by David Boop
But then he thought he did understand. As impossible as it seemed, given the nature of her sled, the thing had come from that cave. Now most of the entrance was choked by the debris torn from the ceiling by her strange gun. Was it, he wondered, that she needed to keep that cave mouth open? Did she need to return? Or was there something inside that mattered to her? Perhaps something stolen or guarded by the strange brutes?
The monsters hesitated also and, in a flash of insight, Red thought that they either needed to take her alive, or they had a concern of damaging her carriage.
All of this made sense at least—the motives behind the standoff—even if nothing else held a shred of sanity. And that forced Red to make a decision. He could run, because the combatants were so thoroughly fixated on one another that they seemed to disregard him. Or he could pick a side.
Then Mathew Hollister shattered the standoff by standing up, brandishing his rifle and roaring at them. “Where’s my brother, you sons of Judas? Where’s Jack? What have you done with him, you—”
The closest of the creatures spun toward him and fired his strange weapon.
TOK!
Mathew Hollister had time for a single earsplitting shriek of total agony and then he was gone. His body seemed to explode from within, becoming an intense ball of white-hot fire. The fireball plucked Red off the ground and hurled him twenty feet away. He slammed into the withered arms of a sunbaked tree. He tucked his chin to protect his head, but the trunk punched him between the shoulder blades and drove all the air from his lungs. Red slid to his knees, losing his rifle, and fell forward onto his palms. Sick, winded, but not out. Not gone. Not yet.
Even as pain burned through his back and lungs, he pawed the Colt from its holster, raised it in two hands to keep it steady, and fired and fired. The first bullet missed the bastard who killed Hollister. The second did not, catching the thing as it turned its hellish weapon on him. The big lead slug did not pass through as if encountering spectral vapors. It struck meat and bone and when it did pass through, the bullet exploded out the other side and sprayed blood on the rocks. Bright red blood. Real blood.
The screams were real, too.
Not human, but no ghostly wails. Cries of agony. A death cry, he hoped.
The other brutes shrank back, and Red chased them with his last four rounds, missing twice, hitting one in the hip and catching another in the shoulder. The uninjured creatures fired back, but they did it while running, while dragging their wounded comrades back into the cave. Then one of them exploded in the same way Hollister had, and Red realized that the woman had fired her gun at them. Red shoved his pistol into the holster and snatched up his fallen rifle. He fired from the hip, but by now the remaining creatures were gone, swallowed by the darkness of the cage.
Gasping with pain and all but biting chunks of the air to fill his tortured lungs, Red scuttled behind a boulder and fumbled to reload his rifle and pistol. Even dazed and hurt he did it fast, but there was no one left to shoot. The creatures were gone, leaving only blood and death and mystery behind.
He turned toward the woman who was still crouching behind the machine. She was fiddling with something on the confounded thing and finally pulled away with a gleaming quartz rod in her hand.
There were sounds coming from the cave and Red thought he saw many of the lumbering shapes milling around just inside there. He was in no shape for a fight—he was flash burned, plastered with Mathew Hollister’s scorched blood, and the world was spinning so harshly that even walking took all of his strength. The woman seemed to realize that. She grabbed him by the arm and pulled him away. Red did not want to flee. He wanted to fight, but now was not a time for fighting. Now was a time for dying or running, and so he ran.
Later, though…Oh yes, later there would be a time for fighting. For killing.
They ran.
– 6 –
The woman led him away quickly, but it was clear she did not know where she was going. Red forced himself to think and act with sense, and in turn guided her to where Nightmare and Hollister’s horse were tethered. The woman shied back, wary of the big creatures, but Red told her it was okay. She allowed him—with great reluctance—to help her mount. Red put her on his own horse, whom he knew and trusted, and then climbed onto the farmer’s threadbare mount.
