by RR Haywood
He covers her body with his to protect her from chunks of brick and plaster and suddenly the bombers are overhead and the world fills with their deafening roar. Harry and Safa lift to fire back. Sending pings back into the ruins opposite as the rumble of nearby explosions reach them, quaking the buildings surrounding them with walls crashing down and chimneys falling. A bomb hits further down the street, sending flame into the air that gives light with noise and distraction.
‘Go!’ Safa urges, pushing forward with Harry.
‘Keep them covered,’ Emily orders Konrad, running up the stairs to peek out to see Harry and Safa moving to press the attack. She joins behind them, darting between broken walls to gain the edge of the building. She fires across, knowing the noise of the pistol will now be hidden in the chaos. Ben jerks up, hearing the louder gunfire, and sees the three moving forward and lifts to aim, sending shots into the shadows across the street as Safa, Harry and Emily break cover to run across.
‘Move.’ A voice at his side, and he flinches at being shoved by Charlie, who drops to Miri’s side as Ben spots Delta holding the pistol taken with ease from Konrad and aims at him.
‘Go,’ Charlie says, pushing his hands into Miri’s stomach. ‘GO! Help them . . .’
A look from Ben to Delta and sometimes in life you have to take that chance and Ben takes it now, rising to leap over the downed chimney with Delta to run across the street firing rounds into the shadows on the other side.
‘What the . . .’ Safa spins, seeing Delta running with Ben.
Delta surges past her, his pistol held double-handed as he breaches the building line. ‘Cover me . . .’
‘Covering.’ Safa spits the word, firing past him with Emily while Harry and Delta push in.
Delta brings his flashlight out, giving light to the shadows as they sweep through and the seconds go by as the net closes. ‘Here!’ Delta calls out. The others rush in to see a pile of spent casings forming a smiley face on the ground in a set of shadows further back in the building but no sign of Bravo.
‘Fuck it,’ Safa hisses. ‘Fall back . . . but eyes up.’
A careful withdrawal back across the street, all of them aiming as they go in case Bravo starts firing again, but no shots come so they get back into their side to take cover while Safa and Emily glare at Konrad.
‘I’m an engineer,’ he says weakly.
‘She’s bad,’ Charlie says, kneeling at Miri’s side. ‘No exit point so the bullet is still in there. Internal bleeding . . . organs could be damaged . . . She needs a hospital. Who is the OIC now?’ he asks as everyone looks at Ben. ‘Orders?’ Charlie asks him.
‘We need to move,’ Harry says. ‘Shooter knows our position; he could send soldiers here.’
Everyone looks at Ben, waiting for orders, waiting to be told what to do as he stares down to the near-silent form of Miri and suddenly he is but an insurance investigator surrounded by highly trained professionals and feeling way out of his depth. It’s like he’s been caught out, that up until now he’s been hanging on Miri’s coat-tails, knowing she was there to guide them, but now it’s down to him. He should tell them he can’t do this. One of them should take over. Safa or Charlie maybe. Harry was a sergeant; he could do it.
‘Ben?’ Safa asks softly.
‘Okay.’ Ben swallows and backs away into the shadow of a wall to stare out into the street.
Options, Mr Ryder? Ben can hear Miri’s voice in his head. The expectation in her voice that his intelligence is right there with the answers. She’d tell him to think clearly and make an informed decision based on all the information they have. To know all the pieces on the board and out-think everyone. The mission comes first. She’d say that too.
‘We need to exfil,’ Delta whispers urgently.
Ben blows air from his cheeks and focusses on the problems facing them. Miri is injured and needs urgent medical attention. They have to stop Mother and reset the changes.
A flash of an idea forms that brings hope surging into his heart. The first available portal out of here comes from the agents visiting Herr Weber in Bundesstraβe 2 in a few hours. They can get through that portal and take the complex with ease because the agents aren’t in it. They can kill the agents before they return through the portal, which stops them dropping the nuclear bomb on London, which means they could reset the changes at the same time as getting Miri medical help. There it is. The solution.
