(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 57

Daylight began to break. I was never that obsessive about Nakskov's nature, to be honest. I appreciated it, taking a few minutes now and then to stop and look at the landscape when I was outside the inner parts of the town, but I never really sought it out. For years, the beauty of the thing was just a plesant biproduct of everyday life. The last few days had started to significantly change that, making me step out of my plans, out of my routines, to enjoy the sight, sound, and overall feel of the wide open.
Of course, taking it in while trying to dry from an escape through a brook, hiding in an unsupervised shed on the outskirts of town was not the way I really wanted it to unfold. I stayed near the house, not wanting to spend the night walking by the roadside in drenched clothing. There were plenty of these sheds to be found, if one knew where to look. Farmers, and even people just owning homes bigger than what they needed on a daily basis, would leave an old wooden shed unattended for long periods at a time, except for the occassional stop by to put something in or take something out of storage. This night I had spent behind garden equipment, except for when I moved about or dared take off some clothing to try manually drying it. By the time the sky began to show the first streaks of sunlight, I was fairly dry, even if far from warm.
I did take a few walks, though. The house was close enough to keep tabs on the situation, even if all I could do was watch from afar. Whether or not they had noticed my absence was hard to say, the activity seeming fairly regular even without a prison escape added to it. A few cars made frequent runs to the place, staying for a few minutes before speeding off along the main road out of town, far away from Nakskov. As the night progressed, the cars stayed longer and came back later. They were driving fewer things farther away. The house was being emptied, but not to a single destination. They were spreading things out, even if knowing exactly where to was impossible.
And then, with dawn about to break, it all died down. No cars returned. Every car loaded a handful of people along with whatever items they carried. They were abandoning it. And as I stood at the curb, looking at the dark house with its curtains drawn, part of me felt a kind of sympathy with the place. Or maybe not sympathy. Maybe more a kinship, the feeling of being left behind steadily becoming far too familiar.
It was a stupid risk. However empty the place looked, all it took was one person, one sentry left behind, to grab me and condemn me to being bound and gagged in that place again, or worse. But the place drew me in. At least, that's what I told myself.
Everything was not gone. A few crates could be seen through the windows, and I recalled the woman I had seen on the bed inside, hooked up to medical equipment, unconscious and badly damaged. I had always assumed she had been hurt by the event, by the time machine being blown and sending out this strange wave of whatever. But through the curtains, through the cuts and tears in the old fabric, I could see the bed inside, empty. She would be there, soon, but she was not there yet. And as I stood there, I had to marvel a bit at how calmly my brain accepted that. My recent past was now my near future. I was remembering things yet to come, and it felt perfectly natural.
It took very little to get in. The house was fairly solid, built back in an age of thick brick walls and heavy wood, not the sleek plastics that many other houses had been upgraded to. But wood meant rot, and especially around the back, the covered terrace was an easy victim. I rattled at a door that looked like its best days were behind it, and after about a minute or two, something clicked as the wood bent, though it never splintered.
Inside, everything looked just as bad. They had not been all too careful in their moving, and scrapes had marked every part of the house. Some had ripped shallow scars in wood and walls, others had left streaks on the same walls, like scoff marks of a wallrunner. It looked like the place had been a warehouse that was robbed, with clearly a lot of things removed rather forcefully. Odds were, that was not that far from the truth. Something told me not all of the things had belonged to these rebels, although they were likely stolen from...
My train of thought came to a halt as I peeked at the upper floor. The door to the small room they had thrown me into was still closed, with a lock on the outside that told me I was not the first to be thrown in there. Or perhaps it had simply been a saferoom for some items, considering how they had completely ignored the window as an escape route. It did actually worry me how quickly my brain was distracted, thinking up escape plans for various scenarios as I stood at the top of the stairs. It was not a habit I had ever expected to develop.
In the end, the distraction was not enough, and my eyes turned back to the crate in the corner. It stood next to an old sofa, looking a bit like a small table, and something told me that was by intent. It was barely a quarter the size of the crates we had found in the school down south, but of a similar design. And as I walked over to it, it turned out to function much the same. A quick slide of a small handle, and a biggerh one popped up, which made the top part of the crate unfold almost without a sound. The silence of the whole thing was lucky, as it turned out!
The size of the house made sound travel poorly, and the design of rooms and walls made it even worse. Part of me could imagine many knocks on the door going unheard, the sound disappearing into the hallway wall or the one separating one large room from another. But in the silence of early morning, that familiar clunk of an old door being opened came through crisp and clear.
