The Cutting Room: A Time Travel Thriller

by Edward W. Robertson

  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?"

  "What do you know about them?"

  "Nothing. Just the rumors. But it was a joke. Nobody believed it except the people who believed in ghosts, alien abductions, the Illuminati."

  My hope receded. "How did it end?"

  "It wasn't all a lie," she said, voice going distant as she returned to her memories of the faraway view she must have had from whatever orbit-borne ship or capsule had exempted her from extinction. "They all fell asleep. They didn't wake up. It happened so fast."

  "Why? Who did it?"

  "I don't know."

  "What else?" Vette said. "What was happening right before this?"

  "Nothing. Nothing that would spur a war. It had to be an accident. A madman." The woman looked up from the floor, eyes bright and sharp. "If you're from the future, why don't you know this? Isn't this your history, too?"

  I shook my head. "I can't say anything more."

  "But it isn't always like this, is it? So silent. So empty. If you're here, that means it has to get better."

  "It will," I said. "I promise."

  We left her in the subway car she'd turned into her home. Neither I nor Vette spoke until we'd walked clean out of the decaying city.

  "We should have taken her with us," Vette said.

  "We can't. We shouldn't be here in the first place."

  "Neither should she. She survived because of a fluke. Sounds like kismet."

  The ocean gleamed to the west. I took the offramp from the highway and the waters sank from view. "Or random, meaningless chance."

  Vette kicked a chunk of cracked asphalt down the road. "Well, the apocalypse wasn't. The whole world doesn't just fall asleep. Whoever created that little virobot designed it that way."

  "Probably."

  "Which means they wanted to end the world."

  "Or to have the ability to end it. There's a difference."

  She shifted her pack on her shoulders. Her wounds had healed, but I suspected there may have been pellets left in her muscles. At least they were steel, not lead.

  "This hadn't happened the first time we visited this world," she said. "If G&A really has time travel, they could have undone this. They didn't, thus they wanted it to happen. QED."

  "That is genuinely convincing," I said.

  "You're surprised I can be convincing?"

  "I'm surprised I can be convinced."

  It was a good theory, but without proof, it remained just that. Back at the house, we spent the next months expanding the garden, digging irrigation canals down to the stream and scavenging hand pumps and hoses to distribute water to the crops. I started tinkering with solar panels, hoping to automate pumps and sprinklers, maybe find a tractor.

  My tablet had had plenty of time to build the software necessary to watch the movies I'd copied from Horizon Studios. After the day's work, we watched them together on the couch, comedies and dramas, planet-hopping sci-fi and historical epics. When my muscles were sore and my mind was exhausted, it was good to get lost in these stories, to be taken away from my own life.

  Now that I knew its people were truly dead and gone, we visited Brownville more often, both to harvest supplies and to search for more clues. There was an abundance of the former and too few of the latter. What we saw matched the woman's story. Most people had dropped in the middle of their daily lives. Corpses lay facedown in their cereal bowls. At the wheels of cars. Behind service counters, their customers collapsed on the other side. Just a few had tried to flee or hide. For most, they'd fallen asleep without knowing they'd never wake up.

  Vette and I remained together. Two years in, we began to fight—I can't remember now what caused it—and I thought we might break apart and live out separate lives. But things calmed down by themselves. We worked side by side, slept together, smiled at each other each morning. If we'd had other options for partners, maybe the cracks would have widened too far to heal, but I think we would have been fine no matter where we were. We were good together. She had a quick mind and was eager to solve problems. In the brief time we'd worked as CR together, her youthful silliness had annoyed me, but now that it was just us and the wind, I found it wonderful.

  Days became years. With Vette's help, I got the irrigation automated, but it broke down regularly. Sometimes I wondered if it was more trouble than it was worth. Keeping ourselves fed and our house intact took constant effort. Many of my ambitions for improving the home had to be set aside. I never got a tractor running. Years of neglect and weather had broken the vehicles beyond my ability to repair.

  After six years, my tablet quit working. I couldn't convince it back to life. But we'd stored our movies on Vette's tablet, too, and although we'd seen them all by now, we watched one each night until the day her device failed as well. After that, we read books aloud to each other, or told made-up stories of our own.

  Do you know what it's like to be truly alone together? I doubt it. But it doesn't matter. We had it for ourselves, and that can't be taken away.

  One day I found her on the porch gazing at the distant sea. She had a funny look on her face. I asked her what was the matter.

  "Nothing," she said. "Just trying to remember what lobster tastes like."

  "It was good, as I recall."

&n
bsp; She smiled. "That's not helpful."

  There wasn't anything to be done about it then and there—it was the middle of our spring growing season and any setbacks could make for a lean summer once the creek shrank—but I kept it in the back of my head. A couple months later, with one crop harvested and the next seeded but not yet sprouted, I got together our bags and took her down to the sea. I'd scavenged a few lobster traps, but after three days of surf and sun, they remained stubbornly empty. While Vette snoozed in the afternoon rays, I shuffled across the sand to a surf shop, grabbed flippers and a mask, and waded out to sea.

  Call it beginner's luck, but within an hour of snorkeling, I swam back to shore with a bug in my hand. Vette woke as I was stoking up the fire. When she saw my catch, she laughed and clapped her hands.

  I wish we'd had more days like that. But early on, it felt like we had to work too hard to ever leave the farm. Later, when I'd learned the plants could fend for themselves for a couple days and be none the worse for wear, we took more trips into the city, touring dusty museums and monuments, hiking up towers to watch the sunset, but I was already getting old. After years of hard labor, my knees weren't much for stairs. But Vette was always so happy to get away from our house on the hill, if just for a day, so I did the best I could.

  We could have turned off our internal birth control. We talked about it many times. But it would have been too selfish. Anything we created would wind up erased when the Cutting Room came back for our young selves. At different points throughout the years, we both argued that it might be okay, that in a way it was no different from dying—wouldn't it be better to give our children existence even if that existence would later be negated?—but we never agreed on this at the same time. After a couple of decades, Vette's eggs stopped, and so did our discussions.

  We had each other. That was enough.

  She died first. She was 62. Much older than I ever thought we'd make it, but that didn't mean I was ready. One day she was healthy, the next she had a cough. Pneumonia. Near the end, I tried to give her antibiotics, but they were decades old, as useless as my reassurances, my prayers, my hands. She burned away from the inside. By the end, she no longer had the strength to cough.