The Endless Fall and Other Weird Fictions

by Jeffrey Thomas

  But all these considerations had distracted him. He’d let down his guard. Suddenly, there it was: another of the jellyfish-things, appearing like an extrusion of ectoplasm from behind the crashed helicopter itself. It might even be the same entity that had tried to reach him before.

  “I’m going crazy,” Stan muttered to himself, quaking all over and close to tears. “It’s battle fatigue, that’s all. And I drink too much. And that shrapnel scrambled my brains. I’m still watching I Love Lucy and I just don’t know it.”

  But he had made a mistake in speaking to himself aloud. The creature had heard him; he could tell by the way it lifted a little and its membrane stretched more taut. It stopped drifting, spun to face him facelessly, and as before began whisking toward him.

  Click! The next channel. Stan was whimpering. In this shot, a scorched tank rested in the center of the road. Again, it was some impressive make that had yet to be invented. Not impressive enough, though, to have defended the city from the threat that had come. But where were the bodies of the soldiers, the citizens? What had they done with the bodies?

  There, at the end of the street: three of the jellyfish glided into view, pale against the black smoke, almost glowing. Now four of the creatures...five. They hadn’t noticed him yet.

  Stan had seen enough. Enough. He reached his hand to another knob, and turned the RCA Craig’s power off.

  But the image didn’t vanish. The static kept rasping. The only thing he accomplished was to make those five phantoms at the end of the street whirl around in the air to direct their attention his way.

  Stan jumped to his feet and darted to the wall near his two windows, where the set’s power cord was plugged into an outlet. He jerked it out of the wall socket, then turned and looked back at the screen.

  Because he had moved away from the set, the reception had improved. That was the only change. The black and white vision of destruction remained, with the five entities approaching him steadily.

  He thought of fetching a hammer and smashing that seventeen inch screen. But what if that only opened the window? Let them into his reality, here in the past?

  A flash of light outside his windows, like a bomb igniting. There were several beats of delay before the accompanying peal of thunder. The storm was moving along, then. Good...good! It was the storm that had opened the way, wasn’t it? Some triangular relationship between the electrical storm, the TV, and the conductive metal hatch bolted so close to his brain. If that triangle could be broken again, that’s what would really cut the power to his set.

  But he was afraid the storm wouldn’t pass in time. The five entities would have reached him by then. He had to take more decisive action. He was a soldier, damn it. The war was not yet over; hell, it was a long way from beginning. Maybe he could change the outcome – keep the invaders from entering his world right here and now.

  So Stan rushed to meet the enemy. Charged his TV as if to hurl himself onto a sprung hand grenade to save his comrades. What he had learned was that he could disrupt the signal; it was probably the steel plate that was doing it. So he snatched up his TV antenna and bent his head forward and pressed his indented cranium against the twisted metal helix that jutted from the black orb between the two rabbit ears.

  That did it, all right. The surge in static was almost deafening. The TV screen turned entirely to snow, as if a sandstorm were raging inside that little box. He could not see the creatures, and they could not see him. Right? The snow formed an obstruction, a wall...and blocked this way, the invaders could come no closer.

  Right?

  He closed his eyes, squeezed them tight, and held his position until the lightning storm could truly pass, to cinch the deal. Held his ground like a good soldier.

  Stan opened his eyes at last, and what enfolded before him as his lids lifted was like watching an idle TV power up for the day’s first viewing.

  Static still sizzled in his ears, but maybe that was flames crackling, because fires still burned here and there all around him, sending smoke twisting into the air. He looked above him, making an inarticulate sound deep in his throat, and saw the black clouds that formed a near-solid cataract across the sky, as if to encase and trap this insignificant little world, an insect preserved in amber. Falling ash alighted on the skin of his upturned face and came to rest delicately on his eyelashes. Was it his imagination that the ashes smelled of death, as if they were the thinnest parings of human flesh?

