by Alex Scarrow
Maddy estimated they must be about a hundred yards or so into the wood by now. If the general shape of the New York estuary hadn’t changed too much in the last two thousand years, and Sal had picked the right point for them to head uphill into the woods, then it had to be close by. Although, looking at the foliage ahead of her, Maddy couldn’t see anything that looked like a termite mound of red bricks.
‘Sal?’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, sighing. ‘I really thought we were in the right place.’
‘Don’t worry, we’ll just go back down to the river and get our bearings again.’
Sal shook her head. ‘No, jahulla… no, I’m right! I’m sure we’re in the correct place.’ She looked around them. It was all dense foliage. She pushed aside creepers and vines that looped down from low branches. Yanked angrily at them. ‘Here somewhere…’
‘Come on, let’s go back down and try again.’
Sal picked up a stick and used it to thrash at the nettles and brambles.
‘Sal?’
‘I’m not wrong!’
She hacked at the foliage, decapitating nettles, sending leaves and stalks fluttering.
‘SAL! Stop it!!’
She stopped. Turned slowly to look at Maddy. She slumped down to the ground, exhausted.
‘This is shock,’ said Maddy. ‘Post-traumatic shock.’ She joined her, reached out and took the stick from her hands. ‘We need to catch our breath, Sal, stay calm, yeah?’
Sal was looking past her.
‘Sal? You and me… we’ll go back down to the river, and get our bearings again. OK?’
‘Right.’
Maddy offered her a hand and pulled her to her feet. ‘We’ll find it, Sal. Easy as easy-peas.’
She tossed the stick behind her into the remaining thicket of nettles and brambles only to be rewarded with a metallic clang and rattle.
They both spun round. A veil of ivy cascading down from the branches of a chestnut tree hung as thick as a velvet theatre curtain. The stick had created a gap, through which they could see a few inches of the graffiti-covered corrugated grooves of the shutter door.
Sal grinned. ‘I knew it.’
Maddy and Sal grunted with effort as they hefted the shutter up between them. Three foot up, enough to wriggle through inside. It was unpowered, just as Maddy had expected it to be. The archway would be on generator power right now, essential systems only. It was dark inside, almost completely black. The dim light of the forest spilling in from beneath the shutter door revealed several yards of grubby concrete floor and no more.
‘Bob? You powered up in there?’
She could hear the faint chug of the generator at the back.
Good. At least that’s working.
‘Bob?’ None of the monitors were on. She tried to make out whether any of the PCs’ standby indicators were glowing. If they were, they were actually too faint to see from here.
She stood up inside and wandered over to her right where their breakfast table and assortment of armchairs were. Her thigh bumped against the arm of one of them. She side stepped, shuffling to her right until her hand finally touched brick wall.
‘You OK in there, Maddy?’ called Sal. She was crouched beneath the shutter, holding it in case the thing rattled down again.
‘Fine… just looking for the light switch. It’s somewhere here.’
She patted dry, crumbling bricks until her fingers brushed electric flex.
‘Ah! Nearly there!’ Her fingers traced flex along the wall until she found the switch box. ‘Bingo, bongo!’
She flipped the switch and the tube light above the kitchen table buzzed, winked and finally flickered on.
‘Oh God!’ gasped Sal.
Maddy turned round. ‘What is it?’
She saw for herself. Blood. Lots of it. Dark, smeared and spattered across the floor.
Maddy picked her way across the floor, avoiding pools and bloody drag smears that were already clotting and drying out. ‘Bob? You on?’
One of the monitors flickered on from standby mode. She made it over to the desk and sat down in one of the office chairs.
›Hello, Maddy.
‘Bob! What happened in here?’
Sal joined her a moment later, looking decidedly queasy. ‘Oh pinchudda. This is so disgusting. There’s blood everywhere.’
›Warning.
‘What is it, Bob?’
›There is an unauthorized presence in the archway with you.
It was then they heard a scratching, scraping sound coming from the far corner of the archway where several storage racks of bits and pieces, rolls of electrical flex and buckets of circuit boards lined the wall.
