Around the side of the large building, Jim saw a group of nearly twenty people in simple clothes that clearly marked them as prisoners. He ran toward them.
“Hey!” Dr. Mike called. “Jim, we don’t have time for this!”
Jim reached the small crowd. They looked at him with frightened, confused eyes. Their clothes were stained in blood.
“Is this all of you?” Jim asked. “Everybody who was housed here?”
“It’s all that’s left,” a woman cried.
A man stepped up to her and put his arm around her. “Everybody else was lost when the forgemites ran through,” he said. “By the time those monstrosities were dead, the guards and most of the prisoners were dead too, or bled out shortly after.
“You’re all that survived?” Jim asked.
The man shook his head. “Only some of us survived the attack here. Others wandered down from the other facilities. Some of them have amnesia pretty bad.”
“You’re coming with us,” Jim said. He looked at Dr. Mike, whose face showed his disagreement. “This here is Dr. Mike. He can get you out.”
“Oh my God,” a frail, middle-aged woman said. “Dr. Mike! God, you’re alive…I heard rumors, but I never thought it was possible.”
“I’m sorry,” the pharmacist said. “I don’t recognize you…”
“I’m Mary Lewin,” the woman said. “My mother worked for you when I was just a kid.”
“Of course!” Dr. Mike said. “Sally Lewin! Is your mother—”
“We lost her five years ago,” Mary said. “She always hoped one day we could go home.”
“I’m so sorry,” Dr. Mike said. His resolve was melting before Jim’s eyes.
“How many of you are connected in some way to Dr. Mike?” Jim asked.
Four hands other than Mary’s went up. Jim looked at Dr. Mike. “You see? You talk about the store and how important it was. These are your people. And they deserve to be freed.”
“Fine,” Dr. Mike said. “You’re right. But this is not going to be easy, Jim. I hope you realize that.”
“Jim?” someone called out. “Your name’s Jim?”
He looked and saw the teenaged girl who had been on Butler Avenue with Clyde. “You know me?”
“Your friend, Clyde, he wanted us to find you. He didn’t want you left behind.”
“What’s your name?” Jim asked.
“I’m Emma. I have a friend down here, Dylan. We got separated when the agents caught us and got sent to the places for people who got erased.”
“If he was sent there he’s probably in the same place as Clyde,” Dr. Mike said. He sighed. “We could double back that way and see what—”
Emma suddenly burst into a run. “Dylan!” she yelled.
Jim saw the boy stumbling toward them. He had a gun awkwardly jammed into his waistband. He didn’t look hurt but he seemed off in some way. Still, he embraced Emma when she met him. They held each other and then kissed for a long time, ignorant of or not caring about all the other people watching them.
Jim looked in the distance behind Dylan and Emma, but he didn’t see anyone else coming down the path. He walked over to the reunited couple.
“Are you okay?” he asked Dylan.
“I’m fine. Who are you?”
“This is Jim, Dylan,” Emma said. “The one Clyde wanted us to find.”
Dylan’s face fell. “Clyde. Fuck, I’m sorry.”
“What happened?” Jim asked. “Did you see him?”
“I’m sorry,” Dylan said again. “The forgemites…the damage was too much. He vanished.”
“He…vanished?” Jim asked.
Dylan nodded. “When he died. He disappeared. Like this fucking place absorbed him.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Seeing Emma was the jolt that Dylan needed. Reeling from Clyde’s death and disappearance, he had thought it was only a matter of time until something, be it human or creature, got a hold of him.
When Emma emerged from a cluster of people outside a large building and ran to his open arms, he felt his heart fill with a reminder of the love they shared, and through that, who he was before becoming trapped in the Forge.
After reuniting and having to tell Jim the news about his friend, the group fell into line behind Dr. Mike, who somehow had survived decades in the Forge and lived to tell about it.
There had been some discussion about Dylan’s pistol, but he made it very clear that he was not about to part with the only weapon available to them. There was some protest, but Dr. Mike ended it. “Let him have his weapon. Either we get out or we don’t. The gun won’t make much difference.”
Dr. Mike led the way toward what he called an “access point.” Jim had expressed concern about which access point they were headed toward.
“Wouldn’t it be best for everyone if we went to the store?” Jim asked.
“The store leads to a pocket universe,” Dr. Mike said. “All the other access points that I identified lead to legitimate worlds.”
“How many worlds are out there?” Emma asked.
“Probably infinite, if I had to guess,” Dr. Mike said. “The structures in the Forge have access to twelve different points. But one of them has what I want.”
“What’s that?” Dylan asked.
“A way to put an end to all of this.”
They continued mostly in silence. The siren continued to sound its warning, but the small group didn’t encounter any resistance.
“What happened to you in here?” Dylan asked Emma.
“Just got shut away with a bunch of poor women who didn’t even know who they are or how to function. Even when the cells opened and I was able to get out, most of them didn’t even react. It’s terrible what happened to all these people…and now those creatures…”
“They got Murphy,” Dylan said. “The forgemites. They killed him before he could kill me.”
