Fic: Frequently Asked Questions (4/6)
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tli_productionsHeader information and notes contained in Part 1.
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
4
“You need to get right in,” Jess says, leaning back in her chair, “so no one can see what we’re doing.”
The whole thing seems over the top but at the same time it’s a sensible precaution, so Stephen ignores the faint twinge in his side and carefully places his hands on either side of Jess’ overly large console chair and leans in over her shoulder so that their cheeks are almost touching.
“How’s this?” he asks, unnerved by the proximity and his sudden lack of peripheral vision.
Jess turns slightly and makes eye contact. “Not quite what I had in mind, but it’ll do,” she tells him, almost cheerfully. Something must be showing on his face because she quickly adds: “I have cameras on the rest of the hub. It’s all safe.”
Stephen forces a slow, nasal exhale and tries to change the subject. “What did you want to tell me?”
Jess’ expression shifts. “Emily and I did some digging last night, after you all left,” she explains. “On Patrick Quinn and Ethan Dobrowski. I already had a file on the latter, but records were bare.”
Stephen frowns.
“Ethan Dobrowski was a real person – before Patrick Quinn assumed his identity. There are birth records, some educational notes, all sorts of official stuff. The kind of thing that a time traveller probably wouldn’t think to make up.” Jess pulls a face. “Honestly I don’t know how much of the adult Dobrowski’s life we can actually attribute to Patrick Quinn.”
“He might have just taken the name long enough to survive before disappearing again.” It’s the kind of thing Stephen might have done, had he been stranded in a human era.
“Exactly,” Jess nods. “I gave the original file to Matt when we were first trying to track Ethan down – before you got back. But last night, Emily and I found some more stuff. I – I’ve uploaded it to a secure server, emailed you the link.”
She looks worried, and Stephen frowns again. “What is it?” he asks as gently as he knows how.
Jess hesitates. “One night in January 1937, the bodies of two men were found by a river near Vladivostok. It was the middle of winter, so it was recorded as exposure, and they were never identified. There was a single eyewitness, an elderly woman who saw a strange man in the area the night before the two men were found.”
“Let me guess,” Stephen says, “he matched Ethan’s – Patrick’s – description?”
Jess nods. “She claimed she had a conversation with him, and that he identified himself as Ethan Dobrowski. According to police archives, he apologised for bothering her, and for what he had done before disappearing into the night. The police couldn’t implicate him in the men’s deaths, but it obviously still made their report. But that’s the thing. The same night in what’s now St. Petersburg, a man named Ethan Dobrowski was locked up in a police station for what they called ‘subversive acts’.”
“So Danny’s brother grew up to either be a transient possible murderer, or some kind of protestor?” Stephen asks. “How does this help us?”
“I don’t know,” Jess admits. “But over maybe a ten-year period, there are other dualities we found, most of them criminal, even by modern standards. It would have been impossible for one man to have done everything attributed to Dobrowski, at least the stuff that survived to modern records.”
“So some of it was definitely Danny’s brother.”
“It looks like it,” Jess nods. “Which really doesn’t look good for Danny. Never mind what we know about Patrick’s disappearance.”
Stephen had never met Danny in his original timeline, and he’d never given much thought to the circumstances around the ex-police officer’s involvement with this ARC.
“Cliff notes?” he asks quietly.
Jess considers him for a long moment. “Patrick went missing when he and two boys were playing in a haunted house as kids. One of them was found dead, the other got out. Patrick was presumed dead – until yesterday.”
“Haunted.”
Jess pulls a face. “We know better now,” she says wryly, “but the stories about that house go back decades, at least. It’s been derelict for years, no one wants anything to do with it.”
Stephen closes his eyes tightly for a moment. “I need to find Hilary.”
“He’s in your lab,” Jess says quickly. When Stephen glances at her, she shrugs and tilts her head to the tray of black boxes at the end of her workstation. “Even if it wasn’t my job to keep track of everyone, he’s been easy to track for the last few days.”
“Oh.”
Jess smiles. “You’re welcome. Now off you go.”
