“You wish your planet to be free of our influence?”
“Yes.” Matt finished his pitch by lowering his head as a sign of respect. “But until then, I am your tool. I am your loyal soldier.”
After a long moment of icy wind whipping over the vast surface, the obelisk suddenly descended into the ground, disappearing like a retracted switchblade.
Matt looked down to see the surface underneath him gently rippling and undulating like a puddle of water. Something began to quickly spread up his left arm, creeping up the sleeve of his jacket, some type of inky-black substance, until, without warning, his entire arm was seized with white-hot pain. Thinking his proposal was rejected, he screamed, trying to pull his immobilized arm out of the puddle, but it was futile. “No! Please— what’s happening?” Matt’s eyes darted around the vast open space like a trapped animal until the substance began to dissipate. He could feel his arm loosening, like a resin object breaking free of its cast. He yanked his arm out of the puddle and pulled up his sleeve to reveal a black, featureless device locked around the contours of his forearm, spanning the length of his wrist to his elbow.
The Combine had just fitted him with a time band. They had accepted his offer. Matt was in business.
Back on Earth, Dan, Jensen, and Ally were still engaged in a fierce, but ultimately hopeless battle with the Whitescreecher nest.
Across the room, Trey suddenly appeared, descending the stairwell, his weapon firing as he entered the chamber. “Jesus, what the… they’re everywhere! Covering fire!”
Unable to see behind him. a creature loomed from the shadows.
Ally saw it moving on him, but it was too late. “Trey, lookout! Behind you!”
The attack was sudden. As Trey spun around to fire, the Whitescreecher leaped onto him, and in a blinding, ripping motion, completely disemboweled him. These creatures attacked with a ferocious, unnatural speed that was impossible to counter. It only took a few seconds to end Trey’s life. He died confused.
“No!!!” Jensen screamed as he continued firing, rushing over to save his fallen friend, who was now staring up lifelessly at him. The creature paused its frenzied feeding of Trey’s innards and pivoted to Jensen. The peppering of plasma fire only seemed to agitate the creature, not injure it. It lunged forward and swatted at Jensen with its talons, sending him twenty feet into the air. He landed hard; his shoulder, along with several ribs shattered as he agonizingly gasped for air.
Ally saw the creature now scuttling towards Jensen and loaded her last arrow - a special one fitted with an explosive tip. She aimed and fired.
The Whitescreecher heard it whisking through the air and darted out of the way, the arrow just missing it by inches. The wall behind the creature erupted into a ball of fire, causing it to screech and scurry off into the darkness.
Dan reached Jensen and pulled him up, but he wailed in pain. “Just leave me, man. I’m toast. My shoulder is out—my ribs are all broken and fucked up—.”
“Stop your whining, Jensen,” Dan hissed as he swapped out his ammo cartridge for a fresh one.
“I’m serious, man. Forget me. Go cover Ally. She needs help.”
As Dan reloaded, he glanced over to see Ally was now backed up against a wall, firing her blaster. The ferocious battle had just grown a lot worse as several more creatures emerged into the chamber. He spun around to Jensen and met his eyes. “You stay alive, Jensen That’s an order. You hear me?”
Still gasping for air, Jensen gave Dan a fatalistic smile, his teeth bloody. “Just another day in hell, right?”
Ally kept firing as one of the creatures raged towards her. These things took a lot of punishment before dying. Her aim was surgical as her rounds cracked into its strangely elongated forehead. She was purposely avoiding its armored chest area, but it made no difference, as its entire body seemed to be re-enforced with some type of hardened exo-bone or cartilage.
Click-click!
“Shit!” Ally growled as she skillfully ejected her spent plasma magazine and fished out a new one from her supply pouch.
But the creature was almost on her now, readying itself to lunge. That’s when Dan brazenly tackled the godawful thing to buy Ally some much-needed time. Both went tumbling across the ground. Dan spun to Ally. “Get outta here! Go!”
