THE H-BOMB GIRL by Stephen Baxter (beach books txt) 📕

no, or call her stupid as she had before. But she just looked back gravely. “Your friends won’t like it.”

“I know.”

“And your home is the first place they’ll be looking for you.”

“I know that too.” She was puzzled by Agatha’s reaction. “You’re not trying to talk me out of it.”

“Oh, no. This is something you have to do. Your mother is family.” Agatha smiled thinly. “I told you, you’re strong. I couldn’t stop you if I tried.”

She gave Laura the creeps. “And is it getting to you? This pressure of being stuck down here?”

Agatha shrugged. The candlelight seemed to pick out the lines in her face. “I’m used to it. And besides.”

“What?”

“I’ve got you back,” Agatha whispered.

Laura sat rigid.

Agatha leaned over, stiffly, and put her head in Laura’s lap.

Laura stroked Agatha’s hair. It was cut short, bristly, speckled with grey. And it was patchy, Laura saw. In places it seemed to have fallen out in clumps.

Agatha’s shoulders shook, subtly. She was crying.

They were going to have to deal with this, Laura thought. Agatha and her. They would have to dig the truth out between them, and set it before them, and look at it honestly, whatever it was.

But not tonight. First they had to get themselves out of this mess.

She stroked Agatha’s hair until the strange, skinny woman started to fall asleep.

She heard a soft thumping sound.

Nick, maddened by the pain of his headaches, was ramming the back of his skull against the brick wall. Bernadette was trying to soothe him.

Nick stopped at last, and lay in Bernadette’s arms.

He whispered, “Nuclear war is glamorous, you know. Those missiles they fire go all the way up into space, before coming down to earth. And the explosions are hotter than the sun. It’s like space touching the earth.”

“Hush,” Bernadette said.

“Suppose you had the power, Bern. To push the button, like President Kennedy. The power to blow up the whole world. You’d be more powerful than Jesus. Wouldn’t you be tempted to do it, just for the hell of it? Wouldn’t you? Even if you would die yourself. All that power…?”

But the pain returned. He cried out, and went back to slamming his head against the wall.

Chapter 19

Laura was jolted awake by a blue flashing, a high-pitched beeping. Everybody was scared, save Agatha.

It was Laura’s “phone”—or rather, Miss Wells’s. Agatha had taken it from Laura’s pocket and set it up on a heap of rubble. The screen showed the time in big numerals. 7:00:02. 7:00:03. 7:00:04.

“I thought we ought to make sure we woke up,” Agatha said.

Bernadette hissed, “You might have set it off.”

Agatha frowned. “Set it off?”

“You know. Told Miss Wells we’re here.”

“It’s just a mobile,” Agatha said.

“A mobile?”

She showed Laura what she had done to it to make it work like an alarm clock. “See, you tab this key and scroll through the menu…” As she clicked the phone’s keys with her thumb, words and numbers flickered across the little blue screen. “It has a lot of functions. Calculator.”

“A what?”

“Like a slide rule. There are even a few games in here.” She smiled coldly. “You can have a bit of fun, even where Miss Wells comes from.”

Laura had no real idea what she was doing. She took the phone and closed it up, so it went dark.

Joel said, “ ‘Where Miss Wells comes from.’ You don’t come from the same place.”

“Sort of. Not exactly. Actually we are from the same date. The year 2007. But we’re not from the same timeline. I’m from a different history.”

Everybody just stared.

Joel said, “Then how do you know how to muck about with a gadget like this?”

“We have similar stuff where I come from. Some things don’t change. In fact we both come from 2007, because in both our timelines it took that long to develop the machines that brought us here.”

Laura said, “We don’t have time for this. We’ve got to get my mother.”

As Laura had known they would, they all argued. And just as Agatha had said she would, Laura held her ground.

Nick barely said a word. He slumped in a corner, eyes hidden, rubbing his face. He had come crashing down from his cocktail of drugs, but he was no better than yesterday.

Bernadette said, “Whatever we do, I’m dying to drain my ‘taters. Where’s the bathroom, Agatha?”

“That’s a point,” said Joel.

They all dispersed into the corners of the mouldy cellar.

It was Joel who produced something more substantial than just a piddle.

Nick hooted. “Quite a log you left behind, brain-box. At least we won’t have any trouble finding our way back here again.”

Joel hadn’t done up his trousers. “Shut up. We’re in a survival situation. Umm, anybody got any un-scratchy paper?” They moved back through Agatha’s tunnel complex, away from the city centre.

They came up out of a dry old sewer, emerging in an empty workmen’s hut. They were just outside Queen’s Drive, the ring road that ran around the city centre, a short walk from Laura’s home in West Derby.

By now it was gone 8 a.m. Even inside the hut the light seemed dazzlingly bright. They hung back for a moment, unwilling to go outside. But they had been sleeping rough in a hole in the ground, and a bit of finger-combing and spit wasn’t going to make much difference.

They stumbled out. Nick staggered a bit in the daylight, and lifted his hand to his face. Bernadette took his arm.

It was a Thursday morning, Laura reminded herself. Thursday, 25th October. But it was nothing like a normal morning in Liverpool.

People hurried along the pavement, walking to work, looking anxious. Some clutched their identity cards, as if they expected to be challenged any moment. The shops were all closed up, with hand-lettered signs:

There was hardly any traffic about. No buses. A few lorries, some carrying troops or police. One petrol tanker, with squaddies riding shotgun on the back. There were a few private cars on the roads, but they were all heading out of the city,