  Looking down again, he whipped around to glance this way, then that. He was standing out in the open in the middle of the street. Then he raised his hands in front of his face and examined them. His skin was utterly colorless. The world here was black and white.

  A tiny disturbance in the air like an unheard whisper or rustle reached him, and he whirled again to look down an intersecting street. Hovering toward him was something like a burial shroud, a winding sheet instead of a bed sheet, carried on the wind. But there was no wind.

  He spun to look down an alley on his other side, from which two more of the airborne membranes were emerging. The enemy forces were advancing on him from every direction. And that was when Stan had one more of those intuitions that the creatures themselves, perhaps, were putting into his head, with its special receiver. This intuition told him these were not so many individual beings, but individual cells – numbering in the millions, the billions – that in their totality constituted one great, single entity. God was too small, too humble a word for it.

  “I’m going crazy,” Stan sobbed loudly, as if protesting to the nearing cells themselves. “It’s battle fatigue. And I drink too much. And that shrapnel messed up my brain. I’m still watching I Love Lucy but I just...don’t...know it!”

  He dropped to his knees there in the middle of the street as the circle around him tightened, as if he were the center of some TV test pattern...the hub of a complex geometry...an integral figure to complete an unfathomable equation...a vacuum tube to be inserted into a faulty television set. They had lured him. They needed him. And he would, thankfully, never know why. It was beyond human comprehension.

  Stan threw back his head, palms pressed hard to his temples, and wailed to the crushing sky. The encircling entities converged on him...making it time to cut away for a commercial break.

  SUNSET IN MEGALOPOLIS

  -1-

  The worst part of being held prisoner in the Limbo Field all those millennia was that he badly needed to relieve his bladder. Ultimatum didn’t need to eat or drink in order to survive – the manna waves he had been exposed to in 1962 had rendered him immortal – but he still enjoyed eating and drinking nonetheless, and this was how he had come by his uncomfortable situation. He’d had plenty of time to regret his behavior since.

  Only minutes before he had been imprisoned in the Limbo Field, like a fly in amber, Ultimatum had at long last discovered the underground laboratory of the heinous Castigator. But the evil scientist had been ready for him; his Limbo Field projector could immobilize even one with the god-like powers of Ultimatum. And since that time, if there was one thing Ultimatum had regretted as much as having drunk a supersized soda at his favorite fast food restaurant shortly before raiding the Castigator’s lair beneath the city streets of Megalopolis, it was that he had acted on his discovery immediately instead of waiting for other members of the League of Heroes to back him up. In the early years of his imprisonment – long after the Castigator had fled his headquarters, cackling in triumph – Ultimatum had waited for his teammates to finally uncover his whereabouts and free him. But decades dragged on, then centuries, and Ultimatum had to admit to himself that they would never come. Despite the super powers of several of his fellow Leaguers, none were immortal like he, and they would have long ago died out – no doubt believing he had somehow died before them.

  Had they ever caught the Castigator and brought him to justice? Ultimatum only knew that the Castigator never returned to his subterranean hideout. In fact, in what he judged to be thousands upon thousand
s of years, no one else had entered that hideout and encountered Ultimatum there, frozen in the middle of bolting down a murky corridor, his face set in a grim and determined expression and his silver cape flowing out behind him.

  In all those waiting years – unblinking, not breathing, the only moving aspect of him being the electrical activity of his brain – Ultimatum had staved off madness by reliving again and again the many successes he had enjoyed before his ignominious downfall. The villains he’d defeated and brought to justice, such as the Carcass, Dark Cloud, the Attila Brothers, the Jackanapes crime syndicate, and the Black Russian. He recalled the happier phases of his long, bittersweet love affair with the beautiful Kimberly Kristal, and tried not to dwell on the fact that in his absence she must have eventually turned her affections to another man. And that she would have passed away a long, long time ago.

