Day of the Predator tr-2

by Alex Scarrow

  Maddy ducked beneath and into the archway. ‘Yeah, it’s me,’ she replied, in a dull, lifeless voice.

  ‘I thought you’d left us. Maybe gone for good.’

  Maddy’s face creased with a tired smile as she crossed the floor. ‘It did cross my mind.’

  ‘You shouldn’t blame yourself. But look — ’

  ‘Don’t, please.’ Maddy raised a hand to hush her. She slumped down in a swivel chair beside Sal. ‘I screwed up. I was hasty and impatient and killed Liam in the process. I’ve got to find my own way of dealing with that. And it’s not going to help you trying to tell me that I shouldn’t be beating myself up over it.’ She buried her face in her hands, pushing up her glasses and rubbing tired eyes.

  ‘No, listen to me,’ replied Sal, sitting forward. ‘Bob says he might not be dead.’

  Maddy peered through her fingers.

  ‘In fact, Bob’s been analysing the tachyon signature around the window we opened. He’s almost certain that we caused a portal, not an explosion.’

  The screen in front of them flickered to life.

  › Sal is correct. An 87 % probability of a random portal.

  Sal reached out for her arm. ‘He’s alive, Maddy. Do you see? Alive.’ She made a face. ‘Probably.’

  Slowly Maddy lowered her hands from her face. ‘Oh my God. You serious?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Maddy turned towards the screen. ‘Bob? You’re sure of this?’

  › 87 % probability. The decay signature of the particles while our window was open was very similar in structure to the decay of a closing window.

  ‘Can you work out where we sent him?’

  › Where is likely to be nowhere. He was unlikely to have been geographically repositioned.

  ‘When, then? When?’

  › Negative. I have no data.

  The momentary look of hope on Maddy’s face quickly slipped away. ‘So we’ve blasted him into history and we’ve no idea when?’

  › Affirmative.

  She looked at Sal. ‘And what? I’m supposed to feel better about this? This is supposed to be good news?’

  ‘He’s alive, Maddy. That’s something.’

  ‘He’s lost. Lost for good. Might as well be dead. But don’t you see… it’s worse than that. If he and the other support unit, and god knows how many other people, have been blasted back into history, we’ve really messed up. That’s a whole load of contamination right there.’

  ‘So? We’ve been here before. We’ve fixed time before. In fact… look, if they cause a whole load of contamination, that’s a good thing. Right, Bob? That means we’ve got a chance to — ’

  › Negative. Contamination is to be avoided.

  ‘But if they change things and we get time waves here in 2001 it’ll give us some sort of clue where they are.’

  › Affirmative.

  ‘See? We can find them. It’s possible. For example, if Liam’s any time in the last century he could make his way to New York and use the guest book again.’

  Maddy shook her head. ‘Maybe, maybe. But… they could be any time. Any time, Sal. I mean, not just a year ago, or a hundred. But maybe a thousand, ten thousand… a million. God, if he’s just five hundred years back, what document could he scribble in then? There wasn’t a written language here in America in those days. It was just Indians and wilderness.’

  Sal shrugged.

  ‘And if he’s like thousands of years back…’ She turned to look at the screen. ‘That’s possible, right?’

  › Affirmative. Provided there is enough energy invested in a portal there is no limit to how far back in time a subject can be sent.

  ‘If he’s gone back thousands of years, Sal, any attempt to contact us could totally change history. I mean really mess things up. Just look at what happened when those neo-Nazis went back to 1941. They turned the present into a nuclear wasteland!’

  ‘I’m just saying…’

  ‘Saying? Saying what? We’re totally messed up here! God… there could already be a freaking time wave on the way! And then what? New York vanishes? More zombies?’

  Sal reached for her arm again. ‘Maddy… please! You’ve got to stay calm. We need you calm. You’re the strategist. You can figure this out. I know you can.’

  Maddy shook her head. ‘Uhh,’ she muttered. ‘Foster’d figure it out. But me?’

  He’d know exactly what to do. In fact, if the old man had been here, he would have been smart enough not to have caused this problem in the first place.

