Chapter 1 a whole new world
The big ball of bright stabbing pain eased and Ben felt he could start to breath again, slowly he took a deep deep breath and thought he could almost feel the oxygen reaching to all the extremities of his body.
He led still for a moment, internally checking for any injuries, all seemed well and he flexed his muscles slowly. He lifted his head off the floor and looked around, it was dark, which was good. He was in a small room, a window set high in the wall showed darkness outside.
He slowly, oh so slowly got to his feet, the pain receding with each movement that he made, god he could murder a whiskey. He moved towards the wall closest to him and leant against it, thinking ahead trying to work out where to go from here.
He knew he must be close to the target, the Lightening machine had never got it wrong before. He looked around for his weapons, he couldn’t seem to see them. Moving closer to the place where he had made his appearance he knelt down and felt along the floor in case they had been disrupted during transition. Nothing, god damn it! This was new, he needed his weapons in order to get in and out as fast as possible, he needed to get some new weapons and fast, if he stayed longer than he was scheduled he would be stuck and he knew nothing about the time that he was in.
He left the room cautiously, making sure not to make a sound. He was at the top of a flight of stairs, in what appeared to be an old fashioned style of house. A door stood open at the bottom of the stairs, with muted light leaking under the door. He went down with his back against the wall, constantly looking around making sure no one was around. As he crept towards the door it opened in front of him, an old man stood in the doorway. Ben froze where he stood, shit shit this was the target and Ben had still not gottne to a weapon!!! The old man smiled a crooked smile at Ben, and when he spoke it was in a whisper ‘do you know yet? Do you know?’ Ben shook his head, what was this? A target head never spoken before, everything seemed to be going wrong, had the Lightening machine made a mistake? Had a glitch occurred as he travelled? The old man was still looking at him smiling that stupid smile at him, as if they were sharing the worlds biggest joke.
Ben moved forwards, expecting the old man to back off. He was uncomfortably surprised to see the man stood his ground, seemingly not understanding that he was about to die. As Ben moved swiftly towards the man, he grabbed the nearest thing to hand, a table lamp that felt comfortably heavy in his hands, he swung as he moved forwards aiming at the head. There was a crunching thud as the lamp connected and the old guy collapsed into a heap, like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
Ben didn’t stop but kept his momentum going, he bent down and picked up the target in one swooping move. He was constantly aware of any noises in the house, but so far there was still silence around him. He threw the target over his shoulders and scanned the room, what had the target been doing in here? As he looked around the room, nothing at first glance jumped out at him. It was a normal family room, a fire was crackling in the hearth and a chair sat in front of the fire, but even from here Ben could see that it was empty. Nobody else resided in the room, at the moment and Ben knew that time was ticking on, he could almost feel the time tick tocking down in his head. He shifted the weight of the target and turned towards the front door. He needed to be in the pre arranged place so he could transfer back to his own time.
He ran down the front path and towards the distant town, this was not his goal though, as he switched left towards the school. in the playground he crouched as low as possible while still holding the target tightly.
As the first wave of dizziness hit, Ben did not at first realise anything was wrong as this feeling was a usual side effect of time travelling. But as the wave kept up its momentum and the surrounding area did not disappear as it should be doing, Ben started to worry. Seconds ticked by, each moment Ben was more and more aware that he was not going anywhere, even though the feeling of time travel stayed with him. After what seemed like an eternal age, but may well have been only minutes the feeling subsided and Ben felt normal again.
He stood up and looked around, he was still in the school grounds, with the target at his feet where he had left him. He reached into his back pockets looking for the emergency distress beacon, which would echo through time in the event of an agent being trapped. There was nothing there, his pockets where empty. God damn it first his weapons didn’t travel with him, and now his beacon was gone also.
For the first time, a slight tinge of worry started to override the annoyance Ben was feeling. Something has gone wrong, why had he still felt the side effects of travel but without the actual travel? He stood there frozen, unable to think of a way forwards, then his training kicked in. one step at a time Ben, one step at a time.
Most importantly he had a body at his feet in the dead of the night, anyone walking past would be alarmed and Ben did not want to be noticed and remembered at the moment. In a childish fury he kicked the corpse at this feet, then with a sigh he picked up the corpse one last time and moved out of the playground. He headed towards where he knew the cemetery to be, what better place to hide a corpse than with other dead bodies.
Once he had buried the corpse into an existing plot he lit a cigarette and for the first time thought of his options, that now seemed very few
He could not alert the agency he was trapped in time, but they would have known he had missed his scheduled departure. No doubt they would be sending another agent through soon to pick him up, just as soon as they fixed whatever glitch had occurred. His inbuilt marker would enable them to find him, so all he had to do was lay low for a few hours and he was home free. Feeling a lot more relaxed about his situation, Ben decided to go see if he could get a drink in this god forsaken time.
