The Eternal War (26 page)

Maddy turned it off and offered them an apologetic shrug. ‘Well … not everything is an improvement, I guess.’ She handed the iPhone to him. Wainwright was quiet for a few moments as he stroked the glowing screen in silent wonder.

‘James …’ said Devereau, ‘you and I, our men, could be living our lives in
that
world, not this one.’ He leaned forward, his bayonet scabbard tapping a chair leg. ‘This girl’s country is America. But it’s a different America. It’s a whole nation, a united nation, not a shattered and broken one. Our men, our people, have their own flag, their own government!’

‘Bill.’ Wainwright raised a hand to politely hush his friend. He stared at the iPhone in silence, caressing its smooth screen. ‘This … this seems to me to be technology far in advance of even the British.’

‘It
is
,’ said Maddy. ‘It’s everywhere in my time. Every kid has one. Well, almost every kid.’

He looked at her. ‘This is a child’s thing?’

‘Oh yeah, well … not a toy, but, you know, kids can use them.’

He turned to Devereau. His expression a question. ‘Bill?’

‘I’ve seen other things, James. These ladies arrived out of nowhere, right in the middle of our abandoned old lines by the river. They have machines, devices. You really should inspect them.’

‘This … what this girl is saying, this is for real?’

‘I believe it to be.’ Devereau nodded. ‘There is no other explanation for these pictures, for that device you are holding in your hands.’

Wainwright once more gazed at the screen, the colourful icons of apps.

‘James, if she’s right, if there really is another America, it would no longer be a broken battlefield. There’d be no British and French fighting each other on our soil … spilling American blood.’ Devereau tapped a finger on a magazine page, on the image of the space shuttle launching. ‘Americans achieved that, James. Not British. Not French … 
Americans
.’

Wainwright looked up at him. His eyes narrowed. ‘There was a dream once, old friend, wasn’t there?’

Devereau nodded. ‘A nation of the free. Yes … there was a dream.’

He passed the phone back over the table to Maddy. ‘And you say your time-travelling machine can change everything to how it appears in these pictures?’

‘Yes.’

Wainwright slowly nodded, thoughtfully weighing up all that she’d brought to show him. ‘Well, then … what is it you need from me?’

Becks leaned forward across the table. ‘An axial feed parabolic radio antenna.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘A satellite dish?’ said Maddy. Both colonels looked at her as if she was speaking Hebrew. ‘A radio dish?’

‘Ah …’ Devereau raised a finger. ‘I think they may mean a communications saucer?’

Maddy nodded. ‘Yup … that sounds like what we’re after.’

CHAPTER 46

2001, Dead City

Sal grunted in pain as the creature finally dumped her unceremoniously on the ground. She looked around at the dark place and saw nothing but a few faint glints of daylight. But she could hear plenty: grunts and groans, the gasp of dozens breathing heavily, the rancid odour of stale sweat.

A match suddenly flared in the darkness and she saw she was in the coal cellar of some building along with the entire pack of these strange creatures. The match lit the end of a thick candle, already well used, sheathed in drips and rivulets of hardened wax. In the steady glow she watched the creatures. Some of them settled themselves on beds of scrap cloth and threadbare mattresses, and she realized that this must be their … 
lair
 … for want of a better word. Some of the creatures had no bed or nest to settle on. She noticed that the small childlike creature seemed to be organizing something, distributing scraps of cloth for those without something on which to rest. She heard hushed mutterings and grunts as it pointed and gestured to make itself understood to half a dozen of the salamander-like creatures. They seemed uncertain of their surroundings, and frightened.

They’re new to this group.
She supposed this pack must have picked them up on a foray out of –

Her blood ran cold.

The Dead City.

That’s what this place was, wasn’t it? She’d caught glimpses, turning her head to one side, away from the creature’s sweat-soaked shoulder, caught fleeting glimpses of the outskirts of a deserted town, weeds chest high, saplings growing in the middle of cracked tarmac roads, long ago broken into a crazy paving by Mother Nature. The sun coming up, casting shadows from tall brick buildings lined with windows fogged by grime and algae, nubs of moss emerging from cracked wooden window frames.

