(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 47

Skies were darkening. A thick, grey layer on top of the world, like a huge blanket of week-old lint, or a dust bunny of religious proportions. It was going to rain again. That might not be a good thing.
"Ida!"
The voice and the knocks that followed cut through the still country air around the house. I had never stopped to appreciate it, the quiet, the few times I had been forced to spend time out here. Standing on the old and poorly maintained balcony, not leaning against the railing for fear that the rot had spread much farther than the visible part, I had stood with my eyes gazing over the nearby field, spotting both a few squabblilng swans and a small family of deer grazing. Back when I first heard the word 'juxtaposition', I had been obsessed with finding out what it meant. Two or more things that were put together, even though they were in many ways complete opposites. For example, a peaceful rural landscape, almost idyllic enough to belong in a painting or nature documentary. And a house falling apart with time traveling rebels squatting in it. Maybe not the exact definition of juxtaposition, but good enough for me.
"Ida, I know you're in there!" the voice continued, with the same series of three knocks, precisely spaced, following the words. I wanted to yell back, but the path from the balcony to the door was a bit odd and took me through the entire house, so yelling would be loud and quite likely still useless.
"Other door!" I said through the small window by the main door. "I haven't found the key for that one, yet."
I had recognized the voice quickly, but confirming it by looking through the small window, standing on my toes on an empty wooden crate found inside the house, seemed a good idea. It was true, though, that the key had been nowhere to be found. Luckily, this strange house had anothre door almost next to it, and the key to that had been left on the kitchen counter, for unknown reasons.
"Jesus Christ, you really aren't much of a spy, are you?"
"Not a spy," Alex said, gritting his teeth in poorly concealed frustration. At least he was polite, waiting for me to step aside and gesturing an invite before just waltzing in.
"Then why are you here?" I asked, doing my best not to sound offensive in any way. "I mean, no disrespect, but nobody invitated you. Right?"
For someone who wasn't a spy, the FE agent sure made an effort to subtly study every bit of the house as he walked through the boiler room and then the kitchen.
"I get the feeling nobody invited you into this house, either," he rebutted, in turn seeming to make sure not to sound too snarky. "According to our records, this house belongs to a little old couple living a few towns over. Been for sale for quite a while. Did you buy it?"
On that last remark, he failed to not sound snarky.
"So what if I did? Why are you here, Alex?"
He moved to continue into the house, his eyes going to the currently closed door leading from kitchen to hallway. He wasn't shy about it, either, and only stopped when I physically placed myself between him and the door.
"We've been keeping an eye on you," he said, faking a smile in that special way that was so obviously fake that it seemed like he was honestly admitting that it was not a real smile. "You didn't think you could just run around freely after that whole affair by the harbor, did you?"
More than anything, he seemed casual about everything he said. He wasn't making threats or arguing. He was just stating facts, and nobody could really argue with facts. He probably didn't even have a choice in the matter, some shady boss somewhere handing him his orders.
"I had hoped so, to be honest."
His eyes went to the door again, but this time it wasn't a casual glance. Not the way he kept shifting between the door and looking me right in the eyes.
"If you're such a badass superspy, why do you need to ask permission from me? Just go, snoop around."
He cracked a smile, making it hard to tell if it was polite, grateful, or just very self-satisfied. Then he nodded and walked around me, opening the door.
Ashe stepped through the hallway and into the living room, everybody inside froze. What was a little more surprising, but satisfying to see, was that Alex did the same. His confident swagger slowed to a crawl and then stopped as he gazed around the room, his jaw hanging slightly open and his brows starting to frown a bit.
"Everybody," I said a bit loudly, "this is Alex Jokumsen. He's local. Like, local local. And he's military intelligence, so, you know, don't invade Iraq or anything while he's here."
There were a few coy hellos around the room, and a lot more uneasy stares at the man, making me almost feel sorry for him. He took it in stride, though, nodding his own hellos back at everyone, one by one. He looked almost ready to go through the room, shaking everyone's hand, like the last one to show up at a family birthday.
"What's a spy doing here?" asked a short, young woman who had reflexively stood up from the very low couch by the window, the second Alex stepped into the room. She was obviously nervous, clutching a packet of nicotine gum far too hard.
"Alex, that is Jonna. Your facial recognition connected me to her older brother, who should be here somewhere, too."
Jonna grunted something and pointed her thumb at the small second hallway farther in. There was a small bathroom there, which seemed to be what she was mainly trying to indicate.
"Hi, Jonna," said Alex, like some new member of a self-help group. "I'm Alex, I'm from..."
"Yeah, yeah, we got that, James Bond. She was asking what you're doing here?"
