TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6) (25 page)

‘Your stated intention is to prevent
the future event codenamed Pandora from occurring?’

She nodded slowly. ‘That’s kind
of it. Yeah. You know … save the world?’ She winced as Bob’s
forehead creased with thought and his eyes seemed to disappear into the shadow cast by
his thick Neanderthal brow.

‘What do you think? Bob? That OK with
you?’

‘The original mission goal of
preserving the destruction of the world and humankind appears to be an illogical mission
goal,’ he announced finally. Maddy let out a breath she hadn’t realized
she’d been holding for the best part of a minute. ‘Becks?’

She nodded; her mind had processed the same
information and arrived at the same answer. ‘With the information that Dr Rashim
Anwar has provided us of the future, the previous directive appears to make no
sense.’

‘If that’s your plan, Maddy, if
you wish to work against the goal of your agency then you need to be somewhere else
entirely,’ said Rashim. ‘You need to get as far away from here as possible.
Another place, maybe even another time. You know that, don’t you?’ Maddy
knew.

‘If you really are what you think you
are … 
engineered units
,’ he said that carefully, desperate
not to cause offence, ‘then if Waldstein’s after you, he will, I’m
sure, have all your pre-inception date memories on file. He’ll know everything
there is to know about you.’

Liam stirred.
‘Pre-inception?’

‘Before our recruitment,’
clarified Maddy. ‘Our so-called life stories.’

‘Right,’ said Rashim.
‘He’ll certainly guess you’ve come up here to find your family, Maddy.
He … or more of his support units … could be close by, closing in on
us as we speak.’

‘You’re right.’

‘A new base for us to set up?’
Liam’s clouded face seemed to brighten a little.

‘Yup, new home. New
mission.’

‘I’m not sure I get what our
mission is, though,’ said Sal.

Maddy wasn’t a hundred per cent sure
herself. To make Pandora NOT happen. Yes, that … but also to continue, in
some moderated way, the mission they used to have: to make sure no
reckless time traveller set this world hurtling towards another nightmare timeline.

‘We’re going to make the call,
Sal. We’re going to take control of history. We’re going to steer it so the
world gets a future where we don’t kill ourselves off. Where we don’t
completely trash this planet.’

Liam nodded. ‘Now that makes a bit
more sense to me, so.’

Even Sal perked up a little bit. ‘But
if we’re moving on to somewhere else … aren’t we going to need
some more money, or something?’

‘Aye,’ said Liam.
‘We’ve nearly run out.’

‘True.’ Maddy shrugged. ‘I
guess we better think about where we’re going to get some more, then.’

16 September 2001, Interstate 90,
Westfield, Massachusetts

Bob held the gun up at the man behind the
counter. The sock pulled over his large head was far too small and stretched so taut
that his thick horse-lips were mashed against his teeth and squished back into a hideous
leer, halfway between a snarl and a grin.

‘I ’eed you to ’ive
’e all your ’oney!’

The old Korean man behind the counter
shrugged. ‘What you say?’

‘I ’AID … I ’EED
YOU TO ’IVE ’E ALL YOUR ’ONEY!’ Bob’s voice boomed across
the racks of convenience goods in the petrol station. A trucker taking his pick from
some microwavable snacks in a fridge unit looked their way.

Liam lifted his own sock up to reveal his
nose and mouth. ‘Excuse the big fella, he’s not so good with a sock on his
head.’

‘This is
robbery
?’

‘Aye, yes … yes, I’m
afraid it is.’ Liam shrugged guiltily. ‘Really sorry about that. We’re
going to need some of that money in your till there.’

The old man nodded, understanding.
‘Ah …’ and then ducked down out of sight.

‘Uh?’ Liam hadn’t been
expecting the old man to be quite so co-operative. He looked at Bob. ‘Well, that
wasn’t so hard.’

A moment later the old man reappeared holding
a rusty old Korean model AK47 held together by duct tape. ‘YOU LEAVE NOW!’
he yelled, his finger resting on the trigger and looking dangerously like he was halfway
pulling on it.

‘Maybe we should –’

The gun went off, five rapid-fire rounds
before the old weapon clicked. Jammed. Several polystyrene ceiling tiles exploded in
showers of plastic snow, most of the bullets whistling past them. But one caused a puff
of crimson to erupt from the side of Bob’s head; an ear, almost completely intact,
flew across the racks and landed among the refrigerated snacks not too far from the
trucker.

