He turned his head.

The marauder stood above him.

His armor was quite golden, blinding in the sunlight.

The intruder gazed down at Ben with an expression so absolutely neutral of emotion that it provoked a pulse of surprise. He doesn’t much care that he’s killed me, Ben thought.

The marauder leveled his wrist weapon one more time, now at Ben’s head.

The weapon was unimpressive, built into the curiously insect-jointed machinery of the armor. Ben looked past it. Saw a flicker of a smile.

The marauder fired his weapon.

Most of the time traveler’s head vanished in a steam of bone and tissue.

Billy Gargullo regarded the time traveler’s body with a new and sudden distaste. Here was not an enemy any longer but something to be disposed of. A messy nuisance.

He took the corpse by its good arm and began to drag it into the wooded land behind the house. This was a long, hot process. The air was cool but the sun bore down mercilessly. Billy followed a narrow path some several yards, unnerved by the lushness of this forest. He stopped where the path curved away to the left. To the right there was a clearing; in the clearing was a slatboard woodshed, ivy-choked and abandoned for years.

He probed the door of the shed. One hinge was missing; the door sagged inward at a cockeyed angle. Sunlight played into the damp interior. There were stacks of mildewed newspapers, a few rusty garden tools, a hovering cloud of gnats.

Billy wrestled the time traveler—the lacerated meat of his body—into the sour, earthy shade of the building. His motion caused a tower of newspapers to tumble over the corpse. The papers thumped wetly down and Billy grimaced at the sudden reek of mold.