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56.
Tedda awoke in the darkness, in the ill-smelling trainman's cab atop a ruined rail car in the Green Station. What woke her was the sound of rats scurrying over her legs and trying to get at the contents of her rucksack. She jumped up screaming and flailing. The rats were persistent, and she kicked a few to death, but most exited from the compartment by the same hole by which they'd entered, in one continuously flowing mass of gray fur and long pink tails. "Argh!" Tedda growled disgustedly after them.
As she stood catching her breath, she looked through the grimy window at a dot of motion far below. Wiping dust away with a gloved hand, she spotted a man walking on the street below the station. She caught brief glimpses of him as he passed through her field of vision, which was obstructed by mud blots outside, frozen wiper blades, dead tree branches, and metallic girders. Nonetheless, he was unmistakable. It was Alton-Edgar Hedrock, though he walked like a homeless person. There was a dispirited slouch in his walk, and his clothes were in rags. He wore a dirty watch cap, an old coat, and torn boots. He carried his possessions in a slender sack thrown over one shoulder. Her heart went out to him, knowing she could make it all better for him, even if only for a day.
She yelled, but he could not hear her. Already he was passing out of sight. She pounded on the window, to no avail. She considered pulling out her gun and shooting the window out, but that might scare him off, waste ammo, and get her hurt by shattered glass. She looked down the sloping floor of the car outside, thinking it would take her a long time to get down there to chase after him. What other choice was there?
Impulsively, she reached up and pulled the motorman's signal cord. A long, loud braying sound filled the air. It died after a minute, as the battery played out its last stores of energy. Tedda clambered quickly down through the coach. She slipped and fell, but kept on going, bruising her hand. Holding the hand within the other, she stumbled out on the dusty platform and ran to the stairs. Down she flew, taking two and three steps at a time, so that her boots clattered on the metal. She forgot about the ache in her hand and clutched the railing on both sides as she leveraged herself to take half a dozen steps at a time.
At the bottom of the stairs, he waited for her. He had a hopeless look about him. His eyes looked beaten, and he looked merely curious. Perhaps nobody cared about a stranger in the world now, and he was curious to see why anyone would signal to him.
"Tedda," he said dully, and then something awoke in his eyes.
"Edgar!"
"Hey," he said, breaking into a sunny grin.
She flew into his arms.
They embraced and kissed passionately for two or three minutes. They groaned at the pleasure of holding each other. She felt the comfort bathing her like a warm liquid that filled her soul. "I didn't think I would see you again," she said.
"I didn't exactly give up hope," he said, flapping his arms hopelessly once and looking around, "but you see how it is down here. I take it your source is still alive."
"Yes. Yours isn't."
"I know, and I feel kind of empty sometimes, thinking I'm about to break apart and vanish."
She shook her head. "It's more complex than that. When Hedrock died, you were near him, and you became Hedrock. That's got to be it. Somehow, the laws of this process are more complicated than we thought. Amy has promised to stop the femtoworlds and rules. The war is over."
"Really. Hey, that's great. Meanwhile, this place looks like it's in the last stages of a world war."
"There is some hope," she said.
"Great. I'll believe it when I see it. Look here. It's very sad." He put his arm around her and led her across the street. They walked down several criss-crossing side streets, and to the edge of the city center.
"What's that?" Tedda said curiously. Ahead was a row of flashing amber warning lights atop red and white striped metal sawhorses. Several police cars were parked askew, but they looked abandoned. Their lights had stopped twirling.
"It's the end of the world," he said. "See down there? It's all frozen down there. Time has stopped moving forward. Don't get too close or it will suck you in. I think it's moving toward us slowly."
She walked beyond the flashing lights and parked police cars. Down the street, she saw a strange sight. The brighter evening light of a better time was trapped as if in an ice cube. She saw distant neon, bright billboards, even an airplane with flying lights ablaze but trapped in midair on a descent path. Buses, cars, trucks—all were frozen exactly as dying time had trapped them. She could make out the red taillights on a bus pulling out from the curb. She could make out the leaning stature of a child holding his mother's hand while peering up the street with a worried face. She also could see people running anxiously in her direction as if trying to escape a doom they must have begun to feel coming, but couldn't escape. They were forever frozen with their legs running and their arms reaching out.
Several cars and a fire engine appeared to be trapped half in, half out of the edge of that phenomenon. The driver of the fire engine was frozen in place as he had tried to back his vehicle away from the encroaching barrier, while the rear of the fire engine was still in the realm of moving time. Apparently this had all happened days or weeks ago, and the fire engine had been pushed along as the growing time-death ate its way through the universe.
"Better come with me," Hedrock said. "I know of a little hideout where we can be comfortable." He didn't finish, but she understood: until the end.
They held each other close, and kissed often, as they wandered back into the central city. He took her through a pile of rubble, behind a loose door he lifted away from a brick wall, and into a hideout he had fashioned. In rubble of a collapsed building, there was one room that had survived because a mess of steel girders had formed an A-frame overhead. "It's solid," he assured her. "What have we got to lose?" He grinned.
She found running water at a former kitchen sink. There was a double hotel bed with sheets still on it. There might be rats all around, and a good tremor might bring the whole thing down on them, but for the moment it was all they had. They fell upon the bed and passionately made love, until she passed out from sheer exhaustion, still clinging to him.
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