Soul Seekers (8 page)

20

The base hospital was small, and the ward in which Joshua Ryan was being treated was under armed guard and quarantined from the rest of the building.

Cas saw his father instantly as they entered the ward, lying on his back with an oxygen mask across his face and a saline drip in his arm. But the oxygen mask was suspended from wires and the saline needle was held in position using a jerry-rigged stand. Cas dashed to his side but was stopped by an armed soldier.

‘Not too close, kid, okay?’

The soldier held him firmly but gently, and Cas nodded as his mother knelt down alongside him at the foot of the bed and wrapped her arms around his waist. Cas heard her voice straining to hold back tears as she spoke.

‘What’s happening to him?’

Doctor Harrison stepped past them to the side of the bed and reached down. Cas watched as the scientist’s hand scythed through his father’s leg and out the other side as though nothing was there.

‘Your father, technically, is becoming a ghost,’ Doctor Harrison explained. ‘Lost in time. That is, in a way, what a ghost is. An aberration in time, nothing more. If his mind, his brain, his sense of self remains in the past for much longer, then he will vanish from the present all together.’

Cas felt sick as he realised what was happening to Joshua.

‘So my father was forced to live out his life in seclusion,’ he said finally.

‘Yes,’ Doctor Harrison confirmed. ‘But he left his work behind for us in that shack, a message from the past to the present that we might somehow find and understand. He never gave up hope that he could be found.’

Cas turned to the scientist. ‘He has been found. We can change this.’

‘You cannot alter the past,’ General Winchester growled from nearby.

‘We already did,’ Cas snapped back. ‘People saw us who didn’t before. We were there. You said it yourselves – time is an illusion. My father is there in the past right now!’

‘Your father,’ General Winchester insisted, ‘sacrificed his life so that history would remain preserved. Changing anything, no matter how small in the past, can have immense repercussions in the present.’

‘All the more reason,’ Emily said demurely, ‘to put things right, no?’

‘I’m afraid that will not be possible,’ General Winchester said. ‘The project has been shut down as a result of the accident. We have no means of helping you.’

Cas shook his head. ‘Then find a way! You got us into this mess so you get us out of it!’

‘Can’t you build another machine?’ Karen asked.

‘The machine did not work,’ the general said. ‘It allowed us to see brief images of the past when standing close to it, with headgear that we devised to amplify its signals. But it was hugely unstable and, as you now know, eventually was destroyed. I’m sorry, but now you will all have to leave.’

The soldiers standing around them began ushering them out of the hospital ward. Cas’s mother resisted, shoving one of the soldiers aside.

‘Like hell! I’m not leaving my husband’s side!’

General Winchester gripped her arm. ‘You have to leave. I have my orders.’

‘Obviously your orders are more important than your humanity!’ Karen shouted.

General Winchester pushed her toward the hospital door. Karen turned, and in a flash folded one of her hands over the general’s forearm. Cas stared in amazement as his mother whirled and bowed over, the general’s huge frame flipping over his mother’s shoulder to crash down onto the tiled floor of the hospital.

Before General Winchester could respond, his arm was twisted hard as Karen’s boot slammed into his shoulder, pinning him on his back on the ground. Cas smiled with pride as his mother glared down at the big soldier.

‘I don’t take orders from you,’ she whispered, her words all the more forceful for being spoken quietly. ‘Either find a way to help my husband or I’ll blow this whole thing open tomorrow morning.’

With that she released him and stormed out of the ward, one hand holding her head as Cas saw her fighting back tears.

Everybody stared in silence as General Winchester hauled himself up off the floor and massaged his shoulder with one giant hand.

‘I bet that didn’t go quite as you’d planned,’ Jude chortled at him.

The general’s head swivelled around to glare at them, but it was Siren who spoke.

‘If you don’t help, Cas will lose his father,’ she said.

General Winchester stared down at her. ‘There’s nothing that I can do,’ he insisted.

Siren watched him for a long moment, and then turned her back on him and walked out of the ward.

One by one everybody followed her. Cas desperately wanted to go and find his mother, but something important had popped into his head. He waited until only the general and Doctor Harrison remained.

‘You said that your people wore headgear,’ he said to the general. ‘To amplify the signals from the device you built.’

‘Yes,’ the general nodded. ‘So?’

‘And you said that the human brain is only able to see the past
sometimes
, which is when we see ghosts,’ Cas said to Doctor Harrison, ‘but that Jude, Emily, Siren and my own brain’s frequencies have been altered so that we see the past more often.’

‘Yes,’ Doctor Harrison confirmed. ‘That’s why you’re seeing ghosts all the time now.’

Cas realised that there was less time left that he had thought.

‘Last night, my hand passed straight through a glass of water in my bedroom,’ he said.

Doctor Harrison stared at him, and then at Joshua where he lay on the bed. ‘Oh no.’

