TimeBomb: The TimeBomb Trilogy: Book 1 (3 page)

Freefall …

Dora had witnessed plenty of awful things in her life.

There was a man in her village with a gaping wound on his neck that had oozed pus since before she could remember. Her grandfather had a tumour on his face when he passed away, as big as his nose. Her younger brother had died after a tiny cut on his leg had become infected, and an infection had taken him from the world in the slowest, cruellest way possible.

Dora had seen all these things and accepted them as normal. Deformity and sickness did not disturb her. She had a strong stomach.

But the woman on the undercroft stairs wasn’t sick, she was
ruined
.

She was covered in terrible burns. Her clothes had melted into her skin, and one of her legs hung down over the stone steps at an angle that told of numerous broken bones. She was barely breathing.

But that wasn’t the worst.

Her right arm reached out towards Dora as though grasping for aid, but the other was withered and bent, and it was blurry, faded, as if seen through water. One second it was there, the next it was transparent, then it was back again.

The woman was not only entirely beyond repair, she also wasn’t entirely there.

Dora had no idea what to do. She couldn’t imagine what could have happened to this poor woman, or how she had found her way to the undercroft. It was plain that no physician could save her.

If she shouted for help, the master may come running. But what if he had done this terrible thing? And what, then, might he do to her?

She stood in the doorway, looking down at the woman, frozen. Then she heard the noise of a door opening upstairs, and footsteps on the landing above her. Her scream had woken the house.

‘Dora,’ gasped the injured woman, as if squeezing out the syllables was the hardest thing she’d ever done.

Dora felt helpless. She peered more closely, trying to reconstruct the ravaged face. Was it someone she knew? The footsteps above reached the top of the main staircase.

Dora scurried down the undercroft steps until she reached the prone figure.

‘Mistress, pardon me, but what can I do to help?’

The woman reached her hand up and grasped at the air.

‘Hand …’ she wheezed.

So Dora, eager to give comfort to the dying woman, fought back her revulsion and reached out to take the offered hand. But before she could make contact, a spark of crimson fire leapt from the woman’s fingers, arcing between her and Dora and then …

Dora was suspended in mid-air on a bright sunny day, screaming in alarm as she fell onto a cushion of bright fabric, the likes of which she had never seen before. She bounced clumsily back up into the air, her skirts flapping and her arms waving. Then back down again and a series of lessening bounces until she sprawled in a heap and looked up into the eyes of ten startled children, all in their stockinged feet, wearing the strangest garments she had ever seen. ‘Big kids aren’t allowed on the bouncy castle,’ said one prim, outraged little girl. And then …

Sprawling on the floor of a chamber hewn from rock – large, silent, ice cold – was she in a cavern? A grey half-light picked out floor-to-ceiling racks of cocoons, each containing the blurred outline of a person. There were thousands of them, stretching away into the darkness. She rose to her feet and saw movement in the distance – three tiny figures, so far away. They were waving. She raised her hand to wave back and then …

Water, shockingly cold, up to her neck. She sank beneath the surface before she could even take a breath. Her clothes dragged her down into the dark, suffocating depths. She thrashed and struggled, and broke the surface with her face. She caught a glimpse of a large boat under sail, a warship or a privateer, perhaps. She sank back beneath the water before she could call to it. She fought her way up again, her face breaking the surface for a second time. She managed to raise one arm out of the sea and wave at the distant ship, but the cold and the weight of her dress were too much. She sank again, fast. She felt her ears pop, felt the pressure increase on her as she realised she was about to die. Animal panic pulled open her mouth to try and take a breath to ease the fire in her lungs. And then …

Lying in a puddle, gasping like a landed fish on the floor of a clean white room, sterile and silent but for the soft hum of unseen engines. There was light without fire and warmth without sunlight. Breathing hard now, wild eyed with terror and confusion, Dora cried aloud when the door opened and a tall, fat man in a strange white jacket came into the room. He walked forward slowly, anxious not to startle her. He reached out. ‘Take my hand. Take my hand and everything will be all right.’ But even through her fear she wasn’t going to make that mistake again. She scrambled back against the wall, gabbling refusals and protestations. Her back hit the hard wall and then …

