by Crae, Edward
“Who are you?” a masked man asked Max.
“My name is Max.”
“Where are you from?” the man asked. “I don’t recognize you. And why aren’t you wearing your mask?”
“Indiana,” Max said. “And I don’t have a… mask. Sorry.”
The man pulled off his own mask, revealing his scarred and dirty face. He was bald except for a thin and floppy mohawk.
“What the fuck is Indiana?” he asked. “Where’s that?”
Max rubbed his head, confused and bewildered. “It… was right here,” he said. “I was there and suddenly I was here. That little girl…”
“Rose?” a woman asked, taking off her own mask. She was a hot blond with green eyes. “Where did she go?”
Max shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just grabbed her to catch her and—”
“You grabbed her? Where were you?”
“In Indiana,” Max repeated.
“Yeah,” the man said. “You said that. Doesn’t ring a bell.”
“Well,” Max stammered. “What is this place?”
“This is, or was, Yukona,” the girl said. “Before the comet, that is.”
The comet, Max thought. At least they knew about the comet. Maybe it actually hit in this… dimension?
Max stood, pointing out the giant hole in the vehicle. “I need to look at the sky,” he said.
“Why?” the man asked. “You can’t see anything but shit.”
“What happened here?” Max asked, looking up at the sky.
The man was right. He couldn’t see anything. There was nothing to indicate constellations or anything else other than the moon.
“What do you mean what happened here?” the girl asked. “The comet fucking happened. Were you asleep or under a rock?”
“Well then, what was that thing? That creature that attacked me. What was it?”
“You really don’t know shit do you?” the man asked, shaking his head. “Tell me the truth. Where are you from and how did you get here?”
“I told you,” Max said, shaking his head. “I’m from here. Just a different here.”
The group stared at him for a moment, confused by his statement it seemed. Finally, the leader shouldered his rifle and grabbed Max by the sleeve, pushing him toward the structure’s exit.
“You’re coming with us,” he said. “Maybe Barty will know what’s going on.”
Barty? Max thought. Who’s Barty?
“Move, asshole!”
Max was led through a maze of rubble, most of it covered with tarps and military-style meshes. There were broken down gun emplacements everywhere, probably built and used by some military force early in the… whatever it was that happened here. The longer they, the more Max realized that something even more disastrous than just a comet passing had happened.
He was beginning to think the comet had actually hit.
Finally, after what seemed like hours, the group came to an iron door that was deep in a trench surrounded by stacked vehicles and broken chunks of asphalt. The leader knocked with the butt of his rifle, and a second alter a small door was opened at eye level.
“’sup?” a voice said.
“We got somebody with us,” the leader said. “Claims to be from somewhere else. I think he needs to talk to Barty.”
“Just a sec,” the voice said, now a pair of eyes in the small opening.
There were several clanks, clunks, and sliding metallic sounds before the door opened, and Max could see another strangely-clad soldier type standing there.
“Micah,” the little man said. “Look at this guy.”
The leader turned and looked at Max for a moment. Max was nervous, realizing that Micah’s face was slowly becoming an expression of recognition. Why?
“Holy shit,” Micah said.
“This is Barty,” the girl said. “What the—”
“Come in,” the little man said. “Barty’s gonna wanna see this guy.”
So, Max thought. I look like Barty. Maybe I am Barty. What was going on? Was there another Max on this world; one who had a different name? Maybe this Barty was someone he could relate with; especially if they were the same person.
He was led in, and as they passed, everyone he saw inside pressed themselves against the wall. They all stared at him, some of them whispering under their breaths. All in all, they seemed to recognize him, as if he had been here before. It was an exciting prospect. If he really was an other-worldly version of this Barty, maybe he would get some respect.
Or maybe they would burn him at the stake.
But, as the group finally reached another door—this one more intricate and with electronic locks—he realized things were getting stranger and stranger. There, sitting in a tall office chair in front of an endless line of computer monitors and blinking lights was Max himself.
…or Barty.
Barty—or Max—stared right back at him expressionless. He was not as surprised as everyone else, but looked like he had found his long lost brother. He stood, just like Max would, and spoke…
…just like Max.
“Dude,” he said, smiling. “Get out and close the door. I wanna talk to this guy.”
Max grinned, looking back at himself like a child in a newly found mirror. This was definitely his other worldly twin, an extra-dimensional Max, complete with the same goofy grin. But even as amazing as this situation was, he could only think of one question to ask:
“Do you know a guy named Dan?”
Chapter Four
“It’s a great place,” Jeff said as passed Dan the half gallon-sized whiskey bottle. “Secure walls, barbed wire, scouts, guard towers. The whole shebang.”
“Sounds great,” Dan said. “But we’ve been doing alright out in the world.”
“I can see that,” Jeff said, smiling. “But there comes a time when the road gets old and well… you get old too. You’re here in this little shit going from house to house gathering supplies like scavengers. But eventually all that will be gone. You’ll run out of houses to plunder, and then you’ll have to move on. It’s an endless cycle, my friend.”
