Infinity Cage (18 page)

Liam quickly crossed the outer compound of the temple, dreading what he was going to find in progress beneath the north wall.

As he drew closer, he saw the Romans had decided to get themselves involved. In the past twenty or so minutes, it appeared that Jesus’s outburst at the profiteering of one particular trader had escalated and become a full-scale riot. Half the cohort had been scrambled from Fortress Antonia – the garrison building attached to one corner of the temple – and were now attempting to contain the troublemakers in the north-east corner of the compound. The three centuries, about two hundred and fifty men, had spread out into an encircling line, two ranks deep, and were shuffling forward, compressing the rioters into a containable writhing mass. Projectiles arced out from them – lumps of masonry, jagged-edge stones – which clattered down on the legionaries’ armour, helmets and raised shields. Most of the rest of the temple compound had either been cleared by the Romans, or the gathered pilgrims had chosen to flee before the supervising tribune decided to exercise a zero-tolerance policy and round up
everyone
within the walls.

The paved ground of the compound was dotted with bodies, most of them wearing the purple-and-gold robes of the temple guards, some of them writhing in agony, some perfectly still.
And there were smears and dots of blood that Liam suspected came from them rather than any sacrificial doves or goats.

Closer now, he could see him, in the middle of the riot, standing a head taller than anyone else. Bob was busy swinging a thick six-foot-long wooden beam – which looked suspiciously like the axle from a cart – in one hand, as if he was merrily twirling a cheerleader’s baton. In the other, he held a battered and misshapen Roman shield that had sprouted at least a dozen arrows.

Liam could hear the clunk, clatter, grunts and howls coming from the Romans every time the beam swung back into the maul and gouged out another couple of men from their ranks.

He couldn’t get through to Bob and the mob of rioters … about fifty of them at a guess. Not that he particularly wanted to be trapped in there with them, but this … needed to be brought to an end now. He had what they’d come for – pretty convincing evidence that beneath the temple was where they’d find the other transmitter.

He cupped his hands. ‘BOB!!’

His voice was lost among the noise. He looked around. He needed to let Bob know that he was back up above ground somehow. Not easy. Once Bob went into bull-in-a-china-shop mode it was particularly difficult to get his attention. Waving his arms about beyond the ranks of legionaries probably wasn’t going to be enough. Lying on the ground a few yards away was a Roman javelin with a bent tip. He ran over, picked it up, whipped the prayer shawl off his head and tied it to the end of the javelin. He began to wave it back and forth like a pennant.

‘BOB!! OVER HERE!!!’

The support unit finally spotted the waving shawl. He immediately stopped swinging his improvised war-hammer. The other rioters, seeing their adopted champion had suddenly
ceased fighting, began to do likewise. The Romans broke off their cautious advance, and for a moment the cacophony that had been bouncing off the tall stone walls of the temple compound became a fading echo.

Then an uncomfortable stillness.

‘BOB!’ Liam shouted again. A ripple of clattering lorica segmentata armour as Roman heads in the line swivelled to look over their shoulders at him.

‘We. Need. To. Leave … NOW!’

Bob nodded. He dropped his shield, hefted the oak beam into both hands and held it horizontally in front of him at arm’s length, holding it like a vehicle bumper. He let out a deep booming roar that sounded like some trucker gunning the throttle of an eighteen-wheeler, then he charged towards the front rank of legionaries.

The Romans foolishly attempted to hold fast.

A moment later, the compound echoed with a deafening crash, the clatter of armour, yelps of alarm and agony. Liam saw a couple of helmets comically spinning up into the air, and then Bob emerged through the thin red line, having flattened two dozen soldiers. The rest of the Roman line peeled back in alarm at the raging goliath and the fifty other hardcore rioters took the opportunity and followed in his wake, breaking out of their containment.

Bob finally came to a rest in front of him, panting from the exertion. ‘Yes, Liam?’

‘We need to get the hell out of here!’ said Liam. He nodded to his left; a couple of hundred yards away, opposite the rear wall of the central temple building and halfway down the compound’s west wall, was the large western entrance to the temple compound that led down into the city.

Bob nodded. ‘Agreed.’ Without anything else needing to be
said, they turned and started to run for it, the other rioters following after.

Liam heard orders being barked in Latin behind them. He heard the clatter of armour as some of the legionaries pursued them, but weighed down by their shields and armour they weren’t going to catch up. As they passed the corner of the temple building and closed the gap with the main western entrance, Liam looked up and saw a dozen Roman archers had gathered on the top of the wall above it.

‘Watch out! Arrows!’ he cried.

A volley of arrows whipped down through the air, most of them clattering harmlessly on the paving stones, one finding a target just behind Liam. He heard someone cry out. As they approached the vast entrance flanked by huge pale sandstone columns, another volley flickered down.

