Time Split

by Patricia Smith

  At the top of the stairs he flicked the light switch several times, but the darkness remained. Maybe the circuit breaker tripped, he thought optimistically.

  He tried the handle and was shocked to find the door locked.

  “Jessica! Jessica!” he yelled, as a surge of panic rushed forth before he could control it.

  There was no response, only silence.

  Jason stooped and shone the torch beam at the lock. The key was still inserted on the other side. Quickly he descended the stairs and searched the basement for the necessary tools. He soon returned with a flat head screwdriver, found in a drawer, and a sheet of paper, ripped from a notebook on the bench. He slipped the sheet beneath the door, then manipulated the lock with the screwdriver. He heard the key clatter twice and knew it had bounced. Anxiously, he gently pulled the paper under the base. He was relieved to see his manoeuvre had been a success when the key, which barely clung to the edge of the sheet, slowly came into view.

  When he opened the door and stepped out of the basement he immediately knew something had gone wrong.

  This was his house, but as it was when owned by the previous occupants. There was the wallpaper he and Jessica spent days removing. The gaudy carpet was still in the hall. He stepped into the lounge. A bare wall remained where they had installed a fire, in front of which they’d sat drinking champagne last week to celebrate their first anniversary.

  If this was different, he was frightened to think of what else might have changed. Where was Jessica? Had they even met? A cold fear entered the pit of his stomach. Pull yourself together, he chastised. Solve the problem.

  He moved back to the hall. There was more to it than a house that wasn’t his. The musty smell was stronger here. As he made his way to the stairs Jason suddenly realised the carpet squelched underfoot. He swept the beam across the floor until it reached the front door.

  It stood slightly open. Litter and leaves blocking the base suggested it had been that way for some time. Mould covered the wallpaper where it was exposed to the elements and a sooty black mark stained the carpet where rain had leaked in.

  He tested the switch in the hall, found the power situation the same here, then made his way upstairs. There he apprehensively entered each of the bedrooms in turn, starting with the smallest.

  In all of the rooms the story was the same. Drawers were open, cupboards exposed and clothes strewn. It could have been a robbery, except the jewellery box in the master bedroom still contained rings, bracelets and a diamond studded watch. As far as he could tell the only thing missing was clothing.

  A man’s overcoat hung on the door. Jason tried it on. It was a little tight, but would do. If the temperature in the house was anything to go by, he would need something more substantial than his suit outside.

  He returned downstairs and made his way into the street. There, things weren’t normal either.

  The lack of power extended beyond the house and the entire area was in near blackness. The street, which had always been badly congested with parked vehicles, was now completely empty except for a single police car parked outside of the local station. It was a narrow, straight road which swept down a short hill to the police station at the bottom.

  Jason trotted down and soon arrived outside the building. He tried the door and was surprised to find it open. He was unsure whether this was a good sign or not, as he apprehensively stepped inside.

  The reception area was plunged into darkness as the door closed behind him. He switched on his torch and played the beam around the front desk and walls in the hope of finding some paperwork or posters which indicated the need for a large-scale evacuation. Instead he found only the usual stuff about pickpockets, car thieves and the Neighbourhood Watch scheme.

  He turned to a door which led into the offices and cells beyond. It would usually be locked at all times, but as Jason drew near he noticed it was standing slightly open. He pushed it wider and cautiously peered around the frame. Beyond, a long passage lined with doors travelled the length of the building.

  “Hello!” He was surprised by his own voice, which sounded loud in the confined space. “Is there anyone here?”

  Jason stepped into the passage, his heart noticeably quickening, when there came no reply.

  He was unsure, and a little afraid, of what he might find. The house and empty street pointed to a swift evacuation. If anyone had remained, their behaviour could be unpredictable, and even potentially violent, due to fear or sickness. His hands were clammy and his mouth dry as he began to check the rooms for people.

  There were six in all: four offices and two interview rooms. Unlike the house, they looked perfectly normal as if waiting for the start of shift the following day.

  When he reached the end of the passage Jason discovered two more doors. Tucked around a corner, they could only be seen from this end. Both were heavily secured and had a small pane of viewing glass reinforced with thick mesh. His suspicion, they led to the police cells, was confirmed when he stepped forward and looked through the port.

  Instantly he recoiled in horror at the sight within. Swallowing hard, Jason controlled a gagging reaction. Breathing deeply, he suppressed his revulsion, then slowly stepped forward again.

  The body of a man lay on a makeshift bed on the far side of the cell. His skin was grey and, despite advanced decomposition, Jason could see it was covered in ulcerous sores. The mattress where the body lay was protected by a top sheet. The white linen was stained crimson, which seeped into a vivid yellow at the groin. He could see two pools of vomit, dotted with blood, dried on the floor. There may have been more, but the scope of the port was limited. The liquid had spread wide and therefore must have been quite voluminous. Despite this, all evaporation had taken place and it was bone dry. He couldn’t understand how this could be; he had only been gone for five hours. As he searched the room for a reason why the man would be left to die in his cell he gradually became aware of a sweet, sickly smell seeping beneath the door.

