The Eternal War (17 page)

‘That is not a sensible course of action, Madelaine.’

Maddy looked at her. Becks, quite impassive and calm. Almost childlike in the way she was squatting on the bricks, like some wartime child playing tea party with her broken dolls amid the rubble of her own home, oblivious to her fate.

‘Don’t you see, Becks? We’re all done here. We’re
finished
.’

She stood up, and clattered her way slowly across the bricks towards the doorway leading back into the main arch. She left Becks still squatting on her haunches patiently awaiting further instructions.

‘Madelaine?’

Maddy looked around the mess of the archway. The airborne dust that had filled the place half an hour ago had now settled, leaving a light, pale coating of powder on everything.

‘Madelaine?’ Becks called again from the back room. Her voice, normally so commanding, surprisingly deep for her feminine frame, right now sounded almost like the forlorn bleating of a lamb.

Maddy made her way across the floor, over the wide crack in the concrete, and ducked under the open shutter to look out again at the grey ruins of New York. Smudges of smoke marked the horizon to the north – Queens – where the bombing raid had taken place earlier. And the salmon-pink sun, now settling behind the tortured skeletons of Manhattan’s once fine and proud buildings, cast dappled paintbrush strokes of meagre warmth across the no-man’s land. The only colour on this colourless landscape.

Becks’s faint voice echoed out of the archway after her once more. ‘Madelaine! What are my orders?’

She ignored the support unit, left her sitting in the gathering darkness among the bricks, abandoned like an orphaned child.

‘Madelaine?’

One step in front of the other in the gathering twilight … each one easier than the last. She realized she could leave. Walk away from it all. Walk away from the responsibilities she’d never asked for, walk away from secrets she didn’t ask to know about. If all their field office was now was a crumbling archway and a bunch of machines that didn’t work any more, what difference would it make if she stayed or left?

She realized something.
I can go
.

She turned her back on the East River, Manhattan and the sun setting beyond, and faced north-east towards the ruins of Brooklyn, towards Boston …

Home
.

Perhaps even in this alternate timeline the same people had met, fallen in love and made the same babies and somewhere north-east of here, in her home city, there was a little girl with glasses and frizzy strawberry-red hair who liked messing around with her father’s electronics toolset rather than playing with Barbie dolls. Perhaps that home was there. Perhaps her mom and dad were the same two people and she could explain to them who she was, get them to understand she was their daughter, but ten years older. For them it would be like having an older sister for their only child. A sister who could understand her in a way no normal sister could: a mentor, a guide, a friend.

Her faltering steps across the rubble-strewn landscape quickened.

A part of her argued the case that she still had responsibilities and obligations here. Liam and Sal, they too were stuck in this … whatever this world was. But what could she do for them? Sit on her bunk and wait for them in the dark? Wait until some bombing raid came here and decided to give this portion of the city another pounding?

Maddy shook the nagging voice away. She really hadn’t needed Becks to catalogue to her how complete and catastrophic the damage was to their equipment.

In the absence of a plan, or anything left of their field office for which she had to be responsible, there was only one small voice that made sense. A childlike voice.

I want to go home.

CHAPTER 30

2001, somewhere in Virginia

The Chinese man looked down at them, surprised. ‘
New York!
You wan’ go New York?’

‘That’s right,’ said Liam.

‘You craz-ee.’ He shook his head. ‘I take you far as Dead City. No more. I goin’ west – New Pittsburgh, maybe Cleveland. You shou’ go west too.’

‘Dead City?’

The man shrugged, said something to his wife sitting beside him in the odd-looking vehicle’s front cabin. He turned back to Liam. ‘Yuh … Dead City, you know? Ol’ times use’ to be call’
Baltimore
?’

It was dark and Liam could only see the side of the man’s face, lit by the paper lantern swinging in the fresh breeze. He read the expression as friendly bemusement.

‘You and your friends sit in back … with chickens. I take you north some way.’ The one eye Liam could see glinted in the lantern’s amber light; it was locked suspiciously on him. ‘You no trouble?’

