TimeRiders

by Alex Scarrow

  Not enough to stop him, though. In an instant he was upon the one who’d fired, his blade a lethal flash of quicksilver death across the man’s throat.

  Another short burst from someone else caught Bob from behind and once more his uniform tunic danced, tattered, ripped and bloody.

  Liam fired several rapid-fire rounds at the dark shape. It buckled and fell to the snow.

  Bob leaped forward at another man, his hand twisting the blade into him, but he was slowing down now. Still a deadly force, but no longer with the devastating whip-tail speed of a lethal predator. Instead he had the lumbering energy of a cornered and exhausted mammoth, his flesh-and-blood body weakened by too many wounds to recover from.

  Another short, silenced burst of gunfire, sounding like a walking stick dragged across a wooden picket fence. Bob staggered back heavily.

  ‘Scheiβe!! Töten Sie ihn!’

  Another rattle of suppressed fire.

  Bob collapsed to his knees, wavered for a moment, before falling face forward into the snow.

  A torch snapped on to Liam. Caught in its glare, he instantly tossed the gun aside and raised his hands. ‘Don’t shoot! P-please!’

  The torch panned across his face, blinding him. ‘On your knees!’

  Liam dropped down into the snow.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’

  ‘I’m… my name’s Liam.’

  ‘Who sent you?’

  There was no official name for the agency. None that Foster had been prepared to tell him anyway. ‘I’m… I’m an agent f-from the future.’

  The torch beam dropped down, out of his face, and Liam could now see from the glow that only four of them remained standing. The man holding the torch spoke again.

  ‘From the future? So soon?’ said Kramer. There was bitterness in his voice. Bitter and resentful that his bid to change history had already, after mere minutes, been intercepted.

  Liam knew for certain his life was now going to be measured in minutes… if not mere seconds.

  ‘But this is impossible. Waldstein’s was the only machine,’ snapped Kramer.

  You have to keep him talking, Liam. Keep him talking.

  ‘No, Kramer. You’re wrong. The people I work for have machines. We’re here to protect history.’

  Kramer took a step towards him. ‘But why?’ He shook his head angrily. ‘Why? The world we’ve come from… it’s dying. We killed it with our pollution, we over-populated it, sucked it dry of resources, wiped out almost every other species.’ He squatted down in front of Liam. ‘Why would anyone want to preserve that kind of future?’

  Liam looked up at him. He realized from the haunted expression on Kramer’s face that perhaps he wasn’t driven by greed or an insatiable thirst for power, but perhaps by better intentions. ‘Why would anyone want to protect that?’ he asked again.

  ‘I… I’ve seen the future you made,’ uttered Liam, ‘with my own eyes. It… it’s a world of ashes and… and ruins.’

  Kramer’s eyes narrowed. ‘What?’

  ‘You will end up doing something terrible. And it will destroy the world… leaving nothing. The future may be bad. But what you do makes it far worse.’

  One of the other three men stepped forward and stood beside Kramer. ‘We came back here to make a better world,’ he said adamantly. ‘Not to destroy it.’

  It was the heavily accented man. The one called Karl.

  Liam shook his head. ‘But somehow… somehow that’s exactly what you will end up doing. Something will go wrong. Something you do will lead to a…’

  What was it Foster said?

  ‘… a… a nuclear war. And there’ll be nothing left.’ Liam looked from one of them to the other. ‘God help me, I’ve seen what’s left of humanity. Pitiful ghouls… living on each other’s flesh.’

  Karl’s eyes widened. For a moment he looked lost, confused.

  ‘If there is a Hell, if there really is… then I’ve seen it,’ said Liam. ‘And it will be your actions that create it.’

  ‘Paul?’ Karl turned to Kramer. ‘Paul? Could this be true?’

  Kramer shook his head, his eyes searching for truth in Liam’s face.

  In the distance, they heard a siren begin to wail. Liam’s unsilenced gunshots had clearly alerted the SS guards. The entire regiment would be roused and combing the woods soon.

  ‘You say you have seen this yourself?’ asked Kramer.