I smiled, patting Alex on the shoulder as I pointed to the guy speaking with an open palm.
"You'll like him, Alex. He doesn't want us to know his name, real spy-like. But he did help us capture the robot copy of me that you saw in town."
"So not a spy," Alex grumbled under his breath. Then he put his hands together in a way that made him seem like an awkward public speaker at some paid engagement.
"Yes, hello, everyone. My name is Alex, and I am from military intelligence. I have been working with Ida here for a few days, and I just wanted to see if there was anything I could add to this..."
"Bullshit."
That particular remark garnered a few supporting outbursts. It was Niels, who was sitting in a recliner next to his brother in a rocking chair, both of them tugged away a bit in a weird nook that the living room for some reason had.
"Why you here, spyman?" asked Jonna again, and got some agreement from around the room. A look at Alex and I could see his good nature, natural or not, starting to fail. His smile was getting more strained by the second, and he was rubbing his hands together a bit too hard.
"Very feisty bunch you've assembled here, eh, Ida?"
I nodded, unable to hide a somewhat cocky smile.
"I'm here because I'm military intelligence," he repeated, this time with a less cuddly public speaking voice, "and we just returned from a local farmhouse where a highly magnetized car managed to nearly rip the ears off of one of my colleagues."
A hush went through the room. A few of the faces shifted from vaguely disguised resentment into nervous shyness.
"Wait," said a young man, sitting in another couch to the far left of the room, "how does a magnet rip of someone's ears?"
"Spies like to accessorize, too," replied Alex in a somewhat scathing voice. It took a moment for people to catch the meaning, but many, especially the female ones, suddenly begun rubbing their earrings with an uncomfortable expression on their faces. "Yeah, and funny thing is, we spotted a car leaving there moments earlier. Guess where we found that car."
Without even being asked, Niels awkwardly raised his hand a bit and mumbled what sounded like an apology, all while Jens looked at him with a harsh frown on his face.
"Jens, where did you park?" I suddenly asked, and without saying anything, the big man got up from the rocking chair and put on his jacket before he pushed past Alex on his way out to, presumably, move the car to somewhere less conspicuous. Two others in the room suddenly became restless, too, and finally decided to follow suit.
"Ida, what the hell is going on here? Who are these people?" asked Alex, glimpsing an opportune moment while everyone was preoccupied with people going to move their cars, and perhaps thinking whether they themselves had done something that might attract attention to the place. Jonna's brother Anton stepped into the room in the middle of everything, looking very perplexed at what was going on, but he stepped aside quickly when I guided Alex into the adjacent dining room.
A single table and some old chairs were all that was in that room, and as the sliding door between it and the living room closed shut, the sounds of the people in the other room talking amongst themselves practically disappeared. And yet, Alex insisted on whispering.
"Ida, you gotta gimme something here! You've been dragging a wake of weird stuff behind you for days now, and even if local police doesn't give a rat's ass about a few weirdoes running loose, my superiors are starting to freak out! I'm not even sure they'll let me run this op on my own much longer, or if they'll just have some hardass rush the place and put everybody in a hole to be interrogated one by one!"
Anyone else might have been persuaded by the picture of doom and gloom the man was painting, but what really got to me was the way he was obviously trying to hide his desperation. His voice was getting raspy, and in the light from the naked lightbulb in the middle of the room, his face was starting to have a very red shine. Part of me expected him to buckle over in a coughing fit, or a migraine!
"Look, I don't know if... I mean, can you handle weird? Like, really, really weird? No questions asked, no accusations of lying and so on?"
"I just had two of my best people tell me very convincing stories of killer robots, while we called removal on some lifelike sex doll thing in a warehouse that wasn't there when we got there. I think I can handle it."
"No, I mean weirder than... wait, the robot copy wasn't there anymore?"
"The warehouse wasn't there," he hald hissed at me. "Somebody cleared out everything and torched the surface, I guess to remove microscopic traces. And no, nobody saw a fire. So yeah, I can handle weird!"
"I mean weirder than that," I finally added, sighing deeply as I did. His eyes squinted at me, like someone trying to figure out if he was the target of some really mean prank. I finaly caved in.
"Jonna!" I called, and she pulled the sliding door aside before I gestured her in. She shut the door behind her, looking a bit confused at my sudden calling. "Jonna, would you please tell our friend here where you're from?"
"Friend?" she asked softly, looking the man up and down. I just nodded and signalled to her to continue. "I'm... I'm from Stokkemarke, out east.Why?"
"And would you please tell him when you're from?"
At that question, both the other two in the room were suddenly looking at me strangely. The difference was that one was skeptical, while the other looked almost petrified.
