Extracted Trilogy (Book 2): Executed

by R. R. Haywood

  ‘You had plans in your workshop for the same thing but with a red portal. Is it the same?’

  ‘Haha!’ Bertie says, getting the back off the tablet and staring at the inner workings.

  ‘Bertie, is it the same?’ Miri asks.

  ‘He doesn’t work like that,’ Ria says.

  ‘Totally. S’just binary.’

  ‘What colour do you need?’ Ria asks, long-practised at fielding comments and questions for her brother.

  ‘No colour. Invisible.’

  That does it. His head snaps up as his entire features show instant, laser-like focus.

  ‘And smaller. Something a person can carry and use easily.’

  He drops the tablet and stands quickly. ‘How would you see it?’ he asks, staring intently at Miri.

  ‘Not the apparatus, just the field. That needs to be invisible, see-through.’

  ‘An invisible time machine?’

  ‘Yes. Smaller.’

  ‘A portable, invisible time machine?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That,’ Bertie says, his eyes narrowing, ‘is, like, totally the best idea ever.’

  Twenty-Eight

  Steaks sizzle on the big, gas-fed barbeque grill bought from Walmart. Onions fry in a skillet. The air fills with smells of cooking. Old Greek café tunes play through speakers in the background.

  Ria takes the bowl of salad over to place down on the table as everyone else chats and relaxes after a hard day’s training in the pouring rain outside the bunker. Bertie sits between Ben and Harry opposite Safa and Emily, beaming from ear to ear. Miri and the doctor at one end talking quietly.

  A beautiful Aegean evening. The water surrounding the island is blue and calm. The sky deep and clear.

  Ria goes back to the grill. Busying herself cooking the evening meal of steaks, jacket potatoes and salad.

  It’s been two months since Miri finished debriefs, and while Ria has developed a routine, she still feels weird. Her days are spent outside her hologram home throwing flash-bangs at the others and firing blanks in the rain. Her evenings are spent cooking and doing laundry and chores.

  Thinking of Cavendish Manor makes her think of her mum, a fresh surge of emotion welling up inside. Why can’t they go back and get her? Bloody Miri. Bloody bunker. Bloody everything, all because of bloody, sodding Bertie. He’s a genius and a pain in the arse. He had to go and invent a time machine, the bloody idiot.

  There isn’t time to rescue her mother. She knows that. The portal has to be set back far enough to be away from any ground troops and protected from satellite view by the dense foliage of the big trees bordering her house. Safa and the other three have to run close enough for Harry to use the heavy machine gun. She knows they then have to run to higher ground for Ben to use the sniper rifle before they sprint to the back of the house for someone to fire the missile launcher at the helicopters.

  She pokes the steaks and turns the potatoes. Having a time machine is confusing. She asked why they couldn’t just keep coming back to do the different things at different times. Miri said they had to do it in one go, and that having multiple sets of them helping them would get messy, confusing and dangerous – and what if the wrong Harry, Ben, Safa or Emily went through the wrong portal at the wrong time?

  She also knows two heavily armed gunships crash through the roof and probably kill everyone inside. Including her mum, if she’s not already dead by then.

  ‘Can I do it?’

  She blinks from her train of thought to see Safa standing next to her looking at the meat cooking on the grill. ‘Can I turn them,’ Safa says in her way of asking while telling.

  ‘Sure,’ Ria says. She hands the tongs over and moves along to start unwrapping the potatoes from their silver-foil jackets.

  ‘Train with us,’ Safa says, poking a steak.

  ‘What?’ Ria asks.

  ‘Do some phys – good for you, releases endorphins. I don’t want you getting moody like Ben did.’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Up to you,’ Safa says. ‘No more red meat this week. Bad for the arteries. Get some chicken or fish, or something.’

  ‘Okay, Safa.’

  ‘Going without meat won’t hurt them either.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘You depressed?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Are you depressed?’

  ‘My mum just died.’

  Safa pokes a steak. ‘Get over it. World moves on.’

  ‘It was a few weeks ago.’

  ‘Three months, and so? Go mad. Cry. Scream. Take a training stick and batter Harry. He’d love it. Get drunk. Run about. Do what it takes. Get it out. That shit’s no good inside.’

  ‘I’m not like you,’ Ria says quietly.

  ‘Like what?’

