TimeSplash

by Storrs, Graham

  “Are you Lenin?”

  The man was staring at her open-mouthed, but he seemed unharmed.

  “Da,” he said, forgetting to speak English. “Mehr zobut Lenin.”

  Sandra didn’t understand a word but it sounded Russian and he looked about right and that was good enough for her.

  “You should get outside,” she told him. “This place isn’t safe.”

  He nodded. “Da. Spasiba. ”

  It sounded as if he understood, as if he had thanked her, but he did not move. She looked at the dome above her and the cracks in the walls and floor. She couldn’t drag him out or force him to go. That might bring the whole building down on them.

  “Please. You’ll be safer outside.”

  Nodding, he began to shuffle forward.

  Taking it as a sign that he’d be all right, Sandra stepped around the still-suspended body of her dashing Hussar and hurried outside.

  She had to shake Jay to wake him up.

  “I…must have passed out.” It took him a moment to come to his senses. “Lenin! Is he safe?”

  “Yes, I am safe.” The Russian stood over them. He looked less stunned now, more in command of himself. Sandra saw that he had picked up the submachine gun.

  “Who are you? What are you?” His English was stilted and clumsy. “Why do you come to save me? What…” He looked around at the shimmering buildings and the shifting courtyard.

  “What is happening?”

  Jay propped himself up on one elbow and immediately fell back onto Sandra’s lap. He lay there with his eyes closed for a moment before he looked up at Sandra again.

  “Sniper was yanked back,” she told him plaintively.

  “But you saved him.” He looked toward the Russian.

  “I want this weapon,” Lenin said. “I want lot of weapon. With this…”

  “With that,” said Jay, “you could overthrow the Tsar. Your revolution would be guaranteed.”

  He looked the confused Russian in the eye. “That’s why you’re still able to move around and talk while everyone else is twitching about like it’s Saturday night at the disco. You’re so focused on your damned revolution that no one and nothing else matters. Even this…chaos. Nothing could shift you from the path you’re on.”

  Sandra put a hand on his arm. “Jay. Careful.”

  Jay closed his eyes. Of course, he should mind what he said. Put the wrong idea in this man’s head, make him doubt himself, make him make one single decision he wouldn’t otherwise make, and the splash could be as bad as if Sniper had killed him outright. He reached out his left hand and grabbed his automatic from the ground beside him. He raised it, shakily, and pointed it at Lenin. “Put that gun down and walk away.” The Russian reluctantly obeyed. “Stay outdoors,” Jay added. “If you go inside, you could be injured or killed.”

  “Why do you want me to live? Who are you?”

  “Just piss off,” Sandra told him, picking up the gun.

  Frowning, frustrated, Lenin moved away from them, watching them suspiciously.

  “God, I feel sick,” Jay moaned.

  “You look pretty awful too.” Sandra explored his wound, shaking her head. “Our suits are self-sealing if they get punctured. Yours has already sealed over the bullet hole. I can’t even see how much you’re bleeding.”

  With a roar, part of the reading room’s wall collapsed. Dust billowed out from the hole, then billowed back in again.

  “I think we’re safe enough here,” Sandra said. “And I don’t think Lenin’s going anywhere. If you can just hang on for fifteen minutes, honey, we’ll be on our way back. They’ll have medics waiting, I’m sure.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jay said. It was a struggle to stay awake. “I’m sorry you didn’t get Sniper. I know what it meant.”

  Sandra shook her head. “It’s okay. It would have been nice but…” But somehow it wasn’t as important as it once was. In fact, it hadn’t been for some time, she realised. Jay nodded, as if he understood. “When we get back,” he said, “I want to take you to the ’tractives. You know, like a normal couple.”

  “A date?”

  “Yeah. If that’s all right. I know I’m not anything special. And you’re…you’re so…”

  “I’d love to. We’ll go see a big blockbuster, then have a burger and fries, just like real people.”

  He smiled. “I’ve had enough of this running around being shot at for a while. I need a rest.”

  She stroked his head and smiled at him through a blur of tears. “Fifteen minutes, darling. Then we can both have a rest.”

  Chapter 26: Yankback

  The yankback threw Sniper hard against the bars of the cage. The bodies of T-800 and Edna crashed around him. For a moment he was dazed and winded.

  But he was alive.

  Despite the pain in his leg, he threw back his head and laughed for the sheer unexpected joy of it. He’d beaten them all. He’d been the first to go back so far, farther than any other brick ever had, and he’d come back alive to boast about it. He was the best. No one could ever doubt it. No one would ever dare do again what he had done.

  And, as for the splash, the library had looked like it was about to fall on Lenin’s stupid, fat head—and on that psycho bitch Patty too. Even if it didn’t, he’d left a trail of destruction from Deptford to Bloomsbury. Hundreds of people had been caught in it. Probably dozens had died. When the backwash came, it was going to be a monster!