"Uhm..." she started, constantly looking back and forth between Alex and me, "I'm... I mean, my family is from... we're from 1846."
Although all three od us fell silent, Alex' body language was screaming louder then words ever could! His eyes went back and forth between us, his lips kept trying to form the beginning of a sentence and then giving up. And his hands seemed to be having half a dozen different conversations all on their own, all of them very loud!
"Time?!" he suddenly shouted, loud enough that we could hear everyone shut up in the next room. "You're telling me that she's a time..." He suddenly hushed again, his voice dropping massively in volume but not one bit in pitch."You're telling me she'sa #*@!ing time traveler? Like, some Back to the Futureshit?!"
"More like Terminator, but yeah, something like that," I answered, not even thinking about my choice of words. Startled, I practically leapt aside as he marched in long strides to the sliding door. With one hand, he pulled out open and glared around the living room on the other side of it.
"Quick census," he said in a commanding voice, "what year is everyone in here from?"
The responses came slowly at first, then more built up the courage to follow. 2293. 1740. 1941. The answers ticked in one by one for a few seconds, while Alex stood completely still. Then, without a word, he shut the sliding door and thus shut out the remaining few answers.
"Is this a trick?" he asked, looking over at Jonna, then at me. Jonna said nothing. I shook my head.
"No. No trick. How do you think they know how to build those robot lookalikes?"
"Time travel? That's not a thing that exists. That's not a..."
"Faulty logic," Jonna suddenly mumbled out loud, immediately looking surprised that anyone heard her!
"Care to explain that?" asked Alex. His face was getting a lot of nervous ticks, and his voice sounded on the verge of cracked, all of which made the false, saccarine smile on his lips look even more forced and creepy.
"Well," Jonna started slowly, looking at me as much as she did at him, "time travel doesn't really have to exist. Orbitalcities don't exist, either. But they will be invented one day. The difference is, the day time travelis invented, it can go here, now, and exist without having been created yet. I mean, that's just... you know..."
There was a quiet bit, during which Alex kept pointing his finger at her as if to ask a question or make a remark, but he never said anything.
"Look, Alex... Alex, hey, snap out of it and look at me..."
I waited a little for him to fully react, his eyes constantly glazing over a little and getting that thousand mile stare that people got when they had no idea how to deal with a situation.
"Alex, if you're going to stay here, you're going to have to deal with this, and you're going to have to deal with it on your own time, okay? This is why I wanted to..."
My words were cut off when there was another knock on the door, a rather loud and hectic one. I could hear some of the others in the living room get up and walk to it, but I still stepped around Alex, ignoring his brief complaint, and hurried out to the door myself. Peeking through the small window in it first, I felt a strange surprise fill my body as I opened it up.
"Emilie?"
The weather had taken a slight turn for the worse, threatening to go farther in that direction very soon. Out in the cold drizzle stood the girl from the volunteer place. She was already rubbing her arms and trying not to shiver too much.
"Yeah. Still got room for one more?"
"Yeah, sure," I stuttered as I let her in and locked the door behind her. She gave me a glance as she passed me that almost seemed embarrassed, which made absolutely no sense to me. As we entered the kitchen, seeing through the door as people filtered back from the hallway and into the living room, she stopped. With nervous eyes, she turned to me, still rubbing her arms, but it seeming more like a way to distract her hands than a way to keep warm.
"Sorry to..."
She stopped on her own, like she was struggling to find the right words. Slowly, her fidgetfy movements ground to a halt and she just stared into nothing. When I reached out to touch her, she flinched, snapping back to the real world. There were tears in her eyes.
"They came," she said, her voice cracking almost immediately. "They came to my house. My parents, my brothers. They just... They just took them. Like ithey were some #*@!ing, I don't know, like they were packages to deliver. They just..."
The tears became sobbing, and before I could catch her, she fell to her knees. Curling up, gasping for air, she leaned against the ktichen counter, arms around her knees, weeping.
"They took them, and I just looked. I was nearly home and I just looked while they took them away. I did nothing!"
The last word she punctuated by slamming her fist into the floor, clearly a painful move, but she hid the pain behind the steady flow of tears.
"Emilie," I said, putting on the most caring and sympathetic voice I could muster, "this is important. Do you know where they took them?"
She nodded, rather frantically, tears still flowing.
"I followed them. I ran behind their cars, but they didn't see me." She suddenly broke out in a smile, chuckling lightly. "I mean, who watches the sidewalk for people following a car, right?"
Only when she briefly glanced at her legs did it dawn on me that they were bent out of shape, mainly from the knees down. Not in a dramatic way, but more as if someone had put a far too heavy load on a flimsy metal scaffold. Had she never drawn attention to it, the loose pants would have hidden it just fine.
