Gates of Rome

CHAPTER 33

2001, formerly New York

Ten minutes later, they had beached the canoe on the far side of the river. As they walked along the shoreline looking warily up at the edge of the wood to their left, Sal couldn’t help thinking they were going to be jumped by screaming savages at any moment. Or worse.

‘Hey, Sal?’ said Maddy. ‘Remember those weird-looking reptile people?’

An edgy laugh. ‘They’re exactly what I was trying not to think about right now.’ The mistake, her mistake that had bumped Liam back to the late Cretaceous, had produced an alternate present in which Homo sapiens had never even got a look-in. In their place were lean hominids with elongated heads, descendants of a species of therapod that had managed to survive. They too had developed to a similar level as the humans who lived here now: spears, huts, round hide and wood-framed rafts. But they’d been quite terrifying to look at. The stuff of nightmares. It was an alternative history Sal was more than glad they’d managed to snuff out.

They wandered along the shingle for a while, careful, quiet steps as they listened to the woodland birds calling to each other and the gentle hiss of stirring branches. Even with most of the morning haze burned away and the sun finding its strength, there was still an autumn coolness in the air.

Sal stopped.

‘Sal?’

She looked across at the forest-covered hump of Manhattan on the far side, trying to judge from the sweep of the river heading out towards the Atlantic whether they were standing roughly where the Williamsburg Bridge used to cross.

‘I think this is it. What do you think?’

Maddy wrinkled her nose and scowled at the shoreline across the water. ‘It all looks kind of the same to me. You sure, Sal?’

Sal thought she recognized the large sweep of the Brooklyn side, and the tapering end of Manhattan. She shook her head. ‘Not really.’

They turned away from the river, stepping up a gentle, sloping shoreline, up shingle and silt that finally turned to dry sand crested with tufts of coarse grass. Ahead of them the edge of dense woodland invited them to enter.

‘Just like Mirkwood,’ said Maddy. ‘Isn’t it?’

Sal shrugged. Mirkwood meant nothing to her.

Maddy grimaced. ‘I really hate woods. Particularly thick, gnarly ones.’

They stepped under the low-hanging branches of a chestnut tree and into the wood. The sun was fully up and about its business now and shone in slanting shafts down through the leaves, dappling the forest floor with brush-dabs of light that shifted endlessly across the dead wood, dried cones and undergrowth.

Maddy cursed as a cluster of stinging nettles brushed against her arms. ‘Aghh! I wouldn’t mind if history swept these vicious plants away.’ She rubbed her arm vigorously. ‘Sal? You sure it’s up here?’

‘I didn’t say I was sure… I said I think it might be.’

Out of sight of the defining curve of the river, they were now just walking up an incline through a thick forest. They could be absolutely anywhere. They could be within a couple of dozen yards of the archway and walk straight past the thing.

Maddy estimated they must be about a hundred yards or so into the wood by now. If the general shape of the New York estuary hadn’t changed too much in the last two thousand years, and Sal had picked the right point for them to head uphill into the woods, then it had to be close by. Although, looking at the foliage ahead of her, Maddy couldn’t see anything that looked like a termite mound of red bricks.

‘Sal?’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, sighing. ‘I really thought we were in the right place.’

‘Don’t worry, we’ll just go back down to the river and get our bearings again.’

Sal shook her head. ‘No, jahulla… no, I’m right! I’m sure we’re in the correct place.’ She looked around them. It was all dense foliage. She pushed aside creepers and vines that looped down from low branches. Yanked angrily at them. ‘Here somewhere…’

‘Come on, let’s go back down and try again.’

Sal picked up a stick and used it to thrash at the nettles and brambles.

‘Sal?’

‘I’m not wrong!’

She hacked at the foliage, decapitating nettles, sending leaves and stalks fluttering.

‘SAL! Stop it!!’

She stopped. Turned slowly to look at Maddy. She slumped down to the ground, exhausted.

‘This is shock,’ said Maddy. ‘Post-traumatic shock.’ She joined her, reached out and took the stick from her hands. ‘We need to catch our breath, Sal, stay calm, yeah?’