So why isn’t he giving the orders? Why isn’t he telling them to move out to find somewhere to hole up for a few hours until they head back to Bundesstraβe 2 and Arch 451.
A niggle. A voice in the back of his head that grows louder as he connects the dots from the very start to the now. From the time he was extracted and through everything that has happened in a stream of images and each image in his mind carries the emotions and feelings, the reasons for why it all happened and the realisation comes that makes him sag back into the wall. The realisation that brings forth an awful, terrible horror.
‘Mother saves the world,’ he whispers, and every head snaps to stare at him.
‘What?’ Emily asks, shock in her voice.
‘The world was over,’ he says. ‘Then Mother made the changes in one-two-six AD and dropped that nuclear bomb and now it’s not over . . .’
‘Jesus,’ Safa whispers, closing her eyes.
‘I don’t get it,’ Delta says, looking from Safa to Ben.
‘Bertie saw the world was over in twenty-one eleven,’ Ben says. ‘We did Cavendish Manor and all those things happened, then we checked the future and twenty-one eleven was fine . . . But the twenty-one eleven we saw has the changes from one-two-six AD and the nuclear bomb dropping in London . . . which means if those things don’t happen then it goes back to the world being over . . . We can’t reset it . . . We can’t stop the agents dropping that bomb . . .’
The shock hits. The simple reasoning of it. The clarity that Ben gives as he explains it. The chain of events that happens that now cannot be touched.
‘The portal opens again,’ Safa says. ‘When they deliver the bomb, when is that?’
‘Day after tomorrow,’ Charlie says. ‘Seventh February, but we deployed into a barn about ten kilometres from here near an airfield . . .’ He trails off as they look to Miri’s unconscious form.
‘Can we get her to a hospital here?’ Emily asks.
‘She needs specialist care,’ Charlie says. ‘A field hospital here won’t save her . . . We’ve got a combat surgeon in our complex, but she won’t last twelve hours, let alone a couple of days.’
‘Those are the options,’ Ben says. ‘We can try and get Miri through the agents’ portal in a few hours, but we risk killing the world, or we get through the portal in two days near the airfield by which time Miri will be dead . . .’
A heavy silence settles over them that touches even Charlie and Delta, not for the personal connection to the woman, but simply for the fact she is Maggie Sanderson. Everyone in their world knows who Maggie Sanderson is.
‘I’m sorry,’ Charlie whispers. ‘For what it’s worth, I doubt we’d even get through to Bundesstraβe 2. They’ll have a ring of steel round it after today . . .’
Thirty-Five
Berlin, 6 February 1945
Alpha comes to in a surge of adrenaline. Opening his eyes and staring round to a room full of noise and smells. People screaming. Men crying out in agony. People in blood-stained white coats rushing past. Old men and young boys dressed in grey uniforms hurrying past the end of his bed carrying stretchers laden with injured men, women and children.
It takes seconds to understand where he is and seconds longer for the pain to sweep through him. A crushing agony in the back of his head that makes him sink down and squeeze his eyes closed while his hands reach up to finger the dressing wound tightly round his skull.
Kate.
Alpha sits up, ignoring the pain and sickness to look round the huge room filled with beds and blood and screams. A makeshift field hospital. E
xhausted-looking doctors and nurses flitting from bed to bed. A surgeon sawing at a leg while other men hold the screaming patient down.
Kate.
No sign of her. She’s not next to him. He clambers up, swaying from the dizziness that he knows comes from concussion, but still he can’t see her.
‘Lie back down,’ a brusque female voice orders behind him. Hands on his shoulders pulling him back towards the bed.
‘A woman,’ he says in German, pulling away and turning to look at the hooded eyes of a young nurse. ‘There was a woman with me . . .’
‘Lie down. You’ll pass out.’
‘The woman,’ he snaps, earning glances from orderlies and doctors.
‘I don’t know,’ the nurse says. She’s too tired to care, too tired to keep moving.