  Liam nodded. ‘And I think I’d rather die here… than go back to that.’

  Clouds of vapour filled the space between them, caught like fleeting pale ghosts in the beam of torchlight.

  ‘Paul,’ said Karl, ‘this must be a lie.’

  Kramer’s face was shrouded with conflicting thoughts, conflicting emotions. In the distance they could hear the barking of dogs over the mournful wailing of the sirens. Voices raised and growing closer.

  Kramer shook his head. Something in the expression on his face, the glint of his haunted eyes, told Liam that deep inside his troubled mind a decision was being made.

  But what it was, he’d never know.

  A burst of silenced gunfire ripped through the stillness. Kramer’s Arctic-camouflage jacket spat blood and then he flopped to the ground.

  Karl and the other two men turned round to open fire on Bob. The support unit was splayed on his back, holding one of their machine guns loosely in its left hand. Most of their unaimed shots sent divots of dry snow into the air. But all of Bob’s shots hit home, dropping each of the three men with surgical precision.

  ‘Bob!’ gasped Liam, scrambling across the ground wet with blood, snow stained dark as night.

  ‘Bob… I thought you were dead.’

  Up close he could see the support unit had taken too many chest and stomach wounds to possibly survive.

  ‘Information…’ He gurgled blood out of the side of his mouth.

  ‘No… shhhh, Bob,’ whispered Liam, cradling the support unit’s head in his lap. His coarse dark hair, grown over the last six months and long enough to lose a fist in, was matted and wet from a head wound.

  Bob’s grey eyes blinked and fluttered. He was doing some housekeeping on his hard drive – collating files, compressing data.

  ‘Bob?’

  His eyes cleared and locked on Liam. ‘Mission priority one: must destroy the weapons… advanced weapons technology.’

  ‘Yes… yes, of course.’

  ‘Gather the weapons together… destroy them with a grenade,’ he said, pointing towards an equipment satchel lying on the snow nearby. ‘Grenades are in that bag. Use one… set off the others.’

  Liam nodded and realized there were warm tears running down his cheeks. Realized he was shedding tears for a broken machine.

  ‘Bob… I –’

  ‘You must be quiet and listen!’

  He could hear voices now, dozens of them calling out to each other, and baying dogs eager to be let off the leash. In the distance, torches flickered faintly through the woods. Floodlights up on the hill, where Hitler’s Berghof was located, sent beams into the sky.

  The entire hillside seemed to be alive with activity.

  ‘Mission priority two: you must leave, Liam O’Connor. You must not be captured alive. Hide, await the return window or back-up window. You must leave immediately.’

  ‘Just help me get you up! I’ll not leave you here to –’

  ‘Negative. Self-termination must be activated.’

  ‘No! Don’t you do that, Bob! I mean it, don’t you do it!’

  Bob gurgled more blood. ‘Mission priority three: support unit cannot fall into the hands of –’

  ‘No! That’s crazy, we can get you out of here… if you’ll just get off your backside, you big lump!’

  ‘Negative. You must leave now. You should leave now.’

  ‘Bob… will you shut your mouth for just a second?’

  ‘Leave now! Leave Now!’

  ‘Bob! Please… You don’t need to terminate! I’ll do it! I’ll do it!’
/>   He looked around the bloodstained snow and saw what he was after.

  CHAPTER 89

  2001, New York

  Still. Quiet… but for the rustling of a lifeless breeze across the barren landscape. Tall spires of rusted metal and crumbling concrete stand over the lost remnants of a place once called Times Square.

  The creak of a long-faded sign swinging from a lamp post. The squeak and bang of a window shutter somewhere, caught and played with by the haunting wind.

  A sickly yellow sun behind scudding brown irradiated clouds casts pallid beams down on to ashes and dust. From the darkness inside gutted and scorched buildings, milky eyes look out hungrily for some other meagre supply of food… a rat, a dog – if any are left – perhaps another of its kind.

  Not a dying world, but a dead world… just waiting for these last pitiful skeletal survivors of mankind to realize the time has come for them to die.