Sal was looking past her.

‘Sal? You and me… we’ll go back down to the river, and get our bearings again. OK?’

‘Right.’

Maddy offered her a hand and pulled her to her feet. ‘We’ll find it, Sal. Easy as easy-peas.’

She tossed the stick behind her into the remaining thicket of nettles and brambles only to be rewarded with a metallic clang and rattle.

They both spun round. A veil of ivy cascading down from the branches of a chestnut tree hung as thick as a velvet theatre curtain. The stick had created a gap, through which they could see a few inches of the graffiti-covered corrugated grooves of the shutter door.

Sal grinned. ‘I knew it.’

Maddy and Sal grunted with effort as they hefted the shutter up between them. Three foot up, enough to wriggle through inside. It was unpowered, just as Maddy had expected it to be. The archway would be on generator power right now, essential systems only. It was dark inside, almost completely black. The dim light of the forest spilling in from beneath the shutter door revealed several yards of grubby concrete floor and no more.

‘Bob? You powered up in there?’

She could hear the faint chug of the generator at the back.

Good. At least that’s working.

‘Bob?’ None of the monitors were on. She tried to make out whether any of the PCs’ standby indicators were glowing. If they were, they were actually too faint to see from here.

She stood up inside and wandered over to her right where their breakfast table and assortment of armchairs were. Her thigh bumped against the arm of one of them. She side stepped, shuffling to her right until her hand finally touched brick wall.

‘You OK in there, Maddy?’ called Sal. She was crouched beneath the shutter, holding it in case the thing rattled down again.

‘Fine… just looking for the light switch. It’s somewhere here.’

She patted dry, crumbling bricks until her fingers brushed electric flex.

‘Ah! Nearly there!’ Her fingers traced flex along the wall until she found the switch box. ‘Bingo, bongo!’

She flipped the switch and the tube light above the kitchen table buzzed, winked and finally flickered on.

‘Oh God!’ gasped Sal.

Maddy turned round. ‘What is it?’

She saw for herself. Blood. Lots of it. Dark, smeared and spattered across the floor.

Maddy picked her way across the floor, avoiding pools and bloody drag smears that were already clotting and drying out. ‘Bob? You on?’

One of the monitors flickered on from standby mode. She made it over to the desk and sat down in one of the office chairs.

›Hello, Maddy.

‘Bob! What happened in here?’

Sal joined her a moment later, looking decidedly queasy. ‘Oh pinchudda. This is so disgusting. There’s blood everywhere.’

›Warning.

‘What is it, Bob?’

›There is an unauthorized presence in the archway with you.

It was then they heard a scratching, scraping sound coming from the far corner of the archway where several storage racks of bits and pieces, rolls of electrical flex and buckets of circuit boards lined the wall.

›Information: there were two of them. I attempted to extract them both from the field office.

‘Two what?’ Maddy looked at Sal. ‘Oh crud!.. Not two more support units?’

The scraping, scratching sound seemed to be getting closer. Accompanied by a wet gurgle — the sound of exertion.

‘Bob?’

›Affirmative. Two support units.

The cursor skittered along the command line far too slowly as Bob elaborated.

›I was successful in extracting one of the support units completely, and one partially.

Just then Sal strangled a yelp. ‘Shadd-yah! Maddy! Look!’

Maddy turned in her chair and looked at where she was pointing. It emerged slowly into the pooling light, bit by grotesque bit, dragging itself across the shallow crater in the floor, scooped out by a dozen or more old displacement fields. A pale hand… connected to an arm… a blood-spattered shoulder and finally a bald head and the top half of a torso, missing the other shoulder and arm.

It pulled itself towards them — another female support unit, or what was left of one.

Maddy didn’t know whether to puke, scream or run. ‘Jesus!’

›Caution: it is still very dangerous.

Maddy got up and crossed the floor, looking at the pitiful thing dragging itself determinedly towards them. It didn’t look dangerous. She almost felt sorry for it.

