I could feel her stare, her eyes filled with rejection and defiance, but already displaying the seeds of doubt, the hardiest weed of them all.
It was too late in the day to head back to the mountains to leave the CR a sign, so we spent the few remaining hours of light wandering the labs and cafeterias in search of something that could be written on and was sturdy enough to survive whatever weather battered it over the next month. This was surprisingly difficult. In the end, I used a kitchen knife to scratch directions into the side of a large copper kettle and wrote a longer message on paper, which I rolled up, inserted through the neck of a wine bottle, and sealed with a rubber cork.
In the morning, we hiked through the damp, grassy hills, guided by the map on my pad, until we stood in the same rocky thrust where the Pods had dropped us off. On a flat patch of ground, I yanked up grass, dug a small hole, and screwed the base of the bottle inside. Thus secured, I covered it with the copper kettle.
"They are totally going to miss that," Vette said. "We should plant a neon flag. Record a message on my tablet and set it to repeat at max volume."
"Too obvious. We don't know the human race is extinct." I nudged the kettle with my toe. "This is protocol. They'll know to look closely at the landing site."
"If you say so."
"Frankly, given the equipment they'll bring, this isn't necessary in the first place. They'll have thermal vadar, DNA sniffers. If they want to find us, they will." I was starting to sound like I was trying to convince myself. I jerked my chin downhill. "Let's go. Lots to get done."
At the campus, I set to work with more confidence than I felt. I knew very little about wilderness survival. Hadn't even been fishing since I was a kid. At least the early spring weather never threatened to dip near freezing. Our little shack was just a temporary residence, too, meaning I only had a month to familiarize myself with the basic rhythms of this life before we'd have to get to work on a permanent home.
Our ready source of water made things much easier. I dug a proper latrine—we'd been using a corner of the overgrown lawn—as well as a firepit, lining it with bricks I pried up from one of the courtyard paths. Vette brought back wood and stashed it in the shack next to ours. Squirrels and rabbits bounded through the grass, and crows and starlings yapped from the branches, but our pistols (or, more accurately, their users) were wildly inaccurate. In several hours of hunting, Vette bagged a single seagull. Between all the noise, and our dwindling ammunition, we decided to cease gun-based hunting for the time being. I cleaned the gull and spitted it and we shared the greasy, gamey meat.
We foraged along the river instead. Picked oranges. I saw trout lurking in the eddies, but we had no good way to reach them, and I didn't want to go back to the city until we were truly desperate. Superstitious, I guess. Vette found a walnut tree and we gathered up the nuts. They were wrapped in a fleshy envelope, which had gone black and rotten around the ones on the ground, but beneath these layers, the shell itself kept the nut clean and fresh.
This was enough to get us through the first few days. Upstream, we found a grove of avocados. They were more petite than I was used to, but they fruited strongly despite the early season, and were far more filling than anything we'd found to date. Supplemented with what little freeze dried food we'd found in the cafeterias—the only preserved food I trusted—it was just enough to get by.
Hygiene became crude, but we did well enough there, too. There was leftover soap with the cleaning supplies. This era still used toilet paper, but at least it was better than the corncobs we'd endured in 19th century Brownville. I missed my Primetime sonic bidet.
My head knew the Pods would never come, not in this lifetime, but my heart kept hoping. Waiting for that white rush of nothing, that nitrous drift between worlds. I was disappointed anew each day.
When we worked together, Vette was uncharacteristically silent, and as soon as the day's chores were finished, she left to walk along the river. I made her promise not to go far, but I didn't follow her. In some ways, it would be easier if I wound up on my own.
A week came and went. That week doubled, and doubled again, and the month was up. I had meant to raise the issue later that day, but Vette broached it herself over our breakfast.
"Why should we bother living?" She peeled the pebbled skin from her orange and tugged away the white fibrous veins from the wedges of fruit. "If we kill ourselves, it will be erased when they rescue our past selves, right?"
I scraped bitter orange rind from beneath my thumbnail. "Right."
"So it'll be like going to sleep. And waking up in Primetime. Skipping all the tedious, dirty, rancid survival in the meantime. If a better life is waiting for us, what's the point in slogging through this one? Why not head straight there?"
I considered my plate. "For the experience."
Vette rolled her eyes. "Of wiping my ass with paper? How many oranges can one person eat before you've eaten all the oranges you can stand?"
