by Alex Scarrow
The MCV ahead of them glided through the archway over the Via Praenestina, the road heading into the centre of Rome. The thoroughfare in front of them was empty of people, but littered with abandoned carts, rickshaws, dropped bales of goods. As Rashim’s MCV glided beneath the archway into the market square beyond, he had to admit that Stilson’s idea to pump out hundreds of decibels of awful rock music was a pretty good scare tactic. Personally he would have chosen something a little more melodic and sophisticated to announce their arrival, but whatever. It was certainly working.
Stilson’s voice came over the comms-channel. ‘Which way is it to the Colosseum?’
Rashim ducked down through the hatchway looking for Dreyfuss. He beckoned him to join him up in the hatchway. Dreyfuss clambered through the press of swaying bodies below, found the ladder and pulled himself up beside Rashim.
He pointed to the MCV ahead of them bobbing softly on its electro-magnetic field in the middle of the now-deserted market square. ‘Stilson wants directions to the Colosseum!’
Dreyfuss shook his head and shouted something back. It was lost amid the din of the pounding music. Rashim picked up a headset hanging on a hook beside him and passed it to the his-torian, gesturing for him to put it on his head.
‘My God!’ Dreyfuss’s tinny voice crackled over the comms-channel a few seconds later. Behind round-framed glasses his eyes widened. ‘My God! This is actually it! This is really Ancient Rome. This is incredible! Look at those wall decals! That graffiti over there! The –’
‘Jeez, who’s that squawking on the channel? That you, Anwar?’
‘No, Mr Stilson,’ answered Rashim. ‘I’ve got Dr Dreyfuss up here with me now.’
He could see Stilson’s head and shoulders ahead of them, turning round to look back at them.
‘Ah, good job. Dreyfuss, tell me which way do we go for the Colosseum?’
‘Uh, Mr Stilson, see … if this is in fact AD 37, it won’t have been built yet.’
‘No Colosseum? OK, Dreyfuss, give me somewhere else we can go. Where’s the most public place we can gatecrash?’
‘Well.’ He scratched at his beard like a dog scratching for fleas. He looked at Rashim for inspiration. Rashim shrugged a you’re-the-expert at him.
‘Well now, the best place I can suggest … would probably be the Amphitheatrum Statilii Tauri.’
‘Yeah? So where’s that?’
‘It’s in the Campus Martius District.’
They both heard Stilson curse impatiently. ‘Just give me a goddam left, a right or a straight on, OK?’
Dreyfuss pointed towards a broad cobbled thoroughfare branching off from the small square. ‘That road ahead of us, I think. It should take us in a generally south-westerly direction. Which is towards the centre of the city.’
‘Right.’
The MCV in front of them began to slide towards the broad avenue. It was flanked on either side by rows of low shops – tabernae – their stone walls painted with a riotous variety of colours and murals, and fronted with awnings and stalls selling all manner of crafted goods.
Rashim watched pale faces looking out at them from the dark tabernae interiors. Wide-eyed expressions of terror. He wondered whether that was at the sight of the two large hovering vehicles, or the horrendous, wailing, banshee-like noise they were pumping out.
They proceeded slowly, steadily down the thoroughfare, the buildings on either side becoming brightly painted, two-storey structures of clay brick with uncertain-looking balconies of wood and wicker. He saw heads peeking from behind beaded fabric panels and wooden shutters, abandoned animals braying in the street, a baby left on its back in a doorway, pink fists clenching and unclenching above its squawking face.
They entered a second, larger market square. Rashim watched hundreds of people scatter, clay amphoras of olive oil and wine dropped, shattering and spilling their contents on the ground, chickens skittering nervously between the wooden legs of market stalls and packs of dogs barking a challenge as they back-stepped nervously into open-guttered alleyways.
Dreyfuss was grinning at their surroundings, grinning like a fox in a chicken coop. He instructed Stilson to bear left. ‘That avenue’s the Vicus Patricius, taking us past the Forum Traiani … the Palatinus on the left … the –’
‘We don’t need a history lesson, Dreyfuss,’ Stilson’s voice crackled. ‘Just the directions.’
