Alex Scarrow - The Eternal War

Behind thick milk-bottle lenses, the boy’s eyes widened. ‘You … you seen dinosaurs for, like, real ?’

Liam nodded, his face all of a sudden very serious. ‘Aye. Went back in a time machine, so I did. Saw all sorts of dinosaurs … including this big beastie.’ He tapped his nose with his forefinger. ‘But that’s super top secret, young man, all right?’

The boy nodded so vigorously his glasses almost fell off his face.

‘I’ll tell you something else too … We saw ’em in huge herds. Hundreds of the fellas all together in one place. Incredible sight, so it was.’ He winked at the boy. ‘Not small groups like your teacher just said.’

‘Wow,’ the boy gasped.

‘And, like I said, they were brown, like dust, you see, because there wasn’t such a thing as grass back then. They were brown as camouflage against the dirt, not green against grass. See what I mean?’

The boy nodded. ‘Should I put that down on my activity sheet, mister? Brown?’

Liam glanced down at the boy’s clipboard and saw a pop quiz. One of the questions was about the supposed colour of their hides.

He nodded. ‘Sure … put down brown .’

The boy’s forehead furrowed with a difficult dilemma. ‘But … er … I might not get a tick for that.’

Liam shrugged. ‘Aye … maybe so, but at least you’d be right , eh?’

He felt a hand on his shoulder and looked up to see Becks standing over them, her hair tied back in a tidy ponytail and wearing a plain dark woolly jumper that covered the still very visible scar tissue up her left arm.

‘Liam, you are aware Maddy would not approve of this,’ she cautioned.

‘Ahh … and you see this girl?’ whispered Liam to the boy. The boy looked warily up at her stern expression. ‘She saw these dinosaurs too … smacked one of ’em right on the nose, so she did. Actually started a stampede.’

‘This person does not have security clearance to know about our operations,’ Becks uttered firmly. ‘I recommend that you stop.’

Liam smiled. ‘Right, yes … of course.’ He glanced at the boy’s clipboard. ‘Brown, OK?’ He flicked him a conspiratorial wink and stood up. ‘What’s up, Becks?’

‘It is time now,’ she replied.

‘Uh?’

She nodded at a large digital clock above the entrance. It was a couple of minutes to eleven. ‘Time for us to drink coffee.’

1831, New Orleans

Abraham Lincoln staggered across the bar, knocking several tables along the way, leaving a trail of spilled whisky and snarled curses behind him as he stepped outside into the evening. The paltry sum of money with which that blood-sucking little French trapper had paid him off was all gone now, tossed down his throat during the afternoon.

The evening was still busy with dock workers hefting bales of hides and pelts off a row of flatboats, little more than rafts made from logs lashed together with a rudimentary shack in the middle. Across the river, he could make out the chimney stacks of several paddle steamers impatiently puffing clouds into the crimson sky. Their several decks were lit by gas lamps. To his whisky-soaked mind they looked like giant wedding cakes lined with candles floating on the glistening Mississippi. Quite something to behold.

New Orleans was alive and bustling with activity, even now, with the sky smearing from afternoon, to evening, to night. By contrast, back in New Salem, the hearth fires would be burning and thick log doors battened firmly shut for the night.

This is the place he wanted to be. Needed to be. A young man like him with a keen mind and a quick wit could make his fortune right here among all this … this … opportunity . That was it — even the air in New Orleans tasted of opportunity. If a fellow was clever, used his mind, he could make his fortune on these streets along this dockside. Abraham knew he had the kind of instinct and smarts to make himself rich. Rich beyond the dreams of a backwoods boy. He just needed that first little chance to get him going. Enough money to get his first enterprise under way.

Not that he knew yet what his first money-making scheme was going to be. And, of course, he’d just gone and spent all the money he had on an ill-tempered afternoon of drinking. Now he was no better than the dozen other drunks tottering up and down the busy twilit thoroughfare: crossbreed trappers and frontiersmen in tattered deerskins, even one or two Pawnee unused to the bottled white-man’s curse, sprawled unconscious amidst stacked sacks of grain … and now him too, swerving to and fro among businessmen wearing stove-pipe hats and their purse-lipped wives in shawls and bonnets, their bags and possessions behind them on the backs of silent, sullen-faced slaves.

That’ll be me one fine day , he mused drunkenly. A gentleman. A rich, successful businessman. Maybe even a politician one day . He grinned like a fool as he considered that prospect, stepping off the wooden-slat pavement on to the dirt of the busy street, lined with deep ruts carved by the cartwheels of an almost constant train of heavily laden wagons.

Perhaps even president, one day .

He belched: a long and loud croak that made heads up and down the thoroughfare turn. It was in fact so satisfyingly loud that he heard the lady in her lace bonnet cry out in disgust. So loud he didn’t hear the thundering of hooves bearing down on him, nor the clatter of beer barrels rolling off the back of the riderless cart, nor the scream from another woman as she realized what was moments away from happening.

Abraham’s whisky-addled mind had just about enough time to process one final thought as the enormous delivery cart careering down Powder Street behind a team of wild-eyed and terrified horses loomed up behind him … and sadly his last thought wasn’t anything noble or profound, nor farseeing. It was nothing more than this …

Well now, sir … That was a mighty fine belch.

2001, New York

‘So, how does Foster look?’ Maddy rephrased Sal’s question.

‘Yes.’ Sal nodded. ‘I mean, is he really dying?’

‘Foster looks no different to the day he walked out on us.’ Maddy took a bite out of her bagel. Still chewing, she continued. ‘Not a single day older. Which, of course, he isn’t … because for him, every time I go see him in Central Park, it’s the same day he walked out.’ She finished chewing and swigged some coffee. ‘It’ll be us that look different to him, I guess. Not the other way round.’

‘Aye,’ nodded Liam. ‘We’ve been together a while now … seems like we’ve been together an eternity, though.’

‘Seventy-five cycles,’ said Bob. ‘One hundred and forty-nine days.’

‘Five months,’ added Sal. She looked up at Liam and Maddy. ‘Jahulla! That makes me fourteen now. My birthday, it was only four months away when I … I was meant to die.’ She didn’t need to elaborate on that. They all knew each other’s recruitment tales.

‘I missed my fourteenth birthday,’ she added quietly.

Becks cocked her head and the appropriate smile for the occasion flashed across her face, as sincere as a screensaver. ‘Many happy returns, Sal Vikram.’

Liam put down the chocolate muffin he’d been peeling out of its paper cup. ‘Hang on, I’ve missed my seventeenth birthday!’ He reached out and squeezed Sal’s hand. ‘So, a happy birthday to us both, so it is.’

‘Yeah,’ she mumbled, ‘yay for us.’

‘Uhh, so,’ Maddy sighed, ‘this was meant to be fun . Not a freakin’ funeral!’ She turned to Sal. ‘We’ll get a cake on the way home, get some candles on it and you can blow ’em out and … and we’ll play some party games or something when we get back. How does that sound?’