by Darrell Pitt
‘Okay,’ Old Chad nodded. ‘Now I’m convinced. Only I could be that painful.’
‘We’ve got to find Axel and Ebony, and return to our time,’ Brodie said.
‘That’s easier said than done.’
‘Why?’
Their older selves exchanged glances. ‘It’s a long story,’ Old Chad said. ‘We had a falling out and things have never been the same since.’
‘So you know where he is?’
‘We can contact him,’ Old Brodie said, sighing. ‘But we haven’t spoken for years.’
Old Chad tapped a communicator badge on his chest.
‘We’re coming out,’ he said. ‘Turn off the VRG.’
‘The VRG?’ Chad said.
The scenery of hills and fields went dark. Old Brodie opened the door and motioned them outside. Instead of open sky, they saw a black ceiling. Blank walls surrounded them. Even the outside of the cabin appeared unfinished, like scenery on a movie set.
‘This is the VRG,’ Old Chad said. ‘Virtual Reality Generator.’
‘None of this is real?’ Brodie asked.
‘We’re fifty feet underground,’ Old Brodie said. ‘There are probably places like this left on Earth, but this isn’t one of them.’
‘One thing’s real,’ Old Chad said. ‘This is Tanya.’ He studied their faces for a moment before continuing. ‘She’s our daughter.’
Chapter Thirty
We were fine until we entered the atmosphere.
Traveling in silence, I was thinking about the space station and all the people who had died so we could retrieve the temporal resonators. I knew it was necessary, but I couldn’t help thinking they had families waiting for them. Families that would never see them again.
I tried to drive the horror of it away. This is a brutal time. I could understand why Old Axel wanted James Price dead. All this could be avoided by killing one person. Was one life too much to pay for peace?
‘I’m getting some blips on radar,’ Old Axel said. ‘Some Agency ships are closing in on us.’ He swore. ‘I knew this was too easy.’
I shot a glance at Ebony.
Too easy. Sure.
Accelerating, he brought us in over North America, but it was obvious we weren’t going to make it back to the East Coast. Old Axel took us into a sharp dive, heading into the heart of the country; the enormous storm that dominated the mid-west. Old Axel had referred to it earlier as The Eye. The closer we went, the more it resembled one. What would have been the white of the eye—the sclera—was relatively calm, but The Eye’s cornea churned with swirling yellow fog that bubbled and frothed like a whirlpool.
Perhaps the most frightening part was the The Eye’s iris. Like a human iris, it was black. Dead black. Nothing within it moved at all. I dreaded to think what—if anything—existed in that terrible darkness. If anything could exist in it.
The storm was like the shifting layer of a cake. At our altitude we could still see clear sky, with Agency ships on the horizon like a school of silver fish. Below us lay the biggest storm in history.
‘There are twelve Agency ships closing in on us,’ he said. ‘Any second—’ The ship jolted. ‘They’re firing.’
‘I can deal with them,’ I said. Taking on twelve Agency ships wouldn’t be easy, but it wasn’t impossible either. ‘Open the rear hatch.’
‘No.’ The ship shuddered again. ‘I can’t afford for us to get separated.’
We were east of The Eye’s cornea; Illinois or Missouri, in our time. Descending, the fog swallowed us as effectively as if we had been eaten by a monster. Nicotine colored clouds rushed by us as we dropped. Old Axel watched his controls intently, flying by instruments only.
He slowed the vessel and I began to make out shapes in the fog. A skyscraper. A bridge. We cruised low over the ground as the fog rushed by. Finally he landed the vessel with barely a bump. He was the best pilot I had ever seen.
We looked out at the storm. The freakish yellow wind may as well have been a curtain. It was impossible to see anything man-made or otherwise. We may have been in a desert, but I really had no idea.
‘They won’t follow us into the fog,’ Old Axel said. ‘Sensors don’t work in the fog. Nothing works.’
‘This storm—’ Ebony started.
‘It’s not a storm,’ he said. ‘Because storms don’t last forever. It’s a permanent fixture thanks to James Price. We’re lucky it hasn’t destroyed the planet.’
