Time Salvager (Time Salvager #1)(62)
“Thank you, Director Young,” Levin said finally. “This has been educational.”
Young nodded. “Keep this in mind. Make sure Valta and Sourn stay happy. Otherwise, there will be abyss to pay, and you’ll find yourself on the wrong side of ChronoCom because we can’t afford to be on your side.”
TWENTY-THREE
REALIZATION
Much to Elise’s family’s and friends’ delight, she had always been a bit of a neat freak, from something as silly as organizing all her books by genre, alphabetical order, and color, to making sure that the contents of her refrigerator were divided into their proper food groups.
Sure, sometimes that caused friction with her loved ones, like when she continually organized her last boyfriend’s stuff to the point where he couldn’t find anything. They fought over her cleaning habits for months. He was a slob anyway; their relationship was doomed to fail. She just liked things clean and organized, the way they were supposed to be. It made the world a better place.
This made her situation right now on future Earth doubly horrifying. If she could have one wish right at this instant, it would be to take a massive broom and dust off the entire planet. Maybe toss the whole planet in the wash. She wrinkled her nose. By the smell of it, it definitely needed to be disinfected as well.
Elise was standing on a pile of rubble at the water’s edge, watching dirty gooey waves push debris and slop onto the rocky shores. This was the second time James had told her to stay still and she had ignored his command. Well, the first time that hadn’t been completely true. She probably would have waited for him at the Heights if those guys hadn’t come. This time, though, she got bored waiting for him and decided to stretch her legs down by the river in front of the building. What harm could there be? After all, who knew when James was coming back? It seemed every time he said he’d be back soon, he was never actually back soon.
There was a whole world out there for her to see. She had made a hobby of being an intrepid explorer ever since she was a little girl, often spending days wandering the mountainous forests of the North Oregon coast as a teenager. Twice, her parents had had to call for search and rescue. It never deterred her, though. Her love of discovery of the unknown and learning new things led her to biology and eventually to the Nutris Platform. It had also led her to where she was today. In the ruins of Boston. In some godforsaken dystopian future. And hungry as holy hell.
“I should have picked gymnastics or gotten a puppy as a hobby instead,” she grumbled. Her stomach grumbled with her.
She knelt over the water’s edge and skimmed the surface with a stick, watching the oily texture gunk and slide off. She lifted it to her nose. The water was stale, even though it was from a river; it lacked oxygen and nutrients. There was a stench lingering in the air, as if she were walking alongside sewers. It smelled of rust, rot, and death. It also smelled familiar.
Perplexed, Elise splashed some of the water onto a concrete slab with the stick and spread the liquid apart, careful not to get any of it on her. She was pretty sure this atmos band thing would protect her from any harmful elements, but wasn’t ready to bathe herself in toxic river water yet. She sat there and watched intently as the water dried and left an orange residue stain on the rock. She sniffed it again. The same smells as before, but there was something new. The residue consisted of small bits and fragments of animals and plants, long since dead, but never properly decayed. They just rotted and continued to break apart into smaller and smaller pieces until they eventually formed this brown mush.
“No way,” she said, her curiosity making her forget about her dire situation. “This can’t be what I think it is. Could it have grown so far out of control?”
Elise wished she could take samples right now and study the brown gunk. If this crap was what she thought it was, then the potency of the virus discovered only a decade ago, in 2087, was much more serious than anyone from her time could have possibly imagined. She went farther downriver and double-checked her findings, taking samples from several different areas.
She climbed into one of the toppled buildings leaning against another on the other side of the canal. There was a balcony she could hang off of to grab a sample from the center of the flowing river. Maybe the substance and texture there would be different. Carefully watching her step and climbing onto the walls to scale over debris and sections of submerged hallways, Elise scrambled through the dark slanted corridors.
She traversed several small piles of rubble and then stopped when she saw light. She approached it carefully and whistled when she came across the embers of a dying fire in the corner of one of the smaller rooms. Beside it, there was a small nest of cloth making up what looked like a bed. Next to that was a small satchel. Someone had been here recently. Were they passing through like she was? Did they live here? How could anyone survive in this place?
What if they weren’t friendly? Yesterday’s beating flashed through her head and she flinched involuntarily from that memory. Then she remembered her wrist beam. Well, she wasn’t going to be that easy a mark anymore. Let those bastards try to lay a hand on her. Wait, did she remember how to shoot this thing? Elise spent the next few minutes practicing with the wrist beam.
As she fiddled with her control, a shadow strolled into the room. Elise stared, mouth agape, a person about her size and height stared back equally with surprise. Almost an afterthought, she raised her wrist beam at him. If this was an actual gunfight—if they still called it that these days—she would have lost that draw yesterday. However, she was lucky they were both taken off guard and she was the only one armed.