  Ria shrugs and winces at the hot potato burning the tips of her fingers. Safa watches her, puts down the tongs and picks a wrapped potato up in her bare hands. Ria stares as Safa starts unwrapping it, heedless of the agony she must be feeling.

  ‘Know what pain is?’ Safa asks. ‘Pain tells you when something is wrong, but not all pain has to be listened to. The pain receptor in my hand is telling my brain to let it go. My brain is telling my hand to fuck off and get over it cos my brain knows the heat isn’t bad enough to cause damage. So I can hold it for a bit without it doing anything bad. If it gets that bad I can swap hands, but that’s giving in to it, so you hold it and man up and ignore it – that tells the pain to do one.’

  She unwraps the potato and holds it naked in her hand while looking at Ria. ‘It hurts, but I control what I do.’ She places the potato down in the bowl with the others and goes back to poking the steaks on the grill. ‘These need turning?’

  ‘Please,’ Ria says. She looks at the potato, as though wanting to pick it up and hold it and tell the pain to fuck off and do one. She wants to control what she does. She wants a six-pack and muscles in her legs, and for her cellulite to fuck off. She wants to go back and get her mum.

  ‘Come here,’ Safa says, moving back to pick up the potato. ‘Hold your hand out.’ Safa takes her wrist and places the hot potato in her palm. Immediate heat. Immediate pain. A signal to pull back her hand. A signal to drop it, to throw it, to do anything except hold it. Safa doesn’t say anything, but watches her closely. Her own hand still on the top of the potato. ‘Man up, it’s just pain.’

  Ria nods. It hurts like mad. It hurts like crazy. Tears threaten to prick her eyes. She swallows. Safa lifts the potato away and looks at it. ‘I’ll have this one.’

  ‘I want to get her.’

  ‘Your mum? Not happening. No time.’

  ‘I’ll train and get fit . . . I’ll do it.’

  ‘No. Some things can’t be done. We can’t open the portal into the mess inside the house. We can’t go into the house with the choppers coming through the roof . . . And anyway, Ben said if we had done it, we would have done it. Confuses the hell out of me, but he’s an egghead.’

  Ria just stares, feeling stupid for asking. Feeling weak and soft next to Safa.

  ‘These done?’ Safa asks, poking the steaks.

  They eat at the big table. Communal dining al fresco, with big, meaty steaks served with hot potatoes and salad. Ria’s hand hurts. She glances to see Safa’s hand is red, and knows hers will be the same. She wants to be like Safa, but becoming anything like these people is a path too difficult to take.

  In truth, she is equal parts intimidated by, in awe and resentful of them all. Safa and Emily are both so fit and healthy. Ria’s belly wobbles when she runs and her thighs rub together. She’s not fat, but then she’s not fit either. Not fit at all. Okay, maybe she is a bit fat. Not obese though. Curvy. Safa and Emily have six-packs. Actual six-packs. You can see the muscles and everything. Ria has never seen a woman with a six-pack in real life who hasn’t had cosmetic surgery. Even the actors she saw on set were digitally edited to make them look better.

  Ben Ryder is an actual urban legend. Something from folklo
re, and even though he is always polite and friendly, she still feels weirded out when he talks to her.

  Harry is lovely, but so quiet, and Ria finds it hard to find anything to say to him that doesn’t sound like trite, immature gibberish.

  The doctor is nice, but spends most of his time with Bertie.

  Miri is just scary.

  Ria thinks ahead to the night and tries to decide where she will sleep. The island is like paradise, but spiders keep getting in the shack and Bertie refuses to remove them cos, like, they’re totally so cool. Bloody Bertie. She’ll sleep in the bunker tonight. Her rooms are nice now.

  She pushes her steak round the plate and munches on a green leaf while listening to Miri and Ben bickering over the Barrett.

  ‘Thing kicks like a mule. Listen, Emily is a better shot than me . . .’

  ‘No,’ Miri says bluntly.

  Ria knows Ben is struggling to handle the Barrett fifty-calibre sniper rifle. She’s not surprised. The thing is enormous. She picked one of them up once and could hardly carry it, let alone imagine firing the thing.

  ‘You said time isn’t fixed,’ Ben says. ‘So we change. We’ll use something Emily can handle, and let her do the . . .’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not? Time isn’t fixed, Miri . . .’

  ‘No, Mr Ryder.’

