The day would continue to be lovely for another thirteen minutes. She sighed sadly. Then itwould turn into the nightmare of nine-eleven. She entered the busy nexus of Times Square andtook a seat on a bench — her regular bench — beside a litter bin. She watched thestop-start traffic at a busy intersection and the pavements filled with people on their way towork: men already hot with their jackets over one arm and their ties loosened, women in smartsummer blouses and light linen trouser suits.
The large green face of Shrek, looking equally bemused and irritated by Donkey, hung abovethe square — as always. She studied the movie billboard and the others dotted around,beginning to find them all very familiar, like bedroom posters long past their time to betaken down and replaced with something else.
A homeless man approached the bench — as he always did at 8.37 a.m. — pushing ashopping trolley in front of him, piled high with cardboard boxes and an old tarpaulin. Hesmiled politely at her — as he always did — before rummaging through the litterbin and finding a half-eaten sausage McMuffin.
He sat down beside her, his lined and pockmarked face creased with quitepossibly the last smile New York would see today and opened his mouth to say the same thing healways said.
‘Hey, lucky me… it’s still warm!’ He eagerly tucked into his rescuedsandwich.
Sal politely returned his smile.
‘I’m glad,’ she said. And she genuinely was. She was familiar enough withthe next few hours to know this was the last fleeting moment of contentment left in the day, ahomeless tramp, chewing gratefully on a discarded sausage in a bun.
She looked up at the skyline, seeing in the distance the very tops of the two World TradeCenter towers, glistening like polished silver in the morning light. Proud structures thatconfidently seemed to reach up to the blue sky and actually touch it. And inside… somany thousands of people, sitting down to start a regular day at work, opening their emailin-boxes, peeling the lid off their Starbucks coffee, unwrapping their salt-beef and mustardbagels.
The tramp finished his breakfast and sighed with contentment.
He turned to Sal and sucked in his breath to say what he always said at this time.‘Gonna be a helluva day, ain’t it?’
‘Yes.’ She nodded. ‘It is.’
The tramp got up off the bench and pushed his trolley away from her, whistling cheerfully ashe went.
Sal hated this final countdown. Beginning with the distant drone of an engine in the sky andending with cries of disbelief from the pedestrians around her, and a moment later the boomand rumble of the plane’s impact.
She’d sat through this at least a dozen times now. And God knows how many more timesshe’d have to — hundreds? Thousands? Sal wondered if it wouldget any easier for her, counting down those last few seconds.
She closed her eyes. Foster probably wouldn’t approve of that if he knew, but therewere only so many times she could bring herself to watch.
She could hear the plane now.
And then she felt it: a dizzying sense of losing balance, of falling, as if just for a momentthe ground beneath her had been whipped away.
She opened her eyes, looked up… and gasped at what she saw.
Maddy studied the screens before her, steaming mug of coffee in hand — blackcoffee because
She checked the clock on the computer. It was 8.45 a.m.
It was due.
The clock display now flickered to indicate 8.46 a.m.
‘Hmm,’ she grunted. She looked around for the others. Liam was drowsily slumpedon his cot, reading a
‘Er…’ was the best Maddy could come up with right now.
Sal stared dumbstruck at a very different world around her. Shrek and Donkey weregone, so were the posters for
But, most importantly, the Twin Towers were gone and in their place, notquite so high but easily as grand, stood a giant marble column from which an enormous redpennant proudly flapped.
Her eyes dropped to street level. It looked so much less chaotic: fewer billboards adornedthe sides of buildings; the shopfronts looked somehow tidier, more reserved, more upmarket;the streets were far less clogged with vehicles, which themselves looked strangelyold-fashioned, reminding her of some of the odd-looking automobiles she had once seen in atransport museum.
The pedestrians, many more of them than there were a few moments ago, eyed her tatty clothescuriously. She looked down and realized her hoodie with
She turned to look for the homeless man who’d been sitting on the bench beside her, buthe was gone, along with his supermarket trolley. Feeling dozens of curious eyes begin to fixon her, she got up off the bench and quickly hurried across the busy pavement to the mouth ofa quiet backstreet. She pulled out her mobile and dialled the field office.
The display showed two words.
Confused for a moment, she quickly realized she could see no one else talking into a mobilephone either. In fact, she could see no one even holding one, nor any adverts for top-up cardsor service providers or deals with free texts, nor stalls selling novelty phone covers…
?
Maddy looked up at Foster.
‘The plane impact just
Foster, looking bleary-eyed from being woken, and far too pale for her liking, noddedthoughtfully over her shoulder. ‘We’re in trouble… this looks like a bigshift,’ he said quietly. ‘Normally they come in waves, subtle ones at first thatbring very minor changes, then the bigger ones come later if events up the timelinearen’t corrected.’
One computer screen still seemed to be functioning; beneath a prominent red banner with alogo on it were the headlines of the day’s news.
‘What is that?’ queried Liam, pointing to the logo on the banner.
‘Reminds me a bit of the Nazi swastika,’ she replied, ‘but itisn’t.’
‘What’s a
Foster waved a hand. ‘Sorry, Liam… I’ll bring you up to speed later.’He looked more closely at it. ‘It looks like a black eel or snake or something, bitingits own tail.’
‘Yeah.’ Maddy nodded.
Liam spotted something the other two hadn’t yet. ‘I wonder if you noticed thenews is in two languages?’ He pointed to the lower half of the screen where the sameheadlines had been duplicated in another language.
‘German and English,’ said Maddy, ‘that’s all I can see. No otherlanguage options.’
