by Jason Ayres
Just to make sure, he rubbed lots of moisturising cream on his face that he found in one of the bathroom cabinets. That was what women did to make themselves look younger, wasn’t it? There was no harm in giving it a try.
He thought about having a shave, too, but there was no hot water and he didn’t really fancy ripping his face to pieces with the only razor he could find in the bathroom, a cheap, disposable one.
Everything went without a hitch. He reached the perimeter of the base just as it was starting to get dark, which left him plenty of time to carry out his plan. He had the tachyometer tucked safely into his pocket. He would do what he needed to do and then get out of there as quickly as possible. If all went according to plan, he was about to change history for the better. Then, hopefully, his life would be better, too.
Dan hadn’t really thought through all the possible paradoxes of what he was attempting to do might cause. It hadn’t crossed his mind to think that if he carried out his plan successfully, the chain of events that had led him to be here right now in the first place might not then take place.
These were topics that Josh, Peter and the rest of the team had spent hours debating and had come to various conclusions about based on their experiences, such as Josh’s experiment with the packet of crisps. Dan, however, was not privy to any of that knowledge. He realised that changing things could have consequences; hence his earlier decision not to go back to the tunnel. This time, though, he was clear-cut and focused in his mind. There was just one single goal in his mind: carry out his mission, go home, and everything would be well with the world again.
Getting into the base was easy. The guard on the gate seemed surprised to see him when he turned up, remarking that he thought he was in his office, but he didn’t question him any further on it. He didn’t dare. Like most of the people in the base, he was afraid of Dan.
Once safely inside, he positioned himself in the store shed, which was across the square from his office. By his reckoning, he couldn’t have long to wait until the truck containing Lauren drove in.
Sure enough, he heard it approach long before he saw it, but just as he did, there was an unexpected and unwelcome development. There was a man whom Dan didn’t recognise crossing the square, just in front of him. Dan couldn’t identify the man through the prevailing blizzard, especially in the heavily clad outfit that he was wearing, but what he was holding in his hand was unmistakeable.
It was another tachyometer.
It was Josh, it had to be. What was here doing here? Had he tracked Dan down? Had he come here to stop him? How could he possibly have known what Dan was planning to do?
These and many more questions raced through his mind. No matter, he had no intention of turning back now. He watched as Josh crossed to the entrance to the hut he had commandeered as his office, and disappeared round the corner. Just as he did so, the truck containing Lauren drove in.
Dan watched as Ryan and the other man took Lauren from the truck and manhandled her roughly towards the building. He had planned to wait until she was inside and Ryan had gone back to the mess hall before he made his move. Then he would have to be very quick with what he planned to do, especially with the unforeseen factor of Josh now also being on the scene. This was getting extremely complicated.
As soon as Ryan was out of the way, he crossed the square and entered the building. There was just a short corridor leading to his office door, and as he approached he could hear the argument going on inside.
“Over my dead body,” he heard Lauren scream.
He knew that there was very little time to spare. He flung open the door and took in the scene. His younger self and Lauren were fighting and he watched as Lauren tried desperately to grab the gun that was on the table. He knew that she wasn’t going to make it in time.
His younger self had his back to him and hadn’t noticed him come in. This was the critical moment and Dan knew he had to act now.
He rushed into the room and rugby-tackled his younger self to the ground, just as he was about to grab hold of Lauren. Falling to the floor, with his younger self in tow, he looked up to see Josh’s face staring through the window, a look of complete surprise on his face. So he hadn’t been expecting me, after all, then, thought Dan.
The two Dans rolled across the floor and fell apart. His younger self turned towards him, determined to see who’d had the audacity to intervene in his attack on Lauren. The look of surprise on Josh’s face at the window was nothing to that on the younger Dan’s as he realised he was looking at a slightly older mirror image of himself.
“How…?” was the only word that fell from his lips.
Dan’s timely intervention had given Lauren the opportunity to reach the gun, but he certainly hadn’t anticipated what was to come next. It was all happening so quickly.
Lauren hadn’t quite clocked who this mysterious stranger was who had unexpectedly come to her aid, but she had no intention of wasting the opportunity. She grabbed hold of the gun and turned it directly towards his younger self.
Fearful for her life after being terrorised by the younger Dan, her self-preservation instincts kicked in. She’d seen enough that day to know that the old rules didn’t apply anymore: as far as she was concerned, it was kill or be killed.
Without ever having handled a gun in her life before, she pointed it squarely at the younger Dan’s head and pulled the trigger.
“No!” shouted the older Dan, realising too late what was happening, but he was powerless to stop her. There was an incredibly loud bang, and he watched horrified at the bullet hole that appeared in his younger self’s head. With a look of disbelief on his face, the younger Dan toppled backwards to the floor.
Almost immediately he felt himself become light-headed and dizzy. Around him everything changed. Josh vanished instantaneously from the window, and he felt a sudden sensation of falling which quickly faded to nothingness. As his younger self lay dying on the floor, blood seeping from the hole in his head, the older Dan simply disappeared from existence, his entire timeline from 2029 onwards erased.
