TimeRiders

by Alex Scarrow

  ‘Wake up, lads,’ he barked at the men manning the barricade.

  He shielded his eyes from the glare of the sun on the snow-covered fields either side of the rutted gravel track. He sensed something wasn’t quite right.

  ‘Ready the M96,’ he snapped.

  Two of the guards shouldered their carbines and manned the heavy-calibre sentry gun – four high-velocity barrels that could chew up an un-armoured vehicle in a matter of seconds, mounted on a sturdy tripod and sandbagged for stability.

  The truck was still showing no sign of reducing speed as it rolled down twin ruts in the road, splashing fans of slushy mud up on to the banks of snow on either side.

  Kernst took several steps forward in front of the vehicle barrier and waved his arms, indicating to the driver that he should slow down, stop and have some papers ready to show. That, or risk being fired upon.

  He cursed under his breath as he heard the rumble of the truck’s engine increasing in pitch.

  He’s speeding up.

  The German sergeant stepped out of the muddy ruts in the middle of the road to one side and nodded at his men to fire a short warning burst. The M96 buzzed for a second, spewing a small cascade of steaming shell casings on to the ground. Divots of slush and mud danced into the air several dozen yards in front of the closing vehicle.

  But it showed no sign of slowing down.

  Kernst shook his head. The stupid fool driving that vehicle was no doubt some hot-headed American kid trying to break in and rescue a relative, a loved one. Well, the fool was about to die.

  As the truck closed the remaining distance, only fifty yards away now and picking up further speed, Kernst nodded to his men once more. They levelled the M96’s thick barrels at the truck itself, aiming at the windscreen.

  And fired.

  The windscreen exploded. The metal grating at the front of the truck began disintegrating amid showers of sparks. But momentum was still carrying the heavy four-ton vehicle relentlessly forward.

  Kernst found himself diving out of the way at the very last moment into a deep bank of snow as it cannoned past him, careering into the M96 gun emplacement and through the barrier beyond. The vehicle flipped over on to its side and slewed on another ten yards, pulling down a good fifty-yard stretch of chain-link perimeter fencing as it ground to a halt on the snow-covered courtyard in front of the first row of the prison camp’s huts.

  Kernst pulled himself out of the waist-high snow bank and unslung his carbine. He cautiously approached the vehicle, now utterly still… except for a solitary wheel still spinning and a plume of smoke and steam issuing from the jagged and twisted remains of the truck’s front grille.

  The driver’s-side door suddenly burst open and a man emerged, pulling himself out and dropping off the side of the cab on to the ground with surprising speed and agility.

  Kernst fired a dozen rounds at the man. Most of them missed, but (he’d swear later on in the afternoon when asked to recall what he claimed to have witnessed) at least a couple of his shots hit the target square in the chest.

  The man was large, muscular and apparently utterly fearless. He didn’t go down screaming and clutching at his wounds. Instead, his head calmly swivelled round and spotted Kernst. He brought up both his arms, each hand holding a heavy pulse carbine, and fired.

  The German found himself head first in the snow bank again as a hail of bullets zipped over, mere inches above him. Kernst decided he was probably best staying right where he was for now.

  The muscular man strode across the open space, eyes scanning the long squat wooden huts in front of him. A moment later doors began creaking open. From within the dark interiors, faces peered out. Dozens of them.

  [Scanning]

  His eyes locked on each face one after another for a microsecond.

  Nothing.

  No Liam O’Connor.

  Bob strode towards the nearest hut just as an alarm went off across the camp. The shrill sound of orders being barked in German echoed in the air.

  He kicked in the nearest door and pushed his way into the dark interior, his eyes adjusting instantly to the gloom inside.

  [Scanning]

  None of the pale and frightened faces within were that of his mission operative.

  ‘Have… h-have you come to f-free us?’ a frail voice cried out from among the shivering cluster of prisoners.

  Bob cocked his head thoughtfully. ‘Negative.’

  ‘P-please… h-help us. Help us.’

