City of Shadows tr-6

by Alex Scarrow

‘I know that!’ the police sergeant barked. ‘I know that. Lemme think. Lemme think.’

  Just then they heard the echo of a door bang open, the slap of heavy footsteps on linoleum. Nothing Sal could see. It came from around the corner, from where she and Rashim had just emerged via the toystore’s stockroom some minutes ago.

  ‘Who’s that?’ whispered one of the cops.

  The footsteps echoed. Heavy. Even. Measured.

  ‘It’s one of them!’ said Sal.

  ‘Them? Who?’ The sergeant cocked his weapon. ‘One of the shooters?’

  She nodded.

  ‘POLICE!’ he called out quickly. ‘WE ARE ARMED POLICE.’ His voice rolled down the passageway and eventually faded to silence.

  The sound of approaching footsteps suddenly ceased.

  ‘POLICE!’ he called again. ‘YOU BEST COME ROUND WITH YOUR HANDS UP!’

  There was no reply. Just the sound of an ammo clip being ejected and rattling on the floor. The clack-snick of a new one being rammed home.

  ‘That don’t sound so good,’ said the mall guard.

  ‘Just get these two civilians the hell out of here before this turns nasty,’ whispered the sergeant.

  The mall guard nodded. Grabbed Sal’s arm. ‘Let’s go, folks.’

  ‘OK… OK,’ she whispered eagerly.

  The guard led the way. ‘Delivery bay six is right up here. Just ahead,’ he said quietly. ‘We can exit that way.’

  He picked up the pace. Sal stole one last glance over her shoulder at the huddle of police officers in the anaemic, turquoise glow of the passage’s wall lights, checking their weapons and holding them up and steady in the trained and engrained two-hand legs-apart stance.

  ‘Here, this way,’ said the guard. He pushed open double doors that led on to an underground delivery bay.

  As they stepped out, the mall guard holding the swing doors open for them, Sal thought she heard the police sergeant call out one last challenge. Then, as the echo of his shaky voice tailed away, the passage behind them suddenly sounded like a war zone.

  Chapter 24

  7.37 a.m., 12 September 2001, North Haven Plaza, outside Branford

  Liam, Bob and Becks approached the RV cautiously. It sat in the motel’s small forecourt on its own. Overhead the sky was noisy with the thwup-thwup of a police helicopter, hovering above the pale slab of the mall several hundred yards away.

  Liam could also hear the sound of several approaching police cars and ambulances coming from further up Interstate 95, brake lights winking on down the congested road like a Mexican wave as drivers slowed to pull aside and let them through.

  Ahead of them, the RV.

  ‘Maddy said we should meet at the diner,’ said Bob.

  ‘I want to check on SpongeBubba,’ said Liam. ‘You think it’s safe?’ he added. ‘Maybe there’s another of them inside.’

  ‘I detect no idents,’ said Becks.

  ‘Just a moment,’ said Bob. He closed his eyes.

  ‘Why? What’re you doing?’

  A few seconds later the rear door of the RV swung open and a yellow cube appeared on the top step.

  ‘Communicating with the lab unit,’ replied Bob. He smiled down at Liam. ‘SpongeBubba says it’s all clear inside.’

  They crossed the last fifty yards, Liam gesturing at SpongeBubba to get back inside. They didn’t need the lab robot attracting attention. Liam climbed up and slumped down on the rear seat, damp with perspiration.

  ‘Gee!’ said SpongeBubba with a fixed plastic grin. ‘Fun and games!’

  Becks looked down at the small robot. ‘No. Not fun and games. Danger.’

  Bob clambered inside. The RV rocked. ‘Your warning saved us, lab unit. We are grateful.’

  ‘You’re welcome. Where’s my skippa?’

  Liam looked out through the scuffed perspex, hoping to catch sight of the others weaving through the cars in the mall’s car park towards the motel. Nothing yet.

  ‘They’re coming,’ he said. ‘They were just behind us. I think.’ He looked at Bob and Becks. ‘Right?’

  Bob shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Foster will have slowed them down,’ said Becks. ‘He moved very slowly.’

