by Alex Scarrow
Oh Mary-Mother-of-God… they’re going to rip me to pieces!
The nearest seeker swooped still closer to him and the faint cloud of grey began to take form. He thought he could make out the head and shoulders of the indeterminate shape, almost human-like. And a face that took fleeting form.
Beautiful. Feminine.
He almost began to think he was right first time, and that this was Heaven and those swooping forms were angels coming to escort him to the afterlife. Then that vaguely familiar feminine face stretched, elongated, revealing a row of razor fangs and the eyes turned to dark sockets that promised him nothing but death. It lunged towards him…
And then he was staring up at another face, framed with hair dangling down towards him, tickling his nose, with piercing grey eyes staring intently at him. ‘Liam O’Connor, are you all right?’
‘Becks?’
‘Affirmative. Are you all right?’ she asked flatly. ‘You appear undamaged by the explosion.’ He felt her strong hands running up and down his arms and legs, around his torso. ‘No apparent fractures.’
‘I’m OK, I think. Just a little… dizzy, so I am.’ He began to sit up and she helped him.
‘You are disorientated,’ she said.
He looked up at a clear blue sky and a dazzling sun. He blinked back the sunlight — a curious vaguely violet hue to it — and shaded his eyes with a hand. ‘Jay-zus, where are we? Is this another world?’
‘Negative.’ She looked at him, then corrected herself. ‘No. We are where we were,’ she replied.
But when? The spherical chamber and laboratory buildings were gone. Instead of the institute’s water-sprinkled lawns and flowerbeds, there was nothing but jungle. If this was the same place, then it had to be some significant time in the future or the past. It certainly wasn’t 2015.
‘The tachyon interference caused an explosive reaction,’ said Becks. ‘We were pulled through the zero-point window into what is known as chaos space.’
‘Chaos space?’
‘I am unable to define chaos space. I have no detailed data on it.’
‘And then what? We were dumped out into reality again?’
‘Correct.’
He saw another head suddenly appear above a large lush green fern leaf. Somebody else, dizzily sitting up and wondering where on earth they were. It was one of the students: a black girl, her hair neatly thatched into corn-rows. A gold hooped earring glinted in the sunlight.
‘What the — ?’ she muttered as her eyes slowly panned round the tall green trees and drooping vines. Finally her eyes rested on Liam and Becks.
‘Hello there,’ said Liam, waving a hand and smiling goofily.
She stared at him silently with eyes that still seemed to be trying to work out what she was seeing.
He noticed another head appearing out of the foliage several dozen yards away. He recognized the receding scruffy hair and sparsely bearded jowls of the teacher who’d been with the group of students during the tour of the institute.
Other heads appeared, all looking confused and frightened, spread out across a clearing in the jungle, a hundred yards in diameter. Liam recognized the institute’s smartly dressed tour guide, one of the technicians who’d been in the chamber and the rest of the students.
‘Wh-what happened?’ called out the teacher.
The guide’s carefully groomed silver hair was dishevelled, his smart suit rumpled and dirtied with mud. ‘I… I… don’t know… I just …’
Liam looked at Becks. ‘We’re going to have to take charge of things, aren’t we?’
She looked at him blankly. ‘The mission parameters have changed.’
Liam sighed. ‘No kidding.’
He was about to ask her if she had any idea at all of when in time they were when he heard a shrill scream echo across the clearing.
‘What was that?’
It came again. Sharp, shrill and terrified. He got to his feet, as did several others, and pushed through clusters of knee-high ferns towards where the sound was coming from. Becks was instantly by his side, striding slightly ahead of him without any trepidation. Liam realized he felt reassured to have her there despite her diminutive frame. Despite lacking the intimidating bulk of Bob, he had a feeling she was a great deal more dangerous than she looked.
Finally, a yard ahead of him she stopped. Liam stepped round her and looked down.
The blonde girl he’d spoken to earlier — he remembered her name, it was Laura, wasn’t it? — was screaming, her eyes locked on to the thing that was lying in the tall grass beside her.
