Time Riders

CHAPTER 32

2001, New York

Tuesday 12 or 13 (I’m losing count)

It’s a Tuesday morning. The Tuesdays I think of as the ‘sad’days. The Mondays are the ‘happy’ days. I hate the Tuesdays, full of grief,those smoking Twin Towers, the crying and fear… that terrifying rumbling as they comedown, and the air full of dust and scraps of paper.

I’d prefer not to go out into them, prefer to stay in the arch. But Foster saysit’s important I’m equally familiar with both versions of New York, the‘before’ and the ‘after’.

It’s early right now, 7 a.m. I always seem to be the first to wake. The others areall fast asleep. Maddy snores in the bunk below. Liam whimpers like a puppy.

Sal looked up. All was still in the archway. Foster was asleep on an old sofabeside the kitchen alcove, stirring restlessly beneath a quilt. And Bob… Bob rested inone of the birthing tubes in the back room. She wondered what he dreamed about, ifanything.

She closed her diary, sat up and pulled on some clothes under her blanket and then climbeddown quietly. She grabbed a bin bag full of dirty clothes lying beside the bottom bunk andwalked across to the breakfast table.

One duty — collectively agreed — was that every other Tuesday would be a good day to take their meagre supply of clothes down to the laundromat in themorning to collect in the evening.

She checked their small fridge.

No milk.

She sighed. One of the others had finished the last of it without saying. She shook her headand clucked like a mother hen.

They’d starve if it wasn’t for me.

She decided to stop off at the 24/7 store on the way back to pick up some half-fat milk, somebagels and some more Rice Krispies since Liam had discovered a passion for them and seemed todevour bowl after bowl of the stuff.

She punched the red button and the shutter whirred up, quietly rattling and letting in thecool morning air of the city. She breathed in deep and looked up at the clear blue sky. It wasgoing to start out as a lovely sunny day today… as always.

Sal dropped off the laundry with the sweet old Chinese lady who worked at the laundromat. Shewas a chatty old thing whom Sal was beginning to get to know well, always talking proudly- sometimes in broken English, sometimes in Cantonese — about her nephew whom sheannounced with pleasure ‘alway wear ’spensive smartsoo’ to go for his work’. Of course, it was exactly the same greetingevery time she stepped into the shop, as if she was setting eyes on Sal for the very firsttime.

Which, of course, she was. But Sal decided to politely steer their brief chit-chattyconversation in different directions with every visit… gradually learning a little bitmore about her and her family each time.

She headed across the bridge into Manhattan, enjoying the warm sun and watching the citystreets grow steadily busier. The air was thick with smells both pleasant and not so, butnothing quite as bad as she remembered in downtown Mumbai — particularly on the smog-heavy days. Entering Manhattan’s lower east side, her nosepicked out the acrid smell of exhaust fumes mixed with the delightful odour of freshly brewedcoffee and oven-baked bagels billowing from the various coffee shops and fast-food restaurantsshe passed on the way across to Broadway and up to Times Square.

Tuesday starts so well, she noted sadly. Right now, in the earlymorning, it was as fine a day as one could ask for. She looked at her watch.

8.32 a.m.

The day would continue to be lovely for another thirteen minutes. She sighed sadly. Then itwould turn into the nightmare of nine-eleven. She entered the busy nexus of Times Square andtook a seat on a bench — her regular bench — beside a litter bin. She watched thestop-start traffic at a busy intersection and the pavements filled with people on their way towork: men already hot with their jackets over one arm and their ties loosened, women in smartsummer blouses and light linen trouser suits.

8.34 a.m. Eleven minutes to go.

The large green face of Shrek, looking equally bemused and irritated by Donkey, hung abovethe square — as always. She studied the movie billboard and the others dotted around,beginning to find them all very familiar, like bedroom posters long past their time to betaken down and replaced with something else.

8.37 a.m. Eight minutes to go.

A homeless man approached the bench — as he always did at 8.37 a.m. — pushing ashopping trolley in front of him, piled high with cardboard boxes and an old tarpaulin. Hesmiled politely at her — as he always did — before rummaging through the litterbin and finding a half-eaten sausage McMuffin.

He sat down beside her, his lined and pockmarked face creased with quitepossibly the last smile New York would see today and opened his mouth to say the same thing healways said.

‘Hey, lucky me… it’s still warm!’ He eagerly tucked into his rescuedsandwich.

Sal politely returned his smile.

‘I’m glad,’ she said. And she genuinely was. She was familiar enough withthe next few hours to know this was the last fleeting moment of contentment left in the day, ahomeless tramp, chewing gratefully on a discarded sausage in a bun.

8.43 a.m. Two minutes to go.

She looked up at the skyline, seeing in the distance the very tops of the two World TradeCenter towers, glistening like polished silver in the morning light. Proud structures thatconfidently seemed to reach up to the blue sky and actually touch it. And inside… somany thousands of people, sitting down to start a regular day at work, opening their emailin-boxes, peeling the lid off their Starbucks coffee, unwrapping their salt-beef and mustardbagels.

8.44 a.m. One minute left.

The tramp finished his breakfast and sighed with contentment.

