The time gene, p.36
The Time Gene, page 36
Roxy stood before a derelict mill house, almost three-quarters buried in ivy and undergrowth. A former spinning mill, its crumbling stone walls had become interspersed with a huge, warped pine tree whose branches jutted out of the dilapidated roof. The left sidewall had partially disintegrated, but the gable end and eaves were so drowned in gorse and shrubs it was scarcely noticeable.
The Den. He had to be there. Kayleigh had sent her a frantic text message, saying he hadn’t come home, and they were wondering whether to call the police. But Roxy knew where he had to be. It was where his dad hid his loot, way back when, when he’d worked as a part-time fence. Before he went straight. Sort of. Not even Kayleigh knew about it.
A mildewed wooden door, half-buried in thicket, was just discernible on the right sidewall by torchlight. Roxy strutted up to it. The latch was bolted; and it did not look as though it had been opened in years.
She heaved at the bolt, which eventually gave way, but the door still would not budge. She tore herself to pieces scrambling through some thorny bushes and climbing onto a ledge to reach a side door. She heaved and shoved at the bolts, but they were rusted through and melded into the wood; they would not open. Livid, she kicked and punched at the door; and finally part of it gave way, leaving a gap just wide enough to pass through.
She scanned the vaulted room with her torch as the cobwebs smacked into her face. “Liam… LIAM?”
A husky voice quivered across the air. “Rock…?”
“Liam?” A shockingly frail voice, almost threadbare. “Liam?” Lying on a rusted metal bedspread covered in rags and straw was Braemuir’s prodigal son. “Liam!” she cried in an anguished voice. “I had to see you. We can’t meet anywhere else - Mum says she’ll slit her own throat if I see you again.” She paused. “I know I’m not the person I used to be, and I know you’ve every right to hate me…but I had to see you, because…because I love you.”
Roxy swung round her torch and saw for the first time the extent of the debris that littered Liam’s adopted shelter. The floorboards, part-ripped out, were strewn with parts from old tools, piping, machinery, crushed concrete, fallen planks, sacks of rotted grain, broken glass… The mill had once had an upper storey, but the stairwell had caved in and much of the ceiling had collapsed onto the floor below. Amid such detritus, Liam sat propped up on the rusty bunk beds, his hair greyed with dust. She expected him to rant and rave as soon as he saw her, but his expression lifted, as though they were kids again. There was some resistance, as though he were doing this against his better judgement, but he clung to her as if he would never let go. Relief flooded Roxy, who’d been convinced he’d spurn her.
“How’ve you been?” she asked. Straight after, she cursed herself. It had been a stupid question.
“I’m copin’,” Liam said, eyes to the ground. “I’m ok.”
“How did you get in here?” Roxy asked. “I nearly impaled myself.”
“Easy. Through the tear in the wall at the side. Dad taught me.
Roxy rolled her eyes. “Wish I’d known about that,” she said, as she kissed on his forehead, before backing away, as though he were a fierce tom cat that might arch his back and scratch.
Soon they were chatting like old friends, not about Roxy’s mother’s suicide threats or Liam’s prison life, but about the old times. About the Braemuir football team. About Celtic. “I heard Arsenal paid the Celts a record transfer fee for Polo O’Hara,” said Liam, munching a squashed muffin Roxy had brought.
“Told you he wouldn’t stick around long,” Roxy snorted. “Dirty wee Judas.”
“You cannae blame him, Rock,” Liam reasoned. “Juventus an’ AC Milan both put in bids for him. He’s a world class player. You cannae expect him tae stay in Scotland.”
“Why is everything always about money?”
He backed away. “Is that why you’ve been torturin’ that Dundee High kid?”
A pang of guilt ricocheted through her body. But the old rage resurfaced, like lava to the caldera of a volcano. How could Liam defend him, she said, tossing her hair. Surely he cared about the ordinary working man and equality.
“I do. I’m a Communist. I’ve been studyin’ Karl Marx in the clink, eh? But brutalisin’ some wee laddie’s no’ the answer. Was it really all your idea?”
Roxanne bit her lip. “So, you’re sayin’ it’s ok that he gets better chances than me ‘cos he’s got a mum and a dad, and they can afford the Snob School?”