  She was right. Liam decided he should have stayed behind, with Maddy, to help her with the old man. A dreadful thought occurred to him. That those killer meatbots had trapped and finished both of them off. Perhaps Rashim and Sal as well. He felt a growing surge of panic inside him. The idea of spending the rest of his life alone on the run with two support units and something that looked like a yellow bar of soap on stumpy legs terrified him.

  Please… please… somebody else turn up.

  Faith recognized the young woman instantly. The oval jawline, the glasses, the curly strawberry-blonde hair, all a perfect match. But even without the visual match the look of sudden recognition and sheer horror — as their eyes locked — gave the girl away. Faith reached round behind her and whipped out the handgun from her waistband.

  ‘Please move out of the way!’ she commanded the evacuating people all around her as she levelled the gun at her target.

  ‘ OH-MY-GOD-SHE’S-GOT-A-GUN! ’ someone screamed.

  That worked better. The crowd, jostling to get down the frozen escalator, dropped to the floor as one, and Faith had a perfect line-of-sight on Maddy. The only person still on her feet.

  Maddy pushed the large woman crouching in front, desperately trying to get past. But the woman was too big to make a space on the escalator. Maddy found herself clambering over her back.

  ‘Ow! Jesus help me! I’m being assaulted!’ screamed the woman.

  ‘I need to get past!’ Maddy replied. ‘I need to freakin’ well get — ’

  A shot rang out. The glass of the escalator’s side exploded. The woman ducked down as shards scattered over her rounded shoulders and Maddy rolled over the top of her, on to someone else in front. Another shot thudded into the thick rubber handrest.

  She found her feet and decided she was far enough down the escalator to jump over the side. She landed on the top of a display of plastic tropical bushes embedded in a bed of pebbles. Not the softest landing, but perhaps far better than the mall’s faux marble floor. She scrambled on to her feet yet again, people all around her shrieking in alarm as several more shots rang out across the entrance foyer.

  ‘Get out, get out!’ Maddy screamed at the bottleneck of people fighting with each other to exit through the revolving door, and the fire exits either side of it.

  Faith strode towards the safety rail of the concourse above, overlooking the escalator. She saw her target below on the ground floor, grappling with people, tugging at them to make way for her. She took aim again and fired two shots, emptying the clip. Downstairs, more glass exploded, and the screaming all around her took on a new shrill, intense pitch.

  Faith clambered over the rail and let herself drop down. She landed twenty feet below on the hard floor, like a cat landing on its feet, legs flexed to absorb the impact like the over-pimped shock absorbers of a monster truck.

  She reached into her waistband to pull out her last clip. The target — Madelaine Carter — was directly in front of her, trapped because the only way out was clogged with people tangled with each other and too petrified to sort themselves out. She would have smiled if she’d had that particular face gesture on file. Instead, her face remained impassive, as calm and expressionless as a person fast asleep as she rammed the last clip home into the grip of her handgun.

  Sal and Rashim gave the mall guard — Kent — a thoroughly unconvincing pair of aliases and random contact numbers. The guard, though, seemed more than happy to take down what they said, no questions asked. Quite probably he was preoccupied with thanking God he was alive still. He offered a nod — Sal guessed that was his version of a ‘sorry for earlier’ — and told them to go home.

  They now picked their way through the crowd at the front of the mall. A slew of police cars had parked up in a semi-circle just
outside the entrance and officers were setting up a cordon around it, urging the rubbernecking curious back away from the rotating glass doors at the front.

  ‘Good grief… that was…’ Rashim wiped sweat from his forehead.

  ‘Close?’

  He nodded. ‘Incredibly.’

  ‘They’re the same ones that were chasing me and Maddy before we came back in time to get you.’

  ‘Almost identical to your support units. They were definitely a similar batch number. Quite possibly from the exact same batch.’

  A possibility occurred to Sal as they backed away from the crowd outside and studied the front of the mall from a comfortable distance. There were still people spilling out of the revolving doors, being hustled out of harm’s way as quickly as possible by paramedics, cops and mall guards. Maybe they were a batch of support units that had malfunctioned? Perhaps whoever was running their little agency from the future had decided to send them some replacement support units and something had gone wrong in the process?