  But, gently at first, the breeze freshens.

  That loose window shutter across the square bangs ever more heavily; small clouds of dust whip along the ground. The wheel on a rusted and upended pram turns slowly with a click-click-click of bearings.

  Then, faintly – blink and you’d miss it – the slightest shimmer. Like the ripple across the hot tarmac of a motorway on a midsummer’s day, the flicker of hot air above a bonfire.

  A shimmer, flickering, undulating… changing.

  The tallest dead spire overlooking Times Square now has windows, unbroken. As do the other buildings, one after the other. One can see clear roads and faint ghostly apparitions moving along them. Clearer now… not ghostly but solid. Cars, buses, trams… people.

  The sky has changed from an unhealthy poisoned brown to a wet-Tuesday grey and the persistent drizzle of mean-spirited rain.

  Tall crimson-coloured banners with the emblem of a snake eating its tail suddenly adorn every lamp post. Placards appear above shop entrances, featuring the face of a leader who promises to unite the world under his rule. Soldiers in grey and black uniforms and tall leather boots patrol soulless ordered streets full of soberly dressed civilians quietly, obediently, turning up for work.

  This at least is life. Not a dead world any more.

  The breeze freshens again.

  The banners flutter, as if sensing something more is on its way.

  Another shimmer.

  Another change is coming, rippling forward through months, years, decades of time as events realign, destinies change and possibilities find correct versions of themselves.

  The wet grey sky slowly clears, the rain stops.

  The pennants and banners vanish with a whisper, the placards disappear.

  With a final flourish and twist of reality, Times Square becomes noisy, garish, busy, impatient, filled with rude people on mobile phones organizing their day ahead, jostling each other for pavement space, queuing for breakfast bagels and Starbucks coffee.

  A giant green ogre called Shrek peers out from a poster.

  A homeless man pushing a shopping trolley full of cardboard boxes and topped with a tarpaulin takes a moment to sit down on a bench and watch the busy world go by.

  A lovely blue sky. Unseasonably warm sun for this time of year… and the distant drone of an approaching plane on the far horizon.

  CHAPTER 90

  2001, New York

  Maddy lay on her cot in the dark. Opposite, she could hear Foster’s laboured breathing, the wheezy rattle of an unwell man.

  All was quiet in the archway save for the drip of water from the brick ceiling somewhere out in the darkness. The generator had finally stopped thudding. She had lost track of how long that had been now.

  Hours… a dozen? More?

  No power, no light. They’d used their last candle as they’d sat either side of the table and discussed their options should Liam and Bob fail. Not many options, if truth be told. The choices available to them boiled down to just one, really.

  When to do it… when to use the last two rounds in the shotgun.

  When they’d both be ready to admit that all was lost.

  She’d not been foolish enough to let herself think this was actually going to work. That some foggily remembered date from an autobiography that should never have been written would lead Liam and Bob right to the cause of all this? No.

  That was the kind of unlikely happy ending that belonged on some cheesy TV show or some rubbish FX-laden blockbuster movie, the nick-of-time last-minute reprieve for the Good Guys that you always knew was going to happen right from the moment the opening credits rolled.

  Maddy’s face was buried in the pillow when the ceiling lights in the field office winked silently on. Half asleep, it wasn’t until her ears registered the soft hum of the machinery that maintained the time bubble quietly initializing itself that she stirred and turned her face to one side.

  It took another long moment for her to realize the power had come back on. That the archway was bathed in a flickering clinical light.

  Is this for real? Or am I dreaming?

  She sat up quickly on her cot, almost banging her head against the rough springs of the bunk above. And smiled.

  It’s not a dream.

  ‘Foster!’

  She reached across and shook his shoulder. ‘Foster!’

  His rustling breath caught and with a moan of painful discomfort he roused and opened dark, sallow eyes. ‘Whuh… what is it, Madelaine?’

  She pointed up at the bulb in the wire cage above them, glowing brightly. ‘Foster, I think they did it.’

