TimeRiders 05 - Gates of Rome

by Alex Scarrow

  Another figure joined the first. Another male, just as tall, wide and muscular as the first. It was holding a gun in each hand. Hands that were spattered with dark dots of blood. It silently passed one of the weapons to the first unit.

  Maddy realized the crackle of gunfire had now ceased. ‘Oh God, Sal … I think they just killed all the police guys outside!’

  She glanced back at where they’d come from – the entrance to Broadway. And there was the young woman, silhouetted against the daylight glow of the double doors. A perfect statue, gun in one hand, head slowly swivelling, studying the shoppers and staff cowering amid display racks and aisles of cheap tourist goods.

  Oh crud! Now we really are well trapped!

  One of the male support units took a step forward into the store. ‘Everyone please leave!’ his deep voice boomed.

  Nobody dared move.

  He fired a single shot into the floor. ‘Everyone please leave this building now! Or you will be executed!’

  There was an immediate stirring of movement across the store. People hastily getting to their feet, dropping baskets of forgotten bargains and making for the exits. As they streamed anxiously out past the support units, their bald heads panned quickly one way then the other, examining each person’s face as they hurried out. The female grasped the wrist of someone leaving, a young Asian girl. She pulled her closer then placed a hand under her chin to turn her head towards her. The girl whimpered and squirmed as the support unit quickly studied her face. She tossed her aside a moment later.

  ‘Negative ID!’ she called to the other two.

  They’re after us! Specifically us. After me and Sal.

  Outside they could hear the distant wailing of yet more police horns approaching. Times Square was unsettlingly quiet. A thousand or more people, crouched behind rubbish bins and newspaper vending machines, in shop doorways, and peeking out through store windows, all wondering what to do … wondering what was going to happen next.

  And faintly, very faintly, Maddy could hear the deep drone of an approaching aeroplane.

  ‘We know you are hiding in here,’ said the support unit in shorts. ‘Please reveal yourselves to us … and you will not be harmed.’

  Maddy looked at Sal. She shook her head silently.

  Right … they’ll kill us.

  ‘We know you are in this building. There is no way out.’

  Maddy felt her chest heaving, feeling tight, getting light-headed with growing panic. She could see Sal was no better, trembling like a yard dog on a winter’s morning.

  Who are they?

  ‘Madelaine Carter! Saleena Vikram!’ a deep voice boomed. ‘Please reveal yourselves!’

  The girls exchanged a round-eyed glance.

  Who sent them?

  Without any further verbal warning, they moved as one, all three of them, striding forward into the store, each picking a different aisle of goods to walk down. Maddy and Sal dropped down to their hands and knees.

  ‘Which way?’ mouthed Sal.

  Maddy looked around. They were in an aisle stocked with swivel displays of CDs and DVDs or something like that. Nowhere for them to hide, nothing to crouch beneath. She looked down the far end of their lane. There was a service counter with a till and behind it a door that looked like it led to either a stockroom or some sort of staff restroom. She shuffled along the floor on her hands and knees towards the counter, Sal following her.

  In the very next aisle to theirs she could hear the slap of heavy bare feet on lino: one of the male support units. Maddy picked up the pace, shuffling along as quickly and as quietly as she could. Her ragged breath was huffing out too loudly like some faltering fairground steam engine … she only hoped the growing deep rumble of the approaching jet plane was covering it up.

  The aeroplane? Not the 9/11 one? Surely this was history that had been altered enough?

  They were nearly at the end; the swivel racks of cases sporting famous gurning gladiators had given way to racks of plastic toys: swords, spears, tridents. She was beginning to believe they might just be able to sneak out of their aisle and hop round the back of the counter before one of the support units turned into this aisle and spotted them when she caught the strong scent of stale, sweating meat. She looked up from her dirty hands splayed on the floor and saw two equally dirty bare feet in front of her.

  Maddy’s gaze rose as her heart sank, drifting up a pair of milk-white shins, smooth, featureless knees on to the frayed, dangling fringe of some old orange hiker’s anorak. It reeked of stale urine and mouldering tobacco. Maddy could only imagine the fate of the hapless vagrant who’d owned it.

