by RR Haywood
He grabs his go-bag and looks round.
‘Don’t worry about this place,’ she says, seeing him commence the final visual check. ‘What we’re going to do will make all of this meaningless. Coffee?’
Six
The Bunker, Tuesday morning
‘Ssshh, it’s okay,’ Malcolm says, rubbing Ria’s back. ‘Come on, lie down. The doc said you shouldn’t sit up yet.’
‘Ria, come on, love, lie down,’ Konrad says, bending over to kiss the top of her head.
‘I killed my mum . . .’
‘You saved her,’ Malcolm says.
‘He’s right, Ria,’ Konrad adds. ‘You listen to Malc.’
‘They would have hurt her more.’ Malcolm carries on gently stroking her back while she sobs in his arms. The raw emotions pouring out of the young woman.
‘Ben told us what happened,’ Konrad says. ‘You poor love. Your mum wouldn’t want you to be like this.’
‘I killed her . . . Oh my god, I killed my mum . . . I can see her face . . . She . . . she . . . They hurt her and I killed her . . .’
‘Come on now,’ Konrad says firmly. ‘You’ve got to lie down. The doc said, Ria.’ He guides her back into the pillows with Malcolm helping.
‘There you go,’ Malcolm says, wiping his eyes but giving her a warm smile. ‘It’ll all be okay. It will. They should have got us before . . .’
‘Oh, that doesn’t matter, Malc. We’re here now.’
‘We are, Kon. We’re here now.’
‘And we’re not going anywhere,’ Kon says, smoothing thick strands of hair from Ria’s forehead.
‘Nope, we’ll be right here nagging you to eat grapes and chicken soup.’
‘I lost my baby,’ she whispers, her eyes fixed and imploring on Malcolm then switching to Konrad.
‘You’re young,’ Konrad says. ‘Plenty of time for all that stuff.’
‘Plenty of time,’ Malcolm adds.
‘Kids are expensive anyway.’
‘And messy.’
‘And noisy.’
‘And they smell.’
‘And they cry. You did when you were a tiny one,’ Konrad says with a slow smile.
‘Cor, did she,’ Malcolm says. ‘Ria Ria, smelly dear.’
The first smile breaks through at the rhyme she grew up hearing from the two men. They’ve always looked the same to her. Always older, wiser, funny, warm, familiar and down to earth, and always there too.
‘I’m glad you’re back,’ she whispers, reaching out for their hands.
‘Now you rest,’ Malcolm says.
‘Here, you did a cracking job with all that furniture.’
‘Looks lovely,’ Malcolm says.
‘Very nice.’
‘You rest,’ Malcolm says quietly as her eyes start to droop from the meds kicking in.
Another few seconds and she slides into a deep drug-induced sleep. The two men slowly pull their hands from hers and move quietly to the door and up the corridor that smells of pine from the hard scrubbing and mopping last night after the sewage tanks were emptied finally using an ill-fitting hose gaffer-taped to the outlet valve and fed into a Milwaukee drain. It was a busy evening, but it all got done and again the difference between Roland in charge and Miri was stark and clear. Everyone worked, for a start, including Miri.
Harry and Ben drove the van from the parking lot in Milwaukee to a disused warehouse identified by Miri. The van was doused in fuel and set alight, then the two men stepped back into the bunker, grabbed mops and joined in with the cleaning.
‘How is she?’ Emily asks as Malcolm and Konrad walk into the portal room bathed in red from the island portal shimmering open with a live link.
‘Looks terrible,’ Malcolm says with a deep sigh.
‘She’s alive,’ Safa says bluntly, chucking them each a white coverall. ‘These are old crap ones meant to be worn with gas masks, but it’s all we could get.’
‘Um, so what’s the point in wearing them?’ Emily asks while Harry grimaces as he pulls the zipper up over his huge chest, drawing the old-style white biological and chemical warfare protective clothing up to his chin. He tuts again when his beard gets trapped in the zipper, an exhalation of air pushed through his nose that makes Emily turn and grab his hands.
‘Let me,’ she says softly. ‘You’ll yank the hair out.’
‘Too tight,’ he grumbles.
