by Mark Tufo
“Whatever any of you want to believe, the man in there is my way home; yours too, Jack. I will not so easily abandon him, nor my family, for any reason. When the chips fall, then I’ll pick them up, but no sense bending over until that point.”
“Sucks; when Marines think, they make sense in a skewed way,” Jack said as he checked his magazine.
“Going in, then?” Otter asked.
We advanced quickly—stealth wasn’t an option. There was no covered approach and we didn’t have a sequoia to hide Kalandar behind anyway. I didn’t ponder it much at the time but I had to think it was Kalandar’s presence that muted the intense feelings of fear the overseers generally generated and I was happy for it.
I held up three fingers as I gently grabbed the latch to the cabin, then counted down as Jack prepared to head through the door. I would have gone first, but there was no arguing he was the better shot, killed me to admit that but the truth is the truth. How a flyboy beats a ground pounder is beyond me; fucking anomalies.
When I reached one, I turned and pushed the door open hard; Jack was through before I could bring my rifle up. What I saw when he fired chilled me to the bone. The four angels were around Trip in a circle; he was suspended in the air on his back, his arms outstretched, his legs hanging low, his face a blank canvas, eyes open, staring at nothing. Two we had angles on, the others had their backs to us. Jack drilled that first one; its head snapped back, then it sagged, collided with the wall, and slid to the floor. Trip’s body dipped down until he was nearly standing, his head thrown back, mouth open wide in a silent scream.
They must have been in some sort of trance because they were reacting slowly. Took me two quick shots but the second one was also going for a nap. Otter came in next, a pistol in his hand; he was going for the far side of the room. That’s when the fun began, and by fun, I’m delving back into the subjective here. His gun flew out of his hand faster than if he’d thrown it, smashed into and through the window to our left. He wasn’t far behind as some unseen force picked him up and tossed him. He wasn’t lucky enough to make the same opening. I heard a sickening crunch as he made contact with the stout interior logs and fell in a heap. I wasn’t going to play patty cake with my rounds, I just opened up, sending a dozen or more into the closest one. Kalandar wasn’t kidding; they all hit but didn’t seem to faze it. As the one I was shooting turned, the room turned a bluish-black color, yet so bright as to wash out everything else around it—I’d even go so far as to say we had been physically moved to a different place. The light didn’t come from the angel: it was everywhere. I was losing my bearings. I rushed to grab Trip, who now was barely a few inches off the ground. By the time my bolt came open, I had grabbed ahold of him; he barely seemed warmer than an ice cube. An overseer reached down and pushed me away with nothing more than a feather stroke of its finger. As I fell away, all I could think to ask was where Kalandar was before I was picked up and sent along my merry little way. I didn’t even care about what was sure to be a bone-breaking collision. Before I could even process what was happening, I was outside on the ground, blinking, the sun shining down brightly.
“We need to go,” Kalandar said, holding Trip in his arms. Jack was helping Otter up, who was wincing.
“Busted rib,” Jack said to his doppelganger.
“What the hell is going on?” I stood, my head feeling like someone had stuffed it full of lead-lined cotton. I was following the group as we made a less than hasty retreat.
“They made an escape room,” Kalandar said as he widened his gait, making it nearly impossible for any of us to keep up.
Otter was struggling and I could not shake the feeling of having been slammed down with a severe head cold. Trip was a limp noodle; of all the humans, Jack appeared the least affected, but he was saddled with half-carrying Otter.
“Kalandar, we can’t keep up.” I was stumbling, something was definitely not right. The demon stopped and turned, looking closely at me before turning back.
“Were you touched?” he asked me.
Jack caught up. “Holy shit, Mike,” he said, looking at my forehead.
“What?” I was reaching my hands up.
“You’ve got a large blue circle in the middle of your forehead with purplish blue lines radiating out,” Jack said.
“Kalandar?” I asked, because of the five of us, he was most likely to know what was going on.
