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Time's Revenge
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CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN - FINDING B


‘I can’t breathe…’

Darkness… prowling, pressing, suffocating. It was closing in tightly about him to wrap his fragile body in shrouds of grim blackness. The air was stale and burned with a blistering heat that forced globules of sweat up through his skin. The flames burnt and tore at the exposed throat whenever his mouth was open.

‘I can’t move.’

Darkness… clutching, pinning and cloying. Everything was piled heavily upon him to entrap and encage him in this world of burning oblivion. His blood was gurgling inside of him and he felt heavy dread pounding his stomach as he forcefully tried to thrash about in pain. He was trapped though. The air was dry and choking. He was drowning in dust.

‘Help Me.’

All around him there was nothing but deep, oppressive blackness that squatted and cackled in front of him to block his sight with it’s breathe of decay and fungus. He wanted to scream, cry, beg for someone to rescue him, but his dry mouth was sealed beneath a layer of dirt. The dust in the air was giggling as it set upon him, attacking him and choking him with its ugly filth.

Hot… painful, blushing heat was baking him. His flesh was charred and burning. There were sounds of fire filling the air and then he was gasping as he clutched at his leg. Laser light was ripping through the thin layer of skin to spill the blood onto the ground.

Hazy lights rippled before his eyes, splashing and writhing about one another in curls and spirals of pain that streaked throughout him. His eyes were glazed and stinging and everything was a blur. He gasped heavily. The restraints about his body were gone but the heat remained. The very air pulsed with the throb of heavy warmth.

Someone was laughing at him maliciously. They were laughing gleefully at his pain, mocking his weakness. Their glimmering eyes shone like fires of hell, flickering in sickening amusement.

“How do you expect to stop me from taking him?”

The blows were landing upon his face. There was a kick to his stomach that sent him sprawling across the ground. He moaned in fear and tried to sit up, but his body was dying. He was so tired and weak. There was another brutal punch that split his head in two with pounding pain and he gasped as he curled up into a ball. He looked up into the eyes of his torturer, watching the smirk creep across his face.

Jonathan.

B.

He was screaming, darkness and dust filling his mouth with thick silence and tearing pain. He was gargling and spluttering as he was plunged into a black world. Hot tears streaked his face and somewhere Jonathan was laughing again.

Brian struggled to sit up, his hands instinctively reaching to rip the cloying blanket from his damp body. It was suffocating him. Crushing him. He quivered and gasped as he threw the unwanted thing to the ground, his skin still flushed and aching with the burning heat that had afflicted him in the dream.

His looked down at his leg, tracing where the pain had been in his dream. He remembered getting hit now in the dining hall. There was nothing there. He remembered the sharp pain though; a hot blade slicing through him. He remembered Jonathan.

His skull was throbbing with a dull pain that floundered about deep inside of his brain, making his entire head heavy and dizzy.

But pain did not, could not, matter anymore.

“B,” he whispered.

He shook his head slightly as he suddenly realised he was in the medical centre. What was he doing here? Frowning his eyes traced the rocky ceiling and the familiar walls and layout.

Wait… he had been in here before but everything had been blurred as if he were looking at it through frosted glass. He glanced about him until he spotted the photograph on the floor. Carefully he leant down and picked it up, gazing at the faces he knew so well. He remembered now. He remembered Nick telling him what had happened.

Or had it been a dream? It was fuzzy… He shook his head slightly. He remembered Nick’s words quite clearly now. He remembered the feeling of his own hot tears as they had slid down his face.

“Nick?” he ventured. “Nick?”

The medical centre appeared to be empty, or at least Brian could not see anybody. He slowly slid from the bed to the floor, cringing slightly as his bare feet shivered when they touched the cold floor. His feet were heavy, as if his body were made of metal and he swayed slightly for a few moments before he dared release his safe hold upon the bed.

He looked down at the photograph and found coldness seeping through him. He gulped slightly. “Nick? Is anybody here?” His mouth hurt. It was dry and felt as if someone had pasted it with thick, sour treacle.

Tentatively he took a few cautious steps forward, but his limbs felt stiff and sore. The room wobbled about him, but he ignored it and concentrated upon staying upright. He did not have time to rest. Jonathan. Jonathan had been after B. Jonathan was a Gerai spy. The palms of his feet tingled from the cold sensation and then he found himself staggering forward to grip onto a nearby bed to prevent himself from falling.

“Bri?” a voice called. “Bri!”

Brian breathed deeply, feeling depleted after only those short, few steps. He wanted to raise his head, but it was throbbing and spinning. He tried to take in air but nothing seemed to be enough.

Gentle hands were pressing against his shoulders. “It’s okay,” Nick soothed. “Let’s get you back to bed. You shouldn’t be up yet.”

“Nick…” Brian gasped. He gulped to try and give his mouth vital moisture, but it remained stubbornly dry.

Nick carefully took his arms and began to try and lead Brian back to bed, but Brian shook his head and tried to push the arms away. “Nick, wait… I have to tell you,” he murmured. He had to tell them about Jonathan. He was going to betray them.

“Tell me what?” Nick replied softly.

