Anachronist

by Andrew Hastie

  ‘Of course,’ Sim replied with a wink as he opened his almanac — ‘Shit!’

  ‘What?’ she asked, taking the book out of his hands.

  ‘He’s got hold of two Colt 45s and jumped to the meeting place.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Somewhere local.’ He took the book back. ‘Their old primary school. It seems to hold some special significance to the relationship between him and Lenin.’

  ‘I’m coming with you.’ She walked over to her wardrobe and took out a black coat and Samurai sword.

  Sim shook his head. ‘You can’t, Cat.’

  ‘Why the hell not?’

  He held up the page of his book. Lines and symbols danced around her name. ‘Because there is a fifty-four-point-six per cent chance you’re going to get shot.’

  ‘I’ve had worse odds,’ she said, putting on her coat. ‘Now lend me your tachyon and go back to Copernican Hall and re-run the numbers.’

  61

  Hiding Guns

  [London, UK. Date: 12.007-08-22]

  Josh appeared in the middle of the old playground between the twisted climbing frames and broken seesaws. It was a sad sight: chains rusted slowly on swings with no seats, brambles flourished in the sand pit and the roundabout had completely rotted away.

  He’d gone back to the night before the meeting with Lenin so that he could get his bearings, remind himself of the layout of the place and stash something somewhere for insurance.

  He was wearing a long leather overcoat that he’d found in the safe house. It reminded him of the guy out of the Matrix and was also especially useful for hiding weapons. The Victorians really knew how to make a coat: it was waterproof and warm, which was comforting at five o’clock in the morning when the sky was full of dirty grey clouds chucking rain down on your head.

  Inside the coat he could feel the weight of the two pistols pressing against his rib cage. They were hard, awkward shapes that felt cold against his body.

  The school building was in a bad way. It’d been closed down a few years ago and the 60s pre-fab construction hadn’t stood up to the rigours of bad weather and vandals. The smashed windows and barricaded doors looked more like a scene from some zombie-apocalypse movie — broken glass and old bits of classroom furniture were scattered in front of the entrance, and grass and weeds had burst through the pavement as nature reclaimed its own.

  The text from Lenin contained one important word: ‘Pirates,’ and it was all that he needed. There was only one place that meant anything and that was here, at their old primary school, where he and Lenin, or Richard as he was known then, had spent a few blissfully innocent years before everything had got serious. The school was the first and last part of his childhood: before his mum got ill, before he started stealing cars — when he still believed in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, and his friends didn’t stab each other over a disagreement.

  Pirates was a game they used to play in the gym. It was one of his only happy memories of school. His gym teacher, Mr Morgan, was a typical man’s man — an ex-rugby player who took no shit but didn’t dole it out either. He had retrained as a geography teacher and worked in a private school until he got ill and had to take a career break, returning as a primary teacher two years later. It was strange that the only contribution Mr Morgan had made to Josh’s life was one afternoon a week in which he got to play the best game ever invented.

  It was a simple game, the best ones always were. They would put out all the gym equipment including ropes, bars, mats, benches, a whole array of equipment to jump and climb upon, and then with everybody taking their places Mr Morgan would blow his whistle, and the mayhem would begin.

  No one could touch the floor, for it was the sea, of course, and full of sharks. One kid would be the pirate — usually this fell to Lenin, who even then wanted to take control, and he would recruit his crew by chasing them across the equipment and tagging them. Once on his team, they would go off recruiting on their own, and so on until everyone had either fallen into the sea or joined up. It was Spiderman, X-men, Batman and a dozen other things rolled up into one perfect afternoon.

  That was until Mr Morgan’s cancer returned and he had to take sick leave. Josh had cried at the assembly when they said goodbye. He was probably the closest thing he would ever get to a father figure. There were no more Pirate games after that, and they left the school a year later.

