Читать книгу Felix Taylor Adventures 2-Book Bundle - Nicholas Maes - Страница 12

Although the process was uncomfortable, Felix was glad when the TPM engaged and hurled him into the distant future. One moment he could see his pursuers by the door; the next he was being stretched like putty toward a world in which these people had been dead two thousand years. For an instant, too, his pain subsided, only to resurface as his limbs snapped back to normal.

But wait. Was something off …?

He was on the floor and staring up at a ceiling. Instead of totalium, it was built of panelled stone. Beside him was the statue from Mercury’s temple, but there were many other sculptures, too, from Greco-Roman times. The TPM team was nowhere to be seen; a crowd was milling about instead, dressed in the strangest clothes and conversing in a language that wasn’t Common Speak.

“Felix? Can you hear me?” Carolyn spoke. She was standing nearby and panting still, “We’re not in our time. I think your wound affected our trajectory….”

Her words were cut off by a piercing scream. By now a woman had spotted them; in particular, she had seen the blood-soaked toga. Her cries attracted other people’s notice, and a horrified crowd took shape around the pair.

“What are they saying?” Carolyn asked.

“They’re speaking English,” Felix gasped. “And I recognize this space. It’s a famous museum in New York City; it’s called the Metropolitan.”

He couldn’t speak any more. His wound was bleeding, the world was spinning, and the light around him was growing dimmer.

“Hang on,” Carolyn whispered. “Help is on the way.” Sure enough, a guard approached, followed by paramedics and three armed guards. They were speaking into clumsy looking gadgets, and one man was trying to wave her back. She grasped Felix’s hand — to signal that she wouldn’t be parted from her friend.

The crowd was eyeing her with suspicion — her Roman garments didn’t help. She ignored them and stuck like glue to Felix, even when the paramedics wheeled him off on a gurney. When an armed man tried to hold her in place, she vaulted over him and made the spectators gasp. And as the paramedics steered the gurney down a hallway, past an exit to a vehicle that was backed up on a sidewalk, she was right beside it and clutching onto Felix. A man tried to block her from entering the ambulance, but she brushed him off and took a seat inside.

The vehicle moved off. Under different circumstances she might have enjoyed herself: she’d heard about cars but never dreamed she would ride in one. She’d never imagined either that she would see a city filled with such machines, all of them exhaling fumes into the air — an unthinkable act of rudeness in her era. At the same time, she observed the pedestrians’ fashions: how quaint and out-of-date they were, consisting of fabrics like wool and cotton, instead of carbon-fibres and moulded plastics. Was this real or was it a simulation of a bygone age?

She glanced at Felix, who was attached to an IV. Carolyn had studied the history of medicine and recognized this old equipment. A mask was on his mouth and a monitor tracked his heart rate. Human beings, not drones, were supervising these procedures. She found this very odd and … worrying.

“You saved my life,” she whispered. “Please don’t die.”

The ambulance came to a stop. Two men swiftly unloaded the stretcher and wheeled it past a sliding door into a hall that was full of uniformed people. It also contained outdated equipment, wheelchairs, defibrillators, ECG scans, and ungainly computers: Carolyn guessed this was a health facility.