Jason touched her arm. “Terrified, starving and radiation poisoning, I’m not surprised you were going into decline. Do you think that gunfire we heard as we came into town could have just been those lads hunting?”
She raised her brows. “It’s a possibility.” She brightened slightly.
“Come on.” Jason nudged his head towards the door. “Take me to this other place and we’ll make sure your counterpart is safe.”
Sarah led the way from the room and a short while later the pair emerged outside.
A frosty sheen glistened like a sprinkling of silver dust in the moonlight on the tarmaced road beyond the building.
“Is it very far from here?” Jason asked.
“About half a mile.”
“Would it be quicker to get the jeep?”
“Yes. It’s pretty much a straight route, so we could get there really fast.”
They started back towards the vehicle, turned into the alley and hurried along the cobbled lane towards the street where they had left the car.
As they neared the halfway mark and caught their first clear view of the road ahead, Jason thrust a hand out in front of Sarah. “Wait,” he urged.
She stopped. “What’s wrong,” she gasped.
He bundled her towards the narrow paths running alongside the garages lining the alley, the need to hide suddenly becoming an irresistible drive. There he stood listening, his eyes distant as he focused on a remote sound. “I can hear an engine.”
Sarah tilted her head slightly back, trying to control her breathing, which was drowning out all other noises. She paused, listening, before, “Yes, I can hear it as well. It seems to be moving away.” She looked at Jason. “Do you think that’s Briggs?”
“I’m sure of it,” he said firmly. “We never saw another vehicle throughout our entire journey and you said yourself there is nobody else on the roads except for the military.” He waited a moment for the sound of the engine to fade, before, “Come on,” he said, leading the way.
A short while later they trotted out of the alley and came to an abrupt halt when they caught sight of the car up ahead.
For a moment they stood in silence, both too shocked to move or speak, unable to comprehend what they were seeing and yet, at the same time, powerless to tear their eyes away.
“Stay here,” Jason said huskily. He felt sick.
Sarah waited for him to move away. He only travelled a few paces before, unable to resist, she continued following behind.
He crossed the road and approached the jeep, which remained exactly where they had left it.
The damage to the vehicle was obvious even from across the street, but it was not the slashed tyres and smashed windscreen that focused Jason’s attention, it was the body sprawled across the bonnet.
Forcing himself on, he approached the jeep, walking robotically. In a shock-filled haze he looked on as if through someone else’s eyes. He wanted to run as far away as he could, never stopping until his lungs ached and the image that lay before him was burned from his mind.
He looked at the army boots, laced up to the calf, a little closer and he focused on the pants. They were slightly padded for extra warmth and were tucked into the boots to keep out the drafts.
The legs hung across the grill from the knees as though they had been sitting on the bonnet and had just decided to lie down.
Closer again and he could see the warm jumper had ridden up, exposing the edge of a vest and a good portion of abdomen. The stomach almost concave and protruding hips were coloured with bruising. Jason stopped and moved his eyes up. The arms were spread and attached to the frames on either side of the windscreen with cable ties. His eyes came down and moved central.
The throat had been cut and it seemed on the bonnet of the car that blood, black in the moonlight, had spilled over the metal, poured from the hood and pooled on the road beneath the vehicle.
He looked at the face. Tape had been placed over the mouth to stop them screaming out. The green eyes were wide and lifeless and the auburn hair soaked with blood. “Sarah,” he gasped.
“I told you he was ruthless.”
Jason jumped; he did not think she was right behind him. He dragged his eyes away from the scene and turned to the living double. He took her by the arm and moved away from the car. “He obviously thinks by killing you here he will have destroyed your entire existence. What he doesn’t realise is that you are now a woven part of the German timeline and the only way to stop that is to kill you there.”
“So you think he’ll now presume I’m dead.”
“Yes, and he’s completely unaware of my presence,” Jason added. “He’ll be happily getting on with his own plans, thinking nothing can stop him now. I would suggest our next move would be to go to Ponteland and see if we can get some power to use the machine there and if not, then we can get the same part that Briggs took from the other machine in the bunker, start that one up and go back and sort out this mess once and for all. I would suggest as we are again on foot we’d better get a move on.”
Chapter Ten
En-route to Alnwick
Briggs smiled as he pulled off the Morpeth slip road and joined the motorway at speed. ‘That’s one little irritant gone,’ he thought. ‘Now for the next.’
He turned onto the A1, straightened out the vehicle, then floored the accelerator and climbed to speeds which far exceeded the legal limit in peace time. The road was straight and wide and with no other traffic to worry about, Briggs could travel at velocities he would otherwise consider dangerous under the circumstances.
He was aware that medical care would not have exactly been thrust back to the dark ages, but would still be limited. Hospitals could be powered by generators for as long as there was fuel and there would be antibiotics, until they ran out. Eventually, though, equipment would break, specialists would die and, with surviving a priority over education, the medical system would slip back to something that was akin to two hundred years ago.