  ‘I cannot fire the fucking thing when I’ve been moving. Emily is a trained sniper.’

  ‘Miss Rose undertook a sniping course, which is a big difference to being an active sniper.’

  ‘Here they go,’ Emily murmurs.

  ‘Yep,’ Safa says.

  ‘We are using the Barrett, Mr Ryder.’

  ‘Emily can’t handle the Barrett.’

  ‘Which is why you are using it.’

  Ria pushes her steak and chews on a green leaf. Safa and Harry are no good at sniping. Ben is a brilliant shot, but he’s struggling to hit moving targets after running. Ben and Miri bicker. Harry and the doc talk quietly. Emily and Safa the same. Bertie stares round in absolute glee and awe. Ria prods her steak. She misses her mum. She needs her mum. She wonders where her dad is, then immediately feels the bite of anger at him. He deserted them. He ran off. It was Ria and her mum throwing themselves at the people in their house.

  ‘Finished?’

  ‘Huh?’ She looks up to see everyone staring at her.

  ‘You’ve hardly touched your food, Ria,’ Doctor Watson says. ‘Feeling okay?’

  ‘Fine. Not hungry . . . I, er . . . snacked . . .’

  Ria rises to gather the dishes to hide the blush spreading across her cheeks. Everyone else starts trying to help. Ria wishes they wouldn’t. It’s easier to do it on her own. Quicker too. She packs the dirty dishes in a basket ready for washing. Waste food is thrown into the sea to feed the fish with food from the future that will change their genealogy and alter the course of the world; or maybe they’ll just eat it and make it into fish poo. Ria doesn’t care. Harry moves off to smoke. Miri goes after him. The two of them silent in their company of dirty smokers. Ria sniffs the air, scenting the toxic aroma of cigarettes. She has smoked before. She tried it at parties when everyone was doing it. It made her feel sick, but there was also something nice about it.

  ‘Hey.’

  Ria looks up in surprise to see Emily walking towards her.

  ‘You okay?’ Emily asks.

  ‘Yep,’ Ria says.

  ‘That was a lovely meal.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Oh, did you get the thing for Harry?’ Emily asks quietly.

  ‘Yep. Got some popcorn too. Don’t know if Harry’s had popcorn before.’

  ‘Harry will love it. You joining us? We’ll need someone to set it all up.’

  ‘You can do it.’

  Emily is from her time. She knows how to use a tablet. Besides, Emily was an uber secret agent and speaks every language ever invented ever. Ria can speak a bit of French, and that’s only the swear words.

  ‘Join us. We’ll crash out, eat popcorn . . . It’ll be great.’

  ‘No, thanks. Got some stuff to do. Like . . . supplies and . . .’

  ‘Okay,’ Emily says easily. ‘Oh, listen, I was thinking . . . Did you want some personal training or anything? You don’t need to. I don’t mean that. You look great. I meant, you know, if you did? We could do it quietly.’

  Ria would love that. ‘No, thanks,’ she says, wishing she could take the words back as they come out. Why does Emily say everything like it’s a sudden thought? Oh, listen, I just had this idea.

  ‘Oh, okay. Well, listen, just you know, keep it in mind. I can come here or . . . you know, in case you were worried about the others seeing. I get that. I totally get that.’

  Ria doesn’t think Emily does get it. Emily is almost perfect. Safa is perfect. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘They’re still bloody going,’ Safa says, walking over to join them as Ben continues his debate with Miri. ‘Ria, you don’t have to do all the chores. They’ll get lazy if you do everything for them. Just tell Miri to fuck off. Want me to tell her?’

  ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘Up to you.’

  ‘I like doing it,’ Ria says.

  ‘Weirdo.’

  Ria chuckles. She likes Safa’s directness. No sympathy, no empathy, no asking if she’s okay or wants to talk.

  Ben marches over, shaking his head. ‘That woman is stubborn as anything.’

  ‘Most women are,’ Emily says.

  ‘Aw, the Ryder charm not working?’ Safa asks him.

  ‘Ben! Can I show you now,’ Bertie calls out, rushing from the table with the doctor behind him rolling his eyes.

  ‘Sure,’ Ben says.

  ‘Are we invited?’ Emily asks.

