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  ‘But how much will we need?’

  The truth was he didn’t know. He’d never used the generator, never needed to so far. Last time it had been checked out it had chugged away quite happily for a few minutes. If he knew something about diesel generators, if he was a mechanic, he could have probably made an educated guess as to how much fuel they were going to need.

  Thing was… what he did know was that the time-displacement machinery was going to need to charge itself up before they could use it. Since the power had been cut for quite a few hours now the charge would be flat. It was probably going to need the generator running a dozen, maybe twenty-four hours before they’d be able to do anything. He had no idea at all how much fuel they needed for that. Probably quite a lot.

  The girls were looking at him, hoping he had an answer.

  Come on… think. How much will we need?

  That depended on what the plan of action was. As it stood, they needed to transmit a message through time to Bob to arrange a new return window. Where and when they opened the window were factors that would decide just how much of a charge the displacement machinery needed.

  And even if they did manage to get Liam and Bob back they’d need enough energy to send them back to the correct time and place to try to fix history.

  There were too many variables for Foster to work out precisely how much fuel they needed.

  ‘Foster? How much do we need?’ asked Maddy again.

  ‘As much as we can carry,’ he replied. And if that wasn’t enough, they would have to come back down here and get some more. A prospect he wasn’t too happy about, and the girls most certainly wouldn’t be.

  He looked around. There were half a dozen jerry cans further along the bottom shelf. If they emptied those out and filled them up with diesel, then between them they’d be carrying twelve gallons of fuel.

  Enough?

  It would have to be.

  ‘See those jerry cans?’ he said, pointing towards them. ‘We’re going to fill them all up. That’ll give us twelve gallons.’

  ‘That going to be enough?’

  Maybe. I hope so.

  ‘Foster?’

  ‘Sure,’ he replied. ‘That’ll do us fine.’

  Maddy nodded, satisfied for the moment with his answer.

  ‘The next thing we’re going to have to figure out, though,’ he added, ‘is how we’re going to carry those jerry cans back home. Filled, they’re going to be very heavy. We’ll have to take them between us, one at a time. That’s six journeys.’

  Sal turned to them both. ‘Hang on, I’ve got an idea.’

  They emerged up the stairs from the subway station. Between them they lifted the pram laden with sloshing cans of fuel up off the last few steps and on to the rubble-strewn pavement. The pram’s large old-fashioned spoked wheels coped far better with the rubble and debris than some shopping trolley with tiny little castor wheels would have.

  It was getting dark. Foster had intended for them to be back at base safe and sound before too much of the pallid grey daylight had gone from the sky. But things had taken them longer than expected.

  Never mind. They were above ground now, and even though dusk was settling across the lifeless city, the three of them felt happier out in the open than they had down below. They eased the pram through the cluttered street, feeling those eyes upon their backs… watching and waiting.

  ‘We’ll be back home soon,’ said Foster quietly.

  Sal nodded. It wasn’t too far now. Just down East 14th Street, a right on to 4th Avenue all the way down to Delancey Street, then left over the bridge and home.

  Maddy grinned anxiously.

  ‘Just takin’ the little ol’ baby out for a stroll down the avenue,’ she muttered with a shaky sing-song tone. ‘Uh-huh… Just minding our business and heading home. Oh yes indeedy.’ Her eyes darted from one dark window to another.

  ‘How about we do those things quietly?’ said Foster.

  Maddy giggled, then shut up.

  Nerves.

  The wheels rattled noisily over a scattering of rubble.

  ‘I reckon we’re being watched anyway, Foster,’ she replied quietly. ‘Might as well make ’em think we’re not scared.’

  Foster nodded. Maybe she’s got a point.

  ‘Well, a good day’s work, I think,’ he announced loudly. ‘I got a feeling that the worst of this is over.’

  Sal looked up at him. ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘Sure. We’ll get this lot back. I’ll crank up the generator, get things charging up. We’ll have a nice hot cup of coffee whilst we wait. How does that sound?’

