On the fourth pass the rift was swept clean away. The men became mere ribbons of atoms hurled across the abyss of time, to land where and in what part of the space-time continuum none could say.
Strickland crept back along the shoreline, hid himself deep in the shadows. He was overwhelmed by a sense of abandonment. He now had no way to return and no way to notify his Superiors that his mission had failed. He was stranded, marooned in a ‘present’ of which he knew little and understood less. It was an era of tumult and war, in which great events were shaping the very fabric of the future. Only as things now stood, Strickland would be unable to cast his veto. He could not intervene forcefully and so steer events toward the desired conclusion.
Strickland stared out across the dark face of the ocean. He could sense the gathering of the flotilla which, in a few weeks time, would launch an all out assault upon the Continent. The Allied commanders—Eisenhower, Montgomery, Bradley - might now rest easy. They had avoided an assassination plot they had not known existed and could never have defended themselves against. It was bad luck all around. Strickland lay curled in a fetal position, head clutched between his hands.
The future must now fend for itself, must work out its own destiny according to a different set of inputs. The Allies would secure an early triumph, thus occupying the bulk of Germany. Wernher von Braun and his colleagues would serve the Americans in this timeline and not the Soviets. The advantage in missiles and rocketry would pass to the West, unearned and underserved though it was. Who could say how the Junta might fare under such a scenario or what might become of it?
On the headland opposite, marking the entrance to the Straits, stood a centuries-old lighthouse, stalwart sentinel that never rested and never slackened in its vigilance.
BEST LAID PLANS
by Joseph Benedict
The sun had just crested the horizon and already it was ninety degrees and climbing. There was no air conditioning in the cabin, and the windows were shut tight. My shirt clung to my sides. The thin air of the mountain-top didn’t help. Maybe it was just being closer to the sun. If I didn’t do something with the body soon, things were going to get unpleasant.
I sat in an old armchair with knobby slats digging into my back through the cushion. I still had the gun in my hand. The smells of burnt gunpowder and blood filled the room. Across from me, Jack slumped over in a battered rocking chair. It was still rocking. His face was disfigured, the skin slack and bruised. I couldn’t see it, but the back of his head had to be a mess of shattered bone and brains. I sighed and leaned over to rest my head in my free hand. I put the gun away.
Fuck you, Richard. Just pull the damn trigger. His voice was still clear in my head. My eyes burned, both from tears and the sweat that trickled down my face. I dug into my pants pocket and pulled out my cell. No service. A dusty, wall-mounted phone with a mile-long cord hung in the kitchen. I crossed the room, picked up the receiver, and dialed.
“Ritchie? That you?” Distortion muted the voice, but I still recognized Clarence’s thick rasp through the miles of phone line.
“Yeah. It’s done.”
“Good boy, Ritchie! Now get your ass back down here.” The line went dead.
I stood there staring at the phone. I sucked in a deep, ragged breath, and then my face twisted into a snarl. I tore the phone off the wall, snapping the cord, and hurled it across the room. It clattered against the closet door. I staggered into the wall and collapsed to the floor.
“Ah, fuck!” I slammed my fist on the floor.
* * *
An hour and a half later, I stood in the clearing behind the cabin, leaning against a shovel and trying to knuckle the cramp out of my back. The grave was long enough, but shallow. Rocks filled the soil, and the shovel clanged and caught with every scoop. I’d stripped down to my undershirt. The white button-up, now stained yellow with sweat, was tucked into my back pocket and hung almost to my knees. Every so often I tugged it free and wiped my face.
Digging the grave wasn’t part of my instructions. By now, I was thirty minutes overdue at the Mill House. Clarence would be fuming, but not pissed enough to send anyone up here. Not yet.
I picked up the shovel. While I worked, my mind wandered. I saw Jack, a crooked grin spread on his face, sipping a beer and cracking jokes with Pete behind the bar. I saw him curled up on the cold tiles of his bathroom, shaking and sobbing, the night after his first hit.
More than anything, I kept seeing this morning.
