Out of Time

by E W Barnes

  “Please,” Richard gasped. “Raiders. They’re after us.”

  “We cannot help you. Go back the way you came,” the woman answered, as her comrades took up defensive positions.

  Through gaps in the piecemeal wall Sharon saw the glimmer of firelight and silhouettes of moving people. There was a baby’s cry, quickly hushed. It was a camp, a refugee camp, and its guards were not willing to risk the safety of those behind the wall by accepting two strangers.

  “Please,” Sharon said, fear and desperation cracking her voice. They stared at her curiously. In her torn dress and filthy shoes, she must have looked bizarre to them.

  “No,” the woman said, lowering her eyes. “I’m sorry. Please leave.”

  Richard’s head dropped and Sharon’s heart was in her throat. They turned, jogging back the way they came.

  “Hey!” A shout came from behind. “Keep left. There’s refuge in the tunnel.” Richard raised his hand in a wave and veered left, Sharon on his heels.

  Keeping left took them on a long arc around what looked like skyscrapers reduced to huge mountains of rubble.

  “There,” Richard whispered. A hundred feet ahead was a large pipe about four feet across. “The tunnel.”

  Sharon nodded, too out of breath to speak.

  A figure moved out from under the shadow of a tattered piece of furniture hanging over an uneven edge. The figure blocked their path, crouching and opening its arms wide, like an embrace, to catch them if they tried to go around.

  “They always send them to the tunnel,” the shadow said.

  It was a young man’s voice, intoxicated with triumph and violence. Sharon felt nauseated by it. Richard slowed, and Sharon realized as she stopped that there were more behind them. The raiders had them surrounded.

  There was a crack as one of the raiders lit a torch. There were six men—most were barely adults. Their clothes were patched and worn, but they looked better fed than those they’d seen at the camp. Their faces were grotesque, leering in the flickering light and their intentions were clear.

  Sharon wished she’d thought to grab some kind of weapon, desperately scanning for a piece of metal, something she could use to fight the raiders. As Richard put out an arm, moving them both back against a wall of rubble, there was a howl in the distance, answered by a chorus of yips and cries.

  “Isn’t that convenient?” drawled the young man who had spoken first.

  He broke into a cold smile and took a step toward Richard and Sharon, menace stretching out ahead of him.

  “When we’re finished with them, we can leave the remains for the dogs.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  2337 - The Hunters and the Hunted

  “You don’t want to do that,” Richard said in a conversational voice as if they were discussing whether to leave the house without an umbrella on a rainy day.

  “Why’s that, old man?” the raider said. While his face was in shadow, Sharon heard the sneer in his voice.

  “There’s more than just dogs coming,” Richard answered in a slow whisper so creepy that Sharon was not the only one chilled by it.

  The raiders paused their advance, considering Richard’s words. But only for a moment.

  “I don’t think so,” the leader said smoothly as the raiders again moved toward them. “Just us. Then the dogs.”

  Richard raised his arms, and the raiders readied weapons to defend themselves, but they did not attack. They wanted Richard and Sharon alive for their sport and would wait to achieve that goal. They watched him cautiously, but all Richard did was stand with his arms uplifted. He looked like a god of old calling down lightning on his foes, except nothing was happening.

  A shudder ran through Richard, starting at his fingertips, and when it reached his legs his whole body was shaking as if he were trying to stay upright during an earthquake. He began to make noises; strange hissing sounds, whispers, and low growls.

  Without warning, he threw his head back and howled, the sound echoing off the ruins. In the distance, the pack of feral dogs answered.

  “It’s here!” Richard shouted, pointing to a spot behind the raiders.

  Several turned to look, only to be snarled at by their comrades for being distracted. Like the raiders, Sharon saw nothing.

  “And there!” Richard pointed in a different direction.

  The raiders, losing patience with what they—and Sharon—assumed was an attempt to divert them, didn’t turn to look this time.

