He nodded out at the congested street. ‘Twenty-four hours from now, this place gonna be a ghost town. An’ I guess I’ll have to board my shop up from looters an’ mebbe head south myself until they made sure they gathered up all their monsters and got ’em back in cages again. God knows … I don’t want to be the only fool in town if they gonna lose control of ’em all over again.’
‘Right,’ said Liam, nodding.
‘Anyways …’ The old man frowned. ‘You an’ your friends comin’ in to buy some stuff?’
‘Ah no, we were just … sort of getting out of the way of the —’
‘Well, this ain’t a darned hotel!’ He glanced at Bob’s hulking form, hunched over to fit his bristly head beneath the awning above his porch. ‘You’re blockin’ me up from proper customers! You better scoot off me boards, that or buy somethin’!’
Liam sighed. ‘All right … all right, we’re going.’
He led the way down three steps, on to the pavement and into the bustling crowd, against the flow. All manner of people — rich and poor, billycock hats to flat caps, lace bonnets to threadbare shawls — a tide of anxious city people, all grumbling curses and muttering rebukes as Liam waded against the trudging tide.
An hour later they were standing on the side of a road heading north-east out of New Wellington still choked with vehicles and carts heading southwards, making painfully slow progress, but moving at least.
‘Seems like everyone north of here is leaving,’ said Liam.
He wondered why so many civilians would have bothered living so close to the front line anyway. After all, according to McManus the war was an ongoing struggle, a constant ebbing and flowing of the front line, which stretched westwards across New York State, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, with minor skirmishes here and there every summer that shifted the line half a mile one way, then the other.
But it was a stalemate war, wasn’t it? A war with which people had grown used to living. Grown used to it rumbling on quietly in the background like a thunderstorm passing by.
People manage … that’s what they do.
Except, of course, not now. Not with rumours of a big push going around. Not with rumours of killer eugenics being deployed not too far away from them.
‘It’s silly,’ said Sal. ‘The eugenics weren’t dangerous … not the ones that took us, anyway. Were they?’ She looked up at Lincoln.
‘Pitiful beings,’ he said. ‘If truth be told, they were quite sad creatures.’
Liam couldn’t help wondering what to make of the eugenics. Looking at the flood of people going past, he could understand their fear. Back in that farmhouse, the attack had seemed ferocious, quite terrifying at the time. And yet now he realized those creatures had just been a band of runaway workers. Frightened for themselves. Just doing their best to scavenge and survive.
But, if they’d been a frightening sight, he couldn’t begin to imagine what military eugenic creatures must be like. Mind you, he’d already met some, right? The hunter-seekers. They hadn’t seemed so bad.
He shuddered with the thought of something.
There must be other types we’ve not yet seen.
‘We should get going. The road looks like it’s clearing up a bit. We should make better time now we’re out of town. How far is New York from here, Bob?’
‘Information: a hundred and eleven miles.’
‘Ahh, well, that’s all right.’ Liam smiled. ‘That’s not so far to go, then. Shall we?’
CHAPTER 69
2001, New York
‘Oh my God!’ cried Maddy. She turned to Becks standing beside her in front of the computer desk. ‘It’s actually working!’
She could see the soft amber standby light of the four-gang plug socket and spike protector. ‘We’ve got enough amplitude coming in!’
‘Affirmative.’
Maddy ducked down and punched on the nearest of the networked PCs beneath the desk. One of the monitors winked on. She switched on the next one and the next, until all nine computers were busy whirring, at different stages of booting up.
Maddy wanted both of the colonels to see this. Although she knew they more than half believed her story, it would do no harm for them to see this machinery stir to life. She trotted across the floor, skidding on loose grit and skipping over the thick flex of power cable running out through the raised shutter door. It snaked round the low entrance to the ‘fort’, and turned left along a freshly dug trench for twenty yards before rising up over the rear trench wall and across several yards of rubble and weed wasteland towards the opened rear engine hatches of Wainwright’s Mark IV tank. The engine casing, bulky and pitted with rust, juddered unnervingly like a feral cat trapped in a hatbox. It was spewing a thick cloud of smoke from an exhaust pipe at the top of its box-shaped iron turret.
The tank’s labouring engine was spinning a flywheel. Around the wheel was a cam-belt — a loop of thick leather — taken off the vehicle’s drive shaft and leading instead to their battered and sorry-looking generator. They’d hauled it out earlier and set it up beside the tank. The belt was turning the generator’s own internal rotor and armature.
Down the slope towards the river she could see Wainwright and Devereau standing above the borderline. Devereau squatted down and talked to someone in the trench, Wainwright smoking his pipe and looking out across the river.
‘Hey! You two! Colonels!’ she shouted above the rumble of the tank’s bad-tempered engine.
They both looked her way and she waved them over. ‘It’s working! We got power!’
She waited for them to jog over, and then led them back down into the trench, following the cable past the fort and ducking inside the archway across the floor to where the row of computer monitors were all now showing the same desktop wallpaper she’d put on several days ago.
An image of Homer Simpson.
‘Good grief!’ gasped Devereau, unsure what to make of the wall of grinning faces.
Maddy pulled a seat out and sat down at the desk. ‘Computer-Bob? You there?’
‘This … this yellow face,’ said Wainwright, ‘… is the face of your computer?’
‘Uh?’ She looked at the monitors. ‘Oh no … He’s just a … a …’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘Doesn’t really matter.’
A dialogue box appeared on the monitor in front of her.
> Hello, Madelaine. It appears a significant malfunction has occurred.
He was seeing the wreckage of the archway behind her. That, or he was registering internal problems with one or more of the networked computers.
> I also detect two unauthorized personnel in the archway.
‘That’s OK, Bob … that’s OK. They have my authorization to be here.’
> Affirmative.
Wainwright’s jaw hung open. ‘You have a machine that can talk to you?’
‘Oh yeah … Bob, he’s … well, computer-Bob. Not, of course, to be confused with Bob, who’s a … well, sort of a guy-shaped computer and a copy of computer-Bob … and some of Becks, actually, who by the way is also a copy of computer-Bob …’ She looked up at the colonels and realized she was losing them. ‘Just think of Becks here and this computer system as family … sort of.’
‘Family?’ said Wainwright, looking at Devereau, not really any the wiser.