‘Don’t let its hand grab you!’ said Sal.

Maddy took a step back. The support unit’s one hand was reaching out for the toe of her boot. Its mouth snapped open in a bloody snarl of gurgling frustration.

Sal took a wide berth round it towards the storage racks, rummaged for a moment through a plastic bucket of tools and came towards Maddy with a large heavy wrench in her hands.

‘We should squish it.’

‘Just a sec…’ Maddy squatted down in front of the support unit. Careful to keep enough distance between her and that one functioning hand. There was undoubtedly still enough strength in those fingers to crush bones, to throttle her.

‘Who sent you?’

Its bloodshot eyes rolled up towards her.

‘Can you hear me?’

Its gurgling stopped.

‘Who sent you?’

Again this one had a face unsettlingly similar to Becks. Eyes as grey and piercing as hers, but the whites webbed with hairlines of haemorrhaging veins. ‘You… primary… target…’

Maddy wondered what the support unit meant by that — them? The team? Or her specifically? ‘Does someone want us… dead?’

Its mouth snapped shut and open again; it gurgled a paste of dark clotting blood down its chin.

‘Is that it? Someone wants us dead?’

‘… primary… target…’

‘Who sent you?’ The thing was dying, its voice failing to little more than a wet, bubbling whisper. She leaned forward. ‘Please! Who sent you? ’

Its hand reached out for Maddy’s shirt collar and snagged it, weakly balling its fist and trying to pull her closer. Bloodshot eyes stared intently up at her and its mouth opened once again, spilling a viscous drool of dark blood on to the floor. Opened and snapped closed, its fist pulling Maddy’s face down towards its bloodied lips. Its jaw snapped open once more.

‘… cont… contam-’

‘NO!!’ Sal brought the wrench down with a sickening crunch. The support unit squealed like a banshee, a horrible, vermin-like screech. It thrashed about violently on the floor. Sal brought the wrench down again and the screeching ended abruptly. The noise of both impact and the cut-short scream echoed round the archway. As the reverberation faded, they stared in horrified silence at the support unit. Quite dead now.

Maddy looked up at Sal. The blood-spattered wrench was still in her trembling hands, her eyes wide, locked on the horrible mess she’d just created.

‘Why’d you go and do that? She was trying to tell me something!’

‘I… I thought it was — it was trying to bite you!’

Maddy got to her feet, backing away from the remains of the support unit. ‘It… she… was trying to say something. Contamination. That’s it, I think. Contamination.’

‘Contamination?’

‘Yeah… that’s what I think she was saying, like, maybe WE are the contamination event?’ She took several more steps back until her legs bumped against her office chair. She slumped down in it, for the moment robbed of the energy to stay standing. ‘Do you think that means we’re the problem, not the solution?’

Sal joined her. ‘Maddy… oh God, I thought she was going to — ’

She wrapped her arms round Maddy and began sobbing into her shoulder.

A computer beeped.

‘It’s OK,’ Maddy cooed. Stroked her hair. The last hour had been enough to shred anyone’s sanity, let alone a child Sal’s age. She let her get it out of her system, wondering for a moment if she was ever going to find someone whose shoulder she could go and soak. ‘It’s OK. We’re nearly sorted now. Just got to bring the boys back and we’ll be all right. I promise.’

Sal’s head nodded against her shoulder.

A computer beeped.

‘Come on, then, Sal,’ she said, lifting her away. ‘You’re getting snot on my shirt. I’ve only got one decent one.’

Sal laughed. Not so much a laugh as a smile. But good enough.

One of the PCs beeped again — one of those annoying ‘reboot’ beeps, a you-went-and-hit-the-keyboard-in-anger-didn’t-you? beep. Maddy turned round to see computer-Bob had opened a dialogue box and had been patiently trying to get her attention for the last minute.

›Warning: I am picking up approaching ident signals. 300 yards.

›Warning: I am picking up approaching ident signals. 200 yards.

›Warning: I am picking up approaching ident signals. 100 yards.

›Warning.

›Warning.

›Warning.