Dan nodded. The man was right. Even with the widely spaced homes in this rural and wooded county, they’ll eventually hit them all, then there will nothing left. They’ll have to find another county, one which will eventually run dry as well.
“But when guys like us settle down, even with our attitudes of not giving a fuck about civilization—which I know you don’t—it really does work. We don’t like rules that tell us what to do, and at our place we don’t have those. We just have a few simple rules to go by, and even folks like us can get along and get shit done.”
“What rules are those?” Toby asked, seemingly intrigued by the thought of being around other people—especially biker types like Jeff and his cool jacket.
“It’s simple, really,” Jeff said, lighting a smoke. “Typical biker shit. The code, little brother. Don’t steal from your brothers, don’t kill unless it’s absolutely necessary, and always have your buddy’s back. We grow crops, go out on supply runs, and everything we produce or find goes into the common store. The only exceptions are those little personal things you find along the way. Find something cool you want to keep, you say the word and it’s yours. No questions asked.”
“What are the punishments for breaking the rules?” Jake asked.
“Simple. Depends on the offense. Murder—killing a bro—is punishable by death. Lying is punishable by either death or banishment, depending on the severity of the lie.”
“Jesus Christ,” Toni said.
“It’s not a crazy as it sounds,” Jeff said. “It’s pretty simple. If a lie results in the death of a bro, or his ultimate ruin, that’s death. If you lie about stealing, you’re out. Not as severe as you might think.”
“Has anyone ever been executed?” Nathan asked.
“Not a one,” Jeff said. “No need so far. We all respect each other, our privacy, and our beliefs.”
> “What about the walls?” Cliff asked. “How secure are they? You know there are creatures that can climb walls.”
“Yes there are, my friend. That’s why we have lookouts and scouts. The big fella here says you’re one of the best snipers you guys have. We could use you. Let me guess, military?”
“Third Herd,” Cliff said, referring to his battalion in Desert Storm. “Eight years active. Three tours in Iraq.”
“Respect,” Jeff said, holding his hand over his heart. “We’d be more than happy to have you. All of you. I know you all have skills that our community could use.”
“What’s it called?” Toni asked. “Your community.”
Jeff smiled, took a swig from the bottle, and gave his brother a wink.
“Freedom,” he said.
“Dan?” Barty asked. “No. That’s a weird name anyway. Yours is… Max?”
“Yeah.”
“Sit down, Max,” Barty said, motioning toward the office chair that was beside his own.
Max sat down, looking at the monitors before him. They were jam-packed together in a giant wall, clusterfucked like some strange steampunk security system. Some were LCD, some were old CRT, and still some looked like tiny cell phone screens. They all showed areas within a compound, probably this one, and some seemed to be attached to drone cameras.
“So where are you from, Max?”
“Earth,” he said. “Indiana. The land of corn and guns.”
Barty chuckled strangely, much like Max did. “Indiana, huh?”
“Yeah. This is Earth right?”
“Of course,” Barty said. “But it’s obviously not the same Earth you know.”
“What happened here?” Max asked. “That guy mentioned the comet.”
“Yeah, the comet,” Barty said. “It hit about a year and a half ago. Slammed right into the ocean and threw up trillions of tons of debris. We’ve been in a nuclear winter ever since. And then… they came.”
“Who? Those big things? What are they?”
“Aliens,” Barty said. “Inter-dimensional lifeforms that came here from another Earth. They created the comet to alter the genome of this Earth so they could inhabit it. It’s not quite their atmosphere and such, and the animals were incompatible with their own physiology, so they had to change it. Unfortunately for them, and us, the sun happened to throw off a gravitation wave just as they transported the device from their own world. It was thrown off course and slammed right into our planet.”
“So why are they here?”
“They are trying to figure out how to travel to the next Earth, yours probably. They’re stuck here because of the gravitation wave. It rendered their equipment useless.”
“The dimensional travel equipment?”
Barty nodded. “Yeah. So what happened on your world?”
“We just passed through the tail of it,” Max said. “My friend Grace says that the pathogen it carried infected some fungus in the atmosphere and altered it enough to cause a weird fungal infection. The remainder of whatever it was fell to the ground and killed off or changed the lifeforms here.”
“So the sun is still shining?” Barty said, his eyes wide.
Max nodded. “Yeah, but things are fucked up. Monsters, fungus monsters, genetic mutants, strange plants that have been popping up all over. Lately, too, there are some creatures we’ve run across that can animate the dead. So, now we have zombies and shit.”
Barty was speechless. He sat silent for a moment, then looked Max in the eye. “Are… they there?”
“Who?”
“The Dark Ones,” Barty said. “Did any of them ever travel through?”
“I’m not sure. Dan and a few others have seen what they call shadow people. They’re tall, skinny, and creepy. That’s what Jake says.”
Barty nodded. “That’s them. They can’t go through, because of the damaged equipment, but they can peek. They may appear as only shadows.”
“They don’t appear hostile though,” Max said. “In fact, Dan says they have been hunting the big creatures that wake the dead.”
Barty nodded. “I’m guessing you mean their arch enemies. Within their genome is a mutation that caused an entirely separate species to evolve from their own. I’ve seen one. How did this creature get on your world?”