Stephen snorts, which makes Jess jump. She glances at him, then makes a shooing motion while staring intently at a monitor filled with code.
Stephen takes his cue and leaves the hub. He walks to the lift, and a shiver runs down his spine.
Out of the corner of his eye he sees Burton, sitting in Lester’s office. Watching him.
o o o o o
Danny is woken up by a violent tug on his arm. He has barely enough time to think but the alarm hasn’t gone off yet, before the adrenaline kicks in.
He jerks upright as Patrick takes a step back, out of kicking range.
Danny looks around him. He’s still surrounded by twilight gloom, but the skies are clearer. He doesn’t recognise the stars.
“Time to go.” Patrick’s voice is hard. His hand drops down and caresses the revolver still awkwardly holstered inside his stolen suit trousers.
“Where are we going?” Danny takes his time pushing himself to his feet. He’s a little stiff, and hungry as hell, but otherwise he’s had far worse nights than this.
His brother’s expression is unreadable. He jerks his head to his left a little. “This way, come on.”
The pace is slow. They both keep each other in their periphery, and after maybe an hour of quiet trudging through some kind of savannah Patrick takes a machine out of his pocket. Danny can’t get a proper look at it, but it’s small and modern looking – stolen off one of the soldiers Patrick had knocked out at the wedding venue, maybe?
Patrick presses buttons and levers a few times.
They’re in a hilly patch now. Danny tries his luck again. “Where are we going?”
Patrick gives him a long, cold glare. “You’ll see when we get there. Might take a few extra stops, mind you.”
Danny wants to ask what he means, but just then they crest a small hill and Danny nearly stumbles when he realises what’s in front of them.
A small anomaly, flush on the ground.
Patrick makes a satisfied noise. “Right on time,” he tells Danny cruelly. He puts the machine away, takes out the revolver and then grabs Danny’s elbow with his free hand.
“Let’s go.”
o o o o o
Somewhere around 3am, Jenny gives up on sleep. She leaves her jacket on the bed in Lester’s guest room and tries to find her way to the living room. It takes a couple of attempts to find the right door, and she finds herself back in the large, open plan space where she’d been offered her choice from the liquor cabinet.
She ignores all of that and ferrets around in the cubby-like kitchen for a glass which she ends up filling with cold water. Moonlight and quiet city noises filter in through a balcony window, and she leans against the window frame, looking out but not really watching the city below.
Her mind is a rush. Danny and Claudia, Ethan, Patrick, Stephen, the anomalies; her head is a chaotic mess of everything she thought she’d left behind, and everything else that won’t let her go.
A noise behind her makes her jump. She drops the glass; it bounces on the carpet, water splashing everywhere, and she swears.
In the shadows, Lester holds his hands up in apology. He disappears into the kitchen then reappears with a towel, which he uses to mop the water. Jenny scoops up the empty glass, adrenaline pumping and mortified.
“You couldn’t sleep either,” she blurts out. It sounds louder than it should and she claps her free hand over her mouth.
Lester affects a smile and holds his hand out for the glass. “No,” he says simply. He puts the glass in the kitchen sink, then motions Jenny to the sofa. She hesitates, then sinks down onto it. With more grace than anyone should have at this time of the morning, Lester perches at the other end.
“I’m scared,” Jenny says before the silence can get too awkward. She’s surprised to find it’s partly true. There’s still a numbness around the edges of everything that’s happened over the last twelve hours, but the sudden adrenaline is already giving way to something much more familiar underneath.
“You should be,” Lester says quietly. When Jenny looks up at him sharply, he makes a gesture with his hands. “I’d be far more concerned if you weren’t.”
Jenny exhales sharply. “How long... have you known?”
In the shadows Lester’s face is almost invisible. “About what?”
A desperate noise forms in Jenny’s gut. “Claudia Brown?”
“As far as I know, she appeared yesterday,” Lester answers quietly.
“Stephen?”
“He’s been back about six days.”
“Abby and Connor?”
“A couple of months, now.”