Awful, deafening noise. A huge explosion next to her and she was sprawling in rubble, crying and screaming and begging for it to stop. Hands on her shoulders, pulling her backwards. She struggled but then there were hands on her feet, and she was lifted bodily into the air and carried away. Dumped on the ground behind a low brick wall. Bangs and crashes and strange, devilish humming. She coughed as the foul smoke and dust clogged her wet nostrils and frantic, gasping lungs. Hands on her face, forcing her to look up into the bright blue eyes of a young man with close-cropped black hair. Over his shoulder she could see a dark-skinned girl carrying some type of musket. She had a nasty wound across her forehead that leaked blood down across her face. ‘Calm down, Dora, breathe,’ said the boy. ‘It’s OK. You’re all right. It’s a lot to handle first time. I remember. But you need to concentrate, you’ll only be here for moment. I need you to listen, yes?’ Dora nodded, shaking. The boy’s accent was strange, foreign.

‘Don’t.’ Yelled the dark-skinned girl. ‘You mustn’t tell her …’ But she was interrupted by a series of small explosions that drew her attention away. She raised her odd musket and began shooting beams of light at unseen attackers.

The boy bit his lip, worried, but continued speaking. ‘There is one thing you need to know.’ He leaned forward, as if to whisper in her ear, but then …

Darkness, night-time, winter cold made worse by wet clothes. Firelight through trees and the soft chanting of human voices. She did not know what language they were using, but it was not English. She ran forward, hoping for aid, but found herself standing on the edge of a clearing facing a burning pyre. Tied to a post in the centre of the conflagration was a young woman who screamed and screamed as the flames licked up her legs and her dress caught fire. The crowd stood singing songs to the dying victim; Dora presumed they sang in hope of speeding her to salvation from her wickedness. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. The witch’s face was the same face that Dora had seen looking back at her in the mirror a hundred times. The witch was her! Dora screamed in mortal terror as she watched herself begin to burn. The crowd turned, saw her, cried in horror at the impossibility of it, and then …

Freefall …

Sweetclover Hall sat shadowed and sullen amongst its copse of trees. Its windows were boarded up and flaps of plastic patched the holes in the roof, preventing the worst of the weather getting inside, but apart from that the house appeared unloved and forgotten.

Had there been a nicely printed guidebook to tell Kaz the history of the building he was walking towards, he would have learned some very interesting things indeed. He might even have thought twice about entering. But there was no one and nothing to warn him about the house’s bloody and mysterious past, so he pushed open a rust-hinged door and walked across the threshold without a second thought.

The room that had once been the beating heart of the manor lay under a thick layer of dust and cobwebs abandoned by spiders that had moved on in search of richer pickings. The furniture had been removed long ago. Only the presence of a brick baking oven built into the chimney breast revealed the room’s original function.

Kaz sniffed the air. The house smelt of mould and damp and crumbling plaster. Still, it beat sleeping on the cold, wet earth. He walked across the room, brushing away the cobwebs that snagged his face and hair, and pushed open a thick oak door into a wood-panelled corridor.

The bright moonlight barely penetrated this far into the house. The thick darkness and utter silence would have been enough to give most people pause, but Kaz was practical and unsuperstitious. He didn’t believe in ghosts and wasn’t afraid of the unseen things that lurked in the gloom. He knew that the scariest thing this house was likely to contain would be a few rats, scurrying around beneath rotting floorboards.

He moved deeper into the decaying building, not noticing a cellar door on the right, secured with a padlock. Neither did he register the tiny red light in the far corner of the ceiling, hidden behind layers of cobwebs, that denoted the presence of an active infrared camera transmitting his every move back to unseen eyes.

At the end of the corridor stood two tall, wide doors. They were warped and stuck, half open. Kaz squeezed through the opening into a large room, lit by a beam of moonlight that cut across the blackness through a gap in the window boards. This would do.

In one corner of the room a dim grey mound revealed itself, on closer inspection, to be a pile of discarded curtains. They were musty but Kaz arranged them into a makeshift mattress and lay down.