  Jason felt himself gagging again. After one last look he stepped back from the glass and, with some relief, returned to the lobby.

  It was obvious something terrible had happened here and it looked like it hadn’t happened recently. He could no longer fool himself that his interference had been harmless. The town had been abandoned in such a hurry this man had either been forgotten or deliberately left because no one would stop long enough to release him from his cell.

  As he returned to the street the first rays of dawn were beginning to break above the horizon. Even this limited light seemed bright after stumbling around in the blackness of the station.

  His initial thought – to return to Germany in 1930 – was almost instantly disregarded. The power stored in the backup battery was limited and he would only have one opportunity to correct the time split. It was essential he identified the exact moment to return.

  He stood, his mind racing for a possible cause for the altered time.

  There was the incident with the guards, although he couldn’t see how that could have been damaging unless his public disappearance caused global madness. As he relived the moment, he raised his hand and touched his wound, then another possibility crossed his mind.

  He felt fine, but if somehow he had taken a virus back which had then mutated... This thought left him cold. Without a vaccine he was trapped.

  Jason snapped from his reverie. He could speculate all day, but he knew he needed facts.

  It wasn’t possible to remove the teleporter so he went back to the house, secured the basement, then returned to the police station for the car.

  He stood beside the vehicle, considering his options. The thought of sitting on broken glass was undesirable, but still, a brick through the window would be the easiest way to gain access. A suitable projectile was quickly found in a nearby garden. Jason returned to the car, then, standing a short way back, hurled the stone through the passenger window. Whilst the boom still echoed around the streets – shattering the haunti
ng silence – he unlocked the car and climbed into the driver’s seat.

  Gaining access was the easy part, starting the engine was another matter. For fifteen minutes he tried, during which time he was unable to muster even the faintest glimmer from the battery. When another car in a neighbouring street proved to be just as elusive, he realised some other form of transportation was required.

  A diligent search of the surrounding houses and outhouses soon uncovered a bicycle and it wasn’t long before he was making his way towards the city under his own power.

  He hoped as he travelled away from Ponteland he would move into more normal surroundings, but he soon realised it wasn’t to be so. Evidence of quick abandonment, of homes and vehicles, were everywhere. A couple of miles later, as he turned out of the suburbs and joined a road which led onto the motorway, he still hadn’t encountered a single person.

  The road systems, unfortunately, had also changed and as Jason followed what he believed to be the correct route, he unexpectedly found himself on a housing estate. Turning back he followed the signs to the motorway, but as he rounded a bend he suddenly found a car blocking the road ahead.

  He had hardly the time to touch his brakes before he ploughed head-on into the side of the vehicle. The bicycle stopped, but he did not. A brief sensation of flying was immediately followed by pain when he landed hard on the tarmac on the far side of the car.

  Slowly, Jason pushed himself to his knees, then, turning to sit, he checked for injuries. Only a few cuts and grazes to his hands, which had been used to break his fall, seemed to have been sustained. He climbed to his feet and moved around the car to check on the condition of his transportation. As he passed the front of the vehicle Jason realised there was a man in the driver’s seat, his head slumped against the steering wheel.

  “Are you alright?” he called as he approached.

  The man never moved.

  Jason stopped, reluctant to draw closer, his experience in the police station still too vivid. Instead, he moved around to gain a better view of the occupant.

  From the passenger window he could see the man’s face and it was instantly apparent he was dead. Again, as with the prisoner, strange lesions covered his skin and his level of decomposition pointed to the time of death being days or possibly even weeks.

  Jason returned to the bicycle. A dent in the driver’s door showed the force of the impact. He retrieved it from the ground. The front wheel was buckled and the tyre burst.

  He sighed. He should have left ‘time’ alone.

  He pulled his cuff back and checked his watch. Jessica would normally be cooking breakfast now. She would wish him good morning, then embrace him warmly. The smell of bacon would be interlaced with her sweet, floral perfume.

  “Idiot,” he chastised again.

  He released the bicycle; it fell to the road with a clatter. He would have to continue on foot. He could see the roundabout, leading to the slip road, from here. Confident he could pick up a car or something else on the motorway, Jason quickened his pace.

  A short while later the road turned downward, then as he rounded a bend and got his first clear view of the Western Bypass, Jason came to a stunned halt.

  He could scarcely believe what he was seeing. Unable to imagine anything so terrible as to cause such anarchy, he continued down the road at a crawling pace.

  All four carriageways were completely blocked with vehicles – all of which were facing north. The embankments, where accessible, had been utilised to move around the blockage, but this just seemed to have added to the chaos when cars, in places, had slipped down the muddy slopes, crashing into those wedged on the road.

  As he reached the gridlock, Jason realised more had happened here than apparent at a glance. Evidence of carnage could be seen everywhere.

  The body of a man, on the road beside a truck, had one side of his head caved in. Nothing near the carcass indicated the reason for the assault.

  A car nearby had bullet holes along the side. The windscreen was smashed in. A man and a woman were dead in the front with a young child in the back.

