Someone was shouting the countdown.
“Five…four…three…”
She looked over her shoulder. If she succeeded, she’d never see Jack again. If she didn’t, she still wouldn’t see him again. He knew it, too. Their gazes met, clung, and then he smiled and gave her a thumbs up. She didn’t have a free hand, but she could nod. She even managed a smile for him.
“...two...one. Go…go…go,” the tech shouted.
She looked down and wished she hadn’t. The clouds were gone, replaced by what looked like a spinning, shining tornado. Oh, crap. She closed her eyes and stepped off the edge.
Chapter Four
London, 1942
Dusk made its way across the horizon, spreading a modest glow across a scene that was both familiar and stunningly alien. In the past weeks, she’d watched hours and hours of footage of war-time London, seen the vintage cars and clothing in a city in which many of the buildings were not that different from modern London. But most of that footage had been in black and white and grainy in texture. Even the color film had been degraded in quality. Now, in the midst of a thousand impressions her mind struggled to cope with, what stood out the most was the color. Vibrant, rich, alive and clear.
The street she’d arrived on was a quiet one and could be any street in England. The stone facades gleamed gold as the sun’s last rays tracked up them on the way to the other side of the world. The cars parked in front of her were straight out of a colorized Mrs. Miniver.
She turned slowly in a circle. The city had settled into night mode. Down the street, an older man carrying a briefcase let himself into one of the houses with his key. Across from her, a woman straight out of a forties movie stood on her stoop, smoking a cigarette with an air of waiting for something or someone. An ambulance rumbled past, an ancient precursor to the modern-day van with its square and clunky lines. The cross on the side was blood-red in a field of dirty white, giving it a worn, dispirited air. Mel caught a glimpse of weary, soot-covered faces in the front seat before it rounded a corner. The acrid smell of smoke drifted in the chilly air. She’d never smelled death, but at a primal level she recognized its scent in the air, too.
Mel looked higher, above the buildings, so old, so interesting, so postcard English. Against the skyline were ominous columns of smoke rising past thousands of barrage balloons, the helium-filled blimps suspended on cables above the city in a mostly futile effort to deter enemy aircraft. In the semi-silence she heard the rumble of many engines. She turned toward the sound and saw a sky that seemed filled with aircraft.
At first she wondered if it were the B-17s returning from the continent, but the silhouettes was wrong. With a sharp chill, she realized they were fighter craft, most likely heading toward the coast to intercept the enemy. What had been an intellectual exercise, thrilling tales of past glory, was now an ugly reality.
Holy, freaking crap. She was in wartime London. Jack had done it. He’d hurled her into the past.
Mel looked around and found the cigarette-smoking woman staring at her curiously. Mel ran a hand across her wildly tousled hair. Nothing like a spinning vortex to give a girl a bad hair day. It must look odd to the forties lady. She’d cut it short for her stint with the SEALs. No way to make it look forties in the short interval she’d had to prep for this…adventure in time. She smoothed down her clothes and gave the woman an over bright smile that she hoped looked friendly.
“What day is it, please ma’am?”
“You’re American,” the woman said, as if that explained everything. For her, maybe it did.
“Yes, yes I am,” Mel agreed. “It’s December, right?”
“It’s the seventeenth, Thursday the seventeenth.” The woman looked suspiciously at Mel as she started to turn away.
Mel didn’t blame her. “Thank you, thank you very much.” Three days until she had to fall out of the sky again. It wasn’t enough time and it was too much.
The woman paused, her expression softening. “You should get some shoes on those feet before you catch your death, love.”
“I’ll do that, thanks.” Mel could only imagine what the woman thought she’d been up to without her shoes. Now that it had been pointed out to her that she was shoeless, she couldn’t get at her shoes fast enough. She sat on a nearby step and dug them out of the bag she’d managed to hang on to. The suede of Gran’s old shoes was soft, but the shape and feel were odd and alien—perfect for her current reality. She tried standing up. Luckily the heels were square, but they were also higher than she was used to wearing. Her feet were happy not to be bare, but that probably wouldn’t last.