‘What do we do?’
‘We wait it out.’ An explosion sounded somewhere off to our left. Old Axel swore. ‘They’re bombing the surface. Probably hoping to make a lucky hit.’
‘What if a bomb hits us?’ Ebony asked.
He looked worried. ‘They’re using dense particle charges. A direct hit would rupture the hull. It might even destroy the ship.’ Another explosion shook the vessel. It seemed to come from right in front of us. ‘We should sit tight.’
‘You can’t just use the fog as cover and fly us out of here?’
‘The engines wouldn’t take the constant battering.’
‘Maybe I should just fly up there and—’ I began.
‘And take on a dozen ships? Don’t be insane.’ He went to the rear and produced three suits. Yellow in color, they looked like the sort of gear a decontamination worker would wear. ‘Put these on. They’ll protect you from the fog in case the hull is breached.’
‘How long will we wait?’ I asked.
‘It could be a few days,’ Old Axel said. ‘I’ve been through this once before. We were stuck here a week.’
‘A week?’ Ebony said. ‘I hope there’s a toilet on board.’
‘It’s safer to go in your suit.’
‘Go in my suit...’
‘I’m joking.’
‘Oh...yeah...ha ha.’
Yep, my future self was a funny guy all right. I tried to imagine spending a week stuck in this ship dressed like a bowl of custard.
Oh joy.
So we waited. The boom of the exploding bombs diminished as the ships moved to new territory. Then just as we thought they were gone for good, they returned with a renewed vigor.
I fell asleep. It was almost impossible to tell night from day in this place. Old Axel powered down the craft apart from a few lights. It was continually murky outside. At one point I awoke and found myself looking out at darkness. For one horrifying moment I thought we had drifted into the center of The Eye. Then I heard the crash of distant thunder; the bombs were still falling.
When I opened my eyes next I saw Old Axel had heated some food rations. He and Ebony had their hoods pushed back. I did the same as he handed me a plate. I sniffed it cautiously. It looked like beef. Smelt like beef.
I ate some. Tasted like...
‘Is this beef?’ I asked.
‘No. It’s a meat substitute. The Agency has farms in Australia that supply the entire planet.’ Old Axel flashed me a rare smile. ‘Sure beats that Tagaar food. What was that stuff called. K’trash?’
Ebony and I laughed.
‘K’tresh,’ Ebony said.
‘I remember it fondly,’ he said. ‘I seem to recall it tasted like hot seaweed.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ve never eaten hot seaweed.’
I hadn’t meant to make a joke, but the others laughed. I did too when I realized how funny it sounded.
We seemed to be getting along okay. I wanted to ask Old Axel more about the future. More about James Price. More about everything. But there was something I was especially curious about.
‘What did you mean when you said we would take revenge on those who have wronged us?’ I asked. ‘You meant the Agency, don’t you?’
His face blackened and he looked down into this food to hide it. ‘Don’t you worry about that,’ he said, pushing his food around. ‘Everything will sort itself out if you remove Price from the equation.’
I didn’t know what he was trying to hide, but he had a terrible secret. He didn’t say anything for a long
time. Just kept eating. Finally he put down the plate.
‘You don’t know who your enemies are when you’re younger,’ he said, staring into space. ‘You think you can trust everyone.’ He broke from his reverie. ‘That’s why I trust you. Because you’re me.’
‘You can trust Ebony too,’ I pointed out.
‘Of course,’ he said, forcing a smile. ‘Ebony too.’
It felt like the temperature had dropped about ten degrees. We finished eating and resealed our suits. The bombing was drawing closer again. It sounded like there was a pattern to the explosions. The ground shuddered with each detonation. Old Axel looked up, his eyes narrowing.
Another blast, closer than ever, shook the ground.
Pulling down my mask, I formed an air shield around the three of us—and not a moment too soon—as the next bomb landed directly on the ship, tearing it to pieces.
