The Eternal War

by Alex Scarrow

  He realized too late that she and Lincoln had turned right at the top of the stairs, and he’d gone left. The darkness was filled with the sound of feet scrambling up the stairs behind him, scratching and that unsettling humming sound, but more like a gagged snarl now than a humming.

  His hands found a recess, a doorframe and finally a handle. He grabbed it with both hands, pushed the door open and was met with the faintest ruddy bloom of light from the very last blush of dusk. It seeped in through a small square dusty attic window.

  Liam shut the door behind him, treading on boxes of soft things, perhaps toys, or clothes. The room must have been used for storage; the roof was low, with a thick wooden beam running across. He ran across to the tiny window, ducking under the beam, to fiddle with the latch to open it. Behind him he heard the tap and scrape of feet and claws, muted snarling and laboured breathing, then the crash of a fist on a door, the splintering crack of old dry wood giving way.

  And then his blood chilled. He heard Sal scream, muffled by a door further down the landing. He realized as he fumbled with the latch of the small window that their pursuers had chosen to follow Sal and Lincoln and not him.

  Crashing and splintering again. The things were ferociously hammering on it, tearing Sal’s door to pieces. Liam hesitated. He’d planned to open the tiny window and squeeze himself through, perhaps to hide outside on the shingle roof. But …

  Sal screamed again.

  But those things were going to get her.

  Liam cursed under his breath. ‘Ahh … Jay-zus …!’

  His hands fumbled for something, anything, to use as a weapon, frantically patting the floor around him while he listened to the struggle down the hallway: Lincoln bellowing curses, Sal screaming, horrible mewing sounds from those creatures, things being knocked over, blows being landed, the scrape and thud of feet on boards.

  ‘Come on! … Come on!’ he hissed. He heard Sal desperately pleading, Lincoln’s baritone voice too … an enraged roar. The sound of a violent struggle. He had to admit it – Lincoln had mettle. That obnoxious loud-mouthed long-limbed idiot sounded like he was putting up a fight with just his bare fists. Going down, fighting with just his bare fists.

  Liam’s fingers touched a pole of some sort. He felt his way down it to a thicket of coarse fibres. A brush of some kind.

  Ah, stuff it … good enough.

  He picked it up and charged across the small attic room towards the doorway. Failing to remember the low beam.

  Failing to duck.

  CHAPTER 37

  2001, New York

  Colonel Devereau and Sergeant Freeman crouched down and shone their flashlights under the half-open corrugated-iron shutter door into the dark space beyond.

  ‘This is it?’ he said. He sounded disappointed. ‘This is your time machine?’

  By the subdued tone of his voice, Maddy wondered whether he actually really had wanted to believe what she’d told him was for real. It would make persuading him, seeking his help, a great deal easier if he did.

  She knelt down and looked inside. The archway appeared to be in a lot better shape than it had yesterday. Becks must have spent the night fixing things up; she’d swept away the fallen bricks and mortar, straightened up the shelves that had collapsed, tidied the general mess inside. Apart from the gaping crack running across their floor and the jagged holes in the roof it almost looked as normal, except, that is, for the fact that it was utterly dark.

  ‘We have no power,’ said Maddy. ‘Our generator was totally trashed when we, uh, landed here.’

  Devereau shoved the shutter a little higher and it clacked noisily. The men of his platoon ducked inside and another half a dozen torches snapped on and began sweeping the archway, picking out details here and there.

  ‘Negative, Madelaine,’ said Becks. ‘The generator works. I was able to effect a temporary repair. I shall go and switch it on.’

  Becks stepped inside and made her way briskly towards the sliding door leading into the back room. She was lost in the darkness.

  ‘Hey! Miss!’ snapped Sergeant Freeman, swinging his carbine off his shoulder. ‘Where ’n hell you think you’re goin’?’

  Becks turned to look at him as torchlight danced across her face. Quite calmly: ‘To turn the power on, of course.’

  ‘It’s through that far door,’ said Maddy. ‘There’s a storage room back there. It’s where our generator is.’

