Chapter 8

"Why did you invite him?" Connor hissed into Abby's ear.

"He's your friend, Connor, remember? Your friend?"

"Who hasn't spoken to me since Tom died!"

"You haven't gone out of your way to speak to him either!"

"I didn't want to get him involved! Look what happened last time!"

"He's still your friend! I know it hurts to hear it, but I think he knows better now not to meddle in whatever you're up to. He's not going to get involved. Not with the ARC. He just wants his friend back."

"I can't bring Tom back!"

"I didn't mean Tom, you idiot! I meant you!"

Connor glared at Abby as she hurried off in the direction of their kitchen. It wasn't that he was ungrateful: it was nice that someone had actually gone to the trouble of arranging a surprise party for him. Usually his birthdays were just marked by his favourite pizza and a Star Wars marathon. It was just that he really didn't want Duncan involved with anything to do with the ARC and the anomalies. It was true that he hadn't spoken to his friend since Tom's death, not even at the funeral. He didn't feel he had any right to. He had let them down and Tom had died because of it. He had seen Duncan around the university though. Just occasionally, but enough to tell him that his former friend was becoming more and more withdrawn from the real world. He had lost weight. Connor never saw him smiling. He sat on his own in the canteen, and at the back of the lecture hall in a corner by the door.

Connor looked back round and scanned the living room for Duncan's form. It wasn't a massive crowd. Jenny wasn't there. Stephen wasn't there.

Tom wasn't there.

He spotted Duncan over at the window, staring out at the street below. Cutter walked over to him and began speaking to him. He might not be able to remember the past six months or so, but Cutter did remember Duncan, and Tom. He also remembered what happened to Tom, or a version of the incident at least. One that included the woman Claudia, but left out Leek. If only if had been Leek, not Tom, who had been infected. Things could have been so different.

XXXX

"You still haven't told me," Jenny sighed, breaking the interminable silence in the cave cell.

"Told you what?" Claudia asked wearily.

"I've told you what's been happening in my world. You still haven't told me what's been happening in yours."

"Why is that important?"

"We're assuming that Helen's reason's for taking both of us stem from my world and the change that occurred in my Nick's life when you became me. We haven't considered the possibility that your life, and your world, have just as much to do with it."

Claudia drew in a deep, bitter breath.

"I don't see how it can," she replied. "In my world, Nick is dead."

"So in the reality where nothing was changed in the past, and you remained you, the outcome was that on March 4th, Nick, not Stephen, died."

"So it seems."

"Why would that one change, or lack of it, make such a big difference?"

"Is it such a big difference? In one reality Stephen, in the other Nick."

"Of course it is," Jenny gasped. "It's Nick! I know Stephen's a good man and I mourned him at his funeral, but if it were Nick! Don't you feel anything for him? I thought we were variants of the same person. He certainly cared for you. Besides, there aren't many people Helen would go to this much trouble for: surely he's the key."

"Don't talk to me about what I felt for Nick," Claudia spat back. "Don't you dare! You know nothing of my world. Nothing! You barely knew him. I was there, with him, the very first time he saw an anomaly. I persuaded Lester to trust him. I broke the rules for him. I lied for him. I took risks for him. All because I loved him and he loved me. We were happy. Life was busy and dangerous, but we were always together."

"Then you were an item?" Jenny confirmed, determined to have every fact clear in her mind. "A couple? And Lester and the others: they knew?"

Claudia gave a short, bitter laugh and shook her head.

"What?" Jenny asked, frowning.

"Lester gave me away at our wedding," Claudia replied. "Nick wasn't just my boyfriend or latest crush: he was my husband!"

XXXX

"I wouldn't if I was you, mate!" Connor said wearily as he wandered round the room picking up the discarded paper cups and plates that were all that now remained of his decidedly tame, but still very thoughtful, surprise birthday party.