They turned and rode away from the haunted mesa, riding toward another cluster of tall rocks that rose above a stand of trees. It was a few miles’ ride, and they went hard, the woman clutching on for dear life. She stayed in the saddle, though, and continually watched Red as if studying what he did to control his mount. By the time they reached safety, she was managing a fair imitation of handling the reins. It impressed Red, and he found that her intelligence—as well as her obvious courage—made him like her.
They circled the rocks and dismounted. Red climbed to the top of one and used a small pocket telescope to study the terrain. Then he slid back down to the ground.
“They’re not following,” he said.
“No,” she said, and it was the first word of English she’d spoke. “They do not like the sun. Even with their protective garments.”
She had a soft voice and an accent that sounded vaguely British, but as if British was overlaying something else that he could not identify.
“I just need to rest up for a spell,” said Red. “Then I’m going back.”
“Yes. I need to go back, too.”
“Oh, hell,” Red said sternly. “You’re staying here where it’s safe. This is man’s work…”
He stopped talking because the look she gave him all but shriveled the skin from his hide.
“‘Man’s work’?” she echoed coldly. “Are you really that kind of shortsighted fool? You could go charging back there, and they’d skin you alive. Literally. Together we might have a chance.”
Before Red could reply there was a strange, piercing cry from the mountains they’d just left. It rose like some tortured seabird, climbing high into the sky and echoing across the plans, battering into one cluster of rocks after another before being shredded by the wind. Red did not have to ask what unnatural throat uttered that plaintive, horrific sound. His hand fell to the holster Colt, but there was only the faintest cold comfort there. When he glanced at the woman he saw a glittering steel hardness in her eyes and he knew that she was right and he, despite his understanding of the world, was wrong.
“We need to get to shelter,” she said. “They hate the sun, but once it’s down they will be hunting us.”
Red led her into the trees and they found a tiny spring seeping sluggishly from a cleft in the stone. Both of them drank greedily, and the cool water did him a power of good. It chased much of the dizziness away, though his back still hurt and the burns on his skin were painful. He watered the horses, then set about filling the two saddle canteens. While he did that, the woman sat down on a rock and watched him with large, almost luminous eyes.
She pointed to his pistol and held out a hand, palm up. Red hesitated, shrugged, and then handed it over, butt first. The woman examined it, her lips pursed like a jeweler appraising an antique watch.
“Bullets…?” she said, offering the word as a question.
“Yes.”
“Crude,” she concluded and handed it back.
Red could see her in more detail now, and he found himself awed by how exotically beautiful she was. Like a woman in a painting from one of the islands, though far paler. Or a fairy in an old book of poems.
“Who are you?” he asked. “And what in the hell is going on?”
The woman considered him, and his questions, for long seconds. “Tell me…your name,” she said.
“Manfred MacGill,” he said. “People call me Red.”
“Like the color.”
“Yes.”
“Like your hair.”
“Yes.”
She touched her own chest. “Oona.”
“Ah. A pleasure, Miss Oona.”
“Just Oona.”
“Okay, Oona…now
just what in the hell was all that about back there? Who are you? What was that machine, and where did it come from? And what on earth were those…those…things?”
She considered his questions, almost smiling as if they were somehow naïve; and maybe they were, because nothing of the last half hour seemed to fit into any version of the world as he understood it. Not even of what his mother called the “larger world,” where spirits and monsters and demons lurked at the fringes of reality. The other strange things he’d encountered as a sorter of problems all seemed to fit with a degree of practical rightness into that larger world. These things, though, were different, and he’d sorted through the difference on the ride here. The creatures, the woman, their odd weapons, and that mechanical sled, as bizarre as they were, had a sense of undeniable reality to them. Ghosts and other monsters seemed to always live on the other side of a thin veil, as if they were part of a dream that was slipping through a crack into the real world. Not the things he saw today. Everything about them was real, and that made them that much more impossible.
She licked her lips and with a small snarl of intense distaste said, “Those creatures are called Morlocks.”
