The Eternal War Page 11

‘That … that storm? That hurricane we … we …’

  ‘Aye.’ Liam nodded. ‘That’s the sort of thing you get when you remove something from history that shouldn’t be removed.’

  ‘You … you are talking about me, are you not?’

  ‘Aye.’

  Lincoln looked around at the field, goggle-eyed. ‘I … Are you telling me, sir, that I make this much difference to the world?’

  ‘So it seems.’

  ‘Good God!’

  ‘Liam,’ said Bob quietly.

  ‘I cannot conceive of … of …’ Lincoln continued to bluster, ‘of … of anything I might do in my life that could so alter a world as much as this!’ He looked down at his big hands. ‘What could these do that could change a world so?’

  ‘Liam,’ said Bob again, his eyes on the sky.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Sal. ‘Liam …’ Her eyes were on the same thing as Bob’s. She patted his arm insistently as a shadow fell across the field. Liam turned round and looked up.

  ‘Oh …’ was all that rolled out of his mouth.

  Lincoln managed more. ‘GOD’S TEETH!’ he boomed. ‘What in tarnation is that?’

  A gigantic copper boiler hung in the sky, slowly drifting across the fields. Perhaps three hundred, four hundred feet long. The afternoon sun glinted warmly on its copperplated side. Slung beneath it was what appeared to be a building of some sort: a confusion of pipes and chimneys, silos, ladders and gantries, round portholes and hatch-like doorways on several floors. It seemed to be held beneath the copper behemoth by four immense crane-like arms, holding the building like a mother cradling a child.

  They watched it slowly drift above them, across their field of ragged stalks to another field rolling over a hill in front of them. It moved silently, no roar of engines, just the sound of wind rustling through the gaps in the ‘building’ suspended beneath, thrumming taut cables, clinking chains, loose and swinging.

  Eventually it began to settle down to earth a quarter of a mile away from them.

  Nearing the ground, the large crane arms hissed steam from their ‘elbows’ and gently flexed, lowering the building between them to the ground. It settled on thick stilts that adjusted to the uneven tilt with the audible hiss and thud of compressed air until it was level.

  ‘Shadd-yah! Now that –’ Sal nodded – ‘that … is really, really cool.’

  The enormous airship rose slowly, its crane arms retracting to leave the building standing free in the middle of the field. After a few moments they began to see some activity. A large door opening and a wide ramp emerging, extending down to the ground. Then finally, something that looked vaguely familiar to Liam … a tractor belching steam rumbled out on caterpillar tracks and down the ramp, followed by another, and another, and finally a stream of figures.

  The building’s chimney stacks started puffing tendrils of smoke and they heard the clunk and whir of machinery starting up in the field.

  ‘It’s a portable farm! That’s what it is!’ Liam laughed. ‘A bleedin’ pick-me-up and put-me-down farm!’

  Lincoln shaded his eyes with a hand. ‘Am I to presume such a fantastic construction as this is not normal to your time?’

  ‘This is our time, Mr Lincoln,’ said Sal. ‘Just a very different version of it. Everything changed.’

  ‘Yet we did not?’ Lincoln looked confused. ‘How is that?’

  ‘It’s because none of us should be here now anyway, right?’ Liam looked at Bob.

  ‘Correct. None of you should be alive in, or be part of, 2001, therefore you are not affected by the causal change of the time wave.’

  Liam looked at the slowly ascending airship. ‘I think it might be advisable we find somewhere to hide until we know exactly what sort of a world we’re in right now. Everyone agree?’

  Heads nodded.

  Liam looked around and spotted what appeared to be a derelict barn across the far side of the already harvested field. ‘Off we go, then,’ he said.

  Sal glanced one more time at the ascending sky vessel. She noticed it was segmented and as it gracefully gathered height its segments began to stretch and spread, gradually telescoping along its length until it looked like the sleek hull of an antique submarine.

  ‘Come on, Sal!’ Liam called after her.

