TimeRipper Read online

  TimeRipper

  __________

  D E McCluskey

  TimeRipper

  Copyright © 2020 by D E McCluskey

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All characters and events in this publication,

  other than those clearly in the public domain,

  are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons,

  living or dead, is purely coincidental

  All rights are reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form

  by any means, without the prior permission, in writing, of

  the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that of which it was

  published and without a similar condition including this

  condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  ISBN 9798635987674

  Cover art design by:

  Forsaken Folklore

  Instagram

  @forsakenfolklore

  For Lauren…

  I’m sorry I dragged you through all those

  Ripper Tours, pulling you into

  my gruesome obsession!

  You are a true hero!

  PROLOGUE

  FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND pods were deployed; placed in strategic locations around the globe. Containers, filled with death, hidden within plain sight. Each pod was specifically designed to hold the purple mist that resided within them. Every one of them programmed to open at a designated time, to release their deadly cargo. A mist that had been cultivated, meticulously, for at least three years.

  Europe, America, South America, Asia, the Middle East, Australasia. Each location carefully chosen for maximum impact.

  Death and destruction would be prevalent in its wake. It would tear away the fabric of natural life, replacing it with basic and generic elements. A rolling death would stalk the land, devouring everything in its path. The mist could be contained, but once released, it could not be stopped. Everything it touched would be gone.

  When the time came, the five hundred thousand pods would beep. A red light on the casing of each pod would flash five times before turning green. The green light would be accompanied by a hiss. An ugly white noise would precede the release of the purple death.

  Once free of the container, it would fuse with the releases of the other containers and encompass a large percentage of all habitats on the planet. The death toll would be catastrophic. The destruction of the Earth’s resources would be calamitous.

  This was all by design.

  It was a terrorist attack. The most successful and evil terrorist attack in Earth’s chequered history; all done by design.

  There would be no warning. No time to run, nowhere to hide. The attack was inevitable, imminent; the attack to end all attacks.

  The year was twenty-two-eighty-eight, and nothing was ever going to be the same again.

  PART 1

  1.

  Oklahoma, USA. 2288

  JEB OAKENHALL OPENED the front door of his ranch and looked into the dark Tulsa sky. He drew in a deep breath and held it for a moment. His eyes savouring the clouds that were reflecting the light of the waning harvest moon. Where the clouds were absent, an array of stars twinkled their own illumination upon him and his fields.

  He never tired of seeing that particular display.

  It had just gone four-thirty a.m., and the cold air of the night was battling the warmth that would soon overtake it as the sun rose on another glorious day; Jeb’s favourite day of the year.

  Today was the start of the harvest.

  He was an early riser; always had been. Ever since he was old enough, he had been working this ranch. That was at least forty-eight of his fifty-six trips around the sun. He’d begun by helping his grandfather. After gramps passed, ownership fell to his father, before eventually becoming his. It was damned hard work, but he loved it. Plus, as always, he had the help of his boys.

  The harvest was an annual event. It was the one time of the year where job, family, and life commitments, were put aside and everyone came home to the ranch for three days of hard labour.

  In truth, he didn’t need his boys anymore. Not with the technological advancements there had been over the years. This was twenty-two-eighty-eight; but it was a tradition, and a great time for all the family. This year, his grandson had come to help. At eight years old, everyone had thought it was time he learned the ropes.

  Jeb, closely followed by his sons and his grandson, stepped off the porch. They all made their way, in time-honoured tradition, to the combined harvesters that were waiting for them on the edge of the field. With a deep sense of pride and accomplishment, he climbed, with practiced ease, up the chassis and into the cabin of the hulking machine. He tasted another lung full of the morning air. The smell of the wheat lingering on the breeze brought back so many fond memories.

  He was a boy again, back in the day, back to his first harvest. He remembered how his heart had pounded in the excitement of climbing into the behemoth that would do his bidding for the first time ever.