‘We need to go back and put this right,’ Cas said to the general, ‘or it won’t just be my father who disappears forever. We’ll all be gone, including your daughter, Serena.’

The general stared down at Cas for a long moment, and then to Cas’s amazement the huge man’s features crumbled as though collapsing in on themselves and he turned his face away to hide the tears forming in his eyes.

Doctor Harrison shook his head.

‘I’m sorry Cas’,’ he said, ‘but there’s no way to reverse what’s happened to you. What is done is done.’

‘No it’s not,’ Cas replied. ‘You said that some people naturally were able to see their previous lives, and as long as they didn’t stay too long they were okay afterward?’

‘Yes,’ the scientist agreed. ‘There are hundreds of people who have achieved this, seen the past through hypnosis and such like. But that’s different.’

‘Not now it isn’t,’ Cas said as he felt a ray of hope pierce the gloom inside him. ‘I have an idea.’

* * *

21

Siren Winchester stood in a corridor that led to a single, large door. A brass plaque on the door reflected the soft glow of the ceiling lights, the name Gen. Abraham Winchester written across it in bold, heavy letters. The script suited her father’s personality well.

She paced closer to the door and reached up to knock, but then hesitated.

Siren wasn’t used to hesitation, except when it came to her father. His dominance in her life was both an anchor and a burden, one that she shouldered angrily, taking that anger out on those around her. Siren had been taught to fight by her father, both mentally and physically, but she often wondered what she was fighting for. Her classmates did not respect her, they feared her. Her teachers did not respect her, they struggled to control her. Her father, the source of her strength, did nothing but belittle her.

She felt as though she had fought her entire life, for nothing. The realisation rekindled the anger within and she knocked hard on the door.

‘Enter.’

Siren walked into her father’s office and shut the door behind her.

The office was Spartan, scoured of decoration but for a small photograph in a frame that stood on his broad metal desk. Her father’s broad shoulders were hunched and he was staring at the photograph, the mahogany frame stark against the aluminium and grey in the office.

‘What do you want?’ the general murmured.

‘I was about to ask you the same question.’

Her father lifted his big, craggy head to look at her. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

Siren glanced around her at the office. ‘All of this,’ she replied, ‘the long hours, the bare offices, the machines and the experiments. You were a soldier, not a scientist. What have you been doing here? Why didn’t you tell me about it?’

‘Because it was none of your business,’ he snapped back. ‘This was a matter of national security.’

Siren had heard that phrase so many times in her life that she had learned long ago to detest it. She screwed her face up in disgust.

‘That’s what you always say, when you don’t want to talk about things.’

Her father’s eyes bore into hers from across the office but he did not reply. Then his gaze fell back to the framed photograph on his desk. Siren did not need to cross the room to know what the image showed: it had been taken a decade before on a beach in California, when Siren had been just four years old.

Suddenly, it all seemed clear. Siren watched her father staring forlornly at the photograph for a moment longer and realised just what this was all about.

‘It’s mom, isn’t it,’ she said finally. ‘You want to find her.’

The general slowly sucked in a deep breath, as though dragging all of the air out of the office before exhaling it in a gale of despair.

‘I thought it would work,’ he said, more to himself than to her. ‘I really thought that this time it would work. They
said
it would work.’

Siren paced silently across the office to her father’s desk and looked at the photograph.

The beach was a strip of bright white sand, the sky blue, beautiful crashing rollers behind them. Her father, his big muscular arm reaching out of shot where he was holding the camera pointing back at them, dominated one side of the image. Siren, sitting on his other huge arm as he held her, was in the middle. And with her arms wrapped around them both, her mother, Claire, her smile bright and her features filled with life.

Just one year after the picture had been taken she had passed away after a long battle with an illness that had struck without warning and without mercy. Just gone, totally. Siren had not understood then and still didn’t now, how somebody so vibrant, so loving and so damned important to her could simply no longer exist.

The thought prompted her to speak.

‘She’s gone, pa’,’ she said finally. ‘Even if you find her in the past, find her in a previous life, she won’t know who we are. She won’t recognise us.’

Her father’s reply was taut as though his vocal chords were being twisted. ‘You can’t know that.’

‘I can,’ Siren corrected him. ‘We took our own memories back with us but nothing else. We remembered the present whilst trapped in the past, but anybody back there knew nothing of the future. Mom would be a normal person living their life and would have no knowledge of us, no connection. If you approached her she would run away.’

‘No!’

Siren flinched as her father’s huge balled fists slammed down onto his desk and he shot to his feet. He glared down at her but said nothing, his eyes trembling and the muscles in his jaw pulled tight across his face. Siren looked at the pair of telephones on his desk.

‘You could use those telephones right now,’ she said, ‘and organise something to help Cas and his father, Joshua.’

