The Multitude

by J M Fraser

  He racked his brain for a counterpoint. “Wait. Maybe we have a fight and break up.”

  “Think that’ll happen?” Her gaze reflected the same, deep, misty-eyed love swelling his own heart and soul. “Maybe a subway train kills me before I get to Northbrook. That’s what Gabriella has been warning me about, I think. She brought the 2013, lonely version of Brewster DeLay into my life to nail the point home.”

  The notion sank to the pit of his stomach like a rock.

  But Carla smiled. She leaned over, whispered in his ear. “I have a plan.”

  “If it involves us staying safely in this car forever, count me in.”

  “Not forever, but we will take a little drive in it.” She put the wipers on high and threw the car into gear. “You and I are going to Manhattan together. We’ll go into a subway station together, we’ll sit on a bench together until a train goes by, and I won’t die. Then, I’m going to kiss you good-bye, drive to Northbrook, and meet Brewster DeLay in my world, 2012. We’ll be changing my future and your past, thanks to Gabriella.”

  He shook his head. For two puppets on a string, that plan held equal doses of logic and risk. “Why go to Manhattan at all?”

  Carla hit the gas. “Because the best way to end a nightmare is to defeat its monsters.”

  * * *

  They’d driven south of the snow country. The pavement had dried and become much more manageable, but Carla slowed the car. Her face had gone pale.

  “Want me to take over?” he offered. “You look tired.”

  A tear ran down her cheek. She wiped it away with one hand, turning the wheel with the other. “You’re shimmering, Brewster.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She pulled onto the shoulder and stopped.

  He tried to shift over and wrap an arm around her.

  “Wait,” she said. “I have something in my glove box for you.”

  Brewster popped the button. A snow globe fell into his hands, heavy as a paperweight.

  “I bought it in Pulaski,” she said. “Shake it for me?”

  He shook the globe, creating a blizzard that blurred the log cabin within.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” Carla’s voice cracked. “Take it back with you, Brewster. If I don’t make it, you’ll have something I loved.”

  “If you don’t make it?”

  The bright, sunny day turned to midnight black. Brewster shuddered. He’d realized what Carla meant by shimmering.

  The wormholes had hold of him again.

  “Don’t go down to Manhattan alone, Carla.”

  Everything went black.

  CHAPTER 22

  Three hours later

  “I can do this.”

  Alone.

  But she could do it.

  Carla stood at the top of the subway stairs. The sun’s rays cut through the cold air to energize her while scattered clouds puffing across the turquoise sky spared her their shadows, casting them on the other side of the street. Luck seemed on her side, and her earlier sadness dimmed like the remnants of a broken dream.

  No reason for sadness anymore. She had a plan. For happiness. She’d exorcise her demons alone, down in the subway, glued to the bench until the first train swept by. Then she’d go after Brewster in her year.

  Two thousand twelve.

  Time to roll. Passengers exiting the station brushed past her, just as they had in her dreams. City smells of exhaust and street-vendor hot dogs came at her again, along with the clatter of jackhammers and the impatient horns of taxicabs painting the traffic with their signature splotches of yellow. All seemed the same except for the mood. A pall of gloom no longer shadowed her world.

  She headed down.

  At the halfway landing, she bought tokens from a machine and smiled at a transit officer standing at the cashier’s booth. He’d been chatting up the woman inside the cage, but he paused for a moment to flick a wave at her. Who says New Yorkers weren’t friendly?

  She approached a turnstile, glanced at a ponytailed girl struggling to get past the bar in the next aisle, and stifled a laugh when she noticed the reason. “Honey, that doesn’t take pennies. You need to use a token.”

  “Oh.” The girl looked up at her—a cute thing, perhaps twelve or thirteen, blonde, bright-eyed, all sheepish smile and red cheeks. She thrust thumb and fingers into her blouse pocket, as if a treasure trove of tokens waited inside, but she came up empty. She shoved a hand into the slit pocket of her skirt and failed again. Her smile faded.