Bob shouldered their shotgun.

‘Hoy! No!’ Liam pushed the
barrel up as the weapon boomed. The rack of cigarettes behind the old man’s head
exploded with a shower of tobacco shreds and paper.

‘Just get that till!’ barked
Liam.

Bob passed the gun to Liam, leaned over and
grabbed the till embedded firmly in a counter housing. Plywood cracked and splintered,
chocolate bars and scratch cards spilled on to the floor as Bob shook the till
vigorously. The whole counter unit was lifted clean off the floor. With a loud crack,
the till pulled free and the counter crashed back down again.

‘Sorry ’bout the mess
there!’ Liam grimaced, before he pulled the sock back down over his mouth.

Maddy had only just finished filling the
motorhome when she heard the rattle of gunfire inside the petrol station’s
convenience store. Another shot, deeper, the boom of a shotgun. Then a second later what
sounded like a bull charging around inside.

‘Oh Jesus!’ she whispered.
‘I said be discreet!’ They were
meant to be holding the
store up for some quick cash, not levelling the place to the ground.

A moment later she saw Liam emerging,
followed by Bob carrying something that looked almost as big as a bank safe in his
arms.

‘Becks!’ she called out.
‘We’re leaving! Now!’

The Winnebago’s engine started up with
a roar of an accelerator pedal pushed down too hard – Becks’s first go behind the
wheel.

Liam tumbled up the steps inside, Sal
helping him up. He collapsed on to the seat at the back, hyperventilating. Bob followed
him inside and tossed the till on to the floor. The vehicle rocked on its loose
suspension under the heavy impact. SpongeBubba wobbled and lost his footing.

‘Woo-hoo!’ he chirped merrily on
his back, stubby paddle feet whirring ineffectually in the air.

Maddy slammed the door shut on them, cursing
under her breath as she ran along the outside of the motorhome, pulled open the
passenger side door and clambered up on to the seat beside Becks. ‘Go! Go!
GO!!’

Becks eased the gearstick into Drive and the
SuperChief bucked forward like an eager racehorse let out of a trap. The front of the RV
clipped the rear of the rig parked up beside the petrol pump next door, sending showers
of sparks and a twisted aluminium bumper across the forecourt.

Becks spun the big wheel round, finally
regaining control of the Winnebago as they barrelled out of the petrol station’s
exit ramp and up the slip road on to the interstate. At least at this time of night they
weren’t roaring up only to join a road clogged with bumper-to-bumper commuter
traffic. They had three lanes almost to themselves. Becks gunned the accelerator.

‘Slower!’ barked Maddy.
‘Slow down! Keep it under fifty!
We don’t want to get
pulled up for speeding!’

‘Affirmative.’ She eased back on
the pedal and the complaining whine of the vehicle’s engine settled back to an
almost soothing, muted grumble.

Maddy eased herself back in her seat. She
let go of the dashboard in front of her. Her nails had left crescent-shaped dents in the
plastic.

She turned round in her seat to see Rashim
and Sal hefting SpongeBubba back on to his flat paddle feet and Bob and Liam pounding at
the till like a pair of dim-witted cavemen trying to chip flint shards from an
unbreakable boulder.

Jesus.
Not the first time she found
herself wondering,
What kind of a Mickey Mouse team is this?

‘My God!’ she hurled at them,
exasperated. ‘What the hell was that?’

They stopped what they were doing, all of
them staring expectantly at her. A bizarre menagerie seemingly sharing the same
wide-eyed question on their faces –
not good?

She shook her head. ‘I’m pretty
sure I said we should try and be
discreet
about this!’

20 September 2001, Harcourt,
Ohio

It was an abandoned elementary school they
ended up looking at. Many of its windows were boarded up and covered with fading
graffiti, and those that weren’t, were either broken or smeared with foggy green
blooms of moss. The playground beside the main entrance foyer sprouted tufts of grass
and weed between fissures in the tarmac. Along one side, a row of gently rusting bicycle
racks emerged from a bed of several years’ worth of windswept autumn leaves.

The fact that the school was a couple of
miles outside the nearest town and – apart from a gang of kids goofing around at night
with cans of spray paint, some time long ago – it looked like no one had been here
recently, coupled with the fact that it still had a tappable link to the power grid,
made it pretty much a perfect temporary place for them to set up shop.