  He reflected repeatedly on the events that had led to his fateful mutation – when he had been a brash young scientist developing a controversial invention of his own design, a device that would project what he had dubbed the manna ray, which was intended to increase the size of livestock and poultry so as to better feed the Earth’s poor. But an accident in which he himself had been exposed to a mega-dose of manna rays had enhanced his own body in ways he had never foreseen.

  He tried to remember scene-by-scene every movie he had ever watched (including a few based on his own adventures), ran every song he had ever loved through his head ad nauseum, but his restlessness was as difficult to rein in as his sanity. Ultimately, he was able to will himself asleep for long periods. For unbroken centuries at a time, in fact, even with his eyes open. It was a kind of self-hypnotism, a way of putting his mind into suspended animation along with his body.

  But he was awake the day that he was freed at last from the Limbo Field. So it was that he saw the beings who liberated him, and saw that they were not human.

  There were two of them, and Ultimatum could see them clearly because of his enhanced vision. How they could see down here, however, he couldn’t tell; they carried no artificial light source, and the bulbs in the hallways of the Castigator’s former hideaway but burnt out untold ages ago.

  If his mind was in a subdued state, the appearance of the pair of creatures roused him to acute interest – and wariness. Surely the Earth had been invaded during his interment. These entities were less than four feet in height, looked like bluish-gray lollipops maneuvering on limbs like those of a walking stick insect. The flat, circular heads bore no features other than one black, unblinking orb in the center that might be an eye. These two made no sound as they approached him slowly, leerily, except for the scratching of their appendages on the dusty cement floor.

  The Limbo Field projector caught their interest, resting as it did on the floor of the hallway where the Castigator had left it. It had never run down, ingeniously powered as it was by the super-charged emanations of Ultimatum’s own body (if this were not the case, the device would never have had the capacity to overwhelm him). If his breathing were not already suspended, Ultimatum would have held his breath in anticipation as he watched the bizarre duo take to tinkering with the projector. In his observation of them, it was difficult for Ultimatum to determine if they were sophisticated beings, mere children of their kind, or dumb animals acting on primitive curiosity.

  Whatever the case, within moments of their investigation there was a loud beep that startled both creatures into panicky flight, back down the corridor the way they had come. A green light on the side of the projector had turned red, and at long last the Limbo Field was extinguished. Ultimatum’s forward momentum was spent, and he crashed forward onto hands and knees, panting furiously as if he had been submerged underwater all this time.

  After this momentary lapse he regained his strength and coordination, rose to his feet, and went in search of a restroom. He found what he believed to be a bathroom, but the ceiling in this section had partially collapsed and he was afraid of creating a greater disaster by clearing the rubble away. Though it hardly seemed dignified behavior for a member of the League of Heroes, he opened up his costume enough to permit him to urinate on the wall of the hallway itself. Meanwhile, he kept an eye out for those strange beings, lest their curiosity compel them to return. But they did not, and when Ultimatum had finally emptied his bladder (he resisted giving out a great moan of relief that might attract hostiles), he followed the same path the creatures had taken when they’d fled in alarm from the field projector.

  As he stalked what was left of the darkened labyrinth (having to double back and take alternate off-branching corridors a few times due to further cave ins), Ultimatum wondered if these unearthly creatures might even be mutants of the Castigator’s own making, a race of guardians bioengineered to watch over Ultimatum lest he ever escape the trap that had been laid for him. But if that were the case, he reminded himself, it was unlikely he wouldn’t have seen them much earlier…or that they’d free him, however inadvertently.

  Ultimatum didn’t reencounter the pair that had liberated him, but he did stumble upon an unobstructed flight of cement stairs that carried him up into the light – and the open air of Megalopolis.

  What had once been the city of Megalopolis.

  -2-

  Ultimatum had been on the scene only moments after the 110 storey tall Megalopolis Business Hub collapsed as a result of bombs planted by Middle Eastern terrorists. For all the crime the great city had known since its inception, this was an act of unprecedented savagery, and Ultimatum would never forget that even the notorious criminals Foul Ball and the Reamer had lent their super powers to searching for and digging out the bombing’s victims. Villains like them had still held to old standards of fair play, a kind of criminal code of honor which on that terrible day proved itself to be an artifact of a time that would never be seen again.