Dreyfuss nodded. ‘Sorry … just keep on this road until we see the River Tiber, then we take a right and follow the river up into the Campus Martius District.’
CHAPTER 20
AD 37, Amphitheatrum Statilii Tauri, Rome
The workers had cleared away most of the bloody remains from the ad bestia. The last wretched lion had been put out of its misery and fresh dirt sprinkled over the largest coagulating puddles of blood. The crowd were clearly restless for the next round – gladitorii meridiani – to begin, a fight between several sparring partners of convicted criminals. Man versus beast was one thing, but it was quite another to see two pairs of men fighting desperately for their lives. Particularly when it was well known that one of the convicts about to emerge into the arena was Vibius, the notorious child-strangler from the Esquilinus District.
Caligula rather fancied that if the man managed to survive his sparring partner, he would put on some armour, come down to the pit and face the murderer himself. The crowd would love that. He smiled.
The plebs are so easily pleased, aren’t they?
A roar of excitement began to roll round the amphitheatre as wooden gates opened revealing a dark tunnel down to the underground bowels of the arena and a pair of Praetorian Guards leading out two rows of terrified-looking men; a wretched collection of specimens.
He was about to turn and ask his slave, Gnaelus, for his armour to be readied in case the mood to participate in finishing off any squirming survivors took him when he heard, faintly, over the hubbub of the impatient onlookers around the stalls of the amphitheatre, a soft, rhythmic thumping, almost like a distant battle drum.
His lean face knotted with curiosity. ‘Gnaelus, can you hear that?’
The old slave nodded.
‘Now what do you think that is?’
He cocked his head. ‘Sounds like a marching drum, Caesar.’
Some other heads among the roaring crowd began to curiously turn one way then the other at the still faint but steadily increasing volume of that thumping.
The convicts meanwhile were now standing in the middle of the arena, the escort of Praetorian Guards withdrawing to the edges of the pit as a pair of slaves passed out an assortment of weapons to the criminals. Their minds on the prospect of imminent violent death, none of them yet seemed to have registered the growing noise.
Caligula stood up and leaned against the railing of the imperial box. ‘What is that?’ he uttered. ‘It really is getting quite irritating now.’
All of a sudden a flock of starlings fluttered and swooped across the sky above them, quite clearly startled by something. Heads all around the amphitheatre looked up at them, circling once above the arena and then fleeing over the walls and out of sight.
Caligula could hear the roar of impatient excitement for the next round giving way to a chaos of voices filled with curiosity and a growing anxiety at the noise and that sudden peculiar behaviour of the birds.
The thumping sound was now almost on a par with the noise of the crowd, a deep, slow, regular pounding, like a heartbeat. Accompanied by something else now. It sounded like a horn. No. In fact … like nothing he’d ever heard before, a note increasing in pitch, getting higher and higher, more insistent, like a roaring wind whistling with growing intensity.
Up until now he was damned if he was going to display any unease or urgent curiosity like the rabble in the stalls around him. But this cacophony, the thumping so loud his chest was beginning to vibrate, this growing whistling, wailing sound …?
Then shrill screams.
He turned to where they were coming
from and saw something loom over the top of the highest row of stalls, something large. The size of those curious, grey, lumbering beasts from Africa, two of them in fact. But it was all angles, corners, plated like armour and the drab colour of a muddy river. It rose over the edge of the stalls and seemed to slide down just feet above the heads of panicking people fleeing their seats. Hovering – the air beneath it shimmering and churning like the air above a campfire.
The thudding was suddenly so much louder, Caligula could hear what sounded like a voice shrieking and wailing like a man tormented by a thousand demons. He dropped to his knees behind the parapet, his eyes bulging with terror.
The giant thing, not alive, not any kind of animal, he sensed that now – some sort of vast flying chariot perhaps? – finally slid over the last stall and down on to the arena floor, whipping up swirling clouds of sand and dust.
