The Eternal War tr-4

by Alex Scarrow

  The cratered wasteland was littered with bodies, many of them stirring ever so slightly. The orderlies were moving among them, looking for triage cases to treat. Every now and then a solitary shot rang out. Battlefield mercy for those too far gone to save.

  She’d not seen Becks for a while. Not since the density probe had picked up on Liam and the others. How long ago was that? Ten minutes? Half an hour? She realized her mind was dulled with shock, perception rendered unreliable. As if she was stepping sluggishly through a dream.

  ‘Becks,’ she whispered to herself. Saying her name aloud triggered something she never thought she’d actually feel for a support unit. Concern. She always laughed at Liam’s fondness for both Bob and Becks … and now here she was. Actually worried she might just come across her corpse on the ground.

  Captain McManus regarded both American officers, slumped beside each other against the earth works and sandbags inside their bunker. He squatted just outside their low entrance.

  He nodded slowly. ‘All right, then,’ he said finally. ‘If that’s what you gentlemen want.’

  The Northern colonel offered him a grim smile. ‘It is, Captain.’

  McManus pursed his lips, nodded once more and stood up. They were quite right, of course. Neither of these two gentlemen were going to escape a firing squad for this act of rebellion. Examples would need to be made of them. This way, the way they wanted it, would save them the misery of a few hours of waiting, agonizing, and the dishonour of being stripped of their rank insignia before being marched out into a courtyard at daybreak.

  He saluted them both, then stepped away from the entrance to give them a little privacy. He turned to look at the soft, pale-blue light leaking out from beneath a half-lowered metal shutter to his right. He wandered over towards the shutter door and ducked down to look under it.

  He could see a cracked and uneven concrete floor littered with badly wounded men. Many of them, it was obvious, weren’t going to survive their injuries long. A lot of them were already dead. He decided he should get an orderly in here as soon as there was one spare.

  He sighed at the appalling mess and ruin battle made of such frail things as human bodies. Particularly the damage done by those experimentals. The injuries spread out in front of him were quite horrific. He was actually quite relieved the entire test batch of twelve had been killed. They’d looked like they were out of control. His own men would most probably have had to gun them down.

  His eyes drifted up to the curious source of the soft glow of blue light. A row of rectangular screens that flickered blurred images and bright colours.

  He squinted curiously.

  Now what the devil is all this?

  ‘So — ’ Devereau flipped open his holster and pulled out his revolver — ‘that went well, I thought.’

  Wainwright chuckled, burbling blood from his mouth. ‘Indeed.’

  He watched Devereau absently stroke the handle of his gun. ‘Tell me, William, do you really believe there are other might have been worlds out there? Or have we been led a merry dance by this girl?’

  ‘I can’t say … You saw as much as I. All those pictures …’ He smiled. ‘I think I do believe her.’

  Wainwright nodded. ‘It would be quite something if it is true.’

  ‘Maybe you and I will wake up in that world?’

  ‘After we leave this? Perhaps.’ Wainwright reached for his own sidearm, groaning with the effort of moving. He laughed.

  ‘What’s so amusing?’

  ‘Five years ago … I think it was … one of my sharpshooters called in to say he had a clear shot on you. Had a clear head-shot and wanted to take it.’

  ‘And what did you tell him?’

  ‘I said no … obviously.’

  ‘Why?’

  Wainwright wheezed a sigh. ‘Wish I could remember. I … don’t know. It felt unsporting.’

  Devereau shook his head. ‘Unsporting?’ He laughed at that.

  Wainwright joined him, groaning with pain as his body shook. ‘You know, Bill, I have a feeling our broadcast signal, our call-to-arms to the other regiments, was blocked somehow.’ He winced, took a deep breath. ‘I do believe our mutiny would have spread if only word had got out. I can’t believe it is only us — only our two regiments — that wanted an end to this ridiculous war.’

  ‘Nor I.’ Devereau buttoned his collar up carefully. Straightened the peak of his forage cap. ‘Ah, well … we gave it a darned good try, did we not, Colonel Wainwright?’