"Where did they go?"
"There's an old farm, out near Halsted," she said, wiping tears off her nose with the sleeve that still looked moist from the drizzle outside. "They keep them there. All of them."
"All of them?" I asked, a bit hesitantly. She nodded.
"Yeah, they've got, like lots of people there for shipping. Someone once told me that they don't just cut the anchor and make someone snap back to their own original time, because then they end up in the time machine they used for leaving, and that makes them hard to find." Her sobbing had faded, becoming a sniffle. A few old rags had been left in the kitchen by whoever had lived there last, or by someone trying to make the place look more inticing to a potential buyer. I handed her one to wipe tears and rainwater off her face, saying nothing when she decided to clean her nose, too. I just hung the thing back on the little hook on the wall.
"So they..."
"They use a special time machine, very heavy duty stuff. The kind they use to send special units."
With those words, she broke down crying again, shivering, but not from the cold.
"Come with me," I said, helping her to her feet. Being taller than me, by more than a bit, she was difficult to support beyond just getting her off the floor!
In the living room, everybody fell quiet almost immediately. Emilie hesitated in the doorway, clearly feeling an urge to run away from the lot. But she stayed.
"Tell them what you told me," I said to her, and she summarized the entire thing for the people in the room. There was a lot of angry talk, mostly just people cursing the woman in white and her goons. One, I noted, reacted very differently. Standing by the now open sliding door, Alex had a strange look in his eye, a kind of skeptical panic. The moment our eyes met, he stared for a second, then turned his back and went into the dining room, half shutting the door behind him.
The first thing I noticed when opening and stepping through the sliding door was that Jonna was no longer there. I gave the living room a quick glance and, to my relief, spotted her on one of the many couches. Then I turned my attention back to Alex.
"Sonne, listen to me, I don't give a shit! I want you and Teglgaard on this pronto, and I want someone at home office to..."
He stopped hissing at his phone the moment he noticed me in the room. Apart from the angry brow, he looked oddly nervous, or at least stressed, as he took a deep breath and focused on his phone again.
"Look, just... the names are in my case folder, just use the op password. No, just do it, don't call for confirm, this needs direct action, ASAP. Yeah, thanks."
"That Simon on the phone?" I asked, trying to sound like there was nothing to getf all wound up about. Alex nodded. "Got him tracking down the ones I couldn't find?" He nodded again.
"I didn't tell him your little, let's call it a time travel theory," he muttered under his breath, making it seem like time travel was a dirty word.
"It's not a..." I stopped myself, weighing the pros and cons of the semantics in question. "You know what," I ended up adding, "doesn't matter. Let me know what they..."
Without warning, there was a series of loud pops, and the place fell into nearly complete darkness. I could see the silhouette of Alex go for his gun, but never actually pull it out.
"What the #*@! was that?" he asked, instead. I waited for any other sounds, but none came.
"The lamps. All the battery powered lamps we brought, they must have popped all at the same time."
"Why? A power surge?"
I stared at the dark  outline of the man, a bit annoyed that he probably could not see the glance I was sending him.
"Battery power, Alex. I don't think a power surge would... wait..."
My mind fumbled about a bit, trying to recall what was bugging it. When it finally did, I rushed to the sliding door and practically ripped it open!
"Everybody alright?!" I half yelled into the room, suddenly finding myself staring at about a dozen confused and frightened faces. It took a second to realize that I was the one who had scared them!
"What the hell, Ida, you scared the shit out of us," said Niels as he lit another candle with his lighter. A drawer in one of the old pieces of furniture was open and apparently had a bunch of small candles in it. How he had found them was beyond me.
"Is everyone okay?" I repeated. One by one, they all nodded, looking at each other.
"What's the big deal, it was just a power..."
Jens, who had been speaking, suddenly froze in the middle of his thoughts. Then he ran to the window facing the road outside!
"It's hit everything nearby." He turned, almost like in a television drama series. "The streetlamps farthre away are still on."
"Shit," hissed the nameless guy.
"What? What's so important about a power outage?" asked Alex as he pushed his way by me and into the living room. Everybody just stared at him.
"Remember the big power outage a few days back?" I asked, never looking at him. I heard him grunt his yes, though. "That was a blast to throw time travelers out of our time. It's what set all this in motion."
"And now we've got a new one," said Jens as he walked through the room, his big feet making loud, heavy noises against the old carpet.
"So... why is everyone so freaked?" Alex continued. "I mean, everybody's still here, right?"
Jens, in spite of his huge stature, squeezed between myself and Alex with impressive agility. I turned to see him hurry up the stairs to the floor above, the one that had a balcony looking out over the surrounding landscape. Moments later, we all heard his outburst!
