by Alex Scarrow
Fifty yards in front of them, a small Portakabin — all scuffed plastic windows and corrugated iron — housed a pair of security guards. Both of them were staring at the glow of a TV on a desk inside. Where they were crouching at the edge of the tree line, on a normal day, the guards would probably have spotted them by now. But today both of them were glued to their television set. A brass band could’ve marched past them and they wouldn’t have noticed.
‘Bob?’ said Liam. ‘If that van does turn up and I give you the order to go and rescue Mr Lincoln, what’s your plan?’
Bob’s eyes narrowed in consideration for a moment. ‘Incapacitate the vehicle first. Then incapacitate any armed guards and proceed with extracting the target from the van.’
‘We want to get our fella out of there unharmed, so we do.’
‘Affirmative,’ he grunted. ‘I will assess the threat of harm to Lincoln and proceed only if the percentage is favourable.’
‘But you’re not going to kill those guards in that hut, are you?’ said Sal, looking at them. ‘They’re just old men.’
Bob frowned at her. ‘If they are an obstruction to the mission objective, they will be a valid target.’
‘Just give ’em one of your battle-roars, Bob,’ said Liam. He nudged Sal gently. ‘You should hear him.’ He’d seen men recoil from it before. A fleeting recollection filled his mind: the front few ranks of an army of veteran knights and grim-faced mercenaries had faltered, albeit for a moment, at the monstrous sight of Bob standing astride a mound of rubble at the base of the breached wall of Nottingham.
That heartbeat moment before the clash of arms, the thundering of thousands of boots, the jangling of a million rings of chain mail, the rising crescendo of every charging man screaming a noise of hate rinsed with fear … but, above all that, there’d been the deep bellow of Bob’s roar, like some sort of grizzly bear calling from one valley to the next.
‘That’ll scare the bejayzus out of them two poor fellas. They’ll scarper like rabbits, so they will.’
‘My size can be intimidating,’ said Bob matter-of-factly. ‘That is a factor that works in my favour.’
‘Do a scary face, Bob,’ said Liam. ‘Something really gnarly.’
‘Scary face?’
‘Yeah … sort of like your angry face, but much more so.’
Bob pulled up a file from memory. His brows suddenly rumpled and joined into the menacing ridge of a monobrow. His thick horse-lips pulled back to reveal a row of teeth that looked like they could stamp holes through sheet metal.
‘You remind me of a big bad-tempered dog that’s had its chewy bone taken away,’ said Sal.
Liam shrugged. ‘Perhaps, but would you hold your ground with a face like that bearing down on you?’
Actually, she imagined, she probably wouldn’t.
The three of them were silent for a while, the only sounds the restful far-off hiss of interstate traffic, the muted burbling of the TV set and the turf-war chirping call of jays and thrushes in the thick branches above them.
‘So tell me — I’m interested — are you happy with how today’s gone?’
Lincoln looked up from his feet at Agent Mead sitting opposite.
‘Is that what makes your day? Hmmm? Killing innocent American civilians?’
Lincoln’s jaw set. ‘I am an American, sir.’
‘Oh yeah? But what? You don’t like the way America is? Is that it? This is your way of changing it for the better, is it?’
‘I have no knowledge of your two towers or who it is that has decided to destroy them.’
‘Right,’ nodded the agent sarcastically. ‘You’re still going with the I’ve come from another time story.’
‘That is the fact of the matter, sir. Yes.’
The agent shrugged. ‘So … then, let’s run with the ball, shall we?’
‘Run with the ball?’
‘Why don’t you tell me your time-travel tale again.’
‘It is no fiction, sir! I live in the year 1831.’
‘1831, eh? I bet this is all pretty weird then, huh?’
Lincoln sensed the man was mocking him. ‘Of course.’ He answered drily. ‘As it would be to you if you had journeyed across one hundred and seventy years of time.’
‘So you must think it’s pretty far out, huh? Spacey? Futuristic?’
The other two men were quietly laughing along with their boss.