Liam spread his hands, turned to make sure Bob had tucked the shotgun away out of sight. ‘I promise you, sir … we’ll be no trouble.’ He glanced at the side of the man’s vehicle. It reminded him of a traditional Romany gypsy caravan; every surface seemed to be lavishly decorated with intricate Oriental designs, and down along the side a multitude of hooks protruded, from which pots and pans and other kitchen miscellany rattled and clanged softly as the gentle breeze stirred ears of corn either side of the empty road.

‘We’ll just be in the back, then,’ said Liam, ‘keeping your chickens company.’

The Chinese man nodded, satisfied with that. Then turned to his wife and began chattering to her. She didn’t seem quite so pleased to have passengers come aboard.

They made their way to the back of the caravan. It rattled and vibrated from the idling engine beneath, which intermittently spat clouds of vapour out between the spokes of its six wide, wooden cartwheels.

Liam pulled open a wire mesh gate at the rear and stepped up inside to see a cramped space almost completely filled with carefully stacked household possessions. The rest of them followed suit, the vehicle lurching alarmingly as Bob finally pulled himself up inside and slammed the mesh door behind him. There was just about room for the four of them to huddle on the floor, shoulders rubbing shoulders and legs pulled up in front of them.

With a cough and a splutter the vehicle lurched forward and a thousand different objects around them began to squeak and rattle and clank. It might not be the most comfortable ride for them, but at least it was taking them in the right direction – north, towards New York.

So far there’d been nothing from Maddy. No portal, no message. Not a good sign.

Liam was thinking of something interesting to say when, with a flutter of dislodged feathers, a rooster emerged from behind a wobbling cupboard and settled on top of Bob’s head.

‘Oh sorry,’ said Liam, ‘I actually thought he was … uh … you know,
joking
about having chickens in the back.’

Bob swiped a big hand at it and the bird scrambled and flapped around the enclosed space for a full minute before finally, tentatively, returning to roost on his head again.

‘No place like home,’ offered Liam.

Bob stared indignantly back at him.

‘You, sir, look about as happy as a clam at high tide.’

Bob switched to stare indignantly at Lincoln.

‘Suits you,’ said Sal, affectionately patting his arm.

CHAPTER 31

2001, somewhere in Virginia

As dawn started to make its mark on the horizon, the Chinese man deposited them at a junction of roads: one of them heading west, the other continuing north. He warned Liam once again that heading north to New York was ‘no good’.

‘Why? What’s going on in New York?’

The question caused the man to cock his head curiously. ‘You serious?’ He didn’t wait for Liam to answer. ‘You been ’sleep all your life? The city … it all gone now. New York, it just big ruin.’

‘A ruin? What’s up with it?’ He turned round to the others, standing beside him on the shoulders of the road. Sal’s eyes were wide, her face ashen.

‘How you not know this?’ the man asked, incredulous.

‘Well … we’ve … been away, a long time.’ Liam’s answer sounded lame and the Chinese man shrugged a
whatever
, as if to acknowledge that the answer maybe wasn’t his business.

‘The war … it stay there. It never move on. Been there forever.’

‘War?’ Lincoln took a step closer. ‘Great Scott! Did you say
war
, sir?’

The Chinese man leaned back in his cabin, wary of the tall man’s belligerent face. ‘Yeah … you not know of war?’

‘No, sir! A war between
who
, man? Tell me!’

Liam rested a hand on Lincoln’s shoulder. ‘Easy there, fella.’

The Chinese man’s wife uttered something into his ear and he nodded, firing up the engine on his carriage. It coughed and clattered noisily before settling down to a noisy chug. He was clearly getting a little nervous of these crazies he’d picked up and deposited here on this crossroads in the middle of nowhere.

‘Please!’ said Liam. ‘Don’t go yet. We need to know more!’

‘I tell you this … it not safe. North, fighting there never stop. You shou’ go west.’ He pointed east across the rolling fields of barley. ‘East no good too … Dead City, maybe twenty-five mile that way. Poison. Not good for you health.’

He shrugged an apology as his wife tugged insistently on his arm. ‘We go now.’ The carriage’s large wheels rolled forward on to the road as a fan of acrid smoke erupted through the spokes.