"#*@!!" was the first part. Then came the sound of old wood being hit, hard. "#*@! those #*@!ing #*@!ers!!"
With everyone else itching to rush up to him, I waved at them and ran up the stairs myself. I climbed the staircase to see him standing in the doorway to the balcony, leaning his forehead against it withhis teeth gritted and bared. His knuckles had traces of blood on them. So did the doorframe.
"What did you see?" I asked, even though I rushed to the windows overlooking the balcony and looked out myself. He simply pointed to the road nearby, the one leading into town. There were at least five spots, all lit up by swirling, colored lights. Right before the light disappeared in five intense flashes.
"Oh #*@!," I whispered. "Do you know who it was?" Jens simply shook his head.
"Ida, why are we still here?" he asked, causing me to look confused back and forth between him and the now once again dark spots outside by the road. "What is this house? Why didn't it affect us?"
"A rebel outpost," I sighed. "They abandoned it. Dunno where they are now. But they apparently shielded it back when they were still here."
"That's why you gathered us here?" he asked, turning to look at me with tired eyes, forehead still pressed against the doorframe. I nodded. He finaly took his head off the doorframe and walked by me.
"They're here," he said, not bothering to turn and look at me. "They're coming for us. We need to batten down the hatches." With those words, he disappeared down the staircase.
Downstairs, we were both met with frightened glances. Alex was standing a bit aside from everyone else, checking something on his phone with an intense look in his eyes, but everyone else seemed to have been just waiting for us to return, now silently awaiting our report from upstairs.
"They are coming," I blurted out, before Jens could even get a word in. "We need to..."
It felt almost like a dramatic cliché, me about to pass on a battle plan, and then getting cut off in mid sentence. But unlike unoriginal action movies, it was not an explosion or even gunfire that interrupted. Instead, a string of a dozen or so loud crackles could be heard through the walls, the walls muffling them enough to make it hard to place them geographically. But they sounded close by!
"What the hell was that?" Alex asked remarkably levelheadedly.
"Someone just timed in," Emilie answered, her voice still sounding a bit frail.
"Lots of someones," Niels added.
Everybody just stood around for the next few moments, listening intently. Snapping out of it, Jens and the nameless guy went to different windows, sneaking a peek outside. None of them seemed to spot anything.
"Alex," I said casually, nodding to the dining room. He sent an uneasy look around the room before he strolled calmly through the sliding door.
"What?"
"Take this," I said, handing him two small plastic bags. He looked at them, pushing and prodding them a bit to identify the things inside.
"Ida, these are boxershorts. And are those... are those socks?"
I nodded.
"Look, the pops you just heard were time travelers. I know it sounds insane, but these can hurt them."
"Socks? Underwear and socks have time travel powers?" he asked, his voice drawing out the words in disbelief.
"It's not just socks and... Look, it's just these. They're special, oka..."
We were interrupted when a loud banging sound came from the main door. In the living room, we could hear a panic start to form, a few voices calming the crowd.
"So what, I just shove underpants in their faces and yell skidmarks or something?"
Alex' voice was reaching a pitch that promissed nothing good. His breath was getting rapid and his eyes squinted in a way that seemed a bit erratic. None of it was good.
"Basically, yes! Just keep it away from the others, it's against time travelers and it doesn't care who those time travelers are. You got it?"
He stood for quite a while, just looking at me with his mouth hanging a little open. A few times he looked to the living room, to the people now loudly discussing what to do, as another loud bang came from the front door.
"Alex, you got it?!"
"Yeah, yeah," he stuttered, still visibly confused, "shove underwear in time traveler's face, stay away from friends, I got it!"
"Great. It's just a matter of..."
The banging sound returned, this time followed by a loud crack as wood gave in. From somewhere in the house, Jens shouted words that could not be understood through the walls. I could hear something heavy being dragged.
"There's a backdoor, out by the small conservatory at the end of that hallway. They'll find it soon. Watch it. Don't get hurt. We clear?"
Alex nodded, and as I pointed my finger toward the other hallway, he hurried for it.
Running through the living room I pushed people aside more crudely than I wanted to! In the main hallway, I found Jens and a few others cooperating on getting furniture stacked against the main door. I didn't wait around, but instead bolted through the kitchen, heading for the secondary door. It was a miracle none of the attackers had thought of it yet, but I was not going to complain or ask questions!
As I got there, I found the nameless guy looking around for things to stack against it. He seemed flustered, his face red in the light of the old and dim lightbulb that hung naked on the wall.
"Don't," I said quickly, fearing that it sounded like a hiss or a scolding. "We need to funnel them."
