by Peter Clines
“He can’t do that.”
“With his connections? Sure he can. I bet he could arrange some kind of ‘security drill’ that would drop a hundred Marines from Camp Pendleton here in the next half hour or so. And then we’ll never find out what’s happening here.”
Jamie scowled.
“So,” Mike said, “we’ve got until the end of the week. We should get back to work.”
“Yeah,” she said. “You want to have sex?”
He looked at her. “Right now?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Because it was a lot of fun the first few times,” she said, “no matter who you turned out to be. And it means we can put off watching the security footage for a while longer.”
“We need to.”
“I have needs, too.”
“And I’ll gladly try to satisfy them, if that’s what you want,” he said. “Believe me. But we need to do this.”
—
THE SECURITY FOOTAGE was custom-encrypted. It would only play in the control room. Jamie was pretty sure she could write up a patch that would let it play in the conference room, but they all agreed it wasn’t worth the time. If the control room was dangerous, the conference room was, too.
Arthur leaned on his cane behind her chair. Mike noted that it had gone from mild affectation to an actual support for the man.
“Fuck,” Sasha said, staring down at the main floor. “We’ve got a serious roach problem.”
“They get brave when there’s no one around,” said Mike. “Didn’t take them long.”
Olaf looked down through the window. “Must be a hundred of them down there.”
Mike stood next to Sasha and peered down through the window. Dozens and dozens of tiny spots moved across the floor like drifting motes of dust. “Probably more that we can’t see. My mom used to say there were ninety-nine cowards hiding for every brave one that came out in the light.”
She shook her head and stepped away from the window. “Little fuckers.”
“How do we want to do this?” Jamie glanced up at them from her chair. “Work backward? Start at the top?” There were three gray squares, each on its own screen. The security cameras inside Site B had stopped filming at some point. Two of them had died almost simultaneously, the other had lasted fifteen seconds longer.
Sasha rested her hands on the back of the chair. “Do we know when ‘the top’ was?”
“Let’s start thirty seconds before the alarms went off,” Arthur said.
Jamie set her hand on the track ball, shifted it, right-clicked, shifted, and clicked again. Her fingers came back to the keyboard and danced on the number pad. The three squares filled with images. Site B from different angles. “Okay,” she said. “Everyone ready?”
Mike stepped back and found a sweet spot that let him see all three screens. “Good.”
Arthur nodded. Olaf crossed his arms. Sasha just bit her lip.
Jamie tapped the mouse. The images came to life, although the only real movement was the constant sweep of the red warning light. The time code spun away in the corner.
Camera two looked straight at the rings. They could see through to the main floor and its own flashing light. Mike remembered the angle from the first time he watched Olaf crosswalk.
Nothing happened. From three different angles.
“The alarms should go off any second now,” said Arthur.
On camera one, a shaft of light appeared.
“The Door,” said Mike. “Neil’s checking things out before he locks it up.”
Sasha’s eyes went wide and she put her hand over her mouth.
Jamie reached out and tapped the mouse. All three images froze. “Do we really want to watch this?”
Sasha closed her eyes and whispered into her hand. It sounded like “Fuff Vee.”
“We owe it to him,” Arthur said. “He worked on this project almost as long as you. He wouldn’t want us to get weak over this.”
“I think what he’d want is to be standing here with us,” said Olaf.
Mike set a hand on Jamie’s shoulder. She reached up and squeezed it. The ants pulled out the image of the last time they were in this configuration. Him. Her. Arthur. His hand on her shoulder. Her shouting at him.
He set the ants to new tasks. Cataloging. Filing.
Jamie reached for the mouse.
The images came to life and camera two went black. White lines of static flickered across it.
Arthur leaned forward. “What happened?”
Jamie’s fingers danced between the keyboard and the mouse. The images rewound, then began to crawl forward at quarter speed. There was no sound. She tapped something and the image from camera two expanded to fill its screen.
“There,” said Olaf. He reached out and almost touched the screen. “Do you see it?”
“Move your hand,” said Sasha.
The air was rippling. It was the familiar summer-heat haze that meant the Albuquerque Door was about to open. But the blurry air spilled out around the rings by at least five or six feet. It almost covered the screen.
The air shifted and the screen went black.
“Dammit,” said Jamie.
She reached for the controls again but Mike stopped her. He moved his hand to point at the bottom of the screen. The concrete floor was there, complete with painted lines. His finger slid up and circled the base of the ramp, just visible through the batch of blackness. A little higher and he traced the dim outline of the rings. “It’s all still there,” he said.
Sasha reached out her own hand. “Are those stars?”
There were over a hundred of them, at least. Crisp and clear, like photos from the Hubble. They were brightest toward the center of the rings.
The ants swarmed in Mike’s head, bringing out hundreds of images until they had the right one. “That’s the Northern Hemisphere,” he said.
Olaf glanced at him. “Are you sure?”
Mike tapped the side of his head. “I’ve looked up at night a couple of times.”
“So now the Door’s going out into space?” said Jamie.
“No,” said Olaf. He ran his finger across the screen. “See it?”
Mike peered at the screen and saw the gray line Olaf had caught. It was hidden in the fuzziness at the end of the void. A barren horizon of gray soil marked by a few low hills and rocks.
“It’s the Moon,” said Sasha.
“It can’t be,” said Olaf. “The Door opens here. Right here.” He pointed at the floor.
Jamie shook her head. “Not this time.”
Something fluttered at the edge of the screen. At quarter speed, the lines of static were visible as pieces of paper from the workstations. They zoomed into the rings—into the area where the rings should’ve been—and vanished. A moment later, something red whipped out from under camera two and disappeared into space.
