TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6) (3 page)

BOOK: TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6)
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So, we are running. I can’t say
where. I won’t say where we’re going. Just in case, reader, you’re
ONE OF THEM! Can’t be too careful, right? But we have a plan. Sort of.
There’s a place we’re driving to and we just stopped here at this
roadside shopping mall-diner-service station place. It’s been a crazy two
days. A blur. One big panic after another.

I needed to write this. Get my head on a
little straighter. So … there it is. Maybe our job of stopping pinchudda
morons from messing with changing time is finished now. Maybe this
‘agency’ thing’s all over. Maybe all that’s left for us is
just trying to stay hidden. Staying alive. I don’t know. I don’t know
what the next few weeks hold for us. Jahulla, I don’t even know what the next
day holds for us.

I don’t even know if these last
six or so months have even been for real. Maybe it’s all been one big
nightmare and I’ll wake up again in my bedroom in Mumbai and it’ll be
2026 again.

Nice dream.

So … I’ve written
enough. Maybe too much. I might just rip this up. Burn it. Eat it or something. Or
maybe I’ll stuff it into my Burger
King box with the rest of
the cold fries and floppy gherkin where no one is likely to find it.

But writing this helped a little, I
guess.

My name is Sal and, like I said,
I’m lost, and quite a bit scared and not at all happy about things right
now.

Chapter 2

11 September 2001, New York

Maddy took off her glasses and buried her
face in her hands. Air hissed between her fingers: a long, torpid sigh that was a signal
to the other two, Liam and Sal, to shut-the-heck-up for just a moment and let her
think.

The archway was quiet except for its usual
noises: the faint chug of a filtration pump from the back room, a tap dripping
somewhere, the soft burr of a dozen PC computers’ heat fans. It sounded like it
did on any normal day, except for perhaps the inane trash-talking between Liam and Sal
playing
Mario Kart
on the Nintendo.

‘Hey, what’s up with that girl,
skippa?’ chipped in SpongeBubba.

Maddy raised a hand to shush the lab robot.
‘OK.’ Her voice was muffled behind her other hand. ‘This is what we
need to do.’ She straightened up, put her glasses back on and turned towards the
monitors on the computer table. She addressed the webcam.
‘Computer-Bob?’

A black DOS-like dialogue box appeared on
the monitor beside the camera.

> Yes, Maddy?

‘Can you force the archway’s
displacement field to reset to Monday?’

Today was Tuesday, early afternoon. Outside
the archway a
collective pause had settled across the city: a pause in
which the sky was clear of planes, television presenters had said all there was to say,
and everyone was still busy wondering if the last few hours had been for real and the
Twin Towers really had just been completely destroyed.

> Affirmative.

‘Do it, then. Do it now!’

‘What’s going on?’ asked
Rashim.

‘We’re all going back in
time,’ Sal answered. ‘By one day.’

The young technician still looked
bewildered. Only a couple of hours ago – from his perspective – he’d been
approached by Maddy and the others back in Roman times as he’d quietly been
setting up the receiver array for the rest of his group to home in on. Now that was all
history, or not, depending how you looked at it. Now he was here, stuck with them
because they couldn’t just leave him behind, dangling like a loose end. And
Project Exodus, the project he’d spent the last couple of years of his life
working on … well, none of that would be happening now. By grabbing him,
they’d managed to prevent a group of three hundred refugees from the future
completely throwing history off track.

Job done. But now he and his
cartoon-character lab unit were stuck here with them.

‘So,
when
exactly is this
place?’ asked Rashim, looking round the archway. His voice rose with growing
anxiety. ‘I mean, this is twenty, twenty-first-century tech by the look of it.
Yes? Am I right?’

‘This is the day the towers were
knocked down by planes,’ said Liam.

‘September the eleventh, 2001,’
Maddy said quickly. ‘It’s our base-time, our field office. Where we’ve
been operating out of for the last few months.’

The cursor on the dialogue box flickered.

> Stand by. Field
resetting.

They heard the soft whine of energy
discharging into the displacement machine and then the fluorescent lights dangling from
the archway’s low ceiling suddenly blinked out and a moment later flickered back
on. The archway was still in the mess it had been when she and Sal had fled back in time
to the reign of Caligula. Tidying all this up, however, was the last thing on her mind
at the moment.

