(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 25

The road across the water looked no different than it had any other day that I could remember, really. And yet, standing there, glaring at it, felt very different. Vera had driven me there in some sad spare car they had apparently stashed somewhere else, a car she had gone to fetch while I still slept on the couch at the house. She had been repeating the basic instructions on what to do at the old school building down south for the full twenty minutes or so it had taken to get there, driving frustratingly slow. To prevent the car from falling apart, most likely. Go to the school, do this and that. It all basically stuck, but it also melted into a blur. They were fairly simple instructions, with just enough to them that they could apparently then swoop in and finish the job, whatever that meant.
It felt wrong. It felt like something was missing. It felt rushed, somehow. As I stood there, it occured to me that I was in the wrong spot, first of all. Vera had repeated over and over how she couldn't go farther than that, and might have expected me to walk from there. In the end, I turned and walked back, away from the small bit of road spanning the harbor. The bus would take me there, and it weirded me out that this had apparently not been obvious to her.
Walking back, I found myself distracted, thoughts popping up in my head. The pictures Mischa had taken felt burned into my brain cells, each one of them vivid in there. But the walk back took me past the cluster of supermarkets all bundled together not far from the harbor, and one picture kept sticking out in my mind.
Watching silently as people entered and exited the supermarket doors felt somehow very wrong, like stalking someone from the bushes in their garden. There was essentially nothing wrong with standing in the small patch of green, looking at my phone for the bulk of the time and then looking up at the nearby supermarket doors for the rest, nobody was being annoyed by me. But it felt wrong. More than that, it felt dumb, once I went over it in my head. Nothing really prevented me from going inside and looking around, nothing but my own hesitations. But those hesitations had a hold on me, a hold that I finally forced myself to break.
The inside of the store was the usual buzz of people shopping for food and whatnot. I rarely did much shopping beyond a few snacks or some last minute craving, typically yoghurt. Small groups of young people were spending their break from the nearby schools doing much the same, giggling and chatting about no doubt some innane banality. That could have been me. I missed innane banalities, very much.
It took literally a few seconds to spot him. He was moving into his seat behind the cash register, fitting the metal box with change into the small space in front of him, and people were avoiding his line for the moment, all except one elderly lady glancing through the magazine she had chosen, and a tall, somewhat young guy casually checking his phone, although so briefly and regularly that I felt he might just be watching the time impatiently.
Telling myself over and over in my head that there was nothing unusual about browsing aimlessly through supermarket aisles, I browsed aimlessly through the supermarket aisles, making sure to never be away from a line of sight of him for more than a few seconds. It took a couple of minutes until the reality of the situation dawned on me, to be honest. That reality was that it was boring. And it came completely out of the blue! He was a time traveler, in one way or another. He could be from the future or the past, near or far, perhaps even from other places on Earth, too. Or from space! He could be a Martian from the year 5000 or some intergalactic orphan. He could be anything. But what he actually was was just some guy in his late teens or early twenties, manning a cash register at a local supermarket. And that was simply too much for my brain to handle.
I felt dizzy leaving the store, like part of my brain was shutting down in some silly protest. Everywhere I looked, I saw people. Not a dense crowd, just scattered people drifting through their daily lives and routines, shopping at the supermarket, walking their dogs or their baby carriages. People. All across the parking lot, there were just everyday people walking around. And every single one of those completely ordinary, borderline boring people could be from another time, another planet, maybe another dimension! And I could not for the life of me handle this line of thinking!
Feeling a shiver in my body from something other than the creeping autumn cold, I walked straight past the bus depo, ignoring my original plan to grab the first bus going to the old school. I had voices in my head, thoughts that were getting so powerful and starved for attention that it felt like they screamed at me from some lonely valley, echoes washing over me as I silently begged for it to stop. I let my feet pick the direction, actually expecting to end up at my own home, impotently dreaming of taking back my life. My old and perfectly ordinary, boring little life. That was not where they were taking me, though.
Police was there. A single police car, undoubtedly having come from one of the other towns on the island, since there were very few of them assigned here, and I would have recognized this one from the old dent and scrape on the front bumper. At least, so I felt. Maybe my brain was just desperately trying to convince me that I still had some kind of control, that I knew what was going on.
The firetrucks were more impressive, of course. The ladder had been raised on the big truck, but it was no longer in use, simply left with the nose up until further notice. Firefighters were regularly entering and leaving, swapping chores in two groups of two, again and again. The air smelled like charcoal and something bitter. There was no smoke out in the street, only a cluster of people gawking at the damage. Although worried that someone would somehow spot me, I made my way into the small line of onlookers, enough that I could see the house.
We had caused a lot of damage! In the dark, all I had really seen were flashes. Now I could see the broken windows, the burned wooden panels, the collapsed bits of doorway. The hole in the roof seemed to have been made by the firefighters, to release smoke from inside. And as for the insides, one quick look through a partially blackened window was all I needed. Curtains, furniture, everything inside was covered in black, much of it burned away. The fire had to have been insane.
