“We can’t…can’t go back into the past,” she said.
“What?”
“We can’t go back into the past…we–we have to keep going forward if we are to stand any chance of defeating them.”
“What are you saying?” Aiden began, staring at the weird girl. “Who are these people you keep mentioning? Were they the ones who attacked us?”
The trio heard a soft thump outside. Their assailant must have jumped into the hall through the broken window.
“What do we do now?” Aiden whispered, turning to Kimberley with wild fear in his eyes.
“I…I need a pen,” Rachel said and the other two glared at her.
“Yeah, you think this is a joke?” Kimberley snapped, checking the rounds in her clip. She was almost out. More shots were fired at them from outside. “This is crazy!” she whispered and pulled out her pen. “Here! Wonder why I’m doing this! What the hell are you gonna do with a pen right now, huh? Write us out of here?”
Aiden stared at Kimberley. “Do you really believe her?” He was unconvinced. “She’s insane!”
“Hey!” the man outside shouted. “I know you’re in there, Aiden! I just want my package, okay? Seems your cop friends are no use to you right now! Look around you! Wonder who did my job for me?” He started laughing.
“It’s him!” Aiden whispered, cringing back with heightened fear. “He’ll kill us if we don’t give him what he wants!”
“Not doing that,” Kimberley said, shaking her head and picking up the package from where Lyndon had dropped it in the confusion that had earlier ensued. “That’s against the law.”
“Like.…Like when you wanted to kill Rachel?”
“Very funny.…Who said I wanted to do that?” the police sergeant asked him, and when no answer was forthcoming: “What’s the story with this guy, anyway?”
“N-Nothing, really…,” Aiden began, fidgeting with his hands as he spoke. “I-I was just going to give him the coke and he shot a cop and we had to escape in the cop’s car…and…”
“What?” Kimberley turned sharply. “You drove down here?” Another bullet flew past. This one was too close for comfort. “Okay, we gotta leave right now.”
Rachel nodded in agreement. “Here, hold my hands, both of you.” She was quite serious and the others hesitated before obeying. “Not the jacket,” she corrected them. “Touch my skin.”
Her two companions were really not listening.
“I want you to tell the cop with you to throw out her gun, Aiden!” Carl Bain bellowed from outside. “She’s a broad and I don’t like killing broads! I will count to three and if she doesn’t do this before three, all hell will break lose here!”
“You heard him,” an alarmed Aiden told Kimberley. “He means it, Kim!”
Rachel grabbed Kimberley’s free hand and turned to Aiden. “Hold me,” she commanded him.
“What?”
“Hold my hand if you want to leave with us!”
He obeyed her without hesitation, and once the girl made sure that they were all connected via their hands, she scribbled her name on a sheet of the book in her possession.
“You can write on its pages?” Aiden wondered aloud, and when the strange girl failed to catch on: “They’re wet?”
“Yeah…they’re not really…wet.”
“Seriously? Is that not…”
“One!” Mr. Bain shouted outside. “Two!” He peered out from behind the metal cabinet he was protecting himself with and stared at the empty space before the door ahead. There was no gun on the floor. “Three!”
He got up pumping bullets into the office before him as he walked towards the door with his right arm stretched out. His shots were calculated ones leveled at the open door as well as the walls surrounding it. He was equally ready to spring away from the line of fire should his opponent suddenly emerge before him and start shooting.
But nothing happened.
He got to the door and backed one of its walls, breathing hard.
Still, nothing happened.
Scanning the room from his vantage position, he suddenly bolted into it, swerving to both sides of the door in a quick, responsive manner, but there was no one behind the door.
Carl Bain was perplexed. He dropped his outstretched arms.
The room was empty.
Then he saw some clothes on both sides of the door, and a single sheet of paper lying near a police jacket. He stooped to pick it up. It had only one name on it.
Rachel.
Chapter 3: The Strange Girl’s Book
AIDEN freaked out as he got up, clinging to a horizontal pipe for dear life. He began to look around in wild confusion, his eyeballs shaking in fear.
“Wh-Where are we? What the hell happened just now?!” Kimberley cried to his right. She wore a military uniform beneath a bulletproof vest, and an M16A4 rifle with a mounted ACOG sight hung lazily from her right shoulder as she tried to maintain her balance in the knee-deep water they were all trying to make sense of. On seeing her, Aiden started freaking out again. “Will you just shut the hell up?” she demanded in a troubled voice, glaring at him, and he clamped up, but not for long.
“Our.…Our clothes have…have changed?” he tried to point out to the female sergeant and she looked at him quizzically.
Then she realized what he was saying. “HOLY SHIT!” she mouthed, feeling her clothes and the gun. “HOLY SHIT!” she shouted. “What the hell’s going on?”
“No time to explain,” Rachel began, wading forward to Aiden’s left. She sounded very anxious and unsure of herself. “First, we need to move on.”
“What?” Kimberley cried, still touching her clothes for some sign of familiarity.
“We need to move on,” the little girl repeated. “We’ve got to move very far away from the point of entry, and then think of what next to do. The Gray Ones take a longer route, so we’ve got some time. The book brought us here, but we cannot stop here.”