“Bloody hell,” Jenny breathes. She’d been able to piece together some of it earlier – yesterday? – at the wedding venue, even with everything else that had happened, but hearing it in Lester’s calm delivery had a whole different impact.
Lester makes a small noise. “Not to sound cowardly, but I did try to respect your decision – both of your decisions – to sever ties when you left.”
Jenny’s hands find a scatter cushion. She pulls it close. “It wasn’t personal.”
“I know.”
And he does know, that’s the thing. It had been Lester who had overseen the original plan to go to the future to find Abby, Connor and Stephen; he’d procured one of the few surviving anomaly locking mechanisms to keep the present and future at the racetrack separated for as long as possible. He’d stayed behind to guard the site and run interference.
Whatever bureaucratic voodoo had kept them – and Sarah’s “disappearance” – off the government’s radar for as long as it had, Jenny had never given it enough thought other than to be grateful for the perceived head-start when she and Danny had individually decided to call it quits.
Maybe she should have – given it more thought, she means.
There must be something showing on her face, or else the silence had gone on for too long, because Lester’s next line is: “Penny for them?”
Jenny snorts, shakes her head. “I was just thinking about the last mission we went on,” she explains. “You did so much for us.”
A shadow crosses Lester’s face – not just from the clouds outside. “You all did so much more.”
Tears prick at Jenny’s eyes. She, Danny, Becker and Sarah had left for the future ARC.
She, Danny and Becker had come back.
And then she and Danny had left what was left of the present ARC.
Now Danny was gone and it was just her, alone in the night.
No, not alone.
Jenny hugs the cushion tightly to her stomach. “This is all wrong,” she whispers.
“Yes, it is.”
Jenny closes her eyes.
When she opens them again, sunlight is streaming through the window, and she’s covered in a thin blanket.
At the other end of the sofa is a set of keys and a sheet of headed paper with an immaculately written set of phone numbers on it.
The first one is annotated Jessica Parker. Call to make lunch plans.
o o o o o
In the end, Claudia doesn’t have to wait for an anomaly to open. It’s been a full season since her encounter with Charlotte, the equivalent of spring bringing longer days and some easy to catch fish upstream in the valley.
It had taken her a while to figure out how to set effective traps, but half remembered flashbacks to boorish Keith from the Home Office have finally landed Claudia a feast. The fish are small enough to fit in the palm of her hand, but there are at least a dozen and she knows what to do with them.
On the horizon, at the valley crest, a shadow moves along the skyline.
Bird monster!
Claudia grabs her food pouch and hits the ground.
The shadow keeps moving along the skyline.
Claudia glances around. Her fishing traps are hidden. She blends into her surroundings.
She squints into the distance.
Something is coming towards her.
Claudia retreats a few steps, reaches for her stick.
The thing gets closer, and she realises it looks like a person.
Not a person. A hominid.
It’s coming straight for her.
The hominid staggers towards Claudia, then veers to the stream. It collapses into the shallow water, and Claudia lets out a loud, jagged breath. She keeps hold of her stick, and with her free hand reaches out to touch the hominid’s shoulder.
It’s one of the smaller adults, and it’s shivering. It rolls over into its back when Claudia jostles its shoulder and she sucks in a loud gasp.
Blood trickles out of the hominid’s mouth, and it reaches out with a shaking hand and grasps Claudia’s fingers.
Easy, easy, Claudia wants to say, but her throat is dry. She drops her stick and touches the hominid’s forehead with the back of her hand. It’s feverishly hot.
The hominid groans, then loosens its grip on Claudia’s hand. Slowly its arm drops back to its body and it stops breathing.
Claudia looks for a pulse, but there’s nothing. The only sounds she can hear are the trickling of the stream and her own rushed breathing.
She looks around again. The hominid had come from over the hill, so she picks her stick back up and starts climbing.
It’s not long before she reaches the top. She flings her hand to her mouth, but it doesn’t make a difference.
Even if she could have made a sound, there is nobody to hear it. The downward slope into the next valley is littered with the bodies of hominids. If any of them are still alive, Claudia can’t tell.
