by Alex Scarrow
She stood beside Becks.
‘That’s high enough,’ she whispered. If there were unspeakable horrors outside ready to attack them, then she didn’t want the shutter door wide open.
She chewed her lip anxiously. ‘I’m not sure I wanna see this one.’
Becks said nothing. Her eyes grey, non-committal, impassive. Waiting for Maddy to issue her orders.
‘OK … no point me being all girly, right?’ she mumbled before ducking down, squeezing under the shutter and emerging outside. Still squatting on her haunches, she got her first glimpse.
‘Oh … sweet Jesus …’
Becks stooped down low and joined her outside. Together they slowly stood up to get a better view of the world around them.
New York was barely recognizable. The Williamsburg Bridge above them ended in a twisted mass of cables, railway lines and fragmented road tarmac that angled down into the East River. It looked like it was a casualty of war from some time ago.
They were perched at an awkward angle at the bottom of a large shallow crater. She took a dozen tentative steps up the side and looked out over the uneven lip.
Halfway across the East River she could see the stumps of the bridge’s midway support stanchions. On the far side, swathed in a thin mist, Manhattan island looked like a moonscape of grey rubble, punctuated with the barely standing skeletons of bombed-out buildings, like a dozen hands’ worth of broken fingers pointing accusingly at the sky.
A long time ago, a lifetime ago it seemed now, Maddy used to play a computer game called Call of Duty, a Second World War shooter. One of the better multiplayer levels had been set amid the bombed-out ruins of Stalingrad, a twisting maze of gutted, half-collapsed buildings, craters, blown-open cellars. What she was staring at now was pretty much just that.
She turned to look at the state of things on their side of the river. Brooklyn was almost equally unrecognizable. Although the devastation seemed one degree less total on this side of the river, all the buildings were gutted skeletons — shattered, artillery- or bomb-damaged and blackened with soot. There were, however, some almost complete frames of buildings standing still. A factory building to their right, across a pockmarked and cratered quay, had no roof, but at least it still had four complete walls lined with empty window frames, scarred, splintered and gouged by shrapnel and gunfire.
‘It’s a war zone,’ said Maddy.
Becks joined her and nodded. ‘Affirmative. There is extensive evidence of prolonged war.’
Maddy looked at her. ‘No kidding.’
‘Look!’ said Becks, pointing up at the sky.
Maddy followed her finger and saw through a haze of fog that seemed to fill the whole sky like a low-hanging autumn mist, the ghostly outline of several large shapes that moved slowly and purposefully together like a pod of whales.
‘What the hell are those?’
‘Aircraft?’
‘Too slow for airplanes,’ said Maddy. ‘And too large. They look like balloons or Zeppelins of some kind.’
They watched the faint shapes manoeuvre, their profiles long and nautically slender, topped by an irregular outline of stacked protrusions that made them look eerily like battleships.
Then through the haze Maddy caught a strobing flicker of light on the ground. A distant flash through the haze that momentarily revealed the broken-teeth outlines of far, far away bomb-damaged buildings. A moment later they heard the faint percussive thump of explosions.
‘Sounds like some place is being bombed,’ whispered Maddy.
‘It is a war that is still in progress,’ said Becks.
Maddy looked across the river at the ruins of Manhattan. The hazy air over there was clearing momentarily and she was able to see a little more detail. She saw movement. The glint of metal, something that looked like a gun turret slowly rotating on an artillery platform. In among all the chaos of gutted skyscrapers, knotted and rusting support cables, sagging floors and slopes of rubble and dust she thought she detected the regular, ordered geometry of pillboxes and bunkers.
She turned her back on the river and Manhattan to look north-east towards Brooklyn and Queens, or what was left of it. Across warehouses with collapsed roofs, and twisted industrial cranes no good to anyone now, low apartment blocks pockmarked and deserted, she thought she also saw the telltale signs of an entrenched front line.
‘Great,’ she muttered. ‘Just great.’
‘What is it, Madelaine?’
