‘When we were freezing to death, you mean?’ she said, flushing a little.
‘So in court you said we ended up together — that we had a family?’
‘Ah, you want me to tell you what happened?’ she asked, moving closer to him so her arm brushed against his.
Josh could smell the sun on her skin as she came nearer — a mixture of exotic scents that set his senses on fire.
‘No,’ he answered, putting his arm around her, ‘I want you to show me.’
Her arms were round his neck.
‘About time, Joshua Jones. I was starting to think you’d never ask,’ she said breathlessly.
Josh closed his eyes as he felt her lips touch his. He could feel her body pressing against him, the electricity between them as they entwined. Time seemed to stand still as they fell back into the grass.
Then there was nothing.
He was holding thin air.
He could still feel the warmth of where Caitlin had lain on the flattened ground seconds before, but she had simply vanished.
Something had gone very wrong. An icy dread formed in the pit of his stomach as Josh frantically searched for any trace of her existence in the blades of grass. His mind caught vague echoes of Caitlin in the natural fractal structures of their timelines, but there was nothing more than a fleeting glimpse, nothing he could use. He pounded the ground with his fists, tearing out clumps of long grass in frustration. He couldn't explain it, but somehow he could sense that the continuum had just been radically altered; the past had been disrupted, and Caitlin had been swept away in the aftermath.
To be continued…
Copyright © Andrew Hastie 2018
Published by Here Be Dragons Limited.
The right of Andrew Hastie to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the Author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchase.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
5.3
To my beautiful wife and daughters, thank you for everything.
To my father, may you rest in peace.
A x
1
Alone
[Boju, Chu. Date: 9.494]
Josh knelt staring at the space where Caitlin should have been, his hands still clutching at the grass. He could smell her perfume lingering in the air, feel the warmth of her body on the flattened ground.
Instinctively, he hit the rewind on his tachyon, and the world around him spun back two minutes. It made no difference; she was still gone, and there was no stable trail to follow.
He couldn’t bring himself to leave that moment, even though his instincts were screaming to follow, to take action, to pursue the smallest trace of her — his heart told him to stay, to wait, just in case she came back.
The sound of Sun Tzu’s cavalry came thundering across the valley. It seemed louder than before; when she’d sat there eating noodles and telling him about how the battle played out. Josh struggled to remember what she’d said; he hadn’t been paying too much attention to the words, just the shape that her mouth made as she spoke them.
He waited, desperately hoping to be wrong. Seconds turned into minutes, and still there was no sign of her. A pall of smoke rose up the side of the valley bringing with it the metallic tang of cordite and gunpowder. Josh couldn’t remember if Caitlin said they used guns and right now he didn’t care — she was gone and he had no idea what to do next.
He could sense there had been some kind of temporal adjustment — a ‘repair’ as the colonel would’ve called it. It felt like he’d been disconnected from reality, like he’d changed channels on the TV and was watching some foreign movie without subtitles.
Josh tried to focus on the memories of the last few hours. They were becoming hazy and vague, even his carefully thought out dishes for the picnic were proving hard to remember. He looked down to where they’d been laid out on the blanket and realised that too had disappeared.
Down by the river the battle raged on. One of the mounted warriors caught sight of Josh and turned his horse towards him. The rider was clad in gold and red, his face hidden behind a demonic mask. The sun glinted off the plates of his armour as they bounced rhythmically against the horse’s flanks, his hand a blur as it whipped his mount into a charge.
Watching the horse thunder towards him through the long grass, Josh decided it was time to leave. He estimated the distance between them and began to count down under his breath.
‘Ten, nine, eight, seven...’
He looked around once more, feeling the drum of the hooves tearing up the ground as the horse bore down on him.
‘Six, five, four, three...’
Josh opened his tachyon and dialled the coordinates for the colonel’s house, present day — it was the only other logical place for him to go now.
‘Two, one... ready or not,’ he muttered, flicking his middle finger at the warrior who was levelling a bow at him.
A second later an arrow ripped through the air where Josh should have been.
[>>]
2
Present
[London. Date: Present Day]
For a moment, Josh thought he’d travelled into the future; that all their talk of him being the ‘Paradox’ may have finally come true.
Except that the date on his tachyon told him it wasn’t.
He was in the present — at the frontier.
The colonel’s house was gone. The whole street, Churchill Avenue and the Gardens, had been obliterated, replaced by enormous old skyscrapers that rose up into a sickly, smog-filled sky, like rusting hulks of an abandoned civilisation.
Dirty rain stung his face, pouring down through the lattice of corroded pipes that ran between the old tower blocks. Standing in the garbage-strewn alleyway, in the semi-darkness of their permanent shadow, Josh knew that something had gone badly wrong with the continuum.
Above the decrepit towers and nicotine-coloured clouds, Josh caught tiny glimpses of blue sky. Bird-like dots circled back and forth through the lower layers of cloud where the skyscrapers punched holes through the smog. They flew erratically amongst a network of distant walkways that stretched out between the buildings. Their movements were too unnatural to be birds, but Josh had no idea what kind of flying machines could do that — he wished he was up there.
