Shimmer: A Novel

by Passarella, John

  “She—she—she’s gone!”

  “Who?”

  “Liana,” Thalia said, shaking her head wildly. “I told her to stay out of the dark! I warned her!”

  “How do you—?” He took a deep breath. “What do you know?”

  Thalia stared at him, not comprehending the question. “Too much,” she said. “Not enough.”

  “Tell me,” he said calmly, attempting to soothe her.

  “She was… I sensed. No, that’s not right,” Thalia said, shaking her head again. She nibbled on her thumbnail and fought the urge to scream. “Can’t you feel it?”

  “What?”

  “Her… absence!”

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  “She was… a light,” Thalia said. “A light that’s winked out. Now it’s dark. All darkness. What will I do without her, Ambrose?”

  Ambrose wrapped his arms around her and held her tight. “Don’t worry, Thalia,” he said confidently. “When the others return, we’ll come up with a plan.”

  “I warned her,” Thalia whispered. “Warned her about the dark.”

  Chapter 38

  “What now?” Logan asked.

  He sat on the curb beside Gideon, who had surreptiously returned his sword to his duffel bag. The police had shut down a two block stretch of Kings Highway, enforcing a detour while paramedics treated survivors. Although none of the vehicles involved in the crash had caught fire, two fire trucks waited nearby. Using axes to smash the remaining windows on the bus, firefighters rescued the wounded and recovered bodies or, in some cases, body parts.

  Gideon gave a slight nod. “They follow their training.”

  “You are talking about Liana and Barrett, right?”

  “Of course,” Gideon said with a grim smile. “Weren’t you.”

  “Are you worried?”

  “Are you?”

  “Mom always said, ‘Those left behind, are left to worry.’”

  Gideon shrugged. “Worry is in a mother’s job description. There’s a fine line between concern and worry. I prefer to stay on the concerned side.”

  “What are their chances?” Logan said. “In… there?”

  Gideon shook his head. “Let’s not speculate on their survival. Remember, they’re not alone. They have each other. And the combination is right.”

  “Combination?”

  “In a rift crossing, you want a magic user and a sword wielder together,” Gideon said, interlacing his fingers to form a doubled fist. “Complementary strengths.”

  “Right,” Logan said. His father had been lost after a solitary crossing. And Thalia, though she had returned from her rift crossing, had not returned whole. Surviving a rift crossing required might and magic. But there were never any guarantees. And Barrett—while he wasn’t out of control—had obvious self-esteem issues. He had something to prove and maybe he wasn’t thinking clearly. That distraction could get them both killed. Glancing at Gideon’s profile, Logan couldn’t help thinking Liana would have been better off crossing the rift with the older brother.

  “Look sharp,” Gideon said abruptly.

  Logan followed his gaze and saw the Chief of Police approaching from a grim row of covered bodies, few of them whole.

  Chief Grainger had arrived at the accident scene as Logan and Gideon were climbing through a shattered bus window. He’d stopped long enough to tell them to wait for him, then left to direct his people through the crisis and cleanup. Now, at last, he was returning to them, no doubt seeking answers.

  “Let me guess,” Grainger said. “This… accident is the result of another rift.”

  After a surprised glance at Logan, Gideon turned back to the chief and said, “You know about rifts?”

  “Yes,” the chief said. “And I assume you’re part of the illustrious Walker family? You resemble the other one. Barrett.”

  “Brothers.”

  “Figures,” Grainger said. He looked an accusation at Logan. “You people were supposed to warn me about something like this.”

  “There wasn’t time,” Logan said. “Everything happened so fast.”

  “Almost everyone on that bus was killed, or seriously injured.”

  Gideon sighed. “It caught them by surprise. Nothing in their experience prepared them for what happened. We tried to help them.”

  “Is that so?” Grainger asked.

  “Yes,” Gideon said softly, “it is.”

  Logan thought there might have been a hint of guilt in Gideon’s voice, but not for any reason Grainger might have suspected. Logan recalled how Barrett had ignored Gideon’s instructions, determined to attack the Outsider rather than first stop the bus. Not exactly stellar teamwork.