‘No, you’re too bloody big is what it is,’ she says quietly, pulling the hairs free from the zipper. ‘Lift your chin up a bit . . . bit more . . .’ She starts smiling at him, seeing the tension in his gaze and tweaks his beard. ‘Needs cutting.’ She holds his eyes on hers, trying to find the smile that’s normally there. ‘Let me do it later?’
‘Aye,’ he says, offering a tight smile. ‘Done?’
‘Yep, all done.’ She pushes the zipper up under his chin then reaches to put the hood over his head. He stoops down, letting her. He’s not right. The man who lifted Alpha off his feet one-handed. The man who held an army back at the top of the stairs in Cavendish Manor. The man who was shot in North Korea but didn’t flinch and carried on working. She slept on him last night on the island after mopping through the bunker. They lay side by side with her head on his chest and her arm draped over him. That she adores him is obvious. She kisses his cheek nearly every day. She hugs him, holds him and seems drawn like a satellite to his centre of mass, and right now she detects that Harry just isn’t himself. There is a disquiet. A sense of all not being well.
‘Working?’ the doctor asks, waggling a bendy stick about while Ben stares at the screen of a large tablet.
‘Nope,’ Ben mutters. ‘Ah, there it is!’ he calls out as the screen comes to life with a close-up of Doctor Watson’s face looming from the camera hovering in front of his nose. ‘That’s good quality,’ he adds, looking at the doc then back to the screen.
‘Fisheye lens,’ the doctor says, turning the long bendy pole to record the room as they watch the screen.
‘Fisheye?’ Harry asks.
‘Wide-angled,’ Ben says.
Everything done for this point now, to see what the future is like, to see what the world is and how it was broken. To find the fault and fix it. To save humanity.
‘Activating,’ Miri says, her voice somewhat gruff from coughing so much. She presses the device in her hand to turn on the tiny blue shimmering light as the tension in the room increases. The doctor holds the radiation counter bought from the survival store and bends closer to the small blue light.
‘No change,’ he reports.
Ben waves his hands in front. ‘No change in temperature . . .’ He leans closer to sniff the air of the blue light. ‘Can’t smell anything.’
‘Don’t sniff the bloody air!’ Safa snaps. ‘Could be chemicals . . .’
‘Fair one,’ Ben says, easing away. ‘Camera then . . .’
‘Finally,’ Safa mutters under her breath. ‘Faffing about . . .’
They watch as Ben feeds the camera towards the blue light. The long, thin bendy pole looming at the portal. The tablet screen fills with the iridescent blue light as the lens works to refocus until suddenly the device is within the blue and the screen grows darker. Ben frowns, blinks and gently pushes forward, feeling resistance on the other side. ‘Not going through,’ he says quietly. They watch the screen, seeing just blackness and the odd streak of blue as Ben pulls back a little and tries to guide it forward again. ‘Blocked,’ he says with a shake of his head and a look round to Miri. ‘You sure you put the right coordinates in?’
Miri checks them and nods. ‘Confirmed.’
‘Could be rubble,’ Ben says, pulling the camera out. ‘We’re a day after Bertie went here . . . so maybe his drone or his presence disturbed something.’
‘Redeploy then,’ Safa says to Miri. ‘Move back a few feet.’
‘Is that an order, Miss Patel?’ Miri asks.
‘Er . . . yes?’
‘Are we needed?’ Malcolm asks politely, glancing
at the door.
‘Yes,’ say Miri and Safa at the same time, looking at each other with narrowed eyes for a split second.
‘Teamwork,’ Safa says.
‘Your expertise may be required,’ Miri says.
Malcolm and Konrad nod, but stay quiet as Harry tuts at the zipper under his chin and the suit too tight across his chest.
Ben picks up the second tablet, thumbing the screen to take the footage recorded by Bertie on his original trip to 2111 back to the beginning, looking for obstacles that could have shifted. He watches the screen showing the pock-marked ground littered with chunks of concrete, bricks and parts of houses crumbled and broken.
‘Stand by,’ Miri says, working out the fresh longitude and latitude coordinates. The Blue goes off and the room fills with the sound of breathing and the rustles of small movements made by people waiting quietly. ‘Five metres,’ Miri says as the tiny blue light comes back on.
