Castaways in Time (The After Cilmeri Series) (29 page)

“I’m scared, Callum.” Cassie’s eyes were on
her feet as her legs moved rhythmically beside his.

“I am too,” Callum said. “I’m afraid of
losing you.”

“It’s going to work,” David said from a few
steps ahead.

“He’s done it four times,” Callum said.

“That knowledge is keeping me climbing these
stairs,” Cassie said.

Callum found Cassie’s hand and they weaved
their fingers together in a tight clasp.

“I wouldn’t be leading you up here
otherwise,” David said.

Then a door banged below them and feet
pounded on the stairs. Callum looked down through the stairwell.
Driscoll was coming up the stairs behind them, his gun in his
hand.

September, 2017

Cassie

D
riscoll was still
several floors below them, but he was coming on fast. Cassie’s
breath caught in her throat at the sight of the gun. “Oh God.” As
if Lady Jane’s death wasn’t bad enough. She felt like throwing
up.

“Stop!” Driscoll shouted up at them.

David didn’t even break stride. “Not gonna
do that.”

Cassie glanced up at him. When David had
talked about jumping, Cassie hadn’t heard the slightest hitch in
his voice that might indicate fear or uncertainty. At a few inches
over six feet and two hundred pounds, dressed in his freshly
laundered clothing (MI-5 was good for something, it seemed), he’d
transformed himself into the medieval man he’d grown to be. The
last two days had put some uncharacteristic lines around his eyes
and mouth, from exhaustion, Cassie guessed, but that only made him
look more forbidding.

“Just get to the top.” Callum pulled out his
own gun. “I can hold him off if he starts shooting.”

“Why doesn’t Driscoll have anyone with him?”
she said.

“He doesn’t have anyone he can trust any
more than we do,” Callum said.

Because they’d paused to look down, David
was now half a staircase ahead. “Come on, guys. Keep up!” he
said.

Cassie and Callum ran, moving side-by-side
in a steady motion. They caught up with David, and Callum passed
off the duffel to him. David slung it over his shoulder. The papers
in the bag might mean the difference between life and death—a lot
of lives and a lot of deaths—if they could take them home, but
Callum shouldn’t be carrying the bag as well as the gun if Driscoll
started shooting. They passed the seventh floor and then the
eighth. The pounding below them grew closer.

“Don’t look,” Callum said.

Cassie didn’t. She didn’t dare hesitate even
for a second.

The stairs ended at the ninth floor. David
hit the safety bar on the door and went through it. Cassie and
Callum followed. She didn’t know where David was going, but he
seemed to because within a few seconds he found a second stairwell
to the right of a pair of elevators.

No stairs led down from here at all, but
only went up and just one floor, to what Cassie prayed was going to
be the roof. She was terrified—absolutely terrified—of jumping off.
They were completely insane to consider it. She didn’t want to do
it; she didn’t want Callum to do it, but neither could she see
letting David go alone. The possibility of failure had her throat
squeezing closed, but the utterly insane idea that it really might
work kept her following both men up the steps, around a corner, and
out onto the roof.

Bank after bank of solar panels took up most
of the roof space, along with a massive air conditioning unit, some
other industrial-looking boxes which might have been for power and
gas, and an extensive antenna array like on the MI-5 building.
Other than the equipment, the roof was empty and lit up as if it
were day, with torchlights and strobe lights crisscrossing the
night sky. Cassie started across it after David, heading for the
edge. She braced herself with every step for what she had committed
herself to doing:

Jumping off.

They were insane. And yet, she was going
through with it anyway.

“Don’t make me shoot you, Callum!” The shout
echoed across the rooftop.

Cassie stopped and turned to see Callum
facing away from her, standing between her and Driscoll, who
blocked the doorway of the stairwell.

“Let us go, Driscoll!” Callum said. “This
has nothing to do with you.”

Driscoll brought up his gun.

“Get down!” David caught Cassie in his arms,
and they rolled together behind one of the metal boxes.

Two shots rang out, followed by two more and
a shriek, cut off sharply.

