Sticky Fingers

"But darling, you know your daughter has sticky fingers. The sweet little dear can't keep her hands to herself."

River could honestly say he had never felt the temperature in the room drop as quickly as it did right then. His team, who had already been alert, all seemed to defy physics and straighten up even more. He wondered if he was imagining things because none of them had been slouching. They never slouched while on duty.

He did, however, understood what their bodies were communicating. He didn't appreciate his wife's jab at her step-daughter either. While his daughter did like getting her hands into things, she would never sell them out.

It broke his heart that the two females still hadn't found a way to get along, even after two years. It seemed as if things between them had gotten worse instead.

The only reason he had married the damn woman in the first place was for his daughter. Maybe next time he should consult the little menace?

"River."

His boss's voice coming from behind him pulled him back to the situation at hand.

There was too much going on for him to be distracted by family issues. Tony, his boss, knew all about the challenges he was facing in his family but now wasn't the time to think about them.

No, they had more important issues at hand, like the end of the human race. Something they had been so close to stopping after a decade of hard work.

And now all that hard work had been for nothing.

The feeling of failure that had crashed through him when they recognised the contents of a box they had received at the office hadn't left him. The contents of that box should have been safe in his house. There had been no reason at all to think they wouldn't be.

The device was supposed to be top secret. And it was supposed to be safely locked away in his house. No one should have known about it, and no one should have had access to it.

But somehow, the portable time-travel device he had been entrusted with, had been sent to Tony.

In pieces.

The pieces that were left of it.

Somehow their enemy had gotten his hand on it and destroyed it.

A dangerous enemy that liked the world in its current state of chaos, and did not want it to change.

And that enemy had just destroyed their only chance at beating the deadly virus ravaging the world. You would think that since they had a cure for leprosy, finding a cure for a virus adapted from the leprosy bacteria would have been easy.

The answer to that was a negative.

They still couldn't figure out what else was in the virus.

And the fact that it was airborne made it harder to protect their people. They had lost cities and towns faster than they could have ever imagined because of that.

River often wondered if there were still some survivors in some of those cities. Was it possible that some people were strong enough to live infected?

A weakened immune system is what usually killed people as the virus attacked them from the inside out, but what happens if someone had a strong immune system?

When a town got infected, they rarely did a deep search to see who survived. It was the job of the uninfected of that town to organise themselves and seek shelter in one of the testing communes. If they were confirmed negative, they were allowed to join the rest of us.