She’d caught sight of old shopfronts and signs, faded and flaking:
MCKENZIE’S HARDWARE STORE, RUSSELL AND BARTON’S CANDY AND CONFECTIONERY, MA JACKSON’S FRIED CHICKEN
. Signs that swung lifelessly above smashed windows and hollow shells beyond, long ago picked clean of anything useful or edible.

The Dead City. Hadn’t that Chinese man warned them not to stray any closer?

‘Miss Vikram.’ She turned her head at the sound of the whispered voice, and saw, to her relief, Lincoln lying on the pile of coals beside her.

‘Jahulla!’ she hissed, surprised at how pleased she was to see him. ‘Are you OK?’

His wiry hair was clotted with dried blood. ‘One of those infernal big ones walloped me hard in that farmhouse. I must have been knocked senseless for a while.’

‘I think we’re in that Dead City that the Chinese man said we shouldn’t go near.’

Lincoln nodded. ‘I believe we are.’

‘I’m frightened,’ she said.

‘Me too.’ Lincoln swallowed. ‘Do you have an idea what these creatures are?’

She shook her head. If she believed in the things her parents had once believed in – in Shivu, in Brahma and his four heads and Vishnu with all his arms – all that crazy stuff, perhaps she might have allowed herself to think they were something supernatural, something evil.

‘Spawn of Hell?’ whispered Lincoln. ‘Demons? Do you think we died? And this is the very first layer of the underworld?’

She looked at him, incredulous. ‘Why? Do you think that?’

He winced as he fumbled at the lump on his head. ‘These are not any creatures of Earth I have ever seen.’

Their whispered conversation had attracted the attention of the ‘child’. It stopped organizing the others and wandered over towards them with an awkward gait that looked like an uncomfortable approximation of a person walking. As if it was making a conscious effort to appear more human.

Sal and Lincoln instantly stopped speaking and looked up at it from the pile of coals they were lying on. She could see it more easily now, even if it was just by candlelight. It was no more than four feet tall, slender and narrow shouldered. Its head was loaf-shaped like the others, but, in proportion to its meagre body, much larger.

The creature squatted down, a position that looked more comfortable for it to settle into, and cocked its oversized head curiously at them. Its eyes were bigger than those on the ape-like variety that had carried her and Lincoln. Bigger and more childlike. But it was the mouth that drew her attention. There were no lips, just a jagged, uneven line of scarred, ribbed and bumpy flesh. As if some careless, or perhaps drunk, sculptor had fashioned them as an afterthought from lumpy clay.

Sal noticed, surprised she hadn’t spotted it before, that the creature had a dark bow-tie tied round its thin neck. It looked almost comical, and reminded her again of children playing dress-up. If she wasn’t so terrified of what these creatures were going to do to her and Lincoln, she might have thought this thing actually looked almost cute.

‘I … I’m … Sal,’ she whispered. ‘M-my name … is … S-Sal.’ She pointed at Lincoln. ‘And he is … A-Abraham.’

It cocked its head again, the eyes – all black like a rodent’s – narrowed, and faint frown lines appeared on its featureless pale skin. The gash of a mouth flexed unpleasantly.

‘Shal?’

‘Saleena,’ she said again. ‘M-my l-longer name … it’s Saleena.’

‘Shaleena?’ it repeated carefully.

‘No, it’s
Ssss-
aleena.’

‘Thatsh what I shaid. Shaleena?’

She realized its malformed mouth was producing a lisp. She nodded. ‘That’s right, then.’

It looked at Lincoln. ‘Ay-bra-ham?’ it pronounced carefully.

He nodded.

The creature looked down at them carefully for a full minute in a thoughtful silence, then finally its lips rippled and flexed.

‘My name ish … Shixty-one.’

My name is Sixty-one?

‘That’sh what my name
ushed
to be.’ The creature’s lips moved in a way that Sal interpreted as a possible smile, although with the twisted jagged lines of its ‘lips’ the twitch of movement could have meant anything.

‘I changed my name … It’sh Shamuel, now.’

She shot a quick glance at Lincoln.
Did he just say Samuel?

She looked at it again. ‘Your name … did you s-say y-your name is
Samuel
?’

It nodded. There was a hint of childlike pride in that gesture, she thought. Like a little boy showing his teacher that he can actually tie his own shoelaces now.

‘That’sh exshactly right.’ It smiled again. ‘Shamuel’sh the name.’