  ‘Wonderful,’ she replied.

  ‘How long will it take until we can try bringing them back?’ asked Maddy.

  Foster made a show of shrugging casually. His eyes, though, were on the lengthening evening shadows on either side of the street. ‘I’d say about twenty-four hours until we can actually try opening up a portal.’

  ‘Twenty-four hours!’ Maddy’s voice bounced off the nearest walls and rippled off down the deserted ruins of East 14th Street.

  ‘But –’ he smiled – ‘the good news is that we should be able to transmit a message through to the support unit and Liam much sooner.’

  ‘Bob,’ said Sal. ‘That’s what we agreed to call him.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry… Bob.’

  ‘So, how does that transmitting-messages-through-time thing work exactly?’

  ‘I’m no physicist, Madelaine, so don’t start throwing questions at me. But the explanation I was given is that it’s all to do with tachyon particles. They’re particles of matter that can travel faster than light and thus are able to travel through time. If we aim them at roughly where we expect Liam and Bob to be, then Bob’s on-board hardware will detect them and decode the message.’

  ‘But they can’t send a message back to us?’

  Foster shook his head. ‘No. The particles can only travel back through time, not forward.’ He snapped his torch on, throwing a cone of light down the darkening street. ‘We know they’re somewhere around Washington, so we’ll aim the tachyon array in that general direction.’

  ‘It doesn’t need to be that precise, then,’ said Sal, ‘you know, aiming the signal?’

  ‘Well, the more precisely you can aim the particles, the fewer particles you need to send, which means you need less energy. If we knew exactly where they were standing, it would take a lot less energy. So, if we keep the message nice and short and spread the beam wide… it amounts to just about the same power burn.’

  Maddy nodded. ‘I think I get it. It’d cost the same energy if we had a longer message but used a narrower beam.’

  ‘You got it.’

  They walked in silence for a little while, accompanied only by the sloshing of the jerry cans in the pram and the clatter of its wheels over the rubble-strewn pavement.

  ‘I hope Liam’s all right,’ said Sal. ‘I know it’s been only a few days since he went back, but it feels like he’s been gone for ages.’

  ‘He has… from his point of view nearly six months has passed.’

  She frowned. ‘That’s just so weird.’

  They walked in silence for a while as she struggled with the idea that Liam’s experience of this crisis had stretched over nearly half a year. ‘So… so how long have you been a TimeRider?’ asked Sal. ‘You’re pretty old, so I guess you must have been doing it for a while?’

  ‘Long enough, Sal,’ he replied, ‘long enough.’

  ‘Does it all make sense to you, yet?’

  Foster shook his head and snorted dismissively. ‘Does it heck. It still messes with my mind.’

  CHAPTER 59

  1957, Prison Camp 79, New Jersey

  Liam was exhausted. Barely an hour into the morning shift digging the ditch alongside the camp’s wire perimeter and he felt drained, barely able to lift his spade. Nearly six months of poor food, little more than a starvation diet, had left him feeling weak and unable to sustain
any sort of physical exertion for long.

  He leaned on the spade, trying to catch his breath, giving his aching muscles a moment to recover. Sweat rolled down the small of his back, soaking his shirt. Clouds of his hot breath puffed out into the crisp winter air in front of him.

  ‘You better not let Kohl see you,’ whispered Wallace in the ditch beside him.

  Kohl was one of the more ruthless guards. Last week he’d pulled a man from the defensive ditches being dug around the camp and beaten him repeatedly with the butt of his pulse carbine for stopping and taking a rest. News was the man had died later on from his injuries.

  It was from one of the guards that Liam had learned why they were digging these defensive ditches around the wire-fence perimeter. There’d been some raids, successful raids, by a small band of resistance fighters. Several camps had been overrun, the prisoners freed and most of the soldiers who’d been guarding them killed. There was a rumour spreading among the guards that these fighters were being led by some demonic entity. There were varying descriptions of this thing; some of the guards who’d survived described a giant, eight or nine feet tall, with the horns of a devil protruding from its head. Another eye-witness described this demon as being made of iron, yet able to move at a terrifying speed with the agility of a tiger.