  [Tactical assessment]

  Bob could see that the confusion of escaping prisoners would help him rather than hinder him. Standing out there alone, if he attracted too much fire, took too many hits, his genetically enhanced body would struggle to repair the damage done. Even though he was an artificial human, he was still just blood, bones and organs. It was a body that could be killed.

  With hundreds of people fleeing in all directions, the guards would be confused; their fire would be divided, turned on the fleeing prisoners as well as him.

  Bob looked down at them. ‘You are free to leave,’ he uttered in a monotone voice.

  Fifty-four huts. Bob proceeded to each one in turn, ushering out those brave enough to make a run for the flattened section of perimeter fencing. His eyes quickly and systematically scanned the faces of the prisoners huddled inside.

  Outside, the camp courtyard was thick with chaos. People scrambling towards the downed fence, the snow scuffed and flattened with footprints and stained pink with blood. The air was full of screams and crying, the percussive rattle of shots gunning prisoners down, barked orders, vengeful shouts.

  He observed half a dozen guards, taken by surprise, overrun, beaten and then shot as they pleaded for mercy. Bob, himself, had casually tallied thirty-six kills by his own hand, a number that would be taken into account when his silicon mind later evaluated his mission performance.

  As he followed the fleeing crowd of people out of the camp, his eyes momentarily logging each face and coming up with a negative, a small, lean man jogged across the snow to join him.

  ‘Hey, you!’

  Bob turned to look at him.

  ‘Yeah, you, big guy!’

  A gun rattled in the distance and several rounds zipped by his head. Bob swung his carbine round, levelled the weapon and fired a short burst in one swift reactive movement. Fifty yards away, a guard doubled over amid several puffs of crimson.

  The small man’s jaw dropped open, revealing a mouthful of tobacco-yellow teeth.

  ‘Jeeeez, man… now that… that was some shot!’

  Bob continued quickly striding towards the downed fence. ‘Information: the standard accuracy of this firearm is effective at up to one hundred yards,’ he explained crisply.

  The man shrugged. ‘Yeah, well, sure… but you just kinda swung that thing up an’ just fired without even aiming –’

  ‘This tactical situation is hazardous. Reinforcements will be deployed here soon,’ Bob announced, stepping across the twisted and crumpled remains of the chain-link fence. ‘You must leave the vicinity immediately.’

  ‘No kidding,’ replied the man. ‘Those guys are going to be mighty annoyed when they arrive. I sure ain’t stickin’ around for that!’

  Bob was already over the fence and jogging across the snowy field beyond. The small man caught up with him again, panting already as he struggled to keep pace with him.

  ‘Hey! My name’s Panelli. Raymond Panelli,’ he gasped. ‘But I let my friends call me Ray, ’cause it’s… Ow!’ He stumbled on a rock buried beneath the snow, cursing as he hopped and cradled his foot for a moment before struggling to catch up again with Bob.

  ‘So… so, what about you?’ he wheezed. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘My name is Bob.’

  ‘Bob?… Bob? That it?’

  They jogged in silence across the field for a while, heading towards the cover of a treeline. Panelli was rasping like an asthmatic old man beside him.

  ‘So, Bob?’

/>   Bob continued in silence. Eyes scanning the faces of other prisoners streaming across the snowy field. Inside his skull, the computer was busy assessing his mission’s performance score, evaluating the tactical situation. Meanwhile his body was already hard at work dealing with five gunshot wounds sustained during the raid, congealing the blood around the wounds, white blood cells already coalescing to combat any infection.

  ‘Hey, Bob!’

  The small man running beside him was becoming a useless distraction. Bob turned to look down at him. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Uh… mind if I sort of… team up with you for now? You kicked some butt back there, I mean really stuck it to them guys. It was just amazing.’ Panelli shrugged. ‘So, I figure you’re a good guy to have as a friend.’

  Bob evaluated the small man. He could provide assistance in some way.

  ‘As you wish,’ he replied flatly.

  CHAPTER 53

  2001, New York

  Thursday/Friday? (I don’t know)

  Three days now. I think it’s three – it’s hard to tell. The tins of food in the cupboard are running out and we’ll be going hungry soon.

  Foster and Maddy went out there a few times looking for supplies. They’ve not found anything so far, just ruins and bones.

