Simon Clark - The Fall

Carswell began to unfold the sheets of paper. As he smoothed them down onto the tabletop he told them what they needed to do.

Carswell said, ‘Today is Tuesday. My guess is that the next time the Bluebeards strike will be at dawn, probably either Friday morning or Saturday at the latest.’

‘So?’

‘So, my dear Mr Baker, I suggest we should be ready to attack them the moment they exit the time gate – which, Rolle informs me, is down by the river.’

‘Attack the Bluebeards? Are you serious?’

‘Absolutely serious,’ Carswell said crisply. ‘The best form of defence is attack.’

‘But how? We’ve a town full of exhausted civilians, not a garrison full of crack marines.’

‘But you’ll have surprise on your side. Always a worthy ally. As you say, the Bluebeards will emerge from their lair expecting no opposition from a demoralised and beaten population with no weapons worth speaking of. What they will find – to their amazement – is an effective, well-armed fighting force with more than a few surprises up its sleeve.’

‘Hell, Carswell. In the past you’ve accused me of coming up with some fanciful ideas. Now this really takes the biscuit.’

‘Hear me out, Mr Baker.’ Carswell tapped a sheet of paper. ‘These are the blueprints of your war machines. If you’re lucky, you have around 72 hours – at the most – to build them.’

‘What on Earth are they?’ Jud angled his head. ‘That’s a drawing of the tour bus, isn’t it?’

‘Spot on, Mr Campbell. And it shows just how you’re going to turn it from a vehicle designed to carry trippers about the countryside into a rolling fortress on wheels.’

‘A rolling fortress?’ Sam looked at Jud, who worriedly nipped his bottom lip between finger and thumb. ‘You mean something like a tank?’

‘Well, perhaps something more like a battleship – only one that moves on land rather than water.’

Sam glanced at Jud again. ‘Jud, do you think it’ll work?’

Jud stared back down at the plans, his lip still pinched between finger and thumb. After a while he looked up at Sam and said in a small voice, ‘It’s going to have to, isn’t it?’

Tuesday night, 21 stDecember 1865

Countdown commenced at nine o’clock that Tuesday night.

Carswell had brought the mantelpiece clock from the farmhouse and stood it on a shelf in the barn where everyone could see it. Then in firm, bold letters on the wall above the clock he chalked:

Through the open doors of the barn Sam could see the falling snow. Beyond that the fields lay in darkness. A darkness that was so deep and dense it was nearly tangible.

And for all anyone knows , Sam thought bleakly, those barbarians might be moving this way again. To finish looting the town. And to clear out the outlying houses they missed on their first raid. Houses like this one.

Sam looked back at Carswell, who was striding round in his iridescent red waistcoat barking orders. In the cold air of the barn his breath came out in huge bursts of white vapour.

First, he ordered that as many oil lamps as possible should be brought into the barn. ‘This is where we will work night and day,’ he told them as the lamps were lit, filling the great void of the barn with a golden light. ‘This is where we’ll eat; this will be home until the conversion work is finished.’

Most of the people there were men and women who’d made the first time-jump back from 1999. Even so, they’d started to go native after living and working in Casterton for the last seven months of 1865. They looked at the cars, the ice-cream van, the tour bus, with surprised expressions, as if seeing them for the first time. Many were still bewildered by the plan outlined by Carswell. And there were more than a few objections.

A grey-haired man held up his hand. ‘Why can’t we just get out of town until all this is over?’

Carswell sighed, irritated by what he saw as flagrant stupidity. ‘Do I have to explain all over again? The roads are now blocked. We are marooned here as effectively as if we’d been washed up on a desert island.’

A woman shook her head. ‘But how can we attack these barbarians? From what we’ve heard, there were thousands of them.’

‘Probably no more than two thousand, maximum.’

‘But you were saying that we’d probably only have about two or three hundred people at most to fight them. That’s suicide.’

Sam saw Carswell’s hands clench as he fought down the anger growing inside of him. ‘Dear lady. In 480 BC, in Greece, a force of four hundred or so Spartan warriors successfully held back the entire Persian army of several hundred thousand men.’

‘Don’t patronise me, Mr Carswell.’ The woman had the bearing of a schoolteacher. ‘At Thermopylae the Spartans delayed the Persian invasion of Greece by several days. However, those Spartans were highly-trained fighting men, and even so they died to a man. So how in heaven’s name do you suppose a few hundred townsfolk from Casterton are going to wipe out all those barbarians when they come marching into town?’

‘I don’t suppose for a moment we will kill them all.’

‘Why on Earth sacrifice our own people in what must be a futile endeavour, then?’

‘Because,’ Carswell said, ‘my way is your only hope of survival. Also, I intend to employ the same strategy as the Spartans did at Thermopylae. You’ve no doubt seen the Hollywood version of this historical event? So you’ll recall the Spartans didn’t meet their enemy on open ground. They held them at a narrow pass between a cliff face and the sea where the ground was only a few yards wide. This meant the Persians couldn’t deploy their cavalry and they could send forward only a few hundred of their troops at a time – because space was so restricted. That’s why we’ll launch our attack between the cliffs and the river.’

It was Jud who raised his hand this time. ‘Just how do we know they’ll come through the pass down by the river?’

‘Oh, they will. Rolle has assured me of that. Because that’s where the time-gate that they have to use to reach this year 1865 lies.’

‘But if he’s wrong that means we will—’

‘Then we must rely on the hope that he won’t be wrong, Mr Campbell. Now, I must tell you we are wasting valuable time. We should have begun work on these vehicles an hour ago.’

‘But what gives you the right to be in charge?’ Sam asked. ‘We haven’t appointed you as our leader.’

‘No, but that’s part of the deal. This is my plan; therefore I’m in charge.’

‘But who made the deal?’

‘I did.’

Everyone turned to see the man who stood in the barn doorway. Snow speckled his hair and face white. His eyes blazed as bright as before.

‘Rolle?’

Rolle walked into the barn, looking round at the vehicles. His eyes grew wide.

‘Rolle, is it true? You brought Carswell here?’

Rolle nodded so sharply that snowflakes dropped from his beard. ‘It is true. There are no other options now. In the past I have fought the plague with penicillin. Now the Bluebeards are the plague. We must fight them with every weapon at our disposal. All I can do is beg all of you to follow Mr Carswell. Do everything he asks, and perhaps with God’s love we will come through the inferno unharmed.’

These were the most lucid words Sam had heard from Rolle. He watched as the man went to the bus and ran his fingers abstractedly over the metal sides. Already he seemed to be slipping into that interior dream-world of his. He hummed to himself while continuing to run his fingers over the metalwork as if he was drawing pictures only he could see.