Alex Scarrow - Gates of Rome

‘And this, then,’ uttered Cato almost reverentially. ‘This must have been one of the chariots they arrived in.’

Maddy turned to look. He was on the other side of the room now, holding his candle up to inspect something large that glinted dully in the gloom. She and Bob hurried over and a moment later, the three of them were inspecting the dusty, slanted metal sides of a large vehicle. To Maddy’s eyes it looked like a cross between a Humvee and a hovercraft.

‘Multi-terrain personnel carrier. With anti-grav thrusters for a limited-altitude vtol capability,’ said Bob. ‘This appears to be a more advanced model than the prototypes being field-tested by the US military in 2054.’

Maddy shook her head. ‘This is completely crazy! The scale of time contamination… I mean this is insane. What the hell were they thinking?’

‘Maddy?’ It was Sal.

She turned round and saw her silhouette in the doorway. ‘How is he?’

‘Macro’s bound him up.’ She managed a relieved smile. ‘Not serious, he said. Just a flesh wound.’

‘OK… OK.’ She sighed. ‘That’s good.’ She looked round the room. There were plenty of other things to inspect. Perhaps, somewhere in this room, please God, a time machine of some sort. Something to get them back home. Now.

‘Bob, if they’ve brought with them some sort of a time-displacement device, and it’s in here somewhere, we need to find it.’

‘Affirmative. But there is unlikely to be a viable source of power still.’

Bob clambered up on to the slanted metal hull of the vehicle. ‘I will look inside the personnel carrier.’

‘You do that.’ She turned to Sal. ‘We’re going to find a way home, Sal. I promise. Stay with Liam, OK?’

Sal nodded and quickly disappeared out of the doorway.

A time machine. Please tell me you idiots brought with you a means to get back home. Please. You guys can’t have been that stupid. Right?

Perhaps they weren’t stupid. Just desperate.

She returned to the tables stacked with guns and ammunition cartridges and webbing and field equipment, hoping to find some first-aid packs. Anaesthetic for Liam, more importantly something antiseptic to cleanse the wound. Antibiotics to fight any potential infection. He wasn’t going to make it if that sword wasn’t clean. In this pre-penicillin time even a paper cut could finish you off if you got unlucky. She found a first-aid pack, unzipped it. It was fully stocked.

‘Sal!’

Sal came back in. ‘Here… unwrap Liam. There’s an antibiotic spray in here. Use that and use these bandages; at least they’re clean.’

Sal took the first-aid pack and hurried back outside. Maddy resumed looking round the vast room. Her candle picked out a large object in the middle. A box, a crate of some kind.

Crate? A protective crate?

She made her way quickly towards it, doing her best to stifle the growing hope it might actually contain a machine eagerly waiting to be switched on and ready to conveniently whisk them back home to 2001.

Life doesn’t actually work that way, does it, Mads? Not for them at any rate.

Closer, she could see it looked less like a packing crate and more like the kind of travel cage you’d transport a wild animal in. She’d once watched a show on cable TV, a ‘day-in-the-life-of’ kind of show based on LaGuardia Airport. There’d been an episode with a sedated Indian tiger in a crate in the back of an aeroplane. Last of its kind or something. Anyway, the crate had looked not unlike this one. She stepped warily closer to it… expecting at any moment to hear the enraged snarl of a roused tiger or a lion coming from inside. She noticed a sliding trapdoor on one side of the crate.

Lion, tiger… or time machine. This crate, reinforced with iron brackets on the corners, had to contain something important. Gently she eased the trapdoor to the side, revealing a hatchway eighteen inches wide and six high. A viewing slot? A feeding slot?

She wrinkled her nose. There was an awful stench spilling out of it. Like sewage. Slurry. No, even worse. Decay.

A feeding slot, then. It had to be there was some kind of animal being kept in there. Or one that had died and was quietly decomposing. Slowly she raised her candle, its flickering glow beginning to pick out a few slats of wood on the inside.

‘Hello?’ she uttered softly. ‘Anything in there?’

She heard a sudden scratching sound, the scramble of movement inside the box. Then a pair of eyes suddenly lurched into view.

Oh my God!

Eyes. Wide and milky. Almost human. Or perhaps human, but entirely insane, animal-crazy. Completely feral. The eyes were accompanied by a shrill, frantic, gurgling, whinnying cry. Its face — yes, a human face, she could see that now — was hidden from the bridge of the nose down to the chin by some sort of leather and iron mask strapped round the head and caked in scum and dirt.

‘Oh God! Over here!’ she cried. ‘There’s someone alive in here!’

AD 54, Imperial Palace, Rome

Bob worked the reinforcing brackets off then pulled away the thick bars of wood that made the cage.

‘Jeeez!’ whispered Maddy as she caught her first glimpse of the rest of the pitiful creature cowering inside. ‘Is that really a man in there?’

The frail, skeletal body inside looked like that of an old man, edges and bulges where bone pushed out against paper-thin skin. His skin was darker than Mediterranean skin; Middle Eastern, Asian perhaps. And hair. Lots of it, cascading down his narrow shoulders, once upon a time dark, but now grey threaded with white in places.

The man cowered in the corner at the sight of Bob pulling the cage open, bar by bar.

‘Shhh! It’s OK,’ Maddy cooed softly. ‘We’re not going to hurt you!’

Cato stepped closer to get a better look at him. ‘Is… is this one of the Visitors?’

The man in the mask glanced at him quickly. He nodded vigorously, manic, darting eyes growing even wider. He whimpered, mewed and gurgled, bony hands gesturing frantically at the mask over his mouth.

Maddy stepped forward. ‘Let me take that off you. Is that what you want?’

The man scrambled unsteadily forward; his bare feet padded off a soft bed of trampled faecal matter — years’ worth of human waste compacted into an almost compost-like bed — on to the cool, hard tiles with a gentle patter. He turned his back to Maddy and frantically lifted his long, matted hair to reveal a crusted iron band with a padlock on it.

‘It’s a lock. I’m… I’m sorry… I don’t…’

‘Let me,’ said Cato. He pulled his sword out and carefully dug the tip of his blade into the lock’s rusted clasp. With a sharp twist, it snapped and showered flakes of rust to the floor. Maddy eased the band away from his head, grimacing at the skin worn bald at the back of the man’s head, the fresh scabs, the fading scars.

The old man untangled his matted hair, the long wisps of his beard and moustache, from the mask’s locking band. He eased the mask itself away from lips crusted with scab and dried mucus. The feed tube, the outside of it coated in the slime of rotting food lodged in the front of the mouth, emerged from a largely toothless face; gums almost completely black with the ruined stumps of dead teeth.

‘ Oh Jesus,’ Maddy whispered, controlling the urge to retch.

The mask clunked to the floor, the echo filling the cavernous, dark room.

‘Are you one of the Visitors?’ Cato asked.

The man seemed to be in a state of shock, hyperventilating. Gasping. His tongue, snaking out and tasting the air, relishing its release from captivity.

‘Did you come from the future?’ tried Maddy in English.

His darting eyes stopped on her immediately.