‘Well, since you ask, I think this world is decidedly rude. What I have seen of it.’
‘Rude?’ The agent shook his head. ‘That’s priceless.’ He grinned, amused by that. ‘Go on … you’re almost convincing.’
Lincoln was happy to. ‘Although what I have seen of its constructions and devices are quite beyond my comprehension, I do see clearly it is an amoral, selfish world.’
‘Really?’
‘Quite so, sir. And lazy. Why is it that everyone is so fat?’
The van leaned into a turning and then began to slow down.
‘Ah, looks like we’re nearly there,’ said the agent. He smiled coldly at Lincoln. ‘The next bunch of fellas who’ll be asking you questions aren’t going to be quite so indulgent, Abraham. You’re soon going to be thinking of us as the nice guys, trust me.’
Through the partition at the front they could hear the driver talking to someone, a crisp, professional exchange.
‘You’re going to vanish into a dark cell somewhere, Abraham. Every day of the rest of your life is going to be an extremely unpleasant one. And while all that’s going on I want you to think long and hard about what you and your terrorist buddies have done. All the innocent people you’ve wiped out today.’
There was the muffled sound of a voice raised as a challenge, a moment later the crack of a hand-gun.
‘What the — ?’
They heard a loud thud against the van, making the whole vehicle rock and a side panel bulge inwards. All three agents began to fumble inside their jackets for their weapons.
The rear door of the van was suddenly wrenched open, blinding daylight spilling inside. Lincoln looked up, his eyes narrowed against the glare, and recognized the outline of the giant he’d seen in that archway yesterday.
The men in suits had their guns out, aimed, and were all shouting in unison at the giant man to raise his hands … when, as one, they simply stopped.
‘Jumping Jeezus … what in God’s name is THAT?’ gasped Agent Mead.
The giant man paused and turned to look round at what they were staring at.
Finally Lincoln did the same. Looking out of the back of the van, he saw it for himself … an impossible sky.
CHAPTER 25
2001, Quantico, Virginia
Liam and Sal stood up together and emerged from beneath the low branches of the cedar tree to get a better look at the rapidly advancing wall of reality, chasing its way towards them across the Virginian countryside.
At first it looked like a whole continental shelf was filling the blue sky, as if the earth’s crust had split and broken and one half of North America was sliding across and engulfing the other. But it wasn’t solid. It churned and changed like a liquid reality as it raced towards them. Like brewing storm-cloud formations filmed and then played in fast forward.
In among the looming darkness faint watermarks of fleeting possibility appeared: fantastic buildings that had never been, twisted creatures that had no place on this earth and a sea of tormented faces — lives glimpsed momentarily, people that could have been, but never would be.
‘Oh boy,’ gulped Liam. ‘It’s going to be a big one, right?’
Sal nodded. ‘Yes … a big one.’
Then it was upon them. The slam of a tornado moment. A maelstrom of thrashing energy and darkness. Liam kept his eyes open, absolutely determined to witness it all, this his first time to see a time wave up close, to be outside the archway and see for himself what reality replacing reality actually looked like. In the few seconds of it he thought he glimpsed a Roman soldier morph into
something half human half mechanical; the screaming tormented face of a newborn baby become a girl, a woman, an old woman, a decaying skull — a complete life lived in no more than a second.
Then it had passed over them.
Liam turned to watch it go. A twisting, undulating, serpent-like ribbon of black across the sky receding away from them like a freight train.
‘Jay-zus …’ Breath failed him. He sucked in a lungful and tried again. ‘Jay-zus-Mary-’n’-Joseph! Did you … did you ever see anything like that?’ he gasped. He looked beside him. Sal was on the ground, all of a sudden kneeling amid rows of shin-high stalks of something: a harvested crop of wheat or corn maybe.
Liam helped her up.
‘That … was … incredible!’ He grinned manically at her.
Sal looked around them. ‘This is very different, Liam.’
Liam hadn’t even bothered to take the new reality in yet — his mind was still on the infinite possibilities he’d glimpsed in the time wave. He turned round to look where Bob and the van and the guard hut had been only moments ago.
