| Grief drove me,
there is no stronger emotion than that. "You could destroy everything! You could splinter time!" "Time's already splintered! This wasn't supposed to happen!" Eyes and nose streaming, tears following well-worn tracks over my face, I half-shouted, half-screamed at Abby, standing in the clearing in the Forest of Dean. She and Connor had followed me here from the ARC. The ARC! How fucking clichéd an acronym is that anyway?! How can a place like that even exist in normal society? But this isn't normal, is it? This is an anomaly in itself, this world where Claudia Brown doesn't exist, where my bitch of a wife found a man called Leeke to help her create a menagerie of pre-historic and future predators for some ludicrous form of research. Where my best friend didn't give a damn about me. Where he's dead. Dead because of me, dead because I changed things and gave Helen the opportunity to destroy everything including Stephen. I had to put things back. I had to go back to the Permian and put right whatever had gone wrong. The creatures from the future. It had to be the creatures from the future. We'd thought they were all dead but they can't have been. Some had to have escaped, survived; changed the evolution of the world somehow - just slightly. I'd tried once before, dragging those raptors back to the past, thought I'd stay - maroon myself there until another anomaly opened and I could go through that one and another one until I'd found the right one. But Stephen followed me through, stopped me from staying. Why the hell he did that I never found out and I'll never know, not now. "You could kill yourself, kill any of us, wipe us out of history!" Abby made a fine point. I didn't care, God help me, I didn't care. I just wanted Stephen back, to see him rolling his eyes at me like he used to, to hear him laugh again. We used to be friends, before I found out that he'd slept with Helen, before he'd started seeing her again, before he'd begun to disagree with everything we were doing, brainwashed by my monster of a wife, suspecting me of everything from espionage to trying to murder him with a Velocaraptor. Helen had changed him, this place had changed him. This wasn't where I belonged. Maybe precious little sleep was to blame. Lester called me 'unbalanced', Connor lay on the sympathy and Abby watched me with an increasingly worried expression, but still I couldn't see passed the gaping hole in our team, in my life - Stephen Hart. Hatred born of a passionate friendship had given me energy - he'd been something to fight against when everything else seemed to have gone to hell. Now he was gone and the only thing I had left to rage against was an empty office and a paper-strewn desk, a meaningless existence in a world I didn't like. I remembered a quote from some movie Stephen and I had once watched, lounging on my sofa with beers and a Chinese take-away. "If you send someone to save the world, make sure they like it the way it is." I didn't like it. Since watching a man who'd once been my best friend get torn to pieces by a pack of raptors, I'd barely slept. Whenever exhaustion dragged me under I dreamt in red and woke up with Stephen's screams still ringing in my ears. I tried whisky to numb my unconscious mind, waking up with the worst hangover of my life the first time, and overdoing it the second time, waking up in the ARC infirmary with a burning throat and a cramping stomach from the pump they'd used on me. Abby got it into her head that I'd tried committing suicide. I hadn't, as I told her, as empathically as I could. I didn't want to die. I just wanted things to go back to the way they had been. And telling her that put the idea so solidly into my head, I started to work out just how I would go about doing precisely that. Leeke had found the creatures he'd collected - he'd found the Gorgonopsid, which meant he'd found an anomaly that connected with the Permian. Lester had confiscated all the records, had all the computer files brought back to the ARC. Getting access wasn't all that difficult, especially not after telling Connor I wanted to research how a traitor had managed to get his hands on so many creatures without us knowing. It was mostly the truth. I started back into the meticulously kept detail of location and entrapment Leeke and his men had taken part in under Helen's dubious command. After working thirty-six hours straight I fell asleep at the keyboard and dreamt of Stephen's hand against my face, his fingers in my hair, breath on my skin. I woke up incredibly aroused but the grief was quick to hit and within a second or two I was curled up in the chair sobbing like a child and swearing to myself I'd not shut my eyes again until I was back where I belonged or I was dead. Taking two deep breaths to calm down, I heard a scream - Stephen's scream. I walked to the door of my office and looking out through the glass panel I saw him, on the floor, raptors taking deep bites of out him, tearing his skin away, chewing through muscle. I hammered on the door with my fists until my hands were bleeding and kicked at it until I'd three broken toes. "Nick! Nick." Jenny woke me up. Head down on the desk, nose pressed against the keyboard. A dream inside a dream. I was damp and for a moment I thought I'd wet myself or I'd come - both ideas were as distasteful as each other. Then I realised I'd actually knocked over my cold mug of coffee into my lap. I muttered