“Come, we must make distance from here. They will be back soon enough.” Kalandar avoided my question and my eyes. My head might have been muddled, but I didn’t need many cognitive abilities to realize this wasn’t so good. My vision would blur and then refocus, the horizon a wavy line. I barely noticed when Jack and Otter came abreast of me.
“Mike?” Jack asked. I could barely make out the features of his face as they swirled together. I must have looked like I’d dosed on six or seven hits of windowpane, my mouth hanging slack, my eyes wandering around, and my head moving in place as I attempted to create some reality out of the churning illusion.
“I think I like posies more than formaldehyde.” Last words before bouncing my chin off the ground.
Dreams came hard and fast, if that’s what they were. Visions, omens, portents, I don’t know. In more than a few, I put a well-aimed bullet into Trip’s brain basket. In the hundredth, thousandth iteration, I found myself with some sort of ray gun. I was ready to pull the trigger when Trip finally found his voice and calmly asked me to stop.
“You know, even psychically, this hurts,” he said.
“Where are we?” My finger still on the trigger.
“Not sure, this is not of my creation.”
“So, you’re real?” I was having a hard time believing that.
“I could be, but how would you know?” he asked back. “Why do you keep shooting me?”
“I don’t know, other than there’s some sort of sickening satisfaction to it. Already going through so much bullshit, and you’re just adding a big heaping of suck on top of it, like a rotten cherry.”
“We didn’t know,” he offered in defense.
“You are actually screwing with time and space, and you didn’t think anything was going to happen? You ever think you should have maybe talked to Rod Serling?”
“Where do you think he got most of his ideas? Going to ask you a question, Ponch, and I need you to answer truthfully. If you could go anyplace at any time, would you?”
I wanted to tell him to shove his reasoning up his ass, but I don’t give a shit—there is not a human being alive who wouldn’t take that. If maybe just to say one final goodbye to a loved one. Or to see an old girlfriend, boyfriend, husband, wife, back when times were still good. To have taken a right on Main Street instead of a left into oncoming traffic. And then, after you were done with the more personal events, what about going to see the pyramids being built, witnessing the birth of Christ—shit, go to see a dinosaur or two.
“Yeah, Trip, but for most of us that’s an unobtainable fantasy; we can think about it all we want with no real ramifications.”
“Want to know what’s really screwed up about time?”
I nodded.
“Once something is done, it can’t be undone. I had a brother; I was twelve when he was nine. I was watching him on a summer day. A bunch of us went down to the quarry to do some swimming.”
I knew where this was going. “I’m sorry, Trip. He drowned while you were horsing around with your friends?”
“Huh? No. He stubbed his little toe really bad on a rock, broke it in like three places. I got in so much trouble! Grounded for three weeks and his toe always stuck out at a weird angle after that.” He stuck his pinkie finger out as a display. “Plus, he always felt the need to take off his shoes and socks and display it to me, all the time. Kind of a ‘look what you did to me’ thing.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“The first place I went back to was that day. I did everything I could to change that event, even went so far as to remove the rock. D
idn’t matter. Time is fluid in a sense, but also very rigid once it’s laid down. The trick is going ahead to see potential outcomes and then coming back to align the pieces in the correct way. At any rate, that’s the effort I’ve made to stem the nightmares I have witnessed. How easy it would be to go back and get rid of the scientists who tainted the flu viruses—that’s not how it works, though. There’s a comfort in going back, but an incredible sadness as well, to see things already done that will never happen again.”
“So, the lesson here is that shooting you in the head will accomplish nothing?”
“You’re shooting me in the head? Why are you doing that?”
“I, ah, meant figuratively. What did the overseer do to me?” I said as a way to steer the conversation away from this particular subject. “I take it I’m not awake, and I’m pretty sure the vast majority of this is being manifested in my mind.”
“Oh, we’re both more awake than we have ever been. The real problem is falling back into the sleep-walking we naturally inhabit. The overseers aren’t really our enemies.”