He turned to Sal and sucked in his breath to say what he always said at this time.‘Gonna be a helluva day, ain’t it?’

‘Yes.’ She nodded. ‘It is.’

The tramp got up off the bench and pushed his trolley away from her, whistling cheerfully ashe went.

8.45 a.m. Now only seconds to go.

Sal hated this final countdown. Beginning with the distant drone of an engine in the sky andending with cries of disbelief from the pedestrians around her, and a moment later the boomand rumble of the plane’s impact.

She’d sat through this at least a dozen times now. And God knows how many more timesshe’d have to — hundreds? Thousands? Sal wondered if it wouldget any easier for her, counting down those last few seconds.

She closed her eyes. Foster probably wouldn’t approve of that if he knew, but therewere only so many times she could bring herself to watch.

She could hear the plane now.

And then she felt it: a dizzying sense of losing balance, of falling, as if just for a momentthe ground beneath her had been whipped away.

She opened her eyes, looked up… and gasped at what she saw.

Maddy studied the screens before her, steaming mug of coffee in hand — blackcoffee because someone had used the last of the milk and not leftany for breakfast — and waited for the first ticker-tape newsflash to report ‘somekind of explosion’ at the World Trade Center.

She checked the clock on the computer. It was 8.45 a.m.

It was due.

The clock display now flickered to indicate 8.46 a.m.

OK, it’s now past due.

‘Hmm,’ she grunted. She looked around for the others. Liam was drowsily slumpedon his cot, reading a National Geographic magazine he’dfound lying around the archway. Foster, who looked frailer and ill this morning, remained fastasleep on his couch. Bob was still in his tube, being nourished intravenously with somehorrible-looking gunk.

‘Er…’ was the best Maddy could come up with right now.

Sal stared dumbstruck at a very different world around her. Shrek and Donkey weregone, so were the posters for Mamma Mia and Planet of the Apes. She noticed some of the more recent buildings looked a littledifferent too.

But, most importantly, the Twin Towers were gone and in their place, notquite so high but easily as grand, stood a giant marble column from which an enormous redpennant proudly flapped.

Her eyes dropped to street level. It looked so much less chaotic: fewer billboards adornedthe sides of buildings; the shopfronts looked somehow tidier, more reserved, more upmarket;the streets were far less clogged with vehicles, which themselves looked strangelyold-fashioned, reminding her of some of the odd-looking automobiles she had once seen in atransport museum.

The pedestrians, many more of them than there were a few moments ago, eyed her tatty clothescuriously. She looked down and realized her hoodie with Ess-Zedsplashed brightly across it, the ripped and patched drainpipe jeans stood out in starkcontrast to the sombre and characterless grey suits everywhere. And something else: virtuallyeveryone was wearing a red armband that featured a white circle and some small black design onit. It reminded her of the old war films; the bad guys used to wear those redarmbands…

What were those bad guys called? Oh yeah… Nazis.

She turned to look for the homeless man who’d been sitting on the bench beside her, buthe was gone, along with his supermarket trolley. Feeling dozens of curious eyes begin to fixon her, she got up off the bench and quickly hurried across the busy pavement to the mouth ofa quiet backstreet. She pulled out her mobile and dialled the field office.

The display showed two words. No signal.

Confused for a moment, she quickly realized she could see no one else talking into a mobilephone either. In fact, she could see no one even holding one, nor any adverts for top-up cardsor service providers or deals with free texts, nor stalls selling novelty phone covers…nothing at all to do with mobile phones.

?

Maddy looked up at Foster.

‘The plane impact just didn’t happen,’ shesaid. ‘And a moment later most of the news-feed screens went blank,’ she added,pointing to the row of monitors now all synchronously blinking an error message.

Foster, looking bleary-eyed from being woken, and far too pale for her liking, noddedthoughtfully over her shoulder. ‘We’re in trouble… this looks like a bigshift,’ he said quietly. ‘Normally they come in waves, subtle ones at first thatbring very minor changes, then the bigger ones come later if events up the timelinearen’t corrected.’

One computer screen still seemed to be functioning; beneath a prominent red banner with alogo on it were the headlines of the day’s news.

‘What is that?’ queried Liam, pointing to the logo on the banner.

‘Reminds me a bit of the Nazi swastika,’ she replied, ‘but itisn’t.’

‘What’s a swastika?’ asked Liam.

Foster waved a hand. ‘Sorry, Liam… I’ll bring you up to speed later.’He looked more closely at it. ‘It looks like a black eel or snake or something, bitingits own tail.’

‘Yeah.’ Maddy nodded.

Liam spotted something the other two hadn’t yet. ‘I wonder if you noticed thenews is in two languages?’ He pointed to the lower half of the screen where the sameheadlines had been duplicated in another language.

‘German and English,’ said Maddy, ‘that’s all I can see. No otherlanguage options.’

Foster turned to them and gathered his thoughts. ‘OK, well it doesn’t take agenius to work out that history’s been shifted to incorporate a pretty significantalteration.’

‘Er… the Germans won the SecondWorld War?’ suggested Maddy.

‘More than that, Madelaine; it looks like they went and conquered America.’

Liam looked at both of their ashen faces. ‘That really isn’t good, isit?’