  And those creatures outside. We now know they’re cannibals.

  Foster found the leftovers of one of their own kind, half eaten… and nearby the bones of loads of others. Those things seem to exist in small tribes, feeding off each other. When I think now how close I came to being taken… That creature running its hand through my hair must’ve been sizing me up! Working out if I could be eaten.

  I don’t want to die like that. I’d rather anything else. I keep expecting to hear them at any moment outside the garage door, scratching at it, trying to find a way in.

  I’ve never been so jahully-chuddah scared in my life.

  ‘I… I don’t want to go out there again,’ whispered Sal. ‘Never. Never again.’

  Foster could see the terror in the poor girl’s eyes by the guttering glow of the candle on the table between them. The rest of the arch was lost in the darkness.

  ‘We have to,’ he said firmly.

  ‘But… but, those things…’

  Those things had once been human beings. But something had happened. He suspected some sort of a nuclear war. There was plenty of blast damage, scorched walls and debris suggesting a moment of intense heat. Decades of radiation sickness would account for their pitiful condition, anaemic complexion, the running sores, toothless mouths.

  ‘Foster’s right,’ said Maddy. ‘We can’t hide in here forever.’

  ‘But… they… those things are… cannibals.’

  ‘Yes, we know exactly what they are,’ Maddy snapped.

  ‘Perhaps we might be able to communicate with them,’ said Foster. ‘If some sort of nuclear war happened in 1956 and we’re in 2001, then those creatures will be the grandchildren of the few that survived. Post-apocalypse children who’ve only ever known ruins and rubble. It’s possible the eldest of them might just remember some language.’

  ‘You’re kidding, right?’ said Maddy. ‘They dribble, they don’t talk. They see us as a free-range meal.’

  Perhaps she’s right. Those things would probably kill them before he could find a way to communicate with them.

  He sighed. ‘All right, well… we’ve wasted enough time. I was hoping another time ripple would arrive, perhaps one that would improve our situation. But it looks like this is what we’re stuck with. So we’ve no choice. We need to find some way to generate power. Enough to reboot our computer system… and enough, if we can, to open a window and pull back Liam and Bob.’

  Maddy frowned. ‘Sounds like we’re gonna need a lot of power.’

  ‘Even if we only have enough to pull one of them back, we might learn exactly where and when the timeline was changed.’

  She pulled her glasses off her face, and wiped the scuffed lenses. ‘But then we’d also need enough power to send them back to that point in time to fix it, right?’

  ‘Yes.’ Foster managed a grim smile. ‘But, look, we’ll worry about that when we get to it. One thing at a time.’

  ‘Oh jahulla, we’re so-o-o-o doomed,’ whispered Sal.

  ‘No, we’re not,’ he replied sternly. ‘If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the long years I’ve been here working for the agency, it’s that everything is fluid… nothing is fixed. We can, we will… we must… change it all back. Do you understand? Failure is not an option.’

  Both girls stared at him silently.

  ‘Nobody’s going to do that for us. It’s down to us. If we just sit safely in here until we starve to death, well then… that’s it. That world outside our shutter doors is what will remain forever more.’

  He let those words hang above the table, their three faces caught in the flickering glow of the candle, still and impassive.

  ‘So… we have a generator in the back room where the clone tubes are. We need to find some diesel fuel for it.’

  ‘Why don’t we have stores of diesel?’ asked Maddy. ‘What’s the point of having a back-up generator if there’s no fuel to run it?’

  Foster shook his head. ‘We used to maintain a store of diesel fuel… but there’s something about the energy of our field office’s time bubble that corrupts it at a chemical level.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning the diesel degrades. The fuel we have in the back room is useless. We need to get out there and find some more.’

  He was silent for a moment, listening to the haunting wind outside their shutter door moaning softly.

  It was Sal who broke the silence. ‘Then I… I guess we’d better get off our butts and start looking.’

  Maddy nodded. ‘Yeah. We’ve got your gun. Those creatures will keep their distance.’

  ‘Out there in New York somewhere – maybe in someone’s basement, in a storeroom – there’s got to be some diesel fuel.’

