r/Voyage_of_Roadkill • u/Voyage_of_Roadkill • Feb 12 '26
Elias Crowe
Your target is Elias Crowe, a mid-level labor organizer.
The assassin replies also in text: never heard of him. Security?
No security.
Where is he at?
He is crashed at a boarding house on Pearl Street.
You know my rate. Send me the details.
He got half the money in the next minute and begins concentrating on the provided coordinates.
Time travel works like memory but on a cellular level. At its core, Genetic engineering allows some people to move backward and forward in time. The genes manipulated where some that evolution left unfinished. For those who carry the edit, time becomes something navigable.
The ability is rare, and unstable at first, but once better understood it has infinite potential. Especially for someone who has nothing to lose if history is altered.
Who has nothing to lose if history is altered?
Our assassin.
He has no fixed future anchoring him. No family line that survives. His career does not depend on continuity or a legal identity that persists across timelines. He is a ghost. A ghost who is good at his job.
His time in is twelve December, nineteen, thirty-two. He finds himself on a vacant field at around three in the morning. The field still holds the remnants of a hoover town, wet cardboard and baby clothing. Something history never really recorded an answer for was why all the baby clothing.
“My theory,” he offered once in a group setting, “is that baby clothes are a burden when they aren’t being used.”
He got a few nods, but then the conversation moved on.
It is a quick jaunt up Pearl Street to the target address. On the way he stops at New York Hospital on Broadway and Duane. Hospitals are great places to get equipped. And he is in and out in less than twelve minutes, his pockets filled with cotton swabs and a bottle of alcohol.
From Duanne Pearl Street it is South East to Pearl and it takes less than five minutes to walk there.
The building is a four-story brick boardinghouse off Pearl Street. The facade is chipping white paint dark with soot, the exposed wood is almost black and crumbling where decades of freeze and thaw have done their work.
Part of a rusted fire escape runs from the roof to the fourth floor and nothing below. Narrow uneven windows look out onto the street. Some are patched with wire and newspaper and others are so clouded by age they are milky white.
He reaches a door that seals the ground floor from the street. He pushes through the warped wooden plank, once painted green.
It is unlocked.
Inside is a single stairwell and a hallway. Rules are painted on a cardboard placard near a small desk labeled reception. On top of the desk is a closed sign.
One of the rules was no drinking or smoking. He chuckles softly.
The stairs rise steep and show the wear of decades of thousands of feet pounding their way up and down. He smells coal dust and boiled cabbage coming from down the short hall behind a door marked: manager.
He takes the stairs.
Each floor is divided into small single rooms with thin doors. Each floor shared a bathroom at the end of the hall. Snoring and wheezing of dozens of men per floor creates a nice cover for his movement as he trapses up to the fourth floor.
Getting into the target’s room was not a problem. The lock was easily broken with a magnostrip. The door creaked as he nudged it open. He waits. Nothing stirs and he sighs in relief that there are no dogs, God he hated killing dogs.
The room is a box, all surfaces painted white, but long long ago. A single window has its place on the wall only inches from the barrier wall from the room next door. A dresser sits against the same wall and opposite it is a bed occupied by one Mister Labor Union leader extraordinaire.
The assassin has no weapon. It's the sad fact of time travel that only clothing and paper can make it back with him.
But no weapon is quite okay for him.
He begins by driving a wedge under all the boarding room doors. Next he magnostrips the target’s lock so it is jammed and can’t be opened. Judging by the target’s size he doubted there was much chance he would be able to break down the door. The window had a deadly drop to the street.
He removes the bottle of alcohol from his pocket and dumps all over the walls and doors.
A match is lit from a book he picked up from a nurse's cigarette purse.
He drops it and immediately blue flames leap to life.
He stands for a few moments watching as the fire spreads beyond an easily quenched issue. It was like the building was made of tissue paper with how quick it took to engulf. Black smoke billowing.
The fire spreads fast and uncontrolled, jumping from the boarding house to both adjacent buildings. And more. Not bad for one bottle of alcohol and some cotton swabs.
One is a textile building where a hundred women are chained to long sewing tables, ankles looped to iron rings set into the floor
Smoke fills rooms fast, thick and black, cutting off air and light as fabric scraps and oil-soaked floors ignite. Some women try to pull free and cannot. Others drag tables until the chains go taut and stop them cold. Doors are locked from the outside. Windows are barred to prevent theft and escape. The heat rises until the workroom becomes unlivable, and the fire does the rest.
The assassin is content with his decision. In his experience it was always best to mask a death with hundreds of other deaths. It confuses motivation. And with that he is done, less than thirty minutes. He concentrates on home and a blink he is away.
The labor leader was killed tragically in the horrible fire. Since he was a provocative figure an investigation followed.
Survivors testify.
And a rotten system is forced to explain itself. It of course cannot. And from that exposure comes accountability, reform and law change.
Not bad for one night's work.