Read Online The Day Before Tomorrow by Nicola Rhodes - Free Book Online Page A

you’re not who you think you are either.’ 
    ‘Who is?’ said Cindy gloomily. 
    ‘Why don’t you want to know?’
     ‘Because – well, what if the world has changed for the better.’
    ‘Better!  How can this ,’ Tamar swept an arm around the room in an encompassing gesture.  ‘Possibly be better?’
    ‘Well, you don’t know. Neither of us knows, maybe we’re happier now than we were then.  We have no idea what the world was like before it changed, just fragments no real picture.’
    ‘Oh I see, better the devil you know, is that it?’
    ‘I suppose so.’
    ‘Oh, don’t be such a coward. Somebody messed with our lives, and I, for one, want to know who – and why?’ 
    ‘Besides, what if it’s better the other way?’ she added thoughtfully. 
    * * *
     As Denny drove through the county of his birth, he was afflicted with the strangest feeling that he had landed on an alien planet.  The Americans, like the Martians in the “War of the Worlds”, appeared to have transplanted a mysterious vegetation that had covered the land with stars and stripes.  Every doorway, front porch and gateway, every pillar and portico, every tree and lamppost was festooned with fluttering banners.  It made the whole world look like the Land of Oz, once dreary black and white, now in fabulous Technicolor.  It made Denny depressed. He had once quite liked Americans – well, everybody needs somebody to look down on, but right now, he felt as if he would hate them all forever.  Somewhere in the back of his mind, he was reminded that from somebody’s point of view, that was probably the idea. 
    He had been having these thoughts for a while now, intermittently.  The idea of a great cosmic conspiracy was growing on his mind.  It certainly would explain a lot of things.  And he was even having what he thought of as delusions of grandeur.  That is, he thought that maybe it all had something to do with him personally – or at least, if not him, then certainly Tamar, and himself by association. 
    He put a lot of this down to his unwillingness to believe that ordinary human beings were capable of making purposeless war all by themselves, just because that was what they were like.  He wanted it to be a conspiracy, a menacing shadowy plot in which humans were just the innocent pawns. A view that he knew was naïve in the extreme.  But still the feeling persisted. 
    And yet, the Americans in particular, had swept across nations with frightening efficiency.  And Denny supposed that they ought to be good at war if any nation was.  They had certainly made enough films about it.
    Of course, to be fair, they had also made a lot of TV shows about adolescent angst but it did not mean that they had the monopoly on it.
     

~Chapter Twelve ~
    H ome!  It looked just the same as she remembered it, until she realised that her memory of late had not been terribly reliable.  Perhaps home did not really look like this at all.  Had never looked like this.  No sooner had she thought this then the room seemed to change before her very eyes, just for a fraction of a second.  It became far bigger for one thing.  Behind her, she heard Cindy gasp. 
    She turned.  ‘You saw that too?’
    Cindy could only nod. 
    ‘The room changed, didn’t it?’  Tamar persisted. 
    Cindy agreed to it. 
    ‘Then it was real, it wasn’t just a memory.’  She looked around her as if she expected it to happen again.  The room remained resolutely the same. 
    Disappointed but undeterred, Tamar continued in the same vein.  ‘Then this means that the world is coming back – the other world, the way it was before, doesn’t it?’
    She picked up a photograph of her and Denny; this had been taken about a week after they had first got together – at least she thought it had.  Perhaps it had not; perhaps this photograph was not really here at all.  She remembered it being taken, in one of those silly little passport photo booths.  They had