As ben walked through town, he took notice of his surroundings for the first time, when he had took the assignment he knew he was going back to his old town, but this here and now was far beyond when he knew it. Normally when Ben took missions, he was in and out without taking in the scenery, an assassin in time, the perfect weapon. He had thought when he set off that this would be the same, so had not given a thought to arriving back in Guildburn. Now he had some time to kill, he looked around the town that he had known so well in his own time. It seemed different somehow, he was hard pressed to say what those differences where, but he was also not surprised the time he was in now was 50 years before he was born, so he would have been more surprised to find it exactly the same.
He moved up Main Street, looking for an open bar, it was 2am, surely there would be a bar open some where. As he walked up the street and glanced to his left an right, his brain did a stutter and he once more looked to his left. What the…….
There was a movie poster up on the wall, nothing surprising in that, but what had made Ben stop and stare was the movie star in the poster. Ben knew without a doubt they she had died 20 years before the time he was in now, she was a famous icon. Mostly because she had died so young, and she was now looking at him from the poster in a time that she was not supposed to be alive in. Ok ok, one small change Ben, one small change.
Now more alert than he had been, he looked around for more small signs that the time itself was wrong. There was nothing he could immediate see that alarmed him, but this was not his time so anything could be wrong and he would not be able to see it.
He moved on up the street, taking it all in, the set of the stone in the houses, the shop fronts and what they were selling. All normal for this period, all just as it should be
He turned a corner, and stopped in his tracks, his blood running cold. His heart seemed to stop and then restart at double the tempo.
There in front of him was a sight that told him, not only was this time wrong but it was seriously wrong. This was no glitch from the lightening machine, this was something else altogether. He was looking at the tallest building he had ever seen in his short life. It reached all the way to the sky and beyond, looking up he could not see the top of that building no matter how far back he leant. He walked slowly towards it, a sheer black building with no windows that he could see, and only one door set into the front of the building. There was a large sign, ‘red rose’ high, high above him, so large it covered almost the whole side of the building. But nothing else, just this large black building with its red sign. What was it? Who owned it? Ben wondered, but most importantly what did it all mean?
There was a bench not too far from where he stood, and he made his way towards it, puzzling over this building and dead movie stars. As he sat there a woman slid into the seat next to him.
‘have they taken someone of yours too’? she asked, her voice deep and husky in the silence. Ben looked over to her, she was about his size, with a mass of red curls on her head. She was wrapped up against the night chill in a large 2 sizes too large for her winter coat. He decided to play along to see if he could get further information from her,
‘yeah, my mum and dad’ keep it short, keep it simple. Don’t over play the part and you cant get tripped up.
‘bastards’, she hissed. ‘they took my little niece yesterday, I was her guardian since they took her mommy 2 months ago’ she took a hip flask from out of her pocket, ‘want some moonshine?’
God he could have kissed her there and then, his training argued against him taking a drink from a strange woman in a new world, but his sense wanted to be dulled, so he took a long gulp from the flask. It burnt his throat as it went down, but also seemed to bring this new world sharper into focus.
‘god, what do they want?’ she asked as she too took a gulp from her flask. ‘they just take us and expect us not to ask any questions’
Unsure what to say that would not give him away, Ben stayed silent, hoping she would expand on this ‘they’ he was rewarded with his silence, as she seemed to want to talk.
‘how long before we rise up against them? Surely there must be someone or some group? You would think so wouldn’t you? I mean you see it all the time in the movies, the down trodden finding a hero and everyone living happily ever after. I don’t think there is a happy ever after for us though is there? I mean, if a hero was going to come along to save the day, he would have arrived by now wouldn’t he? It has been 25 years since they took hold, so this is it. Our so called lives’
The weariness in her seemed to spread towards him, as if contagious. He felt his will seem to shrink along side her and wanted to get as far from her as possible, but she had the moonshine and this need overrode the other. He reached for the flask again, and asked ‘does it have to be a man? What about you? You could be the hero’
She laughed, a bitter ugly laugh, ‘ ah sugar, I was only jesting, you know as well as me that the time for heroes has passed’
She sat then in silence, looking at the building with a loathing Ben had never seen on the face of another human being
They sat that way for a while, in silence staring up at that big black building, each wrapped in their own thoughts. As the dawn started to break in the distance , she stirred next to him. ‘we better get moving sugar, before the day guard arrives’
She moved away and starting walking in the direction of the town. Ben followed her, and she turned back. ‘do you need some company sugar?’
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Originally Posted by Hannah
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