TimeRiders

by Alex Scarrow

  She smiled weakly.

  He got up out of his seat to join Maddy at the table. On his way over he pulled the door to the back room shut, reducing the deafening rattling chug of the generator, clearly struggling on the last dregs of fuel, to a muted background rumble.

  He sat down heavily in an armchair beside her. ‘It’s almost over, Madelaine.’

  ‘It’s over for Sal,’ she replied.

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  She looked up at him. ‘How do you mean?’

  He rubbed his face tiredly. ‘Time travel is very muddy stuff… It’s an unpredictable science. If Liam and Bob can go back and fix things second time round, then, it’s possible… just possible, that the corrective wave of time realigning, shifting everything back to normality, might also return Sal to us.’

  She sat up. ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘It’s possible… just that.’

  She grasped his hand. ‘Poor Sal.’ Tears cleaned fresh tracks down her grime-covered cheeks. ‘I can’t bear to think what… what –’

  ‘Then don’t think about it. If she comes back to us… IF… she comes back to us, those things that happened to her, well… they won’t have happened. She’ll have absolutely no memory of what’s been going on here these last few days, she’ll –’

  ‘Foster.’

  He stopped talking. Maddy’s head was cocked, her eyes narrowed, squinting as she listened to something. ‘Did you hear that?’

  ‘Hear what?’

  ‘I thought I heard…’

  Then he heard it himself – something moving in the backstreet outside. The skittering of a loose chunk of rubble kicked carelessly across the ash and dust-covered cobblestones. The light brush of something against the corrugated-iron shutter door. Then tapping.

  Their eyes met and both knew what it meant.

  ‘They’ve found us, haven’t they?’ whispered Maddy.

  ‘I think so.’

  The tapping on the shutter door suddenly became a frustrated bang. Maddy jerked in her seat and whimpered.

  ‘They’re trying to find a way in,’ said Foster.

  ‘Can’t we open the displacement window right now?’

  He looked anxiously across the floor at the row of LEDs on the time machine, eleven of them blinking together… awaiting a twelfth to turn green.

  ‘Not yet… we open it too soon and we could blow this one chance.’

  Scratching. He could hear a scratching… scraping noise.

  Maddy held her breath, listening to the soft noise slowly growing louder, more intense. ‘What’re they doing?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  But he did.

  They’re probing the walls for a weak area. Perhaps they’ve already found some loose bricks and they’re now scraping out the crumbling mortar between them.

  He looked again at the LEDs, willing that last one to flicker over to green.

  They both heard the clatter of a brick falling to the ground outside. ‘Oh God no!’ Maddy hissed. ‘They’re coming through the walls!’

  Foster reached for the shotgun on the table. Maddy snapped on a torch and studied the walls for a sign of their handiwork. Her breath rattled and fluttered noisily in the quiet stillness.

  ‘I… I don’t want to go like… like S-Sal.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, panning a second torch along the base of the arch walls, ‘I won’t let them take us. I promise you that.’

  His beam passed over a small mound of dry grey powder on the floor.

  ‘There!’

  She moved her beam over to the pale dust, then worked it up the wall until she glimpsed a hairline crack of daylight and a solitary brick shuffling in the wall, dislodging more crumbling mortar on to the ground.

  ‘Oh my God… you see that?’

  ‘Yes,’ Foster replied. Getting to his feet and stepping across the floor towards the front wall, he aimed his gun at the loose brick. The brick fidgeted again and then shuffled inward, falling on to the floor with a heavy thud. Foster glimpsed one of the boiled-fish eyes through the hole left behind… and fired.

  They heard a high-pitched scream and anguished cries of rage outside. The scratching intensified, now coming from several other places along the wall.

  ‘Oh God, Foster!… It’s everywhere! It’s –’

  There was a bang and the sound of something heavy clattering on to the floor in the back room.

  ‘Jesus!’ snapped Foster. ‘They’re in!’ He ran across the floor and quickly rammed home a locking bolt on the sliding door.