Rex looked up from the plate he was sniffing and watched Connor move around the room, padding round happily to keep his friend in view. He seemed sad and slow. Maybe he didn't like the cold: it was very cold today. Rex didn't feel cold. He'd been flying all over this funny cave now that the noisy creatures had gone and Abby had let him out of his nice warm tank. The air was chilly though, and Rex was hungry. He padded back round to the half-eaten food on the paper plate. He had seen one of the noisy creatures eating it earlier and they had seemed to enjoy it. It was surprising that they didn't realise how well he could see them through the shawl that covered his tank, but maybe the point wasn't to stop him seeing them, but them seeing him. There had been a lot of creatures that he didn't recognise. Abby and Connor didn't like new creatures getting to know him too well. Rex sniffed the food again. He didn't recognise it, but he didn't recognise a lot of things here. The creature had enjoyed it. He decided to try a small, green, round thing on the plate: it looked like a bit of a small fruit. In the blink of an eye, his tongue darted out and grabbed the green thing. Rex munched happily. It seemed okay. Suddenly Rex stopped munching. Something was very wrong. His mouth was burning. He spat out the treacherous green thing and turned round in circles, looking for some water to take the burning away.

Connor looked round at the odd squawk from Rex and the clattering that had followed. The lizard was shaking its head and running round in awkward circles as if it was looking for something. As he turned, Rex had knocked some of the cups and plates off the table. Connor's eyes spotted the half-chewed remains of the jalapeño on the table top. He smiled and caught hold of a wriggling Rex.

"I did warn you, mate!" Connor giggled. He walked over to the kitchen carrying Rex under his arm. "Abby," he called up the stairs. "Can lizards drink milk? I think Rex has just discovered Mexican party food!"

XXXX

"Is this your house?"

"In a way."

Helen looked up at the man half-way up the stairs. She was surprised it had taken him this long to ask. Fatigue must play a part, of course: he would hardly have slept well in the cave cell. It was two days since their arrival and the late evening. He had slept away most of the day. That didn't matter: the night was when she needed him to be awake. There was too great a risk of someone spotting them if they went about in the day time. It was one thing when she was on her own, but he was still new to this. Still new, and still young. Eight years younger than the last time she had seen him. She liked the younger version: he was more manageable. He still trusted her implicitly. She had only been gone a year in his time, less than that really. It was easily put down to the anomalies and another abduction, just like his own. He hadn't met any of his so-called new friends, courtesy of those anomalies, so his loyalty was to her, and her alone. He had seen the devastated wilderness of Cai's world and had been programmed with the details of history that she had wanted him to know thanks to Cai's rapid learning machinery.

Helen watched him walk past her at the foot of the stairs and continue into the kitchen. He was worth watching. The ability to go back in time certainly had it's perks.

"Is there any coffee?"

"It's in the pot," Helen called back, following her prize through to the kitchen. "I heard you moving about upstairs."

"You know me too well, Helen," the man smiled up at her as he poured himself a mug from the steaming coffee-pot.

"You have no idea how well!" Helen smiled in reply.

XXXX

Connor hated Mondays. There were very few things he hated more than a Monday, unless it was a Tuesday after a bank holiday weekend. He knew that, working at the ARC, such things were completely illogical. Monday could just as easily be the last day of his week as his first and bank holidays were, more often than not, their busiest times of year.

He sighed and pulled open the door to his locker. Something white and rectangular fell out as he shoved his bag onto its shelf. He bent down to pick it up. It was, or at least appeared to be, a card in an envelope. It had his name hand-written on the front of the envelope in clear, simply printed capitals.

Connor put the envelope down on a table and shrugged off his coat, hanging it up on a peg before turning his attention back to the envelope. He started to open it, then paused. Wasn't it usually at this point in the horror movies that something bad happened? Weird, inexplicable messages turn up then, while the poor dupe is distracted by opening and reading the message, some black-clad masked manic sneaks up behind him and finds some new, inventive way for him to die horribly?