‘And now … it’s
yesterday,’ said Maddy. ‘The day before 9/11.’ She sat down in the
office chair beside the desk and huffed air. ‘Which now gives us twenty-four
hours’ breathing space before those psychotic killer meatbots come back to finish
us off.’

Rashim’s dark eyebrows rose, looking
from Maddy to the others, for someone to add a word or two more of explanation.
‘Psychotic …?’

‘There’re
more
of
them?’ asked Liam.

‘Two more, we think,’ said Sal.
‘Six of them came through.’

‘What
killer
things are
these?’ asked Rashim.

‘Six! Jay-zus!’ Liam’s jaw
dropped. ‘And you two managed to kill four of ’em?’

‘Could someone please tell me what
psycho killer things
you’re talking about?’

‘Yes. We did pretty good,
huh?’

Liam laughed. ‘I’ll say
–’

Rashim closed his eyes. ‘PLEASE,
EVERYONE, WILL YOU
STOP
IGNORING ME!’

The others turned to look at him.

‘I … I’m …’
Rashim opened his eyes and smiled half apologetically. ‘I … I’m
very close to … uh, losing my mind. Please – the least one of you people can
do is answer just one of my questions.’

Sal pointed at Bob. ‘The psychotic
meatbots we’re talking about are clones, support units like these two. Four men
and two women. They came from the future to kill us.’

Rashim nodded gratefully, then silently
appraised Bob. ‘He’s a military-grade gene product, isn’t he? One of
the earlier-gen versions?’

‘Correct,’ Bob rumbled.

‘Computer-Bob dealt with two of them
for us,’ said Maddy. ‘And one got taken out by a time wave, I think. The
other one … well, you guys saw what happened.’

One of the units had managed to leap after
Maddy and Sal as their hastily opened escape portal began to collapse in on itself. It
had emerged on the other side missing both its feet and one hand and yet it had still
managed to be quite lethal. As Bob held it down, Maddy had put several rounds into its
bald human head. The first and last time she ever intended to fire a gun at anything
point blank.

‘You said six of them?’ said
Rashim.

Maddy nodded. ‘Yup, there are two more
of them and they may be out there in New York somewhere.’

Sal sat down on the other chair beside
Maddy. She scuffed the toes of her boots against the floor. ‘More of them could
arrive,’ she said. ‘Right, Maddy? Another six?’

Maddy nodded. ‘Tuesday morning,
sometime during Tuesday morning, that’s when they arrived. So right now it’s
twelve noon, Monday. Which means we’ve got eighteen, maybe nineteen hours before
they come again. And if another batch – technically, I guess, the same batch –
don’t come then we’ve
still
got those other two to worry about. And
they’ll be back from wherever computer-Bob sent them on a wild-goose chase.
That’s right, Bob, isn’t it?’

> Affirmative.

‘Affirmative.’

Both Bobs answered the question.

Maddy turned to look at them all. ‘Two
of them we might stand a chance against. But if another six turn up right here in this
archway …?’ She pulled on her lip, made a face. Not the sort of face to
instil confidence in her little team.

‘We could set some sort of a trap for
them,’ said Liam. ‘As soon as they arrive, get Bob to open a portal and drop
them right into that chaos space. Could we not do that?’

Maddy shrugged. ‘We could do. But,
Liam, you’re missing the point. And it’s actually quite a big
point.’

Liam splayed his hands. Irritated by her
patronizing tone of voice. ‘What?’

‘Someone else knows about us, Liam.
Someone knows exactly
when
and
where
we are. We’re not a secret
any more.’

‘That means we’re still in
danger?’ added Sal quietly.

‘If we stay here, yes.’
Maddy’s words rang round the archway, a reverberation off damp brick walls that
seemed to last indefinitely and not quite fade away.

Liam muttered a curse under his breath.
‘That’s great. I was just about gettin’ used to this place, so I
was.’

‘I’m thinking the sooner we
leave, the better,’ said Maddy. She regarded the gloomy interior. Hardly a place
anyone would normally look at with dewy-eyed fondness. But it
had
become their
home. It
had
become something of a safe haven, a nest, a shelter. And yes,
between the seemingly constant firefighting they’d experienced from here, there
had been moments of … dare she say … fun.