“Good,” Emma said. “He was awful.”
Dylan agreed, though that thought in itself was troubling. Was this how far they’d come? Murphy had killed Matt. He’d almost killed Dylan and Clyde. And he had handled Emma in a way that Dylan didn’t like at all. But still, Dylan had never found himself feeling satisfaction at someone’s death before.
“He was in charge of this whole place,” Dylan said. “He masqueraded as a low-level flunky like Stevens, but he wasn’t. I think that’s why we haven’t seen Stevens around here. He’s probably back in the real world.”
“They had put us back in 1989, remember?” Emma said. “So if Stevens got back it’s because of one of the purple cycles. And that means we missed our chance to get out at the end of the full moon.”
“We will get out of here, Emma,” Dylan said. “Out of the Forge, out of the store, out of all of it. And we will walk away and never look back.”
They arrived at a massive transport elevator. The platform was connected to a series of pulleys and machine rigging that extended up hundreds of feet. Dr. Mike encouraged everyone to enter, then did something to a panel on the side of the elevator. The whole operation lifted up slowly, rising no more than a foot every few seconds.
“Can’t this thing go any faster?” someone called.
“Look at it,” someone else said. “It’s huge! Must weigh tons. And it’s gotta move all of us too.”
A gunshot cracked through the air, and Dylan heard someone in his party cry out. He pulled Murphy’s weapon from his pants and looked around, trying to place the source of the attack. More gunshots rang out. Dylan felt a bullet whiz by his head, missing him by a centimeter.
“Get down!” he heard Jim call. “Everybody down on the ground!”
They all dropped down on the slowly rising elevator. Dylan tilted his head up. There was still at least a hundred feet for the structure to climb.
“Who’s shooting at us?” Emma whispered in his ear.
“Gotta be the guards. Maybe reinforcements from the outside?”
“Shit,” someone said. “Bert’s sho
t! He’s hurt bad!”
Dylan felt obligated to do something, but he was scared to even sit up. The gunshots continued all around them, and nobody else seemed to be getting hit, so it seemed the attack was coming from below. Still, bullets zinged off the elevator structure in powerful ricochets, and any one of them could hit him or Emma or any of the others.
He crawled to the edge of the platform.
“What are you doing?” Emma called from behind him.
He didn’t respond, but inched his way to the edge. He managed to look out just enough to take stock of the scene. He crawled back to the cluster of people.
“I saw at least ten people down there. All armed, all shooting up at us.”
“We just have to hang on another minute,” Dr. Mike said. “They can’t reverse the elevator’s motion until it stops. Which means we have a very short period of time to get off of here once it docks.”
Dylan glanced up again and saw their destination coming into view. Most of the shooting had stopped.
“On my word we stand up and move,” Dr. Mike said. “Five, four, three, two, one, now!”
All of them got up, except for a woman cradling the wounded man.
“Please,” she said. “Somebody help me move him!”
A few others ran to her and helped move Bert off the platform. The elevator started lowering again. The remaining people jumped and climbed and managed to get free of the platform before it was too far down.
“We need to get out of here,” Jim said. “The guards are going to storm the elevator and send it right back up.”
Dr. Mike nodded. “Down that hallway. That’s where we need to go.”
“I recognize this place,” Emma said. “Dylan, that’s where they brought us down from the store!”
Dylan looked and saw the entrance to the strange, spinning hallway. “Let’s go,” he said. He took Emma’s hand and they started in that direction.
“Wait!” Dr. Mike called. “You can’t get out that way!”
“You guys,” Jim said, “we need to stick together!”
“Then come with us!” Emma called. “Let’s go home!”
Several of the other people in the group followed them, but Dylan saw that Jim was still standing with Dr. Mike. Dylan and Emma and their followers crossed the distance to the hallway. Inside, they moved to the center console. “I think we hit this button to spin it,” Emma said. She tapped on the screen, and the hallway started to spin.
“This way!” Dylan called. He ran down the hall as it turned. The others followed him. They burst through the doorway and suddenly a thick soup-like fog engulfed them. Dylan closed his eyes and pushed forward in a panic. Finally the fog was gone.
Dylan looked around. The pharmacy looked the same as it had in all their trips before the agents had interfered. He looked for Matt’s body but saw nothing. The others in their party pushed past them and ran out the open door.
“Wait!” Dylan called.
The last man out the door turned around and pulled it shut just before Dylan could get there. He opened it quickly, but the people were gone.
Dylan felt foolish thinking he could coordinate the refugees. They seemed to have a system of leadership in place that he had nothing to do with and knew nothing about. He turned to Emma. “The store’s still in 1989. I don’t know if it’s been through a cycle or not but there’s no purple death out there right now. I don’t know what the hell all those people just thought they were doing, disappearing themselves like that.”
She accessed the panel next to the hidden door. Once the back door was sealed up, she jumped up on the counter. “I think all of our stuff is gone along with…well…”
“Matt’s body,” Dylan said. “I know. I hope he made it back to the alley. Maybe he’s okay.