CHAPTER 47

2001, outside Dead City

Captain Ewan McManus studied the city skyline through field glasses. ‘Marvellous,’ he muttered without any real enthusiasm. He lowered his glasses, his eyes squinting back sunlight beneath the peak of his helmet.

‘Are you saying they went in there?’ asked Liam. ‘That’s the Dead City you were talking about last night, right?’

McManus nodded. ‘The very same.’

White Bear was beside them. He’d just returned from scouting ahead. ‘Tracks lead into city,’ he said. ‘Many more track, go into city.’

‘As I suspected.’ He tucked the field glasses back into a pouch on his belt. ‘This area’s been plagued by runaway eugenics. They raid for food, sometimes just for fun. And that’s where they scurry back to.’

‘I also see human track … is small, light, maybe girl,’ said White Bear, looking at Liam. ‘Your sister? She walk. Maybe eugenic need rest awhile,
dah
?’

‘Oh Jay-zus! Thank God … she’s alive!’

McManus slapped his shoulder. ‘There you are. Some jolly good news.’

‘So what now? We’re going in?’

McManus nodded. ‘Of course we’ll go in. This is the kind of thing my lads are used to doing – house-to-house, urban fighting. Not for the faint-hearted. It’s combat up close and not very pretty, I’m afraid.’

He shook his head. ‘Of course, if the Confederate army had the gumption to go in and clean this mess up earlier instead of ignoring the problem, we wouldn’t have so many eugenics to deal with now.’ He puffed his lips. ‘Pfft. Ruddy useless lot. Nothing more than poorly trained farmhands, fools and felons.’

‘So when?’

McManus turned to Liam. ‘When are we going in?’

Liam nodded.

‘I shall call in the regimental carrier first. A few things my chaps’re going to need.’ He turned away from Liam towards the rest of the mounted platoon, pulling down the communicator from his helmet.

‘Summon Sky God,’ said White Bear, grinning.

‘Excuse me?’

‘Big Bird … in sky. It come … make much snow.
Dah?
’

‘Oh, right. You like the snow, do you?’

The Indian nodded vigorously.

Liam turned to look at the silent city, once upon a time a city called Baltimore. From this distance it didn’t look dead. Just peaceful. He could see tall buildings towards the middle of it, the chimneys of factories, the steeples of churches further out and the ordered rows of brick houses in the suburbs. A peaceful city slumbering in the midday sun.

He heard the thud of heavy feet approaching and turned to see Bob.

‘Anything?’

‘Negative,’ Bob rumbled. He’d gone to climb a nearby water tower in the hope that he had a better chance of sniffing something out. But still no messages from Maddy, not even a partial message, not even a single tachyon particle. Which could only mean one thing: she had her own problems to deal with.

Same thing, different day.
When
weren’t
they desperately fighting their own separate fires?

CHAPTER 48

2001, New York

‘I presume you are referring to our divisional communications hub?’ said Wainwright.

Becks nodded. ‘Colonel Devereau has explained that the hub services communications between this section of your front line and your High Command back in Fredericksburg, Virginia.’

He cocked an eyebrow at Devereau. ‘It appears you have spies at work over here, Bill.’

‘We know where it is. Have done for some time. Just south of what used to be Times Square. We’ve seen the dish and the antennae. If our sky force was worth spit in a barrel, we’d have bombed it to rubble years ago.’

Wainwright got up and paced towards one wall of his office. A huge map all but covered the entire wall, pin heads protruded, notes were tacked to it and pen marks and scribbles identified troop deployments and defence concentrations all along the east side of Manhattan. In a war with some movement to it, that information would have been critical military intelligence. But for Devereau most of the information on the map was old news. Bunkers, pillboxes and trenches built many decades ago when both he and Wainwright were boys in shorts. Devereau knew as much about the deployment of Wainwright’s men as he did his own.

The Southern colonel tapped the map with a finger. ‘Here … as you say, just below what used to be called Times Square. Not so very far away from here.’

‘So?’ said Maddy. ‘Let’s go and get it.’

‘Not so far away … but the communications bunker is garrisoned by a detachment of British troops.’ He shrugged. ‘They don’t trust regular Confederate troops with guarding it – just a bunch of dumb ol’ corn-seed hicks … that’s how they see us.’