The motorway normally glowed brightly with tall lamps illuminating the carriages to minimise the risk of accidents, but with the power out, the way ahead was black and the jeep’s main beam, which had been set to maximum, was the only source of artificial light in the immediate vicinity.
Briggs glanced at his watch, lit in the gentle backlight of the dash. It was approaching midnight. It was ten miles to Alnwick and he wanted to arrive soon. He had a vague plan, but wanted to get there when everyone, apart from the occasional sentry, was asleep. He needed time to hunt down his target and get him out of the way before dawn, so he could take up his position in the team.
His body began to settle, coming down from the rush he felt when he had killed the woman. It was not as if she had been a threat, it was just simply she was in his way. It was important he succeeded and her life was considered nothing compared to his.
He reached for the radio and, not thinking, switched it on. The gentle hiss of background radiation filled the compartment instead of music. Briggs twiddled the dial, searching for a reception. He went through the whole bandwidth before he finally gave up and switched it back off.
He furrowed his brow and thought about the wisdom of what he was doing. Everything had now changed. Things he had taken for granted would not necessarily be available to him ever again. He had thought he had thought it through, but now that here he was unable to get something as simple and global as a radio reception, he found himself surprised. He had accepted his world would change, but had thought more in terms of food and medicine.
Surprise was the closest thing to shock Briggs ever got. Shock was an emotion he was not capable of, his mother would say; it was usually him doing the shocking.
He had not spoken to his mother for fifteen years before her death. They had stopped speaking around about the time that his father died. His father had died suddenly from head injuries following a car accident and his mother would not believe him when he said he was not able to attend the funeral due to work.
/> In the run up to his mother’s death his sister had begged him, when she only had hours left to live, to come to the hospital to make his peace, but it had meant cancelling a lunch appointment which had been organised for weeks, so he never went. Not that he would have gone in any case. ‘Cold fish’ is what his mother had called him. They never had much of a relationship. She looked after him out of duty rather than motherly love, she confessed in later years, so he was happy to stay away and did not think she would have appreciated him visiting her in any case. She loved Angie; his sister was always the favourite.
Angie had insisted on keeping in touch, no matter how hard he tried to shake her off. She was a beautiful, kind and loving creature, or so he was told. She asked questions he could not answer and pried into his life in a way that was annoying. He was happiest focusing on his career rather than family. Relationships made him uncomfortable. That was an emotion he had to deal with, so it was easier to simply stay away. Angie was the only one left now and even she seemed to be finally getting the message.
The time displacement unit at Kenton was his emergency plan. If he did need medical treatment he could always go back to before the nuclear war and visit a hospital then. Using the machine, he could go anywhere in the world for his treatment and would not just be restricted to the United Kingdom. If his illness was more sinister and he required more specialised, modern care, such as if the radiation caught up with him despite his use of iodine tablets, he could always return to Germany and kill Jason to correct the timeline himself, but this would only be an option in an emergency.
He had been financing a lifestyle he could not afford with military money and he knew they were starting to close in. Too many questions had been asked and two days ago they had wanted to see his records.
The machine had come at just the right time. He could have disappeared, but he did not want to spend his life on the run. That was no fun at all. It was him that did the hunting, somehow being prey did not sit well.
If they had not wanted him to take the money they should not have made it so easy for him to get it. ‘Stupid,’ he thought. It had been so simple, it was a joke. There was so much money passing through the military it was just waiting to be picked up. He was astounded it was noticed; maybe they were not as stupid as he thought. They could not say for sure, but they definitely suspected and it was just a matter of time before they found out.
Ten million was hard to conceal. That was the problem, there was just so much of it he could not spread it thin enough to completely hide it away.
He twitched his shoulders; maybe he should not have been so greedy. That thought hurt, he was not used to admitting to any fault.
Either way, it was definitely a good time to get out. He smiled. Besides, this was a lot more exciting than his day-to-day job. He had been so bored he could have died. That was what had started him off with the money. Initially it was to see if he could do it, then it was for the excitement and the lavish lifestyle did not hurt.
Excitement was what he craved. Life had been so dull, even in the army. He envied his counterpart. A professional killer, the report had said. He tightened his mouth and nodded. ‘Now that’s what I call impressive.’ Still, he was more ambitious than simply being king of Alnwick and as a skilled engineer, he fully intended moving further afield once he assessed which soldiers would be the best to make up his own private army. As for the other Briggs, he had different plans for him.
A sign caught in the headlights shot past, but not too fast for Briggs to see he was nearing Alnwick. A short while later he saw the turn off and began to slow on the approach. He did not want to drive into the town in case the sound of the engine would alert the occupants to his arrival. Instead, he would arm himself and walk the rest of the way. He travelled the length of the slip road and pulled in.