One thudded into Bob’s throat. A bloody barbed arrowhead erupted from the back of his neck.

He grunted, staggered and halted, then dropped to his knees.

‘Bob!’ Liam stopped beside him. ‘My God!’

Bob was spitting dark gouts of almost-black blood down on to his chin. ‘I am fine … Liam. This is not a fatal wound.’

Liam got his hands under Bob’s hairy armpits and attempted to pull him to his feet. ‘Come on! COME ON!’

‘I will … recover … Liam. But … you must go!’

‘I’m not leaving you!’

Some of the other rioters stopped fleeing, and gathered round Bob and helped Liam pull the giant to his feet.

Bob rocked uncertainly on the balls of his feet. ‘This arrow … is blocking … my windpipe …’ His large hands fumbled for the shaft sticking out of the front of his throat. ‘Snapped … I am … unable … to breathe …’

‘I got it!’ Liam grasped the shaft in both hands. ‘Ready?’

Bob nodded.

Liam jerked it out and blood began to spurt down Bob’s chest.

‘Remove … the … other … half …’

Liam reached round the back, grabbed the shaft beyond the arrow tip and did the same again. It came out with a wet sucking sound.

The pursuing legionaries were closing on them now.

‘Can you breathe now?’

Bob gurgled blood, but nodded. He got to his feet and they resumed their escape, along with a dozen others clustered round, their hands all on the support unit – on his back, on his broad shoulders, but not needed. The wall loomed before them. Then as they raced into shadow it was above them and then behind them, as they ran along a wide sloping viaduct that was taking them towards the busy streets of the upper city.

Rashim was right: the next morning the low heavy rain clouds had lifted and a clear lemon-coloured sky was just about visible beyond a thin veil of smog. They took a crowded e-Tram south from the city centre into the sprawling suburbs – a place called Centennial – where uniform, mass-produced housing blocks had naively optimistic names like
Cherry Orchard
,
Summer Green
and
Daisy Way
stencilled on their sides. At the base of every block there was a food-ration station with a winding queue in front of it, watched over by soldiers and stern-faced combat units.

The city suburbs eventually thinned out and became a passing landscape of mostly old pre-FSA abandoned towns and boarded-up malls. The road was flanked every now and then by large weather-worn billboards with the faded shreds of acid-bleached posters – a reminder of better times when Mom and Dad might have wanted to buy a new e-Car, or take their kids on holiday to an Oasis Fun Park, or invest in a FamilyCare medical policy.

Aboard the tram, a screen was playing Denver’s main digi-news station. The news now was only about one fast-moving story: the ‘Pacific Conflict’. They weren’t yet calling it a war, but that’s what it had become.

‘I remember thinking, as a boy, that a resource-grab like this would be the thing that would finally set everything off,’ said Rashim.

Maddy was sitting beside him. ‘What do you mean? A grab for oil?’

‘Not just oil. Minerals. Food. Drinking water. Living space. It is a spent world.’ Rashim gazed out of the window at a passing junkyard stacked with the rusting carcasses of petrol cars. ‘Ever since I was a small boy … we all knew there would eventually be a flashpoint over one resource or another.’

He looked around at the other passengers crammed into the tram. All their eyes were glued to the projected screen. He sighed. ‘We all became such experts at kicking our problems down the road for someone else to deal with. Always “tomorrow we’ll deal with this … we’ll deal with that”.’

The e-Tram finally came to the end of its route south of Denver at a place called Castle Rock. The last few end-of-the-line passengers climbed off along with them. Waiting to get on and head north was a noisy ruck of people loaded down with backpacks and armfuls of their worldly possessions.

‘All these folks think they’re gonna be safer in Denver,’ said Heywood. ‘Little do they know what’s comin’, huh?’

Maddy shot a glance at him to shut up. He caught that, clamped his lips and nodded.

They resumed their journey southwards on foot along Route 87. The landscape looked just as threadbare and forlorn to Maddy as it had on the road to Cleveland. To their right were rolling foothills and beyond them was a distant row of snow-capped mountain peaks that drew ever nearer as they headed south. The Rockies – the North American continent’s ‘spinal column’, running all the way from Canada’s British Columbia down to the state of Utah. Something about the distant peaks
lifted her spirits. Perhaps it was the crisp dusting of snow, virginal and white. They looked untainted.

‘Rocky Mountains,’ said Heywood, noticing her gaze. ‘In the old days, 1850s, settlers on their way to Oregon had to scale them high mountains in clunky horse-drawn wagons. They had to do it before the winter snows came in or they’d get trapped up there and freeze to death. This entire continent was one big unmapped wilderness, no roads, or guddamn diners, or a place to stop, eat a burger and fill up with gas. They were on their own. Like explorers in a whole new undiscovered world.’