  Grainger glanced at the row of bodies. “Could have fooled me.”

  Gideon stood up slowly and stared at Grainger with his one ice-blue eye. “What are you implying?”

  “Soldiers on the front lines generally suffer the heaviest casualties, and yet you two emerged from that wreck with a few bumps and scrapes.”

  “Really?” Gideon said and gritted his teeth.

  “Looks that way from here.”

  “Before you make any more snap judgments,” Gideon said, “you might want to know that four Walkers got on that bus.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me,” Gideon said. “Barrett and Liana are gone.”

  Stunned by the news, Grainger rubbed his jaw and cleared his throat before speaking. “Their remains…are they…?”

  “There aren’t any remains,” Logan said. “They’re gone. Completely gone.”

  “That’s not possible. Unless…”

  “They crossed the rift,” Gideon said. “Before it closed, they crossed to the other side, to wherever Carnifex lives, whatever hell he calls home.”

  “Then they’re not dead? Liana, she’s alive?”

  Gideon shrugged. “No way of knowing. Until they come back. Or don’t come back. Even then, it might not mean they’re dead. Only that they can’t find a way back.”

  Chief Grainger sat on the curb and heaved a prolonged sigh. He brushed the back of his hand across his forehead and stared at the overturned bus. After a long moment he shook his head, seemingly at a loss for words.

  Gideon sat down beside him and waited.

  Logan joined them on the curb, crushing an empty soda can under the heel of his sneaker. He picked up the flattened aluminum disk and flung it into a nearby trashcan. Considering all the death and destruction around them, the civic gesture seemed ironically futile. But it was one small thing he could control.

  “What’s the point?” Grainger said at last, seeming to echo Logan’s dejected thoughts.

  “What do you mean?” Gideon asked.

  “What does this Carnifex creature want here?”

  “Better hunting grounds,” Gideon said. “Might be as simple as that.”

  “But all this killing through a rift. Why not cross and get it over with?”

  “Oh, he will. As soon as he’s strong enough,” Gideon said. “I believe the killing makes him stronger or at least fuels his ability to widen the rift. Eventually, he will cross. Don’t doubt that. Barrett and Liana are attempting to cut him off at the pass.”

  “And if they fail?”

  “Then we send more Walkers through the rift,” Gideon said solemnly. “Or we make our stand here.”

  Grainger surveyed the row of ravaged bodies and shook his head. “Wish I had your confidence.”

  “Failure is not an option.”

  “You sound like your brother.”

  “Hope that’s not the only lesson Barrett remembered.”

  Logan stared at the crippled bus. Failure might not be an option, but success was not guaranteed. He sensed the worst was yet to come and wondered if he would ever see Liana and Barrett again. No Walker talent could span a closed rift. If his sister and cousin were alive, they belonged to another world now.

  Chapter 39

  Leading with the tip of his off-world-steel swo
rd, Barrett hurled himself through the rift into utter darkness. If his aim was true and fortune guided his thrust, he hoped to impale Carnifex and put an end to his brutal incursions. Who knew what havoc Carnifex might wreak on Earth if he managed to cross over? The barbed tentacle, which seemed to have the ability to regenerate, had caused enough death and destruction already.

  Barrett’s first thought—his only thought at the moment he pushed off the padded bus seat—was to destroy the menace. Half measures were useless. In the heat of battle, he never considered the possibility that the rift might close behind him, forever sealing him in Carnifex’s hell dimension. Since his primary paranormal ability was hyperacuity, pausing to consider his options or weigh the consequences of those actions would nullify the advantage his talent gave him. To be effective, hyperacuity demanded impetuousness.

  As he crossed the rift, the light seemed to wink out and the ambient temperature plunged twenty degrees.

  The tip of his sword skittered across a hard, curved surface that felt like polished stone, then sliced through open air. Barrett tucked and rolled, coming up in a defensive crouch, his sword at a forty-five degree angle in front of him.