  A small shadow of doubt crept across his moment of triumph. Somehow Patty had gone back to try to stop him. Whoever had sent her could match what he’d done. Well that was all right. It just meant that, next time, he’d have to go back farther, make the whole splash bigger. There would come a point where no one would dare follow him. No one.

  Until then, he was alive, and free, and London would soon be in flames. He laughed again. Life was good.

  “Having fun?”

  He jumped to his feet, pain vying with surprise. A woman was standing there, outside the cage.

  “Camilla!”

  “Hello, Sniper. Care to share the joke?”

  She looked crumpled, her normally immaculate hair and clothing dishevelled. There were bruises on her face. More importantly, she held an Uzi submachine gun in her hands and it was pointing right at him.

  Sniper swallowed hard and glanced around the cage. T-800 and Edna were slumped across the only exit and the door… The fucking door opened inwards! He would need to drag them out of the way before he could get out. He wondered what kind of protection two bodies would provide against a modern automatic weapon at close range. Not much, he supposed. He limped to the back of the cage, adding a meagre two metres of extra distance between him and the gun.

  “Good news, Camilla,” he said, forcing a smile. “I suppose you’re here on behalf of the investors, to see how things worked out. Well, you can tell them it was a huge success. Well, they’ll see for themselves in a couple of hours when London turns into a madhouse. Their money was well invested. You must be up for a promotion now, eh? Or at least a big bonus?”

  Camilla said nothing. She just continued to watch him with cold clear eyes. Sniper cast about the room, looking for something that might help. Maybe something to distract her for a few seconds while he dragged those stupid bodies out of the way.

  That’s when he noticed Klaatu lying face down on the concrete floor beside the control console. The boy wasn’t moving. There was blood all around him and ugly holes in his back and legs. It shocked Sniper as much as anything that had happened yet that day.

  Rage boiled up in him. “You fucking deranged bitch! You’ve killed him. What the fuck was that for? Are you out of your tiny little mind?” He grabbed Edna’s body and threw him across the cage. His leg was screaming with pain, but he welcomed it. Pain and rage were all he wanted just then.

  He reached for T-800’s body and froze as gunfire exploded into the echoing spaces of the warehouse.

  “Do you want to die right now,” Camilla asked
, calmly lowering the gun to point it at him again, “or would you rather have a few more seconds?”

  Sniper sat down heavily, his hands still resting on T-800. He tried to look crestfallen and defeated, but inside he was excited and triumphant. Tucked into the back of T-800’s harness, out of Camilla’s line of sight, was a small handgun. It was just ten centimetres from his right hand.

  “Go on and shoot me, bitch,” he said. “It’s all over now anyway. I did what I wanted to do. The splash was incredible.” Imperceptibly, his hand moved toward the gun.

  * * * *

  Camilla had had enough. It had been a real pleasure killing the boy and she’d had fun watching Sniper squirm, but she needed to get on and get clear before the backwash came. It was time to end it.

  “Who gives a toss what you’ve done, you stupid jerk?” she sneered. “You’re just a tool. Something to be used and discarded when the job’s done. And that’s what I’m here for. To tidy up the loose ends. To finish the job properly. That was always the plan, you know. Get you to do the dirty work, take the risks, and then blow you away. You were never going to live to brag about this. I always had this planned for you. You and your little boyfriend over there.”

  For an instant, her eyes flicked to where Klaatu lay, for a fraction of a second, the barrel of the Uzi moved in the same direction, and in that moment she realised she had made a fatal mistake. Sniper rolled behind his dead friend and came up holding a gun, aiming it directly at her chest. Shocked, Camilla couldn’t muster her thoughts quickly enough to shoot first. The knowledge that she was going to die right there and then, was all that her mind could cope with. Sniper, on the other hand, looked cool and relaxed as he squeezed the trigger, clearly savouring the fear and defeat that must have been in her eyes. Click! Click! Click!

  They both stared at the empty gun in Sniper’s hand, frozen in postures of horror and amazement. Then Sniper threw the useless weapon across the cage and got to his feet with a roar of frustration and defiance.

  With a determination born of fear, Camilla pulled the trigger, emptying the Uzi’s clip into Sniper in long seconds of crashing thunder and exploding flesh. The weapon kicked and hammered in her grip. Sniper jerked back across the cage as he was ripped and smashed by the stream of bullets. Bright sparks dotted the bars of the cage. The screech of ricochets sliced across the roar of the gunfire. Long after her victim had fallen, Camilla kept firing into him.

  When it was over, she had to force her finger to relax on the trigger. She stared at the carnage she had caused, panting as if she’d torn up all that flesh with her bare hands. Slowly, slowly, her heartbeat eased and her breathing steadied. She threw the Uzi aside, never taking her eyes off Sniper’s body.

  “Now who’s the Arschloch?” she snarled. She turned and left the building without a backward glance.

