The Trouble With Time (6 page)

He said, “So what you’re doing is building an alternative department? Your own personal team on the dark side? Why would I want to join?”

“The dark side?” Quinn’s eyebrows went up. He intoned, in a passable imitation of Darth Vader, “You are beaten, it is useless to resist. There is no escape. Don’t make me destroy you, when together we can bring order to the galaxy. Join me, it is your destiny.” In his normal voice he added, “If money interests you, it’s easy to make when you have access to time travel. I’d be accommodating, if we were partners. Of course, you’d have to abandon a few scruples, and get used to the idea that you’d be doing exactly what your day job is meant to prevent. But then, I’ve explained why your job is entirely futile. For my part, I’d need to be convinced I can rely on you, that you weren’t just agreeing to this in order to get out of the predicament you’re in so you can report me to my superiors.”

“I don’t see how I can convince you of that.”

“Luckily, I do. I was planning to maroon Scott two hundred years in the future, leave him to survive as best he could.” Quinn paused for a moment. “But I’ll know I can trust you if you kill him first. It might even be a mercy to Scott. And to make sure you don’t double-cross me, you’ll do it with your bare hands while I cover you both with a gun.”

With the sudden rush of adrenaline coursing through his veins Jace found he was able to twist himself into a sitting position. From this vantage point he stared at Quinn with rage and disgust. He didn’t consciously decide what to say; the words spilled out on their own.

“I used to respect you, Quinn. Admire you. Like you. Not any more. Turns out you’re a contemptible, lying, two-faced scumbag who doesn’t give a shit for anyone except himself. I’ve met some lowlifes in my job, God knows, but the lowest and meanest of them is a hundred times better than you. You murdered McGuire and now you want to drag me down to your level by making me murder Scott. I’d rather die. Go fuck yourself.”

Quinn’s face changed. That got home, Jace thought.

“You’d rather die . . . I can arrange that for you.”

Without warning, he left the sofa and smashed his fist into the side of Jace’s head, knocking him face down on to the floor. Jace’s desperate bucking and kicking made it take a little longer, but within a few minutes Quinn had used a third restraint to fasten the plastic cuffs binding Jace’s hands and feet together behind his back.

A moment later Jace felt his wrist being grasped. He twisted to look over his shoulder, blinking blood out of his eyes. Quinn had hold of him with his left hand, and was pressing the two buttons on the TiTrav.

Monday, 4
^th
September 2180

The world went black and spun. When Jace had imagined taking his first time trip, it had not been like this; in his daydreams he hadn’t been hogtied, powerless, with death on the agenda. An unquantifiable amount of time passed, then his body smashed to the ground as Quinn let go of him. He smelled wet earth. Autumn leaves and ragged grass pressed damply against his face. A cool breeze blew. Lifting his head as much as he was able, he saw a tangled mass of saplings and creepers smothering mossy gravestones, gilded by the amber light of a setting sun. He guessed where he was. Quinn had brought him to the future, after the end of mankind.

Jace waited to find out his fate, heart thumping. Quinn either intended to put a bullet in his brain, or to abandon him in the future as he had planned to abandon Scott. If the latter then maybe, if he was fast, he could hit out the moment his hands were free and overpower him.

Quinn walked into Jace’s view, and stood quietly looking down at him. His face was cold; bereft of its normal humour, it looked like a stranger’s. He didn’t reach for his gun. Instead he pushed up his left sleeve, and tapped at the TiTrav’s screen.

Jace’s heart sank. He said urgently, “You can’t leave me like this! Cut me free before you go.”

Quinn paused. “I’m surprised you ask me that,” he said. “As you pointed out, I don’t give a shit for anyone except myself. You are here by your own choice. You’ve got a week to ten days to think about that, while you die of dehydration.”

He pressed the buttons and disappeared. Primeval dismay and terror gripped Jace, one human alone on the planet, a tiny speck of life soon to be snuffed out. The air seemed to grow darker and heavier, pressing in on him. The sigh of the wind in the trees emphasized the silence of a dead city. He made a monumental effort to pull himself together, summoning anger and pride to help him.