  ‘Please stay where you are, Madelaine Carter.’ A soft, not unpleasant feminine voice.

  Maddy’s eyes rested on a familiar, impassive face; a face that could have been convincingly introduced to her as Becks’s slightly older twin under different circumstances.

  ‘Look, p-please …’ she whispered, ‘we-we’re just …’

  Faith cocked her head, her grey eyes bright with intelligent curiosity. She seemed to admire what she saw cringing at her feet.

  ‘It is a pity,’ she said softly, a hint of regret on her lips. Then she looked up for the others over the aisle. ‘Abel! Damien!’ her voice barked coldly. ‘I have located the targets. Request authorization to terminate them.’

  Behind them Maddy heard the slap of bare feet. She turned and saw the two male support units standing at the other end of the aisle.

  The one wearing shorts hesitated, its thick brow furrowed with confusion at the increasing volume of that deep rumble. It turned to look around, trying to make some sense of the approaching noise.

  Maddy saw the look on Sal’s face.

  That’s not the aeroplane …

  CHAPTER 31

  2001, New York

  They had no more than a second, perhaps two, to realize what could happen to them. Their eyes met in mutual understanding. A time wave. A big one. Not good.

  Truth was there was no knowing what reality any wave was going to leave behind. More specifically, there was no knowing what kind of mass, if any, was going to end up wanting to occupy the very same space that they were both occupying.

  In the archway with the field switched on they were entirely protected from any mass-intersections brought about by a reality shift. However, outside of the field it was a lottery. A time wave could leave a person merged, fused, with anything that was attempting to occupy the very same space. The likelihood of that varied, of course. On an open, rolling field in the middle of some remote rural county … it was far less likely. But here, inside a cluttered gift shop looking out on to the beating heart of one of the busiest cities in the world?

  Where humankind congregated most densely, for example a place like this – New York – that’s where reality really had the most fun and games reinventing itself. Whatever course history had taken, this bay on the east coast of America, a place that was once an Indian settlement, then a colonial outpost, then a thriving trading port and finally a metropolis – this place was always likely to produce a densely populated alternative version of itself in the wake of a full-blown time wave. And the last place they ought to be when a wave hit was here, inside a building of all places.

  ‘Sal, we need to …’ was all Maddy had time to utter before the wave was upon them.

  It went dark as if the sun had gone out. Unlike Sal, it was Maddy’s first time directly experiencing the effect of swimming in fluid reality as it rippled past her, wrapped round her, presenting fleeting images of infinite possibilities.

  She screamed. It came out of her mouth sounding like a deep, time-dilated moan, like the protracted, mournful song of some distant whale carried across a hundred miles of water.

  Her ears were filled with her own weird voice and a roar like that of a tornado; not the roar of wind, though, but a billion other human voices, female and male, young and old, born and unborn; conscious entities crying in hellish torment and all sharing the same fleeting
few seconds of consciousness. A shared awareness of lives stolen away from them, possible lives that could have been, but now would never be lived; of children, babies, loved ones who would never have a chance to exist. It was a billion screams like her own, stretched out and deep and full of grief, anger and fear. If Hell had a voice … it was this awful, protracted, roaring wail of tortured souls.

  Then it snapped off. Gone. The dark, swirling tornado of liquid reality was suddenly a placid, milky whiteness. Featureless. Utterly blank.

  Oh God.

  She could see her hand in front of her face, but that was all.

  Oh God, I’m stuck in chaos spa–

  ‘Maddy?’ Sal’s voice, the ghost of a whisper.

  She saw a grey shape beside her. Faint. Sal.

  ‘Sal?’ She became aware of other gentle noises all around her: a woodpecker’s jackhammer tap far above them. The echoing cry of a coot? The fidgeting life of a deep, undisturbed wood; the gentle stir of leaves, the creak of swaying branches.

  We’re in some sort of forest.

  ‘Maddy?’ Sal again. ‘Where are we?’

