Time Riders

CHAPTER 89

2001, New York

Still. Quiet… but for the rustling of a lifeless breeze across the barrenlandscape. Tall spires of rusted metal and crumbling concrete stand over the lost remnants ofa place once called Times Square.

The creak of a long-faded sign swinging from a lamp post. The squeak and bang of a windowshutter somewhere, caught and played with by the haunting wind.

A sickly yellow sun behind scudding brown irradiated clouds casts pallid beams down on toashes and dust. From the darkness inside gutted and scorched buildings, milky eyes look outhungrily for some other meagre supply of food… a rat, a dog — if any are left- perhaps another of its kind.

Not a dying world, but a dead world… just waiting for theselast pitiful skeletal survivors of mankind to realize the time has come for them to die.

But, gently at first, the breeze freshens.

That loose window shutter across the square bangs ever more heavily; small clouds of dustwhip along the ground. The wheel on a rusted and upended pram turns slowly with a click-click-click of bearings.

Then, faintly — blink and you’d miss it — the slightest shimmer. Like theripple across the hot tarmac of a motorway on a midsummer’s day, the flicker of hot airabove a bonfire.

A shimmer, flickering, undulating… changing.

The tallest dead spire overlooking Times Square now has windows, unbroken. As do the otherbuildings, one after the other. One can see clear roads and faint ghostly apparitions movingalong them. Clearer now… not ghostly but solid. Cars, buses, trams… people.

The sky has changed from an unhealthy poisoned brown to a wet-Tuesday grey and the persistentdrizzle of mean-spirited rain.

Tall crimson-coloured banners with the emblem of a snake eating its tail suddenly adorn everylamp post. Placards appear above shop entrances, featuring the face of a leader who promisesto unite the world under his rule. Soldiers in grey and black uniforms and tall leather bootspatrol soulless ordered streets full of soberly dressed civilians quietly, obediently, turningup for work.

This at least is life. Not a dead world any more.

The breeze freshens again.

The banners flutter, as if sensing something more is on its way.

Another shimmer.

Another change is coming, rippling forward through months, years, decades of time as eventsrealign, destinies change and possibilities find correct versions of themselves.

The wet grey sky slowly clears, the rain stops.

The pennants and banners vanish with a whisper, the placards disappear.

With a final flourish and twist of reality, Times Square becomes noisy, garish, busy,impatient, filled with rude people on mobile phones organizing their day ahead, jostling eachother for pavement space, queuing for breakfast bagels and Starbucks coffee.

A giant green ogre called Shrek peers out from a poster.

A homeless man pushing a shopping trolley full of cardboard boxes and topped with a tarpaulintakes a moment to sit down on a bench and watch the busy world go by.

A lovely blue sky. Unseasonably warm sun for this time of year… and the distant droneof an approaching plane on the far horizon.