It took Liam a moment for him to make sense of what he was seeing on the ground, then… then he got it; understood what it was. His stomach flopped and lurched and it took every ounce of willpower he had not to double over and vomit.
The teacher emerged from the tall grass to stand next to Liam. He followed Laura’s wide-eyed gaze and then sucked in a mouthful of air. ‘Oh my God!.. That’s not… that’s not what I think it is,’ he whispered, and turned to look at Liam. ‘Is it?’
Among the tall fronds of vegetation nestled a small twisted mass of muscle and bone. At one end Liam could see a long braid of blonde hair, matted with drying blood, and halfway along the contorted form, he spotted a solitary pink Adidas trainer, hanging half on and half off a pale and perfectly normal-looking foot. It had to be one of the three blonde girls they’d tagged behind on the way into the chamber. He could quite understand the girl, Laura, screaming. They’d been chatting, giggling and exchanging phone numbers only ten minutes ago.
Liam recalled Foster saying sometimes it happened; sometimes, very rarely, the energy of a portal could turn a person inside out. Oh Jay-zus, what a mess.
Half an hour later those of the group that had survived the blast and arrived in one piece had made a rough assessment of their predicament. Dotted around the jungle clearing, they’d made the gruesome discovery of more bodies just like the girl’s, turned inside out and almost unrecognizable as human. Sixteen of them. Of the thirty-five people who’d been in the chamber when the explosion — or, more accurately, implosion — had occurred, only sixteen of them appeared to have made it through alive.
Now, gathered together in the middle of the clearing, well away from the forbidding edge of thick jungle, it was Whitmore who first seemed to be stirring from a state of stunned shock. He wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his sleeve and narrowed his eyes as he studied Becks.
‘You!’ he said. ‘Yes, you! I remember now… you said it was going to explode. Just… just before it actually did.’
Becks’s face remained impassive. ‘That is correct.’
‘Hang on!’ he said again, his eyes suddenly narrowing with dawning realization. ‘You… you’re not one of m-my kids. You’re not — ’
Liam could see where this was going. It was pointless continuing to pretend to be high-school students a moment longer.
‘What just happened, whatever’s just happened,’ blustered Whitmore, ‘you damn well knew it was going to happen.’ His voice rose in pitch. ‘Who are you? Is this some sort of terrorist thing?’
Becks shook her head slowly, her face impassive. ‘Negative. We are not terrorists.’
Whitmore fell silent. His lips quivered with more questions he wanted to ask, but he was struggling to know what exactly to ask. Where to begin.
‘Excuse me?’
Their heads all turned towards a boy with kinky ginger hair, neatly side-parted into a succession of waves, and thick bottle-top glasses that made his eyes seem to bulge like a startled frog. He pointed to his name tag. ‘My name’s Franklyn… you can call me that. Or just Frank will do.’ He smiled at them uncertainly. ‘Uhh… I just wanted to say that… this is going to sound really weird, but I guess I’ll just come out and say it.’
‘What?’ snapped Whitmore.
‘Well — ’ he pointed up at the sky — ‘you see them?’
All eyes drifted towards the top of some trees twenty yards a
way, a long branch leaning out over the clearing with strange dangling willow-like green fronds drooping to the ground. In among them, a pair of dragonflies danced and zig-zagged with a buzz of wings they could hear from where they stood.
‘Those are huge,’ uttered Kelly. ‘Good grief!.. Two-foot, three-foot wingspan at a guess?’
‘Uh-huh,’ said Franklyn. ‘They’re really big and I’m pretty sure I know what species that is.’
The others looked at him.
‘It’s a petalurid, I think… yeah, I’m sure that’s the right name.’
‘Great,’ said Laura, ‘so now we know.’
‘No, that’s not the important bit,’ said Franklyn. He looked at her. ‘They should be extinct.’
‘Well, obviously they’re not,’ she replied.
‘Oh yes they are. We’ve only ever had fossils of insects that size.’