She exuded a feral anger that left Liam quaking. “God, Rock!” he quaked. At Polmont he had seen self-harm, drug abuse, assaults on staff, “dirty” protests, he told her. He had not supposed there was much left that could shock him, but she was like corrosive metal plunged in acid… Yet Roxy still detected a certain macabre thrill in his shocked stare.
“What has happened tae you, Rock?” He shook his head. She clutched his arms, vying for sympathy, but he would not respond.
“He’s only a Dundee High kid…”
“Hitler mighta said ‘he’s only a Jew’, Rock…”
Roxanne, forgetting his weakness, began pummelling him. Liam, languid as he was, managed to capture and restrain her. She tried first to scratch, and then bite him, before bursting into tears on his shoulder.
“You need help, Rock.”
“I know; I know,” she sobbed. “But, come on, Liam…you know you fancy me when I’m crazy.” In fact she doubted she looked that enticing, wrapped in her mother’s extra large raincoat. She cuddled up to him, but he pushed her away.
There was a long silence. He fixated on the stains on the concrete walls, as he listened to the walls pulverise and decay. Hissing sobs choked his twitching face. “Vixen…”
She clambered up onto the bunk beside him and flung her arms round him. At first, he pushed her away like an umbrella hurled into his face, but his resistance lessened as her clammy hands clung on tighter and tighter. “I’m no’ a vixen, honest. I’m different, but the old me is in here somewhere,” Roxy pleaded. She loved him…she hadn’t known until he came back, but she’d always loved him. She had thought of him all day today at school. Fousty had chucked her at break for stroking Liam’s hair. He was so cut-up about the split that he had spent lunchtime chewing Cheyenne MacFayden’s face off. That was two hours after Chey dumped Dwayne Jackson for forgetting their one-month anniversary. “I’m evil…I always have been a bit…but it’s not my fault, Liam, honestly,” Roxanne said. “They’ve put beams on me. Dunno who. Demons…the CBI…the IRA…the pigs that sent down my dad. I see flashes o’ light…I hear cameras. I want tae be nice tae people, but I just feel this anger, an’ it’s like I’m bein’ burnt from the inside out. So I hurt people.”
He leered at her, as if to say ‘oh God, not again’. “Beams are no’ real, Roxy! I kenned this guy inside who had tae go an’ see the shrink, an’ he…”
“No, no…this is different, Liam. I’m different.”
“Yeah, Rock. Big deal. You’re different. We both are. But it’s no’ devils what are spreadin’ this poison. It’s the demons in your own mind. I used to be like you, see. My mum’s boyfrien’ used to beat up me an’ Kayles up when we were weans. I tried tae fight him…I didn’t like it when he hit Kayles, see. But, no matter how hard I hit him, he was always gonna be able tae hit me harder. That’s why I always had tae win. Even long after Mum left that scum an’ we went tae live wi’ Dad an’ Kelly, I couldn’t stop myself screwin’ up. I was still fightin’ those battles way after he was out of our lives. That’s why I believed the bullshit you told me about time-travelling so we could win matches. That’s why when we were losin’ the football I had tae joyride old Spottiswood’s car. I thought it didn’t matter what we did…’cos we could go back in time an’ make it better. See you…you feel persecuted ‘cos your dad was persecuted, see; an’ you hit out at people tae defend him. But life isn’t a video game, Rock, that you play over an’ over till you get it right. Folks you hurt stay hurt, and people you kill stay dead.”
“You been studyin’ bloody Freud in the clink?”
“Aye, an’ Nietzsche.”
“Whoey?”
But Roxy did not wait to find out who Nietzsche was. Before a half-second was out she and Liam had melted into a kiss. The mill house, the Dichty and the dark bridge eddied around them in expanding circles of light. As their lips interwove, Roxy felt the darkness turn to midsummer light, the cobwebs to silk, the gorse to blossom and the hard bunk bed to a flowerbed.
