by Jason Ayres
It was clearly his flat, as many of his books and other long-standing possessions were there. It was odd thinking that he had apparently lived in an entirely different home for years.
“The décor’s certainly a lot different from your other place,” remarked Hannah.
The arty prints with which Alice had adorned the walls were gone, along with every other stamp she had ever put on the place. The walls were painted a pale cream white, and the furniture was minimal. He now had a battered, old, black leather sofa in place of the softer furnishings that Alice had preferred.
“Thankfully the tachyometers were both here, mine and the one you had,” said Josh. “It seems I still developed them even without Alice’s help.”
“That’s a relief,” said Peter. “We’d have been sunk without them.”
“It’s bloody weird getting used to all these changes when the rest of the world’s oblivious to them,” said Josh. “A cleaning lady turned up this morning. I’d never clapped eyes on her in my life, but she certainly knew me alright. She was chatting away as if she had known me for years.”
“Which she probably has,” said Peter.
“That’s why Vanessa’s so dangerous and has to be stopped,” said Hannah. “She could change the entire history of the world and only we few would even know she had done it.”
“Right, well, let’s get started,” said Josh, taking them through to his kitchen and opening the cupboard under the sink where he had stowed the tachyometers.
“Are these safe here?” asked Peter.
“Is anything safe anywhere, anymore?” replied Josh.
“Fair point,” he replied.
Over the next ten minutes, he explained the working of the tachyometer to Hannah, who had never operated one before. Then they conducted a quick test, sending Hannah back a few minutes in time and that completed her brief training. They couldn’t afford to delay any longer.
After they had bid Josh farewell, Hannah and Peter headed for Oxford station where they were able to take a short hop on the Hyperloop down to Heathrow, where the state-of-the-art new Ultraloop International Terminal had been built over the site of the now defunct third runway.
What a white elephant that third runway had turned out to be, thought Peter. Just like HS2, by the time it had been completed, technology had rendered it obsolete.
Peter had used the Hyperloop before, but never the Ultraloop, which had been designed for high-speed, long-distance, international travel. Capable of speeds of up to 6,000mph, it was now possible to travel halfway around the planet in just two hours.
Peter and Hannah found that the sensation of being enclosed in the Ultraloop tube felt no different to that of the Hyperloop. There was no feeling that they were even moving, just as a person standing still on Planet Earth has no concept that the planet is hurtling through space at thousands of miles per hour.
Hannah was following Josh’s advice to travel directly to the place and time where Alice had last been seen before taking her journey back into time.
Peter had wanted to take the spare tachyometer along so that he could travel back to help her if she ran into trouble, but Josh remained opposed to this. He couldn’t risk losing the last tachyometer as, if Hannah failed, it could be his last chance.
Locating the garage where Alice had disappeared hadn’t been difficult, using the advanced GPS of the 2050s. This could pinpoint any location on Earth within a fraction of a millimetre and provide live, high-definition pictures from the incredibly powerful cameras on satellites that were constantly scanning every inch of the planet’s surface.
The building was no longer a petrol station, but an automated charging point for the older models of electric cars that couldn’t generate all of their own energy from renewable sources.
Where the pumps had once stood were pairs of saucer-shaped scanners, similar to the old satellite dishes people used to put on the sides of their houses. To charge a car, it just needed to be paused between these dishes for less than two minutes while the electricity flowed wirelessly into the car. After that it was good to go for another thousand miles or more, a useful range in a continent so vast.
Two minutes allowed just enough time for the occupants of the cars to stock up on overpriced drinks, sandwiches and snacks in the shop, one thing that hadn’t changed in filling stations over the years.
Hannah and Peter didn’t need to charge up the car. They were going no further. They instructed their car to pull into the small car park to the side of the station and prepared for what lay ahead.
The car park was dusty and dry, their arrival throwing up small clouds of copper-coloured dust behind the wheels. The sun was beating down and it looked like it hadn’t rained for months.
They got out of the car and were immediately hit by the searing heat away from the air-conditioned environment they had been enjoying on the journey from the town further south from where they had hired the car.
“Are you ready?” asked Peter.
“As ready as I’ll ever be,” replied Hannah. “You know there’s no other choice. I wouldn’t have brought this if there had been any other way.”
She patted the small clutch bag she was carrying which contained the small handgun she planned to use on Vanessa. She had obtained it locally by calling in an old favour from a former colleague who had emigrated out to Australia.
“I still can’t believe Aston came up trumps with that,” said Peter. “Or that he didn’t ask too many questions about why you wanted it.”
“He and I go back a long way,” said Hannah. “He knows I wouldn’t ask unless there was a very good reason.”
“I guess this is it, then,” said Peter.
“I guess it is,” she replied. “If I’m successful you shouldn’t have to wait too long. I’ll set the return journey to come back in a minute or two. Now we just need to find a suitable place to make the jump. Remember what Josh told us – it’s vital to reappear in an open space, not where a building or something used to be.”
