Time Riders

by Alex Scarrow

  She caught herself. What? Really? Seriously?

  ‘This is insane,’ she whispered to herself.

  The distinct form was human. She could see that clearly now. It seemed to be shuffling forward towards her, beginning to block out the swirling light of this ‘other place’. Then all of a sudden the ghostly light was gone. It was dark. In the pitch-black she felt a puff of air on her face, flicking a tress of hair into her eye. She brushed it aside. There was something inside the cage. She could hear it breathing, fluttering irregular gasping coming through the mesh.

  ‘Hello?’ she whispered. ‘Waldstein? Is … is that you in there?’

  The breathing remained unchanged.

  ‘Who’s got that torch?’ said someone behind her. ‘Get it on the cage.’

  She heard someone fussing with something, cursing as they fumbled for a switch too subtle for its own good.

  ‘Waldstein?’ whispered Anna. ‘You all right?’ The breathing faltered and stopped in answer to her question.

  ‘Get the torch on!’

  ‘I’m trying! I can’t find the … Where is it?’

  The poor man in the cage started to say something quietly. Anna leaned forward, finally brave enough to press against the wire mesh. It was still warm from carrying the electrical charge but not hot. And, thankfully, not live. ‘You OK in there?’

  ‘I … I’ve s-seen … it …’

  ‘It’s all right. We’re going to get you out … and then we’ll get an ambulance.’

  ‘I … I’ve seen it,’ his voice rasped.

  Then behind her the torch snapped back on and shadows danced in all directions.

  ‘He’s in shock,’ said Anna. ‘Get the light on him.’

  The beam swung down over her shoulder, casting a grid-work of leaping shadows around the warehouse. Through the wire she could make out the man she’d seen moments ago: the man she’d thought needed medication and a nice comfortable padded cell in which to live out his delusion.

  No burnt human carcass. That much was a relief. But his face … his face.

  Those eyes beneath the frizzy lunatic hair and behind those madman spectacles were still round and wide, but not with the childlike wonder and excitement he’d been exhibiting before. Not any more.

  It was terror. Sheer terror. The look of a mind utterly closed down to protect itself from insanity. At that moment she realized tonight had been no parlour trick. No stage magician looking for an audience, looking for publicity.

  He’s been somewhere. He’s actually been somewhere. And for some reason she had a feeling he’d been gone far longer than a minute.

  ‘What?’ asked Anna Lopez softly. ‘What just happened?’

  His gaze, faraway, perhaps still looking upon another place, seemed to gradually return, slowly catching up with the rest of his body to arrive back in Chicago. His eyes focused on her – a gradual realization that he wasn’t alone, that someone was just on the other side of the wire mesh.

  ‘I …’ His mouth opened, dry and cracked lips. ‘I … I’ve s-seen … the end.’

  Behind her she could hear someone making a call. Phoning an ambulance. Maybe some of them were hearing him. She noticed the sicko with the camera was still filming. Maybe he was disappointed not to have a smoking corpse to show his editor. Maybe this man’s insane babbling was going to be an even better story to file.

  ‘Waldstein?’ uttered Anna. ‘What do you mean … the end?’

  She realized he was crying. A tear rolled down his cheek and soaked into the bristles of his beard. The lost faraway look was finally gone. His eyes were on her. He suddenly looked around the cage. ‘My God! This is … this has all got to go!’

  ‘What? You mean your machine?’

  He slammed a palm into the wire cage and it rang and rattled, echoing around the warehouse. ‘THIS! Time travel! It’s … it’s going to destroy us!’

  CHAPTER 1

  2001, New York

  Alone, Maddy watched a cluster of seagulls picking away at some rubbish tipped on to the low-tide silt of the East River. Overhead, traffic clunked rhythmically across the Williamsburg Bridge, the end-of-day mad-hour rush of city workers returning from Manhattan back to Brooklyn.

  She tossed a small nugget of tarmac into the water, and watched the seagulls scatter at the sound of the splash.

  My God. Her mind was still spinning with the idea. My God, Liam is Foster?

