by David Wong
The school was a little more than two hours from Undisclosed, which I had figured was a safe distance should a pit open under the town and swallow it into Hell once and for all, and yet close enough that Amy would agree to go. It had taken about twelve arguments and one crying fit to come to that compromise. In the end I convinced her that she would have to get some kind of education and actually continue her life at some point. See the world, broaden her horizons. Get off my couch and stop typing on that damned laptop. She was a sheltered kid. She had a shitty time in high school and had barely been outside city limits since. You don’t realize how terrifying the world can be for someone like that, someone who would rather stay in a familiar hole than an unfamiliar mansion.
Which is why you haven’t exactly jumped at the chance to move away, either . . .
But we finally looked into the college thing, did the research and found that her SAT scores were actually good enough to get her a partial scholarship. That and some future-crippling student loans were all it took to get her in the door. There was lots of paperwork and Amy turned into a nervous wreck for the last three weeks before move-in day at the dorms. But here we were.
And that, I thought, will be that. The Utah thing was poorly thought out but now she’ll have classes and meet fascinating people and she’ll love it. She’ll call every day, then every week. And then she’ll mention a guy. A friend, she’ll say. And then she’ll call once a month, only visit twice a semester and then you’ll get the call and she’ll say she’s sorry, she’s met someone, he’s an English major and plays lacrosse or some shit. And she will have grown up. She’ll get some job right out of school in some other city and she’ll never, ever come back here.
And that’s how it should be. She’ll be out of my orbit, out of my sphere of concern, a poor target for anyone or anything that wants to get to me. She’ll be safe. This time.
When a man plans, a woman laughs.
We unloaded boxes and waded through the lobby of the dorms. We wound up waiting in line for elevators along with crowds of skinny girls and well-dressed parents, chubby boys that looked far too young for college and a surprising number of Asian kids. Some guy came along and was handing out packets of forms, dorm rules and shit, and struck up a conversation with Amy. She got along so easily with people, so laid back. She had a light jacket draped over her arm on this ninety-four-degree day. It concealed her missing hand perfectly. They talked and she giggled and he moved on, handing out his packets.
I said, “That guy seemed nice.”
She said, “Uh-huh.”
“Did you get his name?”
“James or Jack or something.”
I said, “Well-dressed guy. Probably gonna be a doctor or something.”
John looked at me, then at Amy then at me again. He said, “He, uh, had a nice ass, too.”
Amy turned, rolled her eyes and we piled into the elevator. We rode up and moved her stuff to her tiny dorm room. And so, for the second time, I said good-bye to Amy and for the second time was sure it was going to be forever. We hugged and I wished her good fortune about a dozen times. Finally I broke off and headed for the hall, sure that I had succeeded, thinking that if you love someone you do have to set them free and that I had done just that, for the good of all. And juuuuust as I was almost out of grabbing range Amy snagged the back of my shirt with a fist and turned me around. She said, “Uh, thank you for helping me move.”
“You said that already. No problem.” She looked like she had something else to say. Quite a bit else, in fact.
John said, “Yeah, it’s not a big deal for me to lift heavy objects. I’m sort of used to it, if you know what I mean.”
I held up a hand to silence him. “John—”
“Of course I’m talking about my penis.”
I said to Amy, “Ignore him. His penis is just like everybody else’s.”
Amy said, “I was just gonna ask you if—”
“You’ve never seen my penis!” bellowed John. “I’d show it right now, to everybody here. If we had time.”
I turned on him. “If we had time? What?”
“Because, well, if you want to look at my penis, you’d better have a whole afternoon, buddy! You best have five or six hours to take it all in, lest its majesty escape you!”
Before I could stop her, Amy said, “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It would make sense if you could see it!” shouted John, plainly agitated. “It would be making loooooong sense, honey!”
“John, just calm down, okay.” I gestured down the hall. “Go wait by the elevator.”
He didn’t move. From behind me, I heard Amy say, “Do you want to get engaged?”