She slowly walks down the hill, still wary of making any noise. There are already screeches coming from above, and Claudia knows it’s only a matter of time before the larger scavengers make their move.
It’s almost enough to make her sick. These people had been good to Claudia before winter. This shouldn’t be how they end.
There’s a small river running through this valley as well, maybe connected to the one in Claudia’s territory, but the closer she gets to it the more she can see that something is wrong.
The water is cloudy. Whatever is in the water, it looks wrong. Unnatural.
Artificial.
Claudia empties her pouch of the hard-won seafood, but the mystery remains. Even if there were any survivors in this group, no one would be able to tell her what had happened.
She catches a glimpse of something out of the corner of her eye. At first she thinks she’s hallucinating, because why the hell would there be a dinosaur in her corner of the Pliocene?
Then she takes another look, and her heart sinks again.
She approaches as carefully as she had come down the hill, stick ready to swing, but she can already see that the dinosaur is dead. She can’t tell what it is, when in time it had come from, but that doesn’t matter.
It’s here, it’s dead and it might be the reason all the hominids are dead.
Except, as Claudia gets closer still, it might not be the dinosaur’s fault after all.
Hidden behind the dead dinosaur is the equally dead body of Helen bloody Cutter.
Finally Claudia makes a noise. It’s loud and ugly and echoes in the valley.
They’re a world away from that day at the ARC with Stepford Nick, Stephen’s disappearing act and the explosion – and Claudia hasn’t thought this much about her old life in way too long.
She doesn’t cry, but it’s a close thing.
She pokes Helen’s body with her stick, just to be sure. Again, for good measure.
Helen’s overalls are unfamiliar, and her boots are woefully inadequate for the terrain, but there’s a full water bottle in a hiking rucksack, along with some notebooks, a change of clothes and a heavy piece of glass.
Tucked into Helen’s belt is a small hunting knife with its own sheath. Claudia barely hesitates before taking it.
She sniffs the contents of the water bottle, pours a little onto the ground, then takes a swig. Could be Evian, which is the most ridiculous thing she’s thought in months but there is a slight tang, and if the river water is somehow contaminated then Claudia will stick to the bottled stuff for a while.
The notebooks are interesting and alien at the same time. They’re all filled with handwriting, a few sketches here and there and what look like newspaper cuttings. Claudia catches a few references to extinction events and fossil records, some longer scientific terms that she doesn’t recognise. Paper-clipped to the inside back cover of one notebook is a large black and white photograph of a man Claudia doesn’t recognise.
A partial caption underneath the picture reads PHILIP BURTON: ARCHITECT OF A NEW DA
Claudia sits back on her heels and takes a deep breath. She tucks the notebooks back into the rucksack, and puts in the resealed water bottle and her food pouch. She considers the piece of glass. It’s the size of a small paperback book, one section blocked out and the rest clear. She turns it over in her hands, slowly piecing together the question of why Helen Cutter would be carrying around an oversized paperweight.
Claudia presses her thumb against one of the corners and the whole thing lights up.
Shocked, she drops it on the ground then slowly reaches out to pick it back up. The lights are inside the glass, forming a picture that she’s never seen before. Three circles have appeared on the blocked out part, and against whatever is left of her better judgement, Claudia presses the middle one.
The picture flashes, and tracks left. Claudia swings the glass in the same direction, and the image moves back to centre.
The left circle flashes twice.
Claudia presses it.
Six metres in front of her, an anomaly bursts into life.
Claudia climbs to her feet and stares at the swirling lights in front of her. It takes too long to break her gaze away. She looks down at Helen’s body by her feet, at the dinosaur behind them, and the valley of dead hominids beyond that.
She makes her decision. She puts the glass into Helen’s rucksack and swings it onto her shoulders. She picks up her stick and says a silent prayer for the hominids.
Then she takes a deep breath and walks through the anomaly.
o o o o o
Onto: Part 5
o o o o o
4
“You need to get right in,” Jess says, leaning back in her chair, “so no one can see what we’re doing.”