  As Josh entered the building he had a flashback of his first day — it all seemed so big and scary back then. His mum had walked him to the gate and waited there as he disappeared inside. He’d watched her from the classroom. She’d stayed at the gate for hours in case he came back out, but he never did — by lunchtime, she was gone and he was busy kicking a ball around the playground with Billy and Shags.

  He felt like a giant as he walked down the corridor to the main hall. In his day it had doubled up as the gym and had been the arena for their game. Everything around him seemed to have been designed for midgets. The coat pegs, noticeboards and what was left of the cupboards were all built at a metre high. Even the chairs looked like something out of a doll’s house.

  The walls were covered in the tags of the various gangs. Every budding graffiti artist came here to practice. Josh was not sure the old headmistress, Mrs Bowler, would have approved, but it did bring a certain street-cred to the place that his art teacher, Mr O’Connell, might have liked.

  Water was dripping into pools from the ceiling where the flat roof had perished. The front of the school was a single-storey building and he had found his way up on to its black-tarred surface many times, hunting for numerous balls that had been accidentally kicked up there.

  It was a ruin now, and he resented Lenin for bringing him back here. Knowing him, it was probably some kind of intentional psycho-bullshit that was intended to put Josh off his guard, but Josh had the luxury of time. He could deal with his ghosts and reminisce all he wanted — tomorrow was as far away as he needed it to be.

  The gym/hall was a larger, two-storey extension at the back of the school. It was in a better state than the front of the building, probably because not everyone could be bothered to walk all the way down. There were a few gang tags sprayed across the walls and the scattered remnants of enough booze and nitrous oxide canisters to suggest there had been some kind of party here recently.

  Every one of the windows in the hall had been broken, but somehow the roof had remained intact. Birds had nested in parts of the ceiling and what was left of the climbing bars; the stench of their droppings was overpowering.

  Josh sat down on one of the old benches, its varnish scored with hundreds of initials of forgotten pupils. He felt the history reaching out to him, surfacing moments of his younger self bundling over the vaulting horse — of his friends screaming with delight as they chased him across the equipment. He longed to go back there and relive those moments, but he knew he couldn’t focus on the past now; nothing was going to change the fact that he had to deal with Lenin once and for all.

  Caitlin had told him that there were certain events that just had to happen, that no amount of changing the past seem to make any difference — this was going to be one of those moments, this was a cornerstone.

  He wished she could be there. She would have been a good wingman for what was to come. Josh had been impressed with her skills on the ship — Cat had obviously seen more than her fair share of action, but Josh knew he had to do this alone, he couldn’t ask anyone else to fight his battles.

  He took one of the guns out and aimed along its sight to where he knew Lenin would be standing the next day. On the raised stage at the other end of the hall, exactly where the old headmistress used to witter on about the three Rs: ‘Respect, Responsibility and Reflection,’ something that no eight-year-old with dyslexia and undiagnosed ADHD had any interest in whatsoever.

  Josh had been an anathema to most of the teachers. They automatically assumed he was just another ‘disruptive influence’, but he wasn’t stupid — he was just b
ored. His grades were hampered by his reading and he fell behind target, finding himself consigned to a class full of misfits and rejects — he had no choice but to adapt to his environment.

  Looking back, it was easy to see how his life had got messed up: the bad breaks, false promises and injustices that he’d experienced as both the system and his own choices let him down. He refused to hold his mother responsible for any of it, even though she blamed herself for everything: if they had been born in a different part of town; if she’d helped him with his reading; if he’d had a father; if she had never got ill... there were too many ifs when you looked at your life that way. That was how Sim saw everything — a series of events that led to where you were now. Josh didn’t want his life to be about probabilities and causalities; he wanted to be in control. He wanted to choose his own destiny. If travelling through time could never fix his mother’s MS, or his dyslexia, then all he could do was use it to ensure that he made the best future for the both of them.

