The Cutting Room: A Time Travel Thriller (19 page)

"Just a possum," I pointed.

She shook her head. "The subway entrance. See that sandwich board blocking the way?"

"What about it?"

"We passed it on the way here. It's been moved."

I tried to keep the skepticism off my face. "It's really wedged into those folding chairs. Memories aren't very reliable. There's a reason they stopped using them in court."

She shook her head hard. "This morning, it was advertising a tuna sandwich and broccoli cheddar soup, and my mouth watered, and I thought about the last time I had broccoli cheddar soup. It was ten months ago—subjectively speaking—at Lorson's Pub on Down Street. And it was delicious."

I stared. The handwritten note on the sandwich board now declared a sale on salmon bruschetta. As I continued to goggle, perplexed as to why a post-apocalyptic mutant would take the time to advertise the day's special for a restaurant that no longer existed, Vette climbed over the rubble blocking the tunnel's entrance, lifted the sign, and flipped it around. That side suggested a tuna sandwich with broccoli cheddar soup.

Vette was pale, but not in a way that registered any surprise. "There's someone here, isn't there?"

I nodded. Early on, we had discussed what we'd do if we learned we weren't alone in Brownville after all. Vette had argued that our present lives were essentially disposable (even more so than usual), since they'd be wiped out as soon as the Cutting Room came back to rescue our past selves. That meant any risk to our lives would be easily outweighed if we found a lead relevant to our original mission—information about how the world had ended, say, or about Green & Associates' true business. There were several ways to glean this info, including the memory chips I still hadn't been able to tap into, but the simplest would be to find someone who had lived through the last days of Brownville.

Which meant our decision was already made.

The debris across the mouth of the subway entrance was carefully arranged to discourage strangers and animals without appearing like an obvious blockade. It was easy enough to clamber over with minimal noise. On the other side, I got out my pad and turned on its light. A staircase descended to a long tunnel lined with grimy tiles. Piles of garbage narrowed the path forward. I got out my pistol.

The tunnel smelled of mildew and faint rot. Several yards in, I stopped to examine a piece of graffiti on the walls, then moved to catch up with Vette. A mound of trash squeezed the way forward and she moved around it. The grout between the next few tiles was off-white, but compared to the dirt-blackened joints ahead of and behind this small patch, it was as bright as a cleaned tooth.

As Vette stepped onto the tiles, I launched forward, bowling my shoulder into the backs of her knees. She cried out in anger. As we crashed to the floor, a gun roared to our right. To our left, flecks of tile spat from the wall and showered our backs.

Vette moaned and writhed. The booby-trapped shotgun had grazed her right shoulder with pellets. Blood seeped through the shredded faux-leather. Still prone, I dragged her away, smelling coppery blood and hot gunpowder.

"We've got to move," I said. "Whoever set that will come check it."

Vette found her feet. "I'm fine. Let's go."

We jogged out the tunnel and up the steps, the light of my pad flinging shadows with each bouncing stride. Outside, the air tested fresh and wet. Vette kept up well enough, so I ran for half a mile before calling a stop. I led us into a hamburger joint beside the highway, took her to the kitchen where my light wouldn't be seen from the street, and helped her ease off her jacket.

"Holy shit," she breathed.

I stopped pulling the coat from her shoulder. "Sorry."

"I mean holy shit, somebody's alive."

"We're lucky
we
are."

She glanced up from her bleeding shoulder and met my eyes. "We are, aren't we? How'd you know?"

"The grout was clean." I finished removing her jacket and spread it on the floor. "Lie down. This will hurt."

The wound wasn't as bad as the mess indicated. Several gouges across her skin. A few pellets may have been lodged inside, but I didn't want to dig them out until we were home. I wasn't too surprised they'd used a dumb analog gun to set the trap. The digitally enhanced versions had probably succumbed to dead batteries, corroded wiring, and expired user licenses.

While I cleaned her up, the only time Vette's gaze left my face was when I touched the alcohol to her wound. Then she squeezed her eyes tight and gripped my shoulder until her nails bit into my jacket. I put pressure on her cuts until they coagulated, then bandaged her up and helped her put her coat back on.