He just looked at me with a very lost expression on his face, but he stepped aside when I pushed through the small entrance room to look out the tiny window in the door. I instantly jumped back with a loud yelp when a set of angry eyes looked back through it!
"Leave," I told the nameless guy. He hesitated, looking at the window and then back at me as I fumbled with the plastic bag. Just from the presence of him, and perhaps our new guest outside the door, I could feel the clothes inside the bag start to heat up as they were freed from my pocket.
"Leave, now!" I yelled at him, watching him closely as he got out of the small room. With him gone, I slid several pieces of clothing over each hand, enough that I had to struggle to get a tight grip on the key as I pulled it out of my pocket. Then I stuck it in the lock and, hearing the rusty old metal of both key and lock scrape together, turned it.
The moment the lock clicked, the door flew open, the stocky man outside nearly ripping it off its hinges! He roared at me and raised his fist to pound me to dust, the fingers glowing with an eerie raddish mist. I didn't think, not even for a second, but just let instinct take over. One hand grabbed him by the face, pressing multiple socks into his eyes and mouth, while the other went for the shoulder of his raised right hand. He screamed instantly, colored dust bursting out of thin air to surround him. Kicking myself away from him more than him away from me, I got a bit of distance between us before the swirl of colors sent him screaming out of this time, or whatever they were doing.
Behind where he had stood, three others now suddenly looked at me with a bit of angry confusion in their eyes. I wasted no time, but simply stormed out the door, sprinting straight at them! The first got a sock crammed forcefully into his mouth and left there. The second, a woman that I thought were a man until the final look at her, soon found me wrapped around her leg. She pulled out what looked like a small baton, but before she could use it, colored dots were engulfing the both of them. As they howled, I threw myself into the bushes nearby, feeling the blast of them disappearing wash over me just as I landed.
The last one looked oddly calm. I got out of the bushes even before the colored dots had truly faded, and he stared me down instantly. Then, he pulled out a small baton of his own. We traded glares for a few moments before I launched myself at him, roaring with all my lungs!
I knew something was very wrong the moment I grabbed at him with my left hand. He gave the hand a quick slap with the baton, then poked me hard in the stomach with the tip of it. Hunching over at the painful jab, I stared at the hand as it became warmer and warmer, before I struggled to get the socks off of it and throw them on the ground. As they smoldered and caught fire, he used my distraction to grab my right arm and pull me in by it. With a furious glare, he pressed the small baton against the hand, and I screamed as the clothes wrapped around it started to heat up. He never let go of the hand, instead staring at me with a very satisfied smirk as I started crying in pain. In his hubris, he never noticed my now painful but free left hand fumble through my pockets. Trying to ignore the searing pain in the right hand, I pulled up a small pair of boxershorts, and the second he turned from looking at the simmering hand to staring me in the eyes, I crammed it in his mouth so hard I felt at least one tooth scrape so badly against the back of my hand that a piece broke off. He tried to pull the boxers out, but keeping his hand away and pressing them in against his attempts to spit them out was easier than his fight to hold onto my now smoldering hand. In a fit of rage, I headbutted him on the chin, making his mouth shut hard around the boxers. I never noticed whether or not he managed to swallow them before the colored dots appeared to swallow him up!
Inside the door again, I finally buckled over, crying out in pain. Both hands red and swollen, it was an endurance challenge to just close and lock the door properly! The nameless guy had left completely, apparently taking my request to heart, and with tears streaming down my cheeks, I made my way in. Once in the kitchen, I stopped, gasping through the pain, and with a last, great effort, I turned on the faucet. It rumbled, making screaming sounds of its own, and for a moment I feared it had been shut off. It would make sense, in an empty house like this. After all, the power was down. But as the first rush of, admittedly brown, tapwater came gushing out, I foud myself smiling warmly at what real estate agents would leave on in case of having to show a house to potential buyers.
With cold water running down my swollen hands, I finally listened. The house wasfull of sounds, now, but it was so full that I had problems telling them apart. There were only very few screams, and none of them were all that bloodcurdling. A few crunching sounds of broken glass being stepped on, sounding very much like it came from the living room. It made sense, that being one of the few rooms with windows facing the street. But what I noticed much more was the sound of electric static filling the air, followed by a snapping boom. As the water cooled my hands, I heard it twice. Alex was getting the hang of shoving underwear in people's faces.
Imore stumbled than walked into the hallway, seeing another door open into what might once have been an extra bedroom, or perhaps a study or home office. The window was smashed, one of only two other than the living room facing the street. The third was the bathroom. The door there was still closed.