Whitmore stood up. ‘Oh my God! He’s right!’ He watched the two dragonflies emerge from the overhanging branch and dart out into the open, their wings buzzing noisily like airborne hairdryers. ‘Insects haven’t been that size since…’ He swallowed, looked at the others. ‘Well… I mean, millions and millions of years.’
‘Petalurids,’ uttered Franklyn again. ‘Late Cretaceous. I’m pretty sure of that.’
Kelly got to his feet and stood beside Franklyn. ‘What are you saying?’
The boy wiped a fog of moisture from his glasses, blinking back the bright day from his small eyes. ‘What I’m saying, Mr Kelly, is those things haven’t existed, alive… in, like, well, I guess something like sixty-five million years.’
CHAPTER 22
2001, New York
‘Maddy! Where are you going?’
Maddy ignored Sal’s pleading voice as she strode across the archway, cranked up the shutter and stepped out into the backstreet.
I can’t do this… I can’t do this.
She felt the first tears roll down her cheeks as she picked her way along the rubbish-strewn sidewalk towards South 6th Street at the top. Her first proper mission in charge and she was already going to pieces. An impetuous decision on her part, stupid and hot-headed enough to go against Bob’s reasoned advice, and now she might just be responsible for killing Liam and the support unit. Not only that, but she’d probably also caused the deaths of dozens of others. And, most importantly, Edward Chan.
‘I can’t do this,’ she muttered. ‘I’m just not ready for this.’
She stepped out of the backstreet on to the corner and watched the busy intersection for a while: traffic turning right to pick up the bridge road, left towards the river; pedestrians making their way over to their jobs in Manhattan… all of them oblivious to the commercial jets already in the air and heading towards their doom.
She wanted Foster back. Needed him back. What possessed him to think for one moment she was actually ready to run a field office? His pre-recorded ‘how to’ answers stored on the computer just weren’t enough. She needed him to talk to, to explain the technology to her more fully, to tell her more about the agency and their place in it. There were so many gaps in her knowledge she didn’t even know enough to have an idea what questions to ask. She was floundering.
‘Damn you, Foster!’ she hissed under her breath, and wiped at her wet cheeks.
The old man could be anywhere in New York, if, indeed, he’d decided to stay on in the city. He’d walked out on her on one of the Monday mornings, walked right out of the Starbucks with a bag over one shoulder, leaving her alone with her coffee. It was Tuesday today. If he was that desperate to see the world before he died, then he might just as well be on a Greyhound bus to some other state or even on a plane to somewhere exotic.
Face it. He’s gone for good.
‘She just got up and left!’ said Sal.
› I sensed emotional stress markers in her voice.
‘Well, duh! Of course she’s upset! She’s just… I mean, she may have just killed Liam!’
Sal realized her own voice sounded shrill and loud. ‘Oh jahulla! Is he dead? Did she kill him?’
› Insufficient data. The residue signal suggests a sudden and violent enlargement of a dimensional pinhole, releasing a vast amount of energy.
‘Like a bomb?’
› Correct. Just like a bomb.
She slumped down in the office chair. ‘So, dead, then,’ she uttered, looking down at her lap and suddenly beginning to feel the stab of pain. The equivalent, in days, of almost three months had passed since Foster had pulled her from a falling building. So much had happened in that time, a world almost conquered by Nazis and then in the blink of an eye reduced to a radioactive wasteland. Their trip to the basement of the Museum of Natural History, finding the clues… Liam’s message in the guest book. And all the clean-up and fix-up after that whole nightmare. It almost felt like another life: Mumbai, Mum and Dad, the burning building.
This place, this scruffy archway criss-crossed with cables, had begun to feel like a home, and Liam and Maddy… even Bob, like an odd new family. Now, in one moment, with one simple mistake, she wondered if that was all gone. She looked up from her hands, wrestling each other in her lap, to see Bob’s silent blinking response on the screen.
› Not necessarily.
‘What? What do you mean “not necessarily”? Do you mean not necessarily dead?’