“No? You looked pretty distressed when we came and got you.”
“Totally. They were going to kill me and anyone who interfered.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong—that vaguely sounds like what an enemy would do.”
“We need to go back, Ponch.”
“Doubtful.”
“You’re going to die here if you don’t.”
“And you?”
“I sealed my fate a long time ago, at university. No matter how many times I try to cover up that discovery. It was what I did while I could before time caught up with me that allowed me to continue. That allowed me to affect positive change even after putting so much disaster in motion.”
“No,” I told him point blank.
“Every story has to come to an end, Ponch, whether it’s good or bad. And I’ve got a tip for you: very rarely does everyone live happily ever after.”
“Trip, I can’t do what you ask, I can’t actively seek out the demise of someone I care for.”
Trip ignored my entreaty. “You’re going to have bouts of lucidity; you will have to convince them to take us back. And as for Kalandar, trusting him right now is going to be touch and go, but there will come a time when you two will need each other.”
I barely heard his words as I was deposited back into the dirt of the earth. I felt like my eyes were crossed, my head on a very loose swivel.
“Mike, you with us?” It was Jack; he was holding a cool compress to my head.
“Ret gee mell,” was what the words that came out of me sounded like. Jack lifted my head and poured water down my throat, which I greedily drank. “Gotta go back,” I choked out after having breathed some water into a lung.
“Can’t, Mike; Trip has flat-lined twice. Otter and myself have performed CPR to get him back but he’s still thready and unstable.”
“Overseers, back.” I could feel my eyes wanting to roll back into my head. “Trip says, only chance.” And that was it in terms of my interaction with those around me, though I was close enough to the surface to stay an observer. That is far from an enviable position. Floating above the action, seeing and hearing everything as it happened around me, like some omnipotent being—though if I were omnipotent I would have been able to do things. Nope, this was impotence—all the tools were there, but too flaccid to use. Maybe a bit graphic, but a fitting analogy. Wonder if there was a psychic Viagra?
“He’s out.” Jack laid my head back down and stood. “Fuck.” He was looking around. “He says we need to go back.”
“I would not advise that.” Kalandar said.
“Yeah, me neither,” Jack replied. “He said Trip said it was our only chance.”
“Yeah, and what kind of neat trick was that? Trip is nearly dead,” Otter said as he monitored the man’s vitals.
“I don’t know, but I trust him, and for some reason I trust them.”
“There is little reason to think the overseers won’t kill us as soon as they see us,” Kalandar said.
“You don’t have to come,” Jack said.
“Of course I do.” At first, I thought he was going to say he had grown fond of us or was duty bound or both. Nothing quite so grand. “I am still compelled by the summoning.” Forced action was action nonetheless.
“Shit.” Otter winced as he got up, a hand going to his side.
“Maybe you should stay behind,” Jack said. “Kalandar will heft these two and I can keep point.”
“I was once ruler of all I surveyed, now I’ve been relegated to pack mule,” Kalandar said as he picked up our limp bodies. “Luckily for them my fire only hurts those I choose it to.”
“I’ll try to keep up for as long as I can,” Otter said.
Jack didn’t fight him on that. Kalandar didn’t wait for the word, just began hoofing it. Jack was jogging to keep pace; Otter didn’t last much more than a couple of hundred yards, once he had to start taking deep breaths he was out of the race.
“I was hoping for more caution,” Jack managed to get out as they moved.
“Whatever these two have left, it is fast dwindling.”
Jack pulled up short as we came to the cabin. The four overseers were out on the front porch, I wouldn’t have been all that surprised if they’d had a cool pitcher of lemonade with them. They looked relaxed and expectant.
“Wait,” Jack said to Kalandar, who had not yet stopped. “I will shoot you!” he yelled.
“Breaking pacts is not such a good idea,” Kalandar said.
“What will you do if I shoot you?” Jack still hadn’t decided on what to do. Chasing an asp into a cobra den did not seem like a good idea.