She found her hat next and gave it a shake to restore the shape, at least that’s what she hoped she did. She found the tag and then carefully settled it on her hair. She looked in the side window of a parked saloon car to see how she looked. The hat did make her look a bit less wild, but she had no clue if she looked right. Hats, other than the gimme variety, were way outside her experience.
In the fading light, with her face blurred by the glass, she could have been Gran looking out at her from an old photograph. With a jolt of shock, Mel realized that Gran was alive back in the States, and not just alive, but a young bride with a new son: Mel’s father.
“Whoa, that’s way too Back to the Future.” That’s when reality whacked her upside the head again. She was in the past. Her legs went weak and she had to lean on the saloon car she’d used as a mirror. The surface was cool, smooth and firm under her hand. It was real, amazingly real.
“Oh, I say, I just polished her,” a male voice said behind her.
Mel jumped and turned. “I’m so sorry.”
He was young and very British. Blonde and upscale, wearing civvies and leaning on a cane. His annoyed expression turned into pleased. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you. It’s just bloody hard keeping her clean, what with all the bloody bombing.”
It was a downside of bombing she hadn’t considered.
“She’s lovely.” Mel used the sleeve of Gran’s coat to rub away her fingerprints. “I am sorry.”
“You’re American.” His eyes opened wider. They were brown and very nice. His upper lip softened into a friendly, interested smile. Some things didn’t change. It was sort of comforting.
“And I’m afraid I’m turned around. Can you tell me which way the tube is from here?”
“I’ll show you,” he said. Mel opened her mouth to protest and he added, “I’m heading that way myself. No petrol to run the old girl. Rationing and all that.” He gallantly offered her his arm. Good manners required her to take it. Mel fell into step beside him, feeling very Greer Garson, only without the accent. Proximity and a slight evening breeze brought his aftershave, or whatever the British equivalent was, to her nostrils. It was clean and crisp and made a nice change from the other smells in the air.
“What brings you here?” he asked, as he steered her around a corner, listing a bit from his limp. Now she could see the tube entrance ahead of them, surrounded by sandbags. Across from it was an anti-aircraft gun, also surrounded by sandbags and buckets. She had to quell an impulse to ask him to take her picture in front of it. She wasn’t a freaking time tourist, well, she kind of was, but that didn’t mean she had to act like one.
“I’m a reporter,” Mel said, falling naturally into her cover story. It was, after all, true. “I’m here to do some stories on our troops and how they are adjusting to English life and the war.”
“Always wanted to visit the colonies,” her companion said, with a wicked grin.
Mel laughed, as she turned and held out her hand. “Thanks so much for showing me the way.”
He took her proffered hand but didn’t let go. “How about a spot of supper? You Yanks eat, don’t you?”
Mel hesitated, but she was hungry. As if to help her make up her mind, her stomach rumbled. She started to agree, but before she could, the sirens went off.“Well,” he said, lifting his gaze to the horizon, “that’s bloody annoying.”
* * * * *
Inside the tube station, families were already there, setting up for the night. There were double-decker bunks fixed along the walls, and floor space was disappearing as fast as people could claim it. Women knitted or handed out food to children. Old men read books that looked both serious and important. There were no young men, except for the ones in uniform, or injured, like Mel’s companion. There were American uniforms mingled with the Brits waiting for the train. It was all orderly, no rushing or pushing. It had the feel of a familiar routine. They’d had plenty of time to get used to it.
“This your first?” he asked Mel, as they found a bit of wall to lean against.
Mel nodded.
“It’s a bloody nuisance, but you grow accustomed to it.” He shifted, propping his back against a bit of wall. “Here, I don’t know your name. Rodney Stanfield. Formerly Captain, RAF.” He thrust out his hand.