  She realized the milky white was nothing but a thick morning mist, cold, heavy and damp against her skin, hanging in dense pools. Above them she could see it was thinner, and saw the pencil-line grey streaks of criss-crossing branches swaying gently.

  She reached out, grabbed Sal’s hand and pulled her towards her.

  A finger to her lips. Shhhh!

  Sal nodded. Wherever they were, they were not alone.

  They heard the rustle of movement very close. Instinctively Maddy squatted down, crouching lower into the thick, pooling mist around them. She noticed the broad leaves of a large fern swaying gently beside her and ducked down beneath its feathered leaves, pulling Sal down with her.

  ‘Call in your identification and condition!’ a deep voice boomed out of the mist.

  ‘Alpha-six. Faith. I am undamaged.’ The female support unit.

  ‘Alpha-four. I am also unharmed.’

  A long silence. Then Maddy heard the swish of someone pushing through foliage nearby, the leaden crack of dry dead wood beneath a heavy and carelessly planted foot.

  ‘I am not picking up Alpha-two’s signal,’ said the female. Faith. ‘He may be damaged.’

  ‘That is a lower priority. The targets will still be in the immediate vicinity. Spread out and search.’

  Something brushed against the fern they were huddled beneath. Maddy felt a long thick twig under her bottom shift as the weight of a foot settled on the other end. Looking up through gaps in the leaf swaying above her face, she could see the female unit – the Becks-lookalike – her grey sentinel eyes slowly panning the mist around her like a guard on a watchtower.

  My God … she’s right there! She’s RIGHT THERE!

  Maddy held her wheezing breath and screwed up her eyes. She was absolutely certain that any second now, a hand was going to reach down and push that fern leaf aside. That ice-cold voice was going to calmly call out her discovery to the other two.

  Maddy could feel her chest collapsing with a growing panic. A faint memory skipped through her mind of her and her cousin, Julian, both much younger. They were play-fighting, wrestling; he had her in a hold, her arms trapped by her side and his dead weight lying across her chest. She’d been squirming, panicking, squealing, and he’d genuinely thought she was just playing around. Until she’d started screaming.

  Panic … like that. Breathless panic.

  Hold your breath, Maddy. HOLD IT!

  For seconds that felt agonizingly like minutes ‘Becks’ remained where she was, scouring the milky mist with her piercing eyes. Then finally Maddy felt that twig shift again, relieved of the weight on its end as the support unit lifted her bare foot and took a step, then another, away from them.

  She slowly faded into the mist until she was an unrecognizable blur, another grey pillar, just as easily another tree trunk. Then she was finally gone. They listened to the sound of movement of all three support units receding in different directions, the careless, echoing crack of twigs and cones, the swish of bramble and undergrowth casually pushed aside. The still forest slowly stirred to life after them; a disapproving shake of its head at such noisy and clumsy intruders.

  Maddy hoped they were far enough away not to hear her wheeze like a blacksmith’s bellows as she finally eased her breath out. Dizzy and light-headed she quickly drew in another one.

  ‘Shadd-yah!’ whispered Sal. ‘I thought we were so-o-o-o dead!’

  ‘Me … too …’

  The thump, rustle and crack of distant movement grew steadily quieter as the units moved further away.

  ‘We got to …’ Maddy grabbed at another breath. ‘We’ve got to get back to the archway.’

  ‘But won’t they expect us to do that?’

  ‘We need help.’ She looked at Sal. ‘We really need Bob.’

  And we really need to get back to the archway before they figure that out too.

  ‘Come on.’ Maddy got to her feet then realized she hadn’t a clue which direction to start off in. ‘Which way?’

  Sal looked up at the faint canopy of branches and leaves above them. She pointed to a dull, cream-coloured disc, still relatively low in the morning sky, playing hide and seek with them behind the mist-shrouded canopy of leaves and branches. So very easy to miss.

  ‘The sun,’ she said. ‘Rises in the east, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yup. So that way.’ Maddy nodded to their left. ‘That way, then … should take us to the East River.’