She turned to gesture at their archway — little more than a crumbling mound of red bricks somehow still managing to hold together and not collapse in on themselves.
‘That’s a front line over the river … and on this side, over there, that looks like another front line. Which of course makes where we’re standing … no-man’s land.’
Their pitiful-looking archway was half buried at the bottom of this large crater. It looked like it was an old crater, from an older war. It was bisected by a shallow trough lined with sandbags in places, and almost completely filled in in other places. Abandoned trench works. Abandoned some time ago by the look of them … an old battle line left to slowly fill itself in.
She wondered who the soldiers hunkered down amid the rubble of Manhattan were. She turned to look at the signs of defence structures amid the shattered industrial ruins of Brooklyn and wondered who was dug in there. Not that it mattered.
We don’t want to be stuck here.
She glanced back at the archway, looking like a pile of bricks salvaged, recycled, from some old tenement block pulled down to be replaced with something else; a mound of broken masonry at the edge of a building site. She supposed back inside — while it was still managing to hold itself up — the news wasn’t going to be any better. Sensitive equipment, computers, motherboards … how any of that could have survived that impact …
‘We’d better go back inside and see if anything’s working,’ she said eventually.
CHAPTER 27
2001, New York
Colonel William Devereau could feel the vibrations of the distant bombing raid through the floor. It felt like they were giving the front line further north, up near Queens, a pounding. They liked to do that every few days. A reminder that they had air superiority and could deliver destruction on any stretch of the front line that they chose.
Not that it achieved a whole great deal.
Their carpet bombing would create another hundred new craters, shift rubble around from one place to another and maybe inflict a few dozen casualties, but that was about the size of it. All the way along the New York sector, they were dug in deep as ticks. The damage was psychological if anything.
Devereau pulled out a crumpled packet of cigarettes: Gitanes, French made. They were as bitter as bile, but far better than the American-made lung-shredders. He lit up, took a pull and hacked a gobful of thick phlegm on to the floor. He might have bothered to quit smoking except for the fact that, statistically speaking, a sniper’s bullet or a sky-navy bomb would probably get him first anyway.
Quicker than cancer.
He took this morning’s high-command communique and swiped open the sealed envelope with the tip of his bayonet. His French was just about passable. He could read it even if he struggled to speak it. A page of telegraphed pronouncements … the usual rubbish. The war was going well, the Sheridan-DeGrise Line, running from the Atlantic, west across America, was holding true. The troops were to be congratulated and to be told keep up the good work.
Devereau balled up the communique and tossed it on to his small desk. Few of the troops spoke a word of French anyway; he could just as well tell them anything he wanted. French was the language of high echelons of command. The Union’s generals were mostly imported. Most of them well-connected, Paris-based sons of billionaires who fancied carving out a few years of military glory for themselves before settling down to a cosy life back in mainland Europe.
The troops, on the other hand, the poor wretches cowering in their bunkers right now and hoping
today’s bombing raid wasn’t going to drift further south, were all local boys. Lads from Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York State, Ohio. Sons of soldiers, grandsons of soldiers who’d held the line here for the Union for the last hundred and thirty-odd years.
He laughed dryly at that. Once upon a time it was the Union of Northern American States. But not any more. The ‘Union’ by name, perhaps, but no longer run by American generals and presidents.
He sighed. Long ago he’d given up trying to explain to the lads under his command that the French and their other European allies weren’t over here bank-rolling this war for them, for their dream of a united nation of free men. They were doing it for all their own reasons. Political reasons, complicated reasons, that were hard to explain to young men who could barely read and write.
Anyway, careless talk like that about their French benefactors could end up with him smoking one of these Gitanes in front of a hastily assembled firing squad.
Ah well, do your duty, come what may. Fais ce que dois, advienne que pourra.
On the wall of his small bunker room, damp concrete sweated in patches. Among the patches hung an old sepia photograph in a wooden frame. A collector’s item now.
