Time Salvager (Time Salvager #1)(40)
“Stop. Please,” Elise looked like she was in shock. She sat down on the bench and buried her head in her hands. “My family. My friends…”
James hesitated. Unsure exactly what to do, he reached a hand out and patted her on the back, stiffly. “By the time it happened, you were already dead.”
He thought the words would provide her some comfort. After all, it meant she didn’t have to live through all that suffering of the years that followed. Instead, she just sat there silently, numb, her arms cradling her knees as she huddled in the far corner of the bench.
Embarrassed and unsure how to handle her, James walked back to the console and checked the scanner. They’d be landing in Chicago in a matter of minutes. He’d have to hide her before heading back to ChronoCom. Maybe after he answered whatever questions Smitt and the monitors had, he could retrieve her. If Valta held up their side of the bargain, he could be in Europa in two days. He’d take Elise with him, of course. Maybe they could start a new life, assuming she even wanted to stay with him.
This was all assuming Elise’s health wasn’t an issue. If the Vallis Bouvard Disaster was true, people moving forward in time were doomed to become mentally and molecularly unstable. James never put much stock in that story, thinking it nothing more than scare tactics from the Academy, but it poked at the back of his mind. Well, he’d have to wait and see. For her own good, he might have to kill her after all.
The slum city of Chicago appeared on the horizon. First things first, he needed to find a safe place to hide Elise. He lowered the collie through clouds thick with smoke and soot and entered the habitat zone just under the skyways of moving vehicles. Collies were larger than regular low-altitude transports, and his entry beneath the sky lanes was bound to draw attention. They’d have to park the collie and proceed on foot. He maneuvered to the western town of Humboldt, an industrial center that processed the majority of the city’s waste, to park between several mammoth buildings with dozens of smokestacks rising high into the sky, each stack puffing out noxious plumes that spread out until they faded into the clouds.
Hopefully, the heavy smoke would hide his entry, and there would be fewer people around this more heavily polluted area. When the collie powered down, James went to the emergency storage locker and pulled out two respirators and chem suits, handing one to Elise.
“Put this on,” he instructed. The chem suit was overkill and could draw some attention, but it wasn’t unheard of. It would attract a lot less attention than the antique clothes she currently wore, which ironically looked much more futuristic than the clothing of his time. Not to mention the attention his being nearly naked would draw.
Elise, still in shock, took the gray rubber suit in her hand and stared dumbly at it. Then she frowned. “Why did you give this to me? Are we heading to town or are we growing Ebola cultures in a test lab?”
“Your body hasn’t been immunized or protected. The air will make you sick until you acclimate or we get you a band,” James said. “Also, you don’t exactly look like a local. We’ll need to hide you for a while until this problem gets sorted.”
Elise slipped into the oversize chem suit one leg at a time. She looked like a little girl wearing her father’s clothes. “What do you mean, get sorted? What problem are you talking about?”
“Come on. Let’s go,” he said, opening the hatch and ushering her out. “There are laws that prohibit bringing someone to the present day. I’ll explain later.”
He hurried away from the parked collie, pulling Elise along by the hand and walking down a narrow road with a dozen of the towering processing plants on either side. Elise stared at gray sky, visible through the crisscrossing gaps between the buildings. James kept a hand on her wrist and led her along. A few minutes later, they entered an underground tunnel to the mass transit, and were soon moving deeper into the Earth. Elise, her face covered by the respirator, looked around the train, packed with dirty and tired workers returning from the night shift.
She tugged on his arm. “Are you sure we’re in the future?”
“Do they have flying cars in your time?” he said.
“Well, they sure had this same sort of transit system,” she said. “I mean, how do you still use the same trains from four hundred years ago?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not from around here.”
“Then why are we here? Where are you from?”
James leaned in and lowered his voice. “Born on Mars colony.”
“Why are you whispering?” she asked.
“Because I don’t want anyone to try to mug us,” he said, all of a sudden remembering how naked he was without any of his bands.
The train stopped deep underground and James dragged her through the tunnels. They walked for the better part of twenty minutes, past the gray and brown sublevels until they reached the purples. Higher toward the surface, they reached a set of blue tunnels, where the decor was much cleaner than in the previous sections.
“Why would people want to rob you if they think you’re from Mars?” she asked.
“Because anyone with any amount of money would have left Earth by now.”
They continued down the blue tunnels before eventually arriving at a clean, dead-end street. James led Elise through a set of sliding double doors into a building that was a far cry from the decay they had had to wade through to get there.