In spite of my best efforts, panic began to set in, and quickly! The sound of the door was followed by more than one set of footsteps echoing throughout the empty house, clacking first against the vinyl kitchen floor and moments later the wooden steps from living room to dining room. They were not rushed, not the same busy footsteps as the ones that had filled the house earlier. But they were moving closer.
My brain suddenly and without warning skipped back to thinking in escape routes. I wanted to dash for the room that I knew, but the lock on the door ruled that out. The two windows had nothing but a drop outside, into the garden a full floor below. Had it just been soft earth beneath, I would have taken the chance, but even from upstairs and through the closed windows, the brambles and semi-wild growth beneath was painfully obvious! That left the balcony.
The moment I opened the door to the old, wooden balcony, the cold air rushing in made me slide it shut again. I listened, fearing that voices and rushed steps would ring out as those on the floor below rushed to find me, but nothing happened. Taking a deep breath, I opened the door again, slipped out quickly, and shut it, gently but quickly! Then I knelt below the large window that overlooked the balcony and the field on the opposite side of the stream below. The wind slipping by crept in enough to cover me in cool air, but I still held my breath as much as possible.
I expected to hear voices, hear them coordinate their search, hear them talk about the whole escape action that had just been going on. But nothing. I even could have imagined them chatting about this and that, nothing important to say. But there were no voices, just an eerie silence. A silence that quickly became more eerie when I actually did hear their footsteps up the wooden, slightly creaky staircase.
They sounded in a rush, the footsteps. Looking over the window sill was tempting, but the risk held me back. I could hear scraping, thinking for a moment that they had come to finally remove that one last crate by the sofa. But that wasn't it. The scraping came closer to me, moving away from the staircase. They were moving things in, not out.
And it continued. Things were moved about again and again, and new things were moved up the stairs several times. I tried to think back to when we had held out in the house, when I had gone upstairs to this very balcony to scout for anyone approaching. All I could recall was an empty...
The sounds had changed. In my efforts to recall the part of the future that was in a way my past, I had momentarily ignored the sounds. But now, I no longer could. The scraping of heavy things being moved about had been replaced with a series of snaps both soft and hard, and various brief mechanical hums. I knew that sound, or something like it, but I had a difficult time remembering from where.
With a deep sigh, I shut my eyes to build up a moment of courage. Then, subconsciously holding my breath, I peeked over the sill.
That was definitely not there before! Or later, depending on the angle one looked at time travel from. Looking like a steel circle digging its symmetrical claws into the floorboards, there was something very military about the thing. It was about as wide as the couch, ignoring the very angular claw things that had attached themselves to the floor, and it looked fairly incomplete. That observation was backed up by parts being carried to it. By Karen and Vera. While Lisa and Elmer assembled them.
The team was all there. Apparently!
Being the most silent human being I possibly could, I slid back down, hiding behind the low bit of wall beneath the window between the inside and the balcony. The clanks and ckicks from inside continued, but for a moment, my gaze fell across the now late morning, early noon sky. The dark blues and purples were all but gone, and the ruby red barrier band was giving way to bright blue and yellow, but what caught my eye were some strange glitches. In the sky. Colors that seemed to shift around, just briefly.
"Fuuuuuck....."
It was a low sound that escaped from my lips, not even really a word. Little more than a whisper, little less than a sigh. And yet, the sounds from inside stopped. Sadly, I noticed too late.
"You!" came the voice from over my shoulder, and I turned my eyes to see Lisa standing there!
"Them!" I replied, not really sure why I used such simple phrasing, as I pointed towards the glitches in the sky.
She turned immediately, shouting some incoherent phrase very quickly into the house!
As I watched, my suspicions were confirmed, the glitches getting worse and human shapes then dropping from them and into the nearby fields. For some reason, the way they moved did not seem robotic to me. Time travelers. The woman in white's key minions. It made sense, really! The ones inside couldn't just use our trick with the black dust stuff, or they would be affected, too. That put them all on equal grounds. Except for the sheer numbers...
Lisa disappeared into the house quickly, to absolutely no surprise. I could hear hectic noises from in there, the clanks and whirs of before coming faster than they had. Whatever they were assembling either had to be something to use against an onslaught, or before the onslaught!