And there it was. I had a sinking feeling, visualized a moth flapping toward a blowtorch. I tried to think of the best, most soothing way to turn her down and said, “Sure.”
John looked at his watch. “Well, congratulations. Now we gotta roll. If we leave now there’ll still be enough light to get in some basketball.”
THE DAY WAS so hot it stank. Asphalt baked under our shoes, bodies rustled against one another dancing to the irregular PAP PAP PAP beat of a basketball smacking the pavement. I backed toward the hoop, about where the free-throw line would be if we had played on an actual court rather than this giant cracked piece of playground sandpaper. I spun, jumped, threw up a shot that was doomed the moment it left my fingers.
John snatched the rebound, spun, jumped, slammed. He pumped his fist in victory. “Ring it up! Two hundred seventy-four to one thirty-seven!” In John’s game, each shot is worth one hundred and thirty-seven points. “If I had a dime for every basket I made today, you’d still suck!”
I tracked down the loose ball and handed it to John. In this game, like life, scoring means you get to keep the ball. He dribbled twice, glanced up over my shoulder, and froze. I saw the expression on his face and turned. John squinted and asked, “Was that there before?”
It was a black sphere, floating just over the weeds at courtside. It was gleaming and about three feet wide, looking like a giant hovering eight ball. John strode over to it and I heard him say, “You can sort of see into it. I think I see people.”
He bent over and picked up a broken chunk of concrete. He lobbed it at the sphere, which swallowed it noiselessly. John looked over his shoulder at me and said, “Hole to another dimension, I bet. Wanna go through?”
“After this point.”
John got the ball and dribbled behind the cracks and bundles of weeds we called the three-point line. I knew from the look in his eyes that he was going to take the shot. As soon as the ball left his hands I was bounding toward the rim, that subconscious gauge in the back of my mind already telling me it was a miss off the backboard. It clanged, I leapt. I scooped the rebound from the air one-handed and before John could recover into defense I turned and hooked a shot that ripped prettily through the net.
“Like a drop in the bucket, baby,” I said. “Splash!”
“Damn.” John said, hands on his hips, chest heaving. “Your game be chubby today.” He said this in such a way so that “chubby” rhymed with “today.”
“Tied at two seventy-four, Monster Dave.”
He retrieved the ball from the grass, then heaved a chest pass at me that missed badly. I turned to watch the ball go and, sure enough, saw it hit the black sphere and disappear just like the piece of concrete had.
“Whoops,” said John. “I tossed our ball into another universe.”
“You wanna go home?”
“Yeah, just let me get my ball.”
He walked over to the sphere and peered into it. He lifted a leg and stuck it through, then ducked in and soon it was just his left leg sticking out of this floating ball. He pulled it through and he was gone. I sighed, looked at my watch and wandered toward the spherical portal. I knew he wasn’t coming back until I at least poked my head through, so I bent over and pushed my way in.
The air on the other side was at least thirty degre
es cooler. I stepped out, realizing as I did that I was emerging from a white sphere on this side, brilliant as sunlit snow. I stepped out onto a basketball court that itself was not terribly different than the one we had left. But the world was changed nonetheless. The sun was gone. The overcast sky was an unnatural ceiling of tar-flavored cotton candy and the air had a vague farty smell.
I scanned the landscape and saw other small differences. The park in Undisclosed had been in a polished neighborhood, Victorian houses and carpet lawns. Here the houses looked empty and forgotten, windows smashed, weeds overgrowing, rusting mailboxes. The yellowing white house nearest to us had a single nonsense word spray-painted across the front:
BLOODWORMS.
A dry wind blew, bringing with it that vague sulfur stench once again. I saw John standing nearby, looking up at the rim of one of the half dozen goals that bordered the court.
He said, “Where you been? I’ve been walking around for two hours.”
“Time must move differently here. I came right after you.”
“That’s always your excuse.”
I said, “At least it’s cooler here.”