  She looked once more at the recently deposited building; to her eyes it looked more like a factory than a farm. And at the small figures descending the ramp, emerging into the field, disappearing into the distant crop of wheat or barley, or whatever it was. There was something peculiar about the way they moved, a shuffling inelegant gait that made them look strangely top-heavy, strangely ape-like.

  ‘Sal?’

  ‘I’m coming … I’m coming.’

  CHAPTER 26

  2001, New York

  Maddy rocked on her heels. Then, for a moment, she was actually airborne, everything on the desk in front of her hovering a bare inch for less than a heartbeat. She reached out for the corner of the desk to keep her balance as the whole archway lurched, then convulsed with the bone-shaking impact of something hard beneath them.

  Beneath?

  Showers of grit and cement dust cascaded down from the roof, along with dozens of bricks, clattering to the floor and exploding in clouds of redbrick powder.

  ‘Oh my God … was that an earthquake?’

  The computer monitors and the archway’s lights flickered out in unison and from the back room Maddy heard the deafening crash of what sounded like a significant chunk of the archway roof collapsing in.

  In the dark she winced at the sound of damage and chaos going on around her, wondering if the entire Williamsburg Bridge was going to come crumbling down on her like a house of cards.

  The rumbling outside that had preceded the ‘quake’ faded away, and finally it was quiet save for the patter of grit still trickling down from the loosened bricks above them.

  ‘Becks? You OK?’

  ‘Affirmative,’ her voice came back out of the darkness.

  Maddy fumbled with her hands along the desk, feeling empty soda cans and pens and pads … finally finding her inhaler. She took a pull on it and it rattled and wheezed, giving up its medication and easing the tightness of her throat.

  ‘My God … I thought that was a wave.’

  ‘I believe it was,’ replied Becks. Her voice was further away now. On the other side of the arch.

  Maddy’s legs bumped gently against one of the office chairs, she sat down in it gratefully. ‘It’s never felt like that before, though.’

  She could hear Becks fiddling with something. ‘There is no power feed to the shutter motor.’

  Maddy looked around the pitch black. She couldn’t even see any standby-mode LEDs. No power at all. The generator in the back room should have fired up by now. She should have heard that rhythmic thudding already. Instead, nothing.

  ‘Do you wish for me to open the shutter?’ asked Becks.

  Her heart flipped a beat at the thought of checking the state of the world outside. Given that moment of freefall and the horrendous crash a second later, she wasn’t sure what to expect out there. Still, sitting here in the dark and clutching her inhaler wasn’t going to achieve much.

  ‘Yes. Go on, then.’

  She heard the handle being cranked and the clack of chains, then after a few seconds her dark-adjusted eyes picked out a faint ribbon of light along the bottom. As it widened and brightened, a pall of muted daylight spread across into the archway and her heart sank as she saw their floor littered with rubble and shattered brick. A deep crack ran across it – a palm’s width at its widest, exposing old pipes and dusty stress cables.

  She suspected the whole archway, the bridge’s entire support stanchion was structurally unstable. Perhaps even so damaged that if they ever got out of this fix and returned to normality they might need to find a new home.

  The thought unnerved her more than anything. She realized she’d grown accustomed to this place. It was the anchor, this grubby dungeon, when all
around her was a swirling sea of chaos; it was the one constant. In all the crises they’d been through together thus far, there’d always been here – this archway, this desk, this chair – in which to hide, lick their wounds and ponder a solution.

  Maddy got up and picked her way across the floor towards the widening ribbon of light. Where the backstreet was outside, she could make out fallen brickwork, rubble, weeds poking through.

  It reminded her of Kramer’s apocalypse. Maybe history had somehow managed to double back on that other alternate world, a nightmare landscape of irradiated ruins and those pitiful mutated creatures who’d once been human.

  She stood beside Becks.

  ‘That’s high enough,’ she whispered. If there were unspeakable horrors outside ready to attack them, then she didn’t want the shutter door wide open.

  She chewed her lip anxiously. ‘I’m not sure I wanna see this one.’

  Becks said nothing. Her eyes grey, non-committal, impassive. Waiting for Maddy to issue her orders.