Brian tried to speak, but his stomach was filling with nausea until he felt like he might erupt any moment. He gasped as his eyes flickered closed, his arms wrapping about his stomach. He felt so sick and weak that his words would hardly form.

“J-Jo…” he gasped and moaned in discomfort as everything rippled and churned inside of him.

“Sit,” Nick ordered as he pushed Brian down onto the nearest bed. “Just take it easy for a minute. You’re come through a lot.”

Brian did not want to rest and he opened his mouth again but only a weak moan came out. He shook his head in furious frustration and stared up at Nick with his eyes, begging him to understand how urgent the situation was. Nick pressed a hand against his shoulder and then was rushing across the centre. Brian groaned in frustration at his own weakness as he lie back upon the bed, his stomach throbbing. He shook his head, angry tears dribbling from worried eyes.

Nick was back in a second by his side, a glass of water in his hands. Brian reached out clumsily to take it, his quivering, dry lips sighing at the cool water. “Jonathan,” he whispered finally, gasping as he declared the name.

Nick frowned slightly, not understanding. “What about him?”

Brian gulped. “Jonathan,” he repeated, trying to form more words that seemed to become lost in his desert mouth before he could speak them. “Attacked me…”

“What?” Nick’s eyes widened in horror and he gasped. “Jonathan? Are you sure?”

Brian nodded painfully. He could see B in his head, scared and running away as the monster Jonathan chased him. Jonathan could be after him now…

“B…” Brian gurgled, tears falling. “He wanted B…” He shook his head for a moment and suddenly recalled his awakening before. B had run away. B wasn’t here and neither was Sammy. “He wanted B.”

Nick still stared at him wildly for a moment and then he was clutching for the nearest console, hammering the controls to send a message to Darren’s office. “Darren!” he cried urgently. “Find Jonathan now!” Nick paused for a moment. “And Lance,” he added after a moment’s thought.

Brian was still sniffling and trembling. “Nick?” he whispered. “How long was I…?” He felt so tired, like he had not slept in days and his head was still assaulting him with a throbbing, burning pain that screeched inside of his mind.

“It’s okay,” Nick said anxiously. “It’s natural.” He urgently pulled a hypodermic needle from a cupboard and proceeded to fill it with a translucent orange liquid.

He gasped, his forehead burning beneath his fingers. “How long was I out?” he croaked. It felt like he had been sleeping for weeks. His limbs did not seem to want to move anymore.

“Only a few days,” Nick muttered as he pressed the needle against the soft skin of Brian’s arm.

Brian did not even feel the prick, too occupied by the ache of his head. “That should help relieve some of the pain. It’ll take a few minutes to take affect.”

Brian nodded as he breathed deeply. He raised his weary head and stared back at Nick. “B and Sammy?” he whispered.

Sadly Nick shook his head and Brian leaned back in frustration and pain. Everything was beginning to hurt even more now. “Where are they?”

“We don’t know,” Nick replied. “We think B ran away.”

“Are you sure?” Brian asked urgently. “Jonathan said he was going to take him…”

Nick lowered his head and Brian closed his eyes in anguish. He was trembling and his skin was burning, but inside he was cold and raw. “I have to find him,” he said. “And Sammy. Nick I’ve got to find them!”

“We’ve been trying! Sammy went out looking for him with Kevin, Carl and AJ and none of them came back! Darren won’t let anybody else go until he knows the area is clear of Gerai!”

Brian covered his face with his hands and gave something akin to a faint, strangled moan. He could recall Nick’s words before even clearer now and his heart was painfully struggling to beat as the heavy words pounded into it.

“Bri, I know it’s hard,” Nick whispered. “But you need to rest. You need to rest and then we can look for them!”

“No!” Brian screamed, his voice as loud and as strong as he could manage. “No, I need to find them now! They’re my sons!” He gasped again in pain as his head gave a particularly violent throb that sent him falling back to the bed.

“Bri!” Nick cried. “Just calm down, we’re doing all we can! We can’t rush into this okay?”

Brian did not reply as he buried his face into the pillows. He did not want to be patient or to feel this futile. Something inside was screaming at him and it hurt too much to ignore it, but he had no choice.

“This is like a nightmare…” he whispered.

He wanted to cry. Everything he’d ever loved was slowly being torn away and he could not stop it.

*****


The hours that passed were long and filled with burning hopelessness. Brian lie on his bed trying to take in everything that had happened. It was too sudden. One moment he had been screaming as the rocks came to crush them and then he was awake with a pounding head to be told that his two sons were missing.

He wanted to help them. He wanted to do something useful instead of being confined to bed where he felt like a weak child. He was tired of being told to rest, tired of hearing the others tell him they could do nothing at the moment. He would have stood up and left himself if he thought that he wouldn’t collapse onto the ground as soon as he took a few steps.

Slowly he turned onto his side back to Darren and Nick, listening to the conversation they had been arguing about for the past hour. They had tried to slip away to allow Brian ‘peace and quiet to sleep’, but there was no way on earth Bran was letting them sneak away and leave him in the dark.

“Jonathan has to be around here somewhere!” Nick cried.