Devereau stood in front of it and studied the row of generals in camp chairs smiling for the photographer as they held their ceremonial sabres to one side. Generals from the old, old times, the very first period of the civil war. Generals, all of them proud sons of America: Meade, Sherman, Grant, Hancock, thick whiskers and proud smiles beneath their soft felt hats.
A soldier could fight and die for men like that. For a cause like that … a united America. For freedom. He shook his head sadly. But not for this, not for what this stale war had become: generation after generation of American boys dying on one side for the French …
The room vibrated from the sonic boom of far-off ordnance.
… and on the other side for the British.
CHAPTER 28
2001, Quantico, Virginia
The inside of the derelict barn smelled of compost, the afternoon light spearing in between the loose wooden slats and catching sluggish airborne motes of dust.
‘Here this’ll do us for now,’ said Liam, catching his breath.
Lincoln sat down on a desiccated bale of hay. ‘Young lady,’ he began, still out of breath himself, ‘and gentlemen … we meet again, third time to my counting.’ He frowned. ‘Liam. Liam O’Connor? If memory serves me?’
‘Aye.’
‘Please now … please tell me my timely escape from that under-bridge dungeon of yours is not the cause of all this … this alteration?’
Liam laughed desperately. ‘I’m afraid that … and your untimely jumping into our window home from New Orleans, Mr Lincoln. That’s what’s caused this, all right. A bit reckless and … not too clever of you, truth be told.’
‘You have become a timeline anachronism,’ rumbled Bob. ‘Until you are safely returned to your original time-stamp, history will remain contaminated and this timeline will persist.’
Sal handed him a worn smile. ‘You’ve been a very naughty boy.’
‘So it would seem.’ Lincoln looked down at his feet, sombre. ‘I believe I owe you all an apology.’
Liam, getting warm inside the barn, unzipped and took off his jacket, one of a bunch of hooded sweatshirts branded with various sports team names splayed across them that Sal had purchased for him from Walmart some time ago. He wore them without knowing — without particularly caring — who the Yankees, Redsocks or the Bulls were.
‘Bob, what do you suggest we do now?’
‘Recommendation: we should remain here for the moment, Liam, and await a tachyon signal. They know our location. Madelaine will attempt to open a return window for us.’
‘If she can,’ said Liam.
Bob nodded. ‘Correct. If she can.’
Lincoln looked up. ‘Your time-travelling machinery is broken?’
‘The displacement machine requires a lot of power, so it does. We draw it in from the city’s supply … a lot of it,’ Liam said, unfastening the buttons of his waistcoat. ‘If New York has changed and we’re not getting any energy, then we have a bit of a problem.’
‘We have a generator, though,’ said Sal.
‘Aye. For what good the thing does.’
‘Maddy’ll be running it by now,’ she replied. ‘It just takes a little while to charge up the machine.’
‘This is only a positional translation,’ said Bob, ‘the energy requirement for the return portal will be small. I estimate only three per cent of capacity charge would be required.’
Sal peered out between the wooden slats. ‘There then … shouldn’t be too long for us to wait.’
‘What if this “portal” of yours … does not appear?’ asked Lincoln. ‘What then? Are we stuck in this place?’
‘Jahulla.’ Sal made a face. ‘Are you always this pessimistic?’
He shrugged. ‘No woodsman ever felled a tree by smiling like a fool at it.’
Liam pursed his lips. ‘Very poetic.’ He joined Sal in looking out at the distant farm-cum-refinery and the fleet of smoke-belching tractors and combines buzzing around in the field. The first of the vehicles was returning up the ramp and into the cavernous dark entrance of some sort of delivery bay with a payload of harvested crop. It reminded him, bizarrely, of termites feeding their queen. He shuddered at the unpleasant comparison.
‘If Maddy’s got technical problems her end …’ he began.
Jay-zus, now, when does she ever not?
‘… then I suppose we’ll not be getting a portal back home,’ said Liam.