  “Bananas! Portcullis and flinging! Don’t you see?” Richard screamed at them as if the raiders lives depended on it. “Soap now! Soap. And soup! Parking fortnight mashing!”

  He nodded at them vigorously, his arms waiving. The dog pack yipped in answer.

  “Come no further foul beast!” Richard grabbed a chunk of rubble and hurled it over the raiders’ heads into the blackness beyond.

  Sharon shrank back, staring at Richard in alarm. By this time, she was not the only one. Several raiders ducked as Richard flung more debris over their heads.

  “Barrage!” Richard roared as he dropped his arms, spinning and kicking, flailing in every direction.

  His attention was on unseen things behind the raiders, still throwing debris and shouting. The raiders retreated uncertainly to avoid his unpredictable limbs.

  The way to the tunnel was now open. Sharon edged toward it to position herself to make a break for it, though she did not understand how getting to the tunnel would stop the raiders.

  The leader saw her intent and moved to block her path.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” he said, licking his teeth. “Not until we’re done with you.”

  There was a whine and the leader’s face grew slack. The feral dogs had arrived, sooner than the raiders expected. Just outside the reach of the torchlight many eyes glowed yellow, watching eagerly, waiting for the chase. Richard’s spinning stopped, and he, too, stared at the yellow eyes.

  For a moment all was quiet, humans watching the pack, the pack watching the humans. One dog took a step forward, a black paw in the firelight. It howled and Sharon’s blood froze.

  “Ready weapons!” the leader of the raiders shouted, running to join his comrades in a defensive line to stop the dogs.

  At his shout the dogs leapt forward, snarling, and biting.

  “Go!” Richard shouted as if he were cheering on the raiders, but Sharon knew he intended the shout for her.

  She flung herself into the tunnel, painfully scraping her knees as she pulled them out of the way for Richard to follow. She heard the raiders shouting and the dogs barking and growling, the sounds of metal on flesh, on bones, and bodies thrashing in the dirt. What she did not hear was the sound of Richard following her.

  She kept crawling. The tunnel was narrowing and there was a layer of what felt like mud but smelled much worse and which got deeper as the tunnel diameter shrank. Soon she reached a fork and looked back. She was 10 feet from the entrance and there was no sign of Richard. She hesitated, unsure. If she kept going, there was no way to tell him which direction she’d chosen.

  A shadow fell over the tunnel opening and a man crawled in. His legs almost cleared the edge when a huge shape blocked the light. Richard’s yell was followed by a snarl. The great black alpha dog bit into his left leg, yanking him backwards. Sharon scrambled to help, clasping hands with Richard as he braced his right leg against the side of the tunnel. There was the sound of shredding fabric and Richard groaned loudly as they pulled him out of the dog’s grasp.

  Sharon led the way through the sludge in the tunnel, away from the opening where the dog barked in angry frustration, unwilling to follow them in. The dog gave up as she reached the fork.

  “Left,” Richard gasped.

  “How do you know?” Sharon said as she entered the left fork. The sludge was thicker here, and its putrid smell was worse.

  “The people, in the fort,” Richard panted. “They said to keep left.”

  Sharon was too terrified to argue. It was as
good a reason as any.

  The tunnel became a large pipe, narrowing to about two feet in diameter but grew no smaller. Each time they reached a junction, Richard directed them left. After an hour Sharon lost all sense of direction and no longer knew where they were in relation to where they entered the tunnel.

  Occasionally there were breaches in the walls, places where she could almost stand if she squeezed herself into the rubble piled above. Rain entered through the gaps, diluting what she realized was sewage flowing through the pipe system. The bad news was that when they crawled under one of these openings, she could still hear the dogs, sometimes fainter, sometimes louder. She had no doubt the dogs knew precisely where the pipe ended on the other side.

  They came to a halt at a spot where there was enough light to see each other. Without speaking, they leaned against the curved walls, sitting as far above the sludge as they could, which required bending their heads forward to accommodate the top of the tunnel.

