Tempus: The Phoenix Man

by Matt Hilton

  Bowlam led the way to where they’d confronted some of Mina’s people. The stench of gunsmoke and blood was redolent in the corridor. Bowlam indicated a door that led through to the foyer. ‘We killed one of them in there. The cop who snatched Miller from his car.’ Then he pointed a little deeper along the left branch of the corridor. ‘We were heading that way when the sneaky bastard got Brent. I chased him back this way.’

  Rembrandt moved past him, and saw a figure crumpled in the corridor. Brent Walker had indeed been killed. The top of his skull was a mess, with blood and brain tissue adhering to his fair hair. A fan of similar gore had spurted up the wall opposite a doorway, showing from where his hidden killer had fired. Rembrandt’s eyes pinched. Not so much at the sight of his dead friend, but that the body was still there.

  Why hadn’t Walker been jumped out, back to the Tempus facility, as he had when he’d stepped on the fragmentation grenade in the British Museum? The moment the tracking device implant showed that his life had been extinguished, it should have kicked in the emergency protocol that Rembrandt had agreed with Terrence Semple when accepting this mission. He rubbed a hand across his chin, frowning.

  Yet he had to accept that he did not fully understand the process. On his return trip to the British Museum, there had been evidence of his eviscerated corpse: there were infinite time-lines, infinite versions of each of them, so his current form was how he’d been split-seconds before the grenade went off. Perhaps Semple had come through and pulled Walker back to safety. Maybe the corpse here was residue only, a shadow of a severed time-line, and that decades in the future, in that other reality, Walker had just snapped to awareness in that glowing chamber unaware that here his brains decorated the wall. Rembrandt recalled that after he was saved by Elizabeth Heller’s careful manipulation of the timelines, his eviscerated corpse had left its trace both in the museum and – other later versions of him - in the transvection chamber. After he himself had saved Jamal Dhand, the decapitated corpse from Jamal’s first incarnation hadn’t lain where the scavengers had tossed it down the stairs into the crypt, because he’d averted death before it occurred, thus changing the events in that timeline. Jesus, if he thought about it too hard it would bring on a migraine.

  Rembrandt turned and clapped a reassuring hand on Bowlam’s shoulder. ‘Don’t worry, they’ll do right by him back at base. Brent will be fine. Trust me, OK?’

  Bowlam wasn’t convinced. He looked down at the body of his friend, and shook his head. ‘I’m not leaving him here like this.’

  ‘No. We take him with us. If Kwolek and Ox have done as instructed, they’ll have the van ready.’

  ‘Did you get the others, Chief? How’s Jamal?’

  ‘We’re done here,’ Rembrandt said, ‘and Jamal’s fine. He’s with Miller and the prisoner.’

  ‘Prisoner?’

  ‘The woman that led this group.’

  ‘I thought that our orders were that everyone had to die? You’ve taken a prisoner?’

  ‘Things have changed. Our priority was to stop the assassination of Ronald Reagan. We’ve done that, and hopefully that has ended the effects of the breaches in twenty-eighteen. But it’s important to ensure that a contingency plan isn’t kicked into motion. The group behind the assassination is still out there and there’s nothing to say that by us altering the future, something else won’t happen to put it back on route again.’ Rembrandt held up a hand. ‘Don’t ask. It’s all to do with temporal paradoxes and other bullshit to do with the manipulation of the timelines. We have to stay here until we pass the deadline and make sure that no other attempt is made on Reagan before we can be sure that the future’s been averted.’

  Bowlam shook his head in dismay. ‘What happens to us then, Chief?’ He placed a hand on his chest, almost as if he was checking for a heartbeat. ‘We’re a product of that future. The nuclear war made us what we turned out. If the war doesn’t happen, what will that mean to us?’

  ‘Only time will tell, Rembrandt said, and he didn’t recognise the irony of his own words. ‘Now, come on. You get Brent’s legs; I’ll take the other end. All this shooting’s bound to attract attention. I don’t want to be here when the real police arrive.’

