Excerpt: 2218

It wasn't quite dawn, the sky barely tinging blue and purple to the east, but Gallagher was already up and throwing his bag over his shoulder. There was no time to waste on clear days like this; the spring weather along the Missouri was always unpredictable and this week had been a mess of muddy days. He frowned for a moment as he pushed the front door open, hoping a flood wouldn't be waiting for him on the other side of the bridge again... But he was kidding himself to even hope, he knew already the whole city would be a bog.

“Looks like I'll be tying my bike up again,” he sighed, the door slamming shut behind him and tipping the name plaque hanging beside it. He cringed and straightened it, leveling the green and white sign the best he could in the dim morning light.

WILLIAMS and in smaller letters, street, proclaimed the faded sign, once a street sign some decades ago. It had been manufactured at least one if not two cents before and the fact that it sat barely bent upon his family's shop today served as a testament to the manufacturing practices of the '2s. These things just lasted forever.

The smaller sign below, this one hand-painted on a piece of wood, read “Salvage, Finding, and Resmithing”, the collective professions of himself and his father Peter. It was a decent living, more so right now while his mother was away doting upon her first grandchild (A mental 'ugh' went through his head as he remembered his mother twittering her way out of the house in excitement as she headed for the train, as though his sister was the first person to have a baby ever) and it only had to pay for the two of them, but in Gallagher's case it left him up this early six days a week for the past five years.

That was definitely okay though, because he found the sorts of things no one else even realized still existed; remnants from a past half forgotten and half purposefully denied by society.

Like his bike. Sure, he'd had to change out (make that entirely remove) the gears on the back and replace one of the wheels entirely, not to mention saving up for three months just to get tires made for it, but he was the only guy in town who had a bike with more than one speed to it as a result. Heck, half the city had no idea what a multi-speed bike even was. Which of course made his find seem a bit lame to the public, but it meant that the ride down to the bridge was amazingly easy compared to what it had been on his father's modern one speed.

Yeah, tech from the '2s was so much cooler. He wished sometimes that he'd been alive back then, before God had reset the world again, instead of in his relatively simple time. But maybe he wouldn't appreciate the wonder of his finds so much if he'd been alive then; most books implied that it had been a time in which everything had been taken for granted in their own country, where a “hard day's work” had been eight hours with multiple breaks of simply thinking, no moving or doing, and even that thinking was dull and mundane for most of the people. Tales of other parts of the world were a combination of nonexistent and/or simply impossible to distinguish from the old America, or worse still in languages he wasn't even sure anyone still understood.

He stopped at the edge of the main bridge, hopping off his bike to walk it across. It was significantly slower, but with all the loose nails floating around from the railroad construction he couldn't risk it. Besides, slowing down like this gave him a chance to enjoy the best part of dawn...

The sun glinted off the buildings on the other side of the river, illuminating a few more feet of their surface with each minute. Gallagher found himself holding his breath as he gazed at the orange-lit skyscrapers, awed by the way the steel skeletons reflected the morning light even though he'd seen it every day of his life. High above the street level the remaining panes and sections of glass sparkled as the sun's angle changed, catching the edges of their reflective coating at just the right angles. His heart and wallet both ached at the thought of some day being able to reach those heights and reclaim those remains of the city, but for now he was simply in wonderment of a society that could even create and build such things... Such technology was long dead and he couldn't even begin to imagine a machine that could build things so high. He knew about cranes and could comprehend such a structure high enough to make the stone buildings that made up most of the skyline in front of him, but not the metal giants that went up perhaps 80 stories in some places.

Most difficult to comprehend was the arch that sat just above the water's edge... He'd read all about its construction and still it boggled him, still it impressed him, especially that it was still standing over two and a half cents after being built. How much that arch had survived, how beautiful its faded grey surface was, wrapped in vines and bordered by rust, the one thing no one dared to try and reclaim simply out of respect for the era that built it...

He had seen pictures of St Louis at its height, at full glory in the late 2040s, but none taken at sunrise on the bridge. Every day he saw the same layers of orange and golden glint and every day he wished to see it before it was broken, without the mats of vegetation and rust that coated it now.