A sudden noise brought him back down to earth. It was a feral sound, like a fox scavenging through bins, and it came from behind one of the many large metal pipes that burrowed into the ground around him.
Trying not to make a sound, Josh searched for something he could use as a weapon. The pockets of his travelling robes were empty except for the condoms, which he had optimistically acquired from an Antiquarian chemist, and there was nothing remotely useful in the sea of plastic crap that flowed around his feet.
The head of a large creature surfaced from a nearby pile of rubbish and hissed.
Josh tensed, feeling the adrenalin flood into his veins. It was huge, the largest cat he’d ever seen, or at least it had been once — its features were odd, distorted like the creature had been remade. The kind of thing the Animal Liberation types would rescue from a testing facility: half its scalp had been shaved, and there were steel bolts grafted onto the bare skull. He didn’t have the time to find out why. Whatever they’d done to Frankencat, it hadn’t improved the creature’s mood — the size of its fangs gave Josh all the motivation he needed to start looking for an escape route.
There wasn’t an obvious way out. Centuries of garbage had choked the alley, and wading through it made too much noise. It
was obvious that no one came down to this level anymore. Josh wondered if the Churchill Avenue had ever existed.
There were more sounds from further down the alley — Frankencats like to hunt in packs.
Josh set his tachyon to the coordinates of the Chapter House and hit the button.
Nothing happened.
Frankencat licked his lips and moved out of the trash pile.
Josh tried the tachyon again — it was dead, and so was he.
‘Yo offenda! U got rads?’ shouted a voice from somewhere high above him.
‘No tags, on he,’ came an answer from another.
‘No chip. Swear tru?’
‘Tru as u, bro.’
‘Now double trouble. Drones be buzzin,’ warned a third.
Josh felt a sense of relief: he recognised gang slang — no matter how bizarre it sounded. He still fancied his chances with humans over re-engineered cats any day.
‘Any chance of some help?’ he shouted up to the unseen voices, trying not to sound too desperate.
A half-whispered argument broke out among the hidden gang members, too obscure and quiet for Josh to hear what they said. A minute later, something bounced across the garbage and landed between Josh and the prowling cat. It looked a lot like a pack of batteries wrapped around a battered old tin of dog food.
‘Run, no-tag, RUN!’ encouraged one of the voices.
Josh didn’t need to be told twice. As the cat leapt out to attack the package, he took off in the opposite direction.
He hadn’t gone more than a few metres when the bomb went off and an electrical discharge hit him squarely in the back. Every nerve in his body lit up as the static arced down his spine; then his legs gave way — as though someone had simply switched them off.
When Josh hit the floor, he couldn’t feel a thing — his whole body had gone numb.
The others laughed as they clambered down through the pipes.
‘Ha! No-tag runs like a crip!’
3
Similar
‘You find him where?’
‘12-240, down on the base.’
‘Scan?’
‘No tag. No, nothin — cep tique ticker.’
‘An jonny hats,’ another giggled.
‘Nearly scav meat.’
Everyone laughed. Josh listened quietly: he’d identified at least five different voices since he’d woken a few minutes earlier. He still couldn’t move his legs. Whatever taser-bomb they’d used had knocked out his nervous system better than a night of tequila slammers.
‘He no scender,’ an older voice interrupted. ‘Not a shade, neither.’
The aroma of charring meat drifted into Josh’s nostrils, and his stomach growled. He was hungry, which meant he’d obviously been out for some time.
‘He wake,’ said a girl’s voice.
A boot was inserted roughly under Josh’s stomach and flipped him over. His eyes were clogged with dust and grit from laying face down on the floor and they watered as he struggled to blink away the grime, blurring the figures that sat around the fire in front of him.
As the feeling returned to his arms, he realised that they’d cable-tied his hands behind his back.
Josh’s head swam when he tried to sit upright. The air was heavy and filled with dust which caught in his throat and he coughed so hard it made it difficult to catch his breath.
‘Deadman’s rattle,’ hissed one of the group.
‘Oxy,’ instructed the older voice.
Someone held a mask over his nose and mouth, allowing Josh to take long, deep breaths of pure, sweet air until the coughing passed.
‘Two U’s,’ instructed the elder. ‘Max.’
They took the mask off and Josh’s vision cleared. He seemed to be inside some kind of abandoned tube tunnel, the walls were made of rusted metal sheets bolted together like a ship’s bulkhead. Over the fire, the charred remains of Frankencat rotated slowly on a spit. From the way the flames flickered Josh assumed there must be a steady flow of air running through the tunnel, and somewhere far off he thought he could hear the faint thrum of fans.
He was surrounded by a desperate gang of street kids, dressed in rags, their faces obscured by scarves and filter masks. Each of them held a home-made weapon out in front of them, their eyes wide with fear — some of them looked no older than eight or nine.