  But he’s out there, right? He’s out there somewhere in New York. What about the Starbucks? That was a Monday morning at about nine. If I went there tomorrow morning…

  She quickly realized that wouldn’t work. Foster was gone. He wasn’t back in the arch when the field office bubble reset. Foster was gone from their forty-eight-hour world.

  Gone from Monday and Tuesday. Maddy’s jaw suddenly dropped open. What about Wednesday?

  Sal was looking at her. ‘Maddy? You OK?’

  But where would he be on Wednesday, September twelfth? She tried to remember their last conversation in the coffee shop. She’d asked him where he’d go, what he planned to do with the time he had left to live. He’d said he’d always wanted to visit New York, to see the sights. Just like a tourist. Maddy herself had been to New York so many times before her ‘death’, that she no longer thought like a tourist, no longer mentally checked off the places one had to go see.

  ‘Sal, what places would you visit in New York, if this was like a holiday trip?’

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘If you were a tourist? What would you most want to go see?’

  ‘Why are you — ?’

  ‘Just tell me!’

  She scowled in thought for a moment. ‘Well, I suppose the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the Museum of Natural History. Maddy, why? What’re you thinking?’

  Maddy nodded. Yes. The Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty. She could try those first.

  ‘Maddy?’

  She looked up at Sal. ‘I’m going to go find Foster. Bring him back if I can. He’ll know what to do, Sal. Because I sure don’t.’

  ‘But he’s gone for good you said. He wasn’t here when the bubble reset. He’s gone.’

  ‘Gone from our two days, yeah. But not Wednesday… not Thursday, not any other day after that.’

  ‘You’re going to ride forward?’

  Maddy considered that, but the less time travel she did — forward or backwards — the better. Foster had quietly told her timeriding was a bit like smoking; like a single cigarette, it was impossible to say for sure how much a single smoke might take off your life, but if you could ever avoid having a cigarette that could only be a good thing.

  ‘I’ll miss the reset. That’s what I’ll do,’ said Maddy. ‘I’ll go into Wednesday and hang around those places. Who knows? I might get lucky.’

  ‘You can’t do that! You’ll be gone for good like Foster!’

  ‘No… we’ll schedule a return window.’ Maddy pinched her lip in thought. ‘Yeah, we’ll schedule a window at, let’s say, eight in the evening on Wednesday.’ She turned round and pointed towards the shutter door. ‘Just outside the archway in our side street. That’ll bring me right back into our time bubble, back into Monday.’

  ‘But what if a time wave happens while you’re gone?’

  Maddy shrugged, resigned. ‘I can’t see you coping any worse than Maddy “Mess-up” Carter’s done so far, right?’

  ‘Oh shadd-yah! We should be figuring out how to get Liam back, not messing around visiting tourist attractions.’

  ‘Yeah? But think about it — there’s nothing we can do, is there? Just wait around… wait for a time wave to hit us and hope it’ll lead us directly to him? That’s it. That’s pretty much all we can do right now. Just wait. Well, at least while we’re sitting around here doing nothing useful I can try and find Foster, see what else he can suggest.’

  Sal clamped he
r mouth shut.

  ‘Make sense?’

  Sal nodded slowly. ‘OK,’ she replied, fiddling with a pair of plastic bangles on her wrist. ‘Do you want me to come with you? Two pairs of eyes?’

  The screen in front of them flickered.

  › Recommendation: Sal should remain here as the observer.

  Maddy nodded reluctantly. ‘Bob’s right. If we get a time ripple preceding a wave, we need you here as our early heads-up. You should stay here and do your mid-morning walk around Times Square just like always. And, anyway, if the poop hits the fan and for some reason I end up being stuck out in Wednesday it’ll be good to know there’s someone left holding the fort, right?’

  Sal tried a confident nod. ‘Uh… yeah.’

  ‘Right… that’s the plan, then.’ Maddy looked at her watch. It was just gone five in the afternoon. Outside, the sun would be looking ahead for a place to settle beyond the smoke-filled sky of Manhattan, and most of New York was already back at home, the normal day of work abandoned hours ago as they silently watched live news feeds from their dinner tables.

  Tonight, New York was going to be a ghost town, just like it always was on the Tuesday as the clock ticked down towards their field office time bubble resetting itself.