‘It must have been quite an adventure.’ She smiled. ‘I read about that history. That’s somewhere I’ve always wanted to go back and see for myself.’

‘Tell me, Miss Bossy … I’m guessin’ you an’ the others, you’ve all travelled around, seen some different times before comin’ here, right?’ He shrugged. ‘I say that cos you folks seem like you done the time-travel thing before.’

‘I suppose you could say that.’

‘So, if you don’t mind me askin’, where else’ve you been? Can I ask you that?’ He shot a glance up the road where Becks, Charley and Rashim were walking side by side. ‘Or is your organic gonna come back here an’ kick my ass if I know too much?’

‘You already know too much,’ she said.

‘Hey … you know, I was jus’ bluffin’ back in Denver? I wouldn’t have gone to the authorities an’ told ’em about you people.’

She laughed. ‘Sure.’ They walked on in silence for a while. ‘Not that it matters anyway, Heywood. Nothing much is going to change now. We’re right at the end of things. The end of days.’ She didn’t like the sound of that hanging in the air between
them. ‘So, you want to know where we’ve travelled in time? What things we’ve seen?’

Heywood grinned a mouth full of brown teeth at her. ‘Sure.’

‘Well, OK …’

And that was their conversation for the rest of the afternoon as they walked side by side down Route 87, Maddy recounting their adventures thus far, editing out the bits that he didn’t particularly need to know anything about: Pandora, the Voynich Manuscript, the Holy Grail, the large tachyon beacon hidden in the jungle of Central America. In any case, the old man seemed far more interested in hearing about the places and the famous historical figures. Most of all, her account of their brief excursion to the late Cretaceous era.

‘You bein’ guddamn serious with me? You tellin’ me one of you seen actual, real, alive dinosaurs?!’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s like millions of years! Your machine goes back that far?!’

‘As long as there’s enough energy to tap, then, yeah.’

‘You ever go forward? You know … into the far distant future an’ all?’

‘A couple of us went forward to 2015 –’

‘Forward? You mean backward?’

She shook her head. ‘It’s all relative. We were based mostly in 2001, so that was forward to us.’

‘You ever been any further forward than this time, now?’ asked Heywood. ‘You know, to see who, or if
anyone
, is gonna survive this plague?’

Maddy could have told him that Becks had briefly. But she’d been standing in that jungle basin. She’d learned nothing useful about the aftermath, except the jungle was still there and bustling with wildlife. She decided to keep it simple.

‘No. This is as far forward as we’ve ever come.’

Heywood made a face. ‘You reckon this is it, then? This virus thing does for mankind once an’ for all?’

‘It’s an Extinction Level Event.’ She looked across at the distant snow-covered peaks of the Rockies. ‘But it’s not the end of the world. Just people. Life will go on quite happily without us.’

Late in the afternoon they finally stopped at a town called Monument: a one-strip town off Highway 87. To the east, rolling open plains of ochre-coloured grass; to the west, the acid-rain stripped trunks and branches of the Pike National Forest. Here and there small trees growing in the shelter of the taller Douglas firs were protected from the corrosive rain and were still managing to hold on to their foliage. Beyond the graveyard of the sloping forest were the craggy foothills of the Rampart Range. Beyond, the snowy peaks of the Rockies.

Unlike some of the other ghost towns they’d passed heading south, Monument wasn’t entirely a relic of a bygone era. There was a large soyo-protein refinery nearby, which meant a bare-bones economy feeding the workforce and just enough business trickling in to keep the town from completely flatlining.

There was an old-fashioned motel with antique wall-mounted OLED widescreen TVs that hadn’t worked in decades, faded print curtains and bald-to-the-threads carpets. Attached to the motel was a diner with flickering halogen lights and a fizzing neon sign that promised warm food twenty-four hours a day. It served an ‘official’ menu of algae-protein substitutes in exchange for government ration credits, but the waitress quietly let them know they had some
real
coffee and freshly fried, home-made corned-beef-hash patties available if they had any decent black-market goodies to barter.

Heywood haggled on their behalf. Twenty minutes later and
their last two packs of dark chocolate lighter, they were cradling mugs of steaming
real
coffee and savouring crisp fried patties of corned beef, grated onion and potato. Half a dozen refinery workers in grubby boiler suits from the nearby plant were huddled round a table, and behind the counter the waitress idly watched the flickering image of a floating holo-screen with a busted red-beam playing an old X-Men movie from the twenties in an over-saturated blue.

‘We have about another twenty miles down Route 87 to a town called Colorado Springs,’ said Rashim. ‘Then we will have to take the road west up into the mountains. The research campus is up there.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘Waldstein is up there in those mountains … waiting for us.’