  Maddy nodded. ‘Right.’

  Sal pursed her lips pensively then eventually nodded too. ‘Let’s do it.’

  Foster reached out for their hands. Grasping them tightly, he smiled proudly at them. ‘You know, I’ve got a feeling you two, and Liam, are one day going to turn out to be a formidable team. The agency’s best yet.’

  The girls both managed a brave grin.

  CHAPTER 54

  1957, Prison Camp 79, New Jersey

  Liam tugged the coarse grey blanket tightly around himself, trying to seal in what little warmth his body had managed to generate. He was beginning to lose track of how many weeks he’d been there. He wasn’t sure whether it was four or five months now.

  Had to be about that.

  His eyes drifted across hundreds – no, thousands – of other people wrapped in similar grey blankets and gazing out listlessly through the chain-link fences at the barren winter countryside around the prison camp.

  ‘Look, it’s just hard to accept… to believe,’ said Wallace, standing next to him. He’d been quiet for a while. Cupping his hands and blowing on them as he thought things through. ‘I mean… yeah, I saw your friend, Bob, take Lord knows how many bullet wounds back there at the White House, and he just kind of shrugged it all off. I can’t say I ever saw anything like that.’

  ‘So then you do believe me?’

  Wallace’s jaw was dark with a thatch of unshaven bristles. He scratched his chin irritably. ‘You’re really asking me to believe you’re from the future?’

  ‘Yes.’ Liam shrugged. ‘Well, actually I’m from 1912. But –’ he offered a tired smile – ‘yes… I came here from the future.’

  ‘And you say you came back to today… to 1956, to fix history so that the Germans actually lost the Second World War?’

  ‘Yes. To correct history.’

  Wallace shook his head and laughed. A plume of his breath billowed out and quickly dissipated amid the cool morning air.

  ‘That’s co
mpletely insane. Listen, I’m tellin’ you, them Nazis never even came close to losing that war. They took Poland, Belgium, France, Britain… the rest of mainland Europe in the space of just two years. There’s no way on earth they could have lost the war. No way.’

  Liam shrugged. ‘Well, where I came from they did. That’s what I was told. And they lost badly. Their leader, the Hitler fella, is supposed to have made some pretty big mistakes, like starting a fight with Russia at the same time as he was fighting the –’

  Wallace scratched at his chin again. ‘Well… the old guy, Adolf, was pretty nuts. That much is true. That’s why there was a change at the top in ’44. That’s when Kramer took command of Germany.’

  Liam turned to Wallace. ‘Tell me more about Hitler and this other fella, Kramer. I need to know more. See, all of these things happened forty years after I died and I’m doing my best to catch up and make sense of it all.’

  ‘Died? Oh yeah, you say you were on the Titanic, right?’ added Wallace sceptically.

  ‘Yes, on that bleedin’ – supposedly unsinkable – hunk of metal.’

  Wallace snorted. ‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’

  Liam sighed. ‘Just tell me about them, would you? Hitler and Kramer?’

  The man sucked in a deep breath.

  ‘Adolf Hitler was the leader of the Nazi Party. They came to power in Germany in 1932 because the country was bankrupt and broken and Hitler promised the people he could fix things for them. And, for a while, he did too. He got that country going again and his people loved him for it. But then… he started going a little crazy in the head, mad with the power, I suppose. He had his country build up their armed forces, and then it was inevitable. In 1939, they invaded Poland. That started the Second World War.’

  ‘Second World War? So there really was a first one?’

  ‘The First World War? Yeah, of course. You want me to wind back and tell you all about that too? It happened not long after you say you… uh… died.’

  Liam shook his head. ‘No… this is confusing enough for me already. Just carry on with Hitler and Kramer.’

  ‘OK. So the Second World War started. The Germans took Poland, Belgium, France. They kicked the British army out of France at a place called Dunkirk. And then they spent a year just digging their heels in and building up their defences. Over here in America, although President Roosevelt wanted to enter the war, Congress and the Senate stopped him and kept us out if it. Which, back then, I think most Americans thought was a pretty smart idea. We figured it was a European problem. Not ours.