TimeRiders

by Time Riders (epub)

  ‘Hey, Bob!’

  The small man running beside him was becoming a useless distraction. Bob turned to look down at him. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Uh… mind if I sort of… team up with you for now? You kicked some butt back there, I mean really stuck it to them guys. It was just amazing.’ Panelli shrugged. ‘So, I figure you’re a good guy to have as a friend.’

  Bob evaluated the small man. He could provide assistance in some way.

  ‘As you wish,’ he replied flatly.

  CHAPTER 53

  2001, New York

  Thursday/Friday? (I don’t know)

  Three days now. I think it’s three – it’s hard to tell. The tins of food in the cupboard are running out and we’ll be going hungry soon.

  Foster and Maddy went out there a few times looking for supplies. They’ve not found anything so far, just ruins and bones.

  And those creatures outside. We now know they’re cannibals.

  Foster found the leftovers of one of their own kind, half eaten… and nearby the bones of loads of others. Those things seem to exist in small tribes, feeding off each other. When I think now how close I came to being taken… That creature running its hand through my hair must’ve been sizing me up! Working out if I could be eaten.

  I don’t want to die like that. I’d rather anything else. I keep expecting to hear them at any moment outside the garage door, scratching at it, trying to find a way in.

  I’ve never been so jahully-chuddah scared in my life.

  ‘I… I don’t want to go out there again,’ whispered Sal. ‘Never. Never again.’

  Foster could see the terror in the poor girl’s eyes by the guttering glow of the candle on the table between them. The rest of the arch was lost in the darkness.

  ‘We have to,’ he said firmly.

  ‘But… but, those things…’

  Those things had once been human beings. But something had happened. He suspected some sort of a nuclear war. There was plenty of blast damage, scorched walls and debris suggesting a moment of intense heat. Decades of radiation sickness would account for their pitiful condition, anaemic complexion, the running sores, toothless mouths.

  ‘Foster’s right,’ said Maddy. ‘We can’t hide in here forever.’

  ‘But… they… those things are… cannibals.’

  ‘Yes, we know exactly what they are,’ Maddy snapped.

  ‘Perhaps we might be able to communicate with them,’ said Foster. ‘If some sort of nuclear war happened in 1956 and we’re in 2001, then those creatures will be the grandchildren of the few that survived. Post-apocalypse children who’ve only ever known ruins and rubble. It’s possible the eldest of them might just remember some language.’

  ‘You’re kidding, right?’ said Maddy. ‘They dribble, they don’t talk. They see us as a free-range meal.’

  Perhaps she’s right. Those things would probably kill them before he could find a way to communicate with them.

  He sighed. ‘All right, well… we’ve wasted enough time. I was hoping another time ripple would arrive, perhaps one that would improve our situation. But it looks like this is what we’re stuck with. So we’ve no choice. We need to find some way to generate power. Enough to reboot our computer system… and enough, if we can, to open a window and pull back Liam and Bob.’

  Maddy frowned. ‘Sounds like we’re gonna need a lot of power.’

  ‘Even if we only have enough to pull one of them back, we might learn exactly where and when the timeline was changed.’

  She pulled her glasses off her face, and wiped the scuffed lenses. ‘But then we’d also need enough power to send them back to that point in time to fix it, right?’

  ‘Yes.’ Foster managed a grim smile. ‘But, look, we’ll worry about that when we get to it. One thing at a time.’

  ‘Oh jahulla, we’re so-o-o-o doomed,’ whispered Sal.

  ‘No, we’re not,’ he replied sternly. ‘If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the long years I’ve been here working for the agency, it’s that everything is fluid… nothing is fixed. We can, we will… we must… change it all back. Do you understand? Failure is not an option.’

  Both girls stared at him silently.

  ‘Nobody’s going to do that for us. It’s down to us. If we just sit safely in here until we starve to death, well then… that’s it. That world outside our shutter doors is what will remain forever more.’

  He let those words hang above the table, their three faces caught in the flickering glow of the candle, still and impassive.

  ‘So… we have a generator in the back room where the clone tubes are. We need to find some diesel fuel for it.’

  ‘Why don’t we have stores of diesel?’ asked Maddy. ‘What’s the point of having a back-up generator if there’s no fuel to run it?’

  Foster shook his head. ‘We used to maintain a store of diesel fuel… but there’s something about the energy of our field office’s time bubble that corrupts it at a chemical level.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning the diesel degrades. The fuel we have in the back room is useless. We need to get out there and find some more.’

  He was silent for a moment, listening to the haunting wind outside their shutter door moaning softly.

  It was Sal who broke the silence. ‘Then I… I guess we’d better get off our butts and start looking.’

  Maddy nodded. ‘Yeah. We’ve got your gun. Those creatures will keep their distance.’

  ‘Out there in New York somewhere – maybe in someone’s basement, in a storeroom – there’s got to be some diesel fuel.’

  Maddy nodded. ‘Right.’

  Sal pursed her lips pensively then eventually nodded too. ‘Let’s do it.’

