TimeRiders: The Eternal War

CHAPTER 14. 2001, New York

The man recoiled fearfully at the sight of Bob, taking several quick steps away from him. ‘WHAT IS THIS P-PLACE?’ he bellowed anxiously. His eyes darting from one of them to the next.

It was Maddy who reacted first. She took several steps forward. ‘Liam? Is that …? Oh crud, that’s not …?’

‘Yes, I’m afraid it is, Mads. It’s Lincoln.’

Her jaw hung slack. ‘Oh my God!’ She advanced slowly. ‘Mr Lincoln? Abraham Lincoln?’

Lincoln’s manic eyes settled on her. His shaggy eyebrows scowled, covering his fear with suspicion. ‘You … you know me, ma’am?’

Maddy nodded. She even offered him something that looked like a polite curtsey. ‘Yes, Mr Lincoln. Yes we do.’

Lincoln’s voice softened from an outraged courthouse bellow to something quieter and altogether more agreeable. ‘Then … please, ma’am, tell me where in tarnation I have suddenly ended up.’ He looked around the brick archway. ‘Just a moment ago I was in the Jenkins storehouse.’ His eyes fell on Liam. ‘Listening to you, sir, and your two friends talking about things incomprehensible to me.’

Liam cursed his carelessness. ‘Jay-zus, he must have been following us!’

Lincoln carried on. ‘And then I saw that … that round … doorway appear out of —’ Lincoln’s deep growl of a voice became a breathless whisper and his mouth snapped open and shut like a fish caught on a hook and landed on a riverbank. ‘It arrived out of nothing! Like smoke, like … like a vision of angels. Like …’

Sal chuckled at that.

‘Fool that I am, I dared to step through.’ He glanced at Liam. ‘To follow you through, sir, through the … that … that doorway, and find myself in a … an unearthly whiteness!’ He scratched anxiously at the thick bristles of his beard. ‘Then I find myself here … in this strange place!’

Maddy took another step forward, now only a yard from him. ‘You can relax, Mr Lincoln. Please … it’s all right, it’s OK. You’re perfectly safe here.’

Lincoln studied her in suspicious silence for a moment. ‘You, ma’am. You sound less foreign to me than the others.’ He nodded at Bob. ‘Particularly that ugly ox of a man there. Good God! If I had a dog as ugly, I’d shave its posterior and teach it to walk backwards!’

Lincoln chortled drunkenly at his own joke.

Maddy shook her head. He’s been drinking.

‘Now you, ma’am,’ he said, eyeing Maddy warily, ‘you have the sound of New England in your voice.’

‘Boston,’ she replied. ‘I’m from Boston.’

Lincoln nodded slowly. ‘And I trust you have a name?’

‘Maddy. Maddy Carter.’ She offered her hand to him. ‘We mean you no harm … In fact, we came back in time to save you.’

For several moments he regarded her hand as if it was a snarling dog ready to snap at his fingers. ‘Save me?’

She nodded. ‘You nearly stepped right in front of a speeding wagon.’

‘Aye. It was Bob here,’ said Liam, slapping his meaty shoulder, ‘that yanked you back out of the way. Do you not remember?’

Lincoln remembered that. Remembered being winded and lying on his back. But then it was all a confusing mixture of things he might or might not have seen or heard. The only thing he’d been sure of was the whispered conversation in the dark of the dockside. The mention of his name. The mention of a destiny. The mention of the Jenkins storehouse and the specific time of some mysterious rendezvous.

‘Yes, perhaps I do remember something of that,’ uttered Lincoln. He cocked a bushy eyebrow, narrowed his eyes as he struggled to make some sense of his whisky-soaked recollection. ‘A big … fast wagon? Barrels on it … was it?’

Liam nodded. ‘Aye. A distillery wagon. The horses were running wild, so they were.’

‘There, you see?’ said Maddy. ‘Liam and the others went back to save you.’