‘How long have I been here?’
‘Yesterday, in the evening . . .’
He forces himself to be calm, resisting the urge to snap and demand answers. ‘Thank you. Please, my wife . . . she was with me . . .’
She glances at his hand, seeing the lack of a ring on his fingers. ‘They take women to the old schoolhouse sometimes . . . You didn’t have any papers,’ she says. ‘They’ll want to talk to you. I’ll tell them you’re awake now, shall I?’ She walks off through the maze of beds with a flick of her hand at the glass-lined cubicle at one end and the hard-faced men wearing black uniforms smoking inside it. He casts round for his coat, not seeing it anywhere and guessing it was taken. His sidearm and the Luger were in it. He has to go. He has to find Kate and get to Bundesstraβe 2. He starts to move, walking briskly to a wide aisle, aiming for the doors at the end.
‘YOU THERE . . . STOP!’
He runs.
A night in the basement under the bombed-out house. They made love several times. Buried in the warmth of the blankets, and while the bombers passed overhead, making the shelves in the basement rattle and dust fall from the beams, so they fucked slowly, exploring each other and feeling a strange rush of freedom at knowing there were no cameras or listening devices.
They found old jars filled with water and left in an obvious stockpile by whoever once lived above them. They drank deeply and washed each other, they spoke quietly of former lives, things they had seen and done, places they had been. Kate ad-libbed where needed, but stayed largely honest. Such is the skill required when inventing a past life. They held hands, stroked each other’s heads, cuddled, dozed and grew as human beings.
She didn’t have to fake any of it and that’s the basis of a true legend; to be the person and allow real emotions to come out and react as they would normally. To laugh when something is funny and make sad noises when something is bad. Show empathy, but be selfish. Be selfish, but show a giving nature that seeks only to care and love. To embed in a situation and act with absolute confidence means allowing human nature to show and to be a real person.
Real people have hopes and desires too and she wasn’t lying about the dreams she conjured with him. To have a device and spend their lives together going from era to era to see, study and live.
Their basement, for that night, became a kind of paradise.
‘It’s like that line from Charles Dickens,’ Kate said into the darkness.
‘Which one?’ Alpha asked, lying on his back with her draped over his chest.
‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . . that one. From A Tale of Two Cities? Do you know it?’
‘I think so,’ he said softly, staring off to nothing while looping a strand of her hair round his thumb. ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity . . .’ She sat up, listening in stunned awe. ‘. . . it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way . . .’
A moment in time that seared into her memory. A thing felt inside at the depths of a man she thought she had the measure of, who spoke so quietly, without a hint of boast or brag. Even when he finished and when most people would seek the acknowledgement of their audience he simply stared, listening intently with a mind constantly working while his fingers pushed into hers with raw vulnerability. She felt an urge at that point, a need to tell him who she really was and what she had done. To seek openness and honesty and with it, forgiveness.
‘Sorry,’ he whispered, finally looking at her with a rueful smile. ‘Wasn’t showing off . . .’
‘God no, not at all,’ she replied. ‘I didn’t think that . . . You’re a strange man.’
‘Not really,’ he said, shifting position. ‘We’re all what we’re told to be in a lot of ways . . .’ She blinked at the resonance of his words, her heart thumping harder and her mouth suddenly dry. ‘We get trained, we get told, we see goals and we work to be what we think we should be.’ He gave a dry laugh, smiling to himself, at her, at all of it while she felt a growing sickness building up inside. ‘Look at Emily Rose . . . She was trained and told to be one of us . . . She got through, maybe captured or escaping as Cavendish Manor went down, then she switched sides. She saw it. She saw what we see now . . . that we’re told to act in the service of the good and to do the bad things for the service of the good . . .’ He smiled again, exhaling slowly. ‘Ignore me. I’m being melancholy.’
‘You’re not . . . I like it.’
‘How about you? Ever do something you regret?’