“No nets here, though.” He was right, the naked rims stood silently over us like very tall, thin and largely ineffective sentries. He said, “This one’s regulation but a couple of those other goals are bent on the rims. Must be a lot of dunking in this world.”
There was a tinkling sound from behind us. Glass breaking. We both turned. A bone-thin woman dressed in rags stumbled toward us. She had feebly hurled a glass jar at us that crashed twenty feet short on the pavement. Her eyes were swollen in amazement, a bony finger aimed right at us.
“Y-y-y-you!!” she screeched. “Unstained! Unstained! How!?!?” Her left arm was missing, ending just above her elbow in a jagged stump, as if it had simply rotted off. Her screaming was suddenly cut short when four beings I can only describe as some kind of flying baboons descended on her, beating her savagely with clubs. They hauled her unconscious body into the sky. We watched them fly away, saw they weren’t coming back for us. We exchanged a look, then shot free throws to see who would start with the ball.
John won. We played for a bit but the game wasn’t that much fun. It was the wind. That steady, rotten wind that blew constantly from the south and brought with it faint sounds of screaming and an insectile shrieking noise; it drove every outside shot off the mark by a couple of inches. Soon we both abandoned three-point shots, which brought the game under the hoop. That was John’s domain. His three-inch height advantage gave him a series of rebounds and easy layups, quickly giving him a 548-point lead. Sweat stung my eyes as I drove under the hoop once more, trying a little running hook under the baseline. John’s hands were quick, swatting the shot away. The ball went bouncing off the court.
“Hey!” John shouted after it. “Toss it back!”
I turned to see who he was shouting at. There, by the ball, was hovering what looked vaguely like one of those wet/dry Shopvacs they sell at Sears. It made no sound. I could only presume it was some kind of droid common to this world, though it lacked any kind of eyes or robotic facial features we add to our movie robots to give them personality. What it did have was a bristling array of probes in front of it that were aimed at the two of us, sensors of some kind.
I said, “That thing doesn’t have any kind of ball-handling appendages. You’re going to have to go after it.”
John turned on me, indignant. “I got it last time.”
After five solid minutes of debate we decided to go get it together. At the ball site we noticed the droid was still there, taking its silent measurements or whatever. To our surprise, it spoke.
“Identification please.”
John smiled. “Assey Cocklord.”
It turned to me, repeated the question.
“Felipe Enormowang.”
“Identification not on database. Please state your habitation sector.”
John: “Your Ass.”
Me: “The suburbs west of Your Ass.”
“Sector not on database. Please report to your nearest quarantine facility. Failure to report within thirty minutes will result in—”
We walked away and left the thing chattering back there. It was my ball and I managed to score two quick baskets to get myself back into the game.
Suddenly, from the sky rose a wobbly, mechanical thumping sound, like a car running on a flat tire. I looked up at it and John took the opportunity to steal the ball from my sweat-coated hands. He stepped and hopped and again utilized his genetic ability to dunk a basketball.
“Booyah!” he said, arms in the air. “Dunk off a steal! I done dominated you in two universes, bitch!”
I was sick of basketball. My game had gone as sour as the ominous wind that blew and I longed for the courts of my own universe. Also, that distracting pulsing sound grew louder. I grabbed the ball and sat down on it, using it as a stool.
John said, “Come on. Let’s get in another game before we have to go back to Hot World. I bet it’s not even seventy out here.”
“Nah,” I said. I noticed an old, time-browned newspaper on the ground, headline in three-inch-tall letters: “PHENOMENON CONTINUES AROUND SOUTH POLE, PRESIDENT URGES CALM.”
That thrumming, pulsing sound grew louder. Suddenly there was a sharp CRACK and we both spun around. Where the Shopvac droid had been there was now only a charred spot on the ground and bits of twisted debris.
Above and behind it were five human figures flying slowly toward us on little booths that looked like lecterns. They descended, landing in front of us, undulating clouds of bright blue plasma cushioning the machines as they touched down. All five were adult males, clean, wearing sleek black uniforms that looked military. It occurred to me that they had probably been nearby for some time now but had been hidden by some kind of futurey cloaking device like those ships on Star Trek.