  He pulled the second pistol out. It made him feel like a cowboy — a six-shooter in each hand. The guns had histories of their own. He could sense their past moving under the surface of their carved wooden handles. They’d been halfway round the world: carried by an officer of the 7th Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Bighorn; by a British soldier fighting the Zulu in Africa, and had even murdered a Russian politician on the Trans-Siberian Express.

  He got up and walked over to the half-destroyed school piano and slid one of the guns underneath it. This would be his primary back-up tomorrow if anything kicked off.

  The piano had been a fixture of the hall for as long as Josh could remember. Every morning Mrs Larkley had banged out ‘All things bright and beautiful’ on it, trying desperately to hide the tremors from her alcoholism as she played. He closed his eyes and let the history of the instrument unwind around him. He watched the panorama of events expand until he found a point close to the last game of ‘Pirates’ they’d ever played and moved into it.

  Standing on the stage surrounded by gym equipment, Josh lost himself in the scent of sweat-stained crashmats and rubber-scuffed, waxed floors, then pulled out the tachyon, rotated the dial to bookmark this timepoint and threw the remaining pistol up into the air.

  The gun spun slowly, end-over-end, up into the air as he tapped the watch and jumped back to the present.

  62

  Meeting

  It was close to midnight when he reappeared, the rain had stopped, and the sky above the school was clear and full of stars.

  He could tell by the cars parked outside that Lenin had already arrived, and that he’d brought reinforcements. Josh was going to be heavily outnumbered. He didn’t care — he wasn’t going to be hanging around to get shot — he had a plan.

  Josh stayed out of sight and crept quietly around the grounds of the school. Lenin had posted armed guards at every entrance. It reminded Josh of the time he and the colonel were scoping out the Wolf’s Lair back in 1944; standing in the cold watching the Nazis seemed like so long ago now. He missed the old man and his crazy ways.

  There was a noise from the bushes behind him, and a slight rush of statically charged air that signalled someone actualising nearby. Josh moved back into the shadows and waited to see who appeared.

  It was Caitlin.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he whispered hoarsely to her.

  She looked a little surprised, but it was quickly replaced with anger.

  ‘Trying to stop you doing something stupid,’ she spat back at him.

  ‘This is my fight. Not yours. I don’t go messing around in your life trying to put it right, do I?’

  She looked a little taken aback.

  ‘I wouldn’t have to,’ she said defiantly, ‘if you weren’t about to screw it all up.’

  ‘It’s mine to screw up! Who gave you the right to say what I do with it?’

  Caitlin was about to reply when Sim appeared. He was wearing some kind of dark armour under his cloak — he looked like something out of a video game.

  ‘Dalton is tracking us. According to my calculations, you’re going to need some back-up. You can’t go up against all of them on your own.’

  ‘They have weapons — Uzis,’ Josh warned.

  ‘We know,’ Caitlin said, producing her sword.

  ‘What did you bring with you?’ Josh asked Sim.

  Sim opened up his coat to reveal an impressive array of fighting stars and just about everything else you could buy from a martial arts catalogue.

  ‘So you’re going to go all ninja on their ass?’ Josh said with a laugh. ‘Against automatic weapons.’

  ‘You got a better plan?’ asked Caitlin sarcastically.

  ‘As it happens, I do.’

  ‘Good. Well, let’s hear it, then!’

  Lenin had assured the professor that he knew the perfect place for a meeting. Fermi had his doubts, until he checked the plans of the old school and found it did indeed have everything he required. There was a basement that ran the length of the hall, where he could install his monitoring equipment out of sight in a matter of hours.

  Fermi sat in what had once been the boiler room and checked his laptop: all the readings were stable. He could take a baseline of the gravitational background and then sit back and wait for the show to begin.

  He took out the old watch once more and stroked its finely engraved surface with his thumb. There was something deeply satisfying about such a well-made piece; its construction exuded craftsmanship, a level of mastery he’d hardly ever seen. Fermi felt like a Victorian explorer studying an artefact from a lost civilisation — the symbols and glyphs around its intricate dials made no sense to him. It was a mystery wrapped in an enigma.