In the living room, everything was chaos! Furniture had been thrown about, Jonna was on the floor, a bleeding wound in the back of her head and her hands caught in some strange threads that looked like tactical silly string, which she struggled mdly to get rid of. A disturbingly bright light shone through the large window facing the garden, but that window did not open. Someone had tried to break it, but all they managed to do was leave a few huge cracks in it. By the corner of the small nook in the room, I could see Jens beating the everloving crap out of someone who had not been there before, likely, and hopefully, one of the time travelers come to capture people. Three others were holding another one of them down, while Niels struggled to tie him up with what looked like half a roll worth of ducttape.
Through the sliding down, which had been smashed to splinters, I could make out others struggling, but as I looked on, one of them was yanked away, and as the other, one of ours, dove for cover, colored dots erupted to light up the room. Alex had apparently made his way back into the house. As I watched, slowly regaining my strength, there was a loud crack behind me, and splinters of the front door flew by me like a cloud of sharp steam!
For a moment, everything seemed quiet. I didn't realize at first that my hearing had simply gone away for a little while. I never even considered that something bad had happened until Jens reached over and grabbed me by my jacket collar. Shouting something that only came through as discombobulated vowels, he ripped me aside as something passed my ear. I never even saw what it was.
Sounds returned about the same instant as I landed hard on the old carpet on the floor. For unknown reasons, I only now noticed the scent of of charcoal and burned meat in the air, most of it doubtlessly from the time travelers that had been sent back. From the door to the hallway, the door that Jens had ripped me away from, a woman stepped into the room. She sent me a brief glance, cold and lifeless eyes without a hint of emotion. Then she turned her entire attention to Jens again. With an inhumanly quick punch she broke his shoulder so thoroughly that I could see the bones deform under his clothes, even from my pron position on the floor!
"ROBOTS!" I yelled with all my might, and faces turned towards us by the door! There were barely any of the attacking time travelers left, and I could see that it might be because people in the living room were swarming them and forcing them down, then throwing them into the dining room for Alex to dispatch. A single thought went through my head: That tactic would no longer work.
Even with his shoulder looking like hell, Jens simply slammed into the robot, his other shoulder as a ram, when the one behind it came for me. Both machines went backward, their strength meaningless when pushed. They were made to weigh the same as people, so they were about as easy to push! Resisting my urge to help him in a fight I knew I stood no chance in, I scrambled clumsily to my feet and tried not to fall as I dodged out of the fight entirely!
"It won't work on them, they're robots," I hastily explained as I grabbed Alex by the wrist and got him back into the dining room he was about to leave. He wanted to join the fight, that much was crystal clear. It was admirable, but this was a fight that was not won by courage alone!
"Robots?" he asked, his mind taking a second to remember that everything was insane, and he had no reason to stop and wonder about this added mess.
"Yeah, the time travelers were just to soften us up, I guess. Or they thought the robots would only be needed to drag the fallen amongst us away."
I was breathing heavy. Too heavy. Some poorly defined pain was flooding my midsection, and I hoped dearly that it was simply a stitch, or maybe a strained muscle. Nothing warm came out, nothing stained my clothes. If I was bleeding, it was internally. For some reason, just for a second or two, my mind managed to convince me that was a good thing. For a second or two.
"Robots like the ones you fought by the harbor?"
There was a crash from the living room, the sound of something heavy smashing to the floor. There were other furniture in there but the couches, and I forced myself to believe that only robots had been hurt by whatever furniture had fallen over.
"Yeah, like the..."
Suddenly, all sound dropped away again, but this time it was because of my own mind. Images of the boat in the harbor flashed through.
"Alex, call Josef," I groaned, leaning against the window sill. The window faced the street, but it was obscured by plants that had been trimmed too long ago. My neck hurt like hell as I twisted it around to look outside without twisting my painful waist. Strange lights in the sky mixed with the backdrop of stars that had come out now. In the shine of that unexplained light, I saw shapes in the sky, edges of something floating which kept trying to hide slight reflections of its massive outline.
"Josef?"
"Agent... agent Telmore," I complained.
"Teglgaard?" he asked, pulling his phone out like some modern gunslinger.
"Yes! #*@!ing agent whatever, get him on the..."
There was a scream and the crunch of an already broken window being splintered even more. I turned too quickly, my midsection sending a flood of pains through my entire body, and watched out the window as Emilie was flung through the air and into the light. At the last second, a previously hidden mouth of some kind opened, tentacles reaching out to grab her and pull her into it. Then, it all disappeared again, leaving only the lights and the faint reflections of an outline.
"I didn't track the car," Alex said, out of the blue.
"What? Why do you..."