  ‘That we most certainly did.’

  CHAPTER 91

  1831, New Orleans

  The trail of chaos led a quarter of a mile up Powder Street, battered and split wooden kegs spilling liquor on to the ground and penniless vagrants clustered around each one, eagerly filling their cupped hands.

  They passed a woman with a broken leg howling for a physician, an overturned baker’s wagon that had spilled loaves across the track and a trapper’s bundle of beaver pelts and deer hides scattered across the way, ruined and torn by hooves and wheel rims, before finally finding themselves looking into the gated courtyard and stables of a brewery.

  ‘The cart came from here,’ said Bob.

  A crowd of brewery workers had been drawn out to the courtyard from inside a two-storey brick building, and were gathered around something. They could see workers turning away ashen-faced, doubling over and retching. A woman screamed and ran from the courtyard past them.

  ‘Excuse me? Miss? What just happened?’ asked Sal.

  The woman shook her head and gabbled something about ‘the devil’s work’. Then she was gone, hurrying away as fast as her feet could carry her.

  ‘This is the contamination event,’ said Bob.

  ‘Aye. Come on, we should go and have a look.’

  They crossed the courtyard, heading towards brick-built stables. They could hear the horses inside, distressed, the clattering of circling restless hooves, snorting and lowing behind the stable doors.

  The crowd of people were gathered around something on the ground. Among the babble of frightened voices Sal could hear snippets of whispered words:

  ‘… witchcraft …’

  ‘… work of the devil …’

  A man with a loud voice was busy castigating the brewery workers on the evils of drink … and that this was God’s warning to them, this was God’s punishment.

  They pushed their way through the crowd to get a better look, not difficult since the gathered crowd was reluctant to draw any closer to what it was on the ground that had drawn them round.

  Finally Liam, Bob and Sal could see for themselves what it was — the cause of the disturbance, the cause of the runaway brewery cart. Liam stopped where he stood, queasily covering his mouth with a hand.

  ‘Jay-zus-Mary-’n’-Joseph …’

  Sal took another step closer and squatted down beside … it.

  ‘Don’t touch it!’ screamed one of the crowd of people. ‘It is a creation of evil! A demon!’

  She ignored the warning and reached one hand out carefully towards it … the monstrosity. If she could believe in things supernatural, then a creation of evil sounded like the perfect description for this pitiful ruin of a creature lying on the ground amid its own blood, steaming offal and twisted sinews.

  ‘Is that a person … or something?’ she whispered.

  It was as if a slaughterhouse had dumped a day’s worth of off-cuts and refuse into the courtyard. Amid the glistening purple and bloody gristle she could see the hindquarters of a horse, still flexing weakly, kicking spasmodically. But worse still — the stuff that she was sure would fuel a lifetime of future nightmares for her — the blood-spattered head, shoulders and upper torso of a man welded to the flanks of the same horse, or perhaps it was a second horse. As if God had decided to construct a centaur and in a moment of frustration and irritation had given up and hurled the failed mess down to Earth.

  Her hand gently touched the dead man’s head.

  His eyes fl
ickered open.

  CHAPTER 92

  2001, New York

  Maddy and the other prisoners were seated on the ground fifty yards away from the horseshoe trench, guarded by only a handful of British soldiers. It was clear to them that there was no fight left in the small ragged huddle of Union and Confederate soldiers.

  She watched them processing the bodies of their own first. Checking for signs of life before pulling regimental collar tags from their necks and carrying the corpses down towards the river’s edge where they were being loaded aboard the landing rafts.

  She noticed nearby a particularly dense mound of bodies with crimson tunics, busy with orderlies squatting among them feeling for signs of life. And there — as a body was disentangled and carried away by a couple of them — she saw Becks.

  She got to her feet and started to pick her way across the battlefield.

  ‘Hey! Miss! Sit back down!’ shouted one of the British soldiers guarding them.