  Devereau shrugged. They’d walked once round this odd construction. It reminded him of a termite mound: a large badly put-together hummock made entirely of crumbling bricks. There was presumably no place inside for this other girl – Becks – to run or hide. ‘Better follow her back there, Sergeant,’ he said to Freeman.

  Both headed through the opening to the back room and a moment later Maddy sighed with relief at the reassuring sound of the generator chugging to life.

  The archway’s strip lights flickered then winked on in unison.

  Devereau cursed. He reached out towards the shutter door and yanked it down. ‘Gimme a hand,’ he said to a young soldier. Together they wrestled it down until it clattered and bounced against the floor.

  ‘We’re right in the middle of the dead zone!’ said Devereau. ‘Last thing we want is begging the attention of their sky navy with a careless show of lights!’

  ‘Oh … yeah.’ Maddy nodded an apology.

  The computer monitors were on, all of them busy showing the system slowly booting up. Becks emerged, Freeman with her.

  ‘There was damage to the fuel tank,’ said Becks. ‘We have lost a significant portion of our reserves.’ She approached Maddy and Devereau. ‘We will need more fuel, Madelaine.’

  ‘To recharge the displacement machine?’

  ‘Affirmative.’

  ‘But hang on! What’s the point? You said the tachyon transmission array was –’

  ‘I believe it may be possible to acquire analogous transmission technology and reconfigure it to channel tachyon particles –’

  ‘Excuse me!’ Devereau made a face. ‘Can you two stop talking whatever gibberish mumbo-jumbo that is for a moment?’

  They did and then both looked at him.

  ‘All right, now … I suppose I’m more than halfway towards considering the pair of you aren’t Southern spies.’ He pulled out his packet of Gitanes and lit one, hacking up a gob of discoloured phlegm on to the floor as he did so.

  ‘Do you mind?’ said Maddy testily. ‘That’s disgusting.’

  He ignored her. ‘But you, miss – both of you, actually – have got yourselves a lot of explaining yet to do if you don’t want to find yourself chained up in a federal military prison.’ He pulled on his cigarette and puffed a cloud of rancid smoke into the air between them. Maddy wrinkled her nose at the stench.

  ‘A hell of a lot of explaining,’ he added.

  Becks was silent. A guarded expression on her face.

  Maddy shrugged. ‘Sure … why not? You might as well hear it all … everything.’ She turned to Becks, expecting her to sound a note of caution. ‘After all, this timeline isn’t meant to exist. None of it … not this war, not these soldiers.’ She smiled candidly at him. ‘Not even you, Colonel Devereau.’

  ‘I should not … exist?’ His voice was midway between incredulity and anger.

  ‘Not the way you are. Not like this.’

  He frowned and jutted his bearded chin indignantly. ‘Ma’am, I rather like the way I am, if that’s all the same to you!’

  ‘Look.’ Maddy puffed her cheeks. ‘It’s really complicated. Devereau, I guess I’d better explain to you all about how time travel works.’ She nodded towards their threadbare armchairs. ‘Want to go grab a seat? This could take us quite a while.’

  CHAPTER 38

  2001, somewhere in Virginia

  Bob’s single-minded pursuit of the small creature that had boldly dashed into the farmhouse kitchen and stolen their one firearm from right under his nose was getting him nowhere.

  He was
standing in a field of corn. It was too dark now for his eyes to pick out the broken stalks suggesting which way the creature had fled. He was four hundred yards away from the farmhouse, the light failing, and a cautionary warning flashing in his mind.

  [Tactical error]

  He was about to process that into an analysis tree when he first heard the shouting and banging drifting across the silently swaying field of corn from the farmhouse.

  Several conclusions presented themselves:

  The childlike creature is not alone

  The gun being stolen was a distraction

  The others are in danger

  He bounded back through the corn, taking the path of flattened stalks he’d already made. Ahead of him, the noises grew more distinct, more frantic. From the sound of it he determined the struggle was coming from inside the house somewhere and as he drew closer he could see that the back door through which he’d rushed out only minutes ago was nothing more than a splintered frame swinging gently on bent hinges.