Her father stared down at the phones and shook his head. ‘It’s too late for them,’ he replied. ‘We no longer have a definitive means of returning Joshua Ryan to the present, nor a sufficient reason for doing so.’

‘Sufficient reason?’ Siren echoed. ‘And what’s a sufficient reason pa’, for you?’

Her father stood resolute, not looking at her as he replied.

‘Joshua Ryan has committed an act of supreme courage and ensured, as far as we can tell, that his presence in the past has not contaminated the future in any way. There is no reason to risk undoing all of his hard work by tampering further with the past.’

Siren nodded as though understanding. ‘And if it was mom who was trapped in 1776?’

Her father’s big head jerked to look down at her. ‘Don’t challenge me, young lady, or I’ll have you grounded for a month.’

‘Fine, do it,’ Siren shot back. ‘We’ve already lost mom but Cas’s father is still within reach. Are you going to put him through what we’ve been through? Are you going to make his mother feel the way you do now?’

General Winchester stared down at her as his anger shrivelled, a brief glimmer of horror flitting like a dark shadow across his eyes.

‘I have no choice,’ he uttered.

Siren’s eyes welled with tears of disbelief and she turned her back on him and walked to the office door. As she opened it, she glanced back at the general.

‘Then I’ve lost my father, too,’ she whispered.

The door closed before the general could reply, and he stared down at the picture frame and the two telephones on his desk.

* * *

22

‘I’m going back.’

Cas stood in front of Jude and Emily in the hospital corridor. Their parents were standing nearby and Siren was walking toward them all looking strangely downtrodden.

‘You’re doing
what
?’ Emily uttered.

‘I can go back any time I want to,’ Cas insisted. ‘I’m special.’

‘You sure are special, Cas’,’ Jude replied. ‘How the hell are you going to go back?’

Cas took a breath and explained his idea.

‘The military people who worked on this experiment were able to see the past by wearing special headsets that amplified their brain’s ability to see the past, but they only saw glimpses by looking into that sphere of energy. We already have the ability to see the past since we fell through the energy field. If we just put the headsets on then we should be able to see everything in the past just like we did before.’

‘You don’t know that,’ Cas’s mother said and knelt down before him. ‘I know you want to help but even I don’t understand how all of this works. If you went back again you might end up like your father, like a ghost and trapped between the past and the present. You wouldn’t want that would you?’

Cas looked into her eyes.

‘I’d rather that than do nothing.’ His mother smiled as a tear trickled down her cheek. ‘How did you do that to the general?’ Cas asked her. ‘It was way cool.’

Karen managed a laugh and shrugged.

‘I was a judo instructor before I met your father,’ she said. ‘I haven’t done anything like that for years.’

A reply rumbled down the corridor from behind them.

‘And you won’t be doing anything like it again,’ General Winchester said.

Cas, Jude, Emily and Siren turned to face the general as he looked down at them from where he stood in the corridor, his broad shoulders almost touching the walls either side of him. Doctor Harrison was behind him. There was a long wait for the general to speak, and when he did so his voice was laden with concern as he looked over his shoulder at Doctor Harrison.

‘You’re sure that this will work?’

‘It’s possible,’ Doctor Harrison replied. ‘Right now it’s the only chance we have to reach Captain Ryan before the signal from the past is lost.’

General Winchester looked down at Cas.

‘You have a remarkably resourceful young mind,’ he rumbled. ‘Ensure that you use it or this will all be for nothing. Either way it’s almost certain that my career will soon be over.’

Siren looked up at her father, a twinkle of delight in her eyes. ‘Have you got orders to go ahead with this?’

The general looked down at his daughter and shook his head. ‘No. I have not informed the Pentagon.’ Then he looked at the rest of them. ‘Follow me.’

The group followed the general back into the facility, where a group of soldiers had moved Joshua on his bed. Around Joshua’s head was a large contraption with wires and electrodes poking out of it. Another empty bed lay alongside his, with another headset already attached.

The big screen nearby was still showing the map of the earth, with the clock in the corner recording the current time. Cas stopped near the beds as Doctor Harrison finished preparing the headsets and turned to them.

‘There is no precedent for this,’ he said. ‘This technique has never been tested. Frankly I have no idea what the outcome will be, but what is for sure is that nobody outside of this room can ever know that this happened, understood?’

Cas nodded. Siren stood with her father nearby, watching closely as Doctor Harrison continued.

‘This is how it will happen,’ he said to Cas. ‘I have fitted a headset to your father. These sets detect the frequency of certain parts of the brains, which we can use to help us send your conscience back to the right place in time. That’s how this method of time-travel should work. Your body remains here, but your brain is re-tuned to the frequency of your brain in a previous life, and thus you see through the eyes of your previous life.’

The scientist gestured up to the screen above them.