  Maddy ignored him, drawn to the pale face staring up through its own nest of bodies. She pushed her way past an orderly and squatted down on the ground beside Becks’s cold, still face. Dark blood caked the right side of her face, trickling down from a gunshot wound to her temple.

  ‘Becks?’

  The orderly, a young man with freckles and jutting ears, looked at her sympathetically. ‘You know this woman, miss?’

  She said nothing.

  ‘By the look of it, whoever she was, she put up one hell of a fight.’

  His voice sounded far away. She barely heard it. Instead she gazed curiously at the spatter of a tear on Becks’s left cheek, for a moment wondering whether a support unit could actually cry. Then she realized it was one of her own. She wiped her eyes beneath her glasses and sniffed.

  I’m crying for a freakin’ meat robot. She scowled, angry with herself for being so pathetic and weak. It’s a machine … a tool. That’s all, you moron!

  ‘Becks?’ she whispered. ‘Becks … I’m so sorry.’

  Sorry for what? Sorry that I never bothered to get to know you … like Liam did?

  Maybe. Maybe she was sorry about that. But then again wasn’t it better not to treat these things as human, as friends?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered again, stroking one of Becks’s dark eyebrows. The one she’d made a habit of raising every time she had a question she wanted to ask.

  She was vaguely aware that the orderly was remonstrating with the guard who’d come after her, to give her some space, that she wasn’t about to run anywhere, escape.

  ‘Becks, I’m sorry that we never just … you know, never just talked.’

  Like Liam did, like Sal did. Both of them quite comfortable with the idea of hanging out with Bob and Becks as if they were just like them, human.

  She traced a line down Becks’s cold cheek. Quite dead. Beneath the bodies lying across her were injuries she didn’t need to see — didn’t want to see. Obviously too much catastrophic damage at once, for her body’s self-repair system to cope with.

  The raised voices in the background were a million miles away. Muted. Some other place. This moment was hers alone. A chance to say goodbye. Her own time and space.

  But the voices increased in number, and raised in pitch and urgency. Voices all around her.

  ‘Good God!’

  ‘What is THAT?’

  She looked up at the orderly and the soldier, both now silently staring into the sky. The other orderlies too, gazing open-mouthed at the night sky above Manhattan. Curious, she turned to look in the same direction.

  A horizon that twisted, undulated — a liquid reality of impossible possibilities.

  The time wave.

  Everyone — every soldier, every officer, every prisoner — was now frozen in place, looking at the roiling sky. Bewildered, transfixed, frightened and dumb-struck.

  Maddy … you’ve got to move! You have to be inside! You have to be protected!

  She looked towards the archway. She could see orderlies stepping out of the shutter entrance to see what the commotion was all about.

  Run! Maddy, run!

  She was about to get to her feet when she suddenly realized she couldn’t leave Becks’s body there. That message, locked away inside the support unit’s mind … There was a way to retrieve it and the memories that would preserve who she was. A way to do it … Liam once did it for Bob.

  Her chip.

  She looked around, found a carbine with a bayonet fixed to the end. She reached for it, expecting the guard or the orderly to bark a warning at her. Instead their eyes and everyone else’s were locked on the sky.

  Panicking, fumbling, she tried to get the bayonet off, tugging at it with a growing frustration.

  How does it come off?

  She tried twisting it, and the fixing unlocked with a dull scrape. She wrenched it off the barrel, dropped the carbine and looked down at Becks.

  Do it!

  She would have to thrust the tip of the blade into her skull and dig around inside for that silicon wafer, not much bigger than a memory stick, a sim card.

  She pressed the bayonet’s tip against Becks’s forehead, just above her brow line.

  Do it! Now!

  She tried to push down, but couldn’t.

  If you can’t do it … then take the head — take the whole head!

  She moved the tip down to the soft flesh beneath her jawline.

  Cut! Cut! CUT!

  ‘I can’t … I can’t!’ she whimpered under her breath. She looked up. The time wave had rolled in from the Atlantic, and was now twisting and contorting Manhattan, like clay on a potter’s wheel, moulded and remoulded, like molten wax in a lava lamp.

