The crowd of people were gathered around something on the ground. Among the babble of frightened voices Sal could hear snippets of whispered words:
‘… witchcraft …’
‘… work of the devil …’
A man with a loud voice was busy castigating the brewery workers on the evils of drink … and that this was God’s warning to them, this was God’s punishment.
They pushed their way through the crowd to get a better look, not difficult since the gathered crowd was reluctant to draw any closer to what it was on the ground that had drawn them round.
Finally Liam, Bob and Sal could see for themselves what it was — the cause of the disturbance, the cause of the runaway brewery cart. Liam stopped where he stood, queasily covering his mouth with a hand.
‘Jay-zus-Mary-’n’-Joseph …’
Sal took another step closer and squatted down beside … it.
‘Don’t touch it!’ screamed one of the crowd of people. ‘It is a creation of evil! A demon!’
She ignored the warning and reached one hand out carefully towards it … the monstrosity. If she could believe in things supernatural, then a creation of evil sounded like the perfect description for this pitiful ruin of a creature lying on the ground amid its own blood, steaming offal and twisted sinews.
‘Is that a person … or something?’ she whispered.
It was as if a slaughterhouse had dumped a day’s worth of off-cuts and refuse into the courtyard. Amid the glistening purple and bloody gristle she could see the hindquarters of a horse, still flexing weakly, kicking spasmodically. But worse still — the stuff that she was sure would fuel a lifetime of future nightmares for her — the blood-spattered head, shoulders and upper torso of a man welded to the flanks of the same horse, or perhaps it was a second horse. As if God had decided to construct a centaur and in a moment of frustration and irritation had given up and hurled the failed mess down to Earth.
Her hand gently touched the dead man’s head.
His eyes flickered open.
CHAPTER 92. 2001, New York
Maddy and the other prisoners were seated on the ground fifty yards away from the horseshoe trench, guarded by only a handful of British soldiers. It was clear to them that there was no fight left in the small ragged huddle of Union and Confederate soldiers.
She watched them processing the bodies of their own first. Checking for signs of life before pulling regimental collar tags from their necks and carrying the corpses down towards the river’s edge where they were being loaded aboard the landing rafts.
She noticed nearby a particularly dense mound of bodies with crimson tunics, busy with orderlies squatting among them feeling for signs of life. And there — as a body was disentangled and carried away by a couple of them — she saw Becks.
She got to her feet and started to pick her way across the battlefield.
‘Hey! Miss! Sit back down!’ shouted one of the British soldiers guarding them.
Maddy ignored him, drawn to the pale face staring up through its own nest of bodies. She pushed her way past an orderly and squatted down on the ground beside Becks’s cold, still face. Dark blood caked the right side of her face, trickling down from a gunshot wound to her temple.
‘Becks?’
The orderly, a young man with freckles and jutting ears, looked at her sympathetically. ‘You know this woman, miss?’
She said nothing.
‘By the look of it, whoever she was, she put up one hell of a fight.’
His voice sounded far away. She barely heard it. Instead she gazed curiously at the spatter of a tear on Becks’s left cheek, for a moment wondering whether a support unit could actually cry. Then she realized it was one of her own. She wiped her eyes beneath her glasses and sniffed.
I’m crying for a freakin’ meat robot. She scowled, angry with herself for being so pathetic and weak. It’s a machine … a tool. That’s all, you moron!
‘Becks?’ she whispered. ‘Becks … I’m so sorry.’
Sorry for what? Sorry that I never bothered to get to know you … like Liam did?
Maybe. Maybe she was sorry about that. But then again wasn’t it better not to treat these things as human, as friends?
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered again, stroking one of Becks’s dark eyebrows. The one she’d made a habit of raising every time she had a question she wanted to ask.
She was vaguely aware that the orderly was remonstrating with the guard who’d come after her, to give her some space, that she wasn’t about to run anywhere, escape.
‘Becks, I’m sorry that we never just … you know, never just talked.’
Like Liam did, like Sal did. Both of them quite comfortable with the idea of hanging out with Bob and Becks as if they were just like them, human.
She traced a line down Becks’s cold cheek. Quite dead. Beneath the bodies lying across her were injuries she didn’t need to see — didn’t want to see. Obviously too much catastrophic damage at once, for her body’s self-repair system to cope with.
The raised voices in the background were a million miles away. Muted. Some other place. This moment was hers alone. A chance to say goodbye. Her own time and space.
But the voices increased in number, and raised in pitch and urgency. Voices all around her.
‘Good God!’
‘What is THAT?’
She looked up at the orderly and the soldier, both now silently staring into the sky. The other orderlies too, gazing open-mouthed at the night sky above Manhattan. Curious, she turned to look in the same direction.
A horizon that twisted, undulated — a liquid reality of impossible possibilities.
The time wave.
Everyone — every soldier, every officer, every prisoner — was now frozen in place, looking at the roiling sky. Bewildered, transfixed, frightened and dumb-struck.
Maddy … you’ve got to move! You have to be inside! You have to be protected!
She looked towards the archway. She could see orderlies stepping out of the shutter entrance to see what the commotion was all about.
Run! Maddy, run!
She was about to get to her feet when she suddenly realized she couldn’t leave Becks’s body there. That message, locked away inside the support unit’s mind … There was a way to retrieve it and the memories that would preserve who she was. A way to do it … Liam once did it for Bob.
Her chip.
She looked around, found a carbine with a bayonet fixed to the end. She reached for it, expecting the guard or the orderly to bark a warning at her. Instead their eyes and everyone else’s were locked on the sky.
Panicking, fumbling, she tried to get the bayonet off, tugging at it with a growing frustration.
How does it come off?
She tried twisting it, and the fixing unlocked with a dull scrape. She wrenched it off the barrel, dropped the carbine and looked down at Becks.
Do it!
She would have to thrust the tip of the blade into her skull and dig around inside for that silicon wafer, not much bigger than a memory stick, a sim card.
She pressed the bayonet’s tip against Becks’s forehead, just above her brow line.
Do it! Now!
She tried to push down, but couldn’t.
If you can’t do it … then take the head — take the whole head!