Fun.
Some good memories. Among all
the scary ones, that is.

Liam sighed. ‘Ah well …’
was all the consolation he could offer them. ‘Ah well.’

‘It’s just bricks,’ said Sal
without a great deal of conviction.

The squat lab robot flexed its pliable
plastic face, wrinkling its pickle-shaped nose as its round and permanently staring eyes
scanned the gloomy interior. ‘It’s a very messy place. I don’t like it
very much.’

‘Yeah, but it’s home,’
said Maddy. ‘Or it
was
anyway.’

She looked around the pitted and cracked
floor to where a shallow scoop of concrete was missing – where so many terrifying and
unplanned last-minute portals had been opened up. Where a thick loop of cables dangled
from the ceiling – from which a horrific Cretaceous-era carnivore had once dropped down
and butchered a man right in front of her eyes. Where power cables snaked from one side
of the archway’s floor to the other – there had once lain a carpet of dead and
dying Confederate and Union soldiers, men feebly crying out for water amid the acrid
smoke of battle, bleeding out for a war that should never have been. Where the walls
flanked the shutter door – the probing claws of irradiated mutant humans had once tried
to pick through crumbling mortar to get in at them, to eat them.

And, planted on the very desk she was
sitting at now, the severed head of a young woman had rested recently. Grey eyes,
beautiful grey eyes, glazed over and lifeless, the cranium hacked open to reveal a
bloody pulp, and a small, invaluable microchip inside.

Ahhh, memories
.
Precious
memories
, Maddy noted unenthusiastically.

‘You’re right, Sal, it’s
just a bunch of bricks. The sooner we get the hell out of here, the better.’

Chapter 3

10 September 2001, New York

Maddy took the subway across to Manhattan
and emerged at 57th Street into the warmth of the sun. Middle of the day, that’s
when the old man could be found in Central Park. That was Foster’s pact with her,
his tacit promise when he’d walked out on the team after their first mission.

You’ll always find me here at the
same time. Feeding the pigeons.

She’d made this trip nearly a dozen
times now over the last six months. Six months’ worth of their ‘bubble
time’ – Monday and Tuesday, the 10th and 11th, looped over and over again. Every
time she sat down with him on that bench by the duck pond, beside the hot-dog cart, it
was – for Foster – like their very first meeting after he’d bid farewell and left
her in charge of the team. The world outside the archway’s protective field was
linear, a sequence of moments experienced by everyone in sensible chronological
order.

But, for Maddy and the others, it was time
that occurred
inside the archway
that appeared to be linear, while everything
outside was a weird and endless forty-eight-hour
Groundhog Day
.

She’d asked the old man once why it
was that she never bumped into copies of herself. His answer had been both
straightforward and oddly cryptic.

‘You’re not of this timeline,
Maddy. None of you are. You
might as well be aliens visiting from
another planet as far as earthly cause and effect is concerned.’

Reassuring perhaps, but she’d still
ended up none the wiser.

As always, she caught sight of him sitting
on the bench, sitting back and savouring the sun on his wrinkled face, in that dark blue
cardigan of his, jeans too big for his narrow frame and that scuffed old Yankees
baseball cap clasped in his liver-spotted hands. She stopped for a moment, watching him
through the hot-dog queue, watching him through the clouds of billowing steam coming
from the cart’s griddle.

A quiff of silver-white hair fluttering on
his head: untidy, unruly hair. The likeness was so obvious now Maddy knew, now they all
knew. She wondered how none of them had ever noticed, or remarked, how much alike Foster
and Liam looked. Yes, age completely alters a person’s appearance, but there are
those things that survive the years intact: the shape and set of a person’s eyes,
the habitual expression on one’s face, the lazy way you sit when you think no
one’s looking – things that are as unique as a fingerprint.

Liam and Foster, the very same person, and
she hadn’t seen it until he’d told her.

Foster had given her no explanation for
that. None at all. She had her theories. Perhaps one of them didn’t belong in this
timeline; perhaps one of them had stepped across chaos space from another similar world
and now there were accidentally two of them. She wondered if somewhere, beyond
dimensions she couldn’t even begin to comprehend, there was an old-woman version
of herself.

BOOK: TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6)
10.13Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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