  With a wistful smile, he started the electric engine, imagining what it must have felt like to fire up a real old-fashioned diesel engine, like the one gramps had used in the olden days. He activated his personal input screen, bringing the overhead illuminations of the field to life. The dark of the morning blinked into daylight over the whole of his sixty-acre estate.

  ~~~~

  His memories transported him back forty-eight years, where, as an eight-year-old kid, he had turned the keys on his very first harvest. He smiled as he recalled it hadn’t been a very successful debut.

  Eight-year-old Jeb had been practicing all year on the virtual platform that his father installed for him, and the excitement of sitting in the creaking, torn leather seat, taking hold of the controls, real ones, for the very first time, made his stomach swirl. He didn’t know if he needed to go to the bathroom or if he wanted to vomit up the grits he had eaten for breakfast. But he did know that he wanted to kick-start this huge machine and go out and cut some wheat.

  He knew the drill, he knew how to combat the pitch, he knew how to navigate the three dimensions that this machine utilised hovering over the crops. He even knew the angles that he had to fly to allow for optimal use.

  Ten minutes into his first cut and things were going swimmingly. One thing the virtual platform had failed to inform him of was the sweet smell of the moist, fresh cut wheat. He looked around and saw his two older brothers’ harvesters droning around the field. His cousins, and the extended family, were running around, playing, enjoying the party atmosphere. He nodded, I could get used to this, he thought and sat back, a grin encompassing his whole face.

  That was when it happened.

  Another variable that the virtual platform hadn’t taught him, or readied him for, was barn owls. Huge birds with two-metre wing spans.

  From out of nowhere, there was a crash, and the windshield of his harvester spiderwebbed. He looked up, snapping out of his daydream as the shattering of the protective glass made him jump. The huge, white bird, with a dead rat still in its talons, bounced off the glass, falling dead onto the hood of the harvester. As he jolted, he knocked the controls, sending the whole machine into a spiral of uncontrolled madness. Luckily, he was buckled into his seat by a heavyset harness, otherwise he would have been thrown clear of the windshield and into the path of the out-of-control shears.

  As the behemoth hit the ground with a thud, there came the squealing of metal grinding on metal. The turbulent sound jolted every bone in Jeb’s body. He grasped at the gearshifts, trying in vain to control the monster beneath him.

  He failed
miserably.

  The vehicle hit the wheat field and began to churn huge mounds of earth all around him. It was only then that he remembered the first rule of harvesting. He reached up and slammed the palm of his hand into the emergency shut-down button just above his head.

  With another unearthly squeal and another bone shattering jolt, the huge blades beneath the harvester ground to a grudging halt.

  He had a horrible feeling that the metallic grinding he heard had been the gears sheering. As the harvester shuddered to a halt, Jeb checked himself. He could still feel his legs and was amazed they were still there. Thankfully, his torso and head were still attached. Despite a few scratches and scrapes, he’d come out of the accident unscathed. Unfortunately, the same thing could not be said for his mighty harvester.

  He looked at the devastation around him. Not only had he destroyed one of his father’s harvesters, putting it out of commission for at least the rest of the year, but he had churned up a good portion of his area of the field, wrecking the soil and the natural balance of the crop. As he unbuckled his harness, he was dreading what his father and brothers were going to say.

  ‘Jeb… Jeb, are you OK?’ The nervous shout of his father came from somewhere outside the hole he had found himself in. ‘Jeb, speak to me, son. Are you OK?’

  He could feel tears welling up in his eyes, and even though he didn’t want his father, or brothers, to see him crying, he couldn’t help but blub. ‘I don’t know what happened,’ he sobbed. ‘I think it was an owl. It came from nowhere. I’m so sorry, daddy, I’m so sorry!’

  His father’s face appeared in the shattered windscreen. Jeb was expecting a stern look and an angry voice but was surprised—not to mention relieved—to see the man smiling. ‘Quit your babbling, son,’ he said, laughing. ‘Welcome to the harvest, boy!’

  ~~~~

  Jeb smiled as he sat in his own cockpit, admiring his own sons’ expertise at manoeuvring their vehicles around the illuminated fields with the support drones buzzing after them, collecting the harvester’s bundles. He remembered an old saying that his father had been fond of. ‘A man could die happy bailing hay with his sons in tow!’

  He really did believe this.

  2.

  Paris, France. 2288

  THE POWERFUL ILLUMINATION of the overhead lights from the Slipstream track masked the fact that it was twelve-thirty in the afternoon. Alphonse knew that at this time of the day, the Slipstream system would be packed to capacity with tourists and commuters. I’m glad all I have to do is walk the boulevards, he thought grinning. He turned away from, what he thought of as a technological horror, looming over him, and put his attention back to the street. The Rue de Vichy was rammed. It was crowded both ways, a mixture of people, some of them powerwalking and looking pissed off while others ambled along perusing shop windows and taking in the sites of the famously ancient street.

  He knew this many people on the boulevard could only mean one thing; the Slipstream system had ground to a halt again.

  There must have been another accident. Fucking automated cars, he thought as he stopped and looked upwards. ‘Bring back the old manual drive, that’s what I say,’ he shouted to no one in particular. He watched as a rescue transport manoeuvred itself into position above a small section of the track. A blue magnetic field began to glow from underneath it. The stricken transport, that was blocking the system, was plucked up in the hope that maybe, just maybe, the system would begin to flow again.

  Alphonse chuckled. ‘Maybe we could do with one of them down here,’ he yelled again. No one on the boulevard took any notice of him. Why would they? He was an ‘unlisted person.’ ‘And proud of it,’ he’d shout in defiance if anyone asked. Being unlisted meant that he was off the grid, he didn’t have to answer to anyone. He didn’t have to go through the rigmarole of clocking on, or clocking off, for a mindless, meaningless job that he hated. He could go anywhere he wanted whenever he wanted. Basically, being an unlisted person meant he was homeless, a vagrant; the great ignored. These were some of the names the do-gooders would call his people. He was happy, though. He scoffed at the thought of having to sit in a Slipstream queue for hours on end, only to get to a job that was killing you, to earn just enough money to pay for your house and your kids to go to school in order for them to repeat the whole cycle over and over again!