  There was a subtle but highly localised distortion field surrounding the metal casement. He could feel the shifting waves when he ran his finger over it, as though he wasn’t actually touching the surface but a micrometre above it. This really was a quantum device, he thought to himself. It was in a state of permanent flux: both here and not here at the same time — it was Schrödinger’s watch.

  Fermi couldn’t imagine how the secrets of this device were in the hands of some itinerant car-thief, an opportunist who had stolen something he couldn’t comprehend. Nevertheless, the frustration would soon be over, he told himself. Josh’s need to rescue his mother would soon resolve the situation. Fermi’s men would take him and with the appropriate amount of persuasion he would have the details of the original owner. Then the thief could be on his way, or at least be released into Lenin’s care, whatever that entailed.

  The boy’s mother was recovering well under the ministrations of the private hospital; if all went to plan tonight, there should be no reason why she wouldn’t live a long and healthy life — whatever that was for a woman of her age and condition. He wasn’t sure he could say the same for her son.

  There was an odd burst of static on the walkie-talkie, which coincided with a strange spike on his monitoring screens.

  ‘Three bodies just appeared on the thermal. EchoSix,’ a military voice crackled over the radio, ‘walking south. Appeared out of nowhere. Over.’

  Fermi felt a tremor of excitement as he put on his glasses and sat down next to the laptop.

  ‘Bring the cameras online. I want everything recorded.’

  ‘Copy that.’

  A series of grainy images flashed onto the grid of monitors behind the laptop. The night-vision cameras capturing a trace of the group moving through the grounds of the school. They were painted in eerie hues of green. Their faces were obscured. Only the glowing points of light in their eyes gave him any hint that they were even human.

  The fact that there were three of them disturbed Fermi — Lenin had told him that Jones would come alone, that he had no friends who’d have the balls to stand beside him in a fight. Fermi didn’t like surprises. Hypotheses needed to factor all the variables.

  ‘Scan every sector. Secure the perimeter!’ the professor barked into
the radio.

  63

  Showdown

  Josh walked into the crowded hall with his head held high, looking into the eyes of each member of the ghost squad as he passed them. Caitlin and Sim shadowed him, their weapons still hidden beneath their long coats. By Josh’s estimation, Lenin had brought everybody to the party, and every single one of them was armed. He could tell from the way they wouldn’t meet his gaze that they were nervous, waiting for him to make the first move. Most of them had never fired a gun, except in video games. That could work to his advantage if he played it right, or it could end up with them all getting shot.

  Gossy was standing in the middle of the room. His hands were empty, but Josh could see from the bulge in his coat that he was packing. They nodded to each other and Josh thought for a second he saw a glimmer of concern in his friend’s face — Lenin obviously didn’t have everybody’s total allegiance.

  Lenin sat on a makeshift throne they had built out of a couple of old crates on the stage. He was smoking a joint and tapping his feet to the beat of something loud and bassy playing on the PA system sitting next to him. He put his hand into his jacket and pulled a microphone.

  ‘Ladies and gentleman, give it up, give it up — Crashman is in da house,’ he rapped in perfect time to the beat. There were various hoots and chants from the crowd closing in around them. Josh could feel Caitlin’s eyes burning into the back of his head.

  ‘So,’ Lenin took another drag on his spliff, ‘do you have what I asked for?’

  ‘Do you?’ Josh replied, his voice sounded meek in comparison to the PA.

  Lenin smiled and waved the mic at someone in the corner, who in turn tapped on a door and opened it.

  Josh felt his resolve drain away as he saw the feeble figure of his mother appear through the doorway in a wheelchair. Her head was lolling to one side as if she were heavily sedated. He heard Caitlin gasp and felt the anger rise like a red wave. It engulfed him. He felt every sinew tense as a lifetime of domination under Lenin burst like a putrid ulcer.