“No! Dan!!!”
As the Whitescreecher scrambled on top of Dan, he raised his arms defensively. The creature’s double-jointed jaws distending bizarrely then clamped down on his left hand, ripping it off in one clean motion. Arterial blood sprayed wildly as Dan screamed.
Wheezing in agony from his injuries, Jensen watched as two more emerged from the shadows and began to circle him, closing in for the kill. He drew his sidearm and checked his magazine. He had a few rounds left. He smacked it back in and took aim at the nearest one, but then something overcame him. A change of mind. He raised the weapon and pressed it against the side of his head. The creatures saw the maneuver and hissed. Dan grinned defiantly at them. “Yeah, fuck you too. I’m the one who decides how it happens, not you. Adios.”
Bam!
Ally heard the shot, but she had her own problems to deal with. More Whitescreechers had joined the pack and were moving in on her. She continued firing despite their advance, mentally counting down her rounds, until on the very last one, she placed the blaster underneath her chin, wincing as the hot barrel began to scorch her skin. She closed her teary eyes and began to put pressure on the trigger.
Before she could fully depress it, a thundering and relentless barrage of plasma fire suddenly cleaved the horde. It pounded them like artillery fire. The Whitescreechers broke formation and scattered throughout the room as the rounds continued to rake them. Some were killed, but the others, stunned and wounded, disappeared into the shadowy recesses of the chamber.
Frozen with shock, Ally saw her father appear from behind, wielding two assault rifles he had acquired from the half-eaten remains of Jensen and Trey. He tossed the one rifle that was empty and slipped the other over his shoulder. “Time to leave,” he said, bending down to take her hand. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
Ally could only stare up at him, completely shell-shocked. “Where did you go?” she asked wearily, now noticing the strange black device peering out from the sleeve of his jacket.
“I’ll explain later. We need to—” Matt paused, whirling around to see a fresh resurgence of Whitescreechers approaching again. They had regrouped and were now circling them, closing in for another attack. Meaner, angrier, and now privy to Matt’s diminished firepower. Matt swung back to Ally and grabbed her by the shoulders, kneeling in front of her. “This is going to feel weird, but whatever happens, just know that I’m with you.”
Before Ally was afforded the time to respond, the device on Matt’s arm began to shimmer. Then, all sound in the room was sucked out as if they’d suddenly entered a vacuum.
The last thing Ally saw before disappearing was the Whitescreechers cautiously retreating from the pulse of electric-blue light that was radiating from Matt’s left arm.
Thirteen
Ally’s eyes jerked open, gasping at the sudden sensation of something very cold pressed against her cheek. It had caused the entire left side of her face to go numb. She began to breathe through the maelstrom of pain that was flooding her body. Wearily raising her head, she saw Matt’s blurry figure kneeling over her.
“I’m here, Ally. You’re safe,” he whispered.
His breath was visible, and it was clouding her vision as she tried to focus more on her surroundings. “Wha… what happened?” she blubbered, wincing as she pulled herself upright to gain some bearing, her eyes now adjusting to a quality of light she was not used to. She appeared to be in a wild, snow-capped forest. Upon realizing that, the cold wind suddenly bit into her, causing her to shiver. “Where am I?” she asked, plumes of hot breath chugging from her lips.
Matt gently helped her up some more. “We’re in a remote part of Romania. A few miles outside a village
called Breb.”
That only confused her more. She caught a glimpse of the time band attached to Matt’s arm, its black surface gleaming against the fading light of the day. “Wait… where are they?” Suddenly, she jolted to her feet, frantically looking around as if trying to locate a lost child. “Where are they?”
Matt put his arm out to try and calm her. “Ally.”
She turned to him, her eyes taking on the accusing glare Matt had grown accustomed to. “I said, where are they?”
“They’re gone.”
“No!” Ally snapped, losing balance in the snow, reeling as if being spun by a cold gust of wind. “No… you liar!”
“There was nothing you could do.”
