“You got lost outside the Pennsylvania portal?” the man on the right asked. Both guards were still tense as they sized up the situation.
“I did,” Jim said.
“And you lost your identity? And now you say you’ve got it back.”
“That’s right.”
“Impossible,” said the man on the left. “If you’d lost your identity, you’d have wandered confused for as many cycles as it took to wind you up down here in a holding cell. Nobody just ‘feels better.’ Who are you really?”
“I’d like to speak to Agent Stevens,” Jim said. “He’s CIA and he knows me. Told me to stay away from the store. Can you reach him?”
The men looked at each other. “This Stevens, he’s surface duty?” one of them asked.
“I don’t know what that means,” Jim said. “He’s like a government guy. Something like that.”
“Listen,” the other guard said. “I don’t know who you are. I don’t know why you’re down here or how you pulled that off. But I’m going to escort you out of here as a courtesy. There are people here who would lock you up and throw away the key.”
“I can’t leave,” Jim said. “I think my friend is here somewhere. Clyde Dawson.”
“Nobody who ends up here has a name,” the man said. “It’s time to go. Last warning.”
“Mr. Hamilton.”
Jim turned and saw a man approaching him. The man was dressed like Stevens, but it wasn’t him. “I’m Agent Murphy,” the man said. “I remember you. Didn’t Stevens tell you to stay away from the store?” He turned to the guards. “You did well, boys. That’s why we have the silent alarm.”
“I know I shouldn’t have gone back to the store,” Jim said. “I just want to get my missing friend and get out of here.”
“I’m afraid it’s not quite that simple,” Murphy said. “Everything you see here is government property. You’re trespassing, and there’s a penalty for that transgression.”
“Are you going to kill me?” Jim asked in a shaking voice.
“You’re going to stay here as our guest for at least a while,” Murphy said. He looked at one of the guards. “Escort him to block A.”
The man’s eyes widened in surprise. “A? Is he that high-level?”
Murphy scowled and the guard drew back in fear. “Are you questioning a direct order?”
“No. No sir. We’ll take him to cell block A.”
“Good.”
The guards took Jim by his arms. He thought of resisting, but what good would it do?
They walked away from Murphy and down a long series of passageways.
“I don’t understand,” Jim said to the guards. “You take orders from the surface agents?”
“Mr. Murphy is not simply a surface agent,” one of the guards said. “He gets to work surface because he’s in charge of this entire operation. What he says goes.”
“What’s so special about cell block A?” Jim asked.
The other guard laughed. “Buddy, you aren’t going to be thrilled that you’re so special. Cell block A is where they send the people they want to experiment on.”
The first guard elbowed his partner. “Enough. Blabbing to this guy is only going to get us in trouble.”
They walked in silence. Jim slipped his hands into the pockets of clothes that were never his. His fingers touched something hard. For a second, he couldn’t remember what would be in his pocket, protected from his thigh by the thick leather wallet, and then it hit him. Clyde’s pocketknife, or the stand-in that had appeared in 1989.
The guards led Jim to a building that looked just as old as others he’d seen but not nearly as big as some of them. They nodded to their colleagues at the door, and soon Jim was being led down what looked like an old hospital hallway.
He closed his hand around the knife and said a silent prayer. He didn’t know what kind of deity held sway over the place where he found himself, but he hoped someone was listening. For his sake, and Liz’s and Clydes, and for anyone else who’d been hurt in some way by the goddamned vacant pharmacy.
Jim pulled the knife out and flicked the blade open. He grabbed one of the two guards and pulled the man in front of him. He held his left arm across the man’s chest and pointed the end of the blade at the man’s throat with his right hand. He felt raw panic and adrenaline rush through him.
“Don’t move!” he yelled. “Don’t you dare move!’
Chapter Twenty-Four
Jim pulled his captive close to his chest. He could sense the man’s fear, and a part of him wanted to let the guard go. It had never been his way to hurt or scare anyone. You have no choice, he reminded himself.
The other guard had frozen when Jim made his move, but now a sly smile crossed his face. “What are you trying to accomplish here?” he asked. “Where do you think you’re going to go?”
Jim tried to think of an answer. “It doesn’t matter. You aren’t going to keep me prisoner here.” He backed down the hallway, dragging the guard in front of him like a human shield. He saw signs along the hall pointing in different directions. “Laboratory,” read one, while another read “Quarters.” He almost turned for that one, but saw another marked “Command,” and moved toward that door instead.
“Open that door,” he yelled to the free guard.
“No, I’m not gonna do that,” the man replied.
“Do it now, or I’ll kill him,” Jim said. He pushed the knife against the captured guard’s throat.
“Please, Joel,” his prisoner said, “do what he says!”
The guard named Joel sighed and reached for the door. He stepped out of the way, and Jim backed through the opening, peering over his shoulder just long enough to be sure nobody was coming up behind him.
Three men sat at command consoles. They observed security footage on monitors around the room. The footage switched between images of the Forge, as Jim had seen on the small workstation on the platform, and images of what appeared to be parts of the building he was in at that moment.