Liam coughed and wafted it out of his face and, as it gradually cleared, he watched the carriage clatter, rattle and chug its way along the road heading towards New Pittsburgh, or at least that’s what the hand-painted sign at the junction indicated.

They watched until the carriage was just a faint twinkle of swinging lanterns in the distance.

‘I suppose we should find somewhere to hide before it gets too light,’ said Liam. He looked around. On either side of the roads heading north, south and west, as far as his eyes could see in the grey light of dawn, it was nothing but shoulder-high ears of barley swaying gently and whispering.

They followed the single-lane road heading north. Only a dozen vehicles passed them by; most of them ramshackle-looking carriages, carrying families and their worldly possessions stacked high.

One vehicle in particular sounded different enough as it approached from the distance for Bob to suggest they hide. And they did, crouching in the field amid the stalks of barley as it drew nearer, came into view and eventually rolled slowly past them.

Sal exchanged a glance with Liam.

The vehicle was military, a ‘tank’ being perhaps the most appropriate word to describe it. It looked almost comically top heavy – the approximate proportions of a small terraced house. The top ‘floor’ was a large gun turret that looked like it probably rotated, from which protruded three short-barrelled cannons. At the very top a hatch was open and a tired-looking army officer in a crimson tunic and white sash was smoking a pipe and gazing out across the rolling fields.

The bottom ‘floor’ of the tank was a mass of iron plating and rivets flanked on either side by caterpillar tracks that ground noisily along the tarmac road. The tracks wound round a large solid iron rear wheel and at the front a much smaller spoked wheel. Between the wheels on each side, a miniature side-cannon protruded.

As it slowly passed them by, Sal got a glance at the rear of the tank’s bulky chassis. Iron-plated shutters were open, revealing three panes of glass, like the bay window of a suburban house. Through them she could see, by the muted amber light of a gas lamp, half a dozen soldiers gathered around a table, having breakfast by the look of it, and bunk beds in three-high stacks.

They watched the enormous vehicle trundling its way northwards. The rumble of its engine and the squeak and groan of the caterpillar tracks continued to hang in the air long after they’d lost sight of it in the pallid grey light of dawn.

Liam looked at the others. ‘That looked like a gentleman’s club on wheels.’

An hour later, just after the sun had breached the horizon, they finally came across a smaller potholed lane that branched off the road and led into what appeared to be a small deserted hamlet.

They soon found themselves on a village green overgrown with weeds. The buildings surrounding it were boarded up and derelict. Over every ground-floor window wooden slats had been nailed in place – years ago, by the sun-bleached look of them.

‘A ghost town,’ said Sal.

‘Aye.’

Bob strode towards the door of the nearest building, a chapel. Its timber slat walls were flecked with white paint here and there, but most of it was the dull pale grey of weathered wood.

‘Information,’ his baritone voice rumbled as he reached out a hand to hold down the frayed and curled corner of a notice tacked to the chapel’s door. The others joined him as he read out the faint printed words on the tattered page.

‘Notice of clearance: this settlement has been evacuated in accordance with the War Appropriations Act. It is an illegal act to enter, occupy and/or make use of these properties, which are scheduled to be cleared and used as additional farmland in due course.’

‘It’s an old notice,’ said Sal, pointing at a date in the corner. ‘See? Fifth of June, 1985.’

‘Been deserted for … what? …’ Liam frowned as he struggled to do the maths.

‘Sixteen years,’ said Bob.

‘Right.’

‘I’m thirsty, Liam,’ said Sal.

He realized he too was thirsty. The cool of dawn was soon going to become the cloying warmth of a September morning. They needed to find some drinking water. ‘I suggest we look around, see if this ghost town has a well or a rainwater tank or a spring or something.’

The sun was warming the sides of the old buildings, casting long cool shadows in their wake across weed-strewn front gardens. He could see the remnants of lives lived here: a children’s swing dangling from a rusting A-frame, a mailbox on the top of a post nailed to a picket fence – inside it the dried twigs of some birds’ abandoned nest, a washing line with the tattered threads of laundry still pegged to it, flapping gently.