– 7 –
“Morlock?” he asked, confused. She spoke as if it was the most horrible word a person could utter, but it meant nothing to him. “Are they men? Where do they come from? And for all that, where do you come from?”
Oona studied him, chewing a full lower lip for a moment. “Tell me, Red MacGill, are you a good man?”
The question startled him, but her eyes spoke the earnest need for truth.
“I believe that I am,” he said. “I’ll do no harm to him as has done none to me. I don’t steal, I don’t cheat at cards, and when I give my word, it has meaning. You can count on it.” He paused. “Is that what you wanted to know?”
She nodded. “My father was a good man. He was like you. Like this…” She waved to indicate the land behind them, which made no obvious sense to him. “He came from here. Not here in this desert, but from here. He came to where I live. Where my mother lived. Before he came to us we were very primitive. As helpless and uneducated as little children. Then my father came and brought so many things with him—science and fire and learning. He taught my mother how to read. He taught her friends how to fight, even though we never understood what we fought for.”
Red didn’t understand, either, but did not say so.
“He came once and then went away and came back,” said Oona. “He came a long, long way. When he came back again he brought books, and a gun like yours, and many things. He stayed that time. Settled there. Had children.” She paused as a shadow drifted across her face. “The Morlocks killed him. Killed my mother, my brothers and sisters. They killed everyone but me, but I survived because I was away. I came back to find them all dead.”
A single tear, delicate as a jewel, glistened on her cheek.
“When you say your father ‘came,’” began Red, “came from where to where?”
Oona paused. “My father said that when he told his friends about his journeys none of them believed him. He said he stopped trying to convince people that what he said was true.”
“Try me,” said Red. “I’ve come to believe in all sorts of things lately.”
Oona gave him a strange look. “My father was a time traveler,” she said.
Red couldn’t help but smile. “A time…?”
“See, he was right, people from your time don’t believe.”
“From my time?”
“My father was from a land called England. From this time in England. He told me stories about it. A great island shrouded in fog. It is the heart of the greatest empire of this age, but it began to slide into decline. On his travels he saw it fall, as all empires fall. He saw many others rise all around the world. He saw the rise of this country—your country—as an even greater empire.”
“America?” laughed Red. “An empire? Well…okay, I can understand that. They’ve conquered so many nations to build what they have. They’ve slaughtered uncounted millions. My mother’s people among them.”
She nodded. “America rose in power because of the richness of the land and the development of machines of war. Flying machines. Bombs that can destroy whole cities. Diseases used as weapons, and other things that even I, my father’s best pupil, do not understand.” She touched his arm. “But the American Empire did not last, either. Nothing lasts. As the centuries were consumed by millennia, everything made by man—no matter how strong—falters and falls. Rotted from within, destroyed by conflict, or eroded by entropy. He even went to the very end of Earth itself and beheld its final hours as a world whose vitality had been spent, whose potential to renew itself had been finally exhausted. Even the stars themselves will eventually swell and collapse and die. The greatest glory for a time traveler is to see the wonders of a changing world; but the greatest tragedy is that nothing lasts except time. Maybe, in the very end, time itself will end, but who could travel that far to know?”
“If your old man was from England and is still alive right now? Can’t you get him to help with this?”
“He is…but it is the wrong time. He launched his machine in 1895, which means right now it isn’t built or even conceived. To contact him now would be to create a paradox that might prevent him from building his machine in the first place. Besides, how could I ever convince him that I was his daughter when he had not yet met my mother? Such a thing might drive him mad.”
“Might be doing that very thing to me, truth to tell,” admitted Red. He looked back the way they’d come. “And that sled you were on? What is that…?”
“It is my time machine,” said Oona, nodding. “Not my father’s original machine, for that was stolen. No, this is my own, built with my father’s help while he was alive, and completed after the Morlocks…” She stopped and shook her head, unable to give words to a memory that was clearly too horrible to recount.