‘As the earth moves through its passage and it detects the past, so you see it. But soon it will have moved on, and the time period you’re able to see will be left behind for another year. My best estimate is that you have about twenty-four hours to locate your father and bring him back.’

‘How?’ Cas asked. ‘How do I bring him back?’

Doctor Harrison sighed.

‘That will be the hard part,’ he said. ‘He will by now have started to lose touch with our present. He will forget things, become absorbed by the past until it becomes
his
present. You must bring him back to this very spot, where Hascomb Base is now, and be here at precisely the same time as you arrived yesterday. When the earth passes through the same moment in time, we can alter the electrical fields in your headsets that will re-tune both of your minds into the present.’

Cas looked at his father lying on the bed as though asleep. He looked almost normal but for the fact that he was ever so slightly transparent, like a ghost.

‘Can you put me back in the same place that we left, on Boston Common?’

‘I’ll do my best,’ Doctor Harrison replied, ‘but this isn’t something I’ve done before. Our original device was simply designed to
look
into the past, not
re-live
it. It’s been almost twenty-four hours since you returned, so if I match the frequencies correctly to those that your father is displaying then you should appear in 1776 at the very same place and moment that you left.’ He checked his watch. ‘We must hurry.’

General Winchester spoke from one side. ‘There is another reason to hurry. My superiors will be here at the base in the morning to supervise the shutting down of the remainder of the site. All of the equipment will be taken back. This is your only chance to succeed.’

Emily spoke up from one side.

‘I get how this time thing works now, but how come Joshua is vanishing but we’re not? He fell through the energy field just like we did.’

Doctor Harrison glanced at Cas before replying.

‘Joshua went into the energy field just before you did,’ he replied. ‘Although only a matter of moments in the present, he arrived in the past at least a day before you.’

Jude put the pieces together quickly and his face fell suddenly. ‘So we’re going to end up like that too?’

‘Let’s concentrate on one thing at a time,’ General Winchester cut in. ‘Are you prepared to do this, Cas?’

Cas nodded without hesitation. ‘I’m ready.’

Doctor Harrison gestured to the empty bed. ‘Then you had best lie down.’

Cas turned for the bed but was surprised to hear Jude’s voice. ‘You’re going to need some extra beds and headsets.’

Cas turned as Jude stepped up. ‘You don’t need to come too, Jude,’ he said. ‘There’s no point in us all risking our necks.’

‘Are you kidding?’ Jude uttered. ‘I’d be risking my neck if I left it all to you. What kind of world would this be without
me
in it?’

‘I’m in too,’ Emily said. ‘You shouldn’t have to do this alone, Cas’.’

From one side, Siren stepped forward without a word to join them.

‘No,’ General Winchester snapped at his daughter. ‘This is too dangerous.’

Siren looked over her shoulder at her father. ‘Which is why it shouldn’t be left to one person,’ she said, and then looked at Cas. ‘Especially a wimp.’

A smile flickered across Siren’s features and Cas grinned back at her. ‘Not going to argue.’

Doctor Harrison gestured at the soldiers watching nearby, who immediately dashed off to find more beds and collect more headsets.

General Winchester loomed over Siren, looking down at her with a strange expression that Cas guessed was something between anger and hope. Then, the general bowed over and wrapped his huge arms around Siren.

‘Don’t do this,’ the big man whispered to his daughter. ‘I can’t lose you too.’

Everybody stood in silence as Siren, her own arms barely able to reach around her father, replied.

‘You won’t. This is worth it, pa.’

As the beds and headsets were wheeled into place, Jude and Emily turned to their mothers, who hugged them tightly. Cas heard Jude speaking to his mother as she held him. ‘I won’t be long mom, just got to pop out for a century or two.’

Emily, Siren and Jude took their places on the beds as Cas turned to his mother.

‘We’ll be back soon,’ he said with a smile that he hoped looked confident.

Karen nodded and held his hand. ‘Don’t let your father boss you around.’

Cas hugged her and then walked to the last empty bed. He climbed onto it, and Doctor Harrison adjusted the headset to fit him snugly. Then he stood back and looked at them all.

‘You’ll be travelling back to 1776 very shortly,’ he said.

Emily’s voice drifted into Cas’s ear from somewhere to his right. ‘Can we be hurt, or die, if we’re there and here at the same time?’

The reply was from General Winchester. ‘We don’t know.’

‘Great,’ Jude uttered. ‘Best virtual-reality game on earth and they go and make the bullets real.’

Doctor Harrison’s voice called out from a control panel nearby.

‘Going live in five, four…’

Cas closed his eyes and hoped that they would end up somewhere safe.

‘…three, two…’

A sudden thought flashed through Cas’s mind. What if they didn’t find the
exact
spot they needed to be in order to return their minds to the present?

One
.

Cas felt a warmth wash over him and the sounds of the facility and Doctor Harrison’s voice vanished into an eternal distance.

* * *