Castaways in Time (The After Cilmeri Series) (18 page)

“It does, in fact,” said Jones. “I’ve all
but identified the exact wavelength and frequency of the
intersection between the two worlds that David’s family manages to
manipulate.”

Callum exchanged a glance with Cassie. She
looked as concerned as he felt. Jones seemed pretty pleased with
himself, but to have the Security Service so invested in this
project was not good news. Callum much preferred it when Meg’s file
was buried under a dozen others on his desk.

“We have our work cut out for us, I guess,”
Cassie said.

Callum rose to his feet.

Jones held up one finger. “One moment.” He
turned back to his desk, checked a few things on his monitor, and
scribbled onto a notepad. It seemed Smythe was still driving his
staff hard. Jones then walked to where Cassie and Callum waited by
the exit.

Jones stuck out his hand to Callum. “Good
luck.”

“Thank you.” Callum shook.

Then Jones shook Cassie’s hand, but as he
turned to open the door to let them out of the room, he slipped a
piece of paper into Callum’s left hand. Callum covered up the
action by hustling Cassie ahead of him and pocketing the paper.
Jones clearly didn’t want a camera to see what he’d done; Callum
would have to look at what he’d given him later.

Cassie didn’t argue with the way he urged
her on. Instead, as Jones closed the door behind them, she said,
“How are we going to get out of here unseen?”

“I don’t want just to get out of here,”
Callum said. “I want to find David and then get out of here with
him.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. But how are we going to
do that—?”

Cassie’s question was interrupted by a
distant klaxon coming from the depths of the building.

September, 2017

David

T
hey’d brought
David the computer and hooked it up to the internet as they’d
promised. Once that was accomplished, he answered Natasha’s
questions while he worked, as he’d promised. The brand of computer
was one he’d never heard of, and a quick check of the specs showed
him how the world had changed in the four years since he was here
last, in ways that he probably couldn’t even begin to catalog. His
fingers had been itching for a chance to check out Natasha’s cell
phone since she’d set it on the table between them. He wanted to
take the computer home.

As soon as he got on the internet, however,
it was clear that MI-5 was censoring it. He should have expected
it, given this cave they were keeping him in, but he was
disappointed that he didn’t have access to his old email account.
They hadn’t yet given him the phone call that he’d asked for with
someone from the CDC either. He wouldn’t have minded if they’d
listened in, if only because they might begin to believe the truth
of what he was saying. They also hadn’t let him call his Uncle Ted,
which was starting to annoy David a lot. He wasn’t a terrorist, and
they shouldn’t be allowed to treat him like one.

The internet was so much vaster than four
years ago, and there was a lot more information to sift through.
The papers started piling up in the printer, and every few minutes,
David got up to retrieve what he’d printed out and stick it in the
duffel bag they’d brought him. Honestly, he couldn’t even begin to
articulate how excited he was to have so much information at his
disposal once again. Admittedly, he wasn’t too happy to learn that
regular old penicillin wouldn’t work to fight the Black Plague when
it came around. He needed
streptomycin
, which wasn’t the
same, wasn’t made the same way, and would mean acquiring a bunch of
ingredients Anna didn’t have access to. It was frustrating.

He did acquire some new recipes for
penicillin, though again, the ingredients were going to be a bit
hard to come by in the Middle Ages. The best recipe was created in
a medium which included
corn steep liquor
. Corn was a New
World food and didn’t exist in Britain in the Middle Ages. He would
have to figure out what else they could use that was close to the
same. “When do I get to talk to someone at the CDC?” He looked up
at Natasha.

“We’ll see how the day goes,” Natasha
said.

David ground his teeth. The day was almost
over. He rose to his feet for the eighth time, glancing at
Natasha’s downturned head as he dropped the extra pages that always
seemed to print at the end onto the table. For a second as he
looked at them, he wavered on his feet, and the text on the papers
blurred. He couldn’t chalk it up to standing too fast, because this
was the third time it had happened in the last twenty minutes.