“Melanie Milburn.” Mel stumbled a bit over the last name. It felt odd to be incognito, but she could hardly arrive at the base bearing Norm’s nom de plume.
“Cheers, Melanie.” He made a point of shaking her hand and held on to it when the shaking was over.
Mel didn’t mind. She needed something to hang on to as she listened to the ominous rumble of approaching aircraft. The enemy. There was the rat-a-tat from planes defending London and the pop of the anti-aircraft guns. Those made the ground under their feet tremble. Mel looked up, even though there was only concrete to see. It just seemed easier to hear that way.
“The first is the hardest,” Rodney said. His upper lip had stiffened up nicely now.
Mel had done live fire exercises with the SEALs. Dangerous, without a doubt, but she’d had some control over the outcome. This was different, very different.
“I expect it’s more satisfying to be up there shooting at them.” Mel was proud of how steady her voice sounded, though she had to raise the volume to be heard. Apparently stiff upper lips were catching.
He nodded. “Too bloody right.”
In her mind’s eye, Mel saw the flak tracking skyward in black and white. She’d never seen it in color. As she strained to sort out the sounds, there came the distinctive whine of a bomb following gravity’s pull toward the braced and waiting city. The whole group paused. Hands stilled, pages weren’t turned, toys weren’t played with, and drinks weren’t taken. Mel didn’t even breathe. It felt like forever until contact.
There was a boom. The ground wrenched one direction, then the other. Dust from the ceiling sifted down on them. A baby started to cry. Mel tasted grit in her mouth as she looked at Rodney with eyes that felt wide and dry.
“Close.” He sounded like he was talking about horseshoes or basketball shots. Then she couldn’t hear him anymore. There was only the sound of falling bombs and the wrenching of the earth when they hit. How had anyone survived this? How was it they weren’t all gibbering idiots? Other than that first pause for the first bomb, no one seemed to notice bombs were falling out there. A young mother played a finger game with her child. Another passed around a canteen for her kids to drink from. An old man turned a page in his book as if he were in his own study by a comfortable fire.
This was a different kind of war, a different kind of courage than she’d observed in Iraq. The outcome was still very much in the balance. And there was no precision, no care for civilian casualties. Just raw, ugly destruction as each side tried to kill more people than the other side. She’d never liked thunderstorms and this was one on steroids. There was no time to recover between concussions. Conversation was impossible.
She wanted to cower against the dirty floor, but how could she in the presence of such bravery? She caught some of their courage and felt stiffening flow up her spine. Maybe she caught it from her bluffing upper lip. She realized she was gripping Rodney’s hand and relaxed her fingers. They felt stiff and cold. She noticed he flexed his.
“Sorry,” she mouthed, because there was no way he could hear her. It was hard to keep on her feet. The ground heaved again and again. There was no escape for it or them. And then, just as quickly as it began, it stopped. The bombs first, then more slowly, the flak batteries.
The silence filled with the rustle of the living, the soft cry of a child, the waning drone of the attackers and defenders. The distant, and different, wail of the ambulances rushing to give aid and comfort. Fire engines, too. In her mind, she could see it playing out from the films she’d seen. She couldn’t hear the crackle of the fires, but she knew they were there. She looked at her watch, her dead man’s watch, but she didn’t know what time the attack started, so there was no way to know how long it lasted. And she hadn’t adjusted it to local time either. After a bit, the all-clear sounded.
“Should be a train along shortly,” Rodney said, taking her arm and steering her past the huddles of people to the edge of the platform.
Mel was almost afraid to try out her voice. “Is it like that all night?”
He shrugged. “Depends on the weather. Better than previously when it lasted all day, too.”
Mel nodded. She knew all the stats, all the facts and figures, but there’d been no way to know this without being here. And this was just the beginning. In three days, she had to go up into the sky and get shot down.
“Is it this bad up there?” Mel asked. “In battle?”
“Pretty much, only you can shoot back.” Rodney’s grin was wry and edged with bravado.