something about a shower and ducked out from under her arm, shuffling out of my office towards the wet rooms, feeling twice my age and wishing not for the first time that it had been me with those dinosaurs, not Stephen. Showered and changed, warm beige cord jeans and a blue wool jumper I dug out of my locker, I headed back to my office to stare at the information still displayed on my computer screen. Took a second or two to realise what I was looking at - the anomaly site for the Permian, the one that Leeke had found, in exactly the same place it had always been. The Forest of Dean. Taking two automatics and a handgun from the armoury, with no one giving me a second glance, I gathered other supplies from the kitchen and took a small tent and a sleeping bag from the field store. No one stopped me, no one questioned me. I wasn't aware anyone was watching me. Not until I reached the site. I told the solider on duty I was there as part of the survey being undertaken at all anomaly sites in the wake of Leeke's treason. He trusted me, had no reason to doubt me because he knew who I was, and I set up camp without being disturbed. The Forest of Dean anomaly was regular in its appearances so I hoped I wouldn't have to wait long. I wasn't sure how long I had, how long it would be before I was discovered missing, before anyone would go to my house, realise I wasn't there, work out that I'd gone AWOL…. I figured I'd have weeks if I was to base it on those circumstances. Just before dark I lit the gas stove and heated up some baked beans, eating them straight from the can with a fork I'd stolen from the ARC's cafeteria. I hadn't eaten much since the day Stephen died, was losing weight I could ill afford to lose but like the insomnia I couldn't do much about it. I just wasn't hungry. As I disposed of the can I found something in my jacket pocket - a Yorkie bar - which must have been there for weeks. I remembered Stephen buying it for me when we'd stopped to get petrol on our way back from an anomaly site which had been a lot less work than they usually were. The only things to come through had been two what looked like wild dogs, possibly from not too far into the future. After tranquilising the animals, Stephen had put his head through the anomaly and had described being on the edge of a large city that looked a lot like New York. We'd sent the dogs back through, waited, and half an hour later it had vanished. We'd stopped for petrol and I'd filled up the Toyota while he'd gone in to pay. He'd come out with a Curly Whirly, a Marathon or whatever they're called now, and a Yorkie bar and asked me which one I wanted. I'd chosen the Yorkie and he'd eaten the Marathon on the way back to the ARC, giving the Curly Whirly to Connor, lighting the guy's eyes up. Something so simple. I snapped off a chunk of chocolate and ate it, not certain when the last time I'd eaten chocolate had been. Ten minutes later I'd eaten the whole bar and felt so much better. I thought about Stephen, about how it had been before everything had changed, before I knew what Connor Temple - one of my own students - looked like, before I knew Helen was still alive and had left me for a life of high-risk adventure through worlds thousands and millions of years old. Before we'd ever heard of James Lester or Claudia Brown. A science professor and his lab technician, giving lectures, running workshops, shipping out to the more promising of archaeological digs. Spending long nights in foreign deserts under the stars. I'd lost count of the number of times I'd fallen asleep in a small tent to the soft sound of Stephen snoring and woken up tucked far too close to his body - mine unconsciously seeking out his warmth during the cold nights. We'd been such good friends. He knew me better than anyone else. We could talk without words, communicate with just a single look, one that would usually end with him rolling his eyes and muttering, "oh, all right then," before he'd be following me out to yet another fossil find, yet another discovery of a piece of Darwin's jigsaw that didn't fit. I missed him so much it hurt. But I'd been missing him since arriving here in this wrong world. He hadn't been my Stephen, something had always been off - a divide already in existence between us that Helen's cruel and selfish revelation had simply made bigger. I sat in the tent's opening and watched the clearing where twice I'd seen the anomaly open and close. I had one of Connor's handheld detectors with me in case I did fall asleep. The last thing I wanted was to wake up to find Lester's shoes in my face and the site overrun by armed soldiers. But I didn't need to worry. The sugar in the chocolate and my own racing mind kept my awake throughout the night. And at dawn the detector beeped once as a beautiful rip in time and space flared into life thirty feet from my tent. I heard the lone guard soldier on his radio and knew my time was limited. Grabbing the backpack with the water and ammo inside it, stuffing the handgun down the back of my trousers like I'd seen them do in movies and grabbing the two automatic rifles, I started towards the anomaly, my mind set on fixing things. "Nick! No! Don't do it!" Abby. I turned around, five feet from the turning, twisting shards of time I was about to step through. Connor was with her - they seemed to come as a pair now and I wondered briefly if there was a deeper meaning to that. What if I changed