  ‘OK … no point me being all girly, right?’ she mumbled before ducking down, squeezing under the shutter and emerging outside. Still squatting on her haunches, she got her first glimpse.

  ‘Oh … sweet Jesus …’

  Becks stooped down low and joined her outside. Together they slowly stood up to get a better view of the world around them.

  New York was barely recognizable. The Williamsburg Bridge above them ended in a twisted mass of cables, railway lines and fragmented road tarmac that angled down into the East River. It looked like it was a casualty of war from some time ago.

  They were perched at an awkward angle at the bottom of a large shallow crater. She took a dozen tentative steps up the side and looked out over the uneven lip.

  Halfway across the East River she could see the stumps of the bridge’s midway support stanchions. On the far side, swathed in a thin mist, Manhattan island looked like a moonscape of grey rubble, punctuated with the barely standing skeletons of bombed-out buildings, like a dozen hands’ worth of broken fingers pointing accusingly at the sky.

  A long time ago, a lifetime ago it seemed now, Maddy used to play a computer game called Call of Duty, a Second World War shooter. One of the better multiplayer levels had been set amid the bombed-out ruins of Stalingrad, a twisting maze of gutted, half-collapsed buildings, craters, blown-open cellars. What she was staring at now was pretty much just that.

  She turned to look at the state of things on their side of the river. Brooklyn was almost equally unrecognizable. Although the devastation seemed one degree less total on this side of the river, all the buildings were gutted skeletons – shattered, artillery- or bomb-damaged and blackened with soot. There were, however, some almost complete frames of buildings standing still. A factory building to their right, across a pockmarked and cratered quay, had no roof, but at least it still had four complete walls lined with empty window frames, scarred, splintered and gouged by shrapnel and gunfire.

  ‘It’s a war zone,’ said Maddy.

  Becks joined her and nodded. ‘Affirmative. There is extensive evidence of prolonged war.’

  Maddy looked at her. ‘No kidding.’

  ‘Look!’ said Becks, pointing up at the sky.

  Maddy followed her finger and saw through a haze of fog that seemed to fill the whole sky like a low-hanging autumn mist, the ghostly outline of several large shapes that moved slowly and purposefully together like a pod of whales.

  ‘What the hell are those?’

  ‘Aircraft?’

  ‘Too slow for airplanes,’ said Maddy. ‘And too large. They look like balloons or Zeppelins of some kind.’

  They watched the faint shapes manoeuvre, their profiles long and nautically slender, topped by an irregular outline of stacked protrusions that made them look eerily like battleships.

  Then through the haze Maddy caught a strobing flicker of light on the ground. A distant flash through the haze that momentarily revealed the broken-teeth outlines of far, far away bomb-damaged buildings. A moment later they heard the faint percussive thump of explosions.

  ‘Sounds like some place is being bombed,’ whispered Maddy.

  ‘It is a war that is still in progress,’ said Becks.

  Maddy looked across the river at the ruins of Manhattan. The hazy air over there was clearing momentarily and she was able to see a little more detail. She saw movement. The glint of metal, something that looked like a gun turret slowly rotating on an artillery platform. In among all the chaos of gutted skyscrapers, knotted and rusting support cables, sagging floors and slopes of rubble and dust she thought she detected the regular, ordered geometry of pillboxes and bunkers.

  She turned her back on the river and Manhattan to look north-east towards Brooklyn and Queens, or what was left of it. Across warehouses with collapsed roofs, and twisted industrial cranes no good to anyone now, low apartment blocks pockmarked and deserted, she thought she also saw the telltale signs of an entrenched front line.

  ‘Great,’ she muttered. ‘Just great.’

  ‘What is it, Madelaine?’

  She turned to gesture at their archway – little more than a crumbling mound of red bricks somehow still managing to hold together and not collapse in on themselves.

  ‘That’s a front line over the river … and on this side, over there, that looks like another front line. Which of course makes where we’re standing … no-man’s land.’