Connor shook his head. Those were movies. This was real life. They didn't need strangely be-caped homicidal maniacs: they had Helen. Oh, and a bunch of unpredictable doors to any point in time allowing all manner of natural born killers access to a high concentration of happy meals with legs.

Slowly, tentatively, he eased open the flap of the envelope. No massive explosion rent the air apart. No fine white powder puffed out of the opening. No intestine-spilling murdered approached behind him.

He looked over his shoulder, just to check.

Glancing round the locker room like a guilty schoolboy sneaking a look at the answers to his next exam, Connor turned his attention back to the envelope. Curiosity now began to take hold and he eased the card out. Still nothing bad had happened.

He turned over the card. The words "Happy Birthday" in bright yellow letters burst out from a deep blue background covered in cartoon balloons and ticker tape. Connor let out the breath he hadn't realised he was holding and felt his shoulders drop with relief. It was just a late birthday card. Someone had forgot to, or hadn't been able to, get it to him earlier so they had put it in his locker for him to find when he got back to work. It would be easy enough to do, surely. He opened the card to see who the culprit was. Inside, the verse bounced jovially across a page that echoed grey ghosts of the balloons and tape on the outside. He glanced over it cursorily and looked down to the bottom of the page.

Nothing.

Confused, Connor turned the card over and examined both front and back again, then the inside. Nothing. The card was completely devoid of any mark or clue. The only writing he could find was that on the envelope. He frowned. That couldn't be right: nobody would send a birthday card without signing it, surely. Not anyone who worked here, certainly. But then, if it wasn't someone who worked here, who else could it be? Every employee had been checked and double checked since the incident with Leek. Many had been replaced altogether. He knew most of the faces and a lot of the names, even if it was just their first name. There was nobody who worked here that would have given him a card without signing it.

But still: it was just a birthday card, right?

Connor sat, chewing his lip and staring at the card. After a minute of concentrated thought, he got up and headed for Lester's office.

XXXX

Claudia stared at the wall opposite. She didn't want to look at her cell-mate. Apart from the obvious discomfort of looking at your doppelganger, she wasn't sure that she would be able to complete her story if she moved her gaze from that tiny dent in the chalk wall.

"We were supposed to be on our honeymoon," she said, her voice flat and devoid of any emotion. "We'd already left for the airport when the call came through. Lester. He apologised, of course, but they needed Nick. Something to do with Helen. We told the driver to turn the car round and head back into the city, to the Home Office buildings. Nick said it wouldn't take long: we could get the next flight out. Just a bit of negotiating. I didn't know more until we were there and being briefed by Lester and Ryan."

"Ryan?" Jenny cut in.

"Captain Tom Ryan. Our military attaché. He supervised all of the military based operations for the Home Office. Saved Nick from a future predator once, and a raptor. He was a good man."

"I see," Jenny nodded. She had heard her Nick mention Ryan, but in her version of events, the predator had won that ultimate battle. She sensed a reluctance in her companion to return to her story. "Go on," she urged. "What did they brief you?"

"Helen had made contact," Claudia said bluntly. "She wanted to talk to Nick, but alone and face to face. She named a time and place. Lester had shrugged it off and asked her why they should even bother to tell Nick. She said they would regret it if they didn't. He pushed her for more information and she gave him a glimpse of a warehouse, filled with cages."

Jenny shivered. That warehouse sounded all too familiar.