“I’m a demon, Jack. Is it something you want to find out?”
The overseers did not move as Kalandar got closer, though their attention was pulled to Trip. No words were exchanged, but it was clear to me that they wanted Kali to put Trip down. He was hesitant to do so. I was being offered up, looked like as a sacrificial lamb. One of the overseers came closer and lightly brushed a finger across my head as he took Trip from Kalandar’s arm. This time they placed him in the car, and within a few moments, they were out of sight, just as I was coming to.
“Mike?” Jack was looking down at me.
“Better, thanks. Help me up.”
“Fucked does not even begin to convey the situation we’re in,” he said as we watched the dust trail of the rapidly departing bone-men mobile. “We gave them the only person we have who could stop this.”
“And get us out of here,” I added.
“You both would have been dead in hours, what would that have accomplished?” Kalandar said as he uncharacteristically took a seat—he looked tired. “It is likely the overseers are attempting to do the same things you were.”
“Stop the whistlers,” I said. He nodded. “What now, Jack?” I felt defeated. We were stuck, no ifs, ands, or buts—Valhalla, or wherever we were now, was home.
“There’s no choice really, we follow and get him back.”
“I would not think it possible, but my purgatory could be more preferable to this world.”
“We should get Otter.” My head was down and I was about to start back the way we had come. I was exhausted as well, like I’d just this minute finished fighting the flu. My body was drained, my bones ached, and all I wanted to do was sleep. But we all know there’s no rest for the wicked.
“You might want to grab your, um, manly notebook before you go.” Jack was pointing to the ground where a very dirty notepad resided.
“It’s not mine, Trip gave it to me.”
“Sure,” Jack said.
I reached down and scooped it up, I don’t know if I’d just not looked at it when he’d given it to me or if at some point he’d had a chance to write on it, but right on the cover was scrawled, “read this when I’m gone.”
I flipped open to the first page and the first thing I noticed was how meticulous the handwriting was, like
Trip might have found someone to take dictation while he was taking care of business. The handwriting itself may have been damn near typewritten, but the words themselves, well they were all Trip.
“If I’m dead—no, wait. I don’t like the sound of that. If I’m not alive, you should read this. If you’re dead, Ponch, you should stop reading now. If I’ve been captured by Sleestacks, do not tell Stephanie—she absolutely hates those things.”
I turned past three blank pages.
“Sorry, wanted to put as much distance as I could between me and the Sleestacks, nasty nasty creatures.” I couldn’t tell if he was referring to the costume-clad people from Land of the Lost or some new thing we’d yet to come across. Sure, the Sleestacks were scary when I was seven, but those oversized costume-y hands always made me feel as if I could get away from them if I ever found myself in the land of the dinosaurs—someplace my friends and I always tried to find. If young me knew just how many alternate worlds I would find myself in, I wonder if I would have quit trying, especially since they’ve all kind of sucked so far. Probably not, though; I’ve yet to hit one with dinosaurs. Really hope that one doesn’t come back to bite me in the ass.
“So, as I was saying, if you’re not dead, you should definitely read this.”
I could not help but think, what the hell. There was entirely too much shit going on to be messing with this—until I read the next line, anyway.
“The guy with the name of the animal in the mustelid family, can’t remember, but he needs help. You know—cute face, long whiskers, dexterous hands.”
“How could he possibly know?” I asked, looking around like maybe he was right here dictating to some unseen scribe as we lived the events.
“Oh yeah, if he’s dead, or if he dies, don’t bother with the next section, just go to the end.”
“We gotta go,” I told everyone. Whatever foreshadowing Trip had going on, I wanted to read the part that had Otter alive.
We’d been walking for no more than an hour when we heard gunshots—a bunch of them.
“Otter, it has to be,” Jack said as we moved faster.
“Do I smell rotting flesh?” Kalandar’s broad nose flared as he took in great gusts of air.