Time Riders: The Doomsday Code (3 page)
Read Time Riders: The Doomsday Code Online
Authors: Alex Scarrow
Behind her she could hear someone making a call. Phoning an ambulance. Maybe some of them were hearing him. She noticed the sicko with the camera was still filming. Maybe he was disappointed not to have a smoking corpse to show his editor. Maybe this man’s insane babbling was going to be an even better story to file.
‘Waldstein?’ uttered Anna. ‘What do you mean …
the end
?’
She realized he was crying. A tear rolled down his cheek and soaked into the bristles of his beard. The lost faraway look was finally gone. His eyes were on her. He suddenly looked around the cage. ‘My God! This is … this has all got to go!’
‘What? You mean your
machine
?’
He slammed a palm into the wire cage and it rang and rattled, echoing around the warehouse. ‘THIS! Time travel! It’s … it’s going to destroy us!’
2001, New York
Alone, Maddy watched a cluster of seagulls picking away at some rubbish tipped on to the low-tide silt of the East River. Overhead, traffic clunked rhythmically across the Williamsburg Bridge, the end-of-day mad-hour rush of city workers returning from Manhattan back to Brooklyn.
She tossed a small nugget of tarmac into the water, and watched the seagulls scatter at the sound of the splash.
My God
. Her mind was still spinning with the idea.
My God, Liam is Foster?
That’s what the old man had said, wasn’t it? That he and Liam were the
same
person; that he was once Liam. And now he’d said it, she could see he was right. She could see the likeness in their faces, in their mannerisms, even in the way they talked.
‘Time travel did this to me. Time travel
aged
me, Maddy,’ he’d said.
The fact that Liam was going to become that poor old man … something else for her to keep to herself until she figured that Liam was ready to hear it. She felt so lonely harbouring secrets like this; it separated her from the other two. It felt wrong. After all, they’d been
recruited
together: her, Liam, Sal … the three of them plucked from different times, from the very last seconds of their lives by the old man. They should be a team. There shouldn’t be secrets between them. Not ones like this.
‘
You’re the team leader now
,’ Foster had told her, ‘
it’s down to you how and when you tell Liam about this
.’
She watched the seagulls cautiously return to peck and pull at the plastic bags on the silt.
‘Just great,’ she muttered to herself. Something else to churn away inside her, keep her awake at night. Because it wasn’t just the Foster-is-Liam thing, was it? Oh no. There was that
other thing
, that scribbled message she’d found at their supply drop point … the one for her eyes only.
Maddy
,
look out for ‘Pandora’, we’re running out of time. Be safe and tell no one.
She wondered what she was freakin’ well supposed to make of that. It meant nothing to her. ‘Pandora’ – what was that apart from being a pretty stupid girl’s name?
‘Why does it have to be me?’ Her soft voice caused a strutting seagull nearby to pause and cock its head at her.
‘I’m not talking to you, dumb bird.’ The seagull resumed its scavenging, one beady black eye still warily on her. She watched lights flickering on in Manhattan as the sun began to settle behind the two tall pillars of the World Trade Center.
Foster recruited you for a reason. Foster put you in charge for a reason. Because he knows you’re smart enough to figure things out, Maddy.
She sighed. She’d really like to believe that … that she was
destined
to be a good team leader, a good TimeRider. But somehow, with the way things had gone so far, it all just felt … as if she’d been
winging it
, hanging in there by the skin of her teeth. Lucky not to be dead, or to have caused the deaths of Liam and Sal. Lucky not to have completely messed up the timeline. Lucky not to have destroyed the world.
Way too much stress for an eighteen-year-old girl to have to be burdened with.
‘Darn right,’ she uttered. ‘Way too much.’