  Chapter 27: Unravelling the Past

  The car turned in through the big old gates and followed the gravel drive up to the house. It crunched to a halt with a small whine from its electric engine. It was late afternoon and the drive down from London had been hot and uneventful.

  The countryside around Bodmin Moor was lush and green. London was one big construction site at the moment as the damage from the backwash was slowly repaired. A big scar of destruction ran from the British Museum to Cannon Street then along the river, east to Deptford. It was amazing that hardly more than two thousand people had died. It could easily have been so much worse.

  “Here we are then,” Jay said, breaking a long silence. He nodded at the old building beyond the windscreen. “Looks like it should have been condemned years ago.”

  They peered out at the high red-brick walls of the Porringer Institute of Mental Well-Being. To Sandra, Jay knew, it didn’t seem at all unwelcoming. To her it held only the promise of peace and the end of a long journey through darkness and fear.

  She smiled back at Jay. “I’m looking forward to it. This time will be very different.”

  He took her hand. “I’ll come over whenever I can. It’s a shame you won’t be there for Bauchet’s wedding.” He had only received the invitation the day before. That the intense, hawk-like superintendent had courted and won the heart of Marie Vermeulen, his cool, elegant P.A., was impossible for Jay to believe.

  “Isn’t it great that he gave you a job?” Sandra’s tone was encouraging. He felt a surge of gratitude to her for trying to break his melancholy mood.

  “Especially after the way Five treated me. And you. Anyone would think we were the bad guys in all this!” He fell silent for a moment, pondered this injustice. “If only the job wasn’t in Brussels. I want to be here. With you.”

  She squeezed his hand. “I’ll be fine. This will take time. Dr. Mason says it might be years before I’m completely okay.”

  “But not years in there, right? This place is just for a short while, yeah?”

  She laughed. “Don’t worry. The plan is a few weeks here and then I get out and get a therapist, just like any ordinary nutjob.”

  “Sandra?”

  She shook her head. “I know what you’re going to say but you don’t have to worry.”

  He could hardly stand the compassion in her eyes, knowing the fear and weakness in him that aroused it. “Well, I’m going to say it anyway. These past few weeks have been the happiest I’ve ever had. Even when I was laid up with my shoulder, it was heaven, just because you were there. Now I can’t help worrying that—you know—if you tackle all your childhood traumas, and your hang-ups and all that… What if after all that, you’re different?”

  “I hope I will be.”

  “No. I mean…”

  “You mean, what if I don’t want you any more?”

  He nodded. “Selfish, isn’t it?”

  “Perhaps you’d like to pop in with me? Work on your self-esteem problems?”

  He sagged in his seat, defeated by the inevitability of what Sandra must do and the terrible risk it carried for him. “I want you to be happy,” he told her. “I’ll try to be brave.”

  She continued to look at him, her eyes full of sympathy. “If I don’t work out some of this stuff, I’d be no good for you anyway. Sooner or later my old problems would come back and I’d leave you for some cocky bastard who’d treat me like crap and make me miserable.”

  He knew all this. It made him love her all the more that she was brave enough to face her demons. He grinned at her sheepishly.

  “Strumpet,” he said.

  “Beanpole.”

  She pulled him to her and they kissed good-bye.

  About the Author

  Graham Storrs is a speculative fiction writer living in Queensland, Australia. A former research scientist, IT consultant and award-winning software designer, he now lives and writes in a quiet corner of the Australian bush with his wife, Christine, and an Airedale terrier called Bertie. His writing credits include three children's science books, and a great many magazine articles, academic papers and book chapters. Since turning his attention to writing fiction he has had short stories published in a wide range of magazines and anthologies. TimeSplash is Graham's début novel.

  Follow Graham Storrs on his blog: http://grahamstorrs.cantalibre.com

  and on Twitter: http://twitter.com/graywave

  About TimeSplash

  TimeSplash will be available soon in print from eMergent Publishing, London and Brisbane, and in audio book format from Iambik Audiobooks, Montreal, Canada.

  If you want more background on the book, the characters and its appearances in various formats, TimeSplash has its own website and blog: http://www.timesplash.co.uk

  Table of Contents

  Part I Summer 2047 Chapter 1: Splashparty

  Chapter 2: The Lob

  Chapter 3: The Splash

  Chapter 4: Time to Kill

  Chapter 5: Arrivals

  Part II Winter 2049-2050 Chapter 6: Rumours

  Chapter 7: Beijing

  Chapter 8: The TCU

  Chapter 9: Hide and
Seek

  Chapter 10: Berlin

  Chapter 11: Hunters and Prey

  Chapter 12: Closing In

  Part III Summer 2050 Chapter 13: An Invitation

  Chapter 14: Another Invitation

  Chapter 15: Targets

  Chapter 16: Time Enough

  Chapter 17: Plots and Plans

  Chapter 18: Night Time

  Chapter 19: At the Marina

  Chapter 20: Ready to Go