‘Hang on!’ said Sal. ‘It’s worth a go, I guess.’ She pulled the mobile phone out of the pouch of her hoody, flipped it open, selected Maddy’s phone on quick dial and held it up to her ear. A moment later, she shook her head. ‘No signal.’
Liam looked back outside, up at the sky, blue and cloudless, just like the normal 11 September had been. The sun had dipped past midday an hour ago and glinted with a bronze warmth off the hull of the airborne vessel hovering several miles away and yet still looking impossibly large.
‘If there’s nothing from Maddy by the time it gets dark, it means she’s got problems. No power most likely.’ He shucked his shoulders. ‘Which means we’ve got good news and bad news.’
Sal turned to look at him. ‘Bad news first, Liam. You should always do bad news first.’
‘All right … bad news is it means we’re walking home. The good news is that if Maddy’s got no power, the archway field won’t be on, which means it won’t reset without us.’ He looked at Bob. ‘I suggest tonight we start making our way north-east, back to New York. What do you think?’
‘Affirmative. That is a valid plan. If we maintain a direct true-line route back to New York, I will be able to detect any narrow-beam tachyon signal she might attempt to send.’
‘Tonight? Night, sir?’ said Lincoln. ‘Night? Why on earth would you want to choose the night to walk home? It’s when all manner of scoundrels and thieves emerge for their nefarious purposes.’
Liam continued to study the distant airborne object. ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m a little nervous about all that stuff out there. That’s pretty advanced technology, isn’t it, Bob?’
The support unit joined him beside the wall of the barn and peered out. ‘The airborne vessel may be using lighter-than-air technology.’
‘You mean … like a balloon? Like them Nazi airships?’
‘Affirmative. The ground vehicles appear to be using conventional combustion engine technology. Comparable to the normal timeline.’ He turned to Liam. ‘With closer inspection we could determine more precisely what technology levels exist in this alternate timeline.’
‘Uhh … how about we don’t make a closer inspection?’ He slapped Bob gently on his back. ‘Nice idea an’ all, Bob, but to be entirely honest I’d rather we just made our way back home as quickly and as quietly as we can.’
�
��I agree,’ said Sal. She was going to say something about being a little perturbed by the workers she’d glimpsed emerging from the refinery and shuffling down the ramp. Barely more than dots at that distance, but there’d been something unsettling, almost inhuman about the way they moved.
‘Night-time I suggest, Mr Lincoln,’ said Liam. ‘Given these people have big floaty air vessels, we’d be far more easily spotted in the day.’
‘Night-time,’ Lincoln grumbled. ‘Well now, Mr O’Connor, we shall just have to hope this is a safer world by night than my … home — place — time …’ He shrugged the end of the sentence away. He was still struggling with the terminology of time travel.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t worry too much,’ said Sal, ‘we’ve got Big Bad Bob. He’ll look after us.’
‘Affirmative. I am a support unit. Your safety, Mr Lincoln, is a primary mission parameter. You are to be safely escorted to the New York field office, and from there returned to 1831.’
‘Anyway — ’ Sal put on a cheery smile — ‘I’m sure Maddy’s going to get things up and running and open that portal any time soon, right, Liam?’
He tried to wear the same breezy optimism on his face. But it didn’t take. Instead he cocked a sceptical eyebrow at her. ‘I presume you’re talking about some other team there, Sal? Right?’
‘Uh? Why?’
‘Well, to be sure, and I’d hate to think I sound as grumpy as our new lanky friend here, but — ’ he shrugged — ‘it never bleedin’ well seems to go quite that smoothly for us.’
CHAPTER 29
2001, New York
Maddy stared, heartbroken, at the small mound of debris in the back room. A portion of the ceiling had completely collapsed. Through a jagged hole in the brickwork above she could see shards of sunlight poking through. The bricks had cascaded down on to two of the growth tubes, shattering the plastic and spilling the protein solution and foetuses on to the floor. There was nothing that could be done for either of the growth candidates — one of each: a baby Bob and a baby Becks — they were quite dead.