  “I’ve got extra ones.” Carla had purchased them as souvenirs, but she could certainly spare one for the poor kid. She fumbled in her purse, glanced up, shrugged. “They’re in here somewhere.”

  The girl stared back with the strangest unsettling eyes.

  Carla shuddered. A sudden urge to be done with the transaction set her heart pounding. She came up with a token and held it out. “Here.”

  Their hands touched. The world went into a spin.

  She clapped her free hand onto the railing between aisles to keep from collapsing to the floor. She couldn’t break eye contact with the girl. Two bottomless orbs probed her with a cold, appraising stare in total contrast to the innocence portrayed by the girl’s simple dress, her blushing cheeks, and that ponytail with its cute little bow.

  Gabriella. But the halo Carla had earlier pasted over the girl’s head didn’t fit. Gabriella’s eyes held no kindness.

  Carla screamed, but no sound escaped her lips. The transit officer off to the side kept flirting with the cashier. Neither he nor the woman showed any sign of noticing her silent plight.

  Not one other soul stood on the landing. No one climbed up the stairs from below. Nobody came down from above. How had a Manhattan subway station gone empty in the middle of the day? Where the hell was everyone?

  “Don’t be frightened.” The girl who was so not a girl summoned a childlike gleam to her eyes, fading the horror-show agelessness she’d flashed moments before.

  Carla tried to snatch her hand back, but her puppet master clenched it with an iron grip.

  The bars of their turnstiles went into motion, ushering them through. Tokens be damned.

  “I can sweep your fears away like so much dust,” Gabriella said.

  “Please, no. I don’t want—”

  The buzz of the creature’s touch intensified, and Carla’s immediate terror evaporated, along with every other fear, large and small. All the nagging worries she wore like a shawl on her shoulders even on the best of days sprouted wings, took flight, and left her staggering in an emotional vacuum.

  A single question swept in to fill the void. “Why is all of this happening?”

  “I’ll explain everything by the tracks.”

  They floated down the vacant stairs together, hand in hand.

  She and Gabriella settled onto a bench in the middle of the subway platform, fifteen feet from the tracks on either side. A train approached on the left, first with noise, then wind. A rat scurried from a rail to safety beneath the platform moments before certain obliteration.

  Carla would have shuddered at the sight of the rodent if she had any emotion. “You want something of me, and I’m guessing I don’t have to agree.”

  “Yes,” Gabriella said.

  “Give my emotions back, or you’ll get nothing.”

  “You’re better off not—”

  Carla started off the bench, but Gabriella touched her before she could get away. Sheer terror churned up a wave of nausea that almost had Carla retching.

  “You asked for your emotions,” the creature said.

  Carla closed her eyes long enough for her heart to calm and stomach to settle. When she reopened them, her nightmare of a puppet master still sat beside her. There’d be no avoiding or dancing around this creature. “I get it now. You want to murder me, Gabriella. That’s what the subway dreams have been leading up to.”

  “Murder you?” Gabriella patted Carla’s leg as if she were the doting adult and Carla the child. “No, my
dear, I’m trying to piece you back together. Your soul is split between two bodies—yours and Maynya’s. One must die for you to reach your full potential.”

  “Keep your hands off me, you vile thing.”

  The rebuke elicited a gasp, as if Gabriella actually thought of herself as good. “Look, I’ll freely admit I made a mistake splitting the world in two. But the end justifies the means.” She looked down, scuffed the cement with the tip of a shoe. “This has all been for the greater good.”

  “As defined by you?”

  Gabriella’s face contorted into an expression of fury for the briefest of moments before returning to angelic innocence. “As defined by God.”

  Gabriella’s obvious struggle with her feelings would have been comedic under different circumstances. Apparently, even powerful puppet masters had anger-management issues. Her eyes moistened. “At first I thought God turned his back on me.”

  “At first?”

