Gates of Rome

CHAPTER 31

2001, New York

They had no more than a second, perhaps two, to realize what could happen to them. Their eyes met in mutual understanding. A time wave. A big one. Not good.

Truth was there was no knowing what reality any wave was going to leave behind. More specifically, there was no knowing what kind of mass, if any, was going to end up wanting to occupy the very same space that they were both occupying.

In the archway with the field switched on they were entirely protected from any mass-intersections brought about by a reality shift. However, outside of the field it was a lottery. A time wave could leave a person merged, fused, with anything that was attempting to occupy the very same space. The likelihood of that varied, of course. On an open, rolling field in the middle of some remote rural county… it was far less likely. But here, inside a cluttered gift shop looking out on to the beating heart of one of the busiest cities in the world?

Where humankind congregated most densely, for example a place like this — New York — that’s where reality really had the most fun and games reinventing itself. Whatever course history had taken, this bay on the east coast of America, a place that was once an Indian settlement, then a colonial outpost, then a thriving trading port and finally a metropolis — this place was always likely to produce a densely populated alternative version of itself in the wake of a full-blown time wave. And the last place they ought to be when a wave hit was here, inside a building of all places.

‘Sal, we need to…’ was all Maddy had time to utter before the wave was upon them.

It went dark as if the sun had gone out. Unlike Sal, it was Maddy’s first time directly experiencing the effect of swimming in fluid reality as it rippled past her, wrapped round her, presenting fleeting images of infinite possibilities.

She screamed. It came out of her mouth sounding like a deep, time-dilated moan, like the protracted, mournful song of some distant whale carried across a hundred miles of water.

Her ears were filled with her own weird voice and a roar like that of a tornado; not the roar of wind, though, but a billion other human voices, female and male, young and old, born and unborn; conscious entities crying in hellish torment and all sharing the same fleeting few seconds of consciousness. A shared awareness of lives stolen away from them, possible lives that could have been, but now would never be lived; of children, babies, loved ones who would never have a chance to exist. It was a billion screams like her own, stretched out and deep and full of grief, anger and fear. If Hell had a voice… it was this awful, protracted, roaring wail of tortured souls.

Then it snapped off. Gone. The dark, swirling tornado of liquid reality was suddenly a placid, milky whiteness. Featureless. Utterly blank.

Oh God.

She could see her hand in front of her face, but that was all.

Oh God, I’m stuck in chaos spa ‘ Maddy? ’ Sal’s voice, the ghost of a whisper.

She saw a grey shape beside her. Faint. Sal.

‘Sal?’ She became aware of other gentle noises all around her: a woodpecker’s jackhammer tap far above them. The echoing cry of a coot? The fidgeting life of a deep, undisturbed wood; the gentle stir of leaves, the creak of swaying branches.

We’re in some sort of forest.

‘Maddy?’ Sal again. ‘ Where are we? ’

She realized the milky white was nothing but a thick morning mist, cold, heavy and damp against her skin, hanging in dense pools. Above them she could see it was thinner, and saw the pencil-line grey streaks of criss-crossing branches swaying gently.

She reached out, grabbed Sal’s hand and pulled her towards her.

A finger to her lips. Shhhh!

Sal nodded. Wherever they were, they were not alone.

They heard the rustle of movement very close. Instinctively Maddy squatted down, crouching lower into the thick, pooling mist around them. She noticed the broad leaves of a large fern swaying gently beside her and ducked down beneath its feathered leaves, pulling Sal down with her.

‘Call in your identification and condition!’ a deep voice boomed out of the mist.

‘Alpha-six. Faith. I am undamaged.’ The female support unit.

‘Alpha-four. I am also unharmed.’

A long silence. Then Maddy heard the swish of someone pushing through foliage nearby, the leaden crack of dry dead wood beneath a heavy and carelessly planted foot.

‘I am not picking up Alpha-two’s signal,’ said the female. Faith. ‘He may be damaged.’

‘That is a lower priority. The targets will still be in the immediate vicinity. Spread out and search.’

Something brushed against the fern they were huddled beneath. Maddy felt a long thick twig under her bottom shift as the weight of a foot settled on the other end. Looking up through gaps in the leaf swaying above her face, she could see the female unit — the Becks-lookalike — her grey sentinel eyes slowly panning the mist around her like a guard on a watchtower.