Brian closed his eyes. Nick seemed determined not to believe that Jonathan was not the cause of B’s disappearance, but Brian was far less innocent. He had seen the malevolent hatred burning within those eye sockets. He had seen the way those foul lips had curled into a fearful smirk. That monster had taken B.

“He’s not here Nick, I told you!” Darren sighed. “We’ve looked everywhere!”

“What about Lance?” Brian asked. “Does he know?” Had he been in on this little kidnapping?

Darren sighed and shook his head. “The kid’s in a right state. He’s been crying. He can’t believe it.”

“How do you know he’s not a Gerai as well?” Brian shot back. There had always been something shifty about him that Brian disliked and distrusted.

“He’s seventeen, Bri, and he’s been with us for months. I think we would know,” Nick said gently. “Besides, you should see him at the moment. He’s so upset.”

Brian frowned slightly. “I never liked him. I find it hard to believe that he didn’t notice something was wrong.”

“I’m gonna keep a close eye on him,” Darren assured him. “Just to make sure. I don’t want people to start getting paranoid though. Before we know it we’ll have fingers pointing at everyone.”

Brian closed his eyes for a moment. Jonathan had taken B, he must have seeing as both of them were missing. Despite the drug that Nick had given to him, his head was hurting again. “We need a rescue team,” he said finally.

“We can’t yet. I don’t want to lose any more people. I’ve got people in the observation posts surveying the area and a few stealth sentries out and about because no one can track like they can. Nobody else though goes out until we’re certain there’s no more of them around,” Darren ordered.

Brian curled his clammy fingers together. “My two sons are out there!” he snapped. “Sammy could be dying! There’s no reason why the Gerai would want to keep him alive! No one knows what’s happened to B and to top it all off two of my best friends are missing as well! Wouldn’t you want to do something?”

“Bri, we’re all worried okay?” Darren replied. “We all feel the same - ”

“No we don’t! It’s not your family out there!”

“I am not sending you out there until we know the area is clear and until we know you are better! You don’t want to slip into another coma do you?” Darren said firmly. “We’re all feeling the strain and we can’t give in to it. Bri, we will find them.”

Brian replied with a moody silence. None of them understood. “Maybe we could - ”

“Darren, Darren!” a voice called urgently, drawing all heads around to a small, dark haired young man as he dashed into the medical centre out of breath.

Darren frowned slightly. “What is it Joe?”

The man, Joe, a person Brian was not well acquainted with, gasped for a moment in an effort to revive himself. “I know where B is!” he finally screamed.

Brian sat bolt upright, ignoring the wailing inside his head and the nervous tremors of his stomach. His heart was suddenly flying to sore through his mouth, desperate to be closer to the news.

“What?” Nick asked, as if hardly daring to believe what he was hearing.

“I was in the science lab checking a few things to make sure no one had tampered with them and someone had used the time machine!” Joe said proudly.

“You’re certain?” Darren asked.

Brian felt his hope dissolving slightly, the adrenaline rush that had surged before now made him feel dizzy and sick. “That doesn’t mean B used it,” he whispered. “It could have been a Gerai.”

Joe shook his head, his cheeks flushed with excitement. “No,” he declared energetically. “Two people used it. One went first and then there was another a few minutes later. Like they were following or chasing the first person.”

“B and Jonathan…” Brian whispered faintly. What the hell had B been thinking? Time travel was one of the most dangerous things anyone could mess with!

“You’re absolutely sure of this?” Darren cried, a smile appearing on his face for the first time since he had arrived.

Joe smiled. “Well, we may not be certain it was B and I’ll need someone to check the bio readings, but it’s a damn good lead. It would explain why none of the sentries or anyone seen B leaving the base!”

“Do we know where he went?” Brian asked, gulping slightly in nervous anticipation. At last they might actually know something…

“We can find that out. The readings were encrypted but we can decode them and find out.”

“Do it,” Darren ordered. “The sooner we know where he is, the sooner we can formulate a plan.”

“And I can go after him,” Brian said firmly, sitting up straighter and trying to ignore the way the room wobbled about him.

“When you’re better,” Nick corrected. “Bri, you can’t strain yourself or you could fall into a coma again! I don’t want you to hurt yourself!”

“But B needs me as soon as possible!”

Darren held up a hand in front of him. “He’s skipped to a different time frame and that time frame won’t be going anywhere. We can send you to the exact time he arrived there if we want to. There’s no rush. We need to be patient.” He smiled at Joe. “Great work, Joe.”

Brian fell back onto his bed. Time may not have been going anywhere but that did not stop Brian wanting to get to B as soon as possible. At least he would know where he was though and he could use the time machine and maybe even try to intercept him if they could do the right calculations to send him to the exact moment B had jumped to… that was unlikely. It was almost impossible to make a calculation that exact.

He froze for a moment as he suddenly thought of Sammy. He was still in this time frame… What was he going to do? Going after B would mean leaving Sammy, but how could he not go after B? B was still a child and he had Jonathan in pursuit of him.

“See Bri, I told you we’d find him,” Nick said smiling.

Brian smiled weakly. “Now I just got to find Sammy.”



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