"We can learn more about the conspiracy."
"Everyone's dead and we can't use their computers. We'd move much faster if we were back in Primetime."
I nodded. She was right. I was starting to doubt. The picnic table we ate at had been weathered by rain and dew. Paint curled, exposing its vulnerable wood. Our lives might get easier as we picked up skills and built our home, but as time eroded the resources that had been gathered and shaped by people now dead, the world would only get harder.
"Well?" Vette said. "Wouldn't it be a whole lot easier? Why not just die?"
I stared at the table. There were millions of tables and they were all pointless now. Some would outlast us, but with no one to use them, it made no difference whether they broke down today or in a hundred years. Their existence made no difference. But if that were true, then there was no point in destroying them, either.
"Because we don't have to," I said in a sudden rush of clarity. "If it gets worse, and we can't stand it and we know it will never get better, we kill ourselves then. We always have that choice. As long as we have that choice, we're free."
She sat back on her bench. "Okay."
"Okay?"
"Okay.
We decided that wherever we decided to make our long-term home, it had to be near water. Water was too heavy, bulky, and necessary to travel to every single day. There was no point in starting from scratch on a structure, either. A home with a wood stove near a stream would be ideal. As for location, the city itself would be too exposed, too vulnerable to wildfires. Anyway, we would need a few acres to plant crops, and many more if we planned to hunt and trap meat, which I did.
I stowed the memory chips in the shack at campus. I hoped to unlock the non-wireless ones eventually, but now wasn't the time. Now was about survival. We foraged for several days to build up supplies, then hiked toward the hills to the northwest of the city. These were reasonably green and the houses were widely spaced. A hawk circled, uninterested. Mice hopped through the grass.
Except for the bevy of electronics, it was odd how little different the homes here felt from the ones in Old Brownville or the ones we used in Primetime. Especially in these wealthy houses designed to co-opt the status of the past. Windows, solid walls (mostly at square angles), rectangular doors. Tables and chairs and couches and beds. Strip out the electronics and pare down the plumbing and it could be the 16th century. Integrate the electronics into the very bones of the house, and replace the windows with large plastic sheets that could be dialed transparent or opaque, and it could be the 28th.
We searched the nearest houses. None felt right. I adapted our strategy, locating a creek trickling down from the mountains. We followed it all the way to the city, checking each house along its path. None were perfect for our needs, but there was one that would do well enough, a four-story monster with a cavernous garage and too many windows (tough to insulate, nearly impossible to replace), but it was usefully rustic, including a downstairs equipped with two wood stoves and an auxiliary kitchen.
; Vette chose an upstairs bedroom overlooking the sprawl of cold hills separating us from the city. I took a downstairs room that would be cool in summer and warmer in winter. Protected, too.
We had a home. We had water. It was time for a trip into the city.
Other than the jammed-up roads, there was little sign Brownville's people had been given any warning of the coming end. Here and there a shop window was broken, but the city had gone virtually unlooted. Groceries sat on shelves, long since rotted, or torn up and scattered through the aisles by rats and dogs. A few shelves had been scoured bare, indicating some people had survived the initial collapse, if briefly, but there was more than enough for our needs.
We didn't have a car. It took several trips with a flatbed cart that rattled much too loudly over the asphalt. First stop was a gardening store for seeds and shovels and fertilizer and pots for the more delicate plants that needed to be started indoors. Next we came for clothes, with an emphasis on rugged jeans, boots, and jackets, as well as everyday socks and underwear. There was some cooking gear in the house, but we needed tougher tools. Heavy iron pans. Griddles that could be placed right on the stoves. Metal cups and plates that washed easy and would never break.
And then all the rest of it, the guns and ammunition, the fishing poles and tackle, the animal traps. Tape and glue and tools. Soap and razors and antibiotics. Candles and lanterns and fuel. One last trip, on my insistence, for library books, both practical manuals and works of fiction. We would have free time again eventually.
All the while, along with this physical sundry, I also carried the feeling we were being watched. But each time I looked down the street, or turned my head over my shoulder, certain I'd see a face, a glimpse of a fleeing shoe, I saw nothing.
Ghosts. The presence of the past. Nothing more.
I kept half an eye on Vette, too. Her early doubts evaporated alongside the sweat she generated as she worked. Chopping wood. Digging the latrine. Hauling water. Clearing the field and sowing the crops. She more than pulled her weight.