* * *
I’d pulled into his driveway at a quarter to five. Jack opened the front door before I could finish knocking. He smiled when he saw me, and my heart sunk straight to my feet. He didn’t say anything, just slipped by me and headed to the car.
“What the hell is so important that Clarence has us up at five in the damn morning?” He didn’t turn around to ask, just kept walking.
“We’re heading up to the cabin. Something about a meeting.” Each step seemed weighted as I trudged after him.
Jack paused with a hand on the car door. He started to turn, and then shook his head and got in.
We drove in silence. Strip malls and cookie-cutter neighborhoods gave way to open fields, decrepit farmsteads, and rolling hills. The road went from blacktop to dirt to shallow ruts hidden in the vegetation. The car climbed its way up sharp switchbacks.
The cabin was tucked into a bend in the road on the other side of the summit. I pulled the sedan into the gravel drive with sharp pink light growing on the horizon. The driveway was empty.
“Looks like we’re the first ones here.” My voice cracked, and my face flushed red. Jack shot out a sharp, humorless snort.
We went in. The inside was dark and thick with humidity. We sat down.
“When did they find out?” Jack’s voice was quiet and calm. He set his chair rocking.
“Two days ago.” I paused and squeezed my eyes shut, as if not seeing my surroundings meant they weren’t there.
“And they want to make sure you’re still loyal?”
“No. They have Alice.” My voice was flat.
“Christ, Rich, she’s what, five?” He stopped rocking and leaned forward in the chair. “They wouldn’t really, would they?”
“That’s why we were leaving, remember?”
Jack sat back. After a moment, he started rocking again.
“Look, Jack, I can’t do this. We head back to the Mill, go in the back. Alice will be in a store-room somewhere. We can…” I stopped when Jack held up a hand.
“No. We do that, she dies.” His eyes were set. “You shoot me, you get your daughter back, and then the second you get the chance, you run. Don’t make plans, just wait for the right time.” He sighed. “We should have done that, this time.”
“I can’t…”
“Pull out your gun.”
I did.
“Aim it.”
I did. Sweat ran into my eyes and mingled with the tears, but I did.
“Now fire.”
“I can’t, Jack…”
“Fuck you, Richard. Just pull the damn trigger.”
* * *
The sun burned down from its midday peak by the time I’d finished. Half-way into town, my cell blared to life with a dozen missed calls. I dialed, checked in, explained about the grave. For a long time, Clarence said nothing.
Finally, he said, “Alright, Ritchie. I get it. Just get back here.”
“What about…”
“She’s fine. Zeke’s making her a PB&J as we speak.” I hung up and started waiting for my chance.
SPECULUM CREDE
by Tara Campbell
Marie hadn’t been looking forward to the company picnic that year, even before her daughter began to turn green. Until her little Lisa shrank and sprouted a stem and turned into a hopping green bean, it had all merely been an annoyance: making enough potato salad to fill her jumbo yellow casserole dish, packing Bobby Jr. into his carseat and pulling grown Bobby, her husband, away from his ESPN to steer their Car
avan to Mirror Pond Park.
Before Lisa turned into a green bean and Bobby Jr. turned into a honeypot, and she turned—before any of that happened, she was simply annoyed at having to spend Saturday in work mode. As the Caravan pulled in to the picnic parking lot, and pre-bean Lisa shot out and ran for the food, and she lifted Bobby Jr. out of his carseat and onto her hip, and pulled her shirt down over her out-of-shape belly and headed toward her coworkers, Bobby and casserole in tow, the only thing on her mind was how long they had to stay to be polite.
There they all were, her coworkers: Denise from Sales, Roger from Accounting, the guy from IT who was content to go simply by “I.T.” because those were his initials and his whole name was exotic and unpronounceable. And there was the CEO, Lavinia Hart, and her minion Ansel Evans, the two “overlords” standing off to the side, staring at their employees as though examining a bad rash.
Marie noted the CEO’s stylish blue dress. She let go of her husband’s hand and tugged down on her shirt again.
“Mommy, can I go get a plate?” asked Lisa.
And that’s when it started.
Marie looked down at her daughter. She could have sworn something green flashed in the girl’s eyes.
