ALLIANCE (Descendants Saga)
Page 30
He had to get his bearings. Where was the woman? Where had Anna gone? He didn’t see her. There were too many people to find her—the crowd too uproarious to pick her out.
Brody paused. He had to look for the right clue. Both of them had passed through a portal. There would be residual energies, traces of the portal matrix upon them both. She would only have arrived minutes before him. A woman in her condition could not have gotten far, especially not in all of this clamor.
Feeling with senses that mere mortals did not possess, Brody picked at the wispy traces of the portal. He could perceive them now. They matched the same that clung to him still.
A trail began to form, passing through the crowd, heading away from the fireworks, moving away from the massive four-faced clock now chiming midnight nearby. Wisps of power like a trail of smoke led him on and he followed.
He saw another group of lights, these were spinning on top of a vehicle. Red lights on top of some kind of van. He did recognize the red medical cross painted upon the white body of the van. An ambulance. The traces of portal energy were leading in that direction.
Brody teleported nearer. He was now standing within thirty feet of the woman. Anna was holding her stomach as if she was in pain. She didn’t appear to be in labor, though it was hard to tell. By his estimation, she didn’t look far enough along.
The medical personnel tended to her. The array of apparatus inside the vehicle left him dumbfounded. He didn’t recognize the kinds of machines they were using—none of them.
Anna was laid out upon a gurney of some kind. Something, a clear mask, was placed over her face, presumably to help her breathe. They strapped her to the gurney and then loaded her inside the ambulance. Closing the doors behind, the men loaded into the front of the vehicle.
Sirens blared at those who had gathered around to watch the pregnant woman being loaded up. The crowd parted as the ambulance began a steady trek on toward the main road. If things were the same in this strange version of London, then St. Mary’s Hospital was only a few miles away.
Brody teleported after the ambulance, short distances only that left the impression he was a man walking, but that upon closer observation skipped a hundred paces at a time. The vehicle made a slow trip, since traffic was heavy. He didn’t have any trouble keeping up, or remaining inconspicuous.
As he had expected, the hospital was the same that he had remembered. It had been young when he first journeyed across the Atlantic with his father to London. Clearly it was different now—updated—but it was the same basic construction.
He followed nearby as the ambulance made its way around the building to a lower level. Here there were places for the vehicles to park and for patients to disembark into the facility itself. The medics with Anna removed her from the rear of the vehicle and wheeled her inside.
Brody was unsure now what his course of action should be. If he followed her inside, he might well be able to end this now. Obviously, she was in no condition to run. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Not yet.
All of this was so strange, his surroundings, the city and its citizens. He walked around the hospital again, trying to think. He passed shops full of things he had never laid eyes on before. Lights were everywhere, bright colors and banners.
Then he spotted something that shook him to his core. Rectangular devices displaying moving pictures in color. He had seen larger versions of these: movies they were called. It wasn’t the technology that troubled him now. It was the images being shown.
There on the small screens behind the plate glass window of the shop, the celebration was on display—the same that he had just witnessed below the great Ferris wheel. The fireworks were still going off. He looked back toward the river. The air was quiet. No fireworks now.
Words came across the screens over the moving pictures. Happy New Year!
Brody gasped. It was impossible. How could this have happened. And yet he knew that it must also be true. This was the puzzle piece to explain all that he was witnessing.
He was really in London, but it wasn’t 1945 any longer. The portal he and Anna Parks had passed through—somehow they had been held within and then released much later. This was the beginning of the next century: January 1st 2000.
R A G E
Descendants Saga
CRISIS SEQUENCE ONE
Jonathan Parks never expected to see the end of the
world. He never expected to be the cause of it
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