Free TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6) by Alex Scarrow Page B

years. Each time, he’d studied it under a magnifying glass with the
     help of his angled desk lamp, like a manic philatelist examining a perfect and precious
     unmarked penny black stamp. And every time he’d peered closely at this
     black-and-white photograph he’d experienced the same shiver of excitement, of
     promise.
    A possibility.
    A possibility, and that’s all it was,
     a possibility that those last four numbers of the manufacturer’s mark were the
     year of manufacture.
    2066.

Chapter 12
    11 September 2001, outside Branford,
     Connecticut
    The motel was pretty basic, just what Maddy
     expected for thirty-nine dollars a night. A double bed, a table, a wobbly hanger rack
     and a small TV, manacled to a wall bracket. They got three rooms: one for Maddy, Sal and
     Becks, one for Liam and Bob and one for Foster and Rashim. Basic, but at least each room
     had an en-suite bathroom with a bathtub too small to drown a cat in and presided over by
     a shower unit that sprayed a lethargic afterthought of tepid water.
    SpongeBubba had the RV with an aisle full of
     plastic bags all to himself.
    They all freshened up, each of them
     relishing their turn in the showers, before heading to the diner next door for dinner.
     They chose unhealthy, heart-attack meals from a menu with helpful, if somewhat
     misleading, pictures. After that, they reconvened in Foster and Rashim’s room.
    The TV was turned up enough that anyone in a
     neighbouring room wasn’t going to easily pick words out of their conversation
     through the paper-thin walls. Fox News was on and there was understandably only one
     story today. President George Bush had held a press conference and given the
     administration’s official response to the day’s acts of terrorism, and now
     his words were being dissected by news hosts in meticulous detail.
    Foster was slumped in the room’s only
     chair. The others were perched on the double bed. Becks sat cross-legged on the carpet
     like a nursery-school child waiting for storytime and Bob stood in the corner of the
     room keeping a wary eye, through the window blinds, on the RV parked outside.
    ‘You want to know what the
     future’s like?’ said Rashim.
    Maddy nodded. ‘Yeah, Liam’s
     right, we really should get to know how this century all plays out. All we’ve got
     are scraps of info. Bits here, bits there. Even Foster only knows
some
of
     it.’
    The old man nodded. ‘Only what was
     available on the archway’s computer database and that only takes us up to the year
     2054.’
    Rashim looked at Foster. ‘The year
     your secret agency originates from?’
    ‘I suppose that must be it,’
     Foster answered with a shrug. ‘It’s the year from which Waldstein set it all
     up and took it back to 2001.’
    ‘2054? I was just a small boy
     then!’ Rashim laughed.
    ‘Go on, please. Tell us what you
     can,’ said Liam.
    Rashim leaned back on the bed, hands behind
     his head, looking up at the low cracked plaster ceiling above. ‘It’s not a
     happy story, boys and girls. We screwed things up. Mankind did. We made a mess of
     everything. Funny, it’s all history to me, but the future to you.’ He
     sighed. ‘The world hit seven billion people on the thirty-first of October 2011.
     In my time historians use that date a lot. Like some sort of a marker. The point at
     which it all began to go bad.’
    ‘Go on.’
    ‘Well, whether it was the population
     explosion or peak oil to blame, 2011 is retrospectively seen as the point at which the
     world crossed the line and was doomed.’
    ‘
Peak oil?
What’s
     that?’ asked Liam.
    ‘Peak oil is the term for the point at
     which we were never going to have enough oil-based energy to tide us over until we could
     rely on a new source of energy. Oh, there were things being trialled on a small scale:
     renewables, wind, tide energy, zero-point energy. But nothing that was near enough to
     replacing oil. The rest of the century was one war after another