  “How’s your leg,” Sharon asked. Richard was covered with brown muck and what she could see of his face was ashen and drawn.

  “It’s been better,” he answered.

  “What you did back there, with the raiders, that was amazing,” she started.

  Richard’s brow knotted.

  “You know, distracting them until the dogs came,” Sharon continued.

  Richard dropped his head to his chest. He remained like this for so long Sharon thought he’d fallen asleep. Sharon reached out a hand to shake him and he lifted his head. There were tears on his face, rivulets running down his cheek making clean tracks.

  “That wasn’t me,” he said in answer to her perplexed stare.

  “You didn’t plan that?”

  “That was… it was…” he took a deep breath. “Sometimes the temporal aberration disorder is triggered and there’s nothing I can do about it. It’s like I become someone else. I don’t remember what happened.”

  Sharon nodded, a cold pit of memory forming in her stomach. He reminded her of her mother and her illness. “I see. What do you remember?”

  Richard looked around. “We were trying to get to the tunnel, and then we were in the tunnel, and my leg hurt.”

  “Well, you were brilliant, you saved us,” Sharon said, describing what he’d done.

  “I wonder why the dog didn’t follow us in,” he mused.

  “I think they know where the pipe lets out,” Sharon answered. “I can hear them through the gaps in the walls. I think they’ll be waiting for us.”

  “That may be, but we can’t stay here. We’ve got to keep moving,” he said, getting on his hands and knees again.

  After several hours of crawling with two more rests, they came to a metal grate through which they saw down a hill of debris and out over a barren landscape of dust and dirt, gray in the early morning light. They had reached the edge of the city.

  Sharon grasped the bars of the metal grate and discovered it moved easily and silently as if on a well-oiled hinge. She swung it wide and stepped out, reveling in being able to stand fully upright again. Richard followed, staggering on his injured leg and catching himself on the tunnel’s edge. He took a deep breath.

  “There,” he said pointing across the fields. “We need to go there.”

  Sharon squinted. She could just make out a series of low rectangular buildings, and beyond them what looked like a large sphere. It was a globe, a globe she had seen before. Now she knew where they were.

  “That’s the CERN facility, where the headquarters of the TPC is located.”

  She looked back at the pile of rubble behind them in shock. If the TPC was in the distance, that meant she was standing on the ruins of Caelen’s apartment building. She looked around wildly to find any hint of him there, a piece of furniture, a book. But there was nothing but unrecognizable rubble and decay.

  “Why do we need to go there?” she asked.

  “No, not here. We get there and I’ll tell you everything. What we need is there.”

  “Need for what?”

  He frowned at her. “To stop this, of course,” he said, waving at the destruction around them.

  “But you said there are no temporal amplifiers in this time frame,” she started in exasperation. “How can we do anything without a temporal amplifier?”

  “To stop this, we don’t need a temporal amplifier,” he answered. He looked at the sky. “We should find a place to hide until nightfall.”

  “Why not go now?” Sharon asked.

  “The raiders can see us in the open,” he answered.

  “And the dogs can sniff us out at night,” she replied, certain the pack was not far away. “Day or night the risk is the same. The sooner we get to safety the better.”

  “I guess I can’t argue with that,” Richard said easing himself away from the tunnel entrance. Sharon followed slowly, arms out to catch him if he lost his footing on the shifting pile.

  It took a painfully long time to reach the end of the mountain of debris. Each step they took sent rubble skipping away or started a small avalanche of wreckage cascading down the sides or ahead of them. Sharon listened intently for any response, human or animal.

  Despite the urgency, they rested when they reached the bottom of the heap. It had been hours since Sharon had last eaten—lemon cookies that she could barely remember—and neither Sharon nor Richard had found clean water. Sharon fervently hoped there were supplies at the CERN facility where Richard was taking them; otherwise they would not survive long enough to do whatever mysterious task was needed to stop an apocalyptic disaster.