A second one of these leviathans appeared over the top wall of the amphitheatre, glided down across the stalls, now empty except for the writhing bodies of the trampled and wounded, finally coming to rest beside the first. Both olive-green leviathans were hovering a man’s height off the ground, churning up storms of grit and sand into the thousands of terrified faces all around.
Finally the roaring wind sound began to drop in pitch and volume and both monsters settled gently on to the ground, the storm cloud of dust and sand settling around them. The deep booming thudding and the horrifying wailing continued, however, drowning out the hoarse screams of panic from all sides of the amphitheatre.
Caligula realized that beneath his imperial robes he had wet himself. Another childhood memory for him today.
Shame.
CHAPTER 21
AD 37, Amphitheatrum Statilii Tauri, Rome
Rashim could hear Stilson’s voice over the comms-channel, guffawing like a frat-boy with a hall-pass. ‘Just look at ’em!’
Dreyfuss was grinning too. Drinking in the spectacle of the arena.
The combat unit leading the platoon, Lieutenant Stern, barked some orders to his men and they dropped down from the hulls of both MCVs on to the hard sand, setting up an ordered circular perimeter, kneeling, weapons raised, around both vehicles with quick, well-practised efficiency.
‘Can we cut this wretched noise now?’ said Rashim. ‘I can’t help but think we’ve made our point!’
Forty feet away, standing on top of the weapons turret of his MCV, he saw Stilson nod slowly. ‘I guess these dumb suckers have heard enough AC/DC. Yeah, OK, you can cut it.’
Rashim ducked down inside and gestured for the unit manning the console to turn the music off. He flipped a switch … and all of a sudden they were engulfed with silence. Complete, hear-a-pin-drop silence.
Stilson’s voice quietly crackled over Rashim’s earpiece. ‘I think we got their attention, eh, Dr Anwar?’
Rashim nodded. Yes, I think you could probably say that.
‘Have we got that recording ready to go?’
Dreyfuss had worked with Stilson last night, taking the vice-president’s scribbled words and translating them into Latin then reading them aloud and recording it. He’d fussed and fretted for endless hours over the various versions of the recording, worrying about the precise pronunciation of the language. ‘No one knows for sure how some of these words were actually spoken!’ had been his repeated complaint. But he’d done it … eventually settling on one particular recording as the best he was ever going to get.
‘It’s good to go,’ said Dreyfuss over the comms-channel.
‘Then let’s play it!’ said Stilson, hopping down from the weapons turret, walking across the sloping hull of his vehicle and standing proudly on the front of it, hands on hips like some Shakespearian actor centre stage.
The complete silence was broken by the booming sound of Dreyfuss’s voice over the two vehicles’ synced PA system.
‘CITIZENS OF ROME! We come in peace!’
Rashim shook his head. Only a pompous idiot like Stilson would start with a line as cheesy as that.
‘We have come down from the heavens to be gods among mortals! We are here to show you new ways, to share our knowledge and our wisdom with you. We are here to educate this dark world, bring peace to every land and … prosperity to you!’
He looked at the crowd. The panicked stampede from the stalls had stopped and all around them, on the four sides of the Statilius Taurus, ten thousand faces stared in silence at Stilson … assuming the voice they could hear was his. The members of Project Exodus, crammed down inside the MCVs, began to emerge warily from a ramp at the rear of each vehicle.
‘We … are all gods in human form. We are all from the heavens, a place that we call … America. And we are here to bring you our way of living. The “American way”!’
CHAPTER 22
2001, Barnes & Noble, Union Square, New York
‘This is not the historical reference section, Liam.’
‘What? Uh …’ Liam looked up guiltily from the comicbook in his hands. ‘Oh hi, Bob, I wondered where you got to.’
‘I have been waiting in the historical reference section for twenty-nine minutes.’ Bob looked at the label at the top of the spinning carousel. ‘Graphic novels? You will not find relevant or useful texts in this section. I have located the computer technology section at the –’
‘You should have a look at these!’ Liam flicked through several pages. ‘I never really took any notice of the cartoons in the Cork papers. Thought they were for children, or fools who couldn’t read proper.’ He handed the comicbook to Bob. ‘But this …’ he said, grinning, ‘it’s properly amazing, so. Look at them pictures.’