My God… she’s right there! She’s RIGHT THERE!

Maddy held her wheezing breath and screwed up her eyes. She was absolutely certain that any second now, a hand was going to reach down and push that fern leaf aside. That ice-cold voice was going to calmly call out her discovery to the other two.

Maddy could feel her chest collapsing with a growing panic. A faint memory skipped through her mind of her and her cousin, Julian, both much younger. They were play-fighting, wrestling; he had her in a hold, her arms trapped by her side and his dead weight lying across her chest. She’d been squirming, panicking, squealing, and he’d genuinely thought she was just playing around. Until she’d started screaming.

Panic… like that. Breathless panic.

Hold your breath, Maddy. HOLD IT!

For seconds that felt agonizingly like minutes ‘Becks’ remained where she was, scouring the milky mist with her piercing eyes. Then finally Maddy felt that twig shift again, relieved of the weight on its end as the support unit lifted her bare foot and took a step, then another, away from them.

She slowly faded into the mist until she was an unrecognizable blur, another grey pillar, just as easily another tree trunk. Then she was finally gone. They listened to the sound of movement of all three support units receding in different directions, the careless, echoing crack of twigs and cones, the swish of bramble and undergrowth casually pushed aside. The still forest slowly stirred to life after them; a disapproving shake of its head at such noisy and clumsy intruders.

Maddy hoped they were far enough away not to hear her wheeze like a blacksmith’s bellows as she finally eased her breath out. Dizzy and light-headed she quickly drew in another one.

‘Shadd-yah!’ whispered Sal. ‘I thought we were so-o-o-o dead!’

‘Me… too…’

The thump, rustle and crack of distant movement grew steadily quieter as the units moved further away.

‘We got to…’ Maddy grabbed at another breath. ‘We’ve got to get back to the archway.’

‘But won’t they expect us to do that?’

‘We need help.’ She looked at Sal. ‘We really need Bob.’

And we really need to get back to the archway before they figure that out too.

‘Come on.’ Maddy got to her feet then realized she hadn’t a clue which direction to start off in. ‘Which way?’

Sal looked up at the faint canopy of branches and leaves above them. She pointed to a dull, cream-coloured disc, still relatively low in the morning sky, playing hide and seek with them behind the mist-shrouded canopy of leaves and branches. So very easy to miss.

‘The sun,’ she said. ‘Rises in the east, doesn’t it?’

‘Yup. So that way.’ Maddy nodded to their left. ‘That way, then… should take us to the East River.’

They began to move slowly, cautiously, Sal one step ahead of Maddy, picking a path across the woodland floor that managed to avoid their stepping on the kind of gnarled, brittle dead wood that would crack like a gunshot.

They made their way through the wood in almost complete silence, for what seemed like an hour, but in all likelihood was no more than a few minutes. Finally Maddy thought she heard the gentle sound of the tidal lapping of water ahead of them. The ground beneath their feet stopped being a sponge of decaying leaves, forest moss and fir cones and became firmer, harder.

The cool mist was beginning to thin with the morning sun’s warmth working on it, and soon they could see past the narrow waists of forest-edge saplings to a small cove and beyond that the broad, flat surface of the East River.

Sal settled against the base of the slender trunk of a young tree. Maddy joined her and they studied the shingle and placid, lapping waterline in front of them; the soothing draw and hiss of low tide playing with pebbles.

‘There’s nothing,’ said Sal quietly. ‘New York’s just a wilderness.’ She shivered. ‘And it’s colder. How come?’

Maddy shook her head. She had no real idea. Maybe this was a world with far fewer humans in it. Less people, less pollution, less methane, less carbon — less global warming. Or more likely, given how chilly it felt — autumn cold — perhaps this was a world with absolutely no humans at all in it. It was a well-known fact among ecologists that if you took humankind out of the equation, you could easily knock three or four degrees off planet earth’s temperature.

Anyway, Sal was right; it was much cooler. No humans. Nice idea that.

‘Look! What’s that?’ said Sal suddenly. She pointed along the shingle cove.

‘What?’

‘Over there!’

Maddy squinted into the haze at what looked like a large chunk of driftwood, a log carried up on a high tide and left stranded.

‘It’s a boat!’

Maddy pushed her specs up her nose. Actually Sal was right. ‘I think it’s a kayak… or canoe or something.’

So much for no humans, then.