  He heard a high-pitched scream and identified the voice as Sal’s. Something inside his head twitched. Not the silicon wafer but the small wrinkled nugget of flesh, the brain the size of a rat’s with which it had a synaptic-wire link. As he bounded across the overgrown garden, his mind was drawing up a shortlist of candidate words to describe what he felt.

  Guilt (90% relevance)

  Shame (56% relevance)

  Anger (10% relevance)

  He’d been fooled, lured out into the field so that the others were left entirely alone, vulnerable. No gun between them. No support unit to protect them.

  He crashed through the remains of the swinging back door, knocking it off its hinges. The kitchen looked as if a tornado had passed through it; everything that could be dislodged or broken had been. The wall was a mess of plaster dust and holes, revealing the wooden slats of support posts. The fist-sized holes punched into it all the way through to the hallway beyond. The door into the hallway looked just like the back door – smashed to splinters.

  ‘LIAM!’ Bob bellowed into the house.

  He heard nothing now. The sound of struggling and screaming had ended at some point in the last thirty seconds.

  ‘SALEENA!’ he tried again, stepping into the hallway, his eyes adjusting to the gloom.

  He could see scratch and scrape marks across the floor, along the walls … up the stairs. Quickly, urgently, he clambered up them, the old wooden steps groaning and creaking under the burden of his weight.

  He turned right at the top of the stairs. A door at the end, scratched, battered and split with a deep crack down the middle, hung wide open. And into the room beyond he could see the frame of a bed on its side, an overturned chair. A last stand had taken place there. No bodies, though. Gone.

  In the space of only minutes, seconds, the humans it was his duty to protect had been snatched away from him.

  He took another few steps into the room and saw more signs of the struggle. A chair leg, wrenched from its seat, perhaps used as a club. One end of it was spattered with blood – black in this waning dusk light. There were splashes and dots of it on the pale walls.

  The logical part of his mind berated him with a simple message.

  [Mission status: FAIL]

  The organic part was prepared to express its assessment of the situation with a flood of feelings he was unable, or unwilling, to find appropriate labels for right now. He backed out of the room and slumped against the landing wall, sliding down until he was a hunched mass of dejected muscle at the bottom of it.

  ‘You have failed,’ his deep voice rumbled softly, like a gas boiler switching on, a subway train passing through a subterranean tunnel.

  ‘You failed,’ he said again, this time his voice trembling slightly. He supposed, if Becks had been right here, she would have found that intriguing, impressive even, that his voice was unintentionally conveying an emotion.

  The computer in his skull was nagging him to make a judgement call on a growing list of new mission-priority suggestions: to continue making his way north-east to New York? After all, Madelaine Carter was still there and still needed protecting. To attempt to locate the bodies of Liam O’Connor, Saleena Vikram and Abraham Lincoln? Because there was always the chance, a possibility, one or more of them might still be alive.

  To self-terminate … out of sheer shame. Perhaps his AI was now unreliable, faulty. He had made a poor judgement that had resulted in this. An all-too-obvious ploy to lure him outside.

  Subconsciously he balled a giant fist, angry with himself for being so … stupid. Perhaps another support unit uploaded with freshly installed software and not burdened with many months’ worth of memories of kinship, adventures, jokes even … would turn out to do a far more efficient job than he.

  He was giving self-termination some serious thought, even though the software was advising him quite strongly that it was an illogical conclusion and achieved nothing useful … when he heard the scrape of a footfall beside him. He turned quickly to look along the almost pitch-black landing, quite ready to tear something, someone, apart, limb from limb, for no other reason than mere revenge.

  And he saw Liam, standing there, wide-eyed, exhibiting post-traumatic stress behavioural indicators.

  He was in shock.

  ‘LIAM O’CONNOR!’ his voice boomed.

  Liam took a shuffling step forward, clutching his head. ‘Bob … Jeeez, I … don’t know what … I just …’

  Bob lurched to his feet, closed the gap between them, and before his computer brain could cringe with disapproval, distaste and embarrassment at the behaviour of its host body, Bob’s huge muscular arms were wrapped round Liam’s narrow frame and squeezing him hard.