›Information: there were two of them. I attempted to extract them both from the field office.
‘Two what?’ Maddy looked at Sal. ‘Oh crud!.. Not two more support units?’
The scraping, scratching sound seemed to be getting closer. Accompanied by a wet gurgle — the sound of exertion.
‘Bob?’
›Affirmative. Two support units.
The cursor skittered along the command line far too slowly as Bob elaborated.
›I was successful in extracting one of the support units completely, and one partially.
Just then Sal strangled a yelp. ‘Shadd-yah! Maddy! Look!’
Maddy turned in her chair and looked at where she was pointing. It emerged slowly into the pooling light, bit by grotesque bit, dragging itself across the shallow crater in the floor, scooped out by a dozen or more old displacement fields. A pale hand… connected to an arm… a blood-spattered shoulder and finally a bald head and the top half of a torso, missing the other shoulder and arm.
It pulled itself towards them — another female support unit, or what was left of one.
Maddy didn’t know whether to puke, scream or run. ‘Jesus!’
›Caution: it is still very dangerous.
Maddy got up and crossed the floor, looking at the pitiful thing dragging itself determinedly towards them. It didn’t look dangerous. She almost felt sorry for it.
‘Don’t let its hand grab you!’ said Sal.
Maddy took a step back. The support unit’s one hand was reaching out for the toe of her boot. Its mouth snapped open in a bloody snarl of gurgling frustration.
Sal took a wide berth round it towards the storage racks, rummaged for a moment through a plastic bucket of tools and came towards Maddy with a large heavy wrench in her hands.
‘We should squish it.’
‘Just a sec…’ Maddy squatted down in front of the support unit. Careful to keep enough distance between her and that one functioning hand. There was undoubtedly still enough strength in those fingers to crush bones, to throttle her.
‘Who sent you?’
Its bloodshot eyes rolled up towards her.
‘Can you hear me?’
Its gurgling stopped.
‘Who sent you?’
Again this one had a face unsettlingly similar to Becks. Eyes as grey and piercing as hers, but the whites webbed with hairlines of haemorrhaging veins. ‘You… primary… target…’
Maddy wondered what the support unit meant by that — them? The team? Or her specifically? ‘Does someone want us… dead?’
Its mouth snapped shut and open again; it gurgled a paste of dark clotting blood down its chin.
‘Is that it? Someone wants us dead?’
‘… primary… target…’
‘Who sent you?’ The thing was dying, its voice failing to little more than a wet, bubbling whisper. She leaned forward. ‘Please! Who sent you? ’
Its hand reached out for Maddy’s shirt collar and snagged it, weakly balling its fist and trying to pull her closer. Bloodshot eyes stared intently up at her and its mouth opened once again, spilling a viscous drool of dark blood on to the floor. Opened and snapped closed, its fist pulling Maddy’s face down towards its bloodied lips. Its jaw snapped open once more.
‘… cont… contam-’
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‘NO!!’ Sal brought the wrench down with a sickening crunch. The support unit squealed like a banshee, a horrible, vermin-like screech. It thrashed about violently on the floor. Sal brought the wrench down again and the screeching ended abruptly. The noise of both impact and the cut-short scream echoed round the archway. As the reverberation faded, they stared in horrified silence at the support unit. Quite dead now.
Maddy looked up at Sal. The blood-spattered wrench was still in her trembling hands, her eyes wide, locked on the horrible mess she’d just created.
‘Why’d you go and do that? She was trying to tell me something!’
‘I… I thought it was — it was trying to bite you!’
Maddy got to her feet, backing away from the remains of the support unit. ‘It… she… was trying to say something. Contamination. That’s it, I think. Contamination.’
‘Contamination?’
‘Yeah… that’s what I think she was saying, like, maybe WE are the contamination event?’ She took several more steps back until her legs bumped against her office chair. She slumped down in it, for the moment robbed of the energy to stay standing. ‘Do you think that means we’re the problem, not the solution?’
