Lightning

she had never known, her sweet father, Nina Dockweiler, gentle Ruthie, and Danny, for whom she would gladly have sacrificed herself—were manifested again in this new brutality that fate insisted she endure, so she felt not only the shattering grief at Chris's death but felt anew the terrible agony of all the deaths that had come before it. She lay paralyzed and unfeeling but in torment, spiritually lacerated, at last emotionally broken on the hateful wheel of fate, no longer able to be brave, no longer able to hope or care. Her boy was dead. She had failed to save him, and with him all prospects of joy had died. She felt horribly alone in a cold and hostile universe, and all she hoped for now was death, emptiness, infinite nothingness, and at last an end to all loss and grief.
    She saw the gunman approaching her. She said, "Kill me, please kill me, finish me," but her voice was so faint that he probably did not hear her.
    What had been the point of living? What had been the point of enduring all the tragedies that she had endured? Why had she suffered and gone on with life if it was all to end like this? What cruel consciousness lay behind the workings of the universe that it could even conceive of forcing her to struggle through a troubled life that turned out, in the end, to have no apparent meaning or purpose?
    Christopher Robin was dead.
    She felt hot tears spilling down her face, but that was all she could feel physically—that and the hardness of the shale against the right side of her face.
    In a few steps the gunman reached her, stood over her, and kicked her in the side. She knew he kicked her, for she was looking back along her own immobile body and saw his foot land in her ribs, but she felt nothing whatsoever. "Kill me," she murmured.
    She was suddenly terrified that destiny would try too faithfully to reassert the pattern that was meant to be, in which case she might be permitted to live but only in the wheelchair that Stefan had saved her from when he had meddled with the ordained circumstances of her birth. Chris was the child who had never been a part of destiny's plans, and now he had been scrubbed from existence. But she might not be erased, for it had been
her
destiny to live as a cripple. Now she had a vision of her future: alive, paraplegic or quadriplegic, confined to a wheelchair, but trapped in something else far worse—trapped in a life of tragedy, of bitter memories, of endless sorrow, of unendurable longing for her son, her husband, her father, and all the others she had lost. "Oh, God, please, please kill me."
    Standing over her, the gunman smiled and said, "Well, I must be God's messenger." He laughed unpleasantly. "Anyway, I'm answering your prayer."
    Lightning flashed and thunder crashed across the desert.

    Thanks to the calculations performed on the computer, Stefan returned to the precise spot in the desert from which he had departed for 1944, exactly five minutes after he had left. The first thing he saw in the too-bright desert light was Laura's bloody body and the SS gunman standing over it. Then beyond them, he saw Chris.
    The gunman reacted to the thunder and lightning. He began to turn in search of Stefan.
    Stefan pushed the button on his homing belt three times. The air pressure instantly increased; the odor of hot electric wires and ozone filled the day.
    The SS thug saw him, brought up the submachine gun, and opened fire, wide of him at first, then bringing the muzzle around to bear straight on him.
    Before the bullets hit, Stefan popped out of 1989 and back to the institute on the night of March 16, 1944.
    "Shit!" Klietmann said when Krieger slipped into the time stream and away, unhurt.
    Bracher was running over from the Toyota, shouting, "That was him! That was him!"
    "I know it was him," Klietmann said when Bracher arrived. "Who else would it be—Christ on His second coming?"
    "What's he up to?" Bracher said. "What's he doing back there, where's he been, what's this all about?"
    "I don't know," Klietmann said irritably. He looked down at the badly wounded woman and said to her, "All I know is that he saw you and your boy's dead body, and he didn't even make an attempt to kill me for what I'd done to you. He cut and ran to save his own skin. What do you think of your hero now?"
    She only continued to beg for death.
    Stepping back from the woman, Klietmann said, "Bracher, get out of the way."
    Bracher moved, and Klietmann squeezed off a burst of perhaps ten or twenty