‘Back?’ Lincoln nodded. ‘That’s some of what I heard these three say to each other. Back … they came back in time?’

Maddy shot a look of irritation at Liam and Sal. Careless talk. They should’ve been much more cautious in what they were saying and where they were saying it.

‘Yes, Mr Lincoln,’ she admitted. ‘Yes … they actually came back in time.’

Lincoln’s scowl vanished and was replaced in an instant with a smile that looked horrifically out of place beneath his dark brooding eyes. ‘INCREDIBLE!’ He suddenly grasped her hand firmly and shook it. ‘Most incredible!’ He let her hand go and advanced towards the others.

‘Sir!’ he said, reaching out for one of Bob’s large paws. ‘Sir! As unsettlingly strange as you look, I am indebted to you for saving my life as you did!’ Lincoln’s energetic voice filled the archway as he pumped Bob’s arm furiously.

Bob looked at Liam for help.

‘Just say “no problem”, Bob.’

‘No problem,’ he rumbled.

‘And you, sir!’ he greeted Liam. ‘You, sir, I suspect, by the way you talk, are from Ireland!’

‘Cork in Ireland, aye. Liam O’Connor at your service.’

‘A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mr O’Connor!’

He let Liam’s hand go and then graciously bowed in front of Sal, taking a gloved hand and kissing it. ‘Young madam!’

Sal giggled as if his kiss had tickled. ‘I’m Saleena Vikram. Uhh … just call me Sal.’

He glanced at Becks, reaching for her hand. She eyed him distrustfully as he grasped it and then, about to kiss it, he hesitated, taken aback by the livid ribs and swirls of scar tissue running across her hand, her forearm, all the way up to her elbow. He quickly released his tight grasp.

‘You … you have been in a fire. I am sorry. I hope I haven’t hurt you, ma’am?’

‘I am called Becks,’ she said coolly. She looked up at Maddy, who offered her a subtle nod. ‘Yes, that’s right, a fire. But I am all better now.’

He nodded politely. Finally he turned back to Maddy. ‘And you, Miss Carter, I presume you lead this small and remarkable group of mysterious heroes and heroines?’

She shrugged self-consciously. ‘I muddle through somehow I guess, Mr Lincoln.’

He stood back, hands on hips to study them all. ‘Quite remarkable,’ he uttered again. ‘And am I to truly believe that I am standing in a time that is in my future?’

‘Yes,’ said Maddy.

Lincoln looked at the row of computer monitors on the desk, different sizes displaying different news feeds from around the world. ‘And those pictures … those moving pictures, they are of this time?’

‘Yes … live cable-news feeds,’ she replied, realizing as she did that there was little in that answer he’d understand.

He leaned forward, studying them closely one after the other. ‘Remarkable. Like … like little windows looking out upon every corner of this world of …’ His words died as he pulled in a gasp.

‘Good Lord!’ he yelled, stepping towards the monitor on the end. ‘These buildings! Are they as giant as they appear?’ he said, pointing at one screen. Maddy turned round. On one screen MSNBC was doing a news story on Wall Street. There was a library image taken from a news helicopter of Manhattan’s skyscrapers.

‘Oh yeah … that’s New York. Where we are right now.’

‘New York, you say?’ Lincoln bent over the messy desk, peering closely at the monitor. ‘That is New York! Remarkable!’

Liam gently nudged Maddy as Lincoln’s gaze wandered from screen to screen, muttering with ever-increasing incredulity.

‘Are we not causing contamination here, Maddy?’ he whispered. ‘I mean he has to go back, so … to be the President of the Union states?’

‘Yes, you’re right,’ she replied.

‘Surely we can’t send him back to his time knowing about all this?’

She cursed quietly. ‘He already knows too much. I need to think what we’re —’

‘GOOD GOD!’ Lincoln suddenly exclaimed. ‘A DISASTER!’

‘What now?’ Maddy pulled away from Liam and rushed forward. ‘What is it?’