Red’s heart went out to her. He could never fully describe to another person the atrocities committed upon his mother’s helpless body by white men who wore the uniforms of soldiers.
“Once my father began fighting them in defense of the Eloi, my people, the Morlocks needed to be able to hunt us in the open.”
“‘Hunt,’” echoed Red, nodding. “They slaughtered a local man and ate him, and his horse. They provided for the Eloi, keeping you fed. Why? Were your people…food to them? Were you their cattle?”
She shivered and nodded. “My father changed that. It took a long time, and he sometimes had to be brutal with us, but he taught us to fight. It was not a concept we understood. Violence, aggression, the very concept of self-defense had been bred out of us, and my father forced it back into our experience. Perhaps some philosophers of the future will label him a monster because the Eloi were happy, but that will be unfair. We were happy because we were too stupid to understand our purpose in life. We were only food. We had no other purpose. We made nothing, created nothing, thought nothing of depth. We were cattle, as I understand that concept. My father used that word a lot. Cattle, sheep, lambs.”
“You’re different,” said Red. “You don’t act like a sheep.”
Oona gave him a faint smile. “I was born his daughter. My father raised me to be different. To think, and to know, and to continue the fight should he fall. As he did.” She took a breath. “My father took us to war against the Morlocks. He burned many of their underground cities and drove thousands into the light, where they starved and died. He armed the Eloi. He traveled back in time over and over again to bring us weapons. He scoured the abandoned cities of my world to find other weapons, like these microwave pulse pistols.” She touched the strange pistol at her hip. “To help us be free, he turned us into killers. He became the Devil to the Morlocks. A concept no one in our world understood. The Morlocks learned of it firsthand, to them, he was the soul of evil, just as they had finally become true evil to us.”
Oona rose and walked a few paces de
eper into the mouth of the cave.
“The Morlocks did more than murder my father,” she said. “They stole his original time machine. They took it and over years tore the secrets from what my father had built. They had never lost their understanding of science, of engineering and manufacture.”
Another plaintive cry tore through the air. He glanced in that direction and, through the skeletal arms of the tree saw the sky darkening beyond the rocks where the Morlocks hid.
“We can’t do anything until the sun goes down,” she said.
“Why? If they can hunt us at night…”
“They will, but it means many of them will leave the cave, and we must go back there. By now, they’ll have taken my machine. Theirs will be in the cave as well. I need to reclaim my own and destroy theirs.”
“I have a man to find,” said Red. “The brother of the poor fellow who the Morlock killed. He went missing yesterday. It was his horse they’d butchered.”
Oona shook her head. “If they killed his horse they probably killed him, too. The Morlocks are carnivores, and worse…they are cannibals.”
“That doesn’t surprise me all that much,” said Red. “I have to find Jack Hollister though. Alive or dead.”
“Why?” she asked. “What is this man to you?”
“A stranger. His brother paid me to help him find Jack, and I keep my word.”
“Even if both of them are dead?”
Red looked at her. “You are fighting your father’s fight, and he’s dead.”
They sat for a while with that hanging in the air between them. Finally Oona nodded and continued with her strange narrative.
“Tell me more about these Morlock fellows? What in tarnation are they?”
“They are monsters from what is the future of your world and the present of mine,” said Oona. “They were servants and laborers, once upon a time. People who worked in the factories and underground workshops of the world’s great cities. Over the years they provided so much for the entitled, who lived up in the sunlight, that it caused a split in evolution. The entitled became so reliant on these luxuries that they lost the ability to provide for themselves. They grew frail and weak and stupid, while the laborers grew stronger and cunning.” She paused and her cheeks colored. “My people—the Eloi—are what the entitled became by the time my father arrived. Stupid and innocent and naïve, and totally dependent on the Morlocks for our food and clothing. Meanwhile the Morlocks, who lived too many thousands of years in the dark, became monsters like this one.”