He was losing the battle with his body and
could no longer deny the symptoms that had only gotten worse since
he’d spoken with his father on the pier at Cardiff: his throat was
so sore he could barely swallow around it, he was hotter than
normal, and he had a headache. In the past, even before he found
himself in the Middle Ages, he could often fight off being sick
simply by being determined
not
to be sick, but the power of
positive thinking wasn’t working for him today.

He sat in his chair and stared at the
keyboard, trying to figure out what to do. Natasha still wasn’t
paying attention to him. She had a notepad in front of her, since
apparently (except for his laptop and her powered off cell phone)
no electronic devices were allowed in his interrogation room, and
she had just asked him to relate how King Edward had died. Her eyes
tracked between her writing and the papers David had printed out
but hadn’t yet put into the backpack, most recently on the Black
Death.

David made a split-second decision and gave
into temptation, following through with a plan he’d been concocting
for the last hour but had been nervous about implementing. He lay
his head down on the table in mid-explanation. Given that he had
been relating the story of the fight with King Edward where David
had punched the king in the face, it wasn’t too surprising that
Natasha noticed he’d stopped talking.

Her pen hovered over the paper for a second,
waiting for him to continue, and then she looked up. The sight of
David with his head on his arms brought her to her feet in an
instant. “What is it?”

“I don’t feel so good.”

Natasha’s hand hovered over David’s head,
but she didn’t touch him. “Is that a rash on your cheek?”

Other than the one-way glass which was
darkened so it didn’t show color well, David hadn’t had a proper
chance to look at himself since he’d arrived in the twenty-first
century. If he’d had a rash earlier on the ship, Cassie or Callum
would have noticed it, so maybe it had just developed. His throat
sure hurt; he wasn’t faking that either, and now that his head was
on the table, it felt good to close his eyes. “I probably have
scarlet fever. London was experiencing an upsurge in cases when I
left, and we’d established an infirmary at Windsor to take care of
patients.”

Natasha backed away from him, taking little
steps at first, but then faster ones as she closed in on the
door.

“It’s okay.” David put out a hand, which
stopped Natasha’s retreat, but she didn’t move forward to take it.
“I looked it up and scarlet fever is just strep gone bad, which I
didn’t know before. It’s common in this world too, though I’m kind
of old to get it.” He’d also read that since scarlet fever derived
from strep—as in strep throat—you
could
get it twice, though
it wasn’t a common occurrence. That wasn’t good news. Anna and
Bronwen were counting on the fact that they’d both had scarlet
fever as children to provide them with immunity.

David’s stomach clenched at the thought of
their babies, and the threat untreated scarlet fever could pose for
them. He needed to get
home
. Though now that he thought
about it, he wouldn’t do anyone any good as long as he was sick; it
was better all the way around for him and everyone else that he
was
here. Once again, the world shifting had come through
for him, more than at the initial moment where it had saved his
life. For all the technology that MI-5 was throwing at the problem,
they weren’t going to be able to rationalize their way out of this
one. He didn’t have any midichlorians in his bloodstream. A
supernatural explanation for his world shifting was the only one
that made sense to David, and at this point, he was pretty sure he
didn’t want to inquire any more deeply into it than that.

Natasha was still staring at him, so he
flopped the same hand in her direction. “A good dose of penicillin,
and I’ll be fine.”

But by his last words, he was talking to
himself. Natasha had fled. David lifted his head, surveying the
room and the door which Natasha had left open behind her. He had a
moment where he thought about getting to his feet and following
her, maybe even running, since he wasn’t as sick as all that, but
he abandoned the idea. He didn’t think he’d get far. Better to try
this first. He rested his head on the table again. The black
lacquer felt cool on his cheek. He closed his eyes.