Chapter Thirty-One
My shield saved us, but it was like being in a roller coaster ride with no restraining bar. We were thrown violently into the tempest. I struggled to keep the shield together. When it became obvious we had survived, I pushed up my hood and re-secured it. I started breathing again, but the smell of the storm was in my suit. It was toxic, like burnt rubber. The full blast of the storm hit us.
Ebony grabbed my arm. ‘Holy hell!’ she said. ‘Are you all right?’
I coughed. ‘Kind of,’ I said. ‘The smell—’
‘—is revolting,’ Old Axel finished. ‘I know.’
Another explosion tore the landscape apart, shaking the ground. We saw the flash of it briefly before the storm whisked it away. My eyes settled on Old Axel. He looked the most banged up of the three of us. I actually felt sorry for him.
‘I can fly us out,’ I said. ‘If I get us above the clouds—’
‘No. That’s plain suicide.’
I bristled. ‘I know it’s a lot of ships,’ I said, ‘but I can get us back to Manhattan. I can fly at—’
‘I now. Mach Six.’ He eyed me carefully. ‘You have to pick your fights. This is a time to hide, not to take on the Agency head on.’
‘So what will we do?’
He nodded into the wind. ‘We walk.’
Old Axel picked up a piece of electrical conduit from the ship and tied us together. Consulting a small compass built into the wrist of the suit, he pointed into the swirling storm.
‘East,’ he said.
The ground felt like desert underfoot. In fact I had just about made up my mind we had accidentally landed in Death Valley when a multistory structure loomed in the mist. An office building—or what remained of it. All the glass was missing, leaving only the skeletal structure. In a brief break in the storm I saw another behind it. And another.
Old Axel motioned to a scarred sign.
St Louis Bank, Missouri.
‘We’ve got some distance to cover,’ he said. ‘We’ll take a break first.’
I nodded. He led us to another building, a single story structure with a huge sign scoured clean by the driving wind. The glass in the sliding doors at the front had broken long ago. We passed through into what was once a supermarket, the fog moving about the interior like restless ghosts.
‘We should rest,’ Old Axel said.
We made our way to the back. Finding a door marked ‘Staff’, we entered to find the skeletons of two people around a table. Possibly even more disturbing was what lay between them; two glasses, an empty bottle of scotch and a handgun.
Old Axel swept their bodies to one side, untied the rope and went to the door. ‘I’ll be back in a few minutes.’
‘Rough day at the office?’ I asked Ebony, after he disappeared.
‘The roughest.’ She collapsed into the nearest chair. ‘I think I slept last night, but I’m not sure.’
‘I’m not even sure last night was last night. It’s hard to tell in this storm.’
Old Axel appeared with an armful of rotting deck chairs. ‘These were on special in aisle seven.’
Ebony laughed. It broke the tension and Old Axel smiled at her. ‘I also got us some food,’ he said. ‘We have to be ready for the days ahead.’
‘How do we eat through the suits?’ I asked.
Old Axel pulled out a device from a compartment in the suit. It opened up into a huge bag he called the Enclosed Habitation Environment. EHE for short. It closed us off from the outside world. Adjusting a filter on it, he told us to remove our helmets. The air smelt okay. Not great, but good enough.
A few minutes later we were eating beans straight from a can. It tasted like one of the best meals of my life. I started to laugh.
‘What’s so funny?’ Ebony asked.
‘Look at us.’ I couldn’t stop. ‘We’re living inside a garbage bag.’
‘It could be worse,’ Ebony said. ‘Someone could fart.’
Even Old Axel started laughing.
‘I’m serious,’ Ebony said, struggling to keep a straight face. ‘It could kill us.’
After the meal we donned our helmets again, deflated the EHE and laid out on the three deck chairs. I was asleep almost immediately, awaking some time later to Old Axel shaking my shoulder.
‘Come on, sleeping beauty,’ he said. ‘We need to get moving.’
Ebony was still asleep. He shook her into wakefulness. We had another meal and prepared ourselves for travel. Much to our amazement, Old Axel had already built a makeshift trailer from a shopping trolley, but he had swapped the wheels with bicycle rims. I had no idea how he had put the thing together; he must have been up for hours while we slept.