  Further along, another man lay on the road beside his vehicle, with his family dead inside. The base of his back and half of his buttocks had been blown away by the exit wound of, what appeared to be, a high velocity rifle. Nearby was a shotgun and a soldier with his chest obliterated by a 7.5 mm shell.

  In severe shock by now, Jason walked at a shuffle, absorbing the horrors around, but as he rounded a gradual bend he came to a complete halt.

  The vehicles and land up ahead were completely destroyed after a petrol-assisted fire had raged furiously. The entire embankment was blackened, burnt to soil level by a heat so intense, the tarmac in places had melted and bubbled. Only the scorched shells of cars remained and inside each sat at least one shrivelled, blackened doll.

  Too numb to cry, he looked down the line of fire-engulfed vehicles. How many were involved, he couldn’t guess. He didn’t want to think; then would come the body count. From his present position it was impossible to tell, as the remainder were swallowed by a thick morning mist a hundred yards down the road. Behind the mist was a multitude of horrors.

  Gateshead was just outside the blast zone when the bomb struck the city of Newcastle at 16.47 on January 28th. The resulting shock wave stripped the surrounding hills of houses, leaving nothing more than blackened rubble in the wake of the bomb.

  The bridge which straddled the Tyne on the Western Bypass collapsed. This saved those who were crossing in the rush hour traffic the horror of burning to death in their cars when they plunged 80 ft to the bed of the vaporised river below.

  But Jason could see none of this. He was now even more convinced it had been a massive contain and clean-up operation because of the outbreak of disease.

  Ill with fear, he stopped and decided to rethink his journey. The mass exodus had been travelling away from the city. It was obvious he would have to find his answers somewhere other than Newcastle.

  He glanced skyward as he turned around and began to follow the road north instead. The sun was as close to overhead as it ever got in the winter. He checked his watch; it was approaching midday. The prospect of spending at least one night in this hell hole was looming. He needed to think about supplies.

  Jason climbed the embankment, then scanned for cars with potential booty. Up ahead, on the far side of the opposite carriageway, was a large four-wheel drive with resources strapped to the roof. Returning to the road, Jason weaved his way through the blockage and soon arrived at the vehicle to discover a full set of camping equipment and a boot full of food.

  As he drew near he could see the front wheels were buckled up on the embankment and the windscreen was shattered. Even at a glance the situation looked more sinister than a driver trying to escape the gridlock.

  Jason moved around. At the front of the vehicle he saw two men, their chests riddled with bullets, propped up in their seats. As he stepped onto the bumper, then pushed himself onto the bonnet, he could see the frost-covered bodies glistening in the sun. He leaned forward, his close proximity to the corpses briefly unbearable, then dragged himself up onto the roof.

  Three nylon straps secured the equipment to a rack and as he unbuckled each in turn, he lowered the items onto the road beside the vehicle. Once finished, he packed anything he thought useful into a rucksack before looking around for more transportation.

  It took several minutes of searching through the jam to find an empty car which could be manoeuvred out of the gridlock, but several failed attempts to start the engine later, Jason gave it up as a lost cause. He tried two more vehicles before reluctantly accepting he would have to continue on foot.

  The cars were jammed, bumper to bumper, as far as he could see. This continued for several miles until, in the distance, he saw the cause of the blockage.

  Trotting to the scene he discovered a multiple vehicle pile-up. At the front of the carnage, amongst the tangle of cars and lorries, were two tanks positioned to blo
ck the road. He could barely distinguish where one vehicle ended and another began and couldn’t imagine how many had originally been involved.

  He climbed up the embankment and picked his way around the debris until he was clear of the wreckage. Rejoining the road he found it a blessed relief to leave the massacre behind and to carry on unhindered with his journey.

  The next major town north, which he knew his way around, was Morpeth. Jason decided to continue there in the hope of finding the cause of the time split.

  Without more power he would be relying solely on the teleporter’s backup battery and it was the amount of power stored which would dictate the time he would have again in Germany. He knew at best, this would be no more than ten minutes and the further he went back, the more the time would reduce. There was only one chance to fix this, therefore, he had to know exactly where and when to go.

  He increased his pace. This world was not his; it was a monster accidentally created and, one thing he knew for sure, he wanted out, and he wanted out fast.

  Chapter Eleven

  Jason had been walking for about an hour when he encountered a man, with a rucksack on his back, lying on the grassy verge at the side of the road. This was no surprise. He had already seen travelling by car was a waste of time; the army blockade and volume of traffic had seen to that. He was also not shocked to find, upon approach, the man was dead. He stopped and crouched down. Sitting back on his heels, he kept a safe distance from the body in case of infection.

  The man looked no more than thirty, had brown hair and was reasonably fit. The equipment strapped to his back indicated he intended walking a great distance. His body, open to the freezing air, was well preserved and he was less decomposed than the others. The now familiar lesions dotted his exposed skin, which was grey with patches of blue-black bruising. Dark lines at the edge of the mouth and around the lips could indicate internal bleeding or possibly adjoining tissue disintegration due to disease. The way the body lay, in a comfortable position on its side, it seemed as though the man had merely become too tired and had sat down and died.