Alex Scarrow - Time Riders

Oh my God.

Grimacing, she reached in and gently took hold of it, lifting it outthrough the hole in the wall. She wiped dust from her glasses and shone her torch down on theleather cover.

And grinned. ‘It’s here! I’ve got it!’

She heard both Sal and Foster yelp with excitement.

Pulling the stiff leather cover open, she quickly flipped through the thick pages of thebook. ‘What’s the last possible date that Liam and Bob could have come here, doyou reckon?’ she asked.

‘With Bob terminating six months after mission inception, — that would make it acouple of days after the window we tried opening in Washington. That wouldbe…’

‘Fifth of March 1957,’ said Sal.

Maddy leafed through the pages, noting the dates left by various guests. There were many fromthe previous year. But they quickly dried up in the late summer of 1956.

Perhaps the museum was closed then.

She reached the last page and a last entry from a visitor by the name of JessicaHeffenburger. ‘ The museum must close today. The enemy is about totake our city. I could cry .’

She scanned the other entries on the page. They all shared the same sentiment: sadness,bitterness and defeat… a broken people seemingly accepting the inevitable. Paying onelast visit to their beloved museum.

But then, in a fainter ink, she spotted it: written with a different pen in the gap leftbetween one comment and another, scrawled in the untidy hand of a person writingquickly…

Me and Bob would really like to come home now, please.

Lat: 40°42′42.28"N

Long: 73°57′59.75"W

Time: 18.00, 05-03-1957

She crawled across the slats with the book cradled in her handsand looked down at Foster and Sal standing in the aisle below, both of them staring up at herwith expectant expressions.

‘You find anything?’ asked Foster.

She tore the page out of the book, grabbed her torch, swung her legs over the side and jumpeddown on to the floor, creating a small mushroom cloud of dust.

‘He’s right here!’ she said, flourishing the page in front of her face,then her voice caught and she found her shoulders shaking as adrenaline-fuelled laughterfilled the silence of the basement.

‘He freakin’ well did it!’

1957, New York

Bob and Liam took the steps up and found the museum worker, Sam, dutifully standingguard at the top of the stairs, just as they’d asked him to.

‘We’re all done down there,’ said Liam quietly. ‘Thanks for lookingout for us.’

‘Look — ’ the man eyed them both — ‘you said something abouteverything changing to how it should be ?’

There really wasn’t time for a full explanation, although Liam would have liked to havegiven the man that for helping them out.

‘Time is going to correct itself.’ Liam smiled. ‘And everything is going tobe all right once more. I promise you.’ He reached out and patted Sam’s arm.‘And guess what?’

‘What?’

‘Sometime in the future, I reckon I’ll be seeing you again, so I will.’

Sam Penney watched them go, scratching his head, dumbfounded, trying to make sense of thenonsensical things the young lad had just said, and beginning to conclude that he must bequite out of his mind, when a guard barked at him to help some of the other workers lift aheavy display case down the hallway to be stacked ready for burning.

Liam and Bob stepped out through the double doors on to the museum’smain entrance floor, busy with workmen in boiler suits toiling under the gaze of stern-facedsoldiers. Bob dutifully returned the clipped salute from the guard standing in the mainentrance with a barked ‘ Heil Kramer ’.

Outside, the bonfire had already started and tongues of orange flame chased dancing flakes ofash up into the overcast sky. Liam could feel the searing heat on his face as they made theirway down the grand front steps across the forecourt towards the street. Amid theheat-shimmering pile of burning antiquities he spotted the end of the Egyptian sarcophagussticking out of the pile, the dry wood blackening and paint work, four millennia old,smouldering and peeling off the side.

The workers stood in a pitifully sad group watching the exhibits burn. Beyond the forecourt,on the street, citizens were gathering, sombrely witnessing the valuable relics of history andtheir national heritage disappear in a column of acrid smoke.

On the skyline, Liam noticed the pall of other plumes of smoke drifting up into the coldwinter sky, and guessed that across the city books were burning, priceless paintings wereburning, historical documents, journals and records were all burning, pulled from publiclibraries and private galleries. He imagined the very same spectacle being duplicated inAmerica’s other main cities in the next few days. And duplicated across the cities ofKramer’s Reich over the next few weeks. History being wiped clean, purged wholesale fromthe face of the earth.

He felt physically sick.

They stepped on to the street, pushing past silent faces filled with hatred as they glared athis and Bob’s black uniforms.

Liam was relieved to see the Kubelwagen still parked up outside and no soldiers standingaround it on the lookout for the culprits who’d stolen it.

Bob climbed in quickly and turned on the engine.

‘Do you think they’ll find our message?’ asked Liam as hesettled into the passenger’s seat and Bob eased the vehicle through the crowd back on tothe street. ‘I mean, we’ve hidden it away pretty good… maybe too good.’

‘We will know this in approximately seventy-nine minutes.’

They proceeded south down an orderly Central Park West, on one side of them the city’spark, all winter-bare trees and drab ochre grass, on the other endless office blocks andtraffic nudging forward between red traffic lights. It started to rain. Joyless greasy dropsspattered against the windscreen and soaked dispirited, plodding pedestrians outside.

Liam truly wouldn’t be sorry to leave this drab brow-beaten world behind.

We’re on our way home now… hopefully.

He wondered what the archway looked like, who might be occupying it here in 1957, if indeedanyone was. More to the point — he wondered what the girls and Foster were up to rightnow.

2001, New York

Foster noticed them as they jogged quickly down the steps outside the frontentrance, not just a couple of dozen of them peering curiously from the dark interiors ofgutted buildings… but a hundred or more of them.

Fresh meat… the word’s spreading.

‘Oh God!’ uttered Sal. ‘There’s so many.’

Maddy grabbed her hand protectively. ‘Foster, fire your gun.’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t think the noise will scare them now.’

‘But maybe these are ones who don’t know your gunkills.’

‘Oh, they know all right… otherwise I’m sure they’d already be onus.’

The street leading south, Central Park West, was thick with them… like some bizarresilent rally. To their left was what was once Central Park, now nothing more than a dust bowldotted with the charcoal skeletons of scorched tree trunks, or the frazzled stumps oflong-dead bushes. If the devil was given a say in how a city park should be landscaped, Fosterimagined he would go with something like this.

It was wide open terrain, though. Nothing for the creatures to hide behind or jump out from.Far better than picking their way along some narrow street strewn with rusted vehicles.

‘We should cut across the park,’ he said. ‘Then we’re on the east side. It’s a short way through to the Hudson River.’ Theycould then follow the river down to the bridge. The riverside boulevard was broad all the waydown to the Williamsburg Bridge and they’d only need to keep an eye out for anythingcoming at them from their right.