  ‘What?’

  ‘They were distracting us at the front, meanwhile working on the brick walls at the back.’ His eyes locked on hers. ‘They’re in the back room!’

  There was a heavy thud against the sliding door, leaving a bulge in the thin metal sheeting. The hinges anchored to the old brick wall rattled loosely and rust-coloured brick dust cascaded down.

  Maddy screamed.

  Another heavy thud left another jagged dent.

  ‘This door isn’t going to take too much more of that,’ shouted Foster.

  ‘Oh God, no! Foster! I don’t want to die like this!’

  He looked again at the charge display, cursing that last red LED.

  Please change colour!

  ‘W-what… what if we open the window now? Foster? Can we?’

  He grimaced as the door rattled again from another blow and more brick dust settled on his head and shoulders. Through the thin metal door he could hear them, whimpering, crying and snarling… frustrated by this last obstacle.

  ‘Foster? Now! Open the window now!’

  ‘OK… it’s got to be nearly there. Near enough.’

  He handed her the gun and shifted to one side so that she could replace his weight against the door.

  ‘Hold this as long as you can. If they break through, you’ve got nine shots left. Do you understand?’

  She nodded. ‘I understand… seven for t-them… a-and –’

  ‘That’s right.’ He smiled grimly. ‘Two for us.’

  Another heavy thud. The top hinge rattled loose from the brick wall, showering Maddy with grit and dust.

  Foster grasped her hand tightly and squeezed, then he scrambled across the floor towards the computer terminals, quickly opening up the interface dialogue box with the time machine and tapping in the co-ordinates on the keyboard.

  The door rattled from another heavy blow and the second hinge, halfway down the door, lurched off the wall, showering her again.

  ‘Foster! Hurry! HURRY!’

  He scanned the numbers he’d typed, checking them against Liam’s untidily scrawled figures.

  God help us if I’ve got this wrong.

  He hit ENTER on the keyboard.

  CHAPTER 83

  1957, New York

  Liam fiddled with the stiff starchy collar around his neck, irritated by the stitching of the oak leaves and the death’s-head insignia. He undid the top button.

  ‘How much longer now?’

  Bob was standing in the middle of the floor, surrounded by laundry lines draped with linen sheets. His eyes blinked.

  ‘Scheduled window imminent. Precisely fifty-seven seconds from now.’

  Liam realized his stomach was churning with nervous anticipation. In less than a minute they were going to know whether Maddy had remembered the museum’s guest book. In less than a minute Liam would know whether he was going to be stuck in the past forever.

  ‘You see anything?’

  ‘Negative. No sign of density probing yet.’ And, of course, if the window didn’t arrive, then Bob was due to self-terminate shortly, leaving Liam all alone. He wasn’t sure he was going to be able to cope with that, wondering when the men in dark uniforms were going to round him up and put him back in one of those camps. Or, worse, execute him by firing squad for killing their soldiers, stealing the car, stealing the uniforms.

  ‘Ten seconds,’ said Bob.

  Come on, Maddy… please remember
the museum guest book.

  He stood up, ducking under a laundry line to join Bob in the middle of the floor.

  ‘So this is it, Bob… cross your fingers.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s meant to be lucky.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It just is… It’s… oh, forget it.’

  ‘Window due in six seconds… five… four…’

  Liam clenched his chattering teeth, his fingers crossed tightly round each other for good luck, knuckles bulging beneath his pale skin. ‘Come on… come on,’ he whispered.

  ‘… three… two…’

  Here we go.

  ‘… one…’

  Nothing.

  Liam looked around them, snatching the linen sheets to one side in case they hid the shimmering outline of the displacement window. ‘Where is it?’

  Bob looked at him. ‘There is no window.’

  ‘What? You sure?’

  ‘I would detect tachyon particles in the vicinity if there was one.’

  The nervous energy that had Liam trembling moments ago drained out of him like water from an emptying bath tub. His legs felt wobbly and he found a wooden stool to slump down on to.