Actually, they’d found it quite by
chance. A stop at a diner in the middle of one-strip town, Harcourt. A blink-it-and-miss
town in the middle of Ohio’s faded industrial heartland – the rustbelt, some
called it. By the look of the lifeless smokestacks and fenced-off warehouses, it had
once been a very promising industrial town. Bob had pulled over on the gravel car park
in front of the diner and they’d gone in for a toilet and breakfast bagel
break.

The diner was empty apart from them and one
young waitress
in a green check dress and apron slumped across the end
of the counter reading a newspaper. SpongeBob and Patrick quacked and guffawed from a TV
on the other end. Rashim smiled at the sight of that.

After bringing them the pot of coffee and
breakfast they’d ordered, the waitress found a reason to loiter by their table –
wiping down others nearby, changing ketchup bottles and salt cellars that didn’t
need changing – clearly bored witless with her own company and intrigued by the
diner’s first and only customers that morning.

Her name was Kaydee-Lee Williams – at least
that’s what the plastic name tag on her chest said.

It was Liam who broke the ice and asked her
about the town. She was pitifully keen to answer. ‘Oh, Harcourt’s, like,
totally dead. Been dying for years. Ever since they closed down the auto-parts factory.
That’s all this town was really, a place for a couple of factories to go.’
She shrugged. ‘When the auto parts started getting made in China, the factories
closed. Just like that. Simple.’

She told them how the town’s
population shrank each year. There was no future here, people were moving away,
particularly families with young children. That’s how they learned about the
school in Harcourt, Green Acres Elementary. The school Kaydee-Lee said she’d once
been to. No need for schools any more in a dying town, she’d said.

Maddy looked at it now. It would suit their
immediate needs. It still had a live power feed that they could tap into. The local
electricity company apparently hadn’t bothered to disconnect and mothball the
junction box. Instead, it had obviously been cheaper just putting up some hazard signs
with risk disclaimers all over them.

The town itself also had a pretty decent
hardware store they
could use, and they’d passed a big retail
park a dozen miles back along Interstate 70. Maddy had spotted a CompUSA, a Best Buy and
of course the obligatory mega-sized Walmart.

She looked up at a grey sky. Over halfway
into the month, September’s late-summer promise was fading already, and tumbling
autumn clouds vied with each other to be the first to drop their load on Green Acres
Elementary.

‘Let’s get our stuff
inside,’ she said.

Half an hour later, they’d emptied the
SuperChief of all the things that had once made the archway in Brooklyn their home. And
now ‘home’, or at least their temporary home, was a classroom with mouse or
maybe it was rat droppings on a scuffed linoleum chequered floor and school desks and
bucket chairs stacked along a cork-board wall still decorated with curling pieces of
paper. Thumb-tacked pictures drawn in crayon and felt tip. Childish scrawlings that
spoke of happier times here. Blue skies and suns. Mom-an’-Dad-an’-Me
pictures with tents and barbecues, summer fairs and parades.

Outside it was finally raining. The tapping
of heavy, greasy drops on smeared windowpanes and somewhere inside the school building
they could hear an echoing
drip-drip-drip
where a part of the roof was
failing.

Maddy offered them her best morale-boosting
cheerleader’s smile. ‘It’ll be a bit comfier once we get ourselves
sorted out. I promise.’

Liam remembered the moment he’d first
awoken in the archway – a dark place. All damp bricks and crumbling mortar. And yes,
just like now, the tap-tap-tapping of dripping water from somewhere out in the darkness.
He’d thought it a horrible place to wake up. For a moment even wondered if it
might be an odd version of Heaven. In which case he’d vowed to have a word with
the first priest he came across.

If truth be told, his first impression of the
archway hadn’t been that great. It had appeared to be every bit as grim and
unwelcoming as this place. But they’d made it a home.

‘Aye, we’ll get some bits and
pieces in here to make it nice.’

‘That’s right.’ Maddy
stepped across the classroom and reached tentatively for a light switch. She grimaced as
she flipped it, half expecting failing wiring and the progressive corrosion of damp to
collude in electrocuting her. Instead, several frosted glass panels in the
classroom’s low ceiling flickered and winked to life.