by Tim O'Rourke
But neither three looked back. It was like they couldn’t hear him. Like he wasn’t even there. And perhaps he wasn’t. Maybe he was seeing the past—the murder of the young man—and was therefore unable to prevent his death, however much he protested against it. Through the pulsating lights that danced and swirled before his eyes, Karl watched the three figures pin the young man to the floor. He thrashed his legs as if kicking against an invisible tide that threatened to drag him under. The three strangers set about him in a frenzy, bent over him, arms pin-wheeling through the air like cutting tools. Their heads jackhammered up and down, back and forth, as they fed from his throat.
“Stop!” Karl yelled through clenched teeth, the pain threatening to pull him down into unconsciousness. But he knew he couldn’t let the darkness take him. He had to try and stop the killing. He had to try and save the young man if he could. His mother would have saved him. She had told Karl as a young boy that it was important to fight for those who didn’t have a voice—to fight for those who were unable to fight for themselves.
With his mother’s words whispering at his ears, the darkness took him. It seemed that even the voice of his mother—the person he had idolised more than any other—was unable to stop the blackness from consuming him.
***
Selina turned the vehicle mid-air and swooped back toward the tower of shipping crates. She brought the patrol car to a stop so her door was next to the scaffolding. Selina glanced into the side mirror and watched Karl follow the landlord into one of the crates. She left the engine idling so the car would stay afloat while she joined Karl to find out what had taken place in the crate. Despite what she had said to Karl, she was in no doubt that another murder had taken place. But she was interested to learn what Officer Potter might see at the crime scene.
With the emergency lights still blinking on and off on the roof of the car, Selina climbed out and over the rail that supported the sky-high gangway. Rain bounced off her helmet and ballistic vest. The wind gusted so hard that she gripped the handrail for fear of being blown back into the sky. As she approached the opening to the crate where she had last seen Karl, she heard a sudden noise behind her. Selina spun around to see a cloaked figure further along the walkway. Whoever the stranger was, their face was hidden by a dark hood.
“Hey, you!” she called out.
The figure simply turned and stepped into a nearby crate. With her curiosity piqued, Selina headed along the gangway in search of the hooded stranger. She reached the crate the stranger had disappeared into. The sheet of corrugated iron that had been used as a makeshift door had been pulled to one side. Selina peered into the darkness. She could see no sign of the stranger. Plucking her flashlight from her utility belt, she switched it on.
Officer Riley splashed light into the crate. Unable to see who it was she had come looking for, she took a step inside. She sprayed torchlight up the walls. The light fell on the shrouded figure who she could see was standing in the corner of the abandoned crate.
“What are you doing in here?” Selina asked.
The stranger stepped forward and lowered the hood.
Selina recognised the stranger at once. “Oh, it’s just you, Nik,” she said. “What are you wearing that hood for? And why are you skulking around here in the dark? I didn’t think you could travel forward now that the jukebox was broken.”
“Our plans have changed,” Nik Seth whispered.
Chapter Sixteen
The year 1985
At first, the sensation of the railway man’s fangs slicing into her flesh felt like she was lying on a beach beneath a warm sun. Her whole body suddenly felt hot and prickled with heat. But that sensation soon turned to one of coldness as her blood began to pump through her veins in ice-cold waves. She spasmed and locked in Noah’s arms as he began to draw blood from her throat and into his mouth. As Carol’s blood gushed into the back of Noah’s throat, his eyes rolled back in their sockets as he enjoyed the sticky sweetness of it. But however much it relieved the aching craving deep inside of him, it didn’t quite hit the spot as much as the black stuff did. His intention, however, was not to kill Carol, but change her. Jake Stranger had given him little choice. By performing magic in front of Carol, Jake had made her a target. A target for those who not only wanted to destroy witches and wizards like Stranger, but those who also hunted creatures like Noah. He had, therefore, been left with little choice but to turn Carol—make her a creature like him. Who, then, could she tell about Jake Stranger lest she reveal her new self, too?
Noah felt her go weak in his arms, and then slid his fangs from the side of her neck. Her head lolled to the right and he supported it with one hand. He watched blood trickle from the two piercings in her neck. Very slowly, he leaned in close once more, and mopped up the last of the blood with the tip of his tongue.
Alone in the Talisman Office with Carol, Noah knew he had little time to push Carol before Jake Stranger arrived. Although Jake would soon know the truth about himself and who and what he really was, it was not yet the time for him to do so. There was another who had to be unmasked before that happened. Lifting Carol up into his arms, he carried her from the cellblock and into the passageway. Just before he reached the door that contained a circular padlock, he placed Carol down onto the floor.
Grabbing hold of the circular padlock with one hand, he then turned the dial on the front and to the following combination: 2-0-1-8. The padlock sprang free and the door swung open, filling the narrow passageway deep within the Talisman Office with pulsating beams of bright white light. The brightness was suddenly filled with the sound of screeching. Noah whirled round to see that Carol was no longer lying slumped on the floor against the wall, but was now standing.