Sal joined her. ‘Maddy… oh God, I thought she was going to — ’
She wrapped her arms round Maddy and began sobbing into her shoulder.
A computer beeped.
‘It’s OK,’ Maddy cooed. Stroked her hair. The last hour had been enough to shred anyone’s sanity, let alone a child Sal’s age. She let her get it out of her system, wondering for a moment if she was ever going to find someone whose shoulder she could go and soak. ‘It’s OK. We’re nearly sorted now. Just got to bring the boys back and we’ll be all right. I promise.’
Sal’s head nodded against her shoulder.
A computer beeped.
‘Come on, then, Sal,’ she said, lifting her away. ‘You’re getting snot on my shirt. I’ve only got one decent one.’
Sal laughed. Not so much a laugh as a smile. But good enough.
One of the PCs beeped again — one of those annoying ‘reboot’ beeps, a you-went-and-hit-the-keyboard-in-anger-didn’t-you? beep. Maddy turned round to see computer-Bob had opened a dialogue box and had been patiently trying to get her attention for the last minute.
›Warning: I am picking up approaching ident signals. 300 yards.
›Warning: I am picking up approaching ident signals. 200 yards.
›Warning: I am picking up approaching ident signals. 100 yards.
›Warning.
›Warning.
›Warning.
CHAPTER 34
2001, formerly New York
The shutter door rattled noisily under a hammer-blow impact.
‘They’ve found us already!’ screamed Maddy.
Sal stared at the dented shutter door with bubble-eyed panic. It suddenly jumped again in its running frame and another fist-shaped dent buckled the thick metal slats.
‘They’re trying to break in!’ she screamed.
Maddy turned back towards the webcam. ‘Emergency evacuation, Bob! Activate a portal!’
›Affirmative. You should specify time-stamp.
The shutter door lurched again as another huge dent suddenly appeared.
‘Anywhere! Activate a freakin’ portal!’
›Information: Maddy, it is not advisable to enter a portal without a programmed exit location.
The shutter jumped and rattled again; this time the left side of it clattered out of the top of the running frame and swung inwards. A corner of daylight spilled into the archway.
‘Now, Bob!! Jesus! DO IT NOW!’
She heard the displacement rack start to hum and glanced at the charge display. LEDs flickered one after the other from green, to amber, to red as the reservoir of stored energy began to be discharged into the circuit boards of the machine.
Bob was right, though. If they stepped into that portal when it appeared before them without some coordinates — any coordinates — plotted in, they were stepping into something unknown, unquantifiable. Unthinkable. A place there was no return from.
She didn’t, however, have the time to sit down and tap numbers into the system. Sal was backed up beside her, terrified, hopping from one foot to the other. Screaming something at their pursuers in Hindi.
Maddy couldn’t think clearly. The moment was happening too quickly. She’d planned to set up an emergency evacuation time-stamp: some ‘quick dial’, pre-planned coordinates that she could have Bob pull up and use at a moment’s notice. A precaution. She’d planned to sort that out. It was right at the top of her to-do list. But she hadn’t got round to doing it. Always busy with one thing or another. Always having to clear up after fighting the last fire. Just like everything else, she’d found another way to mess things up again.
‘They’re nearly through!’ screamed Sal. ‘Do something!’
‘Bob… the last time-stamp! Plot in the last time-stamp!’
›Affirmative. Plotting.
The shutter door took another battering, bulging alarmingly on the side that was almost knocked entirely out of its frame. The metal slats there were crumpled and ragged almost like the silver foil wrapper of a chocolate bar.
Sal turned to her. ‘Jahulla! What about Becks?!’
She was in the growth tube in the back room. Last time they’d bothered to go in and check on her progress, to look through that murky gunk at the hairless, pre-birth candidate, she’d had the look of a ten- or eleven-year-old girl.
‘There’s no time!’