  The sun was fully risen when they started across the open space between the city ruins and the distant buildings. No longer navigating teetering slabs and shifting rubble, Richard made good time on his wounded leg. When Sharon finally looked back, the ruins were farther away than she thought they’d be, though the CERN facility did not appear closer.

  The growing distance from the ruins did not dispel their fear of pursuit. They used features in the land to hide them from observation; old irrigation ditches served as low-lying paths and dead trees, still in their windbreak rows, blocked them from view. Still, even though every step brought them nearer to safety, the feeling of being tracked did not decrease. Sharon kept looking behind them, trying to spy the hunters her instincts told her were not far behind.

  It was almost a relief when Sharon heard the first howl. In some ways she preferred facing down the pack than fighting off the raiders. Hunting them was in the dogs’ nature; but the raiders had turned their backs on what made them human, letting fear drive them instead.

  The relief was short lasted. Richard was panting and groaning even as they tried to pick up speed. The pain of his wound was finally slowing him down and Sharon saw blood spatters in the dirt—an easy trail for the pack to follow.

  “C’mon,” Sharon said, throwing his left arm over her shoulder and hoisting him up with her right arm, leaning him against her hip to take the strain off his left leg. It was a desperate three-legged race.

  For the first hundred yards they made good time, but after the initial sprint Sharon was running out of steam. With every step they were losing ground to the pack.

  Even though her eyes were on the path ahead of them so she would not trip and bring them both down, she was caught by surprise when the dusty dirt gave way to a raised lip of dirty concrete and nearly tripped anyway. She looked up. The transportation center she and Caelen had used—who knew how many years before—rose before her. Her heart lifted. If they could get inside, they might have a chance.

  The dogs sensed their prey’s renewed hope. Where before they had been silent, their paws drumming steadily on the dirt, now they became noisy, whining and barking their eagerness to complete the hunt. Sharon risked a look back.

  The dogs were closer to Sharon and Richard than the transportation center. They were not going to make it.

  CHAPTER THREE

  2337 - Darkened World

  Adrenaline surged. Shar
on took great gulps of air and, with one last burst of energy, propelled them over the threshold of the transportation center a few feet ahead of the dogs.

  There. An autocar was standing open as if waiting for its next passengers. It was the only one she could see with windows still intact. The doors looked undamaged. She pushed Richard into the cabin ahead of her and grabbed the doors to shut them.

  They would not move.

  The dogs slowed momentarily at the entrance to the transportation center, sniffing in the gloom. The pack entered warily a few seconds later, heads turning in all directions watching for threats and seeking their prey. Seeing Sharon straining to close the doors to the autocar, they leapt forward, howls echoing through the empty building in a terrifying crescendo.

  No matter how hard she pulled, the doors would not budge. The lead dog paused, crouching, readying itself to leap into the cabin. She leaned back against the seat and desperately kicked hard on the door closest to her. It moved, slowly at first, then faster, coming together with its twin just as the dog slammed into the panel.

  The pack could see Sharon and Richard through the glass but could not reach them. Their frustration sent them into a frenzy. They surrounded the car, standing on their hind legs to bark at the windows, and some jumped on the roof, with a cacophony of whining and howling.

  Sharon shrank back, watching the feral storm with wide eyes. Richard appeared unconscious, blissfully unaware of the whirlwind of angry dogs held back by mere inches of glass.

  Eventually they understood they couldn’t reach their prey. The attack stopped all at once. They retreated from the windows and roof as the last of their howls faded into silence. But they didn’t go far. If they couldn’t get into the autocar, they would wait until their prey came out.

  The dogs settled into a vigil. Some lay on the ground next to the autocar; others sat upright in positions of perfect watchfulness; while others padded around the vehicle in a never-ending tattoo. Their silent pacing was as unnerving as the howling whirlwind had been before.