“There you go,” he said proudly, handing Patty the helmet. Patty wouldn’t take it. “Here.”
He pushed it toward her. “It won’t bite.”
Reluctantly she took it from him. It was solid. It was real. She hefted it in her hands. “How…”
“Don’t ask me. But think about what a cool new anomaly this is! You got your helmet from an echo of your past self. Your past self doesn’t have a helmet because the one she had just moved into the future! A splash within a splash! How cool is that?”
Patty looked again at the group by the door, but they had faded almost to nothing. Carefully, she stepped away from the house until they were completely gone. The helmet stayed solid in her hands. “Can I really wear this when we go back?”
Hal just shrugged. “Looks like it. Come on. Let’s find the others. I want to tell Sniper about this.”
He took her arm and led her into the road, heading in the direction of the town centre. Patty stumbled after him, remembering the look on her own face as her other self handed over her helmet to a duplicate Hal.
“Look!” Hal pointed into the air and Patty looked up to see an old-fashioned aeroplane arcing down toward the Earth from a great height. Behind it a ball of dark grey smoke expanded from what must have been a huge explosion. A trail of smoke led from this to the stricken plane, drawing the trajectory it was taking toward the ground. Even as Patty watched, one of the wings detached itself and took a separate, steeper arc downwards.
“Oh my God!” she cried. A passenger plane would have hundreds of people on board. All of them were going to die.
“It’s all right,” Hal said, calmly. “It should be okay. Just keep watching.”
The aircraft was falling almost vertically now. Other pieces were falling off it. Then, with a mind-wrenching suddenness, it zipped back along its route, like a film being rewound. It went back just a couple of hundred metres, then began falling again. When it reached about the same spot as before, it shot backward again, once more repeating those few seconds of descent. And then it did it again.
Patty turned to Hal, distressed and confused. “You knew that would happen?”
“Happens all the time on a splash. Not on that kind of scale, mind.” He urged her into a walk again. “They say it’s because the timestream can’t allow major anomalies to proliferate. There was probably someone on that plane who did something that affected a lot of people, or who will have children who did, or maybe the plane was going to hit someone who did. I dunno. Somehow these things aren’t allowed to happen. If they did, the splash would just start getting bigger and bigger, increasing exponentially. And that doesn’t happen. The splash settles down. The timestream gets smoothed out and everything goes back to normal. So things start this stuttering, looping thing. They sort of get put on hold until things are sorted out. Looks really weird, huh?”
“What about all those people?”
“They’ll be fine.”
“They don’t know that.”
Hal gave her a look of exasperation that made Patty think he’d begun to regret being kind to such a pain in the arse, even if he did fancy her. She shook her head. “Forget it. Let’s get moving. It makes me nervous just standing around like this.”
A violent rush of sound and air shot past them as if an invisible truck had gone by at high speed. The backdraft was so strong it made both of them stagger sideways. Patty looked around wildly. “What the hell was that?”
Hal for once was not grinning. “I don’t know.” He looked at Patty. “We’d better get to the others.”
They set off at a jog toward the town centre, but didn’t make much speed. The ground undulated unpredictably, and groaning, crashing noises from the buildings all around made them hesitant and nervous. The streets here were full of people—shoppers, office workers, tourists—all of them terrified, many caught in strange loops of activity. When a three-storey building fell to the ground right next to her and began oscillating back and forth within a cloud of its own dust and rubble, Patty screamed and went into a ball. Hal had to grab her and drag her back into motion.
“It’s getting worse,” she shouted through the racket of bending girders and shattering glass.
“It’s the people,” Hal yelled back. “The more people around, the crazier it gets. That’s why we’re heading for the centre. It’s where Sniper and T-800 will be.”
“We’re going to die!”
“No, no. We’ll be fine. Just keep moving.”
But Patty could see the fear in Hal’s eyes. This was worse than he’d seen before. Worse than anyone had ever seen.
The spatial anomalies were so bad now that it was like looking at everything through distorting lenses. The effect was dizzying. The ground heaved like the surface of the sea and in places there were holes, or areas of strange, improbable textures. Patty watched the people around her. Some seemed unaware of the chaos around them, while others were caught up in the madness as walls fell on them, cars ran into buildings, and phantoms only they could see tormented them. Some people moved backward, some were frozen. Many were caught in that hideous, jerky oscillation, on the very edge of destruction.
Patty spotted Sniper up the street. He and T-800 were running about with shotguns—perhaps looted from a store in the town—firing into shop windows and at passing people. Patty gaped in disbelief. The two men were laughing and shouting as they went.
“They’re trying to whip up more of a splash,” she said to Hal. “That’s it, isn’t it? This… this… It isn’t enough for them.”