They were in a large rolling field. The woodland behind them was gone. Fifty yards away, he was relieved to see Bob standing perfectly still, nonchalantly studying the new world around them, and then, a moment later, the tousled brush hair of Lincoln’s head emerging from the stalks as he began to sit up.
‘Come on,’ said Liam. They wandered over towards Bob and Lincoln. Lincoln was on his feet now. He saw Liam approaching.
‘That … that storm? That hurricane we … we …’
‘Aye.’ Liam nodded. ‘That’s the sort of thing you get when you remove something from history that shouldn’t be removed.’
‘You … you are talking about me, are you not?’
‘Aye.’
Lincoln looked around at the field, goggle-eyed. ‘I … Are you telling me, sir, that I make this much difference to the world?’
‘So it seems.’
‘Good God!’
‘Liam,’ said Bob quietly.
‘I cannot conceive of … of …’ Lincoln continued to bluster, ‘of … of anything I might do in my life that could so alter a world as much as this!’ He looked down at his big hands. ‘What could these do that could change a world so?’
‘Liam,’ said Bob again, his eyes on the sky.
‘Yeah,’ said Sal. ‘Liam …’ Her eyes were on the same thing as Bob’s. She patted his arm insistently as a shadow fell across the field. Liam turned round and looked up.
‘Oh …’ was all that rolled out of his mouth.
Lincoln managed more. ‘GOD’S TEETH!’ he boomed. ‘What in tarnation is that?’
A gigantic copper boiler hung in the sky, slowly drifting across the fields. Perhaps three hundred, four hundred feet long. The afternoon sun glinted warmly on its copperplated side. Slung beneath it was what appeared to be a building of some sort: a confusion of pipes and chimneys, silos, ladders and gantries, round portholes and hatch-like doorways on several floors. It seemed to be held beneath the copper behemoth by four immense crane-like arms, holding the building like a mother cradling a child.
They watched it slowly drift above them, across their field of ragged stalks to another field rolling over a hill in front of them. It moved silently, no roar of engines, just the sound of wind rustling through the gaps in the ‘building’ suspended beneath, thrumming taut cables, clinking chains, loose and swinging.
Eventually it began to settle down to earth a quarter of a mile away from them.
Nearing the ground, the large crane arms hissed steam from their ‘elbows’ and gently flexed, lowering the building between them to the ground. It settled on thick stilts that adjusted to the uneven tilt with the audible hiss and thud of compressed air until it was level.
‘Shadd-yah! Now that — ’ Sal nodded — ‘that … is really, really cool.’
The enormous airship rose slowly, its crane arms retracting to leave the building standing free in the middle of the field. After a few moments they began to see some activity. A large door opening and a wide ramp emerging, extending down to the ground. Then finally, something that looked vaguely familiar to Liam … a tractor belching steam rumbled out on caterpillar tracks and down the ramp, followed by another, and another, and finally a stream of figures.
The building’s chimney stacks started puffing tendrils of smoke and they heard the clunk and whir of machinery starting up in the field.
‘It’s a portable farm! That’s what it is!’ Liam laughed. ‘A bleedin’ pick-me-up and put-me-down farm!’
Lincoln shaded his eyes with a hand. ‘Am I to presume such a fantastic construction as this is not normal to your time?’
‘This is our time, Mr Lincoln,’ said Sal. ‘Just a very different version of it. Everything changed.’
‘Yet we did not?’ Lincoln looked confused. ‘How is that?’
‘It’s because none of us should be here now anyway, right?’ Liam looked at Bob.
‘Correct. None of you should be alive in, or be part of, 2001, therefore you are not affected by the causal change of the time wave.’
Liam looked at the slowly ascending airship. ‘I think it might be advisable we find somewhere to hide until we know exactly what sort of a world we’re in right now. Everyone agree?’
Heads nodded.
Liam looked around and spotted what appeared to be a derelict barn across the far side of the already harvested field. ‘Off we go, then,’ he said.