  CHAPTER 26

  65 million years BC, jungle

  Liam wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. ‘Jay-zus, it’s almost as hot as the old lady’s boiler room, so it is.’

  ‘Old lady?’ It was Mr Whitmore.

  Liam thought the man had been far enough behind not to hear his bad-tempered mutterings. He shrugged. ‘Oh, just a… just an old ship I used to work on.’

  He stopped where he was, catching his breath for a moment. The hot humid air felt heavy on his lungs. They stood still for a while, trading ragged breaths and listening to the subdued noises of the jungle around them, the tap of water dripping on waxy leaves, the creak of the tall canopy trees subtly swaying and shifting, the echoing chatter and squawk of some flying creatures far above amid the branches.

  Further back down the trail he’d been hacking out with his improvised machete, he heard the others stumbling towards them: Franklyn, their resident dino expert grinning at the prehistoric jungle around him like a kid in a candy store; Lam behind him, squinting up at the bright lances of sunlight piercing down through the cathedral-like vaulted roof of arched branches and thick leaves, and Jonah Middleton whistling something tuneless as he stumbled clumsily after them. The rest of the group were back on their ‘island’ fixing a counterweight to the bridge so it could be raised and constructing a camp under Becks’s supervision.

  Two days and nights they’d been here already and both nights, like clockwork, rain had come down in a torrential downpour, soaking them all and making sleep impossible. Tonight hopefully, with Becks hard at work — a one-man construction team, they’d at least have shelters to huddle beneath.

  ‘You used to work on a ship?’ said Whitmore, his breath wheezing past each word. ‘Was that before you became… what did you say you were — some sort of time-travelling secret agent?’

  ‘I didn’t really say it like that, Mr Whitmore. Did I?’

  He scratched his beard. ‘I think that’s exactly what you said.’

  ‘Oh well, even though that does sound a little barmy, that pretty much describes me and Becks, so it does.’

  Whitmore shook his head. ‘I’m still trying to get my head round this being real, you know? It’s just — ’

  Liam grinned. ‘Oh, it’ll mess with your head all right. That’s for sure.’

  ‘You’re really from the future?’

  ‘Well, actually, not precisely the future as it happens.’

  Whitmore looked confused by that.

  Liam wondered if he should really say any more. Becks was right in that the more information they handed out to these people the greater the potential risk to blowing the agency’s anonymity. But he also figured what the heck… they were here and the future was sixty-five million years away.

  Might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.

  ‘I was born in Cork, in Ireland in 1896, if you must know. And I should’ve died in 1912.’ He looked at Whitmore and his grin spread even wider. ‘Aboard a ship you might just have heard a little something about… the Titanic.’

  The man’s eyes widened. Lam, Franklyn and Jonah joined them then, all five of them filling the quiet jungle with their rasping breath.

  ‘What’s up?’ said Lam, noticing the goggle-eyed expression on Whitmore’s face.

  ‘That’s… surely… that’s just impossible!’ blustered Whitmore.

  ‘Well now,’ replied Liam, looking around at the Cretaceous foliage, ‘you’d think all of this little pickle we’re in would be impossible, right? I mean… us lot stranded in dinosaur times?’

  Whitmore ran a hand through his thinning salt and pepper hair. ‘But the Titanic… you were actually on the Titanic?’

  ‘Junior steward, deck E, so I was.’

  Jonah pushed his frizzy fringe out of eyes that were filling his face. ‘No… way… dude!’

  Lam wiped some sweat from his brow. ‘This is just getting weirder and weirder.’

  ‘I was recruited, see. The agency plucked me moments from death just as the ship’s spine snapped and apparently both halves went sliding under. Made no difference to time, do you see? It made no difference to history whether my bones ended up at the bottom of the Atlantic with everyone else’s or not. That’s how the agency recruits… poor fools like me who’ll never be missed.’

  ‘My God,’ whispered Whitmore. ‘That’s really quite incredible.’

  ‘What about the other one?’ asked Franklyn.

  Jonah nodded appreciatively. ‘Yeah, your foxy goth girlfriend.’