By the time Roxy drifted back to the bus stop, she might have been dancing flamencos on the moon. Liam had lifted a huge weight from her. True, she had cried a lot…it had been her fault Liam went to prison, as he had only stolen the car on the assumption she could time-reverse any damage later. She was as much to blame for that old man’s death as he was. What a dumbass she’d been! But she loved the way he had forgiven her…even if she hadn’t much appreciated his likening her to a serial arsonist he’d met at Polmont who had insisted he was dead and that locusts were eating his corpse. But Liam had insisted the principle was the same. “He was abused, righ’, by his stepdad an’ five brothers. He was ‘undone’ by his family; you were ‘undone’ by the System with what happened to your dad. You’re both projectin’ corporealised monsters onto it - him wi’ his locusts an’ you wi’ your demons.” Both had rebelled against the world that had crushed him, he by burning everything, she by dreaming of changing the past. Both had sought to send society crashing down.“It’s like old Isaac Newton said: every action has an equal an’ opposite reaction.”
She wanted to cling onto Liam forever in that old mill house, until the walls rotted away and the cogs of time ceased to turn. But if she stayed out all night, her mother would know exactly who she’d been with, and God knew what she’d do when she took one of her tantrums. He had given her a terrible, inexorable hope that the strange lights she had seen these past days and the cameras she heard whirring were but the delusions of a broken mind. The last twinges of the scars left unhealed by Pandora. And the time-travelling escapades of her youth? Childhood games…deadly as it turned out…tainted by the darkness of a charred adolescence. How could they have been anything else? Time-travel was impossible. How could she have been such a fool? Roxy felt more fully human than she’d done for years, instead of a host organism to some monstrous parasite.
And then she saw him, glinting in the trees. Unmistakeable, as the moonlight pooled over the other side of the wood. The Watchman. His camera flash, his malevolent grin.
Chapter Thirty-five
Destiny
The torrid heat heightens the smell of charred meat. The sun is watery as hospital gruel, but its searing heat still intoxicates. The noxious haze from the bombs intensifies the sweltering humidity, like a black smoker billowing from the sea bed. The essence of rotting flesh rises from the river and jars on the tongue. The hospital stands crooked, barely more than a mud hut. Five, sometimes six children lie in one bed, all covered in filthy scabs. Diarrhoea, rickets and cholera are rife, and some have succumbed to the mysterious plague. Their faces are covered in boils that look like black barnacles. Their limbs are emaciated; their bellies swollen, yet the haunted expression in their eyes ails one most. A few cry piteously; but no-one answers. Their mothers are either dead or too sick to respond. Yet most of the children lie still, as though they lack the energy to exhale their last breath.
A wailing woman staggers out of the tumbledown hospital, dragging her two children. The boy, clad in filthy rags, fights tooth and nail; he kicks and bites his mother with his last vestiges of strength; whereas the girl follows placidly, doe-eyed and trusting as a lamb. Still clutching her offspring, the woman prostrates herself to pray fervently. Thereafter, with surprising force, she pushes her children down the riverbank. The boy screams and tries to flee, but his ankle is broken and he cannot move. The girl lies silently in the mud, and reaches for her mother, fearing parting from her more than death. Still muttering prayers and exhortations for mercy, the woman stumbles down the embankment. With all her might, she rams her children’s faces into the marshy bed, and kicks with her last vestige of strength to extract enough damp soil to bury them. As the boy’s cries subsides, and the little girl’s hand lets hers go, she looks up.
The woman in the riverbed stops digging and pricks up her ears. Does she hear the faint roar of gunfire? Isn’t that the weary trudge of soldiers marching through the desert, half-starved like everyone else? At first she panics. “Titov’s men are coming!” she howled. “We will be thrown into a pit!” But in the distance, she spots a torn American flag. “We are saved!” she roars, as she hysterically digs up the shallow grave. She pulls them out; gives mouth-to-mouth; slaps them. But they are limp and blue.
She watches as the Americans storm the hospital. She waits with baited breath for shouts of joy; of relief. But instead a cacophony of machine gun fire erupts, amid petrified screams…
“Noooo….ooooo!”
Clyde Naval Base, Argyll and Bute, 13th January 2048
“Damn good article that. I love Domenica Warburton…very compelling writing style. Some say she’s trash novelisty, but…”
Murdo Ironside flung the newspaper onto the floor. “How the bloody hell can you be so callous, Gordonstoun?”
