Distinct

by Hamill, Ike

  The sound of the termites diminished and then stopped. It seemed that they had exceeded the range of the bugs.

  “Where are you taking us?” Brad asked the woman in the white jumpsuit. He had just saved her life. He figured that she owed him an explanation.

  “We just rescued you. We’re taking you to safety.”

  Brad didn’t argue. They had the weapons and the bus. He still needed them.

  ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪

  Brad recognized the road before he even saw the farm on top of the hill. He had recuperated in that building after being shot in the leg. The place meant uncertainty and pain, but it was also where he had begun to foster a small amount of hope for the future. He turned back to look at Corinna. She was staring out at the pasture. Horses roamed there.

  “This is the place that Robby told me about,” she said.

  A few heads turned at the name.

  Brad recognized a couple of them. He couldn’t put names to the faces, but he recognized them. Then again, everyone looked somewhat familiar. He couldn’t trust his memory.

  “You guys have moved into the big house,” Brad said.

  The woman next to him shook her head. “No. We thought you would be most comfortable here.”

  “I would be most comfortable a hundred miles from here,” Brad said.

  “It’s too dangerous,” the woman said. “Those bugs aren’t the only danger out in the churn.”

  The brakes rang and then chuffed as the bus came to a stop. The driver opened the door. People began to rise from their seats.

  Nobody told him to go, so Brad stayed put. After the others had gone, Gordie slipped away from Corinna and made his way outside. Prince pulled and wagged until Corinna finally relented. She took the dog out.

  Brad was alone on the bus.

  He looked through the window up at the house. He had heard all the stories about the place. It had been a government base, disguised as an aging horse farm that was maintained by a rich old widow. Some people said that Luke had tried to take over the place with the troops that he had gathered in Maine. Others theorized that Luke had been working with Hampton the entire time, and the two of them had conspired to kill the old widow before she could divulge her secrets.

  It didn’t matter.

  All those people were dead, from what Brad heard.

  Someone banged on the outside of the bus.

  “Ghosts are coming. Best to be inside.”

  They walked away before he could ask what the hell they were talking about. Brad finally stood up and walked down the aisle towards the door. He didn’t have anywhere else to go.

  ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪

  People were packed into the house. The curtains were drawn. Without enough seats, some people stood. A few whispered conversations broke out here and there. Brad spotted Corinna and the dogs. He moved through the crowd towards her.

  “You have any idea what’s going on?” Brad whispered to the young woman.

  “They said that ghosts come through every day with the fog. It’s best to stay inside, out of sight. The ghosts go away more quickly if nobody interacts with them.”

  Brad’s forehead wrinkled as he stared at her. She seemed perfectly willing to accept this strange new reality. Then again, he had just survived attacks by swarming wasps, odd lizards, a giant predator, and enormous termites. He had no reason to doubt the existence of ghosts.

  Still, he had to see for himself.

  Brad moved towards one of the curtained windows. Across the room, someone else was peeking out too, so he felt free to push aside the heavy curtain with his finger. There was nothing outside but a humid day. The air was a little heavy with mist, but he could still see across the field. A breeze fluttered the leaves and sent a wave down through an ungrazed pasture. In the distance, he saw the line of latrines along the edge of the woods. One of the stall doors opened and then slid shut as a person exited. It was nice to see that not everyone had hidden away inside. Maybe only a subset of the farm people were afraid of ghosts.

  Every culture had its legends and myths. With everything these people had been through, it wasn’t hard to…

  The thought never completed itself in Brad’s head.

  Someone walked out from behind the maple tree in the yard. Brad knew that wasn’t what had happened, but it was the only way he could explain it to himself. In reality, the person walking hadn’t come out from behind the tree. It was just that they were not there one second and then there the next.

  The sudden appearance was shocking enough. Even worse was the fact that Brad recognized him.

  The name formed on his lips.

  “Pete.”

  In the yard, the man’s head turned, like he could hear Brad’s unspoken call. When Pete took a step towards the house, Brad let the curtain fall back into place. His heart pounded against his ribs. He inched back from the wall. Pete had appeared out of nowhere and he had been nearly transparent. There was no way of knowing if the apparition would be constrained by the walls of the farmhouse.

  Brad shook his head and tried to regain his skepticism. With the curtains between him and the outside, it wasn’t difficult to forget about the ghost again. But his fear had been so real. It was stupid to ignore something that…

  “All clear,” someone said.

  Around the room, curtains were thrown open. The light spilled in from all sides, illuminating the swirling dust kicked up by everyone. A moment later, Brad smelled the fresh air from outside waft in as doors were opened and people began to head out.

  “What just happened?” Brad asked. The older man had been one of the few who had found a chair. He was getting up slowly.

  “Pardon?”

  “I’m new here. What just happened? The ghosts?”

  “Oh. They walk in a big circle around the place, like they’re swirling the drain of some old calamity. Who knows.”