The whole thing seems over the top but at the same time it’s a sensible precaution, so Stephen ignores the faint twinge in his side and carefully places his hands on either side of Jess’ overly large console chair and leans in over her shoulder so that their cheeks are almost touching.
“How’s this?” he asks, unnerved by the proximity and his sudden lack of peripheral vision.
Jess turns slightly and makes eye contact. “Not quite what I had in mind, but it’ll do,” she tells him, almost cheerfully. Something must be showing on his face because she quickly adds: “I have cameras on the rest of the hub. It’s all safe.”
Stephen forces a slow, nasal exhale and tries to change the subject. “What did you want to tell me?”
Jess’ expression shifts. “Emily and I did some digging last night, after you all left,” she explains. “On Patrick Quinn and Ethan Dobrowski. I already had a file on the latter, but records were bare.”
Stephen frowns.
“Ethan Dobrowski was a real person – before Patrick Quinn assumed his identity. There are birth records, some educational notes, all sorts of official stuff. The kind of thing that a time traveller probably wouldn’t think to make up.” Jess pulls a face. “Honestly I don’t know how much of the adult Dobrowski’s life we can actually attribute to Patrick Quinn.”
“He might have just taken the name long enough to survive before disappearing again.” It’s the kind of thing Stephen might have done, had he been stranded in a human era.
“Exactly,” Jess nods. “I gave the original file to Matt when we were first trying to track Ethan down – before you got back. But last night, Emily and I found some more stuff. I – I’ve uploaded it to a secure server, emailed you the link.”
She looks worried, and Stephen frowns again. “What is it?” he asks as gently as he knows how.
Jess hesitates. “One night in January 1937, the bodies of two men were found by a river near Vladivostok. It was the middle of winter, so it was recorded as exposure, and they were never identified. There was a single eyewitness, an elderly woman who saw a strange man in the area the night before the two men were found.”
“Let me guess,” Stephen says, “he matched Ethan’s – Patrick’s – description?”
Jess nods. “She claimed she had a conversation with him, and that he identified himself as Ethan Dobrowski. According to police archives, he apologised for bothering her, and for what he had done before disappearing into the night. The police couldn’t implicate him in the men’s deaths, but it obviously still made their report. But that’s the thing. The same night in what’s now St. Petersburg, a man named Ethan Dobrowski was locked up in a police station for what they called ‘subversive acts’.”
“So Danny’s brother grew up to either be a transient possible murderer, or some kind of protestor?” Stephen asks. “How does this help us?”
“I don’t know,” Jess admits. “But over maybe a ten-year period, there are other dualities we found, most of them criminal, even by modern standards. It would have been impossible for one man to have done everything attributed to Dobrowski, at least the stuff that survived to modern records.”
“So some of it was definitely Danny’s brother.”
“It looks like it,” Jess nods. “Which really doesn’t look good for Danny. Never mind what we know about Patrick’s disappearance.”
Stephen had never met Danny in his original timeline, and he’d never given much thought to the circumstances around the ex-police officer’s involvement with this ARC.
“Cliff notes?” he asks quietly.
Jess considers him for a long moment. “Patrick went missing when he and two boys were playing in a haunted house as kids. One of them was found dead, the other got out. Patrick was presumed dead – until yesterday.”
“Haunted.”
Jess pulls a face. “We know better now,” she says wryly, “but the stories about that house go back decades, at least. It’s been derelict for years, no one wants anything to do with it.”
Stephen closes his eyes tightly for a moment. “I need to find Hilary.”
“He’s in your lab,” Jess says quickly. When Stephen glances at her, she shrugs and tilts her head to the tray of black boxes at the end of her workstation. “Even if it wasn’t my job to keep track of everyone, he’s been easy to track for the last few days.”
“Oh.”
Jess smiles. “You’re welcome. Now off you go.”
Stephen snorts, which makes Jess jump. She glances at him, then makes a shooing motion while staring intently at a monitor filled with code.
Stephen takes his cue and leaves the hub. He walks to the lift, and a shiver runs down his spine.
Out of the corner of his eye he sees Burton, sitting in Lester’s office. Watching him.