“Callum!” Cassie screamed his name and,
after extricating herself from David, scrambled to her feet. Callum
ran towards her, and Cassie almost collapsed in relief.

“Go! Go! Go!” He caught her arm and spun her
around, urging her towards the edge of the roof. “Driscoll’s dead.
We have to get out of here now.”

Before they’d gone three steps, however, the
whuf-whuf-whuf
of a helicopter sounded overhead.

“That’s for me.” David backed away from the
helicopter’s searchlight, which panned across the roof towards them
as the helicopter descended.

Callum moved towards David, but then
staggered—and it was only then that Cassie saw the blood dripping
from his fingers.

“No!” Cassie threw her arms around his
waist, holding him tightly as she sagged with him to their knees.
Another scream rose in her chest.

At last, another agent appeared in the open
doorway that led to the stairwell. He pulled up at the sight of
Driscoll’s body at his feet. David pointed at him. “You! Agent
Callum’s been shot! Go for help!”

The man hesitated.

“Now!” The word split the air.

The man went, his hand to his ear as he
spoke into his phone.

Cassie’s eyes blurred with tears as she and
David together lay Callum down on the hard concrete of the roof.
She kissed Callum’s forehead while David ripped open his shirt. At
the sight of the bullet wound and the blood, David bent his head,
but it was in relief, not despair. “It missed his heart, Cassie.
The bullet hit him high in his shoulder. I think it even went all
the way through and came out the other side.”

“Oh, thank God.” Cassie doubled up the edge
of Callum’s suit jacket and pressed it to the wound, her tears
dripping onto the back of her hands, mixing with Callum’s blood on
her fingers.

“If we get him help soon, he’ll be okay.”
Then David nudged her, forcing her to meet his eyes. “But not if he
comes with me.”

Callum bent his right arm at the elbow,
holding up his hand for David to clasp. He wheezed in pain. “Go. Go
before anyone else comes to stop you.”

David squeezed Callum’s hand. “One of us
will come back for you. If not me, it’ll be Anna or my mom. I swear
it.”

Cassie meant to tell him not to be
ridiculous, that he didn’t have to, but all she got out was, “He’s
weakening.”

“Where’s the medical team? Isn’t this a
hospital!” David glanced towards the elevator doors, which at that
second opened. A team of medics with a stretcher surged towards
them.

Then the backwash of the helicopter blades
swept over them again. “We’ve got your back, whether or not we ever
see you again,” Cassie said.

“I know you do.” David released Callum’s
hand, grabbed the duffel, and ran to the edge of the building.
Without stopping, thinking, hesitating, or looking back, he
launched himself upwards and over the edge, arms and legs
pin-wheeling in the air.

And then he fell below the level of the roof
and was gone.

September, 1289

David

D
avid rolled onto
his back and stared up at the star-strewn sky.

I made it.

He almost didn’t care where he’d landed,
just so long as he wasn’t a flattened pea on a side street in
Cardiff. He’d known that ten stories was over a hundred feet high,
but though he’d launched himself from the roof with a clear vision
of what would follow, the sight of the street below him had been
heart-stopping. He’d fallen, his faith failing him at the last
minute, but even without faith, the familiar-yet-foreign black
abyss had opened up beneath him, and he’d been sucked into it.

An eternity—that is, three seconds—later,
he’d landed with a thump on the turf of a field amidst a herd of
sheep. The animals had scattered at first but had started to creep
back towards him, cropping the grass and no longer concerned about
his presence. “Good thing I’m not a wolf,” he said to them, and
then got to his feet. The ground was wet, but not overly so, and
his cloak had soaked up most of the dampness.

“Okay.” He brushed off the seat of his
breeches and took inventory. The place in his arm where he’d tugged
out the needle hurt a little, his throat was sore only at the tail
end of swallowing, and he was utterly starving. The fish and chips
in the interrogation room had been good but he’d eaten them over a
day ago. All he’d had since then was what they’d fed him through
the IV: salted sugar water and drugs.

All in all, for someone who until half an
hour ago had been unconscious in a hospital bed in the twenty-first
century, he was doing pretty well.