Throwing her head back, she began to hiss and spit. She clawed at the air with her hands, and Noah noticed one of the bangles she wore about her wrist come free and drop to the floor of the passageway. Noah shot forward, taking hold of her wrists once more. She yanked and pulled against him as he tried to drag her into the light and toward the doorway set into the wall. Noah was surprised by her sudden strength and how quickly she was beginning to change from human to vampire. He had only ever seen the change happen so quickly once before, and that had been after he had bitten Laura Pepper.
As Noah pulled and tugged Carol into the light that shone from the open doorway, he could see that her eyes were now as dead and black as his. Her mouth stretched open, her gums bleeding as fangs had already started to break through.
Carol jerked her head left and right. She felt scared. She had no understanding of what was happening to her. The last thing she could remember was the strange railway man leaning forward as if to kiss her neck. Here he was again, gripping her by the wrists once more, but this time, instead of pulling her through a wall and into some strange-looking police station, he was dragging her toward a bright white light. Was she dying? Was this the bright white light at the end of the tunnel that everyone hoped to see once death took them? But she didn’t want to head toward it. She didn’t want to die just yet.
She twisted away from Noah, trying to break free of him. Once more, she looked for any way of escape. There was a doorway to her left, which was open. Beyond that, she could see some kind of locker room. Wooden cabinets were stacked against the walls. But there was a window. As her blood continued to surge through her veins in ice-cold streams, and her vision swayed in and out of focus, Carol was sure she could see a face staring through the window on the opposite side of the locker room. She screwed up her eyes to get a better look. Carol was sure it was the face of Jake Stranger she could see peering in at her. He was banging on the windowpane with his fists. While her attention had been set on the face at the window, the railway man had seized his chance, pulling her through the open doorway and into the pulsating bright white light.
Chapter Seventeen
The year 2067
Annora had heard enough. She pushed past Kiera and headed across the chamber and back in the dire
ction of the narrow passageway. Before she reached it, she felt a hand grip her arm. She spun around to face Potter.
“Get off me!” Annora roared back at him. She shook her arm free of him. She looked at Potter and the rest of the group, an angry scowl across her face. “You are all a bunch of lying freaks!”
From across the room, Kiera could see and sense the pain and anguish Annora now felt. “We’re not lying, Annora,” Kiera said. “I wish that we were, but were not.”
Open-mouthed, Annora stared at Kiera in disbelief. “If my mum and dad aren’t my parents, then who are they!? Who are my real parents? Tell me that—go on!”
“No one knows,” Jake said, he too understanding and sympathizing with the pain that Annora was now feeling. He had never known his real parents. He’d only discovered much later that his parents had been murdered by a wolf, and he had been handed over to witches and wizards, who had raised him in the where and when that he had come from.
Annora spun around to face him. “Noah must know who my parents are. He seems to know everything else. He knew that I was going to end up in that cloakroom in the Night Diner back in 1973. Noah knew enough to ask you to place the umbrella there for me. So if he knew all of that, why shouldn’t he know who my real parents are?”
Franziska took a step closer to Annora. “Noah doesn’t know the identity of your real parents,” she explained. “If he knew, he would tell us. I know he would.”
Still trying to make sense of what Kiera and her friends were telling her, Annora racked her brain for any holes in their story. At last, she thought she’d found a great, big gaping hole in what they had said. She folded her arms across her chest in defiance. “So if no one knows who my real parents are, how can you be so sure that the people who raised me are not my parents after all?”
“Come with me,” Potter said, and this time he didn’t sound belligerent or cocky. His voice had mellowed and he sounded now just as compassionate and concerned as the others did.
Annora wasn’t prepared to forgive him just yet. She couldn’t forget his earlier arrogance. “I’m not going anywhere with you, Potter. The only place I’m going is right out of here.”
“To where?” Kiera tried to reason with her. “You can’t get back to 2018.”
Annora thought about her seemly impossible predicament for a moment. She thought that perhaps she had an idea. “Noah told me to head to the Night Diner in Outpost 71. Perhaps there will be a jukebox there just like there was in 1973. Maybe there’s a way of using that to travel back to 2018 and put all this behind me.”
“The jukebox at the Night Diner doesn’t work,” Kiera said.
“How can you be so sure?” Annora asked, her voice full of suspicion.
“Because I broke it,” Potter said.
“Why did you do that?”
“So our enemies couldn’t travel forward in time and catch up with us here,” Kiera explained for Potter. “We did it so they couldn’t come for our son, Karl. As you know, we’ve already lost one child, our daughter, Cara, and were not prepared to see another die.”
“But you’ve been quite prepared to abandon him for the last seven years,” Annora shot back without thinking. She saw the shocked and hurt expression on Kiera’s face. It was as if Annora had struck her. At once, Annora wished she could take those words back. But she couldn’t.
Clenching his jaws as if he had a foul taste in his mouth, Potter shot forward, so he was standing toe-to-toe with Annora. He stared down into her face, his eyes completely black, and whites no longer visible. “We faked our own deaths to protect our son, if you really must know. Nothing has hurt us more than to be separated from him. We had no choice. While our enemies believed that we were alive, Karl was always going to be a target. They would hurt him to get at me and Kiera. But if they believed us to be dead, they would leave him alone. That is what we hoped, but others have begun to circle around him, wanting to know if he possesses the power of sight that his mother does.”