Danny is woken up by a violent tug on his arm. He has barely enough time to think but the alarm hasn’t gone off yet, before the adrenaline kicks in.
He jerks upright as Patrick takes a step back, out of kicking range.
Danny looks around him. He’s still surrounded by twilight gloom, but the skies are clearer. He doesn’t recognise the stars.
“Time to go.” Patrick’s voice is hard. His hand drops down and caresses the revolver still awkwardly holstered inside his stolen suit trousers.
“Where are we going?” Danny takes his time pushing himself to his feet. He’s a little stiff, and hungry as hell, but otherwise he’s had far worse nights than this.
His brother’s expression is unreadable. He jerks his head to his left a little. “This way, come on.”
The pace is slow. They both keep each other in their periphery, and after maybe an hour of quiet trudging through some kind of savannah Patrick takes a machine out of his pocket. Danny can’t get a proper look at it, but it’s small and modern looking – stolen off one of the soldiers Patrick had knocked out at the wedding venue, maybe?
Patrick presses buttons and levers a few times.
They’re in a hilly patch now. Danny tries his luck again. “Where are we going?”
Patrick gives him a long, cold glare. “You’ll see when we get there. Might take a few extra stops, mind you.”
Danny wants to ask what he means, but just then they crest a small hill and Danny nearly stumbles when he realises what’s in front of them.
A small anomaly, flush on the ground.
Patrick makes a satisfied noise. “Right on time,” he tells Danny cruelly. He puts the machine away, takes out the revolver and then grabs Danny’s elbow with his free hand.
“Let’s go.”
Somewhere around 3am, Jenny gives up on sleep. She leaves her jacket on the bed in Lester’s guest room and tries to find her way to the living room. It takes a couple of attempts to find the right door, and she finds herself back in the large, open plan space where she’d been offered her choice from the liquor cabinet.
She ignores all of that and ferrets around in the cubby-like kitchen for a glass which she ends up filling with cold water. Moonlight and quiet city noises filter in through a balcony window, and she leans against the window frame, looking out but not really watching the city below.
Her mind is a rush. Danny and Claudia, Ethan, Patrick, Stephen, the anomalies; her head is a chaotic mess of everything she thought she’d left behind, and everything else that won’t let her go.
A noise behind her makes her jump. She drops the glass; it bounces on the carpet, water splashing everywhere, and she swears.
In the shadows, Lester holds his hands up in apology. He disappears into the kitchen then reappears with a towel, which he uses to mop the water. Jenny scoops up the empty glass, adrenaline pumping and mortified.
“You couldn’t sleep either,” she blurts out. It sounds louder than it should and she claps her free hand over her mouth.
Lester affects a smile and holds his hand out for the glass. “No,” he says simply. He puts the glass in the kitchen sink, then motions Jenny to the sofa. She hesitates, then sinks down onto it. With more grace than anyone should have at this time of the morning, Lester perches at the other end.
“I’m scared,” Jenny says before the silence can get too awkward. She’s surprised to find it’s partly true. There’s still a numbness around the edges of everything that’s happened over the last twelve hours, but the sudden adrenaline is already giving way to something much more familiar underneath.
“You should be,” Lester says quietly. When Jenny looks up at him sharply, he makes a gesture with his hands. “I’d be far more concerned if you weren’t.”
Jenny exhales sharply. “How long... have you known?”
In the shadows Lester’s face is almost invisible. “About what?”
A desperate noise forms in Jenny’s gut. “Claudia Brown?”
“As far as I know, she appeared yesterday,” Lester answers quietly.
“Stephen?”
“He’s been back about six days.”
“Abby and Connor?”
“A couple of months, now.”
“Bloody hell,” Jenny breathes. She’d been able to piece together some of it earlier – yesterday? – at the wedding venue, even with everything else that had happened, but hearing it in Lester’s calm delivery had a whole different impact.
Lester makes a small noise. “Not to sound cowardly, but I did try to respect your decision – both of your decisions – to sever ties when you left.”
Jenny’s hands find a scatter cushion. She pulls it close. “It wasn’t personal.”
“I know.”
