Story: The Disappearance (XI)

(Part X , XII)

The case was winding down but it wasn't satisfying. There were motives and effects that didn't make sense. Was the whole story about the time disaster to come just part of a huge trap or were there more lies around us than even I could punch through to illuminate the whole web of truths? Why had Rolf McGonagle gone bad, and what did it all have to do with the future, if anything?

The teleporter, or perhaps time machine, had deposited us in a darkened dock area in what looked like a dodgy part of Liverpool. We were surrounded by massive towers of cartons of chocolate digestive biscuits and it was cold. Rolf was on the ground, still knocked out but beginning to look a little blue at the lips. I picked him up, threw him over in the fireman hold, cursing my back in the process and then started to walk towards the light. I assumed Agnes would follow me, but then I realised she was still.

Agnes McGonagle's eyes were glazed and she didn't seem to be aware of her surroundings. She just stood there, eyes responding a little to my waves and then my touching her face. Gosh, she was beautiful, but I realised how much of her bravado was a cover for her inexperience and wondered what I would have done in her case. My first two trips through a teleporter had been a shocking experience and that was without our shared events of time travel, meeting a presumed dead but crooked father, and also meeting our future selves even if they had been a decoy.

Had our future selves been a decoy? I had certainly fooled me, if that were the case, and Agnes had also been fooled by herself. It didn't seem to be credible that could happen. No, they weren't knowing bait, but unknowing decoys. They had believed that there was a problem coming, a monumental disaster, that would swallow uncounted lives. I pulled Agnes along as I also lugged her father Rolf.

The lights were a portacabin and inside there was a greasy looking security guard. He jumped out of his skin when I pounded on the door, and then shrivelled up into a corner as I dumped Rolf on the desk. Agnes was starting to cry. The guard was looking at Rolf in utter shock so I guessed he was on the team and prodded him a little, with his own gun from the desk.

"Day, month, year. Now."

The guard responded and I found we had been transported back to two days before we left. Yes, time travel. This could all get very complicated, but it could also all end up being very simple. I called a friend at the University, he said he'd come and get us, and then we would do the most important thing of all. We would talk, we would think, and we would wait two days.


To be continued...