I am not going to panic. That bastard is not going to get the better of me. First, I have to work out how to get free. Think
.

Quinn had secured him with three of the zip-tie flexicuffs they used in the department. Jace was very familiar with their construction; they were made from two tough plastic strips that passed through a single roller-lock retention block. They could be cut easily enough with wire cutters, or released by slipping a pin between the block and the serrated side of the strap, or melted with a flame. That was why the time police always cuffed people’s hands behind their backs, with the lock the other side from the captive’s thumbs.

Jace did not carry a lighter or pins, and his penknife was out of reach in his pocket. The position he was tied in restricted most movement, and was acutely uncomfortable. He tried twisting his wrists in opposite directions to put tension on the plastic, then wrenching his hands away from each other in the hope of bursting the catch. This achieved nothing except painful wrists.

He needed something solid and rough he could rub the plastic against until it wore away, and he needed to do it now before darkness fell and while he was still relatively fresh, before he got too weak from thirst, hunger, and cold. The nearest headstone was ten or twelve feet away.
Right
. Jace transferred his weight from knees to hips, then moved his shoulders and repeated the action, jack-knifing his body towards the stone. It was slow going, and painful in a multitude of different ways. The thin plastic cut into his wrists and ankles, and he ached all over. He had to steamroller over small branches in his path, his jacket buttons catching and dragging, impeding his progress.

Halfway to the stone he stopped for a rest. His back was killing him. Perhaps Quinn would feel remorse when his anger had died and return, if only to put him out of his misery with a bullet. On reflection, insulting him had been stupid and self-indulgent. He should have stuck to his original plan to play along, hoping for an opportunity to turn the tables before it got to the point where he was supposed to kill Scott. He and Scott together just might, with a lot of luck, have overpowered an armed Quinn, and he’d thrown away that chance. Almost any scenario he could think of would be better than this.

If Quinn came back, he wanted to be untied, waiting for him, ready. He imagined punching him in the face, beating him up. The savage satisfaction of this thought made him set off with renewed zeal towards the stone slab in the deepening twilight. The white scuts of rabbits gleamed in the light of a full moon as they moved about close by; they seemed to know he was not in a position to pose a threat. The grass was alive with small black slugs inches from his nose, and it was getting difficult to see them. However, slugs were the least of his worries. He tried to ignore the pain: he could do this. He remembered his Krav Maga instructor tapping the side of his skull and saying, “It’s all in here. Believe you can do it, and you can.”

Time was hard to judge, but Jace reckoned it took him about twenty minutes to reach the gravestone. Brambles lapping its base scratched his face and caught at his clothes. He had to rock himself over on to his other side and shuffle backwards, feeling with his fingers to line up the plastic holding his wrists and ankles together with the edge of the slab. He pulled off strands of ivy and bramble, then got hold of the spare wrist band to keep it out of the way as much as possible. At least Quinn hadn’t threaded both of them through, which would have given him twice the work. He paused for a breather, gathering his strength, then moved his hands up and down the few inches they would go, fretting the taut strap against the corner of the stone. He had hoped to do it fast enough for friction to melt the plastic, which would have been quick, but he couldn’t. He’d just have to wear it away.

His arms were quickly screaming at him to rest, and every now and then the stone caught his knuckles and scraped skin off. It was difficult to exert much pressure, but the worst thing was that he couldn’t judge his progress – could neither see nor feel if the stone was having any effect at all on the plastic. His mouth was dry, his stomach empty, he hurt all over. He told himself it could have been worse; Quinn could have used metal handcuffs, and he’d have had zero hope of getting them off.

Doggedly, Jace counted out loud; twenty rubs, pause, relax, three breaths and start again. He tried moving his feet for a bit to give his arms a rest, but this was more difficult to control and he went back to lifting his arms sideways, up and down, up and down. The air was cold and the sky had grown so dark Jace could see very little. The rabbits had gone. Some creature moved in the undergrowth, a cat, a rat or a fox. Then unmistakably, he heard the howl of a wolf not far off, and redoubled his efforts, now counting under his breath. Lying trussed on the ground while a pack of wolves ripped him to pieces was not something he wished to experience.