Ben grabs the camera and once again starts feeding it towards the light. All eyes stay on the screen, which fills with colour, then instantly fades to black as Ben guides the end of the pole through. That darkness disappears as light fills the screen, but everything stays blurred as the lens works to focus. Ben twists the bendy pole, working to angle the lens down to the ground, but moves too fast for the focus to stay sharp. The screen blurs again, streaks of grey, black and green.
‘Fuck’s sake.’ Safa snorts a laugh. ‘You wouldn’t make a surgeon, would you?’
‘Piss off,’ Ben chuckles. ‘It’s a bit hard to make it bend . . . I think that’s down . . .’
‘Something moved,’ Emily says urgently, staring at the screen.
Movement on the screen. Something close to the lens that morphs into grey then hues of purple and white with a rocking motion that is strangely familiar.
‘Pigeon,’ Emily blurts. ‘That’s a pigeon.’
They watch the bird bobbing its head forward and back as it struts about in front of the camera. A flutter of movement and another bird lands next to the first one and bobs forward to stare into the lens. The grey feathers hued with purples, whites and blacks all so organic and all so familiar to every person in the room watching them.
‘Grass,’ Safa says. ‘Pigeons walking on grass,’ she adds with a smile.
‘Shit,’ Ben mouths, glancing with Miri to the tablet showing Bertie’s original footage where everything is dead and ruined. No grass, no birds, nothing.
Rapid motion on the live feed from the pigeons suddenly giving flight and bursting away. Feet land in their place, small and clad in red shoes, followed by a tiny pair of hands bracing on the grass as the face of a grinning child looms at the camera, shouting something excitedly.
‘ABORT NOW!’ Miri shouts.
The child grabs the lens, tugging it forward while Ben feels the pull from a hundred million years in the future.
‘He’s got it,’ Ben says frantically.
‘Pull it back,’ Safa says, lunging to grab Ben’s hand. He yanks hard, wrenching the bendy pole from the kid’s grasp with a wince at causing a child pain.
‘Turn it off,’ Ben says, getting the camera back through the blue.
‘NO!’ Emily shouts as the child’s hand plunges into the blue light and starts waggling about in the bunker, knocking the poles askew and making the portal stretch higher and wider.
‘Push him back,’ Safa says, pushing at the kid’s hand to get it back into the future, but the poles widen as the kid’s head looms in, breaching the light to stare round in obvious delight.
‘DAD! DAD! IT’S GOBLINS AND . . .’
‘FUCK!’ Safa yells.
‘THEY SWEAR, DAD! DAD . . . DAD . . . THE GOBLINS SWEAR . . .’
‘Push him back,’ Miri orders.
‘Bloody trying,’ Ben says, gently pushing his hands through the portal to try and force the child back.
‘Get him out,’ Emily urges.
‘Sorry, kid.’ Ben pushes the child, who falls back and away from view, but clearly rallies, lunges forward and leaps through the portal to land bodily in the bunker to a stunned silence of white-suit-wearing adults staring at a small blond-haired child with red shoes.
‘So cool,’ the child mutters and is off, running for the door. ‘GOBLIN HOUSE . . .’
‘GET HIM!’ Ben shouts.
They burst for the door, all of them trying to get through at the same time, cursing and pushing at each other while the child runs down the corridor in glee.
‘GET THAT CHILD,’ Miri shouts angrily.
‘KID . . . COME BACK.’ Ben gets into the corridor first.
‘GOBLIN HOUSE . . .’ The boy yells, running on through the doors into the main room as Ben blunders after him, pushing in to see the boy climbing over one of the big leather sofas and clapping his hands as he jumps up and down on the big cushions. ‘Goblin chairs and goblin sofas and . . .’
‘Kid, no, no, no, come here,’ Ben says.
The boy laughs, leaps off and runs on round the sofa towards the main table, going under and crawling the length of it before popping out next to Miri. She tries to grab him, but her body doesn’t respond fast enough, and the boy laughs happily at her arms closing on thin air as the others give chase and call out.