Bob looked at the cover of the one Liam passed him. ‘Judge Dredd?’
‘Aye. And the hero fella, this Dredd, he looks just like you: all muscles and chin and no bleedin’ smile. You could be his twin!’
Bob’s contemplative scowl remained as he scanned several pages. ‘You cannot see this character’s face. He is wearing a helmet.’
‘Hey, we could dress you up like that. Eh? Get you one of them big motor bicycles and you could ride round the city being all grumpy.’ Liam nudged him. ‘What do you think about that?’
Bob handed the comicbook back to him. ‘This is not relevant reading material.’
‘Well … we’re on strike, are we not? I fancy something a little bit more fun to read.’ He stuck the comicbook under his arm and flipped through a few more. ‘This stuff is all so fun … and look! This one’s got a big grumpy fella who dresses like a bat, so he does!’ Liam giggled. ‘I love it!’
‘This is not useful or relevant reading material.’
He pulled another one out and silently flipped through a dozen pages, grinning at the illustrations. ‘Ah now, will you look at this one. Right up your street, so it is.’
Bob looked at the cover. ‘2000AD: Robo-Hunter.’ He shook his head disapprovingly. ‘It does not depict cybernetic technology accurately.’
‘Aw, come on, Bob. It’s just a bit of fun.’ Liam patted him. ‘I’m having this one as well.’ He looked up at Bob. ‘How much money have we got?’
‘Maddy gave us ninety dollars.’
Liam nodded. ‘Enough for another couple, do you think?’
‘Negative, Liam. You have enough money to purchase one more comicbook, if you still also wish to purchase a hot dog afterwards.’
They were out on 5th Avenue, ambling north in the general direction of Central Park. Hot dogs on the grass in the midday sun – that was the plan. A bit of ‘lads-together-time’ was Liam’s justification for blagging some petty cash from Maddy.
Liam was already eagerly leafing through the glossy coloured pages of Judge Dredd. ‘Ah, this Dredd fella’s such a cool customer, so he is.’
Bob strode along beside him thoughtfully. ‘Define cool customer.’
‘Well … he just seems so calm. See, look at his mouth. It’s always the same … not screaming or laughing or anything. Just like this.’ Liam pressed his lips together firmly into
a passable approximation of humourless stoicism. ‘I wish I could be like that. Calm. Firm. You know? In charge of things. No fear.’
‘You are able to do many expressions with your face, Liam. Why would you want to limit yourself to only being able to do one?’
‘Well, I got a terrible feeling that I spent most of the last few months with me gob hangin’ open like a barn door.’
Which was probably true. It seemed if he wasn’t utterly confused by events going on around him, then he was busy being utterly terrified by them.
‘Mimicking human facial expressions is one thing I find difficult to do convincingly,’ said Bob. ‘Becks managed to be far more effective at this.’
‘Ah, but you see that’s part of your charm, Bob, being the surly ol’ lump that y’are.’
‘It is, however, one of my goals to appear more human than that.’
‘Goals?’ Liam looked up at him. ‘You actually have a personal goal?’
Bob nodded. ‘Affirmative. Between mission specifications there is the ongoing imperative to improve the efficacy of my on-board AI.’
‘Now see … when you said “goal”, you actually sounded a lot more like a human just then.’ Liam laughed. ‘Then you went and ruined it with all that mission specification nonsense.’
They walked in silence for a while. ‘May I ask you a question, Liam?’
‘Aye. Sure.’
‘Do you have … personal goals?’
He frowned. ‘Well, there’s a question and a half … hmmm.’ Since being snatched from certain death at the bottom of the Atlantic all those months ago it seemed his mind had been double-timing to catch up on events. To learn about this world of 2001; to learn about nearly a hundred years’ worth of twentieth-century history and technology. His mind had been so swamped with absorbing new information it seemed there was little time or space inside his skull for such petty things as … a personal goal, a wish, a hope. Even a comicbook.