From Lauren’s perspective, he simply vanished. She hadn’t had the chance to get a close look at him, and would never know the identity of the mystery man who’d come to her aid. She had no way of rationalising who this guardian angel was or where he had gone, but that was the least of her worries.
Now she now sat on the floor, adrenaline coursing through her veins, scarcely believing what she had just done. A powerful cocktail of emotions washed over her. There was relief that she was still alive, guilt that she’d just killed a man, no matter how bad he had been, and fear for what was going to happen to her now.
She got up to see that there was a pool of blood pouring from Dan’s head onto the floor. There was no doubt whatsoever that he was dead. What would happen when the others found out? No matter, she was made of strong stuff and she was holding a gun. She would do whatever it took to survive.
She pulled herself together, got up and sat down behind the desk. She didn’t have long to compose herself but quickly started to formulate a plan.
The gunshot had been heard all over the base. A couple of minutes there was a knock on the door and she heard an extremely nervous voice from outside.
“Is everything alright, Dan?” said the voice, which she recognised as Ryan’s. “I heard a gunshot.”
“Come in,” she said.
Ryan nervously entered the room. He appeared to be alone. He took in the scene, Dan’s body on the floor, and her pointing the gun at him. Her confidence grew as she could see that he looked absolutely terrified.
“Shut the door,” she said.
“Is he dead?” asked Ryan.
“Very,” replied Lauren. Despite the horror of what she’d just been through, she felt far more in control of the situation than she’d expected, and it wasn’t purely because she was holding the gun. Ryan was falling apart in front of her eyes.
“Please don’t shoot me,” pleaded Ryan.
She definitely felt that she had the upper hand here. “I’m not going to shoot you, Ryan,” she replied softly. “Now why don’t you sit down and tell me all about this place and what’s been going on.”
From that point onwards, she had complete control of the situation. Ryan broke down completely, telling her everything Dan had done. He told her about the oppressive nature of the regime, about the boy he’d put out into the cold for stealing food, and about the sexual favours he’d demanded from the women on the base.
Less than an hour later, she was standing in the mess hall, addressing the entire community. With Ryan beside her, she calmly broke the news to them of Dan’s death. From everything Ryan had told her, she didn’t think they were likely to lynch her, but the reaction she got took her completely by surprise.
A spontaneous cheer and a round of applause broke out. She was far from being the villain of the piece; in fact, she was now being lauded as their saviour. Dan’s dictatorship and sickening habits had made everyone there hate him, and the relief on everyone’s faces was clear to see.
She made the most of her situation by offering herself up as their new leader. She was accepted unanimously. In her acceptance speech as leader, she declared that there would be no more guns, no more orders, and no more hierarchy. They would form a single community, working together to survive the apocalyptic situation they had all found themselves in.
She rose to the task admirably. When the Black Winter finally relented the following spring, she’d successfully nurtured a prosperous community that had grown to over 200 people, all alive, well and happy. As civilisation returned, she found herself hailed as a national hero, and was recognised as such in the New Year’s Honours List the following year.
She’d come a long way since she was running karaoke nights in The Red Lion, that was for sure.
Lauren Watson, MBE. Whoever would have thought it?
Epilogue
August 2049
Peter, Hannah and Jess had arrived at Charlie and Kaylee’s house, excitedly looking forward to a barbecue with all their old friends. It had been months since Peter and Hannah had seen the others, following a lengthy trip ‘down under’.
As they rounded the side of the house, they saw their friends, all waiting there for them. Charlie was busy with the barbecue, the kids were playing swingball on the lawn, and over on the patio, Kaylee and Alice were placing bowls of salad and bread rolls on the table.
As they made their way over to the others, Josh emerged from the large French windows carrying a crate of lager. Close behind him followed Lauren in a skimpy dress, wobbling in her high heels, and clutching an already half-drunk bottle of Prosecco.
“Hey, you guys! It’s time to party!” she cried out.
It was going to be a good night.
The end…but now the adventure continues in Splinters in Time…
Splinters in Time
Prologue
October 2019
Josh was lost in the wrong time.
Not only was it the wrong time, it was also the wrong universe. He didn’t even know which the right universe was anymore. Clutching the damaged, wand-like device in his hand, he was stumbling from one version of reality to another; through time bubbles he could no longer control, desperate to find a way home.
Powered only by the kinetic energy of the earth’s rotation, his malfunctioning device was sending him further and further back in time, and increasingly distant from home. Nicknamed the tachyometer in homage to an old time-travel movie, the adventure it had sent him on had gone decidedly wrong.
Every jump he now took through time sent him to a different timeline, including many nightmarish and unrecognisable worlds from his own.