"Cool." She put her pack over her good shoulder and headed for the door out of the kitchen. "What are you waiting for?"

"Vette, that's the adrenaline talking. You were
shot
."

"Maybe. Yeah. Listen, I'm not sleeping on the kitchen floor of some dirty burger shack."

I shook my head. "We'll find a real bed. Come on."

This wasn't difficult. An apartment block stood behind the restaurant. I tried several apartments until I found a two-bedroom with no corpses inside it, then locked the door behind us and handed Vette my water bottle. She drank thirstily.

"Get some rest," I said. "Call out if you need anything. I'll be right here."

She turned her shoulder. "Help me out here?"

I got off her coat and hung it in her bedroom's closet. I turned back to ask if she needed anything else and she pressed her mouth against mine.

I pulled back a moment later. "What are you doing?"

"What I want."

My pulse thundered. "That would just complicate things. The mission. Our lives."

She slipped her hand around my ribs. "There is no mission. This
is
our life now. It's time to give in to it."

Her touch was so strong on my skin it almost hurt. I gazed at her bandaged shoulder. "Your brain is so full of endorphins I doubt you know what you're doing."

"Just shut up, Blake. This will all get erased, won't it? That means there's no such thing as a mistake."

She was right. The world was over and we were in limbo. I kissed her back. One-handed, she pulled off my jacket. Months of work had left her lean and tough and more beautiful than I'd imagined. I was careful not to hurt her shoulder any worse.

After, we lay on the dusty-smelling sheets. The air was humid and our skin took a long time to dry.

"This is like something out of a bad romance vid," Vette laughed.

"What's wrong with romances?"

"In this case? Nothing." She cocked her head, hair spilling over the pillows. "Wait. You're serious. You watch romances?"

"No," I said. "I read them."

"
Read?
You spend too much time in the past."

"That's exactly why I need something to unwind with." I touched her cheek. "You shouldn't complain. Maybe I learned something."

"Maybe you did."

We fell asleep in the quiet darkness. When dawn pulled me out of bed, I worried she'd be coldly and regretfully distant, but she smiled even though her shoulder was sore and tight. I checked the bandage and helped her dress. We walked back to our house in the hills.

"We need to go back," Vette said once we'd shucked our boots and gotten into a bath with water warmed by sunshine and a dark tarp.

"Heal first."

"It's hardly a scratch."

"Then you'll only have a few days to wait."

"This doesn't mean you get to boss me around," she said, but she was still smiling.

I smiled back. I was a little old for her, though not outrageously so, and prone to offering advice where none was wanted, but the months we'd spent working and surviving together had built a deep partnership between us. The trap in the tunnel had only exposed an attraction that was already there.

Besides, except for whoever might have set the trap in the tunnel, I was literally the last man on earth.

When I deemed her fit for service, which took two days longer than her own assessment of her health, we went back to Brownville, approaching the subway tunnel with open eyes and drawn guns. At the entrance, the sign appeared unmoved, but down the stairs, the shotgun trap had been reset, the chips of tile swept from the floor. While Vette kept watch, I located the gun in the wall and detached the wire tied to its trigger.

We crept ahead. Fishing line was strung at ankle-height across the next doorway. I snipped it, then followed the loose strand to a cinderblock balanced precariously over a shelf above the entrance. The tiled hallway smelled faintly of sweat. Vette spotted the last trap, another wire which, when sprung, would dislodge a basket of soda cans and beer bottles onto the hard floor. Nonlethal, but an excessively noisy alarm for whoever was down here.

The tunnel fed to a platform. A train sat on the tracks, as silent as everything else. Like the tunnels leading up to it, the train and the platform were pitch black; I was lighting the way with ultraviolet radiating from my tablet; in the absence of other light, our Primetime-enhanced eyes translated this into something approaching normal vision. Slowly as a cloud, I stepped from the platform into the open door of the train.