“The…Gray Ones? The.…The book?” a confused Kimberley stammered. “Either you’re mad or I’m mad! How did a book bring us here? I give you my pen and–and…and you write down something and…and what the hell just happened? Are you nuts?”
“No, I’m not nuts,” the little girl said, offended by the question as she furtively looked around her like a caged animal. “What does it mean to be nuts?”
The other two gaped at her.
“Crazy?” Aiden explained. “Insane?”
“No, I am not crazy,” she told him.
Kimberley shook her head in confusion. “Then are you alien or something?”
“What does it mean to be alien?” Rachel asked Aiden.
Again, they gawked at her.
“Not of this world?” Aiden began. “From another planet?”
“No, I am not alien,” the little girl told him, and turned to Kimberley, who was still bewildered by it all. “Look, it’s…it’s the book they want,” she blurted out, visibly on edge as she kept the odd volume to her bosom.
“The…b-book?” Kimberley stammered. “What about it?”
“They’ve been chasing me after Father gave it to me down at the…at the Mine,” the strange girl continued, her eyes wandering off to the tunnel’s mouth some distance away, through which light spilled in from outside. “The book brought us here, but we need…we need to move on, because they are surely coming for it.”
“Are you saying the book is a sought of…transporter?” Aiden asked, wide-eyed.
“Yes,” Rachel agreed.
Kimberley held her forehead. “Okay, you said you’ll take us out of the station,” she began. “Thank God for that, though…we can now figure out what happened and find out which part of town we’ve landed in.” She made to move forward.
“We’re no longer in your town.” Rachel sounded confident despite her current state of mind. “W-We’re no longer wearing the clothes we wore at the station, so the book must have…must have moved us.”
“Wait…you mean we a
re no longer in Portwood?” Kimberley stared at the weird girl. “You must be joking, right?” She looked around her with a puzzled expression. “Can’t recall a tunnel as big as this in Portwood, though,” she admitted.
“The sewage system?” Aiden suggested, and Kimberley shook her head.
“Been down there once,” she revealed. “Looked nothing like this.”
“Maybe it’s some place you haven’t been to?”
“Not possible,” the sergeant said. “I’ve got the town map in my office. There’s no place as big as this.”
As if in reply to her unanswered questions, muddy water gushed out from a side compartment and splashed through the three of them on its way out of the tunnel’s mouth. Kimberley found herself protecting her automatic rifle the best way she could as the stream went through. And then it dawned on her. She’d been protecting the weapon as if she had undergone training for that kind of situation in the past. She couldn’t find any other plausible reason.
“When did I join the Marine Corps?” she asked herself, bewildered. “Look,” she said, shaking her head while pointing at Rachel and the tunnel’s dark interior with her hands. “I don’t know who you are, where you came from or what you did, but we need to go back this very minute! You just undo whatever you did, okay? Who knows what is happening back there right now? Jesus Christ!”
“We–We have left your time, miss,” the little girl revealed a bit awkwardly. “We–We have gone into the future.”
“Are you now saying the book is a sought of…of time machine?” an astonished Aiden asked. Rachel stared at him. “Umm…something that helps you travel through time?”
“Yes,” the little girl agreed.
“Dammit!” Kimberley yelled, shaking her head in disbelief. “Give me that!” She stretched out her hand for the book, but the girl drew back and she almost slipped in her frustration. A second attempt also proved futile, but she snatched the leather-bound volume at the third effort.
“You’re not a Bookbearer!” Rachel cried as she moved to retrieve her book. “I’m the only one who can use it!”
“A Book– what?” Kimberley frustrated her opponent’s efforts with an outstretched arm, but before she could do more, the little girl started jumping up in the muddy water, luckily landing on her left boot and causing her to cry out in pain. She lost her guard and, in the ensuing confusion, lost the book as well. She fruitlessly tried to get it back. The girl stumbled into a tiny compartment on the tunnel’s wall and drew away from reach. Mouth agape, Aiden could only stand and watch.
“We cannot go back,” an alarmed Rachel said when the sergeant started reaching back for her gun. “The book only takes one forward. It cannot take one back, and besides, those things must have left your town – they only want the book.”
“Best we listen to her, Kim,” Aiden interrupted, fearful of where all this was heading. “Seems she knows her way around this…”
“Or she’s the only crazy creature around for miles,” the police officer sniggered, trying to regain her composure. Well, she still agreed with the boy, though. ‘Better not screw things up,’ she thought. If there was a balance, this little girl with the strange book might be the answer to the entire saga. If there was a balance, that is, because she still could not believe what had happened – how the police station had suddenly become a murky tunnel at the blink of an eye. “So, where the hell are we?”
“No time to know that,” Rachel said, her eyes glued to Kimberley’s M16A4 rifle. “Look, we are hopeless if we continue staying here. Father said to keep moving until I can find someone who can defeat them.”
“Them?” the female officer asked an umpteenth time, and stretched out a hand in order to help Rachel out of the small cubicle, but the girl hesitated. “I won’t hurt you or try to take the book,” she declared. “I promise.”
“Just step away and hand the gun to your friend,” Rachel told her. “I don’t trust you.”