He was bone tired, emotionally drained, unsure what tomorrow would bring. The only thing he knew for certain was that he would be better able to face his problems after a good night’s sleep. Having identified that as his top priority, he banished all thought from his head and closed his eyes.

He opened them again immediately as the room crackled and burned. A circle of firework-bright crimson snapped into existence near the ceiling and spat out a young woman, who crashed to the floorboards with a heavy thud.

The fire vanished as quickly as it had appeared. Silence and darkness reclaimed the room. The only evidence that something unusual had occurred was the fading patterns that danced on Kaz’s retinas, and the swirls of disturbed dust that billowed in the single shaft of cold, blue moonlight.

Kaz’s exhausted body had been sinking into sleep but now it flooded with adrenaline. He leapt up and stood ready to defend himself from … what? He forced himself to take a few deep breaths and relax. He wasn’t under attack, not as far as he could tell. But what had just happened?

A groan from the centre of the room reminded Kaz that he was not alone. He ran to the girl, who lay on the floor. He reached out to touch her, but as his fingertips approached her they crackled with sparks of crimson, and he leapt back in alarm. The sparks vanished.

‘What … happened?’ gasped the woman on the floor.

Kaz had no idea how to answer that, so he said nothing.

The woman slowly raised herself up on her arms and glanced around the dim grey room. Kaz could see that she was dressed in a plain shirt and trousers. When the woman noticed Kaz she jumped, startled, and quickly tried to rise to her feet, but her legs gave way and she crumpled to the floor in a heap. She swore.

Kaz felt he’d better say something. ‘I am called Kaz. What is your name?’ was the best he could come up with.

‘Yojana,’ replied the heap in an American accent. ‘Sorry, no, Jana. My name’s Jana.’

‘Hello, Jana.’

Jana managed to raise herself again but this time she went for the less ambitious option of sitting up.

‘Hi,’ she replied.

Before either of them could start asking the questions that were forming in their minds, there was another burst of vivid scarlet light. They both scrambled backwards to clear a landing space for the dripping-wet girl who dropped from nowhere with a piercing scream and crashed in the spot vacated by Jana only a second before.

Once again the fire vanished as quickly as it had appeared. Dust billowed and swirled in the moonlight.

Then the two main doors groaned in protest as they were forced inwards. A tall man stepped forward, framed in torchlight, looking down at the three figures sprawled on the floor.

‘Welcome to Sweetclover Hall,’ he said. ‘We’ve been expecting you.’

The wet girl looked up, apparently recognising the man’s voice.

‘My lord?’

‘Hello, Dora,’ said the man. ‘Welcome back. You’ve been away for a very, very long time.’

Kaz smiled to himself; maybe he’d found the adventure he’d been hoping for after all.

Steve the security guard leaned forward and grabbed the CCTV control, zooming in on the face of the man in the doorway. He was a tall man in his early forties, dark haired with thick streaks of grey at the temples, heavy browed, with deep brown eyes and a square jaw. Solid was the best word to describe him.

He could see the man’s mouth was moving so he turned up the sound.

‘… sure they don’t touch each other. We move them in separate vans. Quickly.’ Four men in generic security guard uniforms entered the room, grabbed the three protesting teenagers and bundled them outside.

As the dust settled in the now silent room Steve saw a small flash, like the glint of moonlight on the blade of a sword.

An external camera displayed three black vans with their rear doors open. Steve watched the captives being forced into them. Jana wasn’t putting up much of a fight, and Dora seemed cowed by the unexpected presence of her lord and master. Kaz punched the man carrying him hard in the stomach, but his burly escort barely even flinched.

The van doors slammed and the engines revved. Steve didn’t stay to see them drive away. He was already pulling on his coat and reaching for the keys to his motorbike.

The black-clad figure stood in the shadows of the treeline and watched Steve roar away on his motorcycle, then vanished in a flash of red fire.

Soft. That was good. She liked soft. Warm, too. Nice.

Dora nuzzled down into the pillows, comfortable and cosy in the seconds of amnesia that accompanied her waking. She felt odd. There was a pain in her arm and an ache in her head. What had …?