Soundproofing was minimum inside the compartment. The jeep was built more for speed than comfort and the diesel engine had obviously masked the noise, but when he switched off the car the crackle of machine gunfire interlaced with screams and distant explosions wafted across the Northumberland hills, welcoming him to the ancient town of Alnwick.
Chapter Eleven
En-route to Ponteland
“Jessica and I had been married for five years on the 22nd June,” Jason said, his breathing quickening as the slope progressively increased upwards. “We met at Newcastle University when we were both lecturing on mathematics.” He stopped speaking for a moment. “I wonder where she is now,” he said softly. “Do you think she exists in this timeline?” He looked over his shoulder at Sarah, who was trailing behind. “Do you think..?” He stopped walking and turned to face the woman. “What’s wrong?”
She was bent over, her head down by her knees, several yards further down the road.
Jason hurried down the hill.
“I suddenly felt really woozy.” She returned upright, her face still pale in the torch light. “I thought I was going to faint.”
“When did you last eat?” Jason asked, concerned.
“Nearly two days ago.”
“Two days,” he said, shocked, inwardly cringing, furious with himself for being so thoughtless and inconsiderate. “Why didn’t you say something? You should have told me you were hungry.”
“We had to keep moving. We need to get this timeline fixed and every second we stop to rest or eat is another second that might take us closer to being stuck in this hell hole for ever.”
“That’s true.” He lowered his rucksack to the ground. “But I do have some tinned food in this bag which could be eaten on the move and several chocolate bars retrieved from the bunker stores which would make a scrummy dessert you could carry.”
Sarah nodded. “OK, that’s an option.”
“I can’t have you flagging on me.” He dropped his head for a moment as he dug in the bag then returned upright when he found what he was looking for. “Fish.”
When her eyes filled with hungry desire, Jason smiled and drew back the lid. “I take it that’s a yes.”
They continued up the road at a slightly slower pace whilst Sarah ate.
“I can’t get used to the silence,” Jason said, as they cleared the brow of the hill and caught their first glimpse of the road ahead.
The clouds had completely cleared to reveal a splattering of stars which broke up the blackness of the sky just enough to stop it merging with the pitch landscape. Directly ahead Spica and Arcturus outshone their more modest, but no less spectacular, companions and, slightly left, a small portion of the hundred billion stars in the Milky Way, only visible as a hazy snaking cloud, formed the backdrop for a forest on the horizon.
Sarah finished chewing and swallowed. “Is your world quite noisy?” she asked, before her next mouthful of fish.
“Yes. There was always the background hum of cars, aeroplanes and the sounds of life in general.” Jason looked at her. “Surely it was the same in your world?”
“I suppose.” She stopped eating and thought a moment. “It has seemed very quiet since the war. The noises you’ve described are sounds you just take for granted. They blend into the background and you just shut them off. I like the quiet, but this is a little too quiet even for me.”
“Was there any warning about the war?”
“There were rumblings, but nothing to indicate there was a nuclear war coming. It caught everyone off guard. No-one ever thought it would happen like that. The UN had moved in as peacekeepers after tensions between Bolonia and Serboria had resulted in Bolonia’s capital city being bombed. Last we’d heard Serboria was refusing to relinquish control, then next thing we knew we were nuked. Since then I haven’t seen so much as a vapour trail or picked up a radio signal, so I can only assume the Northern Hemisphere was devastated and it may even be global.”
“I grew up in the Cold War and they said you could go from nothing, not even so much as a skirmish, to full-scale nuclear war in four days.”
“The Cold War?”
“A period whe
re there was a great deal of tension between the Eastern Block and the West. Apparently, we came close to nuclear war on a number of occasions, but thankfully there were people on both sides who warned the opposition when it was time to keep things calm so as not to aggravate those with the itchy trigger fingers. We had seen the effects of a nuclear bomb on a population so we knew using it in a war situation was out of the question. Besides, fallout does not recognise borders and will just go wherever the air currents take it. There are still people today, decades after the Second World War, who are suffering from genetic problems because of radiation.”
“What else do you think would be different in our timelines?”
Jason thought a moment. “Technology was the biggest jump that came as a result of the Second World War. Rockets, jets and computers were developed during the war, to help the war. There was also a leap in medical advancements in areas such as skin grafts, blood transfusions, which were developed before the war, but refined out of necessity during the war, and large-scale immunisations against diseases like tetanus.”
Sarah nodded, her attention focused on the tin as she cleaned the last of the meat from the container. “Everyone is immunised against a number of diseases as a child and we have jets and computers.”
“But how sophisticated are they?”
She glanced at Jason. “What do you mean?”
“We have computers in just about everything. We have computers in our cars, our televisions and we have little handheld computers you can carry around with you.”
She shook her head. “We have nothing like that. It’s mostly businesses that use computers.” She looked at Jason curiously. “How can you get a computer so small you can carry it in your hand? The smallest computer I’ve seen was the size of a desk.”
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