  ‘Yeah, like, totally,’ Bertie blurts, grinning widely. ‘It’s so cool, but, like, I can’t get signals through it, but, like, the energy from the displacement field is acting as a barrier to certain . . . like, space. Like, no energy to carry the . . . In space no one can hear you scream and the explosions in the movies when they have fire and noise are, like, so wrong cos space is, like, a total vacuum and the displacement field has the same properties which, like, totally kill sound waves and . . .’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ Emily says, cutting into his rapid speech. She loops an arm through his. ‘Come on, show us.’

  ‘Is Ben coming? Ben, are you coming?’ Bertie asks.

  ‘Right behind you, mate,’ Ben says, reaching out to grab Safa’s hand before she can dart off. ‘Safa’s coming too. She wants to see it.’

  Ria follows behind them to the shack. She’s seen it already, but feels the same ever-present sense of protectiveness over her brother.

  Bertie leads Emily over, gabbling furiously while constantly turning to check Ben is still coming. They cram into the shack. Ben and Emily going in with Bertie while Safa, Ria and the doctor gather by the door.

  One side of the main room given over to tables. Hologram computer programs shining from tablets; images hovering in the air with reams of binary code and what looks like hieroglyphics. Scraps of paper everywhere. Chewed pencils. Notepads. Sheets pinned to the walls with sketches and diagrams or full of block text written in hand.

  ‘Jesus, Bertie,’ Ben says in genuine surprise on seeing the small, red square of light at the end of the table. The pattern is the same. The way it shimmers and seems alive with a solid wall of colour, but red instead of blue, and the size of an old computer monitor.

  ‘Epic.’

  ‘Bertie. Is that a time machine?’ Ben asks. ‘Has Miri seen it?’

  ‘She has – she comes over all the time,’ Ria says from the door.

  ‘Er, no,’ Bertie says.

  ‘Pardon?’ Ben asks.

  ‘Eh? What? What is? What that? No,’ Bertie says, gabbling in his excitement of showing Ben.

  ‘Can I touch it?’ Ben asks.

  ‘Like, totally.’

  Ben stretches his hand out to the red light. No heat, no sensation at all. He leans over and sees h
is hand coming out the back.

  ‘Er, so is it working then?’ Ben asks.

  ‘Displacement field’s off,’ Bertie says, nodding eagerly. ‘It’s, like, totally the same as the other one, but, you know, testing it . . . Electromagnetic pulses don’t go through, so . . .’

  Ria clears her throat and leans in through the door. ‘Bertie is testing it to push radio signals and cellular waves through . . . I mean, they don’t go through the time machine now, do they?’

  ‘Oh, mate,’ Ben says, ‘that’s brilliant.’

  ‘S’binary,’ Bertie mutters, still grinning at Ben.

  ‘Well done, mate,’ Ben says.

  ‘It’s, like, red,’ Bertie says. ‘Cos, like, the other one is blue.’

  ‘It’s, er, yeah,’ Ben says.

  ‘Finished your woodbine?’ Emily asks as Harry looms behind Ria and Safa.

  ‘Aye,’ the big man says, slightly confused at the question.

  ‘Got a surprise for you,’ Emily says.

  ‘For me? Harry asks.

  ‘Aye,’ Emily says deeply.

  ‘What?’ Ben asks.

  ‘You’ll see,’ Emily says. ‘We heading back in?’

  They stroll down the path with everyone asking what the surprise is and Emily grinning, but refusing to say.

  In the portal room, Ria slips out ahead of the others to fetch the tablet and bags of popcorn. She walks back into the main room to see Emily telling Harry to sit down and make himself comfortable on the huge red leather sofa. The big man complies easily, stretching his legs out with a wry smile as Emily winks at Ria. Ben, Safa and the doctor take seats. Miri stays by the door, curious, but not part of it.

  ‘Popcorn?’ Emily asks.

  ‘Here,’ Ria says, holding the bags out. ‘Sweet, salted . . . Some toffee too.’

  ‘Popcorn?’ Ben asks. ‘We watching a movie then?’

  ‘Movie?’ Harry asks, looking round the room. ‘No screen.’

  Emily takes the popcorn to distribute, then tucks herself on the sofa next to Harry. ‘You’ll love this,’ she tells him.

  Ria switches the tablet on and sets it down. She looks up at everyone sitting and watching expectantly, and realises her brother has come through and is already eating popcorn while staring in awe at Harry and Ben.