  She shot that idea down just as quickly as it had popped into her head.

  No. There was the San Francisco drop point. That’s where they’d get back-up copies of Bob and Becks — frozen foetuses ready to grow. These were ones already fully grown and given a very specific mission. To come after the whole team and not rest until the last of them were dead. Apparently. So… no mistakes there. No malfunctions. Just deadly intent.

  ‘You think we should make our way back to that diner?’ said Rashim.

  Sal was about to answer when two gunshots came from just inside the mall’s entrance foyer.

  A moment later a large plate-glass window exploded and screams ripped through the air. The police who’d set up a cordon to hold the crowd back now drew their sidearms. All of them spinning round to face the glass frontage of the shopping mall. People spilled out of the slowly turning revolving door, the side doors, even through the jagged-tooth remains of the freshly shattered glass frontage.

  ‘There’s Maddy!’ hissed Sal.

  She emerged with the others, arms up and wrapped round her head to protect it, hunkered over like someone getting out of a helicopter. Sal pushed through the crowd now all turning and scattering from the entrance at the sound of another shot fired inside the foyer.

  ‘MADDY!’ she called out. ‘OVER HERE!’

  The girls all but crashed into each other.

  ‘Maddy? I thought you were — ’

  ‘Just GO! Gogogogogo! ’

  Faith picked her zigzagging target out of the retreating, stampeding crowd. She levelled the. 40 Smith amp; Wesson. Now the thing had a fresh clip, she resolved to empty all twelve rounds in several controlled double-taps. To be absolutely certain of killing the target. As she aimed down the short barrel, she caught sight of one of the other targets: Saleena Vikram. Both girls tangled with each other for a moment, then, turning their backs to her, ran away hand in hand.

  Two for the price of one. Faith nodded. Pleased with herself for producing an appropriate saying for the occasion. She was about to pull the trigger when the world went completely dark.

  Chapter 25

  7.42 a.m., 12 September 2001, Interstate 95, outside Branford

  Five minutes later they were all back aboard the RV, on the road and running on the last quarter-tank of petrol, Bob driving north-east as instructed and Maddy rocking back and forth beside him in the passenger seat trying to get a handle on things, get a handle on her jangling nerves, a handle on the growing knot of grief in her chest, as Sal, Liam and Rashim threw questions at her over the seat.

  ‘He’s gone,’ she said, finally answering them as to where the hell Foster was.

  ‘What? Do you mean…?’ Liam struggled to say any more. So Rashim finished his question for him.

  ‘They… they got Foster?’

  She nodded. ‘Shot him.’

  ‘He’s dead?’

  Here it comes. Maddy felt her composure slipping. The blissful comfort of numbness was ebbing away, like the downslope of a novocaine buzz after root-canal treatment. The first hot tears trickled down her cheeks. She tasted salt on her lips and licked them away.

  She nodded. ‘Yes, Foster’s dead.’ Her voice was a lifeless whisper. The flutter and tap of moth wings against a windowpane. She took her glasses off and buried her damp face in her hands and realized that now she’d finally become that typical movie girl-in-distress: all quivering, dimpled chin and smudged mascara.

  Albeit minus the mascara.

  Chapter 26

  2055, outside Denver, Colorado

  Joseph Olivera had got to know Frasier Griggs quite well. Griggs was the only other man in the world, other than Roald Waldstein, of course, who knew of the TimeRiders’ existence.

  Frasier Griggs was Waldstein’s lesser-known junior partner. Where Waldstein was the source of the patents, the ideas man, the genius, Griggs was the practical other half: the software designer behind Waldstein’s prototypes, the builder; the Steve Wozniak to Waldstein’s Steve Jobs. Although most people assumed the ‘G’ in W.G. Systems was in memory of Waldstein’s dead son, Gabriel, Griggs was in fact the ‘Real G’. The company’s first stakeholder, the fledgling company’s first employee and perhaps the closest thing to a friend that Waldstein had ever had. Hell, on his desk, Griggs even had a tea mug with that printed on the side — The Real G.