The hours passed. Once or twice he nodded off, until the pain in his limbs woke him. When the night was darkest and the agony seemed too much to bear, tears ran down his face and death seemed inviting. Death not being an immediate option, he summoned the dregs of his resolution and carried on with the repetitive movement, trying to visualize the plastic as practically worn through, about to give way . . . he’d be a fool to give up when he was so nearly there.

It was almost an anticlimax when it finally happened. Jace’s legs began to straighten behind him on their own, became painful in a new and different and very welcome way. Gradually he extended his body, flexing his spine, letting his sore muscles relax.

He rolled on to his back and sat up against the gravestone, knees bent, so he could work on the band on his right wrist. This position was immeasurably more comfortable, and he could move his arms a greater distance and apply more force. As the cuff gave way and his hands separated, he noticed the darkness was less absolute, and shapes were becoming distinct once more. Birds tweeted in a desultory autumnal way. It was dawn. It had taken him all night to get this far.

His wrists were sore and bloody where the bands had cut into them, his knuckles raw. He wiped his face on his sleeve to try to remove the slugs’ slime. He felt in his pockets for his penknife to release his feet, but the moment he found his phone had gone, he realized Quinn must have searched him while he was unconscious. In the corner of an inner pocket his fingers closed on something Quinn had missed; hard and triangular like a plectrum, it was a locator he’d borrowed from Kayla weeks ago and forgotten about. Jace smiled a grim smile to himself. If a time traveller approached within a mile radius, the locator would give him a minute’s notice, beeping louder the nearer it got to the location where the traveller would time in. He put it carefully away again, and used a slim metal tag on a zip to slide into the roller-lock and remove the cuffs from his feet and the remaining wrist band.

Jace stretched and looked about him; exhausted, chilled to the bone, and feeling as if he’d been on the rack. What would be happening back in his own time? Nothing yet; it would be around six in the morning there as well as here. But later . . . he imagined life going on without him, his colleagues discussing his unexplained absence, ringing his dataphone. As the hours passed, Quinn’s initial pretended concern would turn to reluctant drawing of conclusions: the obvious, neat solution to the mystery of the vanishing TiTrav and the missing operative.

Would Kayla accept this story, or not believe it of him and do some investigating on her own? That would be dangerous for her. He desperately longed to be back in his own time, sorting things out, exposing Quinn. Frustration and misery gripped him. This would not do; if he was going to survive, and he was, he had work to do – he needed to get his stiff limbs moving, explore, discover where he was, look for shelter, tools and food.

The tops of tall buildings were visible above the trees. He headed towards them, to look for a knife.

Thursday, 23
^rd
July 2015

“Florence?”

Floss swivelled, house keys poised by the lock, her other hand holding her bike steady. Nobody had called her Florence since her school days. Screwing up her eyes against the sun, she saw a tall solidly built man with stubble-short hair standing on the pavement. She could have sworn the street was empty a moment before. Though it was a warm evening, he wore a padded jacket and heavy boots.

He came up the steps towards her. “Florence Dryden?”

“Yes, what is it?”

His hand reached out and grabbed her arm, jerking her away from the bicycle. For an astonished second she looked into cold blue eyes, then the world went dark, inky black, and her stomach felt as if she was simultaneously plummeting in a lift and spinning on a fairground ride. Time passed, long enough for her to wonder if he had hit her over the head – was this what being knocked out felt like? Or maybe this was what death felt like. Terror assailed her while she battled with acute nausea, then she felt solid ground beneath her feet and could see again. Someone barrelled past her, knocking her out of the stranger’s grasp and on to all fours. Floss vomited convulsively on rough wet grass, eyes watering, damp soaking through the knees of her jeans while a steady rain fell on her back and seeped through her tee shirt. Behind her she heard thuds and grunts. As soon as she could, her stomach emptier than it had ever been before, weak as a kitten, she struggled upright and turned.