  And now it was crossing the East River.

  Maddy closed her eyes, gritted her teeth and did what needed to be done. Then she got to her feet and started to run. Her feet slapped the ground noisily as she pushed her way past men staring listlessly up at the approaching wave.

  So quiet!

  So perfectly still.

  Just the sound of her panting breath, her feet on rubble and a deep, deep rumble that sounded like the earth itself was preparing to split open.

  She dropped down into the trench, slipping and falling in the blood-soaked dirt on to her hands and knees. She scrambled to her feet, pounding down the last dozen yards, past a young British officer who barely seemed to notice her, his eyes glazed with wonder.

  ‘Good Lord, quite beautiful,’ she heard him whisper as she brushed past him, past a pair of orderlies carrying a loaded stretcher between them, like everyone else standing utterly motionless, transfixed, their task for the moment completely forgotten.

  Maddy reached the crumbling archway and cast a quick glance back at the sky. The front of the reality wave was across the East River, taking the armada of landing rafts and turning them into a million different things: Viking longboats, Roman triremes, Spanish galleons, sea monsters …

  She ducked under the shutter. The floor was still littered with bodies. A few of them barely alive and moaning deliriously from gunshot and bayonet wounds … hands reaching up to her, pleading for water.

  Across the archway she could see the computer system was still up and running, that tank — that beautiful old reliable Mark IV rust-bucket from an older time of this endless war — was still running, still feeding the archway with power.

  ‘Bob!’ she screamed as she picked her way over the splayed limbs of the dead and wounded men.

  She saw a dialogue box appear on one of the screens, although she was too far away to read the response.

  ‘It’s Maddy!’ she gasped. ‘Activate a field! NOW!’

  She collapsed against the computer desk, gasping, wheezing, close enough now to read computer-Bob’s response.

  › Information: insufficient power to include the entire field office.

  ‘Then … then do it just around me!’

  The cursor began to shift across the dialogue box.

  › Caution: there will be
obstructions within the radius …

  Of course, the archway had dropped by several feet. ‘In the air, Bob. A portal mid-air! I need to jump into it as the time wave arrives!’

  For a full second, perhaps two, the cursor blinked without a response. Then finally began to jitter to the right.

  › Affirmative.

  Outside the shutter she saw loose dirt being scooped up by the air pressure just ahead of the wave. She reached out for Becks’s head, cradling it in her arms. Maddy climbed up on to the computer desk. ‘NOW, BOB … DO IT NOW!’

  In front of her a portal shimmered open, suspended three feet above the floor. There was no knowing if that was high enough, whether she was going to emerge into the unchanged archway, reappearing up to her waist in the concrete floor. Undoubtedly fatal. Horribly fatal.

  She jumped for the portal just as the wave arrived and tore the archway into a million different possibilities.

  CHAPTER 93

  11.31 p.m. 11 September 2001, Police Precinct 5, New York

  The police sergeant lurched violently in his seat, the squad car rocking on its suspension.

  ‘Whoa! Hey! Bill! You nearly spilled my darned coffee!’

  Police Sergeant Bill Devereau turned to look at his partner. ‘Uh? Sorry. Must’ve dropped off for a moment there.’

  His partner nodded. ‘You can say that — you were muttering like some juiced-up crackpot.’

  Bill Devereau shook his head. Wide awake now. ‘I … Crazy, I just had the weirdest dream.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  Devereau narrowed his eyes, stroked his chin thoughtfully. The memory of it was fading fast, blurring; the clear definition of it vanishing, like cream stirred into coffee. ‘A war … or somethin’ like that. New York was all just ruins … like, I dunno, like Stalingrad.’

  Sergeant Wainwright sighed. ‘I’m sure you ain’t the only one havin’ nightmares, buddy.’ Their precinct had lost some men earlier today when the Twin Towers came down, good men. And they’d be lucky to find anything of them in those smouldering ruins. They were going to be burying empty coffins for weeks to come.