Alex Scarrow - Gates of Rome

‘Maddy, do you think the Roman contamination is anything to do with this?’

‘I dunno.’

‘It happens at the same time. It can’t be a coincidence, can it? Maddy?’

‘I don’t know! I just…’ She screwed her eyes up. ‘I don’t know anything, Sal! I’m just running… running scared, like you.’ Frustrated, she banged a fist against the side of the canoe. Its fragile wooden frame flexed alarmingly. ‘Just give me a moment to think here, OK?’

‘Sorry, Maddy.’

They drifted in silence for a minute. ‘Sal, why’s someone sent a bunch of support units after us? I mean why? What have — ’

‘Do you really think that’s what they are? Maybe they’re — ’

‘Come on! You saw them too! What do you think?’

Sal nodded silently. ‘They did look like Bob and Becks.’

They drifted for a while, the water gently slapping the taut hide like the palm of a hand on the skin of a bodhran. ‘I’ve got no idea what this is about. But if those really are support units… we’re freakin’ dead already, Sal. I mean it. We haven’t got a chance here!’ She picked her paddle up. ‘We need the others.’

‘What are we going to do?’

‘We need to get Bob back.’ That was it. That was her plan. That’s all she had to offer right now. ‘ He can fight them.’

‘But there’s, like, three of them, Maddy… he can’t fight them all by hims-’

‘That’s his problem, OK?’ She turned round and squinted at the far side of the river where home, Brooklyn, had been only ten minutes ago. It was yet more dense woodland. If it wasn’t for the sun rising into the morning sky indicating which way was east, she would have been hopelessly lost. The canoe had drifted in several lazy circles since they’d stopped paddling and one shoreline looked exactly like the other.

‘Let’s just get back over there… see if we can find the archway.’

That alone was going to be a challenge. It was all trees and thick brambles. And somewhere, somewhere, in the middle of all of that, provided it wasn’t buried or so overgrown by moss or briar, they were hopefully going to be able to find their shambolic molehill of red bricks.

Hopefully.

Sal offered her a supportive smile. ‘I’m glad I’m with you. You usually figure something out, Maddy.’

Do I? Do I really figure stuff out, or have I just been lucky so far?

Maddy returned the gesture with a shrug of bravado. ‘Well, I guess that’s why I’m the boss, right?’ She looked back over Sal’s shoulders at the hump of woodland that was once Manhattan and hoped there weren’t any more canoes lying around waiting to be used.

She dipped her paddle into the water and the canoe began to slowly pull round in the other direction. ‘Come on, Sal… we should get back to the archway as quick as we can.’ She was going to add ‘before they do’, but it seemed an unnecessary thing to say. And saying it was almost like inviting bad luck to come knocking at their front door.

Yeah, right… like, ‘don’t say it and it just won’t happen’.

If only life could be that straightforward.

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.