The Eternal War

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