  Chapter 28

  April 5th 2018

  Inverness, Scotland

  ‘We should’ve taken the train like I said,’ Brian McNeill moaned as he leaned forward in the passenger seat of Alan Drury’s Land Rover. He braced his palms on the dashboard as the rugged vehicle drew to a halt.

  Beside him, Drury muttered under his breath, but it wasn’t at his companion’s constant whining. He’d done plenty complaining of his own, and was every bit as frightened as McNeill. His latest curse was because McNeill was correct: they should have taken the train south, and not relied on the roads. But they had missed the last train, and there were none heading back their way, so the roads it was. That was if the traffic ever got moving again. In front of them the A9 was full of vehicles, all of them stalled at some choke point beyond their line of vision. All roads out of Inverness were full to capacity with people fleeing after the call for an evacuation had gone out. Police, army, even the Royal Navy who were lifting evacuees from the dockside, all aided in the humanitarian effort to shift countless thousands of people out of harm’s way. It was even rumoured that the World Health Organisation were in town, but Drury had to take other people’s word on that because he hadn’t personally seen them.

  ‘Why have we stopped?” McNeill demanded. “What the hell has happened now?’

  ‘No idea,’ Drury said.

  In the back seat, Moira McNeill, Drury’s older sister and Brian’s wife, wound down her window and craned out for a better look. ‘I can see emergency lights,’ she reported.

  ‘Somebody must’ve crashed,’ McNeill said.

  ‘Hardly a surprise in this chaos.’ Drury couldn’t understand how, considering everyone had been forced to drive so slowly and all of them were heading in the same direction. Both sides of the road had been utilized in order to double its efficiency in funneling the evacuees south, and yet the flow of traffic on both sides had stalled equally.

  Other drivers were leaning heavily on their horns. Up ahead, some had alighted from their vehicles to stand with hands on hips as they tried to see what the hold up was. Some voices were raised in anger.

  ‘Look at those idiots,’ McNeill said. ‘They’re not helping getting out of their cars like that. All they’re doing is making things slower to get started again.’

  ‘Idiots,’ his brother-in-law agreed.

  Drury peered in his wing mirror, but it afforded little view and he craned around, trying to see past Moira, but their belongings stacked in the back of the car blocked any view of the road behind. He could determine enough that dozens of cars had stopped behind the Land Rover and already there was no hope of turning around and finding another route past the traffic jam. He swore loudly.

  Sirens howled. A police car zipped by, barreling down the hard shoulder, kicking up loose grit. It was followed seconds later by what was undoubtedly a military carrier. Drury got a brief look at soldiers in the rear of the truck. They sat on bench seats, wearing gas masks and holding rifles. An idling tour coach on their left side blocked his view of the truck as it continued past. Like many of the vehicles on the A9 the coach had been drafted into the evacuation effort, and through its windows he could make out the blurry shapes of people equally as anxious as he was to get moving again.

  ‘What the hell’s going on down there? Can you see anything, Moira?’ McNeill looked expectantly at his wife.

  Moira leaned further out the window, shaking her head. ‘I can’t see for the bend in the road. Those police and army lot are in a hurry to get there though.’

  ‘You’d better stay inside the car.’ Drury was fearful someone speeding out of Inverness might not react quickly enough to the stalled traffic and ram into the cars behind them. The domino effect might be enough to reach all the way to where they were wedge
d. Last he wanted was for his sister to get cut in half by flying metal. Actually, on reflection, the last he wanted was for any of them to be trapped here. He thumbed up the volume on the radio and listened again to the recorded message ordering an orderly evacuation from the threatened city. He could barely hear the announcement over his heartbeat pounding in his inner ears. Not that he required the words, only the urgent tone of the announcer. He’d heard the message enough times in the last few hours to recite it word for word: pity he didn’t believe the lies they were all being told.