And he does know, that’s the thing. It had been Lester who had overseen the original plan to go to the future to find Abby, Connor and Stephen; he’d procured one of the few surviving anomaly locking mechanisms to keep the present and future at the racetrack separated for as long as possible. He’d stayed behind to guard the site and run interference.
Whatever bureaucratic voodoo had kept them – and Sarah’s “disappearance” – off the government’s radar for as long as it had, Jenny had never given it enough thought other than to be grateful for the perceived head-start when she and Danny had individually decided to call it quits.
Maybe she should have – given it more thought, she means.
There must be something showing on her face, or else the silence had gone on for too long, because Lester’s next line is: “Penny for them?”
Jenny snorts, shakes her head. “I was just thinking about the last mission we went on,” she explains. “You did so much for us.”
A shadow crosses Lester’s face – not just from the clouds outside. “You all did so much more.”
Tears prick at Jenny’s eyes. She, Danny, Becker and Sarah had left for the future ARC.
She, Danny and Becker had come back.
And then she and Danny had left what was left of the present ARC.
Now Danny was gone and it was just her, alone in the night.
No, not alone.
Jenny hugs the cushion tightly to her stomach. “This is all wrong,” she whispers.
“Yes, it is.”
Jenny closes her eyes.
When she opens them again, sunlight is streaming through the window, and she’s covered in a thin blanket.
At the other end of the sofa is a set of keys and a sheet of headed paper with an immaculately written set of phone numbers on it.
The first one is annotated Jessica Parker. Call to make lunch plans.
In the end, Claudia doesn’t have to wait for an anomaly to open. It’s been a full season since her encounter with Charlotte, the equivalent of spring bringing longer days and some easy to catch fish upstream in the valley.
It had taken her a while to figure out how to set effective traps, but half remembered flashbacks to boorish Keith from the Home Office have finally landed Claudia a feast. The fish are small enough to fit in the palm of her hand, but there are at least a dozen and she knows what to do with them.
On the horizon, at the valley crest, a shadow moves along the skyline.
Bird monster!
Claudia grabs her food pouch and hits the ground.
The shadow keeps moving along the skyline.
Claudia glances around. Her fishing traps are hidden. She blends into her surroundings.
She squints into the distance.
Something is coming towards her.
Claudia retreats a few steps, reaches for her stick.
The thing gets closer, and she realises it looks like a person.
Not a person. A hominid.
It’s coming straight for her.
The hominid staggers towards Claudia, then veers to the stream. It collapses into the shallow water, and Claudia lets out a loud, jagged breath. She keeps hold of her stick, and with her free hand reaches out to touch the hominid’s shoulder.
It’s one of the smaller adults, and it’s shivering. It rolls over into its back when Claudia jostles its shoulder and she sucks in a loud gasp.
Blood trickles out of the hominid’s mouth, and it reaches out with a shaking hand and grasps Claudia’s fingers.
Easy, easy, Claudia wants to say, but her throat is dry. She drops her stick and touches the hominid’s forehead with the back of her hand. It’s feverishly hot.
The hominid groans, then loosens its grip on Claudia’s hand. Slowly its arm drops back to its body and it stops breathing.
Claudia looks for a pulse, but there’s nothing. The only sounds she can hear are the trickling of the stream and her own rushed breathing.
She looks around again. The hominid had come from over the hill, so she picks her stick back up and starts climbing.
It’s not long before she reaches the top. She flings her hand to her mouth, but it doesn’t make a difference.
Even if she could have made a sound, there is nobody to hear it. The downward slope into the next valley is littered with the bodies of hominids. If any of them are still alive, Claudia can’t tell.
She slowly walks down the hill, still wary of making any noise. There are already screeches coming from above, and Claudia knows it’s only a matter of time before the larger scavengers make their move.
It’s almost enough to make her sick. These people had been good to Claudia before winter. This shouldn’t be how they end.
There’s a small river running through this valley as well, maybe connected to the one in Claudia’s territory, but the closer she gets to it the more she can see that something is wrong.
The water is cloudy. Whatever is in the water, it looks wrong. Unnatural.
