Alex Scarrow - The Eternal War

Maddy felt her legs wobble and give way, and before she knew it she was slumped on her knees among the pile of red bricks and cement powder. Tears streamed uncontrollably down her dust-covered face, leaving clean tracks on her cheeks in their wake.

‘Madelaine? Are you OK?’

‘No, not really,’ Maddy burbled. She buried her face in her hands.

Bricks shifted and slid as Becks stepped round carefully and squatted down in front of her. She reached out and gently pulled one of Maddy’s hands away from her face. For a moment she studied Maddy’s eyes, screwed up behind the round glasses, red and puffy.

‘Why are you crying?’ she asked softly, almost tenderly.

Maddy sniffed, wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand. ‘What the hell else am I going to do? We’re totally screwed. That’s us finished this time. Might as well just … I dunno … just curl up … and … and …’

‘That is not a sensible course of action, Madelaine.’

Maddy looked at her. Becks, quite impassive and calm. Almost childlike in the way she was squatting on the bricks, like some wartime child playing tea party with her broken dolls amid the rubble of her own home, oblivious to her fate.

‘Don’t you see, Becks? We’re all done here. We’re finished .’

She stood up, and clattered her way slowly across the bricks towards the doorway leading back into the main arch. She left Becks still squatting on her haunches patiently awaiting further instructions.

‘Madelaine?’

Maddy looked around the mess of the archway. The airborne dust that had filled the place half an hour ago had now settled, leaving a light, pale coating of powder on everything.

‘Madelaine?’ Becks called again from the back room. Her voice, normally so commanding, surprisingly deep for her feminine frame, right now sounded almost like the forlorn bleating of a lamb.

Maddy made her way across the floor, over the wide crack in the concrete, and ducked under the open shutter to look out again at the grey ruins of New York. Smudges of smoke marked the horizon to the north — Queens — where the bombing raid had taken place earlier. And the salmon-pink sun, now settling behind the tortured skeletons of Manhattan’s once fine and proud buildings, cast dappled paintbrush strokes of meagre warmth across the no-man’s land. The only colour on this colourless landscape.

Becks’s faint voice echoed out of the archway after her once more. ‘Madelaine! What are my orders?’

She ignored the support unit, left her sitting in the gathering darkness among the bricks, abandoned like an orphaned child.

‘Madelaine?’

One step in front of the other in the gathering twilight … each one easier than the last. She realized she could leave. Walk away from it all. Walk away from the responsibilities she’d never asked for, walk away from secrets she didn’t ask to know about. If all their field office was now was a crumbling archway and a bunch of machines that didn’t work any more, what difference would it make if she stayed or left?

She realized something. I can go .

She turned her back on the East River, Manhattan and the sun setting beyond, and faced north-east towards the ruins of Brooklyn, towards Boston …

Home .

Perhaps even in this alternate timeline the same people had met, fallen in love and made the same babies and somewhere north-east of here, in her home city, there was a little girl with glasses and frizzy strawberry-red hair who liked messing around with her father’s electronics toolset rather than playing with Barbie dolls. Perhaps that home was there. Perhaps her mom and dad were the same two people and she could explain to them who she was, get them to understand she was their daughter, but ten years older. For them it would be like having an older sister for their only child. A sister who could understand her in a way no normal sister could: a mentor, a guide, a friend.

Her faltering steps across the rubble-strewn landscape quickened.

A part of her argued the case that she still had responsibilities and obligations here. Liam and Sal, they too were stuck in this … whatever this world was. But what could she do for them? Sit on her bunk and wait for them in the dark? Wait until some bombing raid came here and decided to give this portion of the city another pounding?

Maddy shook the nagging voice away. She really hadn’t needed Becks to catalogue to her how complete and catastrophic the damage was to their equipment.

In the absence of a plan, or anything left of their field office for which she had to be responsible, there was only one small voice that made sense. A childlike voice.

I want to go home.

2001, somewhere in Virginia

The Chinese man looked down at them, surprised. ‘ New York! You wan’ go New York?’

‘That’s right,’ said Liam.

‘You craz-ee.’ He shook his head. ‘I take you far as Dead City. No more. I goin’ west — New Pittsburgh, maybe Cleveland. You shou’ go west too.’

‘Dead City?’

The man shrugged, said something to his wife sitting beside him in the odd-looking vehicle’s front cabin. He turned back to Liam. ‘Yuh … Dead City, you know? Ol’ times use’ to be call’ Baltimore ?’

It was dark and Liam could only see the side of the man’s face, lit by the paper lantern swinging in the fresh breeze. He read the expression as friendly bemusement.

‘You and your friends sit in back … with chickens. I take you north some way.’ The one eye Liam could see glinted in the lantern’s amber light; it was locked suspiciously on him. ‘You no trouble?’

Liam spread his hands, turned to make sure Bob had tucked the shotgun away out of sight. ‘I promise you, sir … we’ll be no trouble.’ He glanced at the side of the man’s vehicle. It reminded him of a traditional Romany gypsy caravan; every surface seemed to be lavishly decorated with intricate Oriental designs, and down along the side a multitude of hooks protruded, from which pots and pans and other kitchen miscellany rattled and clanged softly as the gentle breeze stirred ears of corn either side of the empty road.

‘We’ll just be in the back, then,’ said Liam, ‘keeping your chickens company.’

The Chinese man nodded, satisfied with that. Then turned to his wife and began chattering to her. She didn’t seem quite so pleased to have passengers come aboard.

They made their way to the back of the caravan. It rattled and vibrated from the idling engine beneath, which intermittently spat clouds of vapour out between the spokes of its six wide, wooden cartwheels.

Liam pulled open a wire mesh gate at the rear and stepped up inside to see a cramped space almost completely filled with carefully stacked household possessions. The rest of them followed suit, the vehicle lurching alarmingly as Bob finally pulled himself up inside and slammed the mesh door behind him. There was just about room for the four of them to huddle on the floor, shoulders rubbing shoulders and legs pulled up in front of them.

With a cough and a splutter the vehicle lurched forward and a thousand different objects around them began to squeak and rattle and clank. It might not be the most comfortable ride for them, but at least it was taking them in the right direction — north, towards New York.

So far there’d been nothing from Maddy. No portal, no message. Not a good sign.

Liam was thinking of something interesting to say when, with a flutter of dislodged feathers, a rooster emerged from behind a wobbling cupboard and settled on top of Bob’s head.

‘Oh sorry,’ said Liam, ‘I actually thought he was … uh … you know, joking about having chickens in the back.’