“No!!!” she yelped, refusing to believe it.
“Ally, please, just listen to me,” Matt pleaded.
“You led us into that place! This is all your fault!” When she staggered backward, Matt tried to help her find balance, but she abruptly snatched her arm away, her senses overloaded from the surrounding landscape. She opened her mouth to speak, but all that came out was a scream. A scream from deep within. Shrill and hysterical, the only articulation she could find. Matt grabbed her and covered her mouth, fighting to stifle her, rocking to her convulsions as he wrapped her in a bear hug. They both collapsed to the ground, but Ally kept on screaming. A scream of everything. Until finally, she began to deflate in his arms, moaning with exhaustion from the fight, her eyes filled with heavy tears.
“It’s OK,” Matt said. “Let it all out.”
After a long moment, as if waking from a bad dream into a worse reality, she slumped deeper, her teary eyes now staring vacantly at the ground. “Why did you bring me here?”
Matt held her up and looked into her troubled eyes. “I wasn’t going to watch you die at the mercy of those things. I wasn’t going to give Cromwell the satisfaction. The only way I could save you was to bring you back with me.”
“Back?” she asked breathlessly, still recovering from her outburst.
“We’ve traveled back in time, Ally.” Matt’s voice was purposefully gentle, knowing the impact such a claim could have on the human mind.
She looked up at him, absorbing his claims with great difficulty, unable to form the words she needed.
Matt let go of her and rose to his feet, aware of the question she was silently asking. He looked out through the snow-flecked trees, watching daylight fade over the Romanian forest. “2023… we’re in the year 2023.”
Ally lulled forward and grunted with disbelief. “Oh, god… why?”
“This was the year Rossiter managed to mutate the virus. We’re here to stop that from happening.”
“And then what?”
Matt continued to survey the wooded terrain in silence, his eyes roaming across the carpet of snowy beech and scrub. He turned and crossed over to her again, dropped his rifle, and crouched beside her, clipping off some of his shoulder armor. “When I shoved you away from that altar, my shard - it activated something and sent me to a place… a world the Combine rule. I don’t know where it was, but it was their world. I’m not even sure if it was a world. But somehow, I managed to cut a deal with them.” Matt paused, allowing her to absorb that before continuing. “They showed me where he’s been hiding all these years, Ally. I know where the bastard is. That’s why we’re here.”
Ally cast a pensive look at her father, still trying to process everything. “Where?”
“An abandoned Monastery in the Carpathian Mountains, near Gerlachov Peak.” Matt watched as she shifted uneasily, her eyes filling with a mix of sadness and exhaustion. “Ally, I need your help. I can’t do this alone. If I don’t succeed in getting that virus before Rossiter mutates it, Cromwell wins. It’s as simple as that.”
Ally looked at the forest surrounding her. The stark beauty of this place was completely alien to her. She may as well have been standing on another planet. “We’ll never beat Cromwell.”
“We have to. Neither of us has a choice.”
Ally looked at him. “I did. Until you brought me here.”
“Your only choice was death.”
“At least it would have been on my terms.”
Matt blew out a defeated sigh and stood. Ally’s pig-headed stubbornness was a force to be reckoned with. “Back home at the farm, before I left you that morning, I was asked to fulfill a duty. I was asked to partake in something that had the potential to end the war once and for all.”
“That morning hasn’t even happened yet.”
“And I don’t want it to. That’s why we’re here – to change the future. This is not just my fight either, Ally. It’s yours too.”
There was a long silence as Ally peered through the trees to catch a ribbon of snow swirling off the peak of a distant mountain. She looked at the sky and inhaled deeply through her mouth, filling her lungs with clean air she had not tasted since she was a child. She then glanced down at the ground and gouged out a clump of snow with her fingers, holding it in the palm of her hand, studying it like some precious trinket. The sadness in her eyes had been replaced with an almost spellbound curiosity. “I’ve never touched snow before...” She idly rubbed the melting snow between her fingers then pivoted to study the time band protruding from Matt’s jacket sleeve. “They gave you that thing?”
