He found himself in a garage, empty save for a sedan parked nearby. It was a couple of years old, no more than that. The driver’s door was open and when he slid in behind the wheel he found the keys and a note above the dash.
The note gave him a set of coordinates and instructions to bury what was in the trunk at that location.
It had been awhile since he’d driven anything other than military vehicles and he slid the key in the ignition with a sense of anticipation. A smile came to his face as the car’s twin engines came to life, growling in unison like two caged beasts ready to break free. He steered around the empty garage for a few minutes, to get a feel for the vehicle, then took her out the front gate. As soon as he was clear, he hit the antigrav units and took the car up over the city.
The Detroit-Windsor megaplex shone off to his left, hugging both banks of the Detroit River. He turned the car to the right and headed south along the river, searching for the coordinates.
Twenty minutes later he set down on the north bank, in the midst of a clearing. He killed the engines and waited for them to shut down completely before getting out.
Nate glanced around, but didn’t see anyone. He walked back to the trunk and opened it up.
A large black body bag and one long-handled shovel stared back at him.
“Color me surprised,” he said with a certain amount of fatalism and reached in for the shovel. It took him another half an hour to dig a hole deep enough that he thought the bag wouldn’t get dug up again by the local wildlife. He stabbed the shovel into the pile of dirt he’d created and went to get the body.
Except it wasn’t a body at all. He knew that the moment he tried to pick it up. It was much too heavy and far too angular to be anything human. His curiosity getting the better of him, Nate reached for the zipper and pulled it down a few inches.
The bag was full of cash. Bundles and bundles of it, all neatly stacked and wrapped with rubber bands.
Nate stared at the money a moment, then, being careful not to touch any of it, zipped the bag back up again. Seeing all that money in one place was tempting, but messing with that kind of stuff was sure to put a price on his head. He intended to do what he was told and that was that.
He dragged the bag out of the trunk and over to the hole he’d dug, and heaved it over the edge. It dropped the half-dozen feet and hit the bottom with a flat thunk. Nate gave it one last look and then began shoveling the dirt over it.
There was about an hour left on the assignment clock when he finished the job, which left him plenty of time for the little outing he planned. He returned the car to the garage where he’d found it, leaving the keys inside and locking it up after him for safe keeping, figuring whoever had left it there would have a spare set of their own. If they didn’t… hey, not his problem.
Instead of getting into the farcaster, Nate walked out of the garage and headed down the street to the convenience store he’d spotted from the air. The doors were locked and the lights off when he arrived, but that really didn’t matter to him. He made a beeline for the vending machines outside the front door and peered through the glass at the day’s newssheet.
Even though he was expecting it, the date still left him a bit stunned.
It was November, 15th, the same as when he had left but this November 15th was two years in the past.
“I knew it!” he exclaimed.
The final proof was staring him in the face.
His thoughts were skipping in a thousand different directions by the time he made it back to the garage where the farcaster was located. He reached for the hypo and then stopped.
Do I really want to take that? he asked himself. What if the first dose was tied to the second somehow? Would taking one without the other be dangerous?
He didn’t know.
Had no way of knowing at this point, not really.
His gut was telling him not to, that the two were inexplicably linked and only bad things could come of taking the dose separate from the first. He’d learned to trust his gut.
He took one last look at the angular injector and then hurled it away into the darkness of the garage. He heard glass shatter and for some reason the sound made him feel better.
Time to go home, he thought.
Nate stepped out of the farcaster and rushed immediately for the rest room, determined not to vomit all over the floor. He leaned over the sink and waited for the nausea to strike.
Surprisingly, it didn’t.
He gave it another moment, just to be safe, but his stomach remained strangely acquiescent.
Given what he had learned on the other side, it was clear now that his initial suspicions were correct. He was travelling not just in distance but in time as well via the farcaster, going back and fixing errors, adjusting outcomes, eliminating targets, so that the present, his present, would unfold in a certain way.
The implications were staggering.
It raised all sorts of interesting questions about his employer, Limbus Inc. Who were they really? He’d known from the start that they were a front, but a front for who? Or what? The answers to those questions seemed far more important now than they had when he’d first walked in the door.
Trouble was, he didn’t know how he was going to find them.
As he finished getting dressed, his gaze fell upon the hypo he’d failed to use before leaving earlier that morning. It was still sitting there on the locker shelf, untouched, which meant the clean-up crew hadn’t been around yet.
He took the hypo, walked into the bathroom, and dumped it contents down the sink. He ran the water, washing any trace of the stuff down the drain, then returned the empty hypo to the locker.
Satisfied that he’d covered his tracks, Nate left the prep room and closed the door firmly behind him. He planned on learning as much about Limbus as he could, but not before he got a decent night’s rest.
As he walked down the hallway toward the elevator, he noticed that one of the other doors was slightly open.
The sight brought him up short.
All the time he’d been coming here, he’d never run into another employee. The only interaction he’d had was with his recruiter and even those meetings were few and far between. Nate was suddenly, intensely curious about his co-workers. Who were they? What were they like? How many of them were there?
Maybe he’d find some of the answers he was looking for inside that room.
The open door seemed to beckon.
What can it hurt?
Casting caution to the wind, Nate stepped forward and gently pushed it open.
The room beyond looked identical to the one he’d just left. The same lack of general furnishings. The same bare walls. The same locker and farcaster unit.
The stretcher was new, however.
It stood in the middle of the room, as if someone had been getting ready to wheel it out and had stepped away for a moment to deal with something else. There was an odd, lumpy shape resting atop the stretcher, covered by a sheet now stained with blood and other fluids.
That shape drew Nate like a magnet.
He stepped forward, watching as his hand reached out almost of its own accord and grasped the edge of the sheet. He’d seen more than his fair share of the dead and dying while on active duty and wouldn’t be put off by the sight of a corpse, yet still he hesitated.
Something felt… wrong.
Off.
Something told him that he didn’t want to see what was under that sheet, that he wouldn’t be able to just forget about it and get on with his life, that once he saw it things would be forever changed…
He pulled the sheet back anyway.
And immediately wished he hadn’t.
The thing under the sheet had once been human, but it was hard to tell that now. It was as if some higher force had taken a human form, twisted it inside out and then added hundreds of runaway growths between the glistening wet organs and miles of ropy blood vessels; it was horrifying and strangely, eerily fascinating at the same time.