  No doubt about it, he thought. The polished stone had moved—twisted out of the way. In no dimensions known to Barrett was rock animate, which meant—

  An odor akin to rotting garbage washed over him.

  He heard a rustling metallic sound a moment before a stone club slammed into the side of his ribs, knocking him to the ground.

  Time to face facts, he thought groggily as he climbed to his hands and knees. Whatever it is that feels like stone is actually— “Carnifex!”

  Sudden rustle of metal and—something hard struck his head, snapping it to the side. His limbs became rubbery. Everything seemed to crumble away from him.

  And Barrett sank into darkness.

  A moment of disorientation as the ground seemed to shift, then settle. Poured concrete. Beneath him. And the air was considerably warmer under the glow of dangling light bulbs. Filled with the scent of wood and sawdust.

  “Barrett! C’mon!”

  Gideon’s voice.

  Corrugated steel walls enclosed the space, a building filled with stacks of kiln-dried lumber.

  Oh, no! Barrett thought. The warehouse, in San Diego, before Gideon—but how!

  A gurgling squeal of pain erupted to Barrett’s left.

  He turned and stared at the twelve-foot-high banded stacks of two-by-tens that blocked him from seeing the source of that eerie sound. Nevertheless, he knew what it was and what to expect next.

  “Not this,” he whispered. “Not again!”

  The tower of lumber shuddered with a massive impact, and continued to shake as something enormous scaled the other side. With fateful twanging sounds, the metal bands began to snap, one by one.

  “Barrett, look out!”

  He leapt backward instinctively and collided with the sloppily parked forklift—just as he had once before, smashing his shoulder against the frame of the cab and dropping his sword. The thunderous crash of falling lumber made him feel as if a house were collapsing on him. His lightning-quick reflexes seemed to betray him all over again.

  This was a second look—not a second chance.

  The loose boards slammed into him, hard edges battering his raised forearm, ribs, hips and thighs. He managed to fling his torso through the open cab, but the immense weight accumulated on his legs, pinning him half-against and half-inside the grease-stained yellow forklift.

  Over the shifting mound of two-by-tens came the three-legged Outsider, as massive and implacable as an urban assault vehicle. Its two prodigious rear legs could have substituted for steel girders. The double-jointed foreleg sprouted from the front of its dark, bulbous body like the trunk of an elephant. The Outsider used it in its odd three-legged gait, but also to climb and attack, because from the perimeter of that walking pad were dozens of retractable claws in addition to a larger main claw rising from the top of the pad.

  As the Outsider clambered toward Barrett, the weight of the loose boards pressed down on his thighs, as if he were in the jaws of a closing vise. He grimaced in pain until his jaw creaked, dreading the sound he expected to hear any moment—the snapping of his bones. Once the first one breaks, he thought, there will be no stopping the rest.

  Gideon raced across the fallen lumber after the Outsider, a creature Barrett had dubbed ‘Tripod’ after their first sighting. But he wasn’t laughing now. He would have admired Gideon’s nimble display of grace over the jostling mound of two-by-tens if not for the weight he added to the considerable force already pressing down on Barrett.

  Tripod paused in front of Barrett. Its foreleg rose before his face and the ring of claws snapped into place around the edge of the walking pad, giving the sudden, weird impression of a shark’s maw. With those claws, Tripod had the power to turn Barrett’s face into hamburger.

  Barrett pulled a two-by-ten from the top of the vast pile and created an impromptu shield. An instant later, Tripod’s foot rushed forward and the claws wrapped around the top of the board with amazing force and shattered it, spraying Barrett’s face with a few thousand toothpicks.

  The bulbous body, whose underside was home to a toothy maw and mushroom-like sensory organs, swung down toward Barrett for a closer look. Barrett noticed a deep wound near its rear right leg, dripping viscous black fluid.

  “Open wide, you son of a bitch!” he yelled and flung the jagged edge of the remaining two-by-ten up into the hellish mouth. But pinned as he was, Barrett couldn’t hurl the crude weapon with much force and Tripod chomped down on it with apparent relish before tossing it aside.