“The two we’ve seen were once humans,” Max said. “One of them a serial killer, and the other a woman who worked in a slaughterhouse.”
“Interesting,” Barty mused. “Both of them were killers in a way. Sociopathic behavior.”
“That was my guess.”
Barty clasped his hands together on his lap, smiling as he leaned in. “Tell me, what is the sun like? It’s been a long time since we’ve seen it.”
“It’s the sun,” Max said. “I suppose we take it for granted. But things aren’t normal. Like I said, we have the strange creatures, the plants that popped up after the fragment hit.”
“Fragment?”
“Yeah,” Max said. “The moon pulled the comet apart, and its pieces began coming back. A few of them hit. The first one hit somewhere out west and darkened the sky for a few weeks. It got really cold and a lot of the creatures died. But once everything settled down and the sun came back, there were the weird plants.”
“That’s amazing, man,” Barty said. “But at least you have the sun. It’s still warm here for some reason, but I’d love to see the sun. Tell me, what happened to bring you here?”
“Well,” Max began, “I was studying the journal of a guy that one of our crew met. He was studying this creature that would appear out of nowhere. She would flash like fire and let out a shrill scream as she appeared. Then, she would disappear just as fast. He figured out the pattern she would use, some kind of daisy pattern. She would appear at the peaks of the petals, and at the center. When I saw here, I watched for a minute to figure out where she would appear next, then when she did, I grabbed her. Then I was here.”
Barty was nodding the whole time he told the story, but then he said, “That’s Rose. She has epilepsy. She had a twin sister, but she had a seizure a while back and never came back to this dimension.”
“Epilepsy caused it?”
“Yeah. For some reason the magnetic field generated by the aliens caused her seizures to emit powerful gravitation waves that could cause parallel realities to touch for just a moment. She could actually appear in another dimension. The aliens can do it, too, that’s how they travel. But they can only project themselves and observe, maybe interact in small ways. They’re looking for her because they can use her to escape.”
Max sighed. He wondered why these people didn’t just kill her to save the day, then realized that meant the aliens would be stuck here. Then there was the whole murder thing.
“We can’t catch her either,” Barty said. “She’s good at evading the aliens, but they can sense whenever she has a seizure, and then they hunt her down.”
“Barty,” a voice came over a radio. “Check sector six dash one. Looks like we have seismic activity.”
Barty turned to the monitors, flipping on one of them that was labeled 6-1. There was definitely movement there; a strange spinning object hovering over the ground. It reminded Max of the Nazi bell that Hitler had smuggled away after the allies invaded Germany.
“What is that?” he asked.
Barty sighed, looking at Max with wide eyes that had a twinge of fear in them.
“Devastator,” he said. “They’re trying to disrupt our communications so we send out standard radio signals. They’re on to us, I think.”
He picked up the radio, which max realized was not a radio at all but some kind of weird communicator that used technology other than radio.
“We have to kill it,” Barty said. “Use EMPs and a fragger. Be careful.”
“Copy.”
Barty set down the radio and turned back to Max. “So,” he said. “Let me give you the grand tour.”
Barty stood, and Max noticed that he was using a cane. His right le
g appeared thinner than the left; at least it did through his pants. The boot looked crooked as well.
“What happened to your leg?” he asked.
“It got blew off,” Marty replied. “Shot with some kind of energy weapon. It hurt like hell, but the doc took care of me. Now I have an inoperable robot leg.”
“Why is it inoperable?”
Barty shrugged. “It just doesn’t work. We didn’t have the gemstones to get it powered, so it’s basically just a peg leg.”
“Gemstones?”
“Power stones,” Barty explained. “Energized quartz crystals that used to be pretty common. It’s what powered most of our cities. The aliens took them all. I think that’s why they’re here.”
“Wow.”
That was an interesting revelation, Max realized. He had never heard of quartz carrying that much energy. Certainly the quartz on Earth could transmit and received energy waves, such as wireless signals, etc., but none of them ever actually generated it. Things were obviously different here.
“Who came up with the Theory of Relativity?” Max asked.
“Alfred Bornstein,” Barty said. “Why?”
“It was Albert Einstein on my world.”
Barty laughed, making his way out the door and down the hallway. “Einstein was a composer. I doubt he could figure anything out other than maybe music theory.”
Max shook his head, thinking how odd it was that such a genius was confined to the world of music. He couldn’t imagine the scientist sitting at a piano banging away classic tunes, twiddling his mustache and scratching his furry head. Strange.
“This hallway leads to the living areas,” Barty said. “The bunkers and such. Everyone lives there in kind of a dorm-like setting. There’s a kitchen, a weight room, showers, etc. We don’t use the showers much. No reason, really. Nobody gives a shit how they smell anymore.”
“Yeah,” Max said, crinkling his nose as the smell of body funk wafted down the steel corridor. “I got that.”
Barty nodded at a sentry as they arrived. The man opened up the door, revealing a dark stairway. Barty began downward, using the came to help him negotiate the stairs. He had some difficulty, but it looked like he was doing alright.