Hal seemed taken aback too. “Try and get into the spirit of it,” he said, uncertainly. “No one’s getting hurt. Not really.” He yelled out to Sniper and ran over to him. Patty followed slowly behind. A woman nearby screamed for help and tugged at a couple of hooked rods set into the pavement. As Patty passed the frantic woman she realised the rods were the handles of a baby stroller. The ground around the woman began to glow and slither. Then the woman started twitching and vibrating at a speed that should have shaken her to pieces. It’s the timestream beginning to heal itself, she told herself. It’s all going to go back to how it was. But Patty’s heart was hammering and her breath was coming in short gasps. When someone said into her ear, “Incredible, eh?” Patty screamed and leapt away, spinning round to find Sniper grinning maliciously at her.
“You think this is fun, do you? You sick fuck!” she shouted.
Sniper pretended to look hurt, stepping back with a pout on his lips, but his eyes were still full of the pleasure of seeing her upset. Then his face lit up. “I know what would be fun.” Slowly he brought up the barrel of the big shotgun and aimed it at Patty’s head. “Let’s see what happens if I do this.”
Patty’s face drained of all colour. She couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. All she could see were the two black holes in the snout of the shotgun, grown as big as dinner plates. In that moment she really believed Sniper was going to kill her, just for fun. I’m only fifteen, she thought, the words echoing in her head. Only fifteen.
Chapter 4: Time to Kill
“What are you reading?”
The young policeman leaned across to look at Jay’s magazine. Jay realised the guy must be as bored as he was, more, probably, without Jay’s anxiety for his friend to keep him alert. He held the magazine out for the policeman. “Here. Take it. I keep reading the same paragraph over and over and I still have no idea what it says.”
The policeman sat back. “Nah. I don’t read magazines much. Never anything interesting in them.”
Jay looked at the man’s face but decided it wasn’t some kind of obscure Dutch humour.
“What do you do for fun then? Can’t be much happening in a little place like this.”
The policeman rolled his eyes in an exaggerated gesture of impending sarcasm. “Oh, we don’t have any big, exciting splashparties, with drugs and free love, but we do all right for fun. You know, there is more to life than burning out your brain and bashing in your eardrums.”<
br />
Jay stared in disbelief. Had he really said “free love”? Surely this guy was having a laugh. He sat back in his increasingly uncomfortable chair and tried to focus on the magazine again. The reader was a big, institution-sized, semi-rigid sheet—the kind of outdated junk you found in waiting rooms the world over. They made them like that so you couldn’t easily fold them up and walk out with them in your pocket, he supposed. But who’d want to steal rubbish like that anyway. It had a few hundred titles, mostly in Dutch, but no net connection except to a local database. He touched the compatch on his wrist, thinking yet again that he should call his parents and let them know he was in trouble. And again he decided to put it off a while longer.
* * * *
Patty woke up on the ground. Above her, people were shouting. Around her there was a cacophony of strange sounds—shearing metal, tearing brickwork, sheets of glass falling into the street. With a groan, she rolled onto her back. Sniper, Hal and T-800 stopped arguing long enough to glance down at her.
“Why would I shoot her, you arsehole? What would that get me? This is a splash, or it would be, without that whining bitch tagging along.”
“Well, you brought her,” T-800 complained.
“Yeah,” Sniper agreed. “I thought she was cool.”
The bitterness in his tone made Patty wince. She sat up, looking around. Her left elbow hurt. She must have banged it when she fainted.
“Well that’s no reason to treat her like shit,” Hal shouted.
“Who do you think you are, my fucking father?” Sniper squared up to Hal, chin forward, holding the shotgun with big, strong hands.
Patty stood up and picked up her helmet. She felt a little woozy—a feeling not helped by the way the buildings around her were trembling. Her concern, though, was for Hal. She’d never seen Sniper so furious before. He had always been the king of cool. But now his self-control seemed to be almost gone and it scared her. “It’s okay Hal. I’m okay.”
Sniper turned on her in an instant, the barrels of the gun shoved hard under her chin. “Who gives a shit, bitch?”
Before she could do much more than widen her eyes in shock, Hal had grabbed the gun and pulled it so it pointed away from her. “Are you fucking crazy?” he shouted in Sniper’s face. With almost contemptuous ease, Sniper jerked the gun out of Hal’s grip and aimed it at him.
“What? You’re going to shoot me now, you psycho?” Hal stepped forward, pressing his chest against the gun.
Patty backed away, overwhelmed by the violence and the chaos all around her. T-800 spoke up again. “Hal, for fuck’s sake just shut up, will you. We’re supposed to be having a good time here, not fighting over some little, whining cow.”