  So that’s it, then.

  He looked up at the support unit, standing motionless, looking back down at him with a calm expressionless face.

  ‘So how much time do you have left before you have to terminate?’

  Bob’s brow flickered for a moment. Liam thought he almost detected sadness in that expression… almost. ‘I have fifty-six minutes left on my mission clock.’

  Fifty-six minutes left to live. Liam wondered what a person could do with fifty-six minutes. Not a lot. Time for a cup of tea and some cakes. A bath and a shave maybe.

  ‘I’m really sorry, Bob,’ he said quietly. ‘I think I was getting to quite like you, you know.’

  Bob’s stern face seemed to shift, soften. Liam was certain that behind the flesh and bone, at some level, the unit was experiencing something beyond simple binary numbers and logical functions.

  ‘I am…’ His deep voice searched for unfamiliar words. ‘I… am sorry too… Liam O’Connor.’

  ‘We made a good team, didn’t we?’

  Bob tried one of Sal’s smiles. It worked pretty well this time. Still ugly as sin, though.

  ‘Yes. We made a –’ Bob froze mid-sentence. His eyes focused beyond Liam, then he was blinking rapidly.

  Is he getting something?

  ‘Information: I am registering tachyon particles in the vicinity,’ said Bob all of a sudden.

  ‘Is it another message?’

  ‘Negative.’

  ‘One of them density probes?’

  ‘Negative.’

  Liam got to his feet, ducking under a laundry line. ‘A window?’

  Bob turned round, reached out for a laundry line and yanked it aside. The line snapped, crisp and clean sheets and shirts fluttered to the ground and there, in the middle of the archway, he could see it – the heat shimmer of a time window, flexing and distorting like a pool of water. It was a much smaller sphere than the one they’d stepped into returning from the assassination of John F. Kennedy. But bigger than Washington’s aborted attempt, big enough to carefully step through this time.

  ‘Why’s it still so small?’

  ‘They must have limited power. Or this window has been projected by machinery that is not fully charged.’

  Liam stepped eagerly towards it.

  ‘Caution: you must be entirely within the sphere. Any part of you not within will be left behind when it closes.’

  Liam carefully ducked down low and eased himself within the shimmering envelope of energy. Once he was in, crouching because the sphere was low, Bob joined him, stepping in and hunkering down, wrapping his thick arms around Liam to prevent him wobbling out of the envelope.

  ‘Remain completely still,’ said Bob.

  Then all of a sudden it felt like the ground beneath their feet had been whipped away from them and they were tumbling through air.

  2001, New York

  His feet hit hard, cold concrete. Familiar concrete. Oil-stained concrete. The first thing he noticed was that the arch was pretty dark. The second thing he noticed was Maddy screaming and then the deafening, echoing boom of a shotgun fired just a few feet away.

  He looked up to see Maddy cowering on the floor with the smoking gun in her hands and something he thought was a skeleton at first fly back like a rag doll against the wall. There were plenty more of them: skeletons in tattered clothes, pushing through the sliding door from the back room, long claw-like hands stretching out to grab her. Across the room Foster was staggering from the computer terminals to join her.

  Bob’s reactions were much quicker. He was already on his feet and sprinting with the speed of a bird of prey towards Maddy. His huge muscled arms thrashed violently at the nearest of the skeletal things, shattering bones and tearing muscle tissue.

  He grabbed another and twisted its head with a flick of his wrist. The creature flopped to the ground like a rag doll.

  The shotgun fired again, sending another one of them sprawling against a wall.

  Liam realized he was doing nothing and then remembered he had a gun. He fumbled at the holster on his hip, pulled out the pistol and tried his best to aim at the confusing tangle of pale limbs picked out by a dancing beam of torchlight.

  He fired a shot into the confusing scrum, producing an exploding puff of crimson on Bob’s left shoulder. The support unit glanced back at him and growled.

  ‘Oh Jay-zus, I’m sorry!’

