Lincoln managed more. ‘GOD’S TEETH!’ he boomed. ‘What in tarnation is that?’
A gigantic copper boiler hung in the sky, slowly drifting across the fields. Perhaps three hundred, four hundred feet long. The afternoon sun glinted warmly on its copperplated side. Slung beneath it was what appeared to be a building of some sort: a confusion of pipes and chimneys, silos, ladders and gantries, round portholes and hatch-like doorways on several floors. It seemed to be held beneath the copper behemoth by four immense crane-like arms, holding the building like a mother cradling a child.
They watched it slowly drift above them, across their field of ragged stalks to another field rolling over a hill in front of them. It moved silently, no roar of engines, just the sound of wind rustling through the gaps in the ‘building’ suspended beneath, thrumming taut cables, clinking chains, loose and swinging.
Eventually it began to settle down to earth a quarter of a mile away from them.
Nearing the ground, the large crane arms hissed steam from their ‘elbows’ and gently flexed, lowering the building between them to the ground. It settled on thick stilts that adjusted to the uneven tilt with the audible hiss and thud of compressed air until it was level.
‘Shadd-yah! Now that —’ Sal nodded — ‘that … is really, really cool.’
The enormous airship rose slowly, its crane arms retracting to leave the building standing free in the middle of the field. After a few moments they began to see some activity. A large door opening and a wide ramp emerging, extending down to the ground. Then finally, something that looked vaguely familiar to Liam … a tractor belching steam rumbled out on caterpillar tracks and down the ramp, followed by another, and another, and finally a stream of figures.
The building’s chimney stacks started puffing tendrils of smoke and they heard the clunk and whir of machinery starting up in the field.
‘It’s a portable farm! That’s what it is!’ Liam laughed. ‘A bleedin’ pick-me-up and put-me-down farm!’
Lincoln shaded his eyes with a hand. ‘Am I to presume such a fantastic construction as this is not normal to your time?’
‘This is our time, Mr Lincoln,’ said Sal. ‘Just a very different version of it. Everything changed.’
‘Yet we did not?’ Lincoln looked confused. ‘How is that?’
‘It’s because none of us should be here now anyway, right?’ Liam looked at Bob.
‘Correct. None of you should be alive in, or be part of, 2001, therefore you are not affected by the causal change of the time wave.’
Liam looked at the slowly ascending airship. ‘I think it might be advisable we find somewhere to hide until we know exactly what sort of a world we’re in right now. Everyone agree?’
Heads nodded.
Liam looked around and spotted what appeared to be a derelict barn across the far side of the already harvested field. ‘Off we go, then,’ he said.
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.