“And that is the real reason, Noah first pushed you into this year, 2067, so that you may help to protect our son—so that we had an ally we could trust until Karl began to show his true powers, ” Kiera explained.
“But why send me?” Annora said, feeling more confused than ever. “I’m just a nobody. I’m no one. How could I possibly be of help and keep your son safe? Why would I make such a great ally to you and him?”
“Because you’re more like us than you realise,” Kiera said. She had already forgiven Annora for the spiteful comment she had made. She understood why Annora had made it and didn’t blame her for doing so. Annora was just feeling angry, hurt, and confused.
“I’m nothing like you,” Annora insisted. “Despite what you say, I know who my parents are. I know that they are human, just like me.”
Without warning, Potter snatched hold of Annora’s arm. He frog-marched her across the underground room and into one of the passages that led from it. As Annora tried to pull free, Kiera, Jake, and Franziska followed. Just like the other passageway, it was lit with lanterns that were attached to the rocky walls. Halfway along it, Potter kicked open a wooden door. He dragged Annora into a room where the walls were lined with flickering TV monitors. Beneath these were an array of keyboards and many other electronic devices. Red, blue, yellow, and green lights blinked on and off. Before the bank of monitors were a row of chairs. Potter pushed Annora down into one of them so that she was staring at the TV monitors attached to the wall.
“You can’t keep me here, I’m not your prisoner…” Annora started to protest again.
“Why don’t you do us all a favour and shut the fuck up,” Potter groaned, turning his back on her and facing the keyboard on the metal desk before him. “I don’t know about the others, but you’re beginning to get on my bloody nerves. Christ knows what Karl ever saw in you. Maybe my son was turning into some kind of perv and nagging and whining women like you is how he gets his kicks.”
“How dare you!” Annora said, springing out of the chair. Then, almost at once she dropped back down into it. Now looking as if she had been struck, she stared wide-eyed up at the monitors attached to the stone walls. Displayed on one of them was an image of herself. But it wasn’t a photograph that was being displayed, but a piece of flickering video footage. Yet despite the hazy and fuzzy screen, Annora could clearly see that it was her. The video had obviously been shot on some inward facing dash-cam. She was sitting in the passenger seat of some type of car, which was being driven by a young man. She didn’t need to ask his name. He looked too much like his mother and father. It was obvious to her that she was looking at video footage of her and Karl Potter.
Both of them were wearing military-style helmets of some kind. Visors were attached to these, but they had been pushed up so she could clearly see hers and Karl’s face.
Annora glanced sideways at Kiera. “But…”
“Just watch,” Kiera whispered.
Annora looked up at the screens once more. The video footage was wavering in and out of focus and the sound was somewhat distorted. She saw herself on the video reach for a radio, which was attached to some kind of ballistic vest she was wearing. In the video, Karl looked at her before pulling down his visor. She then did the same. Annora could then hear the sound of emergency sirens bleeding through the speakers attached to the walls adjacent to the monitors. The screen lit up in flashes of blue and red and she understood that she and Karl were in some kind of police vehicle. Although she didn’t remember it, she understood what she was seeing. Noah told her that in the future, she had been a Temporal Officer and had been partnered up with an officer by the name Karl Potter. She was now witnessing that life she had once led, in an alternate future that she would now never know.
Screwing up her eyes, she peered up at the screens as the others stood silently about her. “Can’t you do something about the picture?” she asked. “It’s too fuzzy for me to see.”
“There’s nothing we can do,” Potter started to explain.
“The layers are trying to erase the footage—trying to close the crack that you left behind. Eventually, the footage will disappear forever. It will be like that life you led has never existed. I was lucky to get to the wreckage and steal the dash-cam and hard drive before the emergency services arrived and downloaded it for themselves.”
Still staring up at the monitors, unable to tear her eyes away, Annora said, “Wreckage? What wreckage?”
“Just keep watching,” Jake said over her shoulder.
From what Annora could see and hear on the screen, it appeared that she and Karl were racing toward some kind of urgent incident. The radios were squawking and the sirens were screaming. She found it surreal to be watching herself as if she had acted a part in a movie that she could not remember starring in. But if she found what she had seen so far that surreal, then nothing could prepare her for what was to come next.
The Annora Snow she was watching on the monitor suddenly began to scream and convulse in her seat. She raised her hands to her face and stared at her fingers that were now leaking coils of blue and mauve light. And as if that wasn’t enough, her hands and fingers no longer looked human, but like claws. She saw Karl glance sideways at her as what looked like electricity shot from her fingers and danced across the dashboard of the patrol car. Through the monitor’s speakers, Annora heard herself scream.
The screen suddenly went black.
She gasped. “What happened? Switch the monitor back on. I need to see what happened next.”
“You died,” Potter said. “That’s what happened next.”
“But I don’t understand,” Annora said, pushing back her chair and standing up. She faced those gathered around her.
“You died in a car crash,” Kiera said. “That’s how you ended up travelling backwards and not forwards. When you died in that patrol car, it was like your layer got reset and you never actually travelled there or existed in the year, 2067.”