“Sweetpea?” she asked, kneeling in front of Lisa. “You feeling all right?”
The edges of the girl’s pupils seemed to waver. A green tinge seeped out from the twin black spots, staining her once brown irises and tinting the whites of her eyes. Marie froze as Lisa’s face and body turned the color of grass. The girl grew greener and greener, and her body started to bend and shrink.
Now she had one more reason to boycott all future company picnics.
* * *
Lavinia Hart, President and CEO of Haverton Industries, stood just outside the covered picnic area with a bottle of Perrier, watching her employees enter with their pots and bowls and casseroles. For form’s sake, she’d have to partake. But she’d have to run twice as long the next few days to burn through all the butter and cream and pasta bedecking the table.
She scowled at an awkward-looking man, IT no doubt, adding a bag of chips to the “bounty.”
The sodium, she thought, tapping her mauve nails against the green glass bottle. She patted at her auburn hair, swept up into a purposely down-to-earth ponytail for the outdoors, then brushed invisible dirt off her sleeveless blue silk dress.
“Mr. Evans,” she said, summoning her Director of HR with the flick of a bejeweled finger.
A caramel-colored man wearing creased khaki shorts stepped closer. “Yes, Ms. Hart?”
“Next year, we’re having this catered.”
“But Ms. Hart, you said—”
The sun glinted off her Cartier watch as she raised a hand to silence him. “I work hard enough to provide jobs for these people. There are limits to what I can be asked to endure.”
* * *
Ansel Evans ran a quick calculation in his head. There was nowhere left to cut. Travel had been curtailed, employee bonuses eliminated, raises frozen—the potluck picnic was their last ditch effort to keep the workers marginally happy. Yet the shareholders still wanted more blood from the stone. One by one, all but the legally required employee benefits would go on the chopping block—and then the employees themselves.
Or, they could try again to revisit executive compensation.
He stole a glance at Lavinia. She was glaring at a steaming bowl of white something-or-other dotted with red god-knows-what on the picnic table. Maybe he could use this moment, her revulsion, to redirect the company budget a bit. If she didn’t want to be forced to choke down KFC and mystery salad at these events, perhaps she could think about an adjustment in her own benefits package. It would at least be a goodwill gesture for the employees.
“Yes, Mr. Evans?”
He suppressed a jump. He’d been too busy formulating his argument in his head to notice her staring. He wondered how a being with such cold eyes could withstand sunlight.
What was going on inside that head? First she’d suggested doing away with staff parties altogether, and now she wanted them catered? The only constant with her was that whatever she decided, he would be the face of doom. As Director of HR, he was the messenger of every policy he tried to advise her against.
“Mr. Evans, what is it?”
Her eyes glinted at him from the armor of her perfect makeup, one eyebrow slightly cocked, lips curved in an almost imperceptible smile.
“Nothing, Ms. Hart.”
That’s the way it was: Marketing made all the exciting announcements to the world, he delivered the suckerpunches to the employees.
* * *
As if Marie didn’t have enough to deal with, with her daughter turning green, Bobby Jr. started to change at the same time. He grew rounder and cooler in Marie’s arms and—sticky. Marie gave a little yelp and almost dropped him. She clutched him harder as he took on the shape of a bowl.
“Mommy, can we get our plates?” asked the green bean, jumping up and down where her daughter had stood. Marie squinted at it. It looked more like a pea pod, with a little purple flower bobbing at the end of a curly vine corkscrewing up from the top of its… head, she supposed.
She heard a growl behind her and turned to see a tall, white bear holding her casserole dish.
“You okay?” rumbled the bear. A fine, shining powder drifted from his lips, and between the growls, he sounded something like Bobby.
Marie nodded shakily. So she was crazy. Okay. Just don’t scare the kids.
The bear cocked his glistening head to one side, then bent down toward the peapod. “Come on, let’s fix a plate for you and Mommy, okay?”
With a soft scraping sound, the bear led the peapod toward the picnic tables. White powder sloughed off the bear’s arms and legs, drifting toward Marie in the wind. It was light and sweet, like sugar dust. Sugar. Her Sugarbear. Walking with her Sweetpea.