  ‘You are alive!’ he rumbled unnecessarily.

  ‘Bob … I … think they took Sal … and Lincoln.’

  ‘They are alive?’

  Liam was struggling to breathe, his nose and mouth crushed against the wall of Bob’s sweaty shoulder. He pushed the support unit back and Bob loosened his hug.

  ‘I think so. I think they took them –’

  His words were suddenly drowned out by a deafening roar that made the landing, the whole farmhouse, vibrate like the head of a snare drum. White light flickered into the building, dazzlingly bright, finding holes and cracks in the ceiling above them, sending pin-sharp blades of light down on to them that swept across their skin, across the wooden floor.

  Light from above … the roar too. Directly above them. They tumbled down the stairs before either of them had discussed whether it might be a good idea to actually remain hidden somewhere inside. They stepped through the shattered remains of the front door and out on to the porch, looking up at the brilliant white light. Liam shaded his eyes; it was as intense and uncomfortable as looking directly at the sun. A false dawn of artificial sunlight trained down on them.

  ‘What is it?’ he all but screamed. He couldn’t even hear himself, let alone hear whether Bob managed to answer.

  An icy blast of air swept down on them and he felt something cold and wet settle on his cheeks. In the light he could see a million white fluffy flakes of something slowly descending, swirling in the downdraught, seesawing like feathers, like ash from a forest fire. But they were neither.

  My God … it’s snowing!

  That’s exactly what it was.

  Snow?

  The deafening roar that had filled the air, making talking, shouting, an utterly pointless endeavour for the best part of the last minute, suddenly ceased. It left them in a silence filled only with Liam’s rasping breath and the soft whisper of snow falling and settling on the ground around them.

  ‘What the …?’ uttered Liam, feeling more and more flakes landing on his upturned face, on the back of the hand shading his eyes.

  The blinding light swept off Liam and Bob and back on to the farmhouse, then across the other buildings in the small rural hamlet, like a probing eye trying to make quick sense of the scene.

  Liam tracke
d the thick beam of the spotlight all the way up into a dark and completely starless sky. He thought he was looking at a dense bank of snow-laden cloud above them; that might be the best explanation for the unseasonal and surprising arrival of snow. But then a row of smaller lights suddenly appeared. A row of spotlights trained upwards, casting fans of light across a smooth, burnished copper hull.

  His mouth was useless, slack and open and doing little more than making a gurgling note of surprise.

  CHAPTER 39

  2001, New York

  Colonel Bill Devereau stared at the images on the computer screens: a slideshow of pictures pulled by computer-Bob off the system’s database at Maddy’s request. Photographs of New York, busy and vibrant. Times Square packed with yellow cabs and tourists, a giant billboard with Shrek’s green face leering out over milling pedestrians. A cowboy in his underpants and stetson and boots busking with acoustic guitar surrounded by grinning Japanese girls. A picture of the Spice Girls posing together in front of the Empire State Building.

  ‘My God!’ he whispered.

  A picture of Lady Liberty, mint-green and undamaged by bombs and small-arms fire, standing proud and tall, holding aloft her beacon of hope.

  ‘I forgot what she looked like,’ he said.

  ‘Is the statue damaged in this timeline, Colonel Devereau?’ asked Becks.

  ‘Bill,’ he said softly. ‘I guess you two ladies can call me Bill.’

  ‘Affirmative, Bill.’

  He shook his head sadly. ‘She’s no more than a rusting stump. Bombed by the South back in 1926 during the Second Siege of New York. They blew her up … then used Liberty Island to deploy several artillery batteries. From there they pounded Manhattan to rubble.’

  ‘Where – when – we come from, Bill,’ said Maddy, ‘I mean … it’s today’s date, September the twelfth, 2001, the very same date, but it’s a very different time. Anyway –’ she flapped her hand, dismissing the point – ‘the point is in our time New York’s all there in one piece.’ She smiled sadly. Well, sort of. She decided there was no point mentioning the Twin Towers to him. It would only complicate things.