“Come on, Murdo,” said Hardwin. “It’s just numbness. We can’t feel like we used to. Otherwise, how could we survive?”
But Murdo couldn’t shut down his emotions like that. “How could they…how could they?” he cried, as tears streaked down his face.
“It was an act of mercy, Murdo,” said Prometheus. “Half those children were infected with plague.”
“But the antibiotics!”
Prometheus gave him a withering look. “Where do you suppose they’re going to get streptomycin in the Bangladesh slums?” he yelled. “The world’s just been through a nuclear holocaust. Those people would all have died in agony. It was kinder this way. MacPherson called it the worst day of his life, but he had to safeguard the remaining civilians. The plague could wipe out the population in days. America had to act.”
“End justifies the means, eh?”
“Exactly,” Prometheus agreed. “It’s time you stopped living in your woke cloud cuckoo land, Murdo. Mawkishness is long dead...”
Murdo fumbled for his handkerchief. With a disconsolate sniff he realised he still had that hideous rag the busker had given him.
“I’d have thought you’d have be happy the nukes have stopped. Hiroshima Treaty’s holding up…”
“The Treaty’s a drop in the ocean,” Murdo choked. Millions are dead. And those twisted an’ misshapen newborns…”
Hardwin Hathersage patted Murdo’s shoulder. “If it weren’t for the nukes, we’d all be dead. Or speaking Russian.”
“What do I care if I speak Russian or Dolphinese? Those poor souls’ve got as much right to be alive as we do.” The faces of his companions stiffened in shock. Murdo’s words trod perilously close to treason.
“At least the Ruskis are six feet under,” said Hardwin, determined to keep the glass half-full. “Don’t count on it,” growled Murdo. “They’ll want revenge one day, mark my words. It’s always the same when a nation’s brought too low…rises like a phoenix…an’ breathes an inferno. Besides, no-one knows if Titov’s really dead. I don’t reckon the bombs finished him. He’s hidin’ out in the far north, bidin’ his time. One thing’s for sure, you an’ me’ll no’ live tae see another blue sky.”
“Look on the bright side, Murdo,” Skegness said in an upbeat tone. “You work in probably one of the safest places on the planet. Faslane won’t be bombed…because as far as the Russians are concerned, it already has been.”
Murdo slouched in a corner, inconsolable. “Not that you need nukes. Look at Glasgow an’ London. An’ Manchester was worse…”
Desolation had set in. The news Murdo had dreamt of for years he had greeted only with an apathetic shrug. Allied Forces had retrieved the Crystal of Cathbadh at the bottom of a glacier in the Verkhoyansk mountains in northern Siberia. Canute’s transtemporal hacking had borne fruit. The Russians had encrypted it of course, but Murdo was due to fly to Washington the following week with a team of Harvard mathematicians to decrypt it. Murdo knew what needed to be done. But he had long since lost faith that any human could restore the pre-war order. People simply could not travel decades back in time. How could he have thought they could? And yet, the Crystal was even more precious than they’d first thought. It was Canute who had worked out its baffling innards at their last monthly chronoduct call.
“Erebos.” The Kaironians backed away, pressing their hands to their ears as if expecting their brains to explode. “It has to be. I’m amazed that nobody guessed. Erebos are the only known substance that exists outside of time, and therefore the only entity that can reveal the future.”
The Kaironians collectively paled.
Canute grimaced. “Not to worry. In crystallised form they pose no danger. I know because I worked with them.”
Even Prometheus still looked like he’d seen a ghost. “Honestly!” Canute cried in an exasperated tone. “You’d think, after all my labours on your behalf, you would trust me by now.” He paused, and lowered his head. “I remember this. Losing eleven of your closest friends is not something you brush aside. Don’t you think that blew my mind even more than Sarajevo blew theirs? Once the Erebos crystallise, they are completely harmless. Just as sodium and chlorine are harmful in their elemental forms, but combine to form benign common salt, Erebos crystals are entirely innocuous. That Ono oddity (regrettably) did not die when he used it, did he? You could use the Crystal as a football if you fancied, but as erebos crystals are around 10 000 times harder than marble, I’d caution against headering it.”