2001, New York
Monday (time cycle 57)
I’m watching him now, floating in that tube of gloopy slimy stuff. It’s Bob, but not Bob yet if you know what I mean. It’s a boy actually. Completely hairless and curled up like a baby. You can see the face is definitely him even though it’s not finished yet; all thick bone and that heavy dumb-looking brow. The skin’s not grown on his head just yet. It’s all red-raw muscle fibre and teeth, and two eyeballs that look huge without eyelids. Sometimes they seem to shift, twitch, as if they’re staring at you. But I know he’s not. His baby mind is fast asleep right now, dreaming whatever baby brains dream.
Some first-phase skin has grown across his body, but I can still see patches where it hasn’t. There’s a bit I can see through, just beneath his left arm, where I can still see the ribs, and I think that’s an organ in there. Is it his heart or something? It’s moving. Like an animal in a cage.
Actually, this is making me feel sick. I guess I’m going back to my bunk.
Speaking of puke-making, Liam’s emptying the toilet right now. We got one of these camping toilet things a few days ago. The archway has got a little toilet closet, with a creaky wooden door and a cracked toilet bowl with no seat. It’s totally pinchudda! And it’s not connected up anyway. So that’s why we needed the camping toilet. It has to be emptied every few days cos it stinks the whole place out – when the plastic barrel thing gets pulled out, the back of the toilet comes out and all that ‘stuff’ inside is sloshing around.
Shadd-yah. My turn next time.
Anyway … so we’re going on a trip soon. Somewhere special. You want to know?
I’ll tell you.
Tomorrow we’re going to ‘Sunday’! That’s right, we’re coming out of the loop and going to the Sunday before it. It’ll be my first time travel. Well, no … I suppose when Foster grabbed me from home and took me back here, that was my first time, but I didn’t understand then what was going on. And of course every time the field resets I’m sort of travelling back forty-eight hours in time, right?
But doing this … stepping into the portal, that’s like the real thing. Really being a time traveller. I’ll be stepping through a hole in space and time, through a moment of chaos space. Liam says it’s weird, like all milky white and foggy and there’s creepy movement in there and you can’t see what it is. But he says it all happens so quickly and you’re out the other side before you know it. So not to worry.
Great. Thanks for telling me about the creepy-movey things, Liam.
So, I’m sort of nervous. But excited too cos we’re going to see this rock band called ‘EssZed’. Maddy says they disappeared after 9/11. Just vanished! They’re kind of like meant to be famous for that or something. So this, even though they don’t know it, this is their last ever gig. Maddy reckons I’ll really like them. She played some of their tracks on the computer. They’re total rip-heavy. She says Liam will probably hate them and moan about it not being real music but just noise. Not the sort of ‘ditty’ he’s used to.
LOL.
‘Education’. A ‘field trip’, that’s what she’s calling it. Useful for Becks to get a little more experience playing at being human. She needs it. She’s too serious and robotic. Whereas Bob was dumb – you could pretend he was just an idiot. But Becks is too sort-of ‘cold’. She freaks me a bit when she stares. It’s like she’s looking at you and figuring out the three fastest ways to kill you with nothing but her thumb.
I think I preferred Bob.
2001, New York
The portal shimmered in the middle of the archway, a perfect sphere of energy, and in the middle of it a hint of the ghostly wavering world of a whole forty-eight hours ago: Sunday night. A flickering of neon light and what looked like a twisting, undulating stretch of graffiti-covered brick wall dancing through a heat-haze.
‘Come on, then, Sal,’ said Maddy. ‘Quickly through.’
Sal swallowed back a throatful of nerves and nodded. ‘Yes, all right, I’m ready.’ She stepped forward, feeling the energy lift the hairs on her arms, lift her fringe like a theatre curtain. ‘It tickles!’
Stepping inside the sphere of energy, she could feel the concrete floor beginning to flex beneath her feet, like the canvas of a trampoline somebody else was already jumping up and down on. Then very quickly it softened and sagged like tissue paper … and then all of a sudden the floor was completely gone.
‘
Jahulla!
I’m falling!’ she yelped as her arms and legs flailed and she felt herself tumbling through air.