  The nimble foreleg rose high then crashed down toward Barrett. For a moment, it seemed as if a deranged utility pole were trying to crush his skull. Barrett winced in anticipation of the impact. But the leg struck the cab’s frame above him and created a six-inch V in the steel bar.

  With an impressive battle cry, Gideon lunged up under the Outsider’s bulbous body. His sword sliced into the softer flesh there—the rear legs, the brothers had discovered, were nearly impenetrable—and destroyed a cluster of sensory nodes in the process. Eventually, Gideon would pierce some critical organ within Tripod’s body. And Tripod knew it. The Outsider lashed out with a back leg and flung Gideon away from its vulnerable underside.

  Tripod climbed over the forklift, unmindful of Barrett now, seeking only escape from Gideon’s persistent attacks. Barrett pushed against the two-by-tens, shoving some aside as he reached frantically for his lost sword. But he wasn’t fast enough. In seconds, the Outsider was gone from above him.

  Gideon stumbled past his pinned brother with a worried look.

  “I’m fine,” Barrett lied.

  An eerie ululation filled the warehouse. That sound, made by the Outsider, always preceded its rift. Either it sensed the imminent appearance of the gateway to its world, or it somehow used the sound to summon the rift into existence.

  “It’s hurt. Go!”

  With a curt nod, Gideon left to pursue the creature.

  They both knew that Barrett could dig himself out…eventually, even if Gideon lost his battle. With the Outsider in reach, the priority was clear. Stop and kill the invader. Something they both understood. Cursing his stupidity for not avoiding the lumber avalanche in the first place, Barrett hurled two-by-tens away from his body with his free arm.

  His legs were still pinned when the shimmering curtain of light drifted across his field of vision, moving behind him, in the direction Tripod and Gideon had taken. Twisting around, he saw the creature pass through the dimensional rift, front leg and bulbous body, left rear leg, then—

  Gideon leapt and wrapped his left arm around the outside of Tripod’s right rear leg. Holding on and swinging himself around, he drove the sword up into the soft body, over and over, eliciting deafening shrieks of pain from the Outsider with each strike. Together, the combatants tumbled through the shimmering rift, and vanished.
<
br />   Barrett howled in frustration.

  They had no magic user. They never crossed alone. That was one of their unbroken rules. Until now….

  Barrett panted, tension squeezing his chest more than the two-by-tens. He was experiencing these events for the first time. But on another level, he remembered the outcome. Gideon would fall through the rift, alive, but scarred… and missing an eye. Tripod’s final act of violence. And yet Barrett’s memory of what had happened and what would happen clashed. As if eerily similar realities had been laid one atop the other, and only the slight differences gave hint to the lie, to the new danger.

  Frantically, Barrett worked his way free of the tumbled pile of boards, faster than he had the first time because bitter resignation had been replaced by the grim certainty that this relived reality would somehow be much worse than what he remembered. Unless… unless he broke the chain of events that had led to Gideon’s mutilation and subsequent retirement from the Walker family vocation.

  Barrett’s exertion made his chest burn. His lungs felt seared with each heaving breath.

  Though Gideon had already disappeared through Tripod’s rift—again—Barrett sensed an… opportunity to change the past for the better. Second by second, that hope faded, replaced by a growing sense of failure and foreboding.

  Scrambling across the fallen two-by-tens, Barrett retrieved his sword and loped across the warehouse, crossing the distance in several strides to where the rift had manifested.

  “What am I supposed to do?” Barrett spoke softly but urgently, turning in lazy circles as he peered across the warehouse, seeking the telltale shimmering of air that would mark the rift’s return. He remembered that the rift had reappeared, a weak reflection of its former self and Gideon had dropped—

  —from midair—

  —his clothes soaked with Tripod’s black ichor, his face covered with his own blood, semi-conscious, but sporting a gritty smile of victory. “…should see the other guy,” Gideon had whispered before passing out.

  “Where?” Barrett asked himself, prodding at the memory of what had happened—what was about to happen again.