The Beautiful Land

by Alan Averill

  In the continuing nightmare, she rolls over leaves and smells the scents of autumn and lets the late-afternoon sun warm her face. But, inevitably, a different sound appears—a deep, low growl from somewhere far behind her. Samira always tells herself not to look, but as is the way with dreams, it’s impossible not to. And when she turns her head to see what could possibly be creating such a harsh and unpleasant noise, she sees a giant black machine roaring up the street behind her.

  It’s a street sweeper, the kind with large round bristles mounted on the bottom and a rotating yellow hazard siren bolted to the top. But while most such vehicles top out around fifteen miles an hour, this one moves with the speed of a fine Italian sports car. The bumper is curved like a smile, the headlights are dim little eyes. Behind the windshield, darkened almost to the point of opacity, she can barely make out a shadowy figure with a mad grin; whoever the driver is, there are way too many teeth in his mouth.

  At this point, something in Samira’s consciousness clicks into action, and the tiny piece of her that understands this is a dream attempts to wake the rest of her up. But the self-aware spark is a powerless thing in the face of the nightmare, and its failure only makes the rest of the event more terrifying. So as the dream continues, and her conscious mind begins to silently scream, she presses against the pedals of her bike and churns her legs up and down as fast as they can go. There are no turnoffs on this illusory street, no driveways in which to seek safety or trees to hide behind; her only option is to press forward and try to outrun the monster coming up behind her. Faster, she screams to herself. Faster faster faster faster faster.

  But she never escapes. Not once, not in all the dozens of times the dream has played itself in her sleeping mind, has she ever broken free of the sweeper. Inevitably, her mad pedaling decelerates until she seems to be moving through a thick syrup. Her vision begins to blur. Her legs churn with agonizing slowness. And when the machine races up behind her and catches her with a triumphant roar, she feels herself being pulled off the bike and into the guts of the thing, wire bristles tearing her apart like so much trash from the gutter, flaying skin from bone while somehow leaving her alive and aware of exactly what is happening to her.

  This is the point where she wakes up—always with a scream dying in her throat, sometimes with bloody trails in her skin where nails have clawed at flesh. She always cries after this dream—huge, heaving sobs that seem impossible coming from such a small woman. She cries and cries and waits for the dream to fade from her mind. But, of course, it never does. Not completely, anyway.

  Samira has never told anyone about this dream—not her psychiatrist, not her military companions, not Tak—but she suddenly feels an urge to speak of it to the man sitting in the seat across from her, the one with his fingertips pressed together and his eye twitching in a distracted kind of way. The reason she wants to tell him is so he knows he can’t possibly hurt her any more than her mind has already done, and that whatever plan he’s devising will be nothing compared to the knowledge that every night might end with her being pursued by a maintenance vehicle from hell. She thinks it’s very, very important that he know this because right now she’s as scared as she has ever been in her life.

  The man sitting across from her is Charles Yates.

  After Tak was strapped to the briefcase and sent to a random timeline somewhere down the stack, the large men in black suits threw Samira in the back of a car and drove like madmen to the Omaha Airport, where she was transferred to a large private jet. The inside of the plane was like nothing she had ever seen: plush carpeting, fine art hanging from the sides of the fuselage, even a crystal chandelier over a dining-room table somewhere in the back. She had been plunked into a cushy leather seat and given an injection in her arm which immediately put her into a deep and dreamless state of unconsciousness. But there had been no time to appreciate the nightmare-free nap because when she finally clawed her way up and out of the blackness, she found Charles Yates sitting across from her. He didn’t even need to introduce himself; she knew right away who he was.

  He has yet to say anything even though he knows she’s fully awake and alert. He’s much older than she thought he would be, with grey hair and wrinkles and a pair of thick black glasses that sag on his gaunt face. But the eyes—oh, the eyes. There’s something utterly mad lurking behind the surface of his eyes, a look she’s only ever seen before in the heat of combat. They contain a dark sparkle that seems to say I am capable of absolutely anything, and just looking at them is enough to get Samira’s terror juices flowing. The only way her mind can stay connected to reality is if she thinks of Yates as a kindly old grandfather rather than the raving lunatic she suspects him to be.