  The TimeRiders team established in 2001 became effectively ‘active’, and monitoring their activities began on 4 September 2054. On a day-to-day basis, Joseph and Griggs were the ‘base team’ doing that.

  Only four months after the team started functioning, things began to go wrong. On 3 January 2055, they received a broad-burst tachyon signal from 2001. A malfunction with the field office’s displacement field had caused the first team to be killed. They’d received a garbled plea for help from one of them who’d managed to survive. Griggs panicked. For the first time since working for Waldstein, Joseph saw his boss’s normally ice-cool composure slip.

  It wasn’t that the team had been destroyed that unsettled him; it was the fact that one of them had been careless enough to send an unencrypted, widespread tachyon signal. It was sheer blind luck for Waldstein that the message hadn’t included a mention of his name. But it might as well have, given he was quite likely the only person in the world, at that moment, with the know-how to send a traveller back in time.

  That short signal could have been picked up by labs right across the world, and it could only mean one thing for everyone who might have detected it: that somebody was already up and running with viable displacement technology.

  Joseph remembered Griggs and Waldstein having a blazing row that morning. One held behind closed doors, not meant for Joseph to hear, but the one word he did pick out from their heated exchange was the word ‘Pandora’.

  Waldstein had little choice. Either he had to go back to 2001 and set things up all over again, or he had to send a message to the survivor, instructing him on how to set things up for himself.

  Waldstein wanted to go back, but Griggs insisted that another trip back to 2001 was pushing their luck too far. If this was it, if this meant the premature end of their project, then so be it. Better than the three of them facing a lethal injection.

  Joseph soon learned who’d sent the message, who the sole survivor was. It was Liam O’Connor. A second message arrived after the first, this time via the safe method: the personal advert. A field malfunction, that’s what he’d said. Equipment failure. The Liam unit had been aged chronically by a sudden blast of tachyon radiation that had bathed the entire archway with a lethal dose. The other two units hadn’t stood a chance. They’d died in their sleep.

  Waldstein replied with a detailed packet of instructions. And not a single word of support or comfort. But then that was it, wasn’t it? The Liam unit was merely a piece of equipment to Waldstein: a disposable asset. Joseph had wondered how the man could be so cold; in a way, the Liam unit was as much a part of Waldstein as he was a part of Josep
h’s programming.

  Poor Liam. He’d be alone back there. Alone, and suddenly aware now of what he was. Joseph felt for him. The boy was so young and yet now so old and quite clearly entirely on his own. The ‘base team’ was offering him instructions from afar and that was pretty much all the support the poor man had.

  That was the first thing. The second misfortune happened not long after.

  A contamination event had occurred in 1941. It appeared the event had been corrected by the re-established team but one of the team had been killed. The observer unit: Saleena Vikram. They needed to grow a new one with an adjusted memory: one that would allow her to be inserted into the existing team. Some tricky synaptic programming there for Joseph to do.

  There was no avoiding it; they were going to need to carry out the ‘edit job’ on the Saleena unit here in 2055, then send it back.

  That was it for Griggs. Too much. He wanted out. There was another blazing row between him and Waldstein behind closed glass doors. This time Joseph picked out one word several times over. Pandora. And Griggs screaming at Waldstein, ‘Why? Why do you want that to happen?’

  The third thing was Griggs’s death a few days later. It was sudden, unexpected and left Joseph feeling distinctly uncertain about this whole project.

  The night before he died, Griggs had been on edge. He’d also been drinking. Joseph didn’t get much sense out of Frasier other than he’d told Waldstein he’d finally decided he was going to leave this project, that he didn’t want to have anything more to do with ‘this madness’.

  The next day Frasier Griggs was found dead several miles outside W.G. Systems’ Pinedale, Wyoming campus. The official verdict was that some ‘flood migrants’ must have ambushed him. There were plenty of them out here now — the displaced, the desperate, the hungry — millions of them from the various east-coast states partially or completely submerged by the advancing Atlantic Ocean. The lucky rich lived in fortified urbanizations. The rest in large displacement camps. That’s how it was. The haves and the have-nots separated by coils of razor wire and private security firms.