Time Riders

Reich over the next few weeks. History being wiped clean, purged wholesale fromthe face of the earth.

He felt physically sick.

They stepped on to the street, pushing past silent faces filled with hatred as they glared athis and Bob’s black uniforms.

Liam was relieved to see the Kubelwagen still parked up outside and no soldiers standingaround it on the lookout for the culprits who’d stolen it.

Bob climbed in quickly and turned on the engine.

‘Do you think they’ll find our message?’ asked Liam as hesettled into the passenger’s seat and Bob eased the vehicle through the crowd back on tothe street. ‘I mean, we’ve hidden it away pretty good… maybe too good.’

‘We will know this in approximately seventy-nine minutes.’

They proceeded south down an orderly Central Park West, on one side of them the city’spark, all winter-bare trees and drab ochre grass, on the other endless office blocks andtraffic nudging forward between red traffic lights. It started to rain. Joyless greasy dropsspattered against the windscreen and soaked dispirited, plodding pedestrians outside.

Liam truly wouldn’t be sorry to leave this drab brow-beaten world behind.

We’re on our way home now… hopefully.

He wondered what the archway looked like, who might be occupying it here in 1957, if indeedanyone was. More to the point — he wondered what the girls and Foster were up to rightnow.

CHAPTER 79

2001, New York

Foster noticed them as they jogged quickly down the steps outside the frontentrance, not just a couple of dozen of them peering curiously from the dark interiors ofgutted buildings… but a hundred or more of them.

Fresh meat… the word’s spreading.

‘Oh God!’ uttered Sal. ‘There’s so many.’

Maddy grabbed her hand protectively. ‘Foster, fire your gun.’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t think the noise will scare them now.’

‘But maybe these are ones who don’t know your gunkills.’

‘Oh, they know all right… otherwise I’m sure they’d already be onus.’

The street leading south, Central Park West, was thick with them… like some bizarresilent rally. To their left was what was once Central Park, now nothing more than a dust bowldotted with the charcoal skeletons of scorched tree trunks, or the frazzled stumps oflong-dead bushes. If the devil was given a say in how a city park should be landscaped, Fosterimagined he would go with something like this.

It was wide open terrain, though. Nothing for the creatures to hide behind or jump out from.Far better than picking their way along some narrow street strewn with rusted vehicles.

‘We should cut across the park,’ he said. ‘Then we’re on the east side. It’s a short way through to the Hudson River.’ Theycould then follow the river down to the bridge. The riverside boulevard was broad all the waydown to the Williamsburg Bridge and they’d only need to keep an eye out for anythingcoming at them from their right.

‘Let’s go,’ he said, leading the way down the last of the steps, across theforecourt, through twisted and collapsed iron railings over an intersection all but hidden bythe tangle of rusted carcasses of abandoned cars.

The late-afternoon sun poked through dirty brown clouds as they pushed their way through thefossilized remains of a decorative hedgerow and into Central Park.

‘They’re following,’ said Sal, her voice trembling.

Foster glanced back over his shoulder to see the creatures moving together as a giant pack,hundreds of them shifting across Central Park West, and climbing railings, squeezing throughdead hedges to enter the park in their wake.

‘OK, they’re following, but at least they’re keeping a distance.’

Although, as he said that, he noticed that the distance seemed to be narrowing as some of themore courageous of them edged out several dozen yards ahead of the herd. He wondered if theywere ringleaders — pack leaders, individuals with something to prove to theirfollowers.

The girls picked up their pace, swift strides quickly turning into an untidy jog, kicking upclouds of dust and ash. Foster brought up the rear.

The gap between them narrowed further as the creatures’ hunched-over scuttling becamemore of a hunched-over trot. The braver creatures came closer still, now thirty or forty feetfrom them. Foster turned and glanced at the nearest of them — male by the look of him,tall and painfully thin, a few tufts of pale hair growing in isolated islands on his scalp andrags of clothing dangling from his powder-white body. He could hear thecreature’s laboured breath and a keening whimper as it yearned to close the gap betweenthem. Yet, understandably, it feared the dark metal object in Foster’s hand. Perhaps itsmind remembered a solitary word from a long-forgotten language.

Gun.

And it knew the metal tube could spit death in an instant.

For what seemed an interminable age, they maintained this moving stand-off: the girls joggingacross the dead park, Foster struggling along several yards behind them, his ragged breathgrowing ever more laboured, and the silent herd of creatures easily keeping pace — butslowly, warily, closing in.

‘The other side of the park, look!’ shouted Maddy.

Across the empty concrete bowl of a duck pond and the corroded A-frames of what had once beenswings, he could see a row of stunted black trees and dark metal railings. Beyond that was 5thAvenue, running north to south down the side of the park.

Fifty yards along, he could see a way out that wouldn’t require them to stop and scalethe railings — a gateway. Then, across 5th Avenue, they’d be on to East 72ndStreet. Half a dozen blocks of ruined buildings on either side and then they’d hit theriver.

But this is where they may jump us, he decided. As they pickedtheir way over rubble and weaved through abandoned cars, those creatures would finally closethe gap and be upon them. He decided now was as good a time as any to demonstrate once morewhat his gun could do. He turned round, stopped and levelled his gun at the nearestcreature.

He fired, throwing the pitiful thing on its back with a shrill high-pitched scream. It lay onthe ground in a growing pool of its own blood, bony legs thrashing the ground wildly. The restof the herd immediately turned on their heels and fled across the ash-greypark like rabbits startled by a farmer’s gun.

‘Just reminding them we’re dangerous.’

Maddy nodded. ‘Good.’ But then she looked at the weapon. ‘Eleven shotsleft?’

Foster racked another round into the shotgun. ‘Yes, eleven.’

They made their way quickly along East 72nd and ten minutes later emerged on to the broaddual-lane expanse of FDR Drive, heading south, parallel with the Hudson River.

Ahead of them were the shattered remains of Queensboro Bridge, collapsed in the middle.Beyond that, no more than three quarters of a mile down the Hudson, Foster could see the tallmetal support towers of the Williamsburg Bridge, and on the far side of the river, the squatbrick and industrial buildings, chimney pots and cranes of Brooklyn’s dockside.

They rested for a moment on a wooden bench, overlooking the muddy bank of the river below,all three of them catching their breath.

‘Just over the bridge… and… then we’re home and dry,’ raspedFoster.

‘You OK?’ asked Maddy.

‘I’m fine… just a little winded. Let me grab some air.’

They hung on for a moment, looking back the way they’d come. For the moment it seemedlike they’d lost the creatures.

‘You girls ready?’