He couldn’t see much of his surroundings due
to the darkness of the evening, but the stars gave him some light
and gradually his eyes adjusted. Only two days in the twenty-first
century, and he had already forgotten what it was like to walk in
an unlit landscape.

His surroundings, as far as he could see,
were relatively flat, consisting of fields and pastures. In the
distance, a dark line gave the suggestion of trees and indicated
that he was near a river, though every spot in Britain was within
hailing distance of a river so that didn’t tell him much. He slung
the duffel over one shoulder, thankful it was made of a muddy brown
canvas that didn’t look overly modern, and started walking towards
the river. He assumed that if he followed it, he would eventually
reach a village. Once there, the inhabitants could tell him where
he was.

David was very conscious of how alone he
was. The whole time he’d been in the twenty-first century, he’d
told himself that nothing was going to stop him from bringing
Cassie and Callum home with him if they wanted to come. To find
himself here without them had thrown him off-kilter. They’d all
felt urgently that David needed to leave in that moment or he would
never have been able to leave. He also knew that he couldn’t have
brought Callum with him, not with a bullet hole in his shoulder.
David had to trust that decision, and that Callum really would be
okay. Modern medicine being what it was, David didn’t have too much
trouble convincing himself of that.

It was a bit harder to convince himself that
his promise to retrieve them was one he could keep. But as David
had found over the years, certain problems had to be put aside to
deal with ones that were more immediate. Callum needed time to
recover from his wound. A few weeks, a few months. It mattered to
all of them that they remained behind, but Cassie and Callum were
together, and they were alive; David could commit them to the care
of others, or God, until he could figure out how to get them
back.

After half a mile of walking, David
approached the river, which was good-sized—at least fifty feet
across. The moon had risen, and the shadows of trees interspersed
with the pinpoints of starlight rippled on the surface of the
water. Without too much stumbling around, David found a trail and
followed it south on the east side of the river, which flowed
north-south at this location. He pulled his cloak tighter against
the chill of the evening, and it was only then that he remembered
he was still wearing Kevlar. He suspected that it had been
Callum’s, but there was no point now in cursing Callum’s generosity
in giving it to him. What was done was done.

David couldn’t wear the vest out in the
open, however, so he took a moment to rearrange the order of his
clothing, putting his shirt and cloak back on over the vest.
Television had made him think that Kevlar was a half inch thick.
Callum’s Kevlar, however, was thinner than that, three layers of
woven fabric that felt like nylon, with hard plates inserted in key
places. Though black, not silver, it bore a greater resemblance to
Frodo’s mithril coat than the Kevlar from TV.

He could have put it in the duffel and not
worn it, but something told him he might be better off wearing it,
just until he could put on his own armor again. And then he groaned
as he remembered that he’d left that armor back on the cog in
modern Cardiff. The historians would be having a field day with it,
he was sure, but he would miss it. It had fit him perfectly.

It was just as well that he’d remembered
about the Kevlar, because within another quarter-mile, he reached a
bridge across the river he’d been following. Torches lit both ends,
and a phalanx of farmers-turned-soldiers guarded it. At the sight
of them and their village, David knew precisely where he was. He
would have laughed but for the grave expression on the faces of the
men who confronted him.

“Who goes there!”

David halted fifteen paces from the end of
the bridge. He didn’t answer right away, deliberating as to what,
exactly, he was going to say. That the gray-haired guard who asked
belonged to the village of Maidenhead, established just ten years
ago when a bridge was built here across the Thames, changed
everything. Maidenhead was five miles north of Windsor. David had
no men-at-arms or knights with him, but he was the King of England.
He’d been to Maidenhead. The men here might recognize him.

Arms spread wide, David entered the ring of
light thrown out by the torches and approached the group of men. “I
am your king, David.”

For a moment, David wasn’t sure if he’d used
the right form of English because the men stared at him, pikes and
axes at the ready. And then the man who’d spoken first dropped his
pike head to the ground with a
thunk
. “Sire!” He whipped off
his hat and sank to one knee, hastily followed by the other six men
with him. “I am John Wade, headman of this village.”