  Foster reached out for their hands. Grasping them tightly, he smiled proudly at them. ‘You know, I’ve got a feeling you two, and Liam, are one day going to turn out to be a formidable team. The agency’s best yet.’

  The girls both managed a brave grin.

  CHAPTER 54

  1957, Prison Camp 79, New Jersey

  Liam tugged the coarse grey blanket tightly around himself, trying to seal in what little warmth his body had managed to generate. He was beginning to lose track of how many weeks he’d been there. He wasn’t sure whether it was four or five months now.

  Had to be about that.

  His eyes drifted across hundreds – no, thousands – of other people wrapped in similar grey blankets and gazing out listlessly through the chain-link fences at the barren winter countryside around the prison camp.

  ‘Look, it’s just hard to accept… to believe,’ said Wallace, standing next to him. He’d been quiet for a while. Cupping his hands and blowing on them as he thought things through. ‘I mean… yeah, I saw your friend, Bob, take Lord knows how many bullet wounds back there at the White House, and he just kind of shrugged it all off. I can’t say I ever saw anything like that.’

  ‘So then you do believe me?’

  Wallace’s jaw was dark with a thatch of unshaven bristles. He scratched his chin irritably. ‘You’re really asking me to believe you’re from the future?’

  ‘Yes.’ Liam shrugged. ‘Well, actually I’m from 1912. But –’ he offered a tired smile – ‘yes… I came here from the future.’

  ‘And you say you came back to today… to 1956, to fix history so that the Germans actually lost the Second World War?’

  ‘Yes. To correct history.’

  Wallace shook his head and laughed. A plume of his breath billowed out and quickly dissipated amid the cool morning air.

  ‘That’s completely insane. Listen, I’m tellin’ you, them Nazis never even came close to losing that war. They took Pola
nd, Belgium, France, Britain… the rest of mainland Europe in the space of just two years. There’s no way on earth they could have lost the war. No way.’

  Liam shrugged. ‘Well, where I came from they did. That’s what I was told. And they lost badly. Their leader, the Hitler fella, is supposed to have made some pretty big mistakes, like starting a fight with Russia at the same time as he was fighting the –’

  Wallace scratched at his chin again. ‘Well… the old guy, Adolf, was pretty nuts. That much is true. That’s why there was a change at the top in ’44. That’s when Kramer took command of Germany.’

  Liam turned to Wallace. ‘Tell me more about Hitler and this other fella, Kramer. I need to know more. See, all of these things happened forty years after I died and I’m doing my best to catch up and make sense of it all.’

  ‘Died? Oh yeah, you say you were on the Titanic, right?’ added Wallace sceptically.

  ‘Yes, on that bleedin’ – supposedly unsinkable – hunk of metal.’

  Wallace snorted. ‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’

  Liam sighed. ‘Just tell me about them, would you? Hitler and Kramer?’

  The man sucked in a deep breath.

  ‘Adolf Hitler was the leader of the Nazi Party. They came to power in Germany in 1932 because the country was bankrupt and broken and Hitler promised the people he could fix things for them. And, for a while, he did too. He got that country going again and his people loved him for it. But then… he started going a little crazy in the head, mad with the power, I suppose. He had his country build up their armed forces, and then it was inevitable. In 1939, they invaded Poland. That started the Second World War.’

  ‘Second World War? So there really was a first one?’

  ‘The First World War? Yeah, of course. You want me to wind back and tell you all about that too? It happened not long after you say you… uh… died.’

  Liam shook his head. ‘No… this is confusing enough for me already. Just carry on with Hitler and Kramer.’

  ‘OK. So the Second World War started. The Germans took Poland, Belgium, France. They kicked the British army out of France at a place called Dunkirk. And then they spent a year just digging their heels in and building up their defences. Over here in America, although President Roosevelt wanted to enter the war, Congress and the Senate stopped him and kept us out if it. Which, back then, I think most Americans thought was a pretty smart idea. We figured it was a European problem. Not ours.

  ‘So,’ Wallace continued, ‘there were rumours that Hitler had plans to invade Russia next. He was certainly preparing something. I saw intelligence reports coming in for the president that the Germans were massing tanks and infantry in the east. Then, all of a sudden, it’s like Hitler had a complete change of heart.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, he decided not to invade Russia. In the early summer of 1941 the Germans and Russians, out of the blue, signed a peace treaty. And that was the very same year that Paul Kramer came to public attention as Hitler’s deputy. That was an incredible and very sudden change of heart. Because it was well known that Hitler despised the Russians, Stalin, communists. We all thought they were the next on his hit list.’

  ‘Do you think it was Kramer who changed his mind?’

  Wallace nodded. ‘Yes… yes, absolutely. I think Kramer had Hitler’s complete attention from the very first moment they met; he became his closest adviser, his deputy. And then three years later that sly dog Kramer kicked that crazy old lunatic Hitler out of power.’

  Liam looked at Wallace. ‘See, where I’ve come from – the future, the story I was told is different. This Hitler fella stayed in power and he went and lost that world war. Died in a bunker, if I recall correctly. Took his own life, I think. No mention of a Kramer.’