  ‘Chemical spill, my arse.’ He’d listened as the initial reports of a chemical spill had come in, and at first accepted the news story. But since then – and the claim that the evacuation of Inverness was only a precautionary measure, due to the chemicals being carried in their direction by a weather front pushing across country – he’d gained an understanding that there was more to this than the authorities was letting on. The TV images he’d seen of helicopters being engulfed by a raging mass of airborne dirt told a different tale. He wondered if there had indeed been an accident, but one where a secret nuclear facility had gone into meltdown. The advancing clouds reminded him of old newsreel footage he’d seen from the first atom bomb tests.

  Another military truck roared past.

  ‘Can’t we follow them down the hard shoulder?’ McNeill wondered.

  ‘If we did we’d get a right bollocking,’ said Drury. ‘They need to keep that lane free for the emergency services.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem to bother those people in that Volvo.’

  Peeling out from behind their Land Rover, a family of four, parents and two kids, pulled on to the hard shoulder. The driver, a young man wearing spectacles, was shouting at the woman in the passenger seat. Drury gained the sense that she wasn’t happy with his injudicious manoeuvre, but that he couldn’t care less. The Volvo clipped the back end of their Land Rover as it pushed by. Drury swore, while McNeill tapped the side of his head and mouthed a curse at the bespectacled man. The man swore wildly in response: he was terrified for his family and would allow nothing to stand between them and safety.

  From nowhere came a third military truck. It was travelling so fast down the hard shoulder that the driver had no hope of stopping in time.

  Before the young father could gain any speed the truck rammed the Volvo, lifting the rear wheels off the road and flipping the car over in a graceless cartwheel. The Volvo smashed into the side of the coach. The car was of solid construction, yet it still twisted violently and some of its windows exploded outward. The side of the coach crumpled and screams of pain and fear rang out from those within. The driver of the truck tried to avoid a further collision, but there was little he could do but swerve further to the left, and that took the truck up an embankment, its large tyres churning earth that drummed down on the roof and windscreen of the Land Rover. Drury ducked out of reflex. By the time he lifted his head again the truck had swerved too far to the right, the result that it overbalanced and went on its side. The truck struck the far end of the coach, blasted through the thin aluminium skin and tore most of the front of the bus away. The truck continued to plough across the road and took out another two cars stalled a little beyond Drury’s vehicle. Dirt, smoke, and sparks were scattered everywhere and the noise was colossal, but that wasn’t all: evacuees had been thrown from the coach and lay on the road, or across the roofs of the two damaged cars. Men and women in military jumpsuits and gasmasks lay equally torn a little further on. The stench of spilled fuel, oil and blood wafted on the breeze.

  Inside the Land Rover, Drury’s ears were compressed. He could barely hear the horrified exclamations of his sister and brother-in-law. Stunned, he reached up and touched a raw spot on his forehead. His palm came away slick with blood. He blinked in astonishment at it, then up at the windscreen and saw a hole the size of a tennis ball had been punched through the glass. He searched in his lap and found a twisted bolt sheered from one of the colliding vehicles. He had no recollection of being hit by the missile. He wasn’t even sore. Not yet.

  ‘Oh, Jesus! Oh, Jesus,’ McNeill said, despite being a confirmed atheist. He clawed his way around to check on his wife, and Moira leaned forward and held him briefly before turning to her brother. ‘Oh, no, Alan…you’re bleeding!’

  ‘I…I’m OK.’ Drury was surprised to find he could hear once more. He wiped more blood from his brow. Compared to the people outside, his injuries were nothing.

  Evacuees were clambering from their vehicles. Some of them intended helping the injured, others were simply ghoulish. Without thinking over his reason, Drury also stepped out of the Land Rover. He stood surrounded by thin smoke, his ears pulsing to the clamour of voices, the ticking of engines, the dripping of liquid, both fuel and blood.

  The scene was one of carnage. Someone screamed thinly.

  It took Drury a moment or two to realise it was Moira.

  He spun and found his sister standing by the open rear door of the Land Rover. She had her hands cupped over her mouth in horror, but she wasn’t reacting to the scene of the collision laid out before Drury. She was peering back to the northwest, towards a towering mountain of ash and debris rising above their home city. Fire laced the columns of smoke, some in ribbons of blue or red or yellow, some in widening explosions as gas and fuel mainlines erupted. Detonations sounded, tremendous flashes of light, a devil’s idea of a firework celebration.