But Hal wouldn’t back down. He poked Sniper in the chest. “Go on then, sicko, shoot me. Got the balls for that, you creep? Or are you only brave when you’re scaring little girls?”
With a snarl, Sniper stepped back, then swung the stock of the shotgun up in a tight arc with all the strength his anger gave him. It struck Hal on the temple and the American instantly went limp and dropped to the ground in a heap.
The three of them stood in silence, staring at Hal lying motionless on the ground. After a moment, Sniper said “Shit!” through clenched teeth and turned away. T-800 bent to feel for a pulse. He waited as tense seconds passed, then pulled back his hand as if it had been burnt. “Fucking hell,” he said.
Patty took a further step backward, her hand to her mouth, her eyes wide with horror. “Oh God,” she said. “You killed him.”
Sniper turned to glower at her, seething with rage. She looked up and caught his eyes, realising she was now the focus of all his fury, and panic gripped her. Without even thinking about it she turned and bolted, running as fast as she could for the nearest street corner, her only thought to be somewhere else, somewhere away from this nightmare.
As she ran, stumbling over the undulating ground, shying from falling masonry and starting at every loud noise, she heard Sniper bellowing behind her. “I’ll see you soon in the cage, bitch. You know we’re all going back there, yes? There’s nowhere for you to run, Liebchen. Nowhere you can escape me.”
Patty ran for her life.
Sniper was right, she realised. When their time was up, they would be snatched back through time to the cage at the splashparty. Someone told her that a lob was like throwing a sealed but empty bottle off a bridge into a river. It hit the river, made a splash and disappeared under the surface, but after a while it would bob right back up again. The bottle didn’t jump back up to the bridge, but the metaphor still captured something true about the lob. The bricks didn’t belong where they landed, and pretty soon the timestream spat them out again.
No one ever talked to her about the physics of it all. They just talked in metaphors and similes. Maybe they thought she was too dumb to understand. Maybe they were right. She found herself in a field outside the town. She must have run a couple of kilometres or more. She was so exhausted she was almost falling down. There was a low wall nearby and she made herself jog over to it and flop down behind it before she felt safe enough to stop. She was sure Sniper wasn’t chasing her any more.
This far out from the splashtarget, the effects of the splash were weaker. The ground still shifted, perspectives changed randomly, and trees and animals moved oddly, but the spontaneous self-destruction of buildings, the wild changes in gravity and light, and the horror of seeing people caught in frantic oscillations had been left behind.
She didn’t know where she was and had no idea how to get back to the park with the castle. It didn’t matter. In about an hour she would be pulled back there anyway. Just one hour, before Sniper had her in the cage again. She’d seen him kill a man. What would he do about it? Would he kill her too?
He was armed. Even if he couldn’t bring the shotgun back from 1982—and she had no idea if he could—he had a pistol with him: the one he had used to shoot the little girl. Maybe if she could find a weapon—a rock, a branch of a tree, anything—she might be able to strike him first, incapacitate him, give herself some chance to get away. Maybe she could break into one of the houses across the field and steal a knife or a gun.
But the thought of seeing Sniper again was terrifying to her. She knew she wouldn’t have the courage to attack him. She could imagine how easily he would deflect her blows, his contemptuous laugh as he struck back.
And for the first time since she met him, Patty saw how frightened she had always been of Sniper.
“Jesus!” she said aloud. “You’re one sick chick!”
“Wie is dat?” came a tremulous, male voice from the other side of the wall. “Wie is er?”
Patty tried to keep still, tried not to breathe, but she could hear footsteps approaching. Not wanting to be discovered from behind by a stranger, she got to her feet and stepped back from the wall. A man of about fifty was at the other side. His weathered face and grimy clothes suggested a labourer or a farm worker. He recoiled from her as she appeared, raising a metal rod he was carrying in a defensive gesture. After an instant, the shock in his eyes gave way to amazement and she saw his gaze move down her body and back up to her face.
She held up her hands, palms outward. “It’s all right. I’m just passing through. I’m on my way.”
He lowered the rod a little, relaxing. “You are English?” he asked in a broad Dutch accent.
“Yes. English.” She remembered what Hal had said about a big market that would happen tomorrow. “I’m a tourist. Yes? Tourist? I’ve come for the market. The—er—”
“De Bissing, ja?”
“That’s it. The Bissing. I was just…” It sounded lame but she said it anyway. “I was just taking a walk.”
The man looked around, at the shimmering trees, the undulating ground, the strange lights over the town, and the aircraft still shifting back and forth along its fall to Earth. Then he looked again at Patty, tall and beautiful and outlandishly dressed. She could see his mind working toward an inevitable conc
lusion.
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