They stepped off their flying machines and approached us. One guy took the lead, a handsome officer in his thirties, a neatly trimmed beard.
“Good afternoon,” he said. “I am Sergeant Vance McElroy of the Human Liberation Army. Your appearance here must be quite a surprise to you, but not to us. Prophecy has foretold the coming of strangers from another world since the day of the Great Corruption. It is an honor to meet you. I confess that I do not know from where you came, but I can tell by looking at you that you have not been infected with the . . .”
He talked for what seemed like forever. The wind kicked up again and I wondered if there were any indoor courts here. I couldn’t find a pause long enough to ask the guy. I looked over and saw John giving the man a series of his fake “I’m listening thoughtfully” nods.
“. . . and if you cannot defeat him then all hope for mankind is lost. Gentlemen, the winds of destiny have blown us together. A bright dawn is about to grace this lost and broken world.”
We hung in awkward silence for a moment, but then I had an idea. “Question,” I said. “That flying Shopvac earlier mentioned a quarantine. I presume they used old public buildings for this, such as hospitals and schools, right? So my question is, do any of these converted quarantines still have their gymnasiums intact? Or at least the part that had the basketball goals?”
“No, I’m afraid all of the educational institutions were razed with the first siege, right before the mass book burnings. Human ignorance has been their greatest weapon. But that is not the worst the dark ones have done. Often the . . .”
He droned on and on, and I instantly regretted asking the question. I looked at my watch, saw that it displayed 66:69 as the time. I began to accumulate a list of all of the ways this universe sucked.
“. . . therefore, only with your unique otherworldly genetic makeup can you resist the infection of the—”
“Yes, that’s very interesting,” said John. “But to perform this task you request we’ll need a number of items from our world. You must allow us to return there and come back to begin our quest.”
The man nod
ded. “It is good, then. We shall await your return.”
We picked up our ball and ducked back through the dimensional rift. We stepped from the black sphere and were glad to see the sunlight and netted goals. We weren’t so happy with the return of the oppressive heat, but decided to deal with it rather than return to that other crappy, dysfunctional universe.
We decided on one more game. Before we could inbound the ball, a gang of four strong-looking, attractive, twenty somethings walked up. Two boys, one black, one white. Two girls, one Asian, one a pretty blonde. They oozed curiosity upon seeing the portal and exchanged what sounded from a distance like witty comments. The white boy and girl seemed to dislike each other and bickered good-naturedly as they stepped through the portal, a sense of adventure in the air.
John rolled his eyes. We had an argument over who had the ball last, but John finally admitted he was wrong and gave it to me. We played for a bit, but fatigue had set in and we exchanged two missed shots each.
Then, suddenly, all four of the twenty somethings were ejected from the black sphere. They were covered in dirt and bruises and minor cuts.
“Look!” gushed the Asian girl. “It’s the same moment when we left! None of that time passed here!”
“She’s right!” said the black kid. “Yo, am I glad to see that sun! We saved the whole damn world, man!”
The white boy and girl kissed, apparently having fallen in love during their quest. The boy disengaged and looked at us with excited eyes. “Dude, you guys won’t believe what just happened to us!”
John turned to him.
“You bored a stranger with your stupid-ass story, and he pulled out his cock and whipped you with it like a stagecoach driver?”
The kid shut up, baffled. John picked up the ball and bounced a pass to me.
“Your ball.”
PAGE 375 SCIENCE AND THE BEYOND DR. ALBERT MARCONI
was the last survivor of the plague.
As the team made its way through the abandoned village, the priest described the outbreak that had taken every single member of the tribe but him. Painful sores, blindness, madness, limbs that in the course of minutes seemed to rot and split like bad fruit. Horrors an old man should not have to see in his declining years (the priest had lived to the ripe old age of thirty-seven).