  The destruction of Inverness was total and almost instantaneous and it was enough to catch Drury’s own scream in his throat. Shock made him watch open-mouthed as a huge dome of fire rose above the near horizon as a fuel depot went up.

  His earlier suspicion that there was more to the supposed chemical spill was proven correct, yet it gave him little satisfaction; if anything the fact didn’t impinge in his thoughts. His mind was almost a total blank, consumed by the horror of what he witnessed.

  Drury was barely aware of the hands plucking at his jacket.

  Dumbly he turned from the approaching mountain of ash that now dominated the skyline and blinked at the face of his brother-in-law. McNeill’s features were stricken, pale.

  ‘We have to get way!’

  Drury heard the words but they meant little.

  There was no escaping this.

  Their route south was blocked; forest encroached to east and west – tinder for the wildfires - and the super-heated storm was bearing down on them from the north. But a factor of the human condition was the desire to live. Without any conscious sense of volition, Drury found himself scrambling past the wreckage, following McNeill and Moira through the twisted labyrinth of vehicles, skirting the dead and high-stepping over the clutching hands of the injured beseeching their assistance. Other evacuees joined in the stampede, many others now jumping from their cars to join the exodus. Drury felt himself battered by the shoulders of others forcing a path past him.

  In front of him Moira stumbled and fell against McNeill. The man was the one to fall and Moira paused to help him up. Drury was still in full flight and crashed into them. From behind them came the shouts of panicked humanity, and before any of them could find their feet they were pushed and jostled by the fleeing crowd. Drury felt a fist smack him in the back. Seconds later he took an elbow in his right eye socket. Indiscriminate about where they placed their feet, people clambered over him and his family members, some climbing over the parked cars to either side. Shouts and screams rang loud, but over the calamitous noise there came a high-pitched buzz.

  Some stragglers fought their way past the trio, and Drury was incensed enough to aim a kick at a set of fleeing legs. He missed, but it was a futile gesture anyway. He grabbed at Moira. Told her to run. His sister wouldn’t leave without her husband, and Drury pushed her on, helping McNeill to his feet.

  ‘I think I broke my ankle,’ McNeill gasped.

  ‘I’ll help you. We have to go.’

  ‘Aah! Fucking hell! I can’t put my weight on it.’ McNeill’s face was still pale, but now
it also shone with a layer of cold sweat. He chewed at his bottom lip in agony.

  Moira hadn’t run far. She came back, grabbing at her husband’s shoulder. Her eyes were wide, haunted, and Drury would swear he saw the reflection of the fiery pits of hell in them.

  ‘We have to help him,’ he said as he looped McNeill’s left arm over his shoulder. ‘Get his other arm, Moira. We have to get away now.’

  Moira shook her head. Drury read her expression. Trying to save their lives was pointless. But Drury wasn’t buying it. He wasn’t going to give up. Not while a breath still remained in his body. With McNeill leaning on him, he turned defiantly towards the raging storm bearing down on them. The noise had risen from a buzz to the keening of banshees, and beyond that screech followed the dull groan of the tortured land and the dull thuds of countless detonations. Drury’s mouth fell open as he craned back, trying to make sense of what he witnessed. But there was no sense to be made from what raced towards them. He saw the backmost cars of the jam picked up by the advancing storm front. They were sucked into the cloying muck, sparks and minor explosions marking their positions as they were borne high into the air. The cars were not the only things plucked from the road: those injured or killed in the collision were torn skyward, the coach, the Volvo, the military truck. Drury’s Land Rover bounced and jostled on its wheels, then it too was dragged into the heart of the raging wall of dirt. Even the very asphalt was ripped from the road surface.

  ‘Oh…’

  Drury had no other words.

  In the earth he experienced a tectonic shift as the ground itself buckled beneath him. On both sides abandoned vehicles bounced on their chassis’.