The big, bearded goblin finally captures the boy. Clamping an enormous goblin hand on his arm and swinging the laughing boy up into the air.
‘Got you!’ Harry says, grinning at the boy, who laughs and stares in wonder at Harry’s big beard. ‘Time to go home.’
‘NO, NO, NO . . .’ the boy yells out, squirming to get free, but still laughing in the throes of the game. ‘Do it again . . .’
‘We goblins have got work to do,’ Harry says.
‘I wanna be a goblin . . .’
‘When you’re older,’ Harry says, pausing in front of the Blue. ‘Now you go on home and when you’re bigger you can be a goblin too. Off you go . . .’ Harry leans through the Blue, planting the boy down and looking round before quickly drawing back as Ben thumbs the screen to switch the Blue off.
‘Holy shit. Did that just happen?’ Safa asks, grinning in stunned amusement.
‘Report, sergeant,’ Miri orders. ‘What did you see?’
‘Street, houses, vehicles parked. No damage, nothing like that,’ Harry says, pointing at the original footage still playing on the screen.
‘Did we save the world then?’ Safa asks eagerly, looking round at Ben and the others. ‘Yes? No?’
‘I don’t know,’ Ben says quietly, thinking while looking at Miri.
‘What’s not to know?’ Safa asks. ‘Bertie saw it was ruined and now it’s not ruined.’
Ben thinks. It makes sense. Bertie invented the device then went forward. The world was fine. He went forward again and it wasn’t fine. Something had changed the timeline. Then everything else happened. Has that now fixed the timeline or changed it from what Bertie saw the first time? Does it even matter? The world isn’t ruined in 2111. A happy child just proved that. He glances at Miri, both of them locking eyes with the sudden realisation that whatever they have done appears, at this stage, to have prevented the world being over.
‘We need to see more,’ Miri says. ‘But . . .’ She trails off quietly, filling them all with hope.
‘Um,’ Emily says, lifting her hand as though to ask a question. ‘Dead Nazi?’
‘Oh, cock it,’ Ben groans as Miri tuts and walks off towards her office.
‘Sorry,’ Emily mumbles, wincing while Harry tugs at the zipper trapping his beard again.
Seven
Somewhere in Africa, 2060
Rounds ping the ground, ricocheting from rocks and stones. More whizz overhead. Bravo holds position on one knee behind a bank of earth. His face covered in a layer of grime and filth as he purveys his troops hunkered down, taking cover. Heat shimmers hang over the land and the air feels dry and hot.
Weeks of training a local militia ready to become government-backed troops working to overthrow a breakaway faction of arm
y rebels who, in their infinite wisdom, decided that they didn’t like their land being raped of oil by Western countries.
Those evil rebels took control of the refinery in a very well-controlled assault. Those same rebels then pushed out into the surrounding townships and enforced a rule of law that brought hardship and suffering to the masses.
That’s the strapline anyway. That’s the headline used to whip up support in the UK for involvement in yet another overseas skirmish.
The British Secret Service was sent in to make the problem go away and train the local militia while someone else ensured they would be government backed by the time the assault began. Now that assault is almost over and the last little town lies ahead. A small place, but the buildings are modern, made from concrete and provide excellent cover. Nothing is ever simple, is it?
‘I SAID NOTHING IS EVER SIMPLE, EH?’ Bravo shouts happily at the man nearest him. A broad-faced Nigerian, strong and fit. Sergeants’ stripes on his arm given for working hard throughout the training programme.
The sergeant stares blankly, then smiles and nods. ‘This is simple. Yes,’ he says earnestly.
‘Indeed,’ Bravo mutters. ‘Well, come on . . . RIGHT, YOU LOT. UP AND AT THEM . . . EARN YOUR BLOODY MONEY, EH . . . GO ON . . .’
As Bravo rises to lead the charge of his platoon, the buildings ahead, a small cluster of a half-dozen houses, blow sky high with a huge roaring explosion that sends flames scorching up and debris flying out.
‘WHO DID THAT?’ Bravo roars, grabbing his radio. ‘WHO BLOODY DID THAT? CHARLIE?’