  “Yes, but this amazing line of begats must have been His doing. We’ve gone well beyond the bounds of statistical probability. After a hundred generations, one couple still straddles both worlds, you and Brewster. Or should I say Maynya and Quintus? You are God’s grand gift of forgiveness for my conversation with Herod—not one messiah but two.”

  Carla couldn’t follow. She tried to get off the bench. Failed.

  “Still, you’re right to think me a monster, Carla.” Gabriella averted her gaze and, for a long moment, said nothing more. Finally, “By killing the baby Jesus, I denied Maynya’s world its savior. The people of Sanctimonia, Virtus, and every region beyond their borders live in moral bankruptcy, thanks to me. But your twin can save many of these souls if you help her.”

  Carla’s skin tingled. She took a deep breath and replayed the word in her head. Your twin. She knew everything about Maynya—a selfless woman living in a pristine forestland, a guardian who protected fellow villagers with bow and arrow, and a soon-to-be victim of rape, or worse. “How do I help her?”

  * * *

  Maynya looked up from her knees at the dark-haired barbarian, Phineas, and his scraggly-haired companion, Emil. The two bastards held their penises in their hands, as lewd an offering as she could imagine. She’d never compromise her chastity by servicing them in the debauched manner they proposed, not even to save her life. “I’ll bite them off.”

  Phineas kicked her in the side of the rib cage, sending her tumbling to the ground. She struggled to rise and accept death in the manner befitting a guardian, but the sharp pain from the blow defeated her.

  “We took eight of these whores to the wagon already,” Phineas said. “That’s all the bride master asked us to fetch.”

  “But this one was served on a platter!” Emil said.

  “Bad meat, I say.”

  The voices came at Maynya as if mere whispers in the wind. The swooshing sound of a sword yanked from its sheath soon followed. She took a deep breath and readied herself for passage to the next life.

  A flash of light brought stars to her eyes.

  Had death arrived? No, a cracked rib from the kick to her side wouldn’t torture a dead woman, would it? And would she still smell the sharp scent of forest pine?

  A shadowy presence pulled her to her feet. Maynya gaped at her other self, the woman in odd attire who previously existed only beyond a curtain of dreams. A bolt of light shot out of this woman’s chest, this Carla’s chest, and into hers. “We’re one now,” came a voice that wasn’t a voice. More like an echo within her head.

  Maynya fell to her knees, still bathed in the bolt’s lingering glow. “How can I be one with…a saint?”

  The vision dissolved with an aura of finality that stole her breath away. Had the woman she’d always known but never knew, the sister in her dreams, a woman named Carla, died? A staggering pang of loss pressed harder than the grief she’d suffered after her mother’s death years earlier.

  She closed her eyes, readying herself again to die.

  Another flash. This time in her head, bringing with it a vision of rats.

  A clatter rose in the near distance, a multitude of squeaks so great in number they combined into a shriek. She reopened her eyes.

  A single rat ran at Phineas from behind a tree. He kicked it away.

  Another came.

  And another.

  The shriek grew louder. A great swarm of rats, thousands, came at the men from every direction.

  “Fuck! They’re all over me!” Phineas lost his footing, fell to the ground, and skittered like a crab until he backed into a tree. He swatted the closest rodents away, but scores more followed.

  His partner, Emil, turned heel and ran.

  Maynya scrambled to her feet. Phineas twitched beneath her, shouting, swinging…at nothing. She aimed a kick with as much strength as she could manage and got the man squarely in the balls.

  He doubled over. His scream rang in her ears.

  She shot a hurried look around. Emil had headed back toward the meadow where she’d been captured. She’d have to go the opposite way, deeper into the woods, closer to the Virtus border.

  She hurried away, gasping at the fire in her ribs where she’d been kicked.