  They even had a nickname for this thing.

  Der Eisenmann. The Iron Man.

  One of the guards further down the line spotted Liam resting on his spade and barked a shrill order at him.

  ‘Weiterarbeiten, Du Amerikanischer Haufen Scheiβe!’

  He started digging again, relieved that it hadn’t been Kohl.

  ‘O’Connor, you’re going to get yourself killed if they see you slacking like that again,’ hissed Wallace.

  He’s right.

  The rumours of Der Eisenmann had put these soldiers on edge. Liam could see fear in their eyes as they scanned the distant treeline, unhappy with being outside the wire fence of the camp.

  The Iron Man.

  So much time had passed in here that Liam had almost begun to believe his short time as a TimeRider had just been a figment of his imagination. That time travel was just a fairytale… perhaps his life even, his childhood in Ireland, his working a passage on the Titanic; all those things had been some dream. And in fact this dreary camp, his fellow starving prisoners in their grey rags, the long low wooden huts – that was his real world. His real life.

  But then he’d heard those rumours about Der Eisenmann. A desperate hope had surfaced, a long-discarded possibility, that Bob was behind this Iron Man story somehow. He hated himself for allowing that hope to momentarily flicker to life. Common sense tried telling him that this Iron Man nonsense was nothing more than the superstitious prattle of spooked soldiers completely unused to being on the losing side of any kind of a fight.

  You’re here for good, Liam. Now, just you bloody well get used to it.

  It was hard, though. Hard not to hope that one day, totally without warning, a shimmering sphere might suddenly pop up beside him, and Foster and Bob and the girls would appear and take him back.

  Stop it! No one’s coming for you now. It’s been nearly six months. No one is coming.

  Five months and three weeks. A hundred and seventy-five days. He knew exactly how long now… One of the prisoners worked as a cleaner in the kommandant’s office and had spotted a calendar on his desk. The prisoners kept track of time – marked the endless, identical days passed inside here – through him.

  ‘You all right there?’ whispered Wallace. ‘You mustn’t give up hope, kid. You give up… you die.’

  He was right. It was the thin sliver of hope that came in the form of whispered rumours, overheard conversations between guards, that was keeping them going. Keeping them alive.

  Liam turned to Wallace and gave him a thin, weary smile. ‘I’m all right.’

  ‘You know, lad… things will get better,’ he replied quietly. His thick, dark beard parted with a smile. ‘The American people won’t stand for this. They’ll fight back. I know they will.’

  Liam wondered about that. From what he’d heard, the camps were filled with those people who might have organized or led some sort of a resistance movement: army officers, civic leaders, congressmen, lawyers, teachers, college professors, newspaper editors. The rest… those who’d been spared imprisonment and left to continue their lives so long as they posed no threat to their new masters, were never going to risk their lives, their family’s lives, as long as some semblance of normal life remained for them.

  Liam could see this Führer’s plan with stark clarity – lock up all the potential trouble-makers and either starve them or work them to death. Either way they were never going to see the outside world again. Meanwhile, the rest of the population would get used to the new regime, get used to obeying their new masters, until finally they’d forgotten what it was like to be free. Just as long as their new ruler – their Führer – continued to ensure there was food and water and electricity. What was it he heard someone muttering last night in their dormitory hut?

  ‘… Long as them Krauties keep the trams runnin’, the shops well stocked, the cinemas playing those cowboy movies, the Major League baseball play-offs on schedule and you can still get yer long-boy hot dog covered in mustard an’ ketchup from the vendors ’tween innings, people’ll be content enough to let things go on as they are. They’ll forget all about us in here…’

  Those on the outside might resent being lorded-over, but as long as things were kept ticking over, kept comfortable enough, they were never going to rise up.