"I didn't track the #*@!ing car," he hissed, phone at his ear, waiting for the other agent to pick up. "When you handed me your phone, I downloaded a tracking program." While he spoke, he took the phone from his ear. "Don't trust people, Ida." Then he put the phone on speaker.
"Sir, we're at the Olsen residence, and it... it's a shitshow, sir. Nobody is..."
"Josef, how did you make that weapon against the robots?!"
There was a moment of quiet. Or, more accurately, the phone fell quiet. The living room was now a source of constant crashing, crunshing and screams.
"Ida? Sir, is that..."
"Answer her, Teglgaard!" yelled Alex, raising the phone to his lips for emphasis!
"Sorry, uhm, you need to juryrig a large capacitor to house the charge, and then you..."
"I don't know what the #*@! that means," I said out loud, to both him and Alex, tears in my eyes. With a growing sense of terror, I looked on as Alex walked straight past me and into the living room. It took about five seconds before he returned with Niels, who was bleeding badly from his nose and mouth!
"Teglgaard, run this guy through it!" yelled Alex into the phone, which he handed to Niels. He and Niels locked eyes for a second before Niels simply nodded a bit hesitantly. Then Alex sent me a final look, his eyes looking the least confident I had seen them in the brief time I'd known him, and leaped through the sliding door, into the battle in the adjacent room!
"I can... I think I can do this. Ida, is there a fuse box?"
I was shaking. Every part of my body was experiencing spasms I had never felt before. Small spasms, twitches and jerks, perhaps more like a poorly coordinated shiver than shaking.
"Ida!"
"Yes, yes, there... Oh #*@!, it's on the other side of the living room, in the hallway!"
"Backdoor?!"
"This way," I said, my brain finally snapping back into gear. Not waiting for a response, I darted out through the second hallway and out the backdoor in the rundown conservatory at the back of the house. I could hear Niels follow, but I never turned to look.
The garden was a mess, overgrown and full of thorny plants. Vines and some of the worst thorns grabbed at my clothes as I rounded the corner of the house and ran up a small flight of concrete steps to reach the front yard. At the top of the steps, I stopped abruptly enough that Niels slammed into me from behind, but he managed not to do much damage, except for the repeated throbbing from my waist.
"What?!" he asked angrily, and I pointed up into the air. Whatever was up there, grabbing people from inside as the robots threw them out, only the disembodied lights were visible.
Niels gave me a push as me scraped by on the narrow garden path, between bushes that were slowly reverting to their wild form from neglect. I watched the sky with half an eye as I ran by, quickly turning the next corner and running to the front door that had been smashed to bits in the cloud of splinters that had passed me little more than a minute ago inside.
"Fuse box," I said, pointing to the small hatch on the wall. Niels wasted no time. With the fight still raging visibly on the other side of the open door in the opposite end of the hallway, he pulled out a few tools from his pocket and got to work. While he spent about half a minute on that, I turned my eyes from the hallway and looked out at the tiled path between the main door and the street. The lights slid by irregularly, illuminating the street right outside. I wondered what anyone watching this from surrounding houses, if any, might think of it. But my thoughts stopped when I spotted someone dressed nearly all in white, caught in the lights as they tuched the street out there.
"Got it!" Niels said, stepping away from the fuse box. "Okay, this might... you should stand back," he added, looking less than confident. I heard a scream as someone else was taken by the lights. With determined eyes, I took two steps back, nearly tripping on the stone stairs right outside the door.
Between his fingers, Niels clamped two wires together with a small plastic thingie. Nothing happened. At first. Then, a strange smell started coming from the fus box, and it started to smoke! I sent Niels a look, but he was staring at the box, looking less than confident all of a sudden. When he took another few steps back and covered himself, stepping into the small bathroom that was in the hallway, I took a long step away and to the side of the concrete stair.
A hum filled the noise in the air, and the smell of smoke become a stench of charred plastic. Then, a loud pop, like a car blowing a tyre, sounded out, and everything went dark. The distant streetlights that were still on, the houses nearby, even, for a flickering second, the lights in the sky! Only the stars still shone.
And then, it was all quiet.
Hearing nothing but my own rapid breath, I looked into the dark house. Somewhere, a candle still flickered, but everything else had been snuffed out by the fight. It was a miracle nothing had caught fire. Looking across the road, I saw nearby houses completely dark, a few sounds now possible to hear from them in the night. The woman in white had left, and I suddenly noticed that the lights in the sky had gone, too.
"Is everyone okay?!" I asked loudly into the house. There were a few grunts from inside, and I could ear someone crying. I walked inside, through the shattered door, but in the dark, I could see nothing at all.
"We need to leave," said Alex, scaring the hell out of me as his crude shape emerged in the dark. "And I think we need an ambulance."