  They began to move slowly, cautiously, Sal one step ahead of Maddy, picking a path across the woodland floor that managed to avoid their stepping on the kind of gnarled, brittle dead wood that would crack like a gunshot.

  They made their way through the wood in almost complete silence, for what seemed like an hour, but in all likelihood was no more than a few minutes. Finally Maddy thought she heard the gentle sound of the tidal lapping of water ahead of them. The ground beneath their feet stopped being a sponge of decaying leaves, forest moss and fir cones and became firmer, harder.

  The cool mist was beginning to thin with the morning sun’s warmth working on it, and soon they could see past the narrow waists of forest-edge saplings to a small cove and beyond that the broad, flat surface of the East River.

  Sal settled against the base of the slender trunk of a young tree. Maddy joined her and they studied the shingle and placid, lapping waterline in front of them; the soothing draw and hiss of low tide playing with pebbles.

  ‘There’s nothing,’ said Sal quietly. ‘New York’s just a wilderness.’ She shivered. ‘And it’s colder. How come?’

  Maddy shook her head. She had no real idea. Maybe this was a world with far fewer humans in it. Less people, less pollution, less methane, less carbon – less global warming. Or more likely, given how chilly it felt – autumn cold – perhaps this was a world with absolutely no humans at all in it. It was a well-known fact among ecologists that if you took humankind out of the equation, you could easily knock three or four degrees off planet earth’s temperature.

  Anyway, Sal was right; it was much cooler. No humans. Nice idea that.

  ‘Look! What’s that?’ said Sal suddenly. She pointed along the shingle cove.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Over there!’

  Maddy squinted into the haze at what looked like a large chunk of driftwood, a log carried up on a high tide and left stranded.

  ‘It’s a boat!’

  Maddy pushed her specs up her nose. Actually Sal was right. ‘I think it’s a kayak … or canoe or something.’

  So much for no humans, then.

  CHAPTER 32

  2001, formerly New York

  She studied the twisted form merged into the trunk of the tree. It certainly explained the reason why Alpha-two’s ident signal had suddenly ceased to register.

  The support unit’s head appeared to be buried within the tree; the rest of his body dangled lifele
ssly, slumped against the base of the trunk. It looked oddly like he’d been attempting to charge the tree head first, like an enraged bull, and the tree had simply decided to swallow him up to his neck. She cocked her head, fascinated at the glutinous and fleshy bubbling where the unit’s neck intersected with the bark. The instantaneous merging of trunk, skull and the computer inside at a molecular level would have instantly reduced Alpha-two’s head to a meaningless pulp.

  Faith sensed the wireless signals of the other two support units drawing closer, approaching through the thinning mist.

  Abel emerged first. His eyes immediately rested on Alpha-two’s body. ‘That is to be expected,’ he said calmly. ‘The area has a high mass density. There was a significant probability of intersection.’

  Faith nodded. ‘Agreed.’

  Alpha-four – Damien – emerged from the mist, his eyes momentarily on their colleague before reporting in to the other two. ‘I have not located the targets. They appear to have successfully evaded us.’

  Abel nodded. ‘We must reacquire them immediately.’

  Their three minds began to exchange data electronically, a Bluetooth committee meeting in the silent woodland space between them. All three support units frozen like statues absorbed in a collective reassessment of variables, options and mission priorities. A meeting of minds that resulted in a decision less than ten seconds later.

  ‘They will attempt to return to their field office,’ said Abel.

  The other two nodded.

  ‘This way,’ said Abel. He turned on his heel and had just begun to force his way through a thick nest of thorny brambles when he stopped. Ahead of him stood twelve of them. Humans. Primitive humans.

  The wood seemed to hold its breath in silent expectation as the Indians slowly spread out, bows drawn and ready to use. Charcoal paint smeared round their eyes and across the bridges of their noses; the whites of their eyes almost seemed to glow in the gloom beneath the canopy of leaves.

  ‘These are not our targets,’ said Abel.

  One of the Indians replied with a barked challenge, a language of guttural croaks and hard consonants. He raised a tamahaken of wood and flint; a clear gesture of warning for Abel and the others to back up the way they’d come.