‘My God.’ Maddy shuddered. ‘Say it like that, Rashim … you make it sound like we’re heading towards Mount Doom to drop the frikkin’ ring in.’

‘Mount Doom?’ He shrugged. He didn’t get the reference. ‘I do wonder if Liam might be right, though. We will have no idea if we are walking into a trap until it is too late to do anything about it.’

Heywood perked up. ‘Trap?’

Maddy glared at Rashim for his careless blunder. ‘This is all about getting answers, Rashim.’

‘Trap?’ said Heywood again. ‘What’s this about a –’

‘It’s nothing,’ she answered quickly. ‘Just Rashim being a drama queen.’

Heywood narrowed his eyes. ‘No … Missy, I ain’t an idiot. He jus’ said
trap
, an’ he wasn’t makin’ light of that fact.’

Rashim shrugged at Maddy. ‘You might as well tell him.’

‘Tell me what?’

Maddy sighed. ‘Well, let’s just say we have some history with Waldstein. It’s not all great.’

‘History?’

‘He … Well, we had a bit of a falling out. A misunderstanding.’

‘He tried to take us out,’ said Rashim.

‘Yuh … Thanks for that, Rashim.’

‘Take you out?’ Heywood’s eyes rounded. ‘You mean –’

Maddy raised her hand and nodded at Charley who was distracted, busy gazing at the flickering movie on the holo-screen. ‘Yeah … but look, that was down to a misunderstanding. Garbled communications. It’s a long story, Heywood; the short story is that we’re all friends now. We’ve come here because Waldstein invited us here.’

‘Invited you for what?’

‘To discuss what’s going to happen. What we need to do to prevent it.’

‘So the other guy … 
Leon
?’

‘
Liam
. He’s one of us, a colleague.’

‘An’ what’s he doin’? Is he back in your base or somethin’?’

‘He’s looking into something else.’ Maddy waved that away. ‘It’s not important. The only important thing right now is getting to see Waldstein and having this meeting. That literally is all that matters, Heywood. If we’re going to change this world … that is literally all that –’

‘Maddy!’ Becks interrupted.

‘What?’

‘Maddy.’ She pointed towards the holo-screen behind the counter. ‘It appears something significant has just happened.’

They all turned to look at the glowing blue screen to see that the old movie had been interrupted by a news bulletin. A silver-haired presenter with a solemn face was on. Then footage: bodies littering a city street.

‘OhMyGod. Something’s up,’ whispered Maddy.

‘That your plague?’ asked Heywood.

‘Not yet, it shouldn’t be.’ She half stood up. ‘Excuse me?’ she called out to the waitress. ‘Miss?’

The waitress stirred from her daydream and pulled out her order pad. ‘What’ll it be?’

‘Nothing. Can you just turn the volume up?’ She pointed at the holo-screen. ‘Turn the news up for me?’

The waitress tucked the pad back in her pocket, turned round and hand-swiped the volume up.

‘… 
of men, women and children. As yet it is unclear from this tactical-cam footage whether we’re looking at a chemical or biological weapon
.’

Ticker-tape was rolling along the bottom: +++
Thousands discovered dead in North Korean town
+++

‘
The bodies were found by a pathfinder unit of Pacific Union land forces earlier this morning. Shortly after broadcasting this footage, all communication was lost with the unit
 …’

‘I believe that must be it,’ said Rashim. He looked at Maddy. ‘Our date was only approximate. This must be the beginning of it.’

The newscaster was back on the screen. ‘
Military intelligence agencies have been issuing warnings that North Korea has been developing and stockpiling bioweapons for some time now. It seems the attack in the north by the Pacific Union has provoked the regime into deploying one of these weapons systems
.’

‘On their
own
people by the look of it,’ added Maddy. ‘Why do that? Why not drop it on their enemy?’

‘Bioweapons are most efficient when deployed among civilian populations,’ said Becks.

Rashim nodded. ‘That’s right. I am sure the North Koreans would have preferred Tokyo if they had a way of getting it deployed over there.’

‘Assuming it’s a North Korean weapon,’ said Maddy.

‘… 
experts from FSWRD, the Federal States’ Weapons Research
and Development Agency, have been examining this footage and despatched a scramble team to the area. President Gonzalez, Foreign Secretary Jessica Clinton and Defense Secretary Jonas Goodman are said to be in Tokyo where peace talks are being hosted, and right now are in discussions with the Japanese Prime Minister and attempting to make contact with one of the generals of the North Korean Ruling Committee in order to broker a temporary ceasefire
 …’

‘So … I guess this is it,’ said Maddy. ‘Three days earlier than we thought, then.’

‘Is this the disease that’s gonna make everyone sick?’ asked Charley.

‘Yeah.’ Maddy nodded slowly, her eyes glued to the screen and barely hearing the girl. ‘This is it.’