Candles sat on the plastic seats, wax melted in hardened puddles. At the head of the car, dressers had been arranged in a wide U. A half-filled hamper stood beside them. A door had been laid over more dressers near the car's middle, forming a makeshift table. And at the far end, someone snored in the darkness.

I motioned Vette to me and whispered in her ear. She trained her rifle on the figure beneath the nest of blankets on the floor. I set my tablet on the table and switched the UV light to a normal range. Soft yellow light warmed the car.

I crouched down fifteen feet from the sleeping person and rested my gun over my knees.

"Hello," I said. The figure stirred. I raised my voice. "Hey."

The sleeper bolted upright. A woman, thirtyish, hair chopped short, dirt ground into her elbows, nails, and the soles of her scrabbling feet. She kicked out of the blankets and scooted backward toward the door to the next car.

"It's okay," I said. "If we were here to hurt you, you'd already be dead. We just have some questions."

She stopped cold. Her eyes flicked between me and Vette.

"Who are you?" Her voice cracked, as if she hadn't used it in a long time.

"We were underground when it hit," I said. This was something Vette had come up with, vague enough to explain our survival through whatever form the apocalypse might have taken. "Sealed away until a few months ago. We just want to know what happened."

"How did you last so long?"

I laughed cheerlessly. "It was supposed to be an experiment. The viability of long-term survival and the psychological impact of living underground."

"For disasters," Vette added. "Space colonies. That sort of thing."

The woman pursed her mouth. "Space colonies? Where was this?"

I gestured in the direction I thought was northeast, but we were underground and I had no frame of reference. "The mountains. Old mineshaft from the gold rush days."

The woman examined us both. "How long were you locked away before it happened?"

I shrugged. "Six months or so."

"Before the Etruscan Horseshoe Crisis?"

"Right around then."

She gazed at her hands, which were scabbed and grimy, then nodded. "Then there's not much to tell. It was President Varron. You know how he was. He just kept pushing and pushing until the Etruscans opened fire."

"But how did that lead to the end?"

"Well, we had a new weapon. A very particular and virulent virobot meant to put the Etruscan populace into a comatose state while we moved in with minimal loss of life. Oh, it had safeguards. It was supposed to be coded to Etruscan DNA. And to destroy itself after three days. The afflicted would yawn, stretch, and wave hello to their new conquerors.

"But it didn't stop. It just kept spreading, seeking out everything human. People went to sleep wherever it found them, like lights winking off across the world. And it never shut down. When the lights went off, they stayed off for good."

"That's so crazy," Vette said.

The woman put her fist to her mouth and laughed, ribs shaking. "Isn't it?"

"You think it's funny?"

"It sure is." The woman giggled toothily. "Because everything I just told you was a lie."

"What?" I said.

"Well, not
everything
. But just for starters, there was never any President Varron."

"Why would you lie to us?"

"Because you lied to
me
!" From her seated position, she rolled onto all fours, snarling up at me. "There was no magical Brownville mineshaft space program sanctuary. I was
in
space. How do you think I survived?"

I glared. "Then what happened?"

"Wouldn't you like to know?"

Heat surged through me. I jerked my pistol out of my lap and pointed it at her dirt-filmed face. "Tell me!"

She laughed, mocking. "Big tough man going to solve his problems with his gun. Who
are
you people? What kind of halfwit forgets how the world ended?"

"The same kind who pulls a trigger if he doesn't get answers."

"Blake!" Vette said. "Why not just tell her? If she won't remember, what does it matter?"

The red fog around my eyes dimmed. Reason became possible. But it was more complicated than Vette knew. Memory has rules all its own.

But the protocols were designed to treat small and secretive disruptions to a timeline. Intentionally or not, time travelers had destroyed this world. Killed billions. This was beyond protocol.

Anyway, in the holy church of Time, I was no saint. Not long ago, I had broken this very rule to save the life of a single child.

"We don't know how your world ended," I said, "because we're not from it."

The woman laughed again. "For aliens, you don't have much of an accent."

I shook my head. "We're from a different time."

Her brow wrinkled, dislodging the anger from her face. "Time—? Greene & Associates?"