“How about over here, next to this tree?” suggested Peter, leading the way towards a large, mature eucalyptus tree. “This must have been here thirty-four years ago. It looks ancient.”
“Yes, this will do nicely. I’ve set the tachyometer for half an hour before Alice was seen on the CCTV footage. That will give me time to stake out the place and be ready for Vanessa when she arrives.”
“Are you really going to shoot her?” asked Peter.
“If it comes to that,” said Hannah. “But I won’t do it in cold blood. I’ve got to give her a chance. If she’s willing to hand over the tachyometer I can hardly shoot her then, can I?”
“That’s the honourable thing to do, I suppose,” replied Peter. “But ask yourself this – would she give you the same chance?”
“Probably not,” said Hannah. “But if I stoop to her level, then I’m as bad as her.”
“Good luck,” said Peter. “Stay safe and hurry back.”
He leaned forward and kissed her like it was the last time. She swiftly picked up on his body language and pulled away, saying, “Hey – that felt like a goodbye. You don’t think I’m coming back, do you?”
“Just in case,” Peter said. “I want to make sure if this is our last moment together it’s a precious one.”
“I’ll be back,” she replied with more confidence than she felt. “See you soon.” She stepped back, created the bubble and stepped through.
Remarkably, the area she emerged into had hardly changed. To begin with, she wondered if she had even travelled through time at all.
The eucalyptus tree looked exactly the same as it did thirty-four years in the future and she idly wondered exactly how long it had been there. It was only when she turned around to look at the station that the evidence of her journey became apparent. The electric saucers were gone, replaced by the old-style petrol pumps she had expected to see in this era.
It was baking hot, possibly even hotter than the day she had come from, and she
felt a sweat starting to break out on her brow. Was it just down to the heat, or also down to fear at the danger that lay ahead?
She walked carefully towards the whitewashed walls at the back of the station, looking for a suitable vantage point to stake out the scene. She had about half an hour, by her calculations, until Alice would arrive.
There were several plastic wheelie bins along the side of the building which would provide the perfect cover to monitor the entrance from the road. However, as she approached, she recoiled at the smell of the rotting rubbish that had been festering in the heat. It smelt rank, and to make matters worse, some of the flies that were circling around now decided to make a beeline for her.
The flies in Australia were a pain in the arse. She had noticed that they couldn’t just be batted away like the ones back home but were remarkably persistent. Talk about not taking no for an answer, the pesky things would pester her continually now.
The only way to get away would be to go inside the shop, and that could blow her cover as there was no way of being sure exactly what time Vanessa would arrive.
Unfortunately for Hannah, she already had.
“Looking for someone?” came a familiar voice from behind her, as she crouched behind the large, blue recycling bin.
“Vanessa!” Hannah exclaimed, turning and instinctively reaching for her bag.
“Don’t even think about it,” replied her enemy, covering her with the same laser weapon she had previously threatened Alice with. “Drop the bag.”
“How did you know I’d be here?” asked Hannah as she complied.
“Oh really, did you think I’d be naïve enough not to know you and the others would try something like this? I’ve been one step ahead of you all the way. You know when you all had that cosy little get-together at the Turf? I was there, listening to every word.”
Hannah knew she was in the most dangerous situation she had faced in her whole life, and the only weapon she had left was words. Her only hope was that she could somehow appeal to the woman’s better nature.
“Look, Vanessa, is this really all worth it? We know what you’re trying to do, but you can’t make Josh love you.”
“Oh, I can,” she said. “I’ve got the resources of the most advanced scientific institute in the world behind me. Do you know we make mind-altering drugs for some of the biggest secret service organisations in the world? We can make people do or think whatever we want them to.”
“And is that really what you want? Can’t you see that it wouldn’t be real? You may as well build one of your androids to look like Josh and programme that to adore you.”
“Oh, it’s all very well for you, with your lovey-dovey relationship with Peter Perfect, isn’t it? Well, you can kiss that goodbye because you won’t be seeing him again.”
She raised the weapon threateningly. Hannah knew at that point her number was almost certainly up so she decided she may as well go down in a blaze of glory.
“Said in the jealous tone of a pathetic, inadequate woman who can’t find love herself so resorts to hating those who have,” said Hannah. “The truth of the matter is, no matter what you do to me or any of us, nothing can take away the fact that Peter and I have had the most amazing, beautiful life together, something you’ll never have, with Josh or anyone else.”
She knew she had signed her own death warrant with this rant, but what did it matter? Vanessa would have killed her anyway, and she was damned if she was going to lower herself to pleading for the mercy that her killer clearly didn’t possess. At least she could be proud of her final words.
“Bitch!” hissed Vanessa as she squeezed the trigger on her weapon, letting out the distinctive, high-pitched whistling sound it made before it disintegrated Hannah into nothingness with its single blue bolt.
“That was fun,” remarked Vanessa to the empty space where Hannah had been standing. With every kill she enjoyed it more, and she wouldn’t have to wait long to claim her next victim.
Peter never stood a chance. Hannah had said she would reappear a few seconds after she had left. When it was Vanessa who appeared instead, he knew things must have gone terribly wrong.
