‘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.’
Chapter 39
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!’
Chapter 40
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 ro
w 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.
‘See? We got some power! So, we’ll go get a kettle, a heater, camping stove. We’ll be living like kings before you know it.’
Sal nodded. ‘Just as good as the old archway.’ Taking Maddy’s lead, she smiled. Slightly forced. ‘And at least we don’t have to listen to the trains running overhead all the time.’
Actually, Liam had found that regular faint rumble comforting. Stepping outside into that dark, rubbish-strewn alleyway and listening to the restless noises of Brooklyn had been a somewhat reassuring thing. A sign that life was ceaselessly going on all around them.
Here in this abandoned school, they could just as easily be the last people on Earth and not know for sure one way or the other until they drove into town. And even then, given how lifeless Harcourt had looked on their way in, they’d not be certain.
‘Come on, guys!’ said Maddy. ‘We’ve got a ton of work to do if the agency’s going to be up and running again.’
‘Aye,’ Liam shrugged. ‘Under new management, so it is.’
Maddy grinned. This time not her forced make-the-troops-happy smile. This time a genuine grin of excitement. ‘Yes! Exactly what you just said, Liam. We’re Under New Management. Us! How cool’s that?’
‘We’re really going to change the world?’ asked Sal.
‘Yup …’ Maddy wiped dusty hands on the front of her jeans. ‘Now doesn’t that sound like a better job description? To make the world a better place, rather than just keeping it the same ol’ same crud? Huh?’
Rashim squatted down beside SpongeBubba, amid the plastic bags they’d carried in. ‘A better world?’ he muttered to himself. He was already checking through the more delicate parts of the displacement machine’s components. He held a circuit up in front of the lab robot. It dutifully extended a sensitive graphene-tipped sensor and began to test the integrity of the board.
Rashim looked up at the others. ‘Anything that isn’t the world I left behind works just fine for me.’
Sal gave that a moment’s thought. ‘Making a better world does sound good.’
‘Aye,’ Liam grinned. ‘Aye, it does, so.’
‘Then let’s make busy,’ said Maddy. ‘Highest-priority tasks first, ladies and gents. I need a coffee.’
Chapter 41
26 September 2001, Green Acres Elementary School, Harcourt, Ohio
We’ve been so busy I haven’t really had time to think about things that much. Which is nice. It’s such a crazy pinchudda thing – last night I realized I was missing my parents and I nearly started crying when I reminded myself they never existed! Or, if they did, they were some other girl’s mamaji and papaji!
Then I reminded myself I’m not even Indian. Then I reminded myself I’m not even human. So, as you can imagine, this is really messing with my head.
That’s why I’m glad we’ve been so busy.
A few days ago we got a load of things from a big camping store: sleeping bags, a stove and gas, kettle, lights, torches, food. All the comforts! So it’s been nice. Like a camping trip. We even made a small fire in the middle of the floor and cooked toast and
sausages and stuff. SpongeBubba and Rashim were like a pair of excitable little children! Never done campfire food before. But then have I? Even if I remembered doing that … it would be someone else’s memory, wouldn’t it? Or some made-up memories concocted by some techie somewhere.
Today we need to go back to that big retail park outside of Harcourt and get some more things. Some computers and cables and stuff. Me and Bob and Becks are getting those things.
Oh yeah, Maddy also spotted an Internet cafe last time we came. Said she wants to do some research on where we’re going to set up our permanent new home …
Maddy winced and stuck her tongue out.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Liam.
‘The coffee’s frikkin’ disgusting.’
‘Mine’s all right,’ Rashim shrugged.
‘Yeah, but you’re used to drinking some sort of soya-gunk substitute.’ Maddy put the cardboard cup down on the small table beside their Internet cubicle. The three of them were huddled together suspiciously between the cubicle partitions like three truant teenagers messing about on Facebook.
‘That cack’s all yours if you want any more of it, Rashim.’ She turned back to the computer monitor in front of them. She had Wikipedia up on the screen. ‘So … I guess we should go as far back in time from now as we can get,’ said Maddy. ‘Put down as much distance as we can between us and 2001.’
‘What about going forward in time?’ asked Liam.
She shook her head. ‘We go forward, and it gets increasingly difficult to remain off the radar.’
‘Off the …?’
‘To stay hidden. There’ll be more Internet, more connectivity, more information. Bound to be. I just think we’ve got a much better chance of remaining anonymous if we aim backwards.’
Liam sipped at his coffee. Her explanation made sense to him. It was hard enough getting his head around this time, without going further into an unfathomable future. ‘And I suppose we really have to pick another time? And not stay in this one?’