Free The Terminus by Oliver EADE Page A

sod.”
    Sure enough,
they were where he’d put them in another time… dimension… whatever. Made no
sense to him they should be there if he’d recently returned to relive the same
past. Retrieving his boots, he shrugged his shoulders and logged a mental note
of the phenomenon.
    “Oh… via the
playing fields, please, Gary. The hockey pitch. See, I ’m still trying to get Emma
Pearson out of my head, and that redhead… I’m not kidding about her legs.
They’re a-a-a-awe... some! Okay for you now with that Beastie girl...”
    “Beetie!”
snapped Gary. “ Not okay,
anyway. She might be getting tortured… in the future.”
    “Did she let
you kiss her?” persisted Mike as they headed for
Baker
Street station. “And did you get a hard-on the
first time like they say?”
    “Shut-up, Mike! We’re trying to bloody save what’s left of
the world. Redfor, I’m not so sure this is such a good idea taking Mike with
me?”
    Redfor said
nothing, and Gary refused to admit
to the hard-on he’d experienced whilst kissing Beetie. Surely he was allowed
some secrets from a best friend.
    “Afraid she’ll
go for my irresistibly superior Italian looks, mate?” teased Mike.
    “Nope! More
afraid I’ll be tempted to feed you to the gee-rats, Mikey boy!”
    “There! He
can’t take competition,” Mike announced to Redor. “Like he’s always dodging
soccer practice. Not the same with science or maths at school when he leaves us
all way behind counting on our fingers. So how about going for the redhead
first, Gary? The future hasn’t
happened yet, anyway! I bet you a fiver her legs are better than Beetie’s!”
    Gary’s
mind returned to the night he shared a cell with Beetie, to his fantasies of
her wearing a flimsy, see-through nightie. Nothing wrong with her legs then...
or in her tight-fitting tracksuit.
    “Mike, please
stop distracting me! Think ‘greatest archaeological robbery of all time’ can’t
you? That’s what we’ll need to pull off with this British
Museum exhibition thing. You
started thinking yet?”
    He stopped and
grabbed Mike’s arm.
    “I’m warning
you, Mike. Don’t let me down or I really will feed you to those rats! Okay?”
    Mike nodded
and, unseen by Gary, raised his
eyebrows in mock desperation. They took the Jubilee line train bound for Swiss
Cottage and sat in silence, attracting curious stares. Gary
no longer cared. All he could think about was Beetie and the seemingly
impossible task between him sitting on an Underground train in London
in 2013 and ever seeing her again at some unknown time in the nightmare of a
distant future.
     

Chapter 4: The Hatcheries
     
     
    The circular door flipped open as
soon as the shuttle-pod came to a standstill. A strong arm belonging to a large
surfacer reached in, grabbed the net ensnaring Beetie, as if she weighed no
more than a bag of sugar, and flung her to the ground. The door snapped shut
and the pod sped off as the ogre ogled the girl, amused by her futile attempts
to punch and kick herself free.
    “Hey, this
B32968’s a bit frisky!” he chuckled to his over-muscled colleague. “Should give
us a bit of sport, huh?”
    “Get me out of
this thing, you oaf!” shouted Beetie, fighting the net.
    “Will do, but
only when we’ve got you to the right block,” the man replied, his thick lips
stretching into an ugly grin. “Don’t you remember your old home, Belinda?”
    Belinda ?
    The man lifted
up a struggling Beetie, holding her at arm’s length so she’d be able to take in
her surroundings. Nothing about the Hatcheries was familiar. Several other
girls stood around the drab concrete precinct, or sat on benches, each wearing
something Beetie had no memory of: a dress. Faces glazed, disconnected from
their surroundings, they took no notice of Beetie when she screamed for help.
Another thing: like Beetie, all were exceptionally pretty.
    At first,
horrified seeing girls with arms and legs half-bare, she merely stared. Some of
their dresses