  The man began to shuffle off. Brad reached to touch the man’s arm—to make him pause and answer more questions. He held back, sensing that the man didn’t have any real answers. Nobody did.

  A dog barked. Brad turned and saw Prince standing at the bottom of the staircase. The dog barked again. Brad rushed to the foot of the stairs just as Prince bounded up. Corinna’s legs were disappearing around a corner up there. Brad knew the layout of the second floor. Romie had recovered up there and Brad had climbed the stairs every day as part of his physical therapy. He rushed up after her.

  Corinna was being pulled backwards into one of the rooms. Brad saw her arm fly back and heard a grunt of pain from someone else. Corinna was a fighter, but she was losing. Brad rushed after as the door slammed shut. He jerked and pushed on the doorknob. It was locked from the inside. Someone had changed the hardware. When Brad had lived in the house, none of the bedrooms had locks.

  Brad leaned back and kicked at the door. The old wood splintered around the lockset. When he kicked the second time, it began to move inwards. He put his shoulder against it to help it along. Corinna wasn’t in there. She had been moved out through the other door—the one that led to the back hall.

  The only person in the room was a seated man. Brad had met him before. He didn’t want to even look at him.

  ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪

  “I’m not talking to you,” Brad said. “Where did they take Corinna?”

  Brad tried the door to the back hall. There was nobody on the other side. Behind him, the door that Brad had broken creaked. Brad looked to see Gordie nose his way in. The dog crossed the room and pushed up under Brad’s hand. Comforting the dog brought a little confidence to Brad.

  “I told them to sweat her out. She can’t be reasoned with,” The Origin said.

  “Neither can I,” Brad said. He turned to leave. He didn’t know where they would “sweat someone out,” but it had to be close.

  “Of course you can, Brad,” The Origin said. “Sit for a second and I’ll tell you precisely where they took her. Would you trust me to do that?”

  “No.” />
  Brad left the man there.

  Down the short hall, someone had put a new door where the back stairs should have been. That door was heavy and also locked. Brad had no choice. He had to go back through the room with The Origin or out through the window to the roof. Gordie was at his side as he pushed up the bottom sash of the window. The heat outside was baking off the shingles.

  The Origin’s voice called from the room where Brad had left him.

  “You’re going to break a leg when you fall off that roof. I’ve seen it before. Your shoelace catches on the nail, your bad knee won’t support your weight when you twist, and you fall. You probably get a concussion as well.”

  Brad pulled his foot back in from the ledge. There was a nail there and the loop of his shoelace was dangling right towards it.

  He walked back to the door.

  The Origin had changed. The man’s skin was like black vinyl that had peeled back from the dashboard of a vintage car. Brad’s mom had driven a car like that—an old Ford. When she was in the bank, Brad would peel up patches of the vinyl and feed them through the gap in the window.

  When Brad blinked, The Origin’s skin looked fine again.

  “How do you know the future?” Brad asked.

  “I don’t.”

  “I would have caught my shoelace on that nail, wouldn’t I? How did you know that?”

  “Again, I don’t. I only know what has happened in very similar circumstances when you actually did try to climb out. In some of those, you tried to climb out yesterday, or last week. I don’t know the future. I’m just a man—not particularly smart, and definitely not charismatic—who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “You always seem to be everywhere.”

  “It just appears that way. It’s easy to understand, if you think about it.”

  “How about you explain it.”

  “I thought you didn’t want me to talk to you.”

  “Explain it,” Brad said. He was frustrated. Violence wouldn’t work—Romie had proven that. Brad had survived a conversation with this man before. Maybe he could do it again. This time, he sought a very particular piece of information.

  ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪

  “If you really want to understand, I’ll have to go back pretty far,” the man said.

  “Fine,” Brad said.

  The Origin nodded.

  “In a sense, I grew up not too far from here. Geographically, it would be a couple of hills over. If you wanted to find the place, I’m not sure you could.”

  Brad frowned. He needed concrete information, not a story.

  “I wasn’t a very nice person when I was a boy. I’d like to say that I grew out of it, but that’s not really the case. I grew, and I changed, and eventually I figured out that I was a better person, but that evolution was accidental more than anything else. My mother was a bit of a doormat and my father was deeply unhappy. Really unhappy people tend to want everyone around them to be just as unhappy as they are. At that, my father was truly successful.”

  “Do we really need to…”

  The Origin stopped him with a raised finger. Brad was horrified by the man’s hand. The skin seemed to barely hang off the bones.

  “I thought everything was a trick. To some extent, I was right. My father was usually trying to trick me. So, when I met the woman who I fell in love with, I thought I had to trick her into being with me. Eventually, it worked. But by then, I had spent so long pretending to be a nice person that I discovered that I really was nice. I was kind, gentle, and thoughtful. It all came easily because it was all so rewarding.”

  Brad shook his head. “We’re not judged by how good we are in the best circumstances. It’s how we act when everything goes wrong—that’s how we’re judged.”