“What…” he began.
“Let me cut you short there,” she interrupted. “I can’t be bothered to go through a lot of chit-chat again: I’ve just had all that with your dead wife. So, I think I’ll just do this.”
She raised the gun and blasted Peter into oblivion, amused at the casual manner in which she’d despatched him. She lifted the gun to her lips and blew some imaginary smoke off the end like a cowboy in an old western movie, an evil smile spreading across her cruel, heartless face.
“And now for all the others,” she said.
Chapter Sixteen
May 2058
Josh was getting extremely worried. Peter had promised to check in with him as soon as Hannah had been scheduled to return, and he had heard nothing for nearly twelve hours.
All attempts to contact both of them had failed. Consequently, Josh had called Charlie, Kaylee and Lauren together for what amounted to a council of war.
Keen to stay out of public sight, the four of them were meeting upstairs in The Red Lion. Lauren’s living room, where she liked to slob out and watch TV on the evenings when she wasn’t working, was a complete mess.
“For goodness’ sake, Lauren, you could have tidied this place up a bit before we got here,” complained Kaylee, moving various items of discarded underwear off the sofa and looking disapprovingly at the pyramid-shaped collection of takeaway boxes on the coffee table.
She sat down and pulled a black bra out of the gap between the seat cushions of the red fabric sofa.
“Whose is this?” she asked, looking at the flimsy garment. “That’s not your cup size.”
“Yeah, sorry about that,” said Lauren. “I had a couple of friends up here last night for a bit of a party after the pub closed and things got a little lively.”
“Don’t they always?” said Kaylee, who wasn’t in the least bit surprised after so many years of hearing about Lauren’s antics.
“For goodness’ sake,” said an extremely worried-looking Josh. “Can we skip the usual banter and get on to business. We’re all in terrible danger, and Lauren, I don’t think you’ve any concept of the seriousness of the situation.”
“It’s kind of hard to get my head around it,” she said. “You tell me someone I’ve no memory of ever meeting has disappeared and history’s been changed, but it all seems perfectly normal to me.”
“But you remember Peter and Hannah? Both of them have now disappeared.”
“Of course,” said Lauren.
“Why can she remember them, but she can’t remember Alice?” asked Kaylee.
“It might be because it is their current selves that Vanessa’s got to. If she killed Hannah after she went back into the past, it would be our Hannah, not a past Hannah, so her timeline up to the present day would remain intact,” said Charlie.
“What about Peter? He didn’t go back in time with Hannah,” asked Kaylee.
“She must have got him, too, otherwise we would have heard from him,” said Josh. “Maybe she got them both before Hannah even went back in time. She must have got wind of what they were up to and stopped them.”
“By stopped, do you mean she killed them?” asked Kaylee.
“That’s what she did to the others,” replied Josh. “We have to assume the worst.”
“What are we going to do?” asked Kaylee.
It was the last thing she said before everything in the room changed.
Suddenly and without warning, first Charlie and then Kaylee vanished from the sofa in quick succession, leaving Josh and Lauren alone.
In June 2025, Vanessa, dressed in her black assassin’s gear, looked down at the fluttering flower that was all that was left of the youthful Kaylee she had just blown into oblivion. She smiled and again blew the imaginary smoke from her laser weapon, something that was almost becoming a tradition now after each
kill.
That made six in total. All she needed to do now was get rid of that silly little tart who ran the pub and she would have Josh exactly where she wanted him.
Upstairs in the pub, in 2057, the disappearance of Charlie and Kaylee wasn’t the only change. At the moment they disappeared, the whole appearance of the room was altered.
All of the mess on the table disappeared, various bits of furniture appeared and disappeared, including the sofa they had been sitting on, which changed from red cotton to black leather – the same black leather as the one he had in his flat in Oxford.
Overall it was as if the room had experienced a serious makeover. It was significantly cleaner and smarter than it had been.
“Hurry up and finish that coffee,” said Lauren, seemingly oblivious to the changes. “I want a quickie before the afternoon shift.”
Here we go again, thought Josh, reaching for the coffee cup with his left hand. As he did so, he noticed that his wedding ring had changed. It was thicker, and as glanced across at Lauren he could see that she was wearing one, too. That was something he had never expected to see.
Looking around the room, he noticed a picture of a couple on their wedding day on the wall. Looking closely, he could see that the woman in the wedding dress was a young Lauren, and that he was the handsome groom in the morning suit.
Clearly Vanessa had now taken out Kaylee and Charlie. Their removal, sometime in the past, had somehow resulted in him now being married to Lauren and living in the pub with her.
He turned back to Lauren, knowing that she would probably have no inkling of what had just occurred, but he had to try and find out exactly what had happened to Charlie and Kaylee.
“Does everything seem normal to you?” he asked.
“What do you mean?” she replied.
“I mean, two minutes ago, we were sitting here with Charlie and Kaylee, and now they’ve vanished.”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake, you’re not going to start with all this crap again, are you?”
“Look, just let me try and explain.”