  We’re stuck in here… forever.

  WHUMP!

  A geyser of muddy soil erupted from the ground a couple of yards away and sprayed down on him.

  ‘Uh?’

  CHAPTER 60

  1957, Prison Camp 79, New Jersey

  Liam felt it rather than heard it.

  Another whump nearby that punched his chest softly.

  A geyser of snow and soil was tossed into the air a dozen yards from him. Then another one further away. And another.

  ‘Mortar shells coming in!’ shouted somebody in the trench.

  From the treeline across the field he saw flashes of light amid the undergrowth and moments later heard the distant percussive rattle of gunfire.

  The guards reacted swiftly, dropping down into the ditch alongside the prisoners and returning fire on the treeline. An officer quickly issued orders to several of his men to escort the prisoners back inside on the double.

  They barked hasty orders at the prisoners, shooing them along with their carbines. ‘Prisoners must go inside, now!’ one of them shouted. ‘Move… MOVE! Schnell!’

  Liam did as he was told, keeping his head low as he ran along the ditch towards the open gates at the front of the camp. Div0ts of soil spat into the air just above his head as shots landed home from across the field.

  Another half a dozen whumps landed either side of the ditch, showering them with clumps of wet soil. A prisoner in a tattered olive-green marine uniform just in front of Wallace shouted out: ‘Those are US army mortar shells!’

  The guards bellowed shrilly at them to move faster and Liam soon found himself climbing up out of the ditch and running into the compound through the open gates, herded in by half a dozen more soldiers.

  Wallace, behind him, slapped his shoulder, grinning and gasping at the same time. ‘What did I tell you, kid?’

  The guards standing nearby had their eyes on the increasingly intensive exchange of gunfire going on in the field and warily on the jubilant prisoners. Liam could see they were nervous – as much worried about the growing jubilation among the prisoners inside the camp as they were about the attackers in the treeline.

  ‘Yeah!’ yelled Wallace triumphantly at them. ‘They’re coming for you, you scumbags!’

  Several of them turned towards him, eyes darting from Wallace to the growing crowd of prisoners emerging from their huts into the courtyard to see what was g
oing on.

  ‘Come on!’ Wallace cheered on the distant attackers. ‘Come get these Krauties!’

  Liam grabbed his arm. ‘Wallace, hey, keep it down!’

  A mortar shell landed amid several of the guards in the ditch outside, blowing them to bloody shreds. Wallace and several other prisoners cheered noisily, punching the air with glee.

  The camp kommandant emerged from his hut at a trot, flanked by a dozen more guards. There was a brief, harried conversation barked over the increasing noise of battle. He gestured towards the growing crowd of jeering prisoners. The guards standing around them nodded at his orders and slowly raised their guns.

  Liam realized by the calm, ruthless expression on the kommandant’s face that he’d just given the order for them all to be executed on the spot. None of the other prisoners seemed to have noticed, their eyes on the gunfight across the field outside.

  I have to run… run now!

  Liam began to shoulder his way back through the jeering, defiant prisoners, as the guards silently raised their pulse carbines.

  Jay-zus Christ.

  The rattle of guns being cocked to fire alerted the rest of the prisoners, their eyes darting back to the line of guards. Before they could react, the kommandant barked a single word. ‘Feuer!’

  The guards opened fire.

  Suddenly the air about Liam was alive with the hum of passing bullets, the hard thud of rounds impacting bodies, the muffled gasps of those falling and dying, the screams of the wounded and terrified.

  He stumbled back through the panicking crowd, expecting at any second to feel a hard, sharp blow between his shoulders, punching the air from his lungs and throwing him down on to the compacted snow and muddy slush.

  The opening volley of shots came to a rattling conclusion as ammo clips emptied and the guards began to reload. In the pause the air was filled with moaning and crying and wailing, and the nearing sounds of fighting across the field.

  Liam realized he wasn’t running. He was on his knees in the mud surrounded by bodies twitching and flailing.