TimeRiders: The Eternal War

CHAPTER 41. 2001, somewhere in Virginia

They moved through the darkness silently, across the seemingly endless cornfield. Sal was bouncing uncomfortably over the shoulder of some huge lumbering beast. She might have said ‘man’, but she’d only caught the briefest glimpse of it. It stood on two legs and had two arms, that much she knew, and that was about as much of a comparison as she could make to a human.

The group of them — ‘pack’ seemed like a better word — moved swiftly through the corn stalks, leaves and cobs swiping at her face. She tried to call out to Lincoln, not sure whether he too was somewhere among the pack — behind her, ahead maybe, draped like her over the large meaty shoulder of one of these things. But a hand, the oddest-shaped hand she’d ever seen — two fat fingers as big as aubergines and a thumb like a marrow — clumsily smothered her mouth, mashing her lips painfully against her teeth.

It seemed like almost an hour before the group emerged from the edge of the field and hesitated by the side of a tarmac road, the very same road, she suspected, they’d been driven along by the Chinese man.

It was fully dark now and a gibbous moon had emerged into the sky to bathe the night a quicksilver blue. Upside-down, she could see these creatures more clearly. They were all ‘human-like’ in so far as they stood erect on legs and their arms swung free. But their size and shape varied immensely. She saw that about a dozen of them were as large as the one carrying her. They teetered on small legs, incredibly top-heavy, with a muscle mass that put Bob to shame. They vaguely reminded her of silverback gorillas, except there wasn’t a single hair on them. Bald from head to toe, skin pale, almost translucent in the moonlight.

Their heads didn’t look anything like a gorilla’s head either: loaf-shaped skulls, smaller in fact than a regular adult human’s skull, with tiny, almost delicate, faces. Eyes so small they almost looked like mere pinholes. Beneath those, a gash. No nose, just an open flap of flesh, a hole. And beneath the non-nose, a simple lipless slit for a mouth.

Sal twisted her head and saw others, much smaller, agile-looking. They had slender torsos with a narrow ribcage that reminded her vaguely of a salamander. She noticed their hands were the same kind: two fingers and an opposable thumb. But these were long and thin with bony knuckles and fingernails that were more like claws. Their heads were similar, but the eyes much bigger. She glimpsed all-black eyes, wide and round, that blinked in the moonlight like those of an owl.

She saw one of a third type, the smallest, the size of a child, with a head disproportionately large. It must have been that one which had burst into the kitchen and stolen the shotgun. She wondered where that gun was. Whether this creature had dispensed with it … not knowing what it was or how to make use of it.

Are they that stupid?

She suspected not. They’d cleverly outflanked them in the farmhouse, bottling them up in the hallway. At the very least they seemed to know a house tended to have a back door and a front door.

This smallest creature, the ‘child’, had the same hand configuration, but the two fingers and the thumb on each looked completely human. The hands could easily have been those of some machine-worker who’d lost the little finger and the next one along of both hands in some unfortunate industrial accident. Its face looked odd in the light; she thought she saw some scarring around its lipless mouth.

One other thing she noticed about all these creatures, the last observation she made before the brute carrying her began to lope forward, and her vision blurred as her head bounced and bumped against his muscular chest, was that every one of them was completely naked except for a solitary item of clothing on them. One of the ‘apes’ had a lady’s straw sunhat on its head, the strap tucked under its chin to hold it on. Another had a threadbare winter scarf wrapped round its neck. One of the ‘salamanders’ even had a lady’s polka-dot summer dress on, far too large for its narrow frame.

They looked like children playing dress-up, children who’d raided their mother’s wardrobe and each taken a single item they rather fancied.

The creatures trotted silently along the tarmac road, cautiously watching both ways for signs of an approaching vehicle, even up into the starry sky with wide fearful eyes. They padded several hundred yards up the road. Finally, after a small noise from the ‘child’ — some sort of instruction — the pack of creatures flitted quickly across both lanes and into the enormous field on the far side. The stalks here were shorter, with pommel-like heads of something fluffy that batted against her face as they lumbered through.

Running beside her, she caught a glimpse of another ‘ape’. Stretched over his shoulders, she saw the dark shape of Lincoln’s long limp body. His head bumped up and down lifelessly against the other creature’s bulging chest … and for a moment she was afraid the man was dead, that she was all alone with these freaks. But then Lincoln flinched at a bump and spat a curse at his ape. A big three-fingered fist smacked the back of his head to shut him up. Lincoln snarled indignantly, cursed and struggled with the creature, landing ineffectual punches with his fists on its enormous shoulder, a heaving powerful elliptical bulge of muscle tissue that flexed and wobbled beneath ghost-pale skin as it continued to lumber with all the grace of a rhino, oblivious to Lincoln’s pitiful and futile attempt to fight back.

Sal closed her eyes, relieved he was still alive. Relieved she wasn’t alone, and desperately hoping these creatures were leaving a trail that Bob and Liam were going to be able to follow.