them? "I have to." "You don't! This won't bring Stephen back." "It might. Don't you see? This is wrong, this isn't how the world's supposed to be. Leeke should never have existed. He's wrong. Stephen shouldn't have died. He was never supposed to have died." "We all die." Connor, his usual optimistic self. It sounded optimistic too, somehow, like it was just a fact of life and he'd accepted it with the same ease that he accepted milk was white and the sky was blue. "It's not that simple." I wanted them to understand so badly. Nothing was going to change my mind so I wanted to change theirs. "He wasn't supposed to die now. And Jenny… Jenny isn't supposed to be Jenny. She's supposed to be a woman called Claudia Brown, a woman I might have loved one day." "Nick, please! Stephen's dead, he's gone, you can't bring him back." There were tears in her voice and hearing them tore through the paper-thin walls I'd erected around my own broken heart. I started to cry, as uncontrollable as nature. "I can try. I have to try. Please understand." She was shaking her head. "You could destroy everything, you could splinter time!" "Time's already splintered! This wasn't supposed to happen!" What I sight I must have been, tears flooding over my face while I held two automatic rifles in my hands like Rambo. "I loved Stephen - I have to save him." "You could kill yourself, kill any of us, wipe us out of history! You don't want to do that, Nick, you can't take that risk." But I did want to. I didn't care, God help me. I'd been hurting for so long now, had so little sleep, my whole world was completely unbalanced, so utterly out of shape that I couldn't bring myself to care about anything other than seeing Stephen alive and well. I'd convinced myself somewhere along the line that this incarnation of the world wasn't real - that I'd made it, constructed it, and somewhere through the anomaly my world - another Abby, another Connor, Claudia and my Stephen - was waiting for me. "I'm sorry." The last thing I heard was their commingled cry of single-syllable denial as I turned and ran through into the Permian. It was hot, the sun was blazing. I dragged my cap out of the backpack, took a slurp of water at the same time, then started off down towards where we'd set up camp the last time we'd come through. To my relief I'd come back to the right time. Captain Ryan's shallow grave was still freshly dug, the supplies we'd abandoned still relatively free from sand. Helen's camera case lay in full view. It could only have been hours at most since we'd gone back. There was no sign of Helen. She'd come back on her own when Stephen had turned her down. He could have left with her, but he hadn't; he'd stayed to carry on the fight, to face me every day. He'd never apologised for his actions but then I'd never expected an apology. He wasn't that type of guy. The cage we'd brought the baby monsters through in to attract Mum to us was opened and covered in blood from the ones the Gorgonopsid had eaten. I had no idea how many had escaped. We'd been so sure, hadn't we, that we'd got them all? I remembered checking with Helen… had she known? Had she honestly done this on purpose? Could she have? No. I was certain of it. Not even Helen could work out the exact consequences of leaving a couple of future predators alive in the Permian era. She could have wiped out all of us, made it so that none of us had ever been born. In which case, we'd never have come here to make such a terrible mistake in the first place so nothing would have changed so we would have been born…. It was a real mind-fuck trying to work out time as a circular notion. I stopped thinking about it and instead stood on the rocks and looked around for the first clue to where a future predator would go in a baking desert. Some might say I was born lucky. I felt the white-hot agony in my back before I heard the shrieking of the critters. Turning I saw two of them on the sand behind me. One had blood on its razor-sharp claws and I knew it was my blood. I could feel the wound just above my arse but I didn't think it had gone any deeper than the skin. I could still walk, still feel my legs, which was an incredible relief I allowed myself a moment to feel it before swinging the automatic around from my left shoulder and firing at the two baby creatures at point-blank range. Rapid-fire bullets sliced the first one in half, caught the second one in the side as it tried to flee. I followed it, breaking into a run as it swung itself up onto an outcrop of rocks, firing in its general direction and following the trail of blood. It was fast, but its wound had slowed it down more than mine was doing to me. Adrenaline was stopping me from feeling anything more than a slight twinge, whereas the creature eventually stopped and when I caught up to it was making a terrible noise, like it was calling out for its dead mother. I stood over it, pulled my handgun from the back of my trousers and pointed it directly at the flat crown of its head. With a harsh grating sound it came at me, springing up from where it stood, claws out, aiming for my face. I fired and it dropped out of the air like a stone. I fired again, and again, opening it up, shattering bone structure, wreaking havoc on internal organs, until I ran out of bullets. On the first hit of the hammer against the empty barrel I dropped it, staggered backwards, felt the wound in my back and fell hard onto my arse on