The displacement machine suddenly discharged its energy. A gust of displaced air sent the rubbish on Maddy’s desk fluttering in come-chase-me circles. Three yards ahead of them in the middle of the archway, perfectly aligned with the shallow scoop in their concrete floor, an eight-foot-wide sphere of energy popped into existence. Maddy could see in the swirling, oil-on-water pattern an image of the location that had been sitting in computer-Bob’s data buffer: Liam and Bob’s deployment location. She could see hints of a rich summer-blue sky, and the greens and browns of grass or trees.
‘We can’t just leave her!’
Another crash and the misshapen shutter door swung entirely free on the right-hand side. It collapsed heavily on to the floor inside the archway.
Sal was right. It wasn’t just that they owed Becks. Not just a support unit, she was much more than code and meat now. She was a friend. A member of their small family. And it wasn’t only that — the loyalty owed to a friend. Somewhere inside her memory was a packet of data that perhaps was an answer to every question they had. Perhaps also an answer to this — why they were being attacked. Who’d sent the units. What they’d done to deserve this.
Through the semi-opaque portal, she could see three perfectly bald heads, ferociously pushing their way over, untangling themselves from the twisted and jagged metal and entering the archway.
No time now to save the unborn child floating in the growth tube.
‘GO!!’ she yelled at Sal, shoving her roughly in the direction of the portal.
Sal looked back at her, ducked down and picked up the wrench ready to swing it. ‘I’m not leaving without you!’
‘Don’t worry, I’m coming!’ Maddy stretched across her desk and grabbed the small bullet-dented hard drive, wrenching it free of the ribbon data cable attached to it.
‘Go!!’ she screamed. ‘I’ve got Becks! Now GO!’
Sal nodded, understanding that at least they had the ‘essence’ of Becks with them. She ran forward and leaped into the portal.
‘Bob! Close it right after me!’ Maddy yelled over her shoulder as she turned towards the shimmering sphere. Through the semi-opaque, shifting, dancing image of sun-baked countryside, she could see that one of the support units was entirely free of the tangle of metal and was looking her way. It broke into a sprint towards her. Towards the portal.
She leaped forward, gritting her teeth at the terrifying prospect of hitting
the sphere of energy at exactly the same time as the support unit entered it from the other side; the pair of them fusing together in chaos space and emerging as some entwined, horrifically arranged and short-lived conjoined twins.
‘NOOOOO-!’ She found herself screaming as her feet left the ground and she leaped into the spherical void, her arms swung up protectively in front of her face, for what little good it was going to do her.
CHAPTER 35
AD 54, 7 miles outside Rome
‘How much longer now?’ asked Liam.
‘It is due in two minutes, thirty-six seconds,’ replied Bob.
Liam shook his head. ‘Can’t come a second too soon.’ He looked around the olive trees, grateful that their rendezvous was a quiet, discreet location and seven miles away from the stench of decay and squalor in Rome.
‘I’m glad we’re out,’ he added.
A week, that was all. One week in Rome and Liam could quite happily say he never wanted to see the city again. He shook his head at his naive hope of a week ago: assuming the place was the very definition of order and civilization, an endless spectacle of marbled splendour.
How wrong he’d been.
The city, what he’d managed to see of it, was a slum of over a million people. Buildings stacked several storeys high, packed tightly side by side like arrows in a quiver. And the smell was unbelievable. The stench of human and animal faeces. Of rotting bodies. The city was riddled with diseases from polluted water — typhoid, cholera. Liam recalled Nottingham, a city that had been in just as much trouble. But Rome had something else. It had Caligula.
Examples of his madness were everywhere. In every communal area — marketplaces, forums — T-shaped cruciforms were erected, from which hung those who’d displeased him in some way. Graffiti on almost every wall depicted the emperor as either mad or cruel or demonic, or god-like and benevolent. Rival gangs, collegia, daubed the walls with these lurid illustrations and most of the gangs seemed to favour the emperor. They flourished in the growing chaos of the city.
That was the thing. From those Romans they’d spoken to, overheard — their landlord in particular, a short, thickset and foul-tempered man who seemed to swear with every other word — Liam had got a sense that Caligula had disengaged from running his empire. Was content to let it descend into chaos, ruin and anarchy… while he prepared for some rumoured and imminent destiny.