‘You’re a resourceful person,’ Ebony told him.
Old Axel winked at me. ‘We are.’
We set off into the storm. Within minutes we had assumed the same pattern as the previous day. Step after step through the never ending tempest. I began to wish I had not been so committed to my ideals when Old Axel showed up in the time machine. None of this would have happened if I had just agreed to kill James Price.
But that would have been morally wrong. I had known that when I attacked the Russian Premier. That would have been wrong too. Murder was a crime punishable by jail, and with good reason too. Society needed laws or there would be chaos.
I started counting my steps. When I got to one hundred, I started again. It was over eight hundred miles to New York. There would be a lot of counting. I saw a road sign. Interstate 64. Abandoned vehicles lined the road, skeletons a few feet from the cars. I wondered how the end had come for these people. Maybe they were trying to escape the yellow gas when it suffocated them.
All this could be stopped if we killed James Price.
The storm cleared momentarily, revealing a vast rolling plain ahead. My stomach sunk. The highway wasn’t visible. Here and there ancient buildings littered the landscape.
Eight hundred miles.
How the hell would we ever survive it?
I dearly wanted to take to the skies. We could be in New York in a matter of minutes if Old Axel allowed it. I would suggest it, but I’d wait a few hours first. He seemed obsessed with keeping me safe, but walking through this storm wasn’t the way to do it. He might realize that after a while.
The ground shook. I looked down as a large crack appeared. I could not have been more surprised if an alien ship had landed and John F Kennedy had stepped out.
What the—?
‘Run!’ Old Axel yelled.
We started forward, but we were already too late. The ground beneath the trailer collapsed first and it vanished from sight. Ebony was next. Then Old Axel. We were still tied to each other. I tried activating my powers, but without success. They would not function properly in the suit. I fell to my knees and made a desperate grab for a tree root, but it snapped in my hand. The last thing I saw was the murky yellow orb of the sun. Then the edge of the ground broke away and I followed the others into darkness.
Chapter Thirty-Two
I slammed into a pile of black dust. It was like landing on a bunch of pillows as it
flew in all directions. For a few seconds I couldn’t tell up from down. I swam in it. Then I dragged myself free, wiped my hood and peered around.
Ebony was clambering about on the ground a few feet away. It took me a moment to understand she was looking for her hood. I saw it almost immediately. I disconnected myself from our rope system and retrieved it for her. She reconnected it to her suit and I heard her trying to catch her breath.
I realized what had happened: Ebony had saved us. Falling through the hole, she’d dragged off her helmet and turned the air beneath us into carbon dust. We fell about twenty feet, crashed into it and sunk into its depths.
I asked if she was okay.
‘Yeah,’ she said, coughing. ‘I inhaled a few mouthfuls, but I’m all right.’
I went over to Old Axel who had not fared so well. He had been knocked unconscious by the fall; his head had hit the trolley. I studied his face. At least he was breathing.
‘Where are we?’ Ebony asked. ‘What is this place?’
Storefronts were on both sides of us. A jewelry store. A clothing shop. The center aisle ran away in both directions. Above us was a huge ceiling made from transparent plastic.
‘It’s a shopping mall,’ I said. ‘The dust must have covered it over the years. Our weight made the ceiling collapse.’
The wind and the fog screamed over the hole in the roof. Strangely, the air here seemed more breathable, but I wasn’t about to test that hypothesis. It was eerily silent after the endless roar of the storm.
‘Hello!’
The voice rang out from the gloom where we saw a small man with a torch moving towards us. He waved at us and I cautiously returned the greeting. I could see a thin face, long hair and dark bushy eyebrows. He was not wearing a helmet.
‘Visitors!’ he said, drawing near. ‘We haven’t had visitors is such a long time.’
‘We fell through your ceiling,’ Ebony said.
‘So I see. And where did all this coal come from?’
There seemed little point in lying. The man seemed harmless enough. Ebony explained we were mods, trying to make our way back to New York. The man nodded thoughtfully.