Lincoln’s pointed finger was shaking. ‘A calamity, Miss Carter, a calamity I tell you! Right there through this window! Look!’

She followed his goggle-eyed gaze and saw he was watching the looping footage of tomorrow’s trade towers disaster.

‘No … no, see, relax, this isn’t live.’ She shook her head, wondering how she was going to explain the difference between live footage and recorded footage to a man who’d never seen a moving image before.

‘Are there people living in that structure? That tall tower?’ He turned to her. ‘In what city is that explosion happening?’

‘New York.’

‘Tarnation! You mean here? This very place?’ Lincoln turned to the others. ‘Is this future of yours in the middle of some war?’

Maddy shrugged. ‘Well, sort of …’

‘Then we must join the fight!’ Lincoln turned and rushed into the gloom towards the far end of the archway.

‘Mr Lincoln!’ called Maddy. There was no answer. But she could hear the corrugated-iron shutters rattling under the impact of his fists. ‘Oh crud … he’s a real pain,’ she groaned, and made her way across the floor to join him.

‘Mr Lincoln?’

‘Where is the door, Miss Carter? We must join this fight and defend our —’

‘Mr Lincoln … will you please calm down!’ She pressed the green button to one side of the shutter door and with the whine of the motor and the clank of chains, the shutter lifted, spilling evening light across the archway’s floor through the slowly widening crack.

‘There’s no war going on right now! No invasion of America!’

‘But I saw it just then, Miss Carter, with my own eyes! A vast explosion!’

‘It’s just an image of something that’s going to happen. That’s all. Nothing you need to get all upset about! OK? Look … everything’s fine outside right now!’

The shutter rattled to a halt. For a moment she was unsure whether to show Lincoln the world outside. The more details he learned of the future, the more contaminated his mind was going to be. For an anonymous man with little or no influence on history, that might be an acceptable contamination. But for a man destined to be president …? Well, like she’d said, he already knew too much. A little more wasn’t going to make any difference either way.

‘Take a look … everything’s just fine.’

She gently ushered Lincoln forward, stepping into the cobbled alley. She grabbed his shoulders and turned him to his left, so that he faced the end of their backstreet and the dirty, rubbish-strewn quayside beyond. Above them the Williamsburg Bridge swept across the East River towards the glowing lights of Manhattan. It boomed and rumbled as a train went over above, drowning out the tooting of bridge-borne traffic above and the distant wail of a police siren.

‘See now? Nothing’s going on. There’s no war!’

‘God help me! This … is … quite … rem—’

‘Let me guess. Remarkable?’ she finished for him.

Lincoln didn’t reply. Instead she heard a gurgling sound. She turned in time to see Lincoln’s eyes rolling drunkenly until she could see only the whites. His head lolled to one side; his body slackened like a rag doll, but remained upright and standing. It was then she noticed the thick fingers of Bob’s hand round his throat, and Bob standing behind.

‘My God! You just killed him! You just snapped Abraham Lincoln’s neck!’

‘Negative,’ said Bob. ‘He is unharmed and unconscious. I have compressed a nerve cluster in his neck.’

Sal, Liam and Becks emerged into the flickering amber lamplight of the backstreet. ‘I’m sorry. It was my suggestion,’ said Liam. ‘I gave Bob the order to do that.’

Maddy looked anxiously at Lincoln’s body slumped in Bob’s arms. ‘You sure he’s not … you know, dead?’

‘He will be fine,’ said Becks. ‘Information: he will experience some bruising and some minor swelling only.’

Maddy pulled on her bottom lip for a moment, then finally nodded. ‘Right … yeah, in that case, good idea, Liam. With any luck he’ll wake up back in New Orleans thinking this was all some sort of a drunken dream. He’ll blame it on the whisky.’ She stepped back inside the arch. ‘Quick, let’s get the displacement machine charged up before he comes round.’