  Liam assumed he was referring to the support unit. ‘Becks? No… she’s, uh… she’s certainly not my girlfriend.’

  ‘Whatever,’ said Franklyn. ‘Where does she come from?’

  Lam shook his head. ‘Maybe we should be asking when does she come from?’

  Franklyn’s face stiffened at being corrected. ‘Yes… when.’

  Liam decided a small white lie was better right now. Telling them she was some kind of a robot killing machine probably wasn’t the best thing to be telling them. The last thing their little group needed was a reason not to trust Becks. They all needed each other, and they certainly needed her help.

  ‘Oh, Becks is from the future. 2050-something or other. I guess that’s why she talks a little funny every now and then.’

  ‘She is kind of weird,’ said Franklyn. ‘Like Spock… or something.’

  ‘So, Liam, since it looks like you’re the only one who understands what’s happened here,’ said Whitmore, ‘it seems we’re all going to have to rely on you to get us home. I presume you have some sort of a plan of action? You know… beyond merely exploring our immediate surroundings.’

  A plan? The closest thing to doing any ‘planning’ so far had been figuring out how he’d use the rubbish machete in his hand if a dinosaur was to suddenly emerge from the undergrowth ahead.

  ‘The plan?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Whitmore, ‘I mean… I presume there’s a way out of this mess for us, isn’t there?’

  Liam could see the other three were staring expectantly at him. ‘Well, uh… well, one thing’s for sure, gentlemen. We need to stay right where we are, on that island.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it’s the exact same place that we were.’

  Joseph Lam nodded. ‘The same geo-coordinates as the lab, right?’

  ‘That’s right. We haven’t moved an inch in position… just in time. If we happened to up sticks and move camp somewhere else, it would make it even harder for someone to find us. So we’re best staying put right where we are.’

  Whitmore dabbed at his damp face with the cuff of his shirt. ‘This agency you work for… are they like a government agency? Like the CIA? Like the FBI? Something like that?
’

  Liam hadn’t heard of either of those. So he decided to do what he did best: bluff. ‘Sure, they’re just like them fellas, Mr Whitmore, but you know… uhh… much bigger and better, and, of course, from the future.’

  ‘And they’re going to come for us, right? They’re going to get us all out of here, aren’t they?’

  Liam offered him a stern, confident nod. ‘Sure they are. We’ve just got to hold on here. It’ll take them a little time to find us… but they will. I assure you, they will.’

  They looked at each other uncertainly, until the scraggly beard beneath Whitmore’s stubby round nose stretched with a smile. ‘Well, all right, then. I’m sure between us we’ve got enough know-how to make do for a few days.’

  His smile spread to the others.

  ‘I’d like to see at least one dinosaur first, though,’ said Franklyn. ‘Be real lame not to.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Jonah, pulling out a mobile phone from his pocket. ‘That would be, like, awesome. You know? I could stick it up on YouTube. Whoa! No!’ He pushed his frizzy mop of hair aside. ‘Better than that, dude… do it as a pay-per-download. I could make, like, millions out of this…’

  Whitmore shook his head. ‘What is it with you kids these days?’

  ‘Opportunity,’ replied Jonah. ‘That’s what it is, my man… a golden freakin’ money-makin’ opportunity.’

  Whitmore sighed.

  CHAPTER 27

  65 million years BC, jungle

  Becks stood to one side dispassionately observing the work of the others as they hacked at the slim, straight trunks of the smaller trees they’d already felled, stripping branches from their sides to produce usable lightweight logs for construction.

  She had them divided into two groups. One doing this job, the other group lashing the logs together with lengths of twisted vine to form wigwam-shaped frames. On top of these they could layer the big waxy leaves that drooped from the canopy trees. A few layers of those would give them a covering that would almost be waterproof.

  That had been Liam’s instruction. Make shelters. But her cool grey eyes panned uneasily across the clearing, observing the area of jungle that had been hacked away, the disturbed jungle floor where the smaller trees had been uprooted. Her eyes picked out the slashes of machete blows on other bigger trees that had proven too difficult to fell or uproot and the compressed tracks of footprints on the ground — the distinct oval of signatures of a human presence.