I, on the other hand, had a different plan! It clicked in bits and pieces, like a jigsaw puzzle assembling itself inside my head. First, the impulse to run. Then, the feeling of cowardice, the sense that I was leaving the small team of time rebels behind just to save my own hide. And finally, the realization that all this had happened before. I was from the future now, all this was my past. It had happened, and somehow, they had clearly survived. The only meaningful conclusion was that they would suvive again. In fact, I was most likely to be in the way and cause harm. They had managed before without me, they would manage best now under those same circumstances. At least, that was where my rapid train of thought led me to. I should run.
The second I stepped through the door on the balcony, everything seemed to tense up and move in slow motion. Everyone looked at me, pausing, but only briefly. They had, ironically, no time for me. Practically clutching the wall, I walked around the entire menagerie, watching everyone closely as they watched me, even while they seemed to be expertly assembling the thing on the floor. As I took my first steps down the stairs, it still looked like a metal ring with claws dug into the floor, except now, it had a band of green lights following the ring. It still looked like nothing I knew, and I had no time to care.
Downstairs, out of sight of the four of them, everything looked different from earlier! Stacks of small crates lined the walls, larger crates stood in the middle of the floor. It looked like a small warehouse. Whatever they had emptied out, it was not removed because they were simply abandoning the place. As I stepped from the dining room and back into the indoor terrace, the feeling followed me. Crates, stacked. One large crate on the floor was open, and I rushed to peek inside, hoping for some clever weapon. I found a batch of the knuckle guns. With a sigh, I took out two and put them on, like slipping on large rings. I balled my fists and watched the thin line of blue dots turn on. There could still be robots out there. Time travelers, yes, definitely, but maybe also robots. It was tempting to check other boxes, but as the entire house trembled slightly from something passing over it, I threw away that particular plan. Time to run.
The back door to the overgrown garden cracked open with a crunchy sound, the old wood somehow seeming worse than it did during our own assault. Which was later, with me now in the past. I shook my head, clearing it of weird grammatical thoughts and a desperate search for chronology.
The bushes gave way easily, but as I entered the actual garden, green lights, tiny dots on the ground, began to dance at my feet. I somehow thought to look up, just in time! Throwing myself wildly backwards onto the narrow dirt path, I was barely away before a figure landed heavy where I had just stood. Dry branches from the tall trees around the yard shattered and sprayed about like a quick torrent of toothpicks, and I found myself shielding my eyes from both that and the green lights that were apparently made by something hovering above, clipping the tops of the trees ever so slightly!
Perhaps by instinct, I fired the knuckle gun at the figure, more than once! The figure, a man of rather impressive size, turned slowly and glared at me, while another landed behind him. As he turned, there was an odd sound from the house, like a million buzzing bees going through a metal pipe. It distracted the man for a second, which was enough to let me get out of his path and away.
What followed was a cascade of tiny dots, appearing in the air like physical static. They reminded me of the dots around the woman that had disappeared, but they seemed to float freely, like the air had caught on very fabulous fire. And it burned. I could feel it on my skin, in my throat, ripping through me. But the men, now four of them, felt it much worse, sinking to their knees, clutching chests and limbs as the pain clearly ran through their bodies. Something told me that the device upstairs was finished, or close enough to be activated!
Fighting the pain, I slipped in between plants and assorted garden fixtures. Their eyes were no longer on me, instead turning to the house. One of them stabbed a large spear-like thing into the ground, letting it unfold into... something. They, like I, were fighting the immense pain emanating from the house, but they had work here. I had only escape on my mind. That worked to my advantage.
A mad dash, letting out tormented sounds as the pain seemed to shred my very brain and, to a lesser extent, my body, got me through the driveway and into the street. Figures, people, time travelers were being airdropped there, too, and my immediate impulse was to sprint away from them, deeper into the neighbourhood. I felt caught, trapped, the main road cut off from me by people falling from the sky! But far more, I felt like there was a sword hanging above my head, like imminent danger was still upon me. The pain was pulsing in my skull and in my blood, although less now. Distance.
Flailing my arms ahead of me in fear of my painful distraction making me bump into things, I made my way away from the unfolding chaos. Sounds like ripping cardboard, but louder and more vicious, filled the night air, but with distance, the pain began to lift. Reaching the bend in the road about three houses down, it lifted enough for me to turn and look.
Strange lights lit up the night, although not intensely. They looked nothing like the lasers or gun flashes I would have expected, but more like swirling colors, bordering on pretty! What really caught my eye, though, was a few of the people somehow causing them.
"I know you..." I for some reason whispered into the night, to nobody but myself. I did. I had seen them before. And as I felt the pain touch me again, even at the distance, I recognized them as the ones we had also fought. And I stared at them as a wave of sparks in the air seemed to rip them apart.