In one, he saw a man sitting inside a padded room. The man was curled up on the floor with his legs pressed to his chest. As Jim watched, the man tilted his head back, revealing a ragged beard. The image flipped to an outside view a second later, but Jim was sure of whom he’d seen.
“Who is that man?” he yelled, before he had thought whether such an outburst was a good move. The three men wheeled around in their chairs and looked at Jim with panic.
“All of you!” Jim yelled, backing himself up against a bank of monitors and switches and addressing all the men in the room. “Listen up. I want to know who that man is that you’re keeping prisoner here.”
“What’s happening here?” one of the seated men asked. He didn’t look much beyond college age.
“What’s your name, son?” Jim asked.
“Um… I’m Victor,” he said.
“All right. Vic. Who is the man you’re keeping here?”
Victor looked around at the other frightened men, as if waiting for someone in authority to tell him his next move. Nobody said anything. Victor looked at Jim. “He’s a pharmacist. He was at the center of an incident, so we study him. It’s nothing that serious!”
Dr. Mike. “Thank you, Vic. Now do me a favor and let him out.”
“What?”
“Let him out. Open the door to his cell. In fact, open all the doors you can access.”
“I can’t do that,” Victor pleaded. “I’ll lose my job!”
“And your friend here will lose his life if you don’t act now.”
There was a horrible silence, as it seemed every person in the room was considering his options and calculating the likelihood of their success. Suddenly, Victor reached out to his console and began clicking through options. He hesitated once, then pushed a button. “Done. Now please, let us all go.”
Jim looked at the monitors. Most didn’t show anything that would help him, but at the far end of the room he caught a glimpse of a row of doors, and someon
e emerging from one of them.
“Thank you, Vic,” Jim said. “I’m going to give you back your friend, but please remember I still have a knife. I would like you to let me go find who I came here to find. Okay?”
A couple of the men grunted acquiescence.
“I said, is that okay?” Jim yelled.
All five of the men replied in the affirmative.
Jim released his grip on the captive guard and pushed him toward the one named Joel. The guard he had just released wheeled around and swung at him. He caught Jim’s temple with the edge of his fist. Jim fell, and slashed out with the knife, catching nothing but air.
The men in the room were on him in seconds. They did not move with the kind of training he’d expected. Even the two guards didn’t appear to be prepared for combative resistance. Still, their numbers were more than he could defend against. Rough, sloppy blows rained down on him and he stumbled back against the controls along the wall. The knife fell from his hand and clattered on the floor.
He felt switches click under him. A siren began to wail. All at once, the men stopped attacking him.
“Jesus Christ!” Victor shouted. “You’ve opened the barrier!”
He raced to the controls. All the men were focused on Victor. Jim bolted for the exit to the room.
“Hey!” someone yelled. “Get back here!”
Jim dove for the knife, somehow scooping it up without cutting himself, and ran into the hall. He made his way to the end and turned around a corner. He pressed back against the wall where he wouldn’t be visible to anyone coming out of the Command room. The siren echoed in the distance.
He heard the men enter the hall. “We need to get going,” one said. “There’s no telling how many of those fucking animals got through before the barrier was sealed.”
“Where’d the guy go who caused all this shit?” another asked.
“No time for that. We gotta move. Forgemites could be anywhere by now.”
Jim heard the footfalls moving away from him. At the end of the hall was the door marked “Quarters.” He walked toward that. He knew he had given the men working in the Command room the chance to reset everything he’d had them change, but it seemed like in their panic to leave they had only corrected his inadvertent opening of some barrier.
He opened the door without any problem. Inside was a row of five rooms, their doors ajar. Jim looked into the first one he passed. It was a studio apartment, done up in white. White paint on the walls, white tile on the floor, white furniture. The place was unoccupied.
He walked farther down the hall. The rooms all looked the same, and if they had once held occupants, they didn’t any longer. One of these rooms was meant for you, he thought.
At the end of the hall was a final room. This one’s door was closed. Jim grabbed the handle and pulled. As the door opened past him, he saw the several metal deadbolts that had likely been extended before the situation in Command.
He looked inside the room. The layout was the same as the others in the hall. In this one, Dr. Mike sat in a chair facing a blank wall. He wore baggy light grey sweats and white athletic socks. His hair was much longer than it had been in 1989, and it was flecked with grey. Where his face had once been perfectly clean-shaven, now there was a bushy beard, also dotted with gray tones.
“Dr. Mike,” Jim said.
The pharmacist turned toward the door. He looked at Jim with a blank expression, almost as if he were studying a magic eye portrait. He blinked twice and cocked his head in confusion. “You aren’t with them.”
“No, I’m not,” Jim said. He thought about asking to be invited in but decided to try his chances. He pulled the door to cut off some of the distant sound of the siren, but left it open just enough that if all those deadbolts popped back out, they wouldn’t find purchase. He walked over to a nearby couch and sat down. “I’m going to get you out of here.”
“I don’t think that’s possible.”