Surprisingly, Kimberley obeyed, eyeing the rifle in Aiden’s hands as she stepped away. There appeared to be no point in trying to do things her way now. Until she could comprehend what was happening, that is.
Rachel got out of the compartment and stepped towards the tunnel’s mouth ahead of the others, the book underneath her right arm. She walked like she had a deadline to keep. “Who are they?” Kimberley asked her, beginning to struggle forward like the other two. “Who are these people you keep mentioning?”
“The Gray Ones.”
“The Gray what?”
“Those things that killed your people back at…at your station? I’ve been running from them ever since they killed my father down at the Mine…. They’re also called the Booklords…”
Aiden frowned. “The Book what?”
“The Booklords,” Rachel repeated. “You see, they’ve always been after the book, so…”
“And where was that?” Kimberley cut in. “The killing of your father, I mean…”
“My father died in Rome. The Booklords killed him before the Romans found the Mine.”
“The Italians, you mean.”
“No. The Romans.” The little girl failed to notice that her companions had stopped dead in their tracks. “I escaped with the book before they could get me. Father had already told me what to do some days before the attack.”
“And what do you mean by Romans, Rachel?” Kimberley asked some distance behind her.
“Romans,” she repeated. “The emperor’s soldiers?”
“No freaking way!” Aiden exploded. This was going too far, but judging from what Rachel had already done with the book, believing this new claim shouldn’t be difficult for them to do, right? The girl stopped and turned. “Are you saying you came from the ancient world?” he asked her. “Are you a Roman citizen?”
“No,” she replied, frowning. “I’m a Jew. The Romans enslaved my people and my father said the books will eventually free us if we can defeat the Booklords and perform the ritual with the other book.”
“The other book?” Kimberley frowned. “You mean there are two of these things?”
“Uhuuuuh.”
“But–But how come it’s a book?” Aiden wanted to know, trudging forward again. “I mean, you say you come from ancient Rome, but did they have books in those days? I mean, they weren’t called books back then, right?”
“Aiden, don’t encourage her,” Kimberley rebuked him, eyeing the young girl. “For all we know, she could be a magician’s daughter.”
“Codex?” Rachel clarified, ignoring the police officer. “It used to be a tough, new type of codex, but it’s now a book. It’s been changing form since I left Rome…”
“Right, whatever!” Kimberley moved forward again. She’d heard enough and the sooner they left that freaking tunnel and established a location, the better for them. Whatever tricks the weird girl had up her sleeves would surely be revealed for the phony hoax they were once a location was established.
Of course, the idea of a girl from the past coming into the present was quite unbelievable, but even more so was the suggestion that a mysterious book or time portal made it possible for her. Such things could only be read in fiction. This was why the police sergeant had decided not to take back the book after her struggle with the girl in the tunnel until she was sure of where they were. Rachel could well be a loony who escaped from the mental home down at Bright Street. Jim could have been wrong.
Still, Kimberley found herself wondering why the book’s pages were always wet, and how on earth did they manage to leave the police station?
“Are we in Saudi Arabia?” a puzzled Aiden asked the other two, the seemingly hot and hazy environment they could see beyond the tunnel’s mouth giving him this idea.
“That’s unlikely,” Kimberley said, curiously peering forward. “But this sure looks like…”
“Iraq?”
“That’s ridiculous,” the female military officer snorted.
“But possible,” Rachel said calmly.
Kimberley shivered reluctantly. The strange girl’s countenance always gave her the chills.
They heard gunshots.
“It’s a semiautomatic,” Kimberley noted, squatting at the edge of the tunnel’s mouth and demanding for her M16A4 with an outstretched right arm. Aiden returned the rifle and moved away from the open with Rachel.
The staccato burst had come from their left, below a semi-arid terrain tapering down and away into the dusty distance, beyond which Kimberley could not see a thing. The area before her was also unfamiliar, more of a hilly landscape culminating in a high plateau some distance from the tunnel. She could see that this flat area was walled and had guard towers on all four corners of the rectangular wall. Like a military outpost.
Return fire came from one of the guard towers, and Kimberley spotted a deep trench running towards the plateau some feet from the tunnel’s right. The water gushing from the latter was pouring into this ditch and she pointed it out for the others. “We’ll make for that gutter,” she told them as an exchange of fire ensued between the two parties fighting far away. “It’s our only chance.” Then she realized the two kids were scared out of their wits from the deafening noise of machine gun fire coming from the guard towers and drew back to them. “See, I’m right here,” she assured them, expertly cocking the M16A4. “No one will get hurt. Besides, they don’t know we’re here, yet.”
“How did you know that?” Aiden asked her in a scared voice.
“Because no one’s shooting at us, Dumbo. Now haul ass while I cover. Quietly, though.” Kimberley moved back towards the tunnel’s mouth. Two successive explosions rattled them and the machine guns fell silent. A third one started chattering. “Move it, will you?”
Aiden edged forward, feeling his heart thumping in his ears. Rachel followed behind him, and they stopped behind Kimberley. The noise was so loud that Aiden covered his ears with his hands. “Now what?” he asked their protector.
The White Book Page 3