  Yates clears his throat. Samira jumps. He smiles briefly at this, then leans forward in his seat. Through the window next to him, Samira can see their plane racing against the setting sun and wonders anew where these people are taking her. “Who are you?” he asks finally. His voice is surprisingly weak and contains the slight tremble of an old man. “What is your name?”

  Samira considers this question for a while. Having spent five years of her life translating between insurgents and military men, she knows all about being a prisoner. And though she doesn’t see anything in the fancy airplane that suggests the possibility of torture, the world is full of small brick rooms with drains in the floor. So she decides to respond with truth, and as such, the question-and-answer session moves very quickly.

  “I’m Samira,” she says. “Samira Moheb.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Seattle.”

  “Originally.”

  “Oh. Iran.”

  “How do you know Mr. O’Leary?”

  “We went to high school together.”

  “In the singular reality?”

  “In the…I’m sorry, in the what?”

  “I believe your friend calls it the solid timeline.”

  “Oh, sorry. Yes. In the solid timeline.”

  Yates leans back in his chair and removes his glasses, then rubs his temples with trembling hands. He’s wearing an old cardigan sweater and weathered black slacks underneath a white lab coat. Samira glances at the floor and sees that the hem is darkened with old stains—she doesn’t even want to think about what could have made them.

  Coffee. It’s just coffee. He made some this morning before taking his grandkids to the park.

  “What is your profession?” asks Yates, still rubbing at his temples. A small drop of black goo leaks out from the corner of his eye, but he quickly wipes it away. It happens so fast, Samira isn’t even sure she saw it.

  “Your profession,” repeats Yates, annoyed.

  “I’m military,” says Samira quickly.

  “Is that why Mr. O’Leary brought you here? As some manner of bodyguard?”

  Samira has a sudden image of herself wearing dark glasses with a gun in her hand and begins to giggle. The laughter slips out despite her fear and despite knowing that Yates might take such a reaction very poorly. But she just can’t help it. Go, go, go, she imagines her bodyguard-self screaming into an earpiece. Get the president out of there NOW, so I can mop the floor!

  “No, I’m not a bodyguard.”

  “Is this amusing?” asks Yates in a quiet voice.

  “I’m sorry, I just…I would be a really bad bodyguard. That’s all.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I was a translator. I grew up speaking Farsi and standard Arabic and a little bit of Pashto, so when I joined the army, they made me a translator.”

  “You’re not a combat soldier?”

  Samira shrugs. “I shot a rifle and went through training, but I was never very good at it.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “Tak came for me. He told me…He said some people were going to overwrite the timeline, and I wasn’t in it, and that meant I was going to die. So he came and found me, and we used the briefcase and went…somewhere. Then we came back, and you found us.�
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  Yates nods and leans forward. His breath smells of onions and stale cheese, but also something else. Something wet and old and terrible. It’s a slightly familiar smell, but she can’t remember where she’s noticed it before. Rather than try, Samira keeps her eyes focused straight ahead and imagines her captor sitting in front of an old-fashioned radio and listening to Lawrence Welk.

  “Are you hungry?” asks Yates.

  “N-no, thank you,” responds Samira.

  “Thirsty?”

  “A little.”

  “We have water and tea.”

  “Tea would be…fine. Thank you.”

  He motions to one of the men sitting behind them, the one who hit Tak in the back of the head with his gun. The man leans down and confers with Yates for a moment, then retreats behind a curtain at the front of the plane. Yates seems to lose interest in their conversation after this, his gaze wandering to a spot somewhere outside his window. For Samira’s part, she sits upright in her chair and wonders if suicide is in any way viable. She has a brief flash of leaping up and opening the emergency exit, spinning and falling through twenty-four thousand feet of nothingness before landing in a tiny Samira Splat at the bottom of a strange, new world. It’s an option, at least. Not a very good one, but preferable to becoming some kind of subject in this man’s experiment.