  That’s what the old man had said, wasn’t it? That he and Liam were the same person; that he was once Liam. And now he’d said it, she could see he was right. She could see the likeness in their faces, in their mannerisms, even in the way they talked.

  ‘Time travel did this to me. Time travel aged me, Maddy,’ he’d said.

  The fact that Liam was going to become that poor old man … something else for her to keep to herself until she figured that Liam was ready to hear it. She felt so lonely harbouring secrets like this; it separated her from the other two. It felt wrong. After all, they’d been recruited together: her, Liam, Sal … the three of them plucked from different times, from the very last seconds of their lives by the old man. They should be a team. There shouldn’t be secrets between them. Not ones like this.

  ‘You’re the team leader now,’ Foster had told her, ‘it’s down to you how and when you tell Liam about this.’

  She watched the seagulls cautiously return to peck and pull at the plastic bags on the silt.

  ‘Just great,’ she muttered to herself. Something else to churn away inside her, keep her awake at night. Because it wasn’t just the Foster-is-Liam thing, was it? Oh no. There was that other thing, that scribbled message she’d found at their supply drop point … the one for her eyes only.

  Maddy, look out for ‘Pandora’, we’re running out of time. Be safe and tell no one.

  She wondered what she was freakin’ well supposed to make of that. It meant nothing to her. ‘Pandora’ – what was that apart from being a pretty stupid girl’s name?

  ‘Why does it have to be me?’ Her soft voice caused a strutting seagull nearby to pause and cock its head at her.

  ‘I’m not talking to you, dumb bird.’ The seagull resumed its scavenging, one beady black eye still warily on her. She watched lights flickering on in Manhattan as the sun began to settle behind the two tall pillars of the World Trade Center.

  Foster recruited you for a reason. Foster put you in charge for a reason. Because he knows you’re smart enough to figure things out, Maddy.

  She sighed. She’d really like to believe that … that she was destined to be a good team leader, a good TimeRider. But somehow, with the way things had gone so far, it all just felt … as if she’d been winging it, hanging in there by the skin of her teeth. Lucky not to be dead, or to have caused the deaths of Liam and Sal. Lucky not to have completely messed up the timeline. Lucky not to have destroyed the world.

  Way too much stress for an eighteen-year-old girl to have to be burdened with.

  ‘Darn right,’ she uttered. ‘Way too much.’

  CHAPTER 2

  2001, New York

  Monday (time cycle 57)

  I’m watching him now, floating in that tube of gloopy slimy stuff. It’s Bob, but not Bob yet if you know what I mean. It’s a boy actually. Completely hairless and curled up like a baby. You can see the face is definitely him even though it’s not finished yet; all thick bone and that heavy dumb-looking brow. The skin’s not grown on his head just yet. It’s all red-raw muscle fibre and teeth, and two eyeballs that look huge without eyelids. Sometimes they seem to shift, twitch, as if they’re staring at you. But I know he’s not. His baby mind is fast asleep right now, dreaming whatever baby brains dream.

  Some first-phase skin has grown across his body, but I can still see patches where it hasn’t. There’s a bit I can see through, just beneath his left arm, where I can still see the ribs, and I think that’s an organ in there. Is it his heart or something? It’s moving. Like an animal in a cage.

  Actuall
y, this is making me feel sick. I guess I’m going back to my bunk.

  Speaking of puke-making, Liam’s emptying the toilet right now. We got one of these camping toilet things a few days ago. The archway has got a little toilet closet, with a creaky wooden door and a cracked toilet bowl with no seat. It’s totally pinchudda! And it’s not connected up anyway. So that’s why we needed the camping toilet. It has to be emptied every few days cos it stinks the whole place out – when the plastic barrel thing gets pulled out, the back of the toilet comes out and all that ‘stuff’ inside is sloshing around.

  Shadd-yah. My turn next time.

  Anyway … so we’re going on a trip soon. Somewhere special. You want to know?

  I’ll tell you.