Matt looked down at the strange device that was clamped around his arm, pulling his sleeve up to give Ally a better look. “Yeah, it’s some type of quantum displacement device.”
“How do you get it off?”
Still examining the device, Matt shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ll worry about that when I get to it.”
“We can jump to any year we choose?”
“Not exactly. The device is specifically tailored to this mission with pre-determined dates. We get three more jumps. That’s it.”
“Why only three?”
“That’s all that’s required. Besides, the further you go back or forward, the more taxing it is on the body. Jumping can have irreversible effects on tissue matter. That pain you felt after we arrived here, that was nothing compared to longer jumps. It’s way too dangerous to have unlimited access.”
“I thought the USC had something similar in operation.”
“They did… or will. But that device will be limited in its scope. They also couldn’t figure out how to travel forward in time.”
“So, assuming we pull this off - what’s the third jump?”
“Home.”
“Which one?”
Matt hesitated before answering. “Whichever one you prefer.”
“Jesus, don’t put that on me.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s not fair. Besides, there’s a whole lot of surviving we need to do first…” Ally trailed off, touching her stomach as if suddenly realizing how famished she was. “And that’s going to be extremely difficult with no food.”
“Yeah… that part’s gonna be a little tricky without any money.”
“I’m sure we’ll find something if we search the town.”
“Ally, I have to warn you,” Matt cautioned. “The food here will be a lot different from what you’re used to.”
“Then what do you suggest?”
“Maybe just stick to fruit and vegetables, assuming we can locate any.” Matt began peeling off the rest of his combat armor. “We also need to stash our armor. The townsfolk are going to immediately know we’re not local, but we can at least try and look like we belong to this time.” He clipped off his supply belt, unholstered his sidearm blaster, lifted his jacket, and concealed it down the small of his back. “And if they spot our weapons, it’s going to draw the kind of attention we don’t need. Keep your blaster concealed.”
Ally drew her blaster and checked her magazine. “Doesn’t matter, I’m out.”
Matt fished out a fresh magazine from a supply pouch in his armored vest and tossed it to her. “Make it count.” He then shoved the remaining magazines into his jacket.
Ally
followed suit, tearing off Velcro and unclipping parts of her body armor. Before dumping her belt and sidearm holster into the shallow hole Matt had dug, she tucked the magazine he had just given her into her jacket and pulled out a small rucksack from one of the supply pouches on her chest armor. She unfolded it and began stuffing some basic field and medical supplies into it. One of the most important things Liam taught her was to always be prepared, no matter where you were…
Or in this case when you were.
Fourteen
Matt and Ally forged their way out of the dense forest into a small clearing. It was getting colder, and Ally was beginning to weaken from her empty stomach. They continued to push further downhill until they found a narrow slither of road. The sun was sinking lower behind the mountains while they walked for another hour, until a small car approached from the opposite direction, its headlights barely managing to penetrate the chilly gloom.
Matt kept his head down as the old, beat-to-shit hatchback passed them. He caught Ally turning to watch it disappear around a bend in the road. Even as a child, she had never seen a vehicle like this before. Despite its size, it still seemed ancient and cumbersome, with its internal combustion engine, guzzling gasoline and spewing noxious fumes from its rear exhaust. She was completely fascinated by the way it moved and sounded. Everything in this world, old and new alike, would seem fascinating. Matt knew the strange detachment one felt from experiencing time travel. There was a heightened sense of remote observation – like you were watching another life unfold through a dream. It usually faded after a day or so, but it was an unusual sensation.
They pressed on until they reached the outskirts of Breb. When they caught sight of a decrepit old farmhouse, they crossed the road to get a closer look.
The property was nestled among thick rows of beech and Pedunculate oak. There was a faint light emanating from a single window at the rear of the house.
The Revered Page 10