“Well right now the guards are all dealing with something called forgemites, so I think this is our best chance.”
Dr. Mike frowned. “The siren. Yes. It doesn’t last long. The forgemites can’t get past the barrier.”
“I opened the barrier. At least for a little while.”
Dr. Mike’s eyes widened. “You opened… well. That’s different.”
“My name’s Jim. I’ve met you before, though you wouldn’t know it.”
Dr. Mike nodded slowly. “The bubble. I’m aware that a ghost of me exists there.”
“How do you know that?”
“Word travels. And I’ve had a lot of time for a lot of words to travel.”
“How long have you been here?” Jim asked.
“Nearly thirty years, last I checked,” Dr. Mike said. “Time here moves almost in sync with the real world.”
“Almost?”
“Almost. Do I look thirty years older than you remember me?”
Jim studied the man’s features. He had seen the younger version so recently, though his mind had been jumbled for much of that time. Still…
“No,” Jim said. “You’re older, and by more than a few years. Maybe ten to fifteen. Not thirty.”
“Right. So as I said, it’s not quite the same as the real world. Though I’ve often hypothesized my exposure to the portal is what slowed my aging. No way to know, because they won’t let me conduct experiments on myself. Or on anything.”
“They’ve been holding you captive down here for thirty years?” Jim asked. “What have they done with you?”
Dr. Mike shrugged. “Tests. Many tests, especially at first. Not so much in more recent years. Mostly I just read or watch whatever they bring me. For a while there was a television, with VHS tapes and later DVDs, but now pretty much everything I do is on that.” He pointed to a black tablet on a table nearby.
“You can get the Internet on that?”
“Yes, or at least it’s meant to look like that, but I’m smart enough to know that whatever I’m accessing is carefully curated. I don’t have access directly to the real Internet. I’m not even sure that would be possible. I’m just seeing videos and documents stored on a server somewhere in this place.”
“What happened to you?” Jim asked. “How did you get here?”
“What do you remember about me in 1989?” Dr. Mike asked.
“You were experimenting on the energy or whatever in your store. Doing some things in the back room.”
Dr. Mike nodded agreement. “That’s right. I was working on something very special. See, I found that a crystal, cut just right, could reflect light in a way that didn’t make sense.”
“How so?”
Dr. Mike rolled up the right sleeve of his sweatshirt. On his arm was the scar of a deep injury in a straight line perpendicular to his bicep. “It converted visible light to a powerful, expanding energy,” he said. “I got this the first time I discovered that little quirk.” He pulled the sleeve back down over the ugly wound.
“So that energy is what caused the explosion?”
“Yes. At least I think so. I don’t have any real memory of what went on that day. Most of August 10, 1989 is erased from my mind, which is extremely ironic when you think that a part of myself lived that day over and over in thousands of different permutations.”
“You think the people there are part of the real people?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. I would give anything to be able to investigate it myself but I’ve never been allowed. Like I said, word travels. That’s the only way I know about what is on the other side of the store.”
“So you think the crystal triggered an explosion.”
“Actually, I think the crystal was the explosion. Went off like a massive bomb. When I received that scar on my arm, I thought it was simple, destructive energy. Burning through whatever it touched. But I’ve learned that I was wrong. The energy didn’t destroy. It moved things out of sync with time. If you’re here, you’ve seen what that did to the store.”
“I
have,” Jim said. “What happened to you after the explosion?”
“Hard to say. I was out of it for a while, but at some point I came to on the floor of the store. Everything looked just the same as always, which is when I started to suspect the nature of the energy released by refracting light above the portal. I wouldn’t guess at the existence of the portal itself until much later.
“At that point, the store and all of its items were drifting in and out of time, or maybe it’s just that the pocket universe hadn’t fully baked yet. Either way, I tried to walk out the front door and almost fell into an endless empty space. I could see much of the Forge below but there was no direct way to access it. I didn’t know where I was or what had happened to me and my store. I raced to the back where my office was, and I hid in there for a while, terrified.”
“Wait, the back rooms were there?” Jim asked.
“At first, yes. I would guess that the energy burst made it at least partially through the exterior walls of the store. Eventually it ran out of force and couldn’t take the whole block. But yes, the back rooms were there. And that’s where I stayed. I believe I would have died of starvation if nobody had accessed the store, but it stabilized in its ghostly form in the alleyway, and some investigator chanced upon it. After that, it’s all kind of a blur. Government people snatched me up. I was held hostage in the store for a long time as they figured out what to do about the place and about me. Eventually the Forge was discovered, and all the old structures that it contained.”
“You don’t know who built these places?”
“No,” Dr. Mike said. “I’m fairly certain nobody here knows. They just took what was already here and modified it and modernized it over and over again to create a prison and lab complex, letting them investigate the space between worlds and everywhere it leads.”
“And eventually they moved you down here.”
“Precisely.”
“Okay,” Jim said. “Well I think you’ve been here long enough, Doc. It’s time to go.”
“You think you can get out of here?”
“You seem doubtful.”
Vacancy Page 22