  “Very astute,” The Origin said. “When everything went wrong for me, I fell to pieces. I was at the wrong place. Or maybe it’s more correct to say that I was in the wrong version of this place.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s like we were at the same theater but we saw different movies. In your movie, most of the population were sucked into the sky on Thanksgiving. Is that how it happened for you?”

  Brad nodded.

  “Well in my movie, that never had a chance to happen. The military in my movie were able to predict the incoming threat and they set off a bomb in order to repel the invaders.”

  “How did that work out?”

  “I never got the chance to find out. From what I can gather, it was a small nuclear bomb that was intended to take out Donnelly and the surrounding area. Unfortunately, my family was in Donnelly on the morning, a few days before Thanksgiving, when the bomb went off. When I realized what happened, I set off on foot to join them, one way or another.”

  “On foot, you walked towards a nuclear explosion.”

  The Origin nodded.

  “So many of the roads had been destroyed. I knew that the only way to get any closer would be to cross the hills on foot. I fully expected that I would die fairly quickly as I approached. I never particularly studied radiation poisoning, but I imagined that it wouldn’t take long to kill me.”

  Brad looked into the man’s eyes. He seemed to believe his own crazy story. And when Brad really focused on him, it almost seemed to be true. Brad could see the man’s skin burned and bubbling. He could see the weary sickness in the man’s flesh. There was something wrong with him even though he was sitting up and talking normally.

  “As I walked, I had time to reflect on my life. I came to realize that as easily as I had been converted into a good person, I could just as quickly switch back. There was still a version of me, just below the surface, that would do anything to get what I wanted. I would lie and steal. I would even hurt people if I had to. The only thing stopping me was the idea that I might eventually be reunited with my family. I didn’t believe in heaven or hell. I didn’t believe in reincarnation or any kind of afterlife, but I was just smart enough to realize that I couldn’t know for sure. If I was wrong, and there was an afterlife, I wanted to be able to face my family and look them in the eyes.”

  “You still believe that?” Brad asked.

  “There’s a version of me that does,” he said. “That’s what I found out—there’s a version of everything you could imagine.”

  “How so?”

  “I’ve tried to learn something from each person who I’ve talked to. I learned many theories about the entity that visited your version of the world. The most common idea is that Earth was almost impregnated by an enormous life. If we were ants, this thing would have been an elephant, towering over us. How did it get here? Some say that it moved through dimensions that humans aren’t capable of understanding. In that creature’s reality, moving onto Earth might have been as simple as us walking through a doorway.”

  Brad nodded. He had heard these theories before.

  “Back to my analogy of an ant and an elephant—let’s imagine the scale difference is even greater. What about single cell, adrift in the ocean, and a whale? When the whale swims by, it appears out of nowhere to the cell. And then, helpless to resist, the single cell is carried in the whale’s wake for several minutes. Suddenly, the single cell is drifting in a part of the ocean that it has never seen before. Ocean is ocean, so it doesn’t appear all that different, but it is. To the cell, everything is different, but everything is also the same.”

  “We were caught in the whale’s current?” Brad asked. The idea made some kind of sense. If the entity had been moving through dimensions to reach Earth, it wasn’t out of the question that some of the people might have been swept along with it. There would be no way to test or verify the thought.

  “I can see the idea taking shape in your head,” The Origin said. “You’re wondering if maybe that’s why you don’t share precisely the same history as the other survivors. Everything that happened in the world before that first Thanksgiving was all variable.”

  “Everything?”

  T
he Origin nodded.

  “We all share this time and place together, but we don’t share a common origin.”

  “And why are things changing?” Brad asked.

  The Origin smiled. His front teeth were missing.

  “That’s the really interesting part.”

  CHAPTER 55: UPSTATE

  CARRIE HEARD THE BUS before she saw the movement through the trees. She crept closer to the road and then ducked down when the yellow shape came around the corner. It was a school bus, creeping around the curve slowly. The brakes sang as it slowed to a stop. When the doors opened, Carrie stared through the leaves and held perfectly still. She expected a team to disembark and fan out. They would be looking for her.

  She couldn’t have been more wrong.

  Instead, a slow-walking man made his way out of the brush about fifty yards down from where she was hiding. He walked to the bus and climbed the stairs. The door shut and the bus pulled away.

  The passengers were all staring straight ahead. Carrie stood up as they drove off, heading north.

  She started to climb through the bushes towards the road and had to duck down once more at the sound of another approaching engine.

  This bus was moving slightly faster than the last.

  Carrie watched it head north as well.

  “Where are they going?” she whispered to herself.

  She stumbled on the answer by accident. She jogged up the road after the buses, keeping an ear cocked as the road curved. The sound of an engine behind her drove her to run off the road again. The brush was too thin to provide decent cover, so she climbed a small hill, hoping to put it between her and the road. The hill was dense with pine needles. Carrie dropped to all fours so she could crawl under the brittle lower branches.