  He was happy!

  A rumble in the air caught his attention. He cocked his head as the magnetic field from the hovering rescue transport took hold of another stricken vehicle and began to lift it off the track. ‘Go on, throw that motherfucker away. Do him a favour. You’re all better off dead anyway! Or maybe you already are! Look at you, walking around like the fucking zombies you are…’

  Alphonse liked to shout things like this to tourists and commuters; it relieved the boredom of his days.

  A gendarme appeared out of nowhere, like they normally did when the unlisted were making a nuisance of themselves in public. The large, uniformed man took him by the arm, making him jump. ‘You! Shut your mouth and move along,’ he snarled, dragging him away towards a side street.

  He didn’t offer much—or any—resistance. There was no reason to. He knew he was in the wrong, but he couldn’t help himself. It was all part of his ‘freedom.’

  The gendarme released him with a look that said, ‘get out of here and don’t let me catch you bothering these good people again!’ when the ground beneath them began to shake. It wasn’t the normal tremor he identified with the Slipstream; this had an intensity to it that it knocked the gendarme off balance, sending him tumbling against the red-bricked building beside him.

  Alphonse was waving his hands in the air. This time he wasn’t shouting at the tourists, he was having trouble keeping on his feet. With a furled brow, he looked upwards, past the Slipstream system, attempting to locate the source of the tremor.

  3.

  Tehran City, Iran. 2288

  YOUSSEF HASEEM LOCKED his front door using the remote control and started the electric motor on his vehicle using the same device. It was two p.m., and the Slipstream system to Tehran City Centre should be empty. When the system was working to its full capability, he knew he could make it into the city and back to the office before anyone would even notice he was gone. But, these days, the system was very seldom working to its full capacity.

  He’d forgotten Helen’s birthday, again! To make matters worse, he’d also forgotten to bring his financial chip to work with him, so he couldn’t just jump out at lunchtime and get something for her. Nope, nothing that simple for Youssef, he thought. He had to go all the way home, then out to the shopping district, then all the way back to work, in one afternoon. The round trip, including the shopping, was going take him at least two hours. He cursed himself for not getting something online for her in advance—all he’d have needed to do was to have it delivered to her work and that would have been that.

  He cursed himself again for his forgetfulness.

  He tuned into the broadcasts, hoping to sooth his journey with some ambiance, but as the unit came to life, all he received for his troubles was a burst of horrible white static. It blared out of the auditory devices hidden within the transport’s infrastructure at such a force, it caused him to flinch. He oversteered, and his transport swerved off the Slipstream track. The warning sensors began to scream, adding to the cacophony of ugly noise within the cabin. As the transport bashed into the invisible wall off the side of the track, the dulled chrome of the bumper fatigued as the magnetic field bulged, keeping the transport safe, stopping it from falling the hundred or so metres to the ground below.

  Youssef cursed as he, eventually, came to a screeching halt. His ears were ringing with the screaming of the buckling chrome, the collision alarm, and the white noise from the speakers. Suddenly, they all, mercifully, stopped at the same time. The sudden silence was deafening. He sat in the cabin for a moment, collecting his thoughts, attempting to calm himself. Opening his eyes, he checked himself to see if he was bl
eeding. He wasn’t. He believed this was due to the deployment of the foam cushions on the impact.

  Still catching his breath, he peered out of the window. The front of the transport had dipped over the side of the track and was being held on the system by the magnetic safety field. He had complete faith that the magnetic field would hold, mainly because it was his department that had been responsible for the development of the same system, but still, he was still shook up. He sat back in his seat, breathing deeply through his nose and out through his mouth, attempting to control the racing of his heart.

  Can today get any worse? he thought.

  This question was answered immediately.

  A rattle rippled through the Slipstream track, and with it came a deep rumble. The whole track began to shake. He grabbed at the door handle, gripping it with all his strength. He cursed his arrogance of confidence in his technology as he felt the magnetic safety field failing around him. He closed his eyes, mouthing a quick prayer to Allah, as he braced himself for the one-hundred-foot fall, and the inevitable death that would come at the end of it.

  The fall never happened. All that changed was the deep-set rumbling got louder, and the vibrations became heavier. That’s not coming from the tracks, he thought opening an eye to see what was happening. His nose tickled as something trickled from it. He wiped at it, alarmed to find blood on the side of his hand. It wasn’t a lot, but he knew by the tingle that the flow was getting heavier.

  He looked out of the window, hoping to see what was happening outside. He knew the shaking of the Slipstream had nothing to do with his accident, it was designed better than that. The sky had darkened, considerably. It was an odd kind of darkness; there was a purple hue to the ominous clouds, and the forks of lightning flashing within them burned so brightly they blocked out the midday sun. Each fork was accompanied by a tremendous crack of thunder that sounded more like an explosion.