(This is only the second draft of the book Worthless. Expect typos, plot holes, odd subplots and the occassionally wrongly named character, especially minor characters. It is made public only to give people a rough idea of how the final story will look)

Chapter 23

Nakskov by dark was a very different place than I had ever truly known. Although it was a small town, relatively speaking, it had a definite city feel around the center. Streets were lit, and even if nothing was open that late on an average day, nothing seemed completely shut down, either. Even closed stores had signs of life.
This was nature. No streetlights, and for that matter, no streets. And the fact that it, too, seemed alive was not something that caused a feeling of safety. Clicks and clacks filled the woods as the half moon tried to illuminate our way, and mostly failed. Vera had a small flashlight with her, what looked like a cheap LED thing that had already been discarded, possibly twice, but stitch back together with tape and wishful thinking. It worked, most of the time, but much like the sounds of life, it wasn't as comforting as it perhaps should have been.
"Is this how you live when I'm not around?" I asked her, regrhetting immediately the sarcastic undertone to my voice. She had, after all, saved me, perhaps even saved my life. The fact that she had not exactly brought me instantly to some luxurious hideout was perhaps not something I could really blame her for.
"I spent some time on the run," she answered calmly, either ignoring or not quite catching my tone. "This isn't that bad."
I was about to make a comment on what bad meant for her when we cleared the dense part of the woods. The landscape opened up almost instantly, dense and conservated woodland turning into narrow lines of fairly pruned trees acting as demarkation of the borders of farmland fields. It took only a short while before we even found a laid gravel path to follow.
"How long have you been here, if you don't mind my asking?"
It felt like one of those casual questions, the kind that might follow questions about job, family or even the weather at some boring dinner with my mom's or Peter's old friends. There were some fun people in that group, but not time travel levels of interesting, and I felt like I was dragging the conversation down to that level.
"Me, about 18 years plus, I guess."
I felt myself slow as I gawked at her in the darkness, the outline in the faint light of the Moon and city lights in the distance being all I could really focus on.
"18 years? Like, around here?" I asked, my voice taking on the tone of a surprised child. "Like, in Nakskov?!"
As she stopped and looked around, apparently trying to navigate by the city lights, I did get a feel of wilderness survival, despite the somewhat excessive coat.
"Yeah..." she simply muttered, not indicating clearly if she was actually answering or just thinking out loud.
"Also, what's with the coat? Why did you make it from patches? Is that, like, time travel fashion or som..."
"Fallen friends," she casually interjected, and my brain tried to grasp the concept, but was caught completely off guard.
"Wha..."
"Someone is lost, we remember them with a patch of fabric from something they wore or used."
Somehow, she seemed to just be rambling off some random memorized line, like saying the alphabet or a receptionist answering a phone with the same line day after day.
"But that's a whole coat. That's quite a lot of..."
"It's this way," she calmly stated and started walking off. There was a feeling in the air of unwanted memories, and I was getting the vibe that I was poking something better left alone.
"So have the others been here 18 years, too?" I tried asking to turn the topic in another direction. To my relief, she seemed to relax a bit at the question, her powerwalk slowing into a more natural brisk stroll.
"They have... uhm..."
It was a bit weird seeing her suddenly, and for whatever reason, struggle for words. Her usual and very focused attitude seemed to glitch for a moment, leaving her oddly vulnerable, for lack of a better word.
"Well, the one, Lisa, has been here about 12 years, Karen 8 and Elmer 3, I think?"
It became apparent from the silent movements of her mouth as she walked through it all in her head again that she wasn't unsure of the numbers. It was the use of names that bothered her.
My head perked up without me even thinking about it when there was a brief sound of a large vehicle, likely a truck, wooshing by somewhere near. Walking slowly, always fearing that one misstep would send me into some unseen lake or grove of trees, I scouted the horizon. True enough, a moment later, the lights of a car passed by beyond some overgrown space.
"Are we there yet?" I asked, catching the dumb remark a second too late. Vera just made a grunt, clearly thinking it was sufficient answer. She had picked up the speed again, and I was stressing my brain to find some question that could make her focus less on speed and more on talking.
