Empty Planet

by Lynette Sloane

  I ran after him. Youth giving me the advantage, I easily gained ground between us.

  However, still a good twenty metres behind him, I saw him nearing a caravan. He called out, “Anna, Anna.”

  I shouted, “David! Don’t make me do this!”

  Ignoring me, he called out one more time, “ANNA!”

  I had no choice. I couldn’t let him alert Anna. It felt surreal: surely this was happening to someone else and I was an onlooker.

  I had to stop him calling her before she heard him and found out who he was. I aimed my handgun towards him and squeezed the trigger. The handgun fired silently and David fell to the ground rolling over onto his back.

  I ran over to him. Blood flowed from his chest, the heavy rain washing it to the floor. I knew the wound was fatal. I dropped my handgun and knelt beside my friend.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry; I had to stop you.” I cried, my voice breaking with emotion.

  David’s voice was weak and his breathing laboured.

  He gasped for breath, speaking through his pain, “I know. I had to warn her. I had to see Anna again.”

  Inside the caravan Anna was taking off her headphones to brush her hair. She’d been listening to music on her classic iPod, playing it quite loudly in order to block out the noise of the rain on the caravan roof. Consequently, she hadn’t heard her name being called.

  When she heard my voice outside the caravan she opened the door and ran out to greet me, stopping when she noticed the old man lying on the ground. I looked up at her from my kneeling position, desperation and helplessness showing in my face. She rushed over to me only pausing when she saw how badly hurt the old man was. Anna stood silhouetted by the caravan light, holding her right hand lightly over her mouth in shock.

  David looked up, overcome with the emotion of seeing his young sister for the first time in fifty-five years.

  He sobbed, “Anna-bells.”

  The words were hardy audible. Puzzled, but full of compassion, Anna knelt down beside him and took his hand. Apart from her mother, David was the only person to have ever called her that. It was his special name for her, but this old man surely wasn’t her brother, although he did hold an uncanny resemblance to her grandfather.

  “David?” she said questioningly.

  David’s lips moved soundlessly as he tried to speak, but he couldn’t find the strength to form the words.

  I was distraught. I pleaded with my friend, “Forgive me, please forgive me.”

  For a moment I saw acknowledgement and forgiveness in his eyes, then there was nothing.

  Anna loosed go of his hand and let it drop to the floor.

  “Who was that? He knew me. He knew David’s name for me. I picked bluebells for Mum so he called me Anna-bells.”

  Goliath and Red caught up with us.

  “We’ll take it from here Sir,” said Red, holding out an identification card. “This man was a fugitive, you take your young lady back inside your caravan.”

  Section weren’t going to let Anna think I had anything to do with this incident or that I’d shot her brother. I would have to come to terms with that without her help.

  I put my arm around her and took her inside holding her close, her shock giving way to tears as I tried to comfort her. Anna didn’t want to stay at the caravan park after what had happened, but, as it was too late to find a guesthouse, we decided to stay the night and leave in the morning to look for accommodation in Swansea. The large static caravan had a small shower. We were both wringing wet, but I let Anna use it first while I crept outside to see if the two security guards were still there. I quietly closed the caravan door behind me.

  Several people had come over to see what was going on and Red was sending them back to their caravans. Goliath was in the process of zipping up a body bag with David Senior inside. I walked over and looked at his lifeless face for the last time. I took a long, deep breath and shuddered, trying to hold in the pain of grief and loss and make it go away. A private ambulance drove around the corner and stopped beside us. It had come with orders from Section to take the body back to their morgue.

  An hour later as I lay holding Anna in the master bedroom, I wondered how I would cope when I came face to face with younger David the next morning—in full knowledge that it was me who ended his life.

  __________

  In truth, I found coming to terms with David Senior’s death very difficult. Outwardly I appeared fine, but inside I was a mess. I pretended everything was all right but as the months passed I found I was unable to keep up the façade. Guilt weighed me down and tainted everything I said and did. Many, many times Anna asked what was bothering me but I couldn’t tell her. I became snappy and distant, which was very out of character. Eventually, she could take it no longer.

  “Steve,” she said one evening as I picked at the meal she’d lovingly made for me. “I’ve been offered a job on a film and I want to take it. It’s a great opportunity for a newly qualified makeup artist.”

  I tried to appear cheerful but my depression wouldn’t allow it.

  “Where are you going and for how long,” I asked.

  “I fly to India next week, then we move on to Australia, Columbia and finish filming in New York. I’ll be gone for the best part of a year.”

  I was speechless.

  “Aren’t you going to try to talk me out of it?” she asked indignantly.

  Suddenly I found my voice, and my tears. This was the jolt I needed to get me out of the pit of self-pity and guilt I’d been living in.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’ve been awful. I don’t blame you for wanting to go. I want you to stay, but I can’t ask you to do that. Take the job and I’ll take the time to get proper counselling. I promise I’ll be a different person when you come back … Please say your coming back.”

  Anna held me and said she would, and that she’d keep in touch via the Internet, the way she had while I was at university. She also said she’d send weekly post cards as long as I was honest about my progress with the counselling.

