of the forest.
Dryden came back to Eversman. He took the silenced .45 from where it had fallen, and tucked it into his own rear waistband. Then he reached down, grabbed Eversman by the upper arm, and hauled him to his feet.
“Let’s go,” he said, and stiff-armed Eversman forward, off the road and back into the deep shadows of the forest.
CHAPTER FIFTY
“You would have killed all three of us,” Dryden said. “Me and Claire and Marnie.”
They were just into the woods, moving east, roughly paralleling the curved gravel road fifty yards south of them.
“That’s how it would have gone,” Dryden said, “if I hadn’t known better. You would have driven us out to some place like these farm fields and shot us. Or maybe you would have done it right inside the SUV. Is that what the silencer was for?”
Eversman didn’t answer.
Dryden kept them moving forward, toward the other SUV on the far side of the woods. He had his left hand clenched around a fistful of Eversman’s shirt in back, his elbow locked, propelling the guy step by step.
“I would have lived through it,” Dryden said. “One way or another. I would have survived and even gotten away.”
“Confident thing to say,” Eversman said.
“No. It’s just true. I already know it.”
“How would you know a thing like that?”
For a second Dryden didn’t answer. He forced Eversman forward over a knee-high fallen trunk.
Dryden said, “Marnie asked me yesterday if I would ever change the past. Would I change it if something happened that I wanted to undo? Something I couldn’t live with.”
“We never change the past,” Eversman said. “It’s too much of an unknown. We can’t even imagine what it would feel like from our point of view.”
“That scares you guys,” Dryden said.
“It should scare anyone. It should scare you.”
“It does,” Dryden said. “And when Marnie asked me whether I could do it, I said I didn’t know. But now I do, and it turns out the answer is yes. If something bad enough happened, I would change the past to fix it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’ve got a buddy who oversees missing child alerts that go out on the airwaves, and emergency broadcast messages.”
Eversman said nothing.
“I got a message from him last night,” Dryden said. “Three or four in the morning. I was lying on the floor in Marnie’s room, and we had the machine on, and I heard an emergency test for the townships of Jasper and Willis. But those aren’t townships. They add up to a person’s name.”
“Jasper Willis? Am I supposed to know who that is?”
Dryden shook his head. “He’s nobody. The name is a shorthand code we used in my unit, way back. We’d send it to someone as a text message, like, ‘I heard Jasper Willis got transferred stateside.’ All that mattered was the name itself, and what it meant. Which was ‘Don’t trust your contact. You’re about to get screwed.’”
Eversman stayed quiet. From Dryden’s position, behind and to the right, he could only see the man’s face in profile, but it was enough to see his expression go slack.