Right now he was hiding behind a wall in a rubble-strewn, war-torn landscape akin to news coverage of wars in Africa and the Middle East. But this wasn’t some far-flung hotspot. A broken sign, covered in splattered mud and flecks of blood, hung askew at an angle next to the bombed-out buildings all around him, betraying his true location. Little Clarendon Street, in Oxford.
The sun was rising and he had been running and hiding all night. It didn’t matter how far he ran, or in which direction: there was no escape. Wherever he went, the sound of machine-gun fire peppered by screams of the dying could be heard all around him.
The air was choking him, thick from the incessant shelling. The latest explosion had been way too close for comfort, mere metres away, leaving him gasping for air as he was showered with small stones, with the accompanying dust covering his clothes and eyebrows.
Exhausted, his strength was almost gone. Although he had made every effort to keep fit for his travels through time, his fifty-three-year-old body just didn’t have any more to give.
Sweat poured from his brow as he clutched the tachyometer, willing it to charge faster, desperately needing the power indicator to turn green. Only then could he escape this world and move on to the next. He just prayed that this time he would find some semblance of normality as he couldn’t go on like this much longer.
Breathing a sigh of relief through the dusty air as the light went green, he held out the wand in front of him to open the time bubble. He had no way of controlling where it would take him: that luxury had been lost when it became irretrievably damaged. Now he was at the mercy of its seemingly random whim to send him into any one of what could be potentially millions of different universes.
Just as he was about to step through the bubble, a soldier came around the corner. It wasn’t one of the British soldiers he had seen earlier. He hadn’t seen any of them for hours. This one looked every inch like one of the ISIS fighters he had seen so often on the news on TV in his youth.
Covered in perspiration and with a fevered, fanatical look in his eyes, the soldier shouted something in a language Josh didn’t understand and raised his gun, ready to despatch a hail of bullets towards him. Terrified, Josh leapt forward just as the man fired.
Then he vanished, disappearing into the bubble a split second before the bullets reached him, leaving one rather confused fighter behind.
Chapter One
July 2040
England in the 2030s had been different from the previous decade.
A hundred years before, the Wall Street crash had seen the prosperous 1920s give way to a decade of economic gloom. Almost a century to the day later, another catastrophic event struck the world.
This time it was not a financial meltdown that had brought about the downturn, but an unforeseen climate event. An asteroid strike had blanketed the world in dust, blocking out the sun and stripping away the effects of decades of global warming.
A devastating winter followed, bringing Britain to its knees. With snowfall on a scale unprecedented in recorded history, power supplies failed, food became scarce, and law and order broke down. The population found themselves fighting to survive, not only against the cold, but also against each other.
Over two million people died in Britain during what was to become known as the Black Winter. This bleak title had been bestowed with the Black Death in mind, the last time nature had caused such devastating loss of life.
Many more people had fled abroad, never to return. They had been desperate to escape the Arctic conditions that had gripped Northern Europe in late-2029. Although conditions eventually abated the following spring, many were in no hurry to return, believing it to be only a temporary respite.
Sensationalist media stories that the world was on the brink of a new ice age abounded, and few wanted to risk returning to face it all over again the following winter.
Those fears proved unfounded, but the cost of the Black Winter to Britain had been incalculable. Quite aside from the human loss, the country’s livestock had been almost totally wiped out. Many native species of wild animals and insects simply hadn’t evolved to cope with conditions of such severity. Their populations had been decimated and would take decades to recover.
The landscape was desolate, devoid not just of crops but also
trees, many ancient oaks and other species killed by the months of cold. Even the hardiest of Britain’s plant life had little defence against the devastating cold.
The following summer, the growing season never got started. The frost had penetrated so deep into the ground that it remained frozen, even into July. Although the following winter was not as devastating as feared, it was still much colder and longer than average so the harvest the following year was very poor. This set the pattern for the years ahead as a succession of very cold winters and cool, wet summers put even more pressure on Britain.
The country was in shock and had been left in a mess. It took years to restore all the transport links and public services to their previous levels, by which time the country was effectively bankrupt. The resulting depression made the Great Depression of the 1930s look relatively benign.
With so little home-grown food available, the Government had had no choice but to import heavily from unaffected Australia and New Zealand, as well as Southern Europe. Rationing had to be reintroduced for the first time since the post-war austerity era. This was something very few still alive could remember.
Some countries sought to take advantage of the situation, exploiting their advantage in a desire to punish Britain for leaving the European Union a decade before. This led to angry scenes in Parliament and recriminations all round from those who said that Britain should never have gone down the Brexit route. Australia and New Zealand, by comparison, were only too happy to help, the additional exports to Britain boosting their thriving economies still further.
Regardless of the politics of the situation, by 2035 Britain was in a mess. The climate was still around two degrees cooler than it had been a decade before, and this was continuing to have a major effect on farming. The growing season was starting weeks later than before, with vulnerable crops at risk from frosts far later than had previously been the case. It was clearly going to be a long time before agriculture would get back to anywhere near normal.