› Affirmative. They may have been transported.
‘You mean like one of our time windows?’
› Correct. The sudden dilation of a dimensional pinhole being used to extract zero-point energy may have functioned in a similar way to a portal.
‘Where? Do you know where? Could we find them?’
› Negative. I have no possible way of knowing when they would have been transported to. It would be random.
‘But… but they could be alive, right? Alive, somewhere?’
› Affirmative, Sal. But in the same geographic location.
‘Is there anything we could do to try to find them?’
› Negative. We are in the same situation as before we sent the tachyon signal. If the explosion did not kill them, then they are sometime in the past or future.
The rising hope she was feeling that there might be a way to find them and bring them back in one piece began to falter.
› My AI duplicate and Liam may attempt to establish contact with the field office, provided it can be done with a minimum of time contamination.
‘You mean like Liam did with the museum guest book? A message in history?’
› Correct. If they have not been transported too far in time, it may be possible for them to find a way to communicate without causing a dangerous level of contamination.
‘So what… we wait? We wait and hope for a signal?’
› Affirmative. We must wait and we must observe. There is no other viable course of action.
CHAPTER 23
65 million years BC, jungle
‘Excuse me?’ said Laura. ‘ When did you say?’
Franklyn finished wiping his glasses dry and put them back on again. He took his time savouring the silent, rapt attention of the others sitting together in the clearing. ‘I said sixty-five million years ago.’
The others shared a stunned silence. Eyes meeting eyes and all of them wide. The enormity of the fact taking a long while to sink in for all of them.
It was Whitmore who broke the silence. ‘Sixty-five million years… so that definitely takes us to near the end of the Cretaceous period.’ He looked at the boy, whose glasses were already beginning to fog up again from the humidity. ‘It is the Cretaceous, isn’t it?’
Franklyn nodded. ‘Correct. Late Cretaceous, to be precise.’
‘We’ve travelled in time?’ uttered Kelly. ‘That’s… that’s not possible!’
‘Whoa!’ one of the other kids cried.
Whitmore and Franklyn were looking at each other warily, a gesture not missed by Liam.
‘What? Either of you gentlemen going to tell us what a bleedin’ late cr
ustation is?’ Liam studied them suspiciously. ‘You two fellas looked at each other all funny just then. That means something, right?’
Whitmore pursed his lips, his eyebrows arched as if in disbelief at what he was about to utter. ‘If Franklyn here is right,’ he said, watching the foot-long dragonflies hover and drop among a cluster of ferns nearby, ‘then this is dinosaur times. We’re in dinosaur times.’
Laura gasped. ‘Oh God.’ She took two or three deep breaths that hooted like a steam train coming down a tunnel, like a woman in labour. ‘Oh my God! I was watching Jurassic Park last night! I don’t want to be eaten by a rex. I don’t want to be eaten by a — ’
Several of the other students, not all of them girls, began to whimper at the prospect; the rest began to talk at once. Liam watched Whitmore struggling with the situation himself, shaking his head incredulously and balling his fists in silence. Kelly meanwhile was gazing up at the blue sky and the slightly odd-coloured sun as if hoping to find an answer up there.
Somebody needs to take charge, thought Liam. Or they’re all going to die.
He was damned if he was going to volunteer, though — to be responsible for this lot. He and Becks were probably going to fare much better on their own. One of the three men was going to have to step up and take care of these kids. But, as it happened, as Liam was beginning to wonder how the pair of them were going to discreetly extract themselves — with Edward Chan in their possession — the decision was made for him.
‘You!’ said Whitmore, his lost expression wiped away, all of a sudden remembering there was an issue as yet unresolved. His voice cut across the clamour of all the others’. ‘Yes, you! The goth girl,’ he said, pointing at Becks. He looked at Liam. ‘And you. You know what happened, don’t you? The pair of you weren’t in my party. And you knew that explosion was going to happen. So you’d better start telling us who the heck you are!’
There was an instant silence as all eyes swivelled to him and Becks.