  __________

  Time without Anna passed slowly. I moped around the house and drove Dad and everyone at Section crazy. Even Vanessa Wilkins, the newly promoted Vortex Interface Technician, tried to avoid me. Previous to David’s death she had been quite flirty with me, although I never responded to her advances. Now she said I was no fun and needed to get over myself.

  I kept to my word and went to stay in Ireland, attending all the counselling sessions Section provided for me at their new command centre. Very slowly I learned to come to terms with my part in David Senior’s death and my outlook changed. I accepted that I had given him every opportunity to come back to Section with me, and, in the circumstances, I couldn’t have acted in any other way.

  As I neared the end of my counselling sessions I imagined being honest with an ordinary, non-Section counsellor. I would have had to tell him or her something like, ‘I keep slipping through time to a point where all mankind are extinct. Oh yes, and the other day I brought my best friend back from the future to save humanity—with the antibodies in his blood, of course—and then I had to shoot him because he was going to warn his sister, who’s my girlfriend. That’s why I feel guilty’.

  Now that would get me ‘sectioned’. I laughed at my pun. It was the first time I’d laughed since the shooting.

  With only a week left in Ireland, some high-level, classified information filtered down to me—anonymously of course. There had been an anomaly in the original anti-virus. The samples had mutated and would offer only temporary protection from the Frumscyld-Ábitan virus. When David’s body had been taken back to Section the researchers were able to harvest the rest of his blood and use it to correct the glitch. They had needed all his blood! If he had returned to his time frame they would never have been able to correct this and mankind would still have been doomed. It was tragic, but David’s death had given the human race a chance of life.

  When I returned home Dad informed me
that Section had discovered my kidnappers were also Jumpers. Although some of them had been held for questioning they wouldn’t give up any information. C was determined to find out how they knew about the super-virus, the vaccinations, and the survivor being brought back from the future. Now working full time at Section, my first assignment was to identify their information source.

  With Dad and C’s backing I gradually gave out scraps of false information to various Section members hoping it would get back to the kidnappers so we could isolate the source, but nothing worked, so after a few weeks we went about our other tasks, still watchful for clues as to the infiltrator’s identity.

  One Sunday whilst relaxing at home with Dad I received a call from C.

  “You will be going on a jump tomorrow, travelling roughly ninety years after the super-virus,” he informed me. “Take your handgun on every jump from now on; we don’t know what to expect this far into the future. Hereafter you will be sent to specified locations through a vortex.”

  __________

  I was told I would be jumping into wintertime, so I wore a warm, padded, shower-proof jacket concealing my shoulder holster and handgun, and placed a spare clip in my right pocket. With my jacket zipped, and handgun out of sight, I felt safe and ready to face the future.

  As I walked across Section Headquarters to the vortex room, I could feel the sense of anticipation and excitement in the atmosphere. Everyone was looking forward to sending the Jumpers so far into the future, or at least into a possible future, because if the vaccination worked this future, void of mankind, would disappear and a new well-populated earth would emerge.

  Dad was waiting for me next to the temporal vortex apparatus. He smiled and entered the coordinates into the interface. A sparkling light appeared a couple of metres in front of me. As before, the dark area in the middle of the sparkling light grew to the size of a door allowing me to see an image in the centre. A section of even land sloped away from me covered with shrubs, bushes and long, overgrown grasses. In the distance, at the base of a hill, stood a large suspension bridge spanning a wide river estuary.

  “Take care son,” he said, trying to hide his concerns.

  “I always do,” I smiled as I stepped through the vortex.

  Chapter 12

  Immediately, the cold, biting wind blew in my face making me shut my eyes. When I opened them I realised I was standing on what had once been a motorway, although the hard surface had completely disappeared under the usual topsoil, grasses, bushes and trees. My eyes followed the strip of even land down a gentle gradient to the suspension bridge at the bottom of the hill.

  Rough, gently undulating land stretched into the distance on either side of me, some of it covered with thick woodland and other parts exposed to the strong winds blowing uphill from the estuary. With the exception of the bridge, I was probably viewing the area as it would have looked thousands of years before mankind had claimed it.

  The day was bright, with only a few light clouds, and the ground underfoot still crisp from the previous nights frost. A little patchy fog hung over the estuary completing the idyllic scene, but the cold wind stung my ears making me wish I’d worn a hat. I knew I had a couple of hours before the vortex reappeared so I trudged the half-mile or so down to the bridge. As I neared it, I noticed weeds, small bushes and creeping vines growing over much of the roadway and up the suspension cables and towers. A few of the cables had already snapped and hung limply over the side of the bridge.

  The rusty remains of several vehicles still stood scattered along the roadway making me feel I was on a set of an old movie. I made my way forward. The bridge looked a little unstable but I didn’t think it was going to fall down just yet, so I ventured onto it. The first two vehicles were small and must have been cars. I walked around them and past a tree rooted near the central reservation. In front of me was the remnant of a much larger vehicle, probably an articulated lorry. The tyres had flattened and perished years ago, and the canvas sides had rotted away leaving a badly corroded frame.