  Tomorrow we’re going to ‘Sunday’! That’s right, we’re coming out of the loop and going to the Sunday before it. It’ll be my first time travel. Well, no … I suppose when Foster grabbed me from home and took me back here, that was my first time, but I didn’t understand then what was going on. And of course every time the field resets I’m sort of travelling back forty-eight hours in time, right?

  But doing this … stepping into the portal, that’s like the real thing. Really being a time traveller. I’ll be stepping through a hole in space and time, through a moment of chaos space. Liam says it’s weird, like all milky white and foggy and there’s creepy movement in there and you can’t see what it is. But he says it all happens so quickly and you’re out the other side before you know it. So not to worry.

  Great. Thanks for telling me about the creepy-movey things, Liam.

  So, I’m sort of nervous. But excited too cos we’re going to see this rock band called ‘EssZed’. Maddy says they disappeared after 9/11. Just vanished! They’re kind of like meant to be famous for that or something. So this, even though they don’t know it, this is their last ever gig. Maddy reckons I’ll really like them. She played some of their tracks on the computer. They’re total rip-heavy. She says Liam will probably hate them and moan about it not being real music but just noise. Not the sort of ‘ditty’ he’s used to.

  LOL.

  ‘Education’. A ‘field trip’, that’s what she’s calling it. Useful for Becks to get a little more experience playing at being human. She needs it. She’s too serious and robotic. Whereas Bob was dumb – you could pretend he was just an idiot. But Becks is too sort-of ‘cold’. She freaks me a bit when she stares. It’s like she’s looking at you and figuring out the three fastest ways to kill you with nothing but her thumb.

  I think I preferred Bob.

  CHAPTER 3

  2001, New York

  The portal shimmered in the middle of the archway, a perfect sphere of energy, and in the middle of it a hint of the ghostly wavering world of a whole forty-eight hours ago: Sunday night. A flickering of neon light and what looked like a twisting, undulating stretch of graffiti-covered brick wall dancing through a heat-haze.

  ‘Come on, then, Sal,’ said Maddy. ‘Quickly through.’

  Sal swallowed back a throatful of nerves and nodded. ‘Yes, all right, I’m ready.’ She stepped forward, feeling the energy lift the hairs on her arms, lift her fringe like a theatre curtain. ‘It tickles!’

  Stepping inside the sphere of energy, she could feel the concrete floor beginning to flex beneath her feet, like the canvas of a trampoline somebody else was already jumping up and down on. Then very quickly it softened and sagged like tissue paper … and then all of a sudden the floor was completely gone.

  ‘Jahulla! I’m falling!’ she yelped as her arms and legs flailed and she felt herself tumbling through air.

  ‘Don’t worry about it!’ she heard Liam’s voice say, but already it sounded like it had been shouted down a long, long tunnel, distant echoes fast receding. Then it was gone.

  ‘Liam!’ she cried, but her own voice sounded dampened and swallowed up.

  I really am alone.

  Just like he’d said, here she was, floating – or falling – through an ocean of featureless white. Like a nugget of breakfast cereal see-sawing down through an impossibly large bowl of milk.

  Stay calm, Sal.

  Swirling featureless white all around her. She held her hand up only a dozen inches away from her face and it was so faint, fogged by the mist. She waved it around and felt the air, as thick as liquid, resist her movements. She looked up, hoping to see the faint form of one of the others flailing above her, but she saw nothing but more white.

  Maybe I AM all alone.

  She wondered whether she was in her very own milk-coloured universe, or whether the others were out there somewhere. Perhaps nearby. Perhaps just beyond sight. She wondered if anyone ever got lost in here, never to emerge at the other end. Doomed to spend eternity swirling and flailing. You’d go insane, wouldn’t you? With nothing to see, hear, smell or feel, you’d go completely insane.

  She decided it was probably best not to think about this kind of stuff. But then her mind had more unwelcome questions it wanted to ask.

  What if that’s what the creepy-movey things are? Other travellers … maybe even other TimeRiders who’ve lost their way? Got stuck here for eternity?

  She could all too easily conjure up the image of another girl just like her, lost for endless centuries in here: eyes fogged by madness, opaque like those of a boiled fish, and cackling like an old woman – a mind rubbed smooth of meaningful thought and left utterly, utterly insane.