  No. He’s good. He’s good and kind and he’s going to play checkers with you later. La la la la la.

  The man in the suit returns with two steaming cups of tea, which he deposits on a small table between the seats. Samira picks hers up and blows on it. What a nice old man. Getting you tea. He didn’t have to do that.

  “Did Mr. O’Leary explain the Machine to you?” asks Yates, still staring out the window. “Did he tell you that it was a time machine? Did he use that ridiculous example of the universe as a stack of pancakes?”

  Samira nods. It doesn’t seem possible that Yates could see this motion, but he clearly does. This only increases her awe of him.

  “It is a flawed metaphor,” he says, “but I suppose it works well enough for the layperson. Can I also assume he told you we were bringing another timeline here? That we were, in essence, overwriting reality?”

  “Yes, he told me that,” says Samira. A brief bout of turbulence shakes the plane, but Samira hardly notices. Yates starts to speak again but instead is interrupted by a violent coughing fit that lasts for over a minute. When he pulls his hand away from his mouth, it is flecked with thick black spots.

  “This may come as a surprise to you, but I had no interest in such a thing,” says Yates as he wipes his hand on a napkin and stuffs it into his pocket. “However, the men who ran the Axon Corporation wanted to live in a timeline where they were kings of the world. It was a predictably absurd request, but once made, I realized it was a fine way to keep them all happy and distracted. So while they worried themselves about stock markets and military forces, I was wrestling with far more important problems. How is the tea?”

  Samira blinks. “Um…It’s fine. Thank you.”

  “Good.” Yates nods. He runs his hand across his mouth and then stares at it, as if expecting to see more black there. “You see, I saw the paradox of the Machine almost immediately. If I could create such a thing, others could do so as well. If I could overwrite reality, men in other timelines could do the same. The very possibility that the Machine could be invented somewhere else threatened our existence. Ergo, the only way to prevent that from happening was to eliminate all of the timelines.”

  He finally looks away from the window and back to Samira. His eyes flash with the dim light of madness, and any pretense she had of the kindly grandfather is gone. She opens her mouth to tell him about her street-sweeper dream, but he continues speaking. “But, of course, this created a problem for me. I have no desire to die, nor to sacrifice myself for the imagined good of others. I had to find a timeline where I could exist forever, then find a way to avoid being destroyed by the virus.”

  Samira’s hands are shaking like crazy now, drops of tea flying around the cabin like a miniature rainstorm. “The…virus?” she manages to say.

  Yates leans toward Samira and drops his voice to a harsh whisper. “You see, time—all of time—is a living thing. It breathes and moves and changes as events act upon it. And like any living thing, it can be killed.”

  “You can’t kill time,” whispers Samira. She knows it’s folly to argue with this man, but the words make their way out anyway.

  “Ah, but you can,” replies Yates. “If you eliminate everything in the universe, if you remove every force which can possibly act, then time itself will simply cease to be. And the virus is the key.”

  Samira has a vision of the creature she saw in the alternate timeline, the thing that resembled a baby bird, and she suddenly realizes what the virus is. Immediately on the heels of that thought, she remembers why the stink of Yates’s breath seems so familiar. Oh my God, she thinks wildly. He smells like that thing. He smells just like it.

  “So you see that my problem is twofold,” continues Yates. “One: I must eliminate all life in the universe. Two: I must find for myself a perfect timeline where I can spend eternity in peace. I must find the Beautiful Land.”

  He leans closer and grabs the back of Samira’s head. Her heart leaps into her throat and hangs there, as if all the systems in her body are getting ready to simply stop. “I bent all my will to these problems. For the last thirty years of my life, I did nothing but grapple with them until I was sure I had conquered both. And once I was positive that everything was ready, I turned my plan to action. I activated the Machine, unleashed the virus, and initiated the destruction of all existence.”