the sandy rocks, knocking the wind from me. I dragged in air, gulping it down, willing myself to breathe slowly after that until I could see properly again and my vision cleared. My back hurt though, like hell, and I reached around cautiously to find out how deep it really was. I gingerly counted four scratch marks, just to the right of my spine. There were bleeding but not at an alarming rate and I knew I'd be okay if I could make it back to the anomaly. It took longer to get back to it than it had done to get away from it. It was still active, showed no sign of dissipating, and I stood before it, wondering what would be waiting for me on the other side. Abby had been right of course, I could have wiped out everything. Or I could have changed nothing. I couldn't decide, in my exhausted, hurting state, which one of those two options was worse. So closing my eyes, I stepped through. "Cutter, thank God…." "You're okay!" "You took your time!" "Where's Captain Ryan?" Connor. Abby. Lester. Andrews, Ryan's Second-In-Command. I opened my eyes. "Nick…." Claudia Brown, smiling like she was trying to pretend she wasn't so utterly relieved to see me. I was so utterly relieved to see her that I wrapped one arm around her waist and hugged her tight just for a second. "You're alive." When I let her go, she frowned just slightly. "I think that's supposed to be my mine…." I nodded, stepped back and looked around. "Where's Stephen?" I turned but I couldn't see him. God, don't tell me he's dead here too. I took two steps back, feeling as if the bottom was about to fall out of my new-found world. Catching Claudia's eye I asked her, hopefully, desperately, "Stephen Hart?" "Welcome back." He was at the edge of the clearing, rifle held loosely in one hand as if he'd been expecting something hostile to come through and not me. He was alive, he was smiling. I crossed to him, dropping the guns, got my arms around him and lifted him off his feet, my back protesting, Abby - I think - exclaiming that I was hurt. I didn't care about that. Stephen's free arm had come up around my neck and he was holding me tight to him, like he was as happy to see me alive as I was to see him. "I love you," he murmured into my ear, and I was about to say it right back when I realised I couldn't - he shouldn't…. I put him down, pulled back, staring at him. He looked just a little bit guilty. "Sorry, unprofessional. Not out in the field. I know we agreed. But I thought… I didn't know if you were going to come back." What was he saying? "What do you mean, you love me?" "You know what I mean…." "Do I love you?" His expression sobered. "Nick, you're scaring me." "I mean… I know I do, but do you know… I do?" Did any of that make sense? I was as lost right then as I had been on realising Claudia didn't exist. Stephen's face lit up in a smile. "You only tell me at least twice a day." "Oh, God….." Grabbing him again I hugged him to me, letting go only when he gave an over-done sigh and tilted his head to kiss me. No one had ever kissed me like that before. Opening my mouth to him felt like the most natural thing in the world and tasting him, feeling his tongue slide over mine, was the greatest, most wonderful sensation…. I heard Lester clearing his throat and sprang back like a teenager caught masturbating by his Mum. Then immediately I looked at Stephen again to make sure he hadn't taken offence. He was still smiling and I felt like grabbing his hand and never letting go. I glanced at Claudia, who looked like this wasn't a surprise to her. In fact Abby was watching us like we were two puppies - or rather lizards - she'd just adopted and Connor was looking the other way. So this wasn't anything new. "Listen, Stephen," I turned back to him, "before it turns into a big deal, I don't care about you and Helen…" "Me and Helen?" I knew just from the tone of his voice that it wasn't bullshit. He had no idea what I was referring to. "Never mind. Look, just humour me… does the word 'ARC' mean anything to you?" "As in what Noah built to save the animals from the flood?" "Again, never mind. Where are we… based? You and I?" "Camden Town." He grinned. "Or when we're not in bed, the Central Metropolitan University. Nick, are you sure you're all right?" "Of course he's not all right, he's bleeding!" Between them, Abby and Stephen tried their hand at first aid while I heard Lester mutter something about me bleeding to death on my own time and him having a meeting to get to. Stephen stayed with me, not phased by me grasping his hand as the nurse put a couple of butterfly stitches in my back, despite the armed soldiers still standing guard in case anything else should come through the anomaly that wasn't as friendly as me. It was fine. This was a change I could live with. I'm sure Stephen thought I'd lost my marbles when I kept staring at him, when he took us home, joined me in the shower and finally made love to me in what was apparently our bed. It was a jump-start to a relationship that had only been a vague idea at the back of my subconscious, but it was surprisingly easy to adjust to the difference, especially with Stephen's calloused hands on my dick and his tongue in my mouth. This wasn't my world, not exactly, but in this world Stephen was all mine and always had been. In this world Helen hadn't done such terrible damage, hadn't got the foothold she had in the other one. We had more time, and time is such a precious commodity. |