“Have you ever had to bail out?”
Rodney looked surprised. “Several times. Twice into the Channel. I was lucky.”
Indeed. Clearly Mel needed to pick his brain. She had a feeling that her HALO drop was very different from this kind of bailing out. She was a reporter, just one without a place to sell her stories. Pity. She had a feeling she was going to run into some doozies.
A series of whistles suddenly broke through the crowd noise behind them. Mel, and everyone around her, turned and saw a man roughly pushing his way toward them. He passed under a light and she realized she’d seen his face in one of the newspaper stories from this time.
“He’s a spy,” Mel said, involuntarily. The story had been about him eluding capture by jumping down onto the tube tracks.
The man roughly pushed a pregnant girl out of his way and then headed toward Mel. She didn’t plan to intervene. Her plan was to restore the time line, not mess it up even more. If he hadn’t touched her, she wouldn’t have touched him. But he did and so she did. The SEALs had trained her well. As soon as his hand connected with her shoulder, she grabbed it, popped him in the chin with her elbow, and then used his own forward momentum to flip him on his surprised posterior. It felt good to hit back.
Two Bobbies ran up, and then stopped in surprise, looking from the prone spy to Rodney, and then finally at Mel.
Mel shrugged. “He pushed me. I pushed back.”
The crowd around her took a step back, leaving her semi-alone. Rodney looked impressed. And surprised. But more impressed than surprised.
“She’s an American,” he said. A sort of “ah” sound emerged from the circle around them. He looked at her.
“I’ll remember not to push you,” he said. “How did you know he’s a spy?”
She opened her mouth, but there was nothing to come out it except an unbelievable truth. Train roar filled the space.
“Oh, look,” she said. “Our train.”
She could feel Rodney watching her, as they boarded the train, leaving behind the Bobbies hustling the spy to his feet. She rubbed her face. Jeez, no wonder she ended up dead last time.
* * * * *
So far, Mel wasn’t enjoying her adventures in time travel all that much. All the oooh had worn off, leaving only the ugh. She was tired. She was homesick. She was homeless. Her feet—there wasn’t even a word to describe what her feet felt. And her body, well, it was beginning to identify the sore spots from the vortex buffeting. Th
ere were a lot of them. And that was just the personal stuff.
First, she’d had to cross London by tube to catch her train to Cambridge. After long stops in the dark while bombs fell overhead, they finally arrived. Rodney fed her, as promised, and her stomach was still bitter about that. She’d asked him what it was and he told her it was better not to know. At least she’d been able to pee at the railway station upon arrival in Cambridge. At the moment, her bladder was her only happy body part.
It was dark on the platform, but a kindly air warden had offered to help her find her way to her destination. She could have come down in the morning and should have, but truth was, she wasn’t sure she had the guts to spend the night in London, even knowing where the bombs would fall. Three hours were more than enough.
Of course, her other reason was curiosity. She knew the men had liberty busses into Cambridge. She didn’t know if Jack or Norm took one this night, but there was a chance she could observe them prior to her arrival at the base, if they had.
So she’d made her way like a weary lemming, not sure if she’d ever get used to being when, let alone where. London, the train, even Cambridge seemed to be littered with American servicemen. Bright, confident, interested in everything, but especially interested in English girls, they stood in stark contrast to the British soldiers and citizenry, who’d been at war so much longer and were weary of it. Most of the soldiers were delighted to meet an American, even the Yanks, but Mel tried to stay a moving target, still shaken by the possibility she’d altered the time line. Now she was more than ready to be a stationary target—even for a bomb. It would be a mercy killing.
She looked at the pub, rising stocky and anciently solid in the deep dark. The pub appeared to be Tudor, though Mel wasn’t really up on her architecture, so had no way to know that in a city blacked out by war. She thanked the warden and watched his hooded flashlight vanish into the blackout as he moved away.
Out of Time Page 5