  Several minutes later they were standing outside in their rubbish-strewn backstreet savouring the return of a familiar world. A lovely sunny day in September, the rumble of traffic over the Williamsburg Bridge above them, the honk of impatient horns, the distant wail of a police siren.

  Life. Impatient life.

  ‘I’ve never seen anything so beautiful,’ cried Maddy, her cheeks unashamedly wet.

  ‘Nor I,’ replied Foster.

  She stretched an arm round his sloped shoulders and planted a kiss on a cheek as dry and wrinkled as parchment.

  ‘We made it,’ she whispered.

  Foster smiled. ‘Then let’s bring them back home, shall we?’

  ∗

  The lights in the archway flickered momentarily as a result of the drain of power. The hum of the displacement machinery rose in pitch and then, all of a sudden, there it was. Maddy could see the shimmering outline of the window in the middle of the floor, appearing in exactly the same place it had when they’d sent both of them back to 1941.

  Within the window she could see a faint rippling image, like a reflection in a disturbed pool of water – it looked to her like a world of trees and snow. Then into view the wavering silhouette of something dark merged into the puddle-like image. Unmistakably a human figure. Someone coming to them.

  A moment later… Liam stepped alone on to the floor of the arch.

  ‘Liam!’ screamed Maddy with initial delight. Then she saw that his hands and arms were slick with wet and drying blood, his uniform, his neck, his face, pale like a ghost, were spattered with dark droplets.

  ‘Oh my God… what happened? Liam, are you OK?’

  He turned to look at her, his mouth struggling to reply, searching for words.

  Foster stepped forward. ‘Liam, lad… are you all right?’

  He looked at the old man, frowning, struggling to take things in, blinking back the brightness from the strip lights above him. Finally he nodded as he opened the palm of one hand and held out something metallic. It was the size of a small mobile phone and coated with clots of drying blood.

  ‘I… managed to…’ He took a breath and tried again. ‘Well, anyway… Here’s Bob.’

  Foster reached for the object, taking it from him gently. ‘You did well, Liam,’ he replied softly, knowing full well the grisly deed that Liam had just carried out. ‘That’s no easy thing to do. Come sit down, lad,’ he added, leading him over to the table and chairs.

&nb
sp; ‘Did… did we do it?’ Liam asked.

  Maddy grinned and hugged him tightly in answer to his question.

  ‘Yes, Liam,’ replied Foster, ‘you did it.’

  CHAPTER 91

  2001, New York

  A couple of hours later, after Liam had given a more detailed account of his time in the past, he was fast asleep on one of the cots. His snoring seemed to reverberate through the arch even more noisily than the generator had.

  Foster worked over at the computer desk. Having scrubbed Bob’s neural processor clean of brain tissue and blood, he connected it up to the computer system and began downloading the entire content of its hard drive.

  ‘Bob’s AI is in there amongst that,’ he said, nodding towards the loading bar slowly creeping across the screen.

  ‘That’s a lot of data uploading there,’ said Maddy.

  ‘Well, he was away for nearly six months; all the time, his eyes and ears recording everything that was going on.’

  ‘So, what’s the deal with Bob? Is his AI intact?’

  Foster shrugged. ‘I’m no computer expert. So I don’t know how it works. But the code that makes up Bob’s AI will merge with the computer system’s.’ He tapped the keyboard. ‘You’ll be able to communicate with him in there.’

  ‘Right. Six months of learning… I guess that AI code’s a lot smarter than the idiot that plopped out of the birthing tube.’

  Foster chuckled. ‘Oh yes.’

  She looked at him. ‘How are we going to grow ourselves another support unit? Those tubes are smashed, the gunk they were growing in has all gone off –’

  He raised a hand. ‘There’s going to be a lot of work to do to get this field office online again.’

  ‘I’ll help you with that… You look tired.’ If she was being honest, she would have said he looked ready to keel over and die.

  ‘New clone embryos and growing solution. The generator needs replacing. The walls fixed up. You need to replenish our supplies,’ he added.

  ‘A new generator. That’s going to cost money.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Foster, ‘just go find a hardware store and buy another.’