  Without warning, a bullet skimmed past my head and hit the lorry. I instinctively dropped to the floor and clambered behind the vehicle, unzipping my coat and taking out my handgun before cautiously standing up and peering though a gap in the rusty wreckage to see who was doing the shooting.

  Two men were edging towards me. At first I thought they were just messing about and hadn’t seen me, but I was wrong. Another shot rang out, hitting the vehicle again. The men were heading towards my lorry. I ducked back down and crawled to the front of the vehicle, where the large engine would offer me better cover, and peeped out from behind the lorry. The men were about forty metres ahead of me. The first man fired a couple of shots in my direction, causing me to drop down behind my sanctuary, while the second man ran closer, also firing at me.

  The memory of shooting David Senior came flooding back and the thought of having to shoot anyone again made me feel sick, but I knew my life was at stake; I would shoot them if I had to.

  I shouted out, “Why you shooting at me. Shouldn’t we be trying to survive this together?”

  “Never! All Jumpers must die.”

  “But you’re Jumpers!” I shouted back.

  They shot at me again. I heard the bullets ricochet off the vehicle, missing me by millimetres. I took the safety catch off my handgun and crept around the far side of the rusted out lorry, taking aim at the nearest man. It was a good shot. The man fell to the ground, hit clean in the centre of his chest.

  While the remaining man changed his gun clip I ran from behind my refuge taking aim at him. The bullet hit him in his left shoulder causing him to fall behind the remains of another car. I ran across the carriageway and took cover behind the large tree growing near the central reservation. It had pushed up through a huge crack in the roadway. From this vantage point I could see most of the length of the bridge.

  I heard the creaking of tired metal coming from my left. High above me, a support cable was unravelling. One by one its sinews snapped—weakened and no longer able to take the strain of the thousands of tonnes of concrete it had held for so long.

  Several more men and women were making their way towards me about two hundred metres further along the bridge, each carrying handguns or larger firearms.

  As they got nearer one yelled, “Spread out.” The group spread as they slowly advanced towards me. I knew I didn’t have the firepower to hold them all off, or save my life, and wished I could contact Section to tell them to end the jump, but I had no way of contacting them. When I was on a jump I was on my own.

  The cable creaked again and more sinews snapped. The bridge was now very unstable and started to sway slightly.

  The man I’d shot in his shoulder shouted out to the others, “I’m down but I’m ok. The Jumper’s behind the large tree.”

  I considered climbing over the side of the bridge and dropping into the river, but it was too far down and I would probably freeze to death in the water below. I panicked a little, still wondering what to do. The creaking became louder and the cable finally snapped, making my decision for me. A length of it whip-lashed back away from me and hit two of my assailants, decapitating one of them and mortally wounding the other.

  While the others were distracted, I retreated keeping behind any cover I could find. When there was no more shelter I ran as fast as I could until I was safely off the bridge and half way up the hill. Once at a safe distance from my attackers I flopped down behind some bushes on the cold grass, gasping for breath. I frantically sucked in air, my throat tasting like blood. From my limited training I knew the floor was the safest place to be if anyone started shooting at me again.

  After a couple of minutes I crawled to a point where I could view the bridge through the bush while still remaining hidden from sight.

  The wind blew harder and the bridge swayed, not because of the wind, but because in their weakened state the remaining cables could no longer support the added weight, so one by one began to snap and unrav
el. The rebel Jumpers shouted out in blind panic as the deck pulled free and the roadway collapsed, falling into the river a hundred metres below, taking with it my attackers, the remains of the vehicles, the shrubs and the large tree that had been growing near the central reservation. All that remained of the structure was the far section and the support towers still standing proud in their ivy overcoats.

  I now knew beyond all doubt that the threat came from other Jumpers, and until we knew who belonged to this faction the rest of us weren’t safe. I estimated I had about thirty minutes until the vortex was due to re-open, so having regained my breath I decided to walk uphill away from the estuary. It struck me that I should have been able to see a small town or at least some houses from were I was standing, but apart from the bridge I hadn’t seen any proof that mankind had ever settled here.

  I walked for over twenty minutes, moving away from the motorway, always vigilant in case I should encounter more Jumpers belonging to the faction, or a wild animal: a puma, lion or other big cat descended from animals escaped from safari parks years before.

  The countryside was overgrown with trees, small bushes and other vegetation, but to my right was a more densely covered area. I went to investigate.

  It was evident that this had once been a large garden. The hedges were thick and reached far above my head. I walked around them until I found a break wide enough to push my way through. As I made my way into the garden I stepped on something hard, so I bent down and pushed the long grass to one side to see what it was. It was the rusty remains of a large gate.

  I felt like a little kid again, exploring the garden and making my way to the derelict remains of what would have been a sizable country residence. The remaining brick walls were badly crumbled. Battered by the weather and forsaken by its owners, the house now stood at its highest point less than three metres tall, and in other places, the walls were so low I could easily step over them. The roofs had long since fallen in, evidenced by a few broken slates and rotten timbers still visible at the one end of the house.