‘Why no tag?’ the elder voice asked from the shadows beyond the fire.
Josh’s mouth was parched, and the cough returned when he tried to speak.
‘LL, juice him.’
Someone placed a straw in Josh’s mouth, and he sucked down a warm, sugary liquid that reminded him of an old blackcurrant squash. It was awful, like a hundred years passed its sell-by date, but it was enough to loosen the dust in his throat.
‘What year is this?’ he asked hoarsely.
There was a sharp intake of breath from the gang, as though Josh had just cursed all their mothers.
‘Oldspeak,’ whispered some in disbelief.
One of the larger boys stepped forward, putting his blade across Josh’s neck and speaking in a slow staccato as if the words were a foreign language.
‘You. Tell. Us. Where. You. From. Or. I. Cut!’
The edge of the blade glowed with an electric blue halo and Josh felt the surge of current against his skin. It looked home-made, but it was deadly enough — he dropped the idea of fighting his way out.
The face of the boy holding the blade was half-covered by a filtration mask, but Josh saw enough to recognise the craziest set of eyebrows in South London.
‘Benny? Benny, it’s me, Josh!’
A tiny flicker of surprise flashed in the boy’s hard eyes, tempered by too many years of mistrust to be thrown off-guard by a stranger knowing his name.
‘How. U. Know. Me?’
The pressure of the blade on Josh’s neck increased. It was obvious that this version of Benny didn’t recognise him, but Josh gambled on the chance that the rest of his friends would’ve still hooked up in this timeline.
‘I know all of you! Dennis, Lilz, Shags. I’ve come to help you.’
There was another collective gasp, as if Josh had just performed some incredible magic trick. Some members of the group began slowly creeping closer towards him.
‘You. Help. Us.’ Benny spat as he took the knife away from Josh’s neck and turned towards the others. ‘No one. Help. We Shade. We help our own.’
‘Shade,’ intoned the rest of the group, putting their hands over their eyes.
Josh looked around, recognising the nearest ones. Dennis resembled a half-dead scarecrow, his long curly hair pulled back and threaded with all manner of ribbons, sweet wrappers and feathers. Lilz wore hardly anything at all, just a collage of plastic sheets which she’d made into a patchwork dress that only just covered her modesty, but allowed all of her many tattoos to show through.
Shags looked like he’d been in a war: his right arm was gone, and a metal device covered one side of his skull including his left eye, causing his head tilt to one side.
‘Stand him,’ commanded Lilz before Josh could ask what the hell happened — she seemed to be more senior in this reality.
Josh struggled to see who the owner of the older voice was. He guessed he was watching how this played out.
Rough hands grabbed him and hauled him to his feet. His knees gave way, and he fell back against one of them as he tried to get his balance.
‘Woah!’ said another familiar voice. ‘No touch.’
Josh turned around to see Coz, or what was left of his old friend.
‘Sorry Coz.’
‘How you know?’
‘Magii — he of the Ministry!’ hissed one of the others from behind their mask, making a slicing motion across their neck. Some others nodded and copied the gesture.
‘No!’ Josh shook his head, desperately trying to think what would have altered them so much. ‘What year is this?’
‘12.017,’ Lilz said, smiling. ‘U lose time?’ She hel
d up his tachyon, the dials still frozen.
Josh had no idea what the procedure would be for a busted tachyon: the colonel never mentioned that they could fail. If it was broken, then he had a bigger problem; without the watch there would be little chance of getting back to a “standard normality” — as Sim would call it. Nothing in this timeline looked like it carried any kind of history. Everything seemed to be made from discarded plastic junk, and he was trapped in this alternate until he could find something with a past.
He needed to find out where and when it had all gone wrong, but to do that he’d have to gain their trust. The fact Josh knew their names without being able to explain why just made him look like a spy or a cop and from the way they were acting it was clear his friends were just as badly treated here as they’d been in his timeline — he needed to prove that he wasn’t their enemy.
‘Aw, sad face,’ said the semi-clad Lilz, moving closer and squatting down in front of him. Her eyes glinted with a hunger that Josh recognised only too well — desire. The old Lilz always had a soft spot for him, an unspoken attraction that neither of them would ever really acknowledge or act upon. Josh thought of her as a sister, but this version clearly had very different ideas.
‘Clean,’ she said, running her fingers through his hair and pulling his head towards her. ‘Smells good.’
There were stifled giggles from within the crowd.
‘Get plenty-plenty creds in SexBar.’ Lilz’s tone became more business-like as her hand ran down his chest. ‘After I,’ she added with a wink.
‘Enough!’ barked the older voice. ‘Not for SexBar.’
Lilz stepped back, her hand lingering a little too long on his thigh.
A tall man walked out of the shadows. He was wearing a long leather coat, and his face was obscured by an antique gas mask. In one hand he held a chunky-looking mobile phone with wires and other parts screwed onto it — all the hallmarks of one of Dennis’ creations.
The Infinity Engines Books 1-3 Page 36