Making my way out of the small crowd, I began hastily returning towards the inner town, not knowing where else to go but knowing enough to go away. I ran everything that had happened through my head, over and over, trying to find something to hold onto, something that I could use to find some kind of solution. Most of me just wanted to give the time travelers, or whatever they were, whatever they wanted. To surrender, do what they asked, and be done with it. The rest of me, however, feared that I would just be digging a deeper hole for myself to have to later claw my way out of.
"Jesus Christ, Ida, there you are!"
The rough pull out of my own little world spun me about a bit. I looked up from the sidewalk and looked right at Mischa, walking towards me. Or more likely, towards the burned house near his own. I was just in the way.
"Yeah, I'm..."
He reached out and grabbed me by the shoulders, pulling me in for a hug that felt honestly a bit painful.
"I thought you died in there, for #*@!'s sake!" he gasped, and I could feel him shaking a bit. "What the hell happened?"
As he pulled away, I looked him over briefly. No tears, but wide eyes, open jaw, and that weird stance where he bent his knees and back to be my height when he looked at me, like how adults often did with little children.
"Time travelers," I mumbled, still a bit off guard from the whole emotional thing. "We had to flee, they went #*@!ing nuclear on, like, everything, I think!"
"We?" he asked, suddenly sounding and acting more like his calm, inquisiting self again. "Who's we?"
"One of the time travelers. She basically saved my..."
I ran what I remembered through my head again.
"Saved what?"
"Saved my ass. I think..."
Did she? There were plenty of holes in my memory, but it was getting harder and harder to figure out if Vera saved me, or if her arrival triggered the whole thing. Had she started it, maybe unwittingly? Was this simple, or was it something other than what it seemed?
"Ida, snap back," he said, rushed but not loud. Then he looked over my shoulder as he pulled me into a nearby driveway, hiding us from view of the scene down the street, without making us seem to be actually hiding.
"Sorry, I'm.... I don't know, I think I'm getting things mixed up in my head."
He said nothing, just looking at me as if expecting a more meaningful explanation to come. It really didn't, not to me or to him.
"We need to get you away from those weirdos," he sighed, starting to pace about, rubbing his chin in a slightly melodramatic way, I thought. "We need to make them stop pulling you into this shit." He paused, clearly running some things through his mind himself. "Where did you sleep?"
I actually had to think about it. Everything in my head seemed like fake memories, like remembering a story told to you or a movie you saw.
"I... she took me to..."
"Who?" he asked, as my voice trailed off.
"Vera. Uhm, one of the, the time travelers. The one who saved me. I think."
His pacing had brought him to the middle of the driveway, making him look like someone holding an open air lecture or something. He kept fiddling with his chin area, making me think of detectives in old crime shows. I almost expected him to confront me with a murder or something.
"You seem kinda unsure," he remarked, in a completely calm voice. I had no real argument against that, so I just nodded. To my surprise, he pulled out his phone and started scrolling through a list, judging from his finger movements.
"Calling someone?" I asked, feeling both nosy and a bit dumb at the same time for even asking. This time, he was the one to nod.
"We need to find someone who can help you, Ida. This..." His hand flailed a bit in the general direction of the damaged house. "This isn't working."
"Fine, but who you gon.... I mean, who are you thinking about calling? The police? My mom? your mom? Batman? Who's gonna even believe any of it? I mean, my mom got me therapy, for #*@!'s sake!"
He stopped his scrolling, looking a beat defeated. In a strange twist of fate, I actually felt sorry for him, as if he was the victim.
"We could..."
Feeling suddenly shy about my thinking, I hesitated to finish the sentence.
"What?" he asked. "We could what?"
I ran the basic idea through my head again, tryingto evaluate it more clearly. I got nothing. It was an idea, and making a plan of it was not exactly working for me.
"We could follow them," I just blurted out.
"Follow? You mean run around in trenchcoats and dark glasses and shit?"
"No, no, no. I know where they have their base, right? We park nearby, like people do when they're on the phone in the car and stuff, and then we follow them when they leave."
He blinked a few times, trying to wrap his head around the details.
"They have cars?!"
I nodded. He instantly went back to the list on his phone, making me worry that he had decided to just ignore my dumb idea.
"Who you looking for?" I asked nervously.
"If we need a car, we need a driver."
"Patrick?"
Mischa nodded. Then he put the phone to his ear, which was a bit weird for me to see. Except for his parents, Mischa was all about texting. An actual call seemed... extreme.
"Hey Patty," he chirped. "Yeah. You free? We're doing some spy shit, need a wheel man. Oh. Okay. Yeah." He took the phone from his ear and looked at me. "He can't use the car. So, I guess we..."
"I know where to get a car," I interrupted.