"It became apparent that, somehow, she had been collecting samples of all the creatures that had come through the anomalies, ever since that first one back in the Forest of Dean," Claudia continued, ignoring Jenny. "Ryan suggested that he and his men mount an attack upon the warehouse, but Nick said they couldn't risk letting any of the creatures escape. He went to meet her as she had asked and, as we expected, she kidnapped him." Claudia took a deep breath then continued: "We knew she would try something like this, so we put a tracker on him and followed it to the warehouse. It was a run down looking place, but that was only the part above ground. There was an entire labyrinth of tunnels beneath the surface. Dark, metal-walled and full of stale air. Ryan took his men down into the tunnels. We went in search of the control centre. Stephen led the way. But then we got caught by Helen's men and spent the rest of our time trying to work out how to get out of a cell. They came and took us out of the cell, after a while. Frog-marched us up to the control centre we'd been trying to find. There were monitors there. They showed a massive hall. Ryan and his men were standing in the middle of it, all in a circle facing outwards. Then Helen appeared, out of the shadows, as always. Something had gone wrong, she said. Something that was meant to happen, hadn't happened and now she was going to put things right. Suddenly we saw it: the room that Ryan and his men were in was filled with predators. These ones were different, though: they had machines on their heads. Red, flashing lights. A neural clamp, she called it. She said that it was a matter of destiny: these men had to die, were supposed to be dead already. Suddenly all the lights went out on the heads of the predators and they started dropping on the soldiers. It was a bloodbath. That was when I heard Nick. I couldn't see him. She was keeping him back in the shadows. I didn't know it then, but he was tied up, hands and feet. He was gagged too. With the carnage on the screen, he'd tried to call out. The guards turned their attention away from us for just a second, but that was all we needed. We brought them down before they had a chance to react. Helen slipped out in the fuss.

When the guards were unconscious or, in one case, dead, we went to find Nick. When we got him into the light and took the ropes off, his face was haggard. I'd never seen him look worse. I just put it down to what had happened to Ryan and his men, but I was wrong. 'Didn't you see her?' He asked. I said no, we'd been busy. It was then that he told us what Helen had done just before she slipped out of the control room. She had pressed a button that released the caged creatures in the room below. Nick was adamant: we had to stop them escaping. The predators were loose now too. He had an idea, a plan. He said that the animals associated the sound of a klaxon with food. They should return to the cage room when it sounded, just like Pavlov's dog. We would have to get to the cage room, though, to sound the klaxon.

He said he knew where it was. He and Stephen would go. We should stay here and work out how to close the doors and lock them: Helen had unlocked them from the control room, so we should be able to do the reverse. I didn't want him to go, but what he said made sense and he would never have listened to me anyway. He kissed me and said he'd see me soon, then we could have our honeymoon and leave these guys to clean up the mess. Then he left. Stephen went with him, of course, and we closed the door behind them. It took them five minutes to get to the cage room and sound the klaxon. We couldn't see them, we just got updates on the radios. And we heard the klaxon of course. We had spent all of those five minutes and more at the controls trying to work them out, but nothing we did seemed to have an effect. Connor soon spotted the problem. Before she left, Helen hadn't just released the creatures, she had disabled the control panel too. Now there was no way to close the doors but from the cage room. One control on the inside and one on the outside of the doors. Stephen said the control on the outside was damaged. He would go inside and close it from there. When the creatures returned, he would be the one with the greatest chance of surviving. But Nick wouldn't let him. Stephen told us that Nick had knocked him out and gone into the cage room himself, closing the door behind him as the creatures approached. After that, there was nothing Stephen could do to save him."

"So he watched his friend die."

"So he said."

"What do you mean?"

"Didn't you wonder," Claudia asked, looking over at Jenny for the first time in her narration, "how Helen got hold of all those creatures?"

"In my world, she had help from Leek."

"She had help in my world too," Claudia nodded. "But we didn't have a Leek to help her. Instead, we had Stephen."

"Stephen?" Jenny's jaw dropped. "But..."

"He was Nick's best man at our wedding. He stood beside me at the funeral. He told everyone there how great a friend Nick had been. How humbling his sacrifice was. But all the time, he was lying through his teeth. Nick hadn't sacrificed himself for Stephen. Stephen had knocked him out and dragged him in there. He had closed the door from the outside, then damaged the controls himself. He had betrayed all of us."

Claudia's voice caught in her throat and she took a moment to compose herself before she spoke again. She raised her eyes to meet Jenny's, and they burned with bitter fury as she pronounced her final judgement.

"In my world, your saintly Stephen murdered Nick! He's no hero! He is evil!"