‘Don’t worry about it!’ she heard Liam’s voice say, but already it sounded like it had been shouted down a long, long tunnel, distant echoes fast receding. Then it was gone.
‘Liam!’ she cried, but her own voice sounded dampened and swallowed up.
I really am alone.
Just like he’d said, here she was, floating – or falling – through an ocean of featureless white. Like a nugget of breakfast cereal see-sawing down through an impossibly large bowl of milk.
Stay calm, Sal.
Swirling featureless white all around her. She held her hand up only a dozen inches away from her face and it was so faint, fogged by the mist. She waved it around and felt the air, as thick as liquid, resist her movements. She looked up, hoping to see the faint form of one of the others flailing above her, but she saw nothing but more white.
Maybe I AM all alone
.
She wondered whether she was in her very own milk-coloured universe, or whether the others were out there somewhere. Perhaps nearby. Perhaps just beyond sight. She wondered if anyone ever got lost in here, never to emerge at the other end. Doomed to spend eternity swirling and flailing. You’d go insane, wouldn’t you? With nothing to see, hear, smell or feel, you’d go completely insane.
She decided it was probably best not to think about this kind of stuff. But then her mind had more unwelcome questions it wanted to ask.
What if that’s what the creepy-movey things are? Other travellers … maybe even other TimeRiders who’ve lost their way? Got stuck here for eternity?
She could all too easily conjure up the image of another girl just like her, lost for endless centuries in here: eyes fogged by madness, opaque like those of a boiled fish, and cackling like an old woman – a mind rubbed smooth of meaningful thought and left utterly, utterly insane.
This really isn’t helping, stupid. Think of something else.
She decided she’d rather she
was
on her own; catching a glimpse of something out there, faint and moving, was the last thing she needed to see right now, so she closed her eyes.
Almost as soon as she’d done that, she felt the ground suddenly return beneath her feet.
‘Whuh?’ She opened her eyes to see she was standing in a small car park, lit faintly by a neon red
BUDWEISER BEER
sign that buzzed like an angry fly in a bottle. She took a step clear of the portal and a moment later Liam, Maddy and Becks emerged, one after the other.
‘That was horrible!’ she gasped under her breath.
‘First time’s the worst, so.’ Liam grinned apologetically. ‘Maybe I should’ve warned you.’
She could hear a deep rhythmic pumping sound coming from somewhere beyond the brick wall in front of her. To her left the wall continued past an alcove where cars were parked so tightly in a row side by side she wondered how any of the drivers had managed to get out. The wall came to an end overlooking a dimly lit backstreet where she could see the impatient shifting outline of a queue of people.
‘Oh, it sounds like they’ve started playing already,’ said Maddy. ‘Come on, guys, let’s get inside.’
1193, Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire
Snow fell softly and silently on the track ahead of them, floating down from a loaded grey sky above like cherry blossom. On either side of the forest trail tall thick evergreens sported fulsome white skirts that weighed their burdened branches down low.
Sir Geoffrey Rainault tugged at the cloak slipping down his shoulders, begrudging the body warmth that escaped with the movement. Between saddle-sore legs his mount – his favourite, Edith – plodded relentlessly and wearily: a beast that had carried him across too many countries to remember. Nine months across the sun-baked deserts of the Holy Land, across the spring meadows of endless principalities and dukedoms … and now at last home, England, north of London and en route to the remote wilderness of Scotland.
Geoffrey shifted in the saddle to glance over his shoulder at the others: three other knights, their retinue of squires, sergeants and the token priest travelling with them to attend their five daily prayer meetings. In all, just the eighteen of them now. When they’d set out on their errand, there’d been over sixty in their party. But illness, some battlefield wounds that had gone bad and one or two skirmishes on the way home had whittled their number down. Now, those left, still intent on seeing this lie through, looked like men ready to lie down in the winter coldness and let sleep take them.