  A half hour later, Maynya still ran. She stirred up the fauna as she passed, chasing chattering birds to the treetops. A chipmunk got under foot. In sidestepping it, she tripped over a gnarled root and went sprawling. The sting in her palms and knees joined forces with her ravaged rib cage to bring tears to her eyes. She staggered up, pressed on, using reddened hands to fend off low-hanging branches swiping at her face.

  She’d covered a good three miles during her flight, but for all she knew, the barbarians might be fast on her heels. Whatever she’d done back there, she had no way of knowing how long it might last.

  What had she done? Witchcraft?

  She shuddered.

  No, the flash of light from Carla’s passing had somehow awakened an amazing ability. Like an infant grasping at a rattle for the first time with no knowledge how, Maynya had unwittingly groped inside two men’s minds, found their fears in the shadows, and shaped them into life-sized rats. Were the creatures real? If so, she could do wonderful things when she learned to harness the power. Perhaps she might read hunger in a starving child’s mind and conjure food.

  On the other hand, what if she never learned to harness Carla’s gift? Suppose she lost herself at an inopportune time and created an illusion in front of her own people? The Mystics would surely think her a witch and brand her chest with a W. They’d throw her across the border into Virtus, where the barbarians would crucify her.

  She started running again.

  A clearing came into view through thinning trees. Maynya gasped. She’d gone too far, clear across the border between Sanctimonia and Virtus.

  “Help!” A woman’s voice rose from the meadow, spurring a flock of sparrows into noisy flight.

  The chattering birds swarmed, cut into the forest, and dove toward Maynya before fleeing deeper into the woods.

  Had she conjured them, as well? No, they’d come on their own, chirping a warning to save her from whatever danger loomed.

  “Over here,” the woman cried. “Come open the latch.”

  “No. Leave us be.” The voice of a second woman rose above the first.

  Maynya ignored the sparrows. She hurried out of the trees to help.

  Eight women stood captive in a wooden cage fitted onto a flat carriage. They sported the long black braids and signature floral dresses of fellow Mystics. Horses had been hitched to haul them away.

  “Hurry, before the barbarians return!” A wide-eyed young woman of perhaps twenty gripped the bars at the back of the cage, the swell of her belly stretching the fabric of a faded dress. “My child can’t be born in this awful place.”

  Maynya bunched her fists. Did the cruelty of barbarians know no bounds? Someone’s pregnant wife had been stolen for sale as a bride to another man.

  “Please!”

  She glanced around, cree
ping forward. “Where are your captors?”

  One of the women pointed toward a cabin in the near distance. “They’re settling accounts with our own border guards.”

  Maynya stopped. “Our people wouldn’t do that.”

  The woman spat. “Sentries are corrupt on either side of the border. Ours will trade anything for coal, even women, apparently.”

  “Just let us out,” the pregnant one screeched.

  “No!” The other shot a fierce gaze at Maynya. “We’re bridal stock now. You know what could happen to you.”

  Maynya knew she’d hang if caught trying to save anyone, but she’d cheated death once already. She examined the cage’s latching mechanism, a heavy wooden bar lowered into a metal grip. The captors hadn’t padlocked it, apparently judging it impossible to open from inside the cage.

  “Be gone while you still can,” one of the women said.

  “Go home,” said another.

  “Leave us be.”

  “They’ll kill you.”

  Could she ever find such inner strength as these selfless Mystics? They’d probably fought like hellcats to avoid capture. All were bruised and bloodied. Dresses torn. Braids in disarray. Yet now that they’d been caged, they wouldn’t think of endangering her life to regain their freedom.

  Maynya knew without a doubt what course she must follow.

  A shadow of grief had been clinging to her from the moment she’d been touched by her imagined sister. She choked back a sob and glanced over her shoulder to bid a silent farewell to a land she might never see again. “Did they count you?”

  “Aye,” a woman said. “They know we are eight.”

  “Then eight you’ll stay.” She struggled to lift the latch, gritting her teeth against the pain in her ribs until she pulled the lever all the way up. She swung the gate open and motioned to the pregnant woman. “Climb down.”