  Now to Ultimatum’s crushing despair, instead of finding an even more awe-inspiring, futuristic update of Megalopolis, what he encountered was a city which in its entirety resembled the aftermath of the Business Hub bombing. Half of the city’s skyscrapers had been flattened, and those that remained did so only in part. An invasion by an otherworldly enemy, surely, and one that had succeeded a long time ago: vegetation had run rampant, with ivy growing so thickly on the faces of buildings that their windows could not be discerned. Trees both deciduous and coniferous seemed to have overflowed from the Grand Park, now filling the broadest thoroughfares like a dense parade, while shadowy alleys were impassable due to lush ferns and other undergrowth. The sun was setting on this soul-blasting scene, and the horizon glowed with an eerie green hue. The air was almost too thick, too humid and hellishly hot to draw into one’s lungs. Ultimatum felt that if he were not immune to such things, the changed environment – quite possibly radioactive – might soon have killed him.

  Ultimatum wagged his head like a disapproving god, in whom a terrible wrath was mounting. “Damn you to blazes!” he muttered through bright gritted teeth. He would make the invaders pay for this, if he had to annihilate every last one of them. He felt his eyes growing hot with energy, his heat beams anxious to incinerate the next lollipop-freak he encountered.

  He trudged forward into the ruins, stepping over rubble, spreading vegetation with his arms in order to make progress. His movements in the sweltering heat were making him perspire, and he could smell his own deodorant and cologne. Funny how they had persisted in the stasis field, remaining as fresh as when he had applied them millennia ago. He considered removing at least his metallic silver skull cap, to alleviate some of the heat, but no – he must maintain a sense of decorum, even if there was no one left to judge him by his actions. There was still himself by whom to be judged. He was still Ultimatum, defender of Megalopolis.

  Ultimatum detected a strange screeching noise ahead, the first audible sign of life he had encountered. It sounded like a cross between an enraged monkey and a dentist’s drill. Instinct took over, and he bolted, crashing through the foliage that choked the
street, unafraid of branches that whipped at his face. It sounded like a cry of distress, and however alien in character, it was still like a finger stabbing a red button wired into his very core.

  He erupted into a clearing, at its center a large piece of masonry like a sacrificial altar, padded in thick moss, upon which lay one of the gray/blue insect-like entities. A bright orange creature of the same species was pinning the gray one down, and penetrating an orifice in its stick-thin body. A third being, this one bright yellow, was penetrating an opening in the back of the gray creature’s lollipop head. Ultimatum was sickened and outraged, even if these beings had been responsible for the downfall of Earth.

  Before the pair of rapists could even lift their heads to notice him, Ultimatum had flashed to the side of the altar stone. “Perverted fiends!” he snarled. He snatched the orange one by the neck, closed his huge hand around the yellow one’s head. Not one to shed blood unless there was no other way, he meant only to apprehend the rapists, stun them into submission if he must. Ultimatum had dragged many a limp and beaten villain into police headquarters, his enhanced vision allowing him to see the stars that circled their punch-drunk heads. But his closing fist caused the orange entity’s head to pop free of its body, and the yellow one’s head collapsed in his palm like a crushed cracker. A thick paste the color and consistency of wasabi oozed between his fingers. Ultimatum let go of the two dead bodies, wiping his palms on his tights in disgust.

  The gray creature he assumed to be a female had quit her monkey-like shrieking, and instead emitted a mournful sound like a bow slowly being drawn across the strings of a cello. She, if a she it truly was, scampered off her bed of moss and hunkered down beside the two twitching, oozing bodies, reaching out her own appendages to stroke their torsos. She lifted up her single black orb to Ultimatum in what he realized was an accusing stare, increasing the volume of her laments (though where they issued from he couldn’t determine).