A minute later, though it could have been
longer since he thought he might have fallen asleep without meaning
to, he opened his eyes to find the room full of people in full
hazmat suits: white coveralls and helmets, taped at the wrist and
ankles, with rebreathers making them all sound like Darth Vader.
Satisfaction coursed through him. MI-5 was taking his illness
seriously. The hazmat suits alone told him they were concerned that
his brand of scarlet fever was new—or rather, old—or maybe just
that he was extremely contagious. Considering the number of people
in the Middle Ages who died from what was a very treatable disease
in the twenty-first century, David couldn’t blame them for being
concerned.

Someone shook his shoulder. “Sir. Sir.”

“What?” David lifted his head, and then
decided he’d been better with it on the table. No way was he
getting out of this now that he’d started it. As he’d discovered
when he’d taken Ieuan to the twenty-first century, once you were on
the medical train, it was nearly impossible to get off. And in this
case, he didn’t want to.

“We need a stretcher,” the man said to
someone behind him. “When is the ambulance due to arrive?”

“Any minute, sir,” a second man said.

“And the quarantine unit at the
hospital?”

“Dispatch said that by the time we get him
there, they’ll be ready.”

David observed the next half hour through
eyes kept at half-mast. The two men who had spoken first were
joined by a third, and the three of them placed him onto a
stretcher. A fourth person—David thought she was a woman—stuck an
IV in his arm and hung the solution bag above his head on a metal
hook. The first man had him stick out his tongue to culture his
throat.

“This is a classic presentation of scarlet
fever,” he said to the person standing at David’s head, handing off
the culture to him while accepting a syringe. He pushed up on
David’s side, forcing him to roll onto one hip, and then, without
warning, jabbed the needle into David’s rear.

“Ouch!” David said. “What was that?”

“
Benzathine
penicillin
,” the man said.

“Whatever happened to pills?” David
said.

“For this, they don’t work as well,” the man
said.

Then they wheeled him out of the
interrogation room and down the corridor to the elevator.

“We’ll take care of you, son,” said the
third man, who’d arrived last. He spoke in American English.

David turned his head to one side, trying to
make out the face behind the man’s plastic mask. He couldn’t see
much beyond a lock of gray hair, which fell across the man’s
forehead, and owl-round glasses through which he gazed
speculatively at David.

“Thank you.” David closed his eyes. He
really did feel terrible. And for all that he would have been much
happier were Lili here, part of him was glad that she wasn’t. Even
though he longed for her touch on his forehead, he wouldn’t want
her to worry about him more than she already did.

The elevator doors opened, and the men
wheeled David inside. They rose up, and then when the doors opened,
Natasha was standing in the entrance to the garage. She, too, wore
a hazmat suit, and she walked with him as they wheeled his
stretcher to where the ambulance was parked.

The change in scenery had David feeling
momentarily alert. Not only was he out of interrogation, but they
were taking him out of the MI-5 building! “I’m surprised they’re
letting you walk around,” David said to Natasha. “You were exposed
to me. Why aren’t you quarantined too?”

“Why do you think they’ve made me wear this
suit?” she said. “I’ll be given my own bubble at the hospital, just
like you.”

“A bubble, huh?” David said. “That’ll be
fun.”

“I really appreciate what you’ve done for
me,” Natasha said, deadpan, and for the first time, David
understood what Callum might have seen in her. Admittedly, she
hadn’t been at her best and had been uniquely stressed out for the
last six hours dealing with him.

“What about Cassie and Callum?” David said.
“They could be sick and not know it.”

“My God.” Natasha came to a full stop. She
pulled her phone from the messenger bag she wore diagonally across
her chest and dialed awkwardly through the gloves that impeded her
fingers.

David missed the beginning of her
conversation since he was being loaded into the ambulance, but
after a few minutes, Natasha climbed into the back with him. She
grinned wickedly. “Driscoll will share my prison if he’s not
careful.”

“Are they sick?” David held his breath. His
plan depended on the three of them being in the same place. Since
he didn’t know where Cassie and Callum were, he had to do the best
he could with what he had to work with.

“Not yet,” Natasha’s phone rang. She looked
at who was calling and then answered. “Do you have them?”