  Their pitiful-looking archway was half buried at the bottom of this large crater. It looked like it was an old crater, from an older war. It was bisected by a shallow trough lined with sandbags in places, and almost completely filled in in other places. Abandoned trench works. Abandoned some time ago by the look of them … an old battle line left to slowly fill itself in.

  She wondered who the soldiers hunkered down amid the rubble of Manhattan were. She turned to look at the signs of defence structures amid the shattered industrial ruins of Brooklyn and wondered who was dug in there. Not that it mattered.

  We don’t want to be stuck here.

  She glanced back at the archway, looking like a pile of bricks salvaged, recycled, from some old tenement block pulled down to be replaced with something else; a mound of broken masonry at the edge of a building site. She supposed back inside – while it was still managing to hold itself up – the news wasn’t going to be any better. Sensitive equipment, computers, motherboards … how any of that could have survived that impact …

  ‘We’d better go back inside and see if anything’s working,’ she said eventually.

  CHAPTER 27

  2001, New York

  Colonel William Devereau could feel the vibrations of the distant bombing raid through the floor. It felt like they were giving the front line further north, up near Queens, a pounding. They liked to do that every few days. A reminder that they had air superiority and could deliver destruction on any stretch of the front line that they chose.

  Not that it achieved a whole great deal.

  Their carpet bombing would create another hundred new craters, shift rubble around from one place to another and maybe inflict a few dozen casualties, but that was about the size of it. All the way along the New York sector, they were dug in deep as ticks. The damage was psychological if anything.

  Devereau pulled out a crumpled packet of cigarettes: Gitanes, French made. They were as bitter as bile, but far better than the American-made lung-shredders. He lit up, took a pull and hacked a gobful of thick phlegm on to the floor. He might have bothered to quit smoking except for the fact that, statistically speaking, a sniper’s bullet or a sky-navy bomb would probably get him first anyway.

  Quicker than cancer.

  He took this morning’s high-command communiqué and swiped open the sealed envelope with the tip of his bayonet. His French was just about passable. He could read it even if he struggled to speak it. A page of telegraphed pronouncements … the usual rubbish. The war was going well, the Sheridan-DeGrise Line, running from the Atlantic, w
est across America, was holding true. The troops were to be congratulated and to be told keep up the good work.

  Devereau balled up the communiqué and tossed it on to his small desk. Few of the troops spoke a word of French anyway; he could just as well tell them anything he wanted. French was the language of high echelons of command. The Union’s generals were mostly imported. Most of them well-connected, Paris-based sons of billionaires who fancied carving out a few years of military glory for themselves before settling down to a cosy life back in mainland Europe.

  The troops, on the other hand, the poor wretches cowering in their bunkers right now and hoping today’s bombing raid wasn’t going to drift further south, were all local boys. Lads from Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York State, Ohio. Sons of soldiers, grandsons of soldiers who’d held the line here for the Union for the last hundred and thirty-odd years.

  He laughed dryly at that. Once upon a time it was the Union of Northern American States. But not any more. The ‘Union’ by name, perhaps, but no longer run by American generals and presidents.

  He sighed. Long ago he’d given up trying to explain to the lads under his command that the French and their other European allies weren’t over here bank-rolling this war for them, for their dream of a united nation of free men. They were doing it for all their own reasons. Political reasons, complicated reasons, that were hard to explain to young men who could barely read and write.

  Anyway, careless talk like that about their French benefactors could end up with him smoking one of these Gitanes in front of a hastily assembled firing squad.

  Ah well, do your duty, come what may. Fais ce que dois, advienne que pourra.

  On the wall of his small bunker room, damp concrete sweated in patches. Among the patches hung an old sepia photograph in a wooden frame. A collector’s item now.

  Devereau stood in front of it and studied the row of generals in camp chairs smiling for the photographer as they held their ceremonial sabres to one side. Generals from the old, old times, the very first period of the civil war. Generals, all of them proud sons of America: Meade, Sherman, Grant, Hancock, thick whiskers and proud smiles beneath their soft felt hats.