Kate closed her eyes, feeling a sudden strange weight lifting from her shoulders and in that second she knew, she truly knew in the depths of her being that if she spoke now in honesty it would be okay and as she drew breath to form words to give sound to tell him so the bomb landed above them with a deafening, roaring, ear-splitting boom that brought down beams to flood their dark dry place with light and fire, with choking dust and falling chunks of masonry.
They reacted quickly, with reflexes honed over years of training. Both rolling from the beams, which thudded down from the ceiling. Everything shaking and heaving. The very ground trembling, but Alpha gained his feet and lifted her up, seeing the path ahead that they either took now or remained and died.
He didn’t speak, but pulled her round to go in front, propelling her from behind over and under the falling beams and the awful, terrible noise above them. He got her to the stairs and pulled her back to charge up and ram his head and shoulder into the trapdoor, pushing and straining against the rocks and bricks piling up on top of it. He gritted his teeth, grunting with effort while bracing his legs to lock out and heave, but felt the immovable weight above him while behind the basement was filling with fire, wood and bricks.
This was it. He could see it and sense it. He knew it. This was the point they died, that it would all be over and at some point two bodies would be pulled from the rubble that would be forever nameless and unknown. In that choking moment, in that second before the world crashed through the ceiling and buried them forever, she squeezed in at the top of the stairs and braced her head and shoulder next to his. Both crammed, facing each other with barely an inch to move, but they pushed together, grunting and crying out with eyes locked as the heat grew and the noise got worse. As the building came down so the veins pushed from their foreheads as they surged up, pushing the trapdoor open by degrees that shifted the bricks piled on top.
They gained freedom with a cry of pain and victory, falling out to roll together amidst the masonry raining down that hit their backs and legs and one solid chunk that slammed into the rear of Kate’s skull, making her sink with sudden nausea and an agony blooming in her head. She heard a sound like his voice and blinked in between the blackness to see his face smeared with blood and watched with almost idle detachment as she slid upside down with his hands gripping her wrists. She didn’t feel the drop from the building to the street but opened her eyes a moment later to see flames and smok
e and hear the deep avalanche sound of buildings coming down and engines roaring overhead.
‘WAIT THERE . . .’
She heard his voice again, feeling his hands on her cheeks, but then he was gone and she blinked in the blackness that took her away only to bring her back so she could open her eyes and see Alpha walking from a burning building, a child held in one arm and his hand pulling an unconscious woman behind him. She slept. She woke. She puked and gasped for air and her head hurt and her vision swam and she saw him framed by fire with children in his arms, then a woman over his shoulder, then another child, but Kate could see the head was gone from the tiny body.
‘ARE YOU OKAY?’ She blinked back to life, sucking in air and feeling the burn of vomit in her throat. Her head hurt, everything hurt. ‘ARE YOU OKAY?’ She looked up at the face of a woman.
‘Ja . . . ja,’ she stammered with the sense to answer in German, scrabbling to her feet and looking round at a scene far worse than anything witnessed so far. Mass casualties everywhere. Hundreds killed and maimed instantly. Buildings blazing with flames scorching dozens of feet into the sky and yet more bombers overhead continuing the punishment. She looked round, desperately seeking Alpha. Then she saw him kneeling in the road and ran staggering towards him, seeing his hands pushing on the chest of a child, trying to get air into the broken body. She dropped at his side, instantly going to work to pull the chin back and clear the airways before bending down to give her breath into the lungs of another. They worked together, compressions given and breaths administered for long minutes until the tears pricked her eyes with the hopeless realisation it was too late.
They stopped together. No words were needed, no signals passed that told the other to cease, but an understanding that continuing was hopeless.
‘We have to go,’ Alpha said quietly, his voice almost lost in the chaos.
‘Help this one,’ the gruff voice of a man said, lowering a screaming child down next to Alpha before rushing off. A kid, maybe seven or eight, his arm broken and his face twisted in utter agony. Alpha looked round, his face a mask of conflict. They had to go and hide; this was not their war or their place to be.