  This really isn’t helping, stupid. Think of something else.

  She decided she’d rather she was on her own; catching a glimpse of something out there, faint and moving, was the last thing she needed to see right now, so she closed her eyes.

  Almost as soon as she’d done that, she felt the ground suddenly return beneath her feet.

  ‘Whuh?’ She opened her eyes to see she was standing in a small car park, lit faintly by a neon red BUDWEISER BEER sign that buzzed like an angry fly in a bottle. She took a step clear of the portal and a moment later Liam, Maddy and Becks emerged, one after the other.

  ‘That was horrible!’ she gasped under her breath.

  ‘First time’s the worst, so.’ Liam grinned apologetically. ‘Maybe I should’ve warned you.’

  She could hear a deep rhythmic pumping sound coming from somewhere beyond the brick wall in front of her. To her left the wall continued past an alcove where cars were parked so tightly in a row side by side she wondered how any of the drivers had managed to get out. The wall came to an end overlooking a dimly lit backstreet where she could see the impatient shifting outline of a queue of people.

  ‘Oh, it sounds like they’ve started playing already,’ said Maddy. ‘Come on, guys, let’s get inside.’

  CHAPTER 4

  1193, Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire

  Snow fell softly and silently on the track ahead of them, floating down from a loaded grey sky above like cherry blossom. On either side of the forest trail tall thick evergreens sported fulsome white skirts that weighed their burdened branches down low.

  Sir Geoffrey Rainault tugged at the cloak slipping down his shoulders, begrudging the body warmth that escaped with the movement. Between saddle-sore legs his mount – his favourite, Edith – plodded relentlessly and wearily: a beast that had carried him across too many countries to remember. Nine months across the sun-baked deserts of the Holy Land, across the spring meadows of endless principalities and dukedoms … and now at last home, England, north of London and en route to the remote wilderness of Scotland.

  Geoffrey shifted in the saddle to glance over his shoulder at the others: three other knights, their retinue of squires, sergeants and the token priest travelling with them to attend their five daily prayer meetings. In all, just the eighteen of them now. When they’d set out on their errand, there’d been over sixty in their party. But illness, some battlefield wounds that had gone bad and one or two skirmishes on the way home had whittled their number down. Now, those left, still intent on seeing this lie through, looked like men ready to lie
down in the winter coldness and let sleep take them.

  ‘Sire! Look!’ shouted one of the squires, pointing up the forest track.

  Geoffrey turned back in his saddle and squinted at the bright blanket of undisturbed snow ahead of them. He could make out the perfectly still form of a man swathed in a dark hooded cloak, standing in the middle of the rutted track.

  Geoffrey’s sense of caution stirred him to rein in Edith and raise a gloved hand. He heard the column of bone-weary horses and men shuffle to a halt behind him.

  ‘We are about King’s business, make way!’

  The hooded figure remained perfectly still. The forest was utterly silent, save for the cawing of a murder of crows circling high above in the winter sky, the rasping of the horses’ breath and the clink of a harness as one of the pack horses stirred uneasily.

  ‘Do ye hear?’

  The figure seemed not to. Geoffrey switched tongues. ‘Nous faisons les affaires de rois!’

  A breeze tugged at the hooded cape, but the man within remained perfectly still.

  This is not good.

  Geoffrey looked at the trees either side of the track: perfect ambush terrain. They’d been jumped before by bandits on the Continent in woods much like this. The mistake back then – a mistake that had cost them a good knight and two sergeants-at-arms – had been not to form up the moment the first of them had appeared. He raised his hand and balled it to a fist – the signal for the rest to dismount and make ready for a fight.

  The forest echoed with the metallic clank of buckles and belts, the rasping of chain mail and the drawing of swords from scabbards.

  ‘Step aside now! Or … I will have one of my men fire upon ye,’ said Geoffrey, beckoning forward Bates, one of the sergeants in his retinue and reliable with a crossbow. Bates drew up beside him, ratcheting back the drawstring and slipping a bolt into place.