“Do you think so?”
“I don’t know. All of this is so fucked up.”
“It is,” Emma agreed. “But what can we do? We’re lucky to be alive. What happened down in the Forge…I don’t know how I’ll ever sleep again. Not with the forgemites on my mind.”
Dylan sat next to her. “What about Dr. Mike and Jim and all the rest of them?”
“I don’t know how we could help them. We couldn’t help Clyde, and that’s why we did this to begin with.”
She started to cry and Dylan put his arms around her. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I just felt responsible enough for bringing you into this the first time, and then we were lucky enough to get out and I dragged us back. And Matt and Clyde and whoever else…Dylan…people died!”
“That’s not on you,” Dylan said. “We did the best we could. Now we are going to ride this thing out and we’re going to go home.”
“I love you,” she said.
“I love you too.”
Dylan kissed her. The kiss grew in intensity as he pulled her closer to him. They stumbled off the counter together, still kissing, and took off their clothes in a frantic flurry of shirts and shorts. Dylan rolled onto his back and Emma pulled herself on top of him.
Their eyes met and he nodded and kissed her again. She took over, maneuvering him inside her. He had often wondered what his first time would be like. In none of his fantasies had he imagined a cold and dusty tile floor, nor had he expected to have narrowly escaped death or witnessed things that most humans couldn’t fathom.
Yet there he was with the girl he loved, and the brief experience, as bizarre and different as it was, was in its way as magical and awe-inspiring as everything around them.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Jim watched the teenagers and a few of the other escaped prisoners depart from the spot the elevator had docked, and disappear into the rotating hallway that he knew led to Maverick’s.
“Let’s go,” Dr. Mike said. “We can’t control what others are going to do.”
“Are you sure that isn’t the way out?” Jim asked. “Everything seems to come back to the store.”
“It’s not what we need,” Dr. Mike said. He started walking down a path in the opposite direction of the rotating hallway. “Everybody needs to head this way now. The guards are coming.”
The small group began to jog after Dr. Mike. He led them down a path with only one wall, and Jim intentionally maneuvered closer to the stones on his left side. A length of thick black cable ran along the wall, interwoven with a series of florescent bulbs. They passed several unmarked doors, but Dr. Mike kept moving.
How long had he been planning this? Jim thought it was likely that for a very long time the pharmacist had been working on whatever they were now doing. He had accessed all the plans and schematics for the Forge and had committed them all to memory. It had just been a question of when someone would give him the opportunity to get out of his apartment jail and let him do his thing.
Jim wondered if he would regret not going with Dylan and Emma. The loss of Clyde hurt his heart, even as he believed deeply that his friend was still out there somewhere. After all, disappearing and reincarnating was the way all of this worked, wasn’t it?
Dr. Mike stopped in front of what Jim believed was the fifth door they had encountered. He accessed the panel bolted into the stones and pushed a few buttons. He paused, read something on the screen with a furrowed brow, then entered some text and hit another button. The door slid open. “Let’s go,” Dr. Mike said.
Jim heard running feet from back the way they had come. The guards were closing in fast and if the attack on the elevator was any indication, they were heavily armed. He followed the others through the open door.
He was immediately enveloped by a thick purple fog. He stumbled forward, gagging and choking for air. He bumped into other bodies who were also struggling. Suddenly, the cloud around him was gone. He staggered past several of the others in his party and looked around.
They were outside in a vast open space. It was nighttime, and the air was warm and clean. Jim looked back and saw the opening to the Forge. It was superimposed over the entran
ce to something that looked to him like a military bunker.
“What is this?” he asked.
“This is Reno, Nevada,” Dr. Mike said. “But not the one from our where and when. This one is from some other version.”
“Why here?” someone asked. “How does this get us home?”
“There is no going home,” Dr. Mike said. “Those guards will not let us out. The store is no escape. And even if you could somehow get back to the real world, the government will come after you. In an infinite bundle of worlds, there is probably some other government, US or otherwise, that has access to the space between worlds, but the place we call the Forge is only ever accessed by the American government from our world.”
“What about the people who built all those stone buildings?” a woman asked.
“Whoever they are, they are long gone and they will never come back. Our government is the only group there and they will never let us be.”
Jim thought there was truth to that. After all, Dr. Mike had been made a prisoner for decades. Then again, maybe the issue was that Dr. Mike simply couldn’t leave.
“Why this place? Jim asked. “How is this safe?”
“It isn’t,” Dr. Mike said. “Not yet. Not as long as the Forge operates and our world’s bad people can get here. But on this facility where we now stand, this world’s United States military is going to blow up a thermonuclear weapon. It’s a device more powerful than anything our world has ever utilized, and it’s the thing that punched this world’s way into the Forge. But this world is real and we could all be free here once we do what we need to do.”
“What are you talking about?” Jim asked, though he feared he had a fairly good idea what Dr. Mike intended.
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