  Bob turned back to the task at hand and tore the limb off another one of them and proceeded to swing the flopping thing like a club at the others. Their high-pitched screams made them sound like startled children and they began to scramble back to the door through which they’d entered.

  As Bob pursued them into the back room, the sound of crashing, a heavy perspex tube rolling across the floor and further shrill screams of terror echoed out through the doorway. Liam joined Foster and Maddy.

  ‘What’s happening?’

  Foster looked at him. ‘Bad things, Liam. Bad things.’

  He reached down to Maddy, wide eyed and in shock on the floor.

  ‘You OK, Maddy? You all right?’

  Her eyes drifted from the contorted pale bodies either side of the doorway and on to Liam’s face. For a moment she seemed confused, looking at him as if he was a stranger.

  ‘It’s me! Liam!’

  Recognition flickered into her squinting eyes. Recognition… followed by gradually realized relief. Her mouth opened and closed. Opened and closed. ‘Oh God,’ she finally managed to whisper. ‘Oh God… I thought I was going to… thought those things were… were –’

  Foster reached out and held her. ‘Shhh. It’s OK now. They made it back. Both of them. We’re safe now.’

  The sound of struggling in the back room had ceased. Bob appeared in the doorway, his face spattered with dark droplets of blood, his SS uniform ripped and soaked with even more blood.

  ‘Information: the field office is now clear,’ he said matter-of-factly.

  It was then Liam registered that they were missing someone.

  ‘Where’s Sal?’

  CHAPTER 84

  1957, command ship over Washington DC

  Paul Kramer sat alone in his lab. Truly alone.

  Karl’s dead. All those other men, Saul, Stefan, Rudy, Dieter…

  Others whose faces he could remember, if not their names.

  Now I’m the last.

  He looked up from his lap across the messy floor, thick with snaking cables, towards the atom bomb in its frame, nestling inside the small wire cage.

  There you are, my little friend.

  In his hand, he held a simple toggle switch wired carelessly into the complicated device. A loosely soldered red cable descended from it, linking the switch to his jury-rigged version of a Waldstein field-displacement cage. His thumb rested on the ti
p of the toggle switch.

  Kramer felt so incredibly tired. A solid week now without a moment’s sleep. Not since he’d had Karl killed. If he’d had the courage, he would have activated his device right then. Joined Karl in the hereafter moments later.

  Karl’s adjutant, and several other senior invasion-force generals, had petitioned to see him, over and over. Problems mounting up, issues that needed to be resolved, paperwork that needed signing.

  He could face none of those things right now.

  And there’d be no sleep either. Because the moment his eyes closed the nightmares came. His assassin was no longer some time-policeman from the future, but some dark, formless entity from Hell… hungrily seeking his soul, ready to drag him down through a rip in space-time to burn for eternity for daring to step, albeit briefly, into its dimension.

  ‘Burn… for eternity,’ he muttered quietly.

  His thumb toyed with the toggle switch.

  Paul, it’s time.

  ‘You’re back,’ he said flatly. The voice had been so quiet these last few days. Paul thought it had abandoned him.

  I never left you.

  ‘I thought I was going to die alone.’

  No. You and I, we’ll face destiny together.

  Kramer gently applied pressure to the switch.

  Just a little more, Paul… an ounce more pressure on this tiny little switch… and all life on this world will be gone.

  He smiled weakly. There was poetry in that – to create a new world, a new history, and then be the one to destroy it. Like a child builds a sandcastle, then in a moment of vainglory tramples all over it.

  That’s right. We achieved so much, didn’t we?

  The toggle switch clicked over… and the world turned white.

  CHAPTER 85

  2001, New York

  Foster finished telling Liam their story as they stood in the backstreet just outside the open shutter door and gazed upon the ruined city.

  ‘My God,’ Liam whispered. ‘What do you think happened to this world?’

  ‘A nuclear war of some sort is the only thing I can think of,’ said Foster. ‘I was hoping you might have a better idea, though.’