She looked down at Bobby Jr. in her arms. Sure enough, she was holding a honeypot straight out of Winnie-the-Pooh, complete with “HUNNY” on the side. Even though the pot was sticky, it was suddenly hard for her to hold. Her fingers were fusing together, and she barely had enough time to set the pot down in the grass before her hands turned into long, paddle-shaped flippers. She let out a gasp, which came out like some sound from a nature show.
“Momma, up!” burbled the honeypot.
Marie looked around. The giant white bear was chatting with her completely unfazed coworkers while loading chicken and potato salad onto paper plates. Her pea pod child was jumping around on the table between pies and cakes. Bobby Jr. blurped stickily in the grass, and she looked down at herself to see taut, grey skin stretched over a stout belly. She groaned, and recognized the sound now—it was from a show called “Masters of the Ocean” they’d watched just the week before. Feeling around with her pectoral fins, she confirmed that her teeth had been replaced with baleen. She took a deep breath in and out, almost fainting when water spritzed out the blowhole in back of her head.
* * *
Lavinia Hart squinted at the plump woman with a toddler at her feet. She didn’t know her name, but she recognized her from infrequent forays into the bowels of Administration.
“Mr. Evans, is something wrong with that woman?”
“Which one?”
“Her,” she said, pointing toward the frumpy, spaced-out-looking woman running her hands over her mouth and the back of her head. “I think she’s hyperventilating. Do something.”
Mr. Evans, moved quickly toward the distressed woman and escorted her to a seat. Lavinia appreciated his responsiveness in all matters. As she noted in his appraisals year after year, she could always count upon him to handle any unpleasantness with employees with the utmost aplomb: the phasing out of pensions, the switch to less costly healthcare, the undetectably targeted early retirement scheme of two years ago. He had borne the brunt of all these very necessary decisions with perfect professionalism, leaving her free to chart the company’s course into calmer, mor
e profitable waters.
He is most malleable, she thought. And just then her words played a very clever little trick on her eyes, for at that moment she saw him as a giant marshmallow. A Peep, to be precise. He was a caramel-colored Peep rabbit hopping next to the odd woman, who was now a fat pink Peep bird.
At risk to her professional demeanor, Lavinia giggled at the sight, bringing a paw up to her muzzle to cover her smile.
Lavinia stopped mid-giggle—which had sounded rather like a purr, now that she thought of it—and stared down at her paws. They were large and powerful, and covered in golden brown fur. She turned them over and over again, flexing the fingers (or toes?) to test that they were, in fact, hers. A shiver prickled down her spine when she unsheathed her claws, dangerous and wonderful.
Her eyes roamed down her long, sleek body. She admired her silky fur—milky-white on her frontside, golden brown along her flanks—and marveled at her muscular legs, which ended in the same formidable paws as the ones she held in front of her.
Lavinia’s tail twitched. It had finally happened! All of the management books she’d skimmed had implored her to visualize success, visualize her strength and capability and—though they did not explicitly say this, she could read it between the lines—her superiority to all those around her. She’d tried it, privately of course, so fleetingly and noncommittally no one would perceive her failure, not even herself. But now she had succeeded, and it all seemed so real!
She looked up from her beautiful body and saw that indeed, all of her employees were mere Peeps before her. A maroon Peep rabbit threw a Frisbee to a little green chick. A large, aqua Peep bird tended the grill, its beak drooping slightly over the hot coals. Blue, pink, purple, yellow, green—all possible hues of marshmallow Peep creatures hopped around the picnic tables.
Lavinia suppressed a giggly purr. This was amazing! She’d truly broken through. This was the mental edge she needed to visualize her next takeover. Franzen Enterprises, perhaps? Her ears twitched with anticipation, and she sent her paws up to stroke them. She could actually feel their velvety fur. She was unstoppable! She took a deep breath, wondering if she dared. It would be unseemly, but she couldn’t contain herself: she opened her muzzle and let out a deep, throaty roar.
Kzine Issue 16 Page 6