Some days we hardly saw each other, didn't pass three words. There was nothing unfriendly about it. We were so busy, so devoted to learning this new world. Other nights we stayed up late with a bottle and our candles and talked for hours over how to set better snares and how we might irrigate the growing garden without swamping it under. She showed more practicality than I'd seen from her the few weeks we'd spent together as Cutting Room agents.
The mystery of G&A still loomed, I supposed. But we had years to explore it. Decades, perhaps. For now we were busied enough keeping ourselves fed and warm and clean.
It was a good life, in its way. Each victory was our own. Each rabbit snared or trout hooked was a triumph. It was a life of constant learning, too; discovering we could use chili powder and vinegar to keep the bugs off the plants felt like unlocking one of God's most vaulted secrets.
But it was a life of monotony, too. Of tedium and repetition. There were no restaurants to eat in, no movies to go to, no friends to call or visit. There was no culture at all, except the two of us, and our culture was one of simple survival.
It was with this in mind that, after a couple seasons of work and preparation, with a second wave of fruits and vegetables coming to ripen, and our traps and snares yielding a regular supply of rabbits, possums, and skunks (these got discarded), we returned to Brownville. My tablet's piezomotors still worked like a charm, but I no longer had any use for it. I meant to see if I could find a database of this world's movies, patch that device to my pad's power supply, transfer the files, and build myself a rudimentary operating system to play them on. I'd been growing increasingly stir-crazy, and if I were restless, I could only imagine what kind of wheels were racing in Vette's head.
She happily came with me. Carrying weapons and light packs, we hiked down the road toward the tired, dusty buildings. Crows squawked. Flies buzzed in spurts and settled back into the grass. We entered the suburbs, the duplicate houses on their winding little lanes that had done nothing to keep out the end. These settlements continued for miles and miles, occasionally opening into parking lots and electric fueling stations and strip malls of defunct restaurants and clothes growing more brittle by the day.
During our first ever trip to Brownville, I had gathered it was the movie capital of its world. I expected its stranglehold had slipped during the timeline's digitalization/globalization era, but according to my tourist's map, several studios remained downtown. That was where I took us, approaching along a highway, the single houses replaced first by apartment blocks, then high-rises, then skyscrapers whose heads were swathed in a fog that refused to burn off with the daylight.
I found Clarisade Boulevard and followed it all the way through the former fashion district. The silence ran so deep I could hear the pounding of the surf miles to the west. While I checked street signs and spotted landmarks, Vette kept watch for motion, threats.
The front office of Horizon Studios was a replica of the Northern Hemisphere, a soaring dome painted with continents and clouds, as if the Earth were pimpled by a scale model of itself. All for show. The studios themselves were empty concrete boxes, painted floor to ceiling with a cool, minty blue. Two sets proved they hadn't always relied on computer graphics: a greenhouse full of dead brown plants, and a large warehouse cramped with fabricated plastic cave tunnels.
Interesting, in a way, but I was after the archives. Several rooms were papered with monitors and thick with dusty electronics. The lot's parking structure was roofed with glossy solar panels. I didn't hold out much hope, but after an hour of poking around the basement control room, lights buzzed to life. Monitors flipped on to blank blue screens. Most of the equipment was broken, reliant on networks that were no longer there, or simply beyond my technical ken, but by the time the sun extinguished itself in the ocean, I had found what appeared to be the master files for thousands of movies. I transferred them to my tablet and instructed it to start writing the software necessary to run them.
"We should consider spending the night," I said.
Vette frowned vaguely. "Do we have to? This place gives me the creeps."
"It's a long walk."
"It'll be just as long in the morning."
There was no arguing with that. My pad was still chugging away at its software build. I wrapped it in a cloth and secured it in my pack and walked out of the studio.
The night was damp and thick with the smell of the sea. A low layer of clouds suffocated the city. We walked slowly, rifles on our shoulders, passing through the downtown towers. At an intersection cornered by four splendidly glassy buildings, I heard shuffling. I touched Vette's arm and hid beside a storefront. Down the way, a white-masked possum slouched past the gutters, its beady black eyes looking as fake as a teddy bear's.
I smiled and stepped forward. Vette grabbed my arm.
"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."
The Cutting Room: A Time Travel Thriller Page 14