Artificial.
Claudia empties her pouch of the hard-won seafood, but the mystery remains. Even if there were any survivors in this group, no one would be able to tell her what had happened.
She catches a glimpse of something out of the corner of her eye. At first she thinks she’s hallucinating, because why the hell would there be a dinosaur in her corner of the Pliocene?
Then she takes another look, and her heart sinks again.
She approaches as carefully as she had come down the hill, stick ready to swing, but she can already see that the dinosaur is dead. She can’t tell what it is, when in time it had come from, but that doesn’t matter.
It’s here, it’s dead and it might be the reason all the hominids are dead.
Except, as Claudia gets closer still, it might not be the dinosaur’s fault after all.
Hidden behind the dead dinosaur is the equally dead body of Helen bloody Cutter.
Finally Claudia makes a noise. It’s loud and ugly and echoes in the valley.
They’re a world away from that day at the ARC with Stepford Nick, Stephen’s disappearing act and the explosion – and Claudia hasn’t thought this much about her old life in way too long.
She doesn’t cry, but it’s a close thing.
She pokes Helen’s body with her stick, just to be sure. Again, for good measure.
Helen’s overalls are unfamiliar, and her boots are woefully inadequate for the terrain, but there’s a full water bottle in a hiking rucksack, along with some notebooks, a change of clothes and a heavy piece of glass.
Tucked into Helen’s belt is a small hunting knife with its own sheath. Claudia barely hesitates before taking it.
She sniffs the contents of the water bottle, pours a little onto the ground, then takes a swig. Could be Evian, which is the most ridiculous thing she’s thought in months but there is a slight tang, and if the river water is somehow contaminated then Claudia will stick to the bottled stuff for a while.
The notebooks are interesting and alien at the same time. They’re all filled with handwriting, a few sketches here and there and what look like newspaper cuttings. Claudia catches a few references to extinction events and fossil records, some longer scientific terms that she doesn’t recognise. Paper-clipped to the inside back cover of one notebook is a large black and white photograph of a man Claudia doesn’t recognise.
A partial caption underneath the picture reads PHILIP BURTON: ARCHITECT OF A NEW DA
Claudia sits back on her heels and takes a deep breath. She tucks the notebooks back into the rucksack, and puts in the resealed water bottle and her food pouch. She considers the piece of glass. It’s the size of a small paperback book, one section blocked out and the rest clear. She turns it over in her hands, slowly piecing together the question of why Helen Cutter would be carrying around an oversized paperweight.
Claudia presses her thumb against one of the corners and the whole thing lights up.
Shocked, she drops it on the ground then slowly reaches out to pick it back up. The lights are inside the glass, forming a picture that she’s never seen before. Three circles have appeared on the blocked out part, and against whatever is left of her better judgement, Claudia presses the middle one.
The picture flashes, and tracks left. Claudia swings the glass in the same direction, and the image moves back to centre.
The left circle flashes twice.
Claudia presses it.
Six metres in front of her, an anomaly bursts into life.
Claudia climbs to her feet and stares at the swirling lights in front of her. It takes too long to break her gaze away. She looks down at Helen’s body by her feet, at the dinosaur behind them, and the valley of dead hominids beyond that.
She makes her decision. She puts the glass into Helen’s rucksack and swings it onto her shoulders. She picks up her stick and says a silent prayer for the hominids.
Then she takes a deep breath and walks through the anomaly.
Onto: Part 5
o o o o o
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2022-11-22 03:23 pm (UTC)Really like that scene between Jenny and Lester — it's great when Lester shows his human side, and when people realise that he's being holding the anomaly project together.
Cool to see Claudia's experiences finding Helen's body too — although poor hominids... :(
no subject
Date: 2022-11-23 09:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-01 05:20 pm (UTC)*g* It's always good to me to see a dead Helen....
Things are coming together now.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-01 10:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-02 01:44 pm (UTC)Poor Danny! Poor Jenny!
Excited for dead!HELEN though.
no subject
Date: 2023-01-16 11:20 am (UTC)