  “But you’re still here,” says Samira, her voice barely audible.

  “Yes. I am still here.”

  “So you…changed your mind?”

  “I did not,” he says, rubbing a thumb against the nape of her neck. “The second part of the plan is already in motion. Timelines are being destroyed as we speak, and the virus will not stop until it has exterminated all life…. But that, of course, includes me. So then, how to avoid its gaze? How can I assure myself that the creatures will not follow me to the Beautiful Land?”

  Samira shakes her head and tries to swallow, but there’s a huge lump there that prevents it. Run for the door, she thinks. Run for the door and throw yourself out. But she can’t. Her legs simply won’t go.

  “The only way to avoid them is to become them,” he whispers. A single trickle of black worms from his gum line and down the front of one chipped tooth. He licks it away absentmindedly as he stares into Samira. “I trapped one. I stole its life. And now that the change is irreversible, I am ready to flee this timeline forever.”

  “Are you going to kill me?” asks Samira suddenly. She doesn’t even feel the question form in her mind: it just pops out and hangs in the air like a sad pinata.

  “No,” responds Yates, not unkindly. “You are to serve a higher purpose.”

  “I am?”

  “Only someone from the singular reality can interact with the Machine. I will not use Takahiro, because he has proven himself unworthy of this gift. And I cannot use Judith as I planned because she has vanished. So that means you, Samira Moheb from Iran, are the only option left to me.”

  “I…I don’t understand.”

  “You will become a doorway. A conduit. Yours will be the mind that grants me access to the Beautiful Land. And when I take you there and seal the conduit behind me, you and I shall live forever. And it will be wonderful.”

  He smiles at this, a terrifying thing, and suddenly Samira realizes who has been driving the sweeper all these years. She can feel herself growing faint, feel the familiar terror running inside her, and she knows that this time there will be no controlling it. As her vision begins to fail, she looks longingly at the door of the plane and wishes with all her strength she had the courage to finally set herself free.

  chapter twenty

  “That mu
st have been one hell of an important call,” says Tak to no one in particular.

  He’s staring at the bones of a woman lying facedown in the crosswalk. She’s draped in the tattered remains of a blue dress and holding a cell phone in one hand. The other hand is splayed across the pavement with most of the fingers gone. There is a large, ragged hole in the top of her empty skull, and the more Tak stares at it, the more it looks like someone jammed a straw in there and sucked out the insides like a milk shake. He can see a handful of such skeletons from his current vantage point, all of which appear to have the same wound. He has an idea what caused the carnage but doesn’t want to think about it just yet. There will be plenty of time to freak himself out later.

  His pancake-free insides have finally stopped twisting around, a fact for which Tak is eternally grateful. He uses the sleeve of his rapidly disintegrating suit coat to wipe a fleck of puke from the corner of his mouth, then jogs in place to test his legs. When they don’t send him crashing to the ground, he takes that as a sign it’s time to move. Soon his mind is clicking into survival mode, sorting through his priorities and working on solutions for each. The usual top of the list, water, is shoved to one side and replaced with shelter; Tak is more than willing to die from thirst if it saves him from meeting whatever punched a hole through the brains of an entire population.

  But you can’t die, he thinks. You can’t because Sam is back in the solid timeline with Yates. And you know the kind of man he is. You know what he’s capable of.

  The thought of Samira in the company of Charles Yates strikes Tak with physical force, and he finds himself fighting the urge to begin vomiting all over again. Such thoughts are poison if he’s to have any hope of surviving this bombed-out shell of a timeline, so he quickly makes a new deal with himself: Stop thinking about her. Just don’t think about Sam until you’re out of this place. Then, once you’re back in the solid timeline, you can ruminate until your heart explodes. Deal?…Yeah, okay. Deal.