  Wallace looked at him incredulously. ‘And you’re saying in your history books there’s no Paul Kramer?’

  Liam nodded. ‘As far as I know.’

  Wallace stared at him, struggling to believe such craziness. ‘Good God, if only that were so,’ he replied, shaking his head. ‘The world has watched that man with bated breath. He’s never put a foot wrong. He’s a genius and a madman. We’ve watched his empire grow stronger and stronger, his military technology become so much better than ours. An ever-increasing threat to America over the last fifteen years.’

  Wallace puffed air into his cold hands. ‘But we thought – we hoped – he’d leave us alone over here. There was a hope that Kramer was finally ready to sign a truce between the Greater Reich and America. That the cold war between us was over.’ Wallace sighed. ‘Turns out we were fooled.’

  Liam watched a couple of armed guards patrol the outside of the perimeter fence nearby, their black uniforms and death’s-head insignia covered by thick winter capes.

  Kramer? Is it him? Is he from the future?

  Liam shivered inside his blanket. ‘Listen, it’s just possible this Kramer is someone like me… another time traveller.’

  Wallace laughed. ‘Look, your story is getting too far-fetched, kid. Even for me.’

  ‘Oh, I’m quite serious.’

  Wallace made a face. ‘Back there in the White House, I thought you and your buddy were maybe Secret Service guys. That maybe there was something special or secret about you two. Now –’ he shook his head – ‘now… I’m sorry, I’m just thinking you’re some crazy kid with a little too much imagination.’

  ‘I’m telling you, time travel is possible.’

  ‘Then, you know what? Why don’t you go make a time machine and kill Kramer all by yourself?’ Wallace scoffed. He looked like he’d finally had enough of Liam’s crazy story.

  Liam sighed. ‘I’m just a dumb ship’s steward. Or at least I was. Anyway, even if I had the brains to actually make a time machine, I’d need to know where and when to go… to the very first moment Kramer entered your history.’

  Wallace shook his head. ‘Well, everyone knows that – except you, I suppose.’

  ‘Uh? What do you mean?’

  ‘There’s an account of Hitler’s very first encounter with him. It’s in Hitler’s second autobiography, Mein Sieg… My Victory, the one he published in 1944, just before Kramer ousted him.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘It was April 1941. It’s a well-known encounter. He describes Kramer as a messenger from God, an angel. Divine intervention, he called it. In his book he tells how Kramer arrived in the dark of a wintry night at the notorious Eagle’s Nest. The night of the fifteenth of April, if my memory serves me well.’

  Liam felt his heart pounding.

  Oh my… that could be it. The time and place we should have gone to.

  Wallace turned to go, then stopped. His gaunt face smiled, teeth showing through his dark beard. ‘I guess I’d like to believe in your story, kid, that there’s a better history out there somewhere.’

  ‘There is!’

  He laughed, puffing a cloud of breath before him. ‘Well, let me know when you find it, eh?’

  Liam watched the man turn and go, feet crunching across the snow, huddled in his own grey blanket. A bleak figure. As Wallace merged with the other prisoners, huddling for warmth, Liam’s mind turned to a possibility, a ray of hope. If he could only get that information to Foster and Maddy… that particular place and date.

  Perhaps they’d also stumbled across this information somehow – this supposed inspirational meeting of Kramer and Hitler. Perhaps Bob had made it back through the scheduled portal and right now he and Foster were on their way back to put things right. Back to 1941 to find this Kramer.

  And to kill him.

  It was a hope, wasn’t it? Something for him to hang on to.

  CHAPTER 55

  1956, comman
d ship above Washington DC

  Karl Haas smartly saluted the two SS Leibstandarte standing guard either side of the doors to the Führer’s observation deck. They snapped crisply to attention, and then swung open the double doors for him.

  He proceeded down the oak-panelled passageway towards the second, inner, doors leading on to Kramer’s extravagantly decorated quarters, the heels of his black leather jackboots no longer clacking noisily on metal plating, but softly thudding against the luxuriously thick carpet.

  What is wrong with Paul?

  Karl was becoming concerned with his leader. In the last couple of months, since their final assault on Washington and the taking of the White House, Kramer had become very distracted. It was becoming increasingly difficult to convince him to attend the weekly situation briefings with the regional Gauleiters and invasion fleet’s senior commanders. And when he did turn up he appeared not to be listening.

  It was even getting harder for Karl to see his old friend alone. With increasing regularity it seemed, Kramer insisted he was far too busy to see anyone.

  What is wrong with him? Surely not that body?

  The worst it could possibly mean is that some future agent had tried and failed to get to Kramer. A failed assassination attempt, nothing more.

  And the rest of the news was all good. Back home in Europe the people of Greater Germany were ecstatic with the newsreels they were watching in their cinemas. Footage of their invasion forces marching proudly through the streets of New York, Washington, Boston. Some of that good cheer was evident even among the provinces of Britain and France… who, despite being conquered over a decade ago, had come to realize the Führer was a good man, intent on uniting all people, not enslaving them.