Sal glanced one more time at the ascending sky vessel. She noticed it was segmented and as it gracefully gathered height its segments began to stretch and spread, gradually telescoping along its length until it looked like the sleek hull of an antique submarine.
‘Come on, Sal!’ Liam called after her.
She looked once more at the recently deposited building; to her eyes it looked more like a factory than a farm. And at the small figures descending the ramp, emerging into the field, disappearing into the distant crop of wheat or barley, or whatever it was. There was something peculiar about the way they moved, a shuffling inelegant gait that made them look strangely top-heavy, strangely ape-like.
‘Sal?’
‘I’m coming … I’m coming.’
CHAPTER 26
2001, New York
Maddy rocked on her heels. Then, for a moment, she was actually airborne, everything on the desk in front of her hovering a bare inch for less than a heartbeat. She reached out for the corner of the desk to keep her balance as the whole archway lurched, then convulsed with the bone-shaking impact of something hard beneath them.
Beneath?
Showers of grit and cement dust cascaded down from the roof, along with dozens of bricks, clattering to the floor and exploding in clouds of redbrick powder.
‘Oh my God … was that an earthquake?’
The computer monitors and the archway’s lights flickered out in unison and from the back room Maddy heard the deafening crash of what sounded like a significant chunk of the archway roof collapsing in.
In the dark she winced at the sound of damage and chaos going on around her, wondering if the entire Williamsburg Bridge was going to come crumbling down on her like a house of cards.
The rumbling outside that had preceded the ‘quake’ faded away, and finally it was quiet save for the patter of grit still trickling down from the loosened bricks above them.
‘Becks? You OK?’
‘Affirmative,’ her voice came back out of the darkness.
Maddy fumbled with her hands along the desk, feeling empty soda cans and pens and pads … finally finding her inhaler. She took a pull on it and it rattled and wheezed, giving up its medication and easing the tightness of her throat.
‘My God … I thought that was a wave.’
‘I believe it was,’ replied Becks. Her voice was further away now. On the other side of the arch.
Maddy’s legs bumped gently against one of the office chairs, she sat down in it gratefully. ‘It’s never f
elt like that before, though.’
She could hear Becks fiddling with something. ‘There is no power feed to the shutter motor.’
Maddy looked around the pitch black. She couldn’t even see any standby-mode LEDs. No power at all. The generator in the back room should have fired up by now. She should have heard that rhythmic thudding already. Instead, nothing.
‘Do you wish for me to open the shutter?’ asked Becks.
Her heart flipped a beat at the thought of checking the state of the world outside. Given that moment of freefall and the horrendous crash a second later, she wasn’t sure what to expect out there. Still, sitting here in the dark and clutching her inhaler wasn’t going to achieve much.
‘Yes. Go on, then.’
She heard the handle being cranked and the clack of chains, then after a few seconds her dark-adjusted eyes picked out a faint ribbon of light along the bottom. As it widened and brightened, a pall of muted daylight spread across into the archway and her heart sank as she saw their floor littered with rubble and shattered brick. A deep crack ran across it — a palm’s width at its widest, exposing old pipes and dusty stress cables.
She suspected the whole archway, the bridge’s entire support stanchion was structurally unstable. Perhaps even so damaged that if they ever got out of this fix and returned to normality they might need to find a new home.
The thought unnerved her more than anything. She realized she’d grown accustomed to this place. It was the anchor, this grubby dungeon, when all around her was a swirling sea of chaos; it was the one constant. In all the crises they’d been through together thus far, there’d always been here — this archway, this desk, this chair — in which to hide, lick their wounds and ponder a solution.
Maddy got up and picked her way across the floor towards the widening ribbon of light. Where the backstreet was outside, she could make out fallen brickwork, rubble, weeds poking through.
It reminded her of Kramer’s apocalypse. Maybe history had somehow managed to double back on that other alternate world, a nightmare landscape of irradiated ruins and those pitiful mutated creatures who’d once been human.