"How long did you plan to stay?"
"Standard mission length is 25 years, she mumbled, audible only because of the overall silence around us. "Success or not, we go back after that."
"Back to where?"
"When," she said, stretching her neck to look at the now somewhat close road. It was unclear what she was looking for, the road being fairly clearly there and no cars to be seen at the moment. But she was watching for something.
"Okay, back to when, then?"
She let out a deep sigh, sounding almost disappointed, never taking her eyes off the road.
"Yeah, that's a bit more complicated," she muttered in a slightly bitter tone. "I guess for me it's 3139, on an island near the.... well, a place near Gibraltar that's not there yet."
"And the others?" I asked, as if there was absolutely nothing odd about the topic.
"Dunno," she grumbled as she turned the corner, clapped her hands gently together and stepped onto the sidewalk by the road.
"You don't know?" I just blabbered out, instantly regretting the sightly impolite tone that slipped out along with the words. Vera actually stopped and turned, a weird look in her eyes.
"It's complicated. It's... it's time travel."
And with those words, she turned her attention to the road again.
For the next ten minutes or so, we walked in silence. She didn't seem angry, but her intense focus on the road, for whatever reason, felt like the kind best not interrupted, even if it did mean having to keep up with her powerwalk, practically jogging behind her!
We ended up at the house. It was mostly a dark mass, a blob with angles, surrounded by plants that had clearly grown out of control and strived to devour the entire place, possibly then going for the one next door after that! It seemed extremely forboding, like a modernday hidden jungle temple.
Adding to the drama, Vera passed right by the path leading to the main door. Instead, she stepped through some front yard bushes and carefully navigated her way along a barely visible garden path, through stray branches and old, decrepit garden masonry. Her goal was the back of the house. An old conservatory, an indoor terrace that looked like it could fall apart at a moment's notice. She pulled open the door, unlocked but also uncooperative, and stepped inside, not stopping a single beat to look back. She seemed to simply expect me to keep up, which was honestly becoming a bit difficult.
The inside was as dark as the outside, even moreso when the light of the Moon was blocked by walls and ceilings. The first thing she did was check a small room, right inside the door leading out to the indoor terrace. I managed to sneak a peek under her arm as she looked over the medical machinery in there. A woman, in fairly bad condition, was on a mattress on the floor, all kinds of things connected to her. Knowing full well not to expect her to have a name, I mentally, and silently, called her Cindy.
"One of the casualties," Vera remarked with a rather ominous voice. I suddenly got the sense that she was just as much checking up on the woman as she was, for some reason, showing her to me.
"What is it you need from me?" I asked, suddenly feeling a strange sense of guilt. Vera gently closed the door to the room, then walked the narrow hallway to the door leading into the house proper. We ended up in the dining room, staircase to the left for upstairs, sliding door to the right leading to the living room. The house I lived in was more than large enough, but this old, dilapidated place made me feel uncomfortably small.
"There's a machine in a building down south, I think you're familiar with it," she remarked, never looking at me. As she ran her fingers across the old wooden dining table, dragging up dust, she finally turned and looked me in the eyes. "I think you're familiar with both of them."
Feeling strangely small and vulnerable, I just nodded in agreement.
"It's broken. We need it fixed, or we're sitting ducks here."
She looked at the table, tapping it a few times as if to test its quality by the sound it made.
"And... you think I can fix it? I mean, I can barely fix a flat tyre on my bike!"
"We'll give you the instructions you need," she replied calmly, as if she was talking about something far more natural, like, well, fixing a flat bike tyre! "Now, let's find you a place to sleep!"
Struck by some sudden change, she suddenly seemed very cheerful as she swiped open the sliding door and stepped into the living room with enough of an entrance that the lack of an audience almost seemed unfair! Caught up in that moment, I completely forgot to think of more pressing questions.
As I laid my head on the pillow she had thrown on the couch before leaving and pulled up the old woollen blanket that she pulled out of a broken commode, I got the feeling that she had intended me to forget asking more questions, right before my eyes got heavy and I drifted away into a welldeserved slumber.