Jamie blinked. “Was that…”
“Fire extinguisher,” said Olaf. He pointed at camera three’s screen. “The one from the main support.”
The shaft of light vanished from all the images.
“The door,” said Sasha. “It was closed when we got there.”
“Probably slammed shut by the air pressure,” Mike said.
On the screen the fire extinguisher bounced and tumbled across the barren landscape and came to rest a few yards from the Door. Mike frowned. The ants scurried in his mind.
The lights in the room shifted again. “There’s the alarm,” Arthur said. “Emergency systems are reading this as a hazardous materials leak.”
The images continued to crawl forward. Another fire extinguisher flew into the rings. One of the chairs worked its way around the workstation and rolled to the base of the ramp. It tipped over and flipped up into the starry void. Fluorescent tubes dropped from the ceiling to shatter on the ramp or the platform. Their shards vanished into space.
A white line shot across all three monitors, coming from somewhere behind camera two. It
wobbled like a sound wave. “What is that?” Arthur leaned in close. “Is that some kind of static?”
“Might be a digital artifact,” said Jamie. “The magnetic fields may be affecting the cameras.”
A single laugh slipped past Mike’s lips. Barely a chuckle.
Jamie glanced at him. “What?”
“It’s toilet paper.”
The white line wavered again.
“It’s from the bathroom in the back of Site B,” he said. He pointed at the camera two footage, where the white line extended off into deep space. “We’re watching a hundred feet of toilet paper unwind in slow motion.”
The line twisted and wobbled some more. A few seconds later it was gone, a dim thread in space. A few more scraps of paper and loose items flitted across the screen and disappeared. A cable slithered across the floor like a black snake and into the rings.
A tiny movement caught his eye. He focused his attention on it. “There,” he said.
He pointed at camera three. Just visible in the dark corner was the shadowy figure of a man. He seemed to be pushing on the wall next to the door.
“He’s hanging on to the conduits,” said Sasha. “Why doesn’t he just grab the door handle and get out?”
“The wind might be too strong,” Mike said. “He could just be too scared to let go.”
“Like when drowning swimmers take the lifeguard down with them,” said Jamie.
“Something like that, yeah.”
The workstations were moving now, scraping across the floor. Their assorted cables lifted off the floor and grew tighter and tighter. The other chair rolled free and shot across the open space into the Door. It tumbled across the gray soil and kicked up clouds of dust.
The ants seethed. Mike felt his brow furrow.
Olaf noticed it. “What?”
“It should’ve gone farther,” said Mike. “With that amount of momentum, it should’ve gone a lot farther.”
“How is this happening?” asked Jamie. “Explosive decompression doesn’t just go on and on like in sci-fi movies. That’s why it’s explosive. It just happens all at once, like a balloon bursting.”
“Normally, yeah,” agreed Mike, “but this isn’t normal. We had a hole in space. A doorway into outer space right here, deep down in the atmosphere.”
Olaf nodded. “Every ounce of air on Earth is pushing those things into the rings. This isn’t breaking a water balloon, it’s turning on a fire hose.”
Light spilled across all three screens. Something big dropped from the ceiling and blocked camera one for a moment. It bounced off the concrete, slid across the floor, and spun up into the rings. It wheeled through the lunar sand and fell over.
“The roof panel,” said Sasha.
On camera three, Neil was moving. He stayed low to the ground, but moved toward the lens. His feet entered the frame on camera one.
Camera one flickered to black, then white, and then went dead.
A nitrogen tank rolled across the floor on its side. A dozen feet of hose whipped at the end, twisting in the air to point at the rings. The tank was too wide to go through the rings, but it rolled into the rift and bounced once before coming to rest on the dusty ground on the other side.
The air spiraled into thin whirlwinds that vanished into the rings. Two cables popped loose on one workstation, then a third, and then the whole thing lifted into the air. On camera two, they could see the equipment piling up on the dusty surface. Another roof panel struck the steel ramp and tipped over into nothingness. A few moments later, a section of metal roofing sliced through the cables of the other station. It all slid forward and went in. The last piece of metal never even touched the ground. It curved in midair and swung into the rings.
Camera two died. No flicker or static. It just went black between digital frames.
Neil grabbed at one of the flailing cables from the workstation and missed. He slid another few feet and rolled over to claw at the concrete. At one quarter speed, his screams distorted his face.
His feet grew dark as they hit the bottom of the ramp. It was as if a shadow stretched over them in the bright room. On camera one, they just vanished into the void. He tried to pull them out of the darkness, but the dragging winds forced him to keep them braced against the ramp. Neil screamed again. It lasted fifteen seconds in slow motion.
“His feet are in space,” said Mike.
Camera one flickered. There was one last image of Neil trying to turn, to find something to grab. And then the camera shut off.
FORTY
They stared at the dark screens for a moment. Jamie wiped her cheeks. Sasha closed her eyes.
“It wasn’t that bad for him,” Arthur said without much conviction. He pulled off his glasses and cleaned them on his tie. A drop fell on the lenses while he did. “The slow speed made it seem worse. It was…I’m sure it was quick. That was barely thirty seconds.”
“Just shut up,” muttered Sasha.
They stopped looking at one another. Jamie spun her track ball and cleared all the monitors back to bare desktop. Sasha tapped her head against the window. Olaf stared down at the remaining set of rings.
A swarm of ants raced in Mike’s head. They brought out hundreds of images from the footage he’d just watched, and hundreds more from memory. He made comparison graphs and drew conclusions.
And then he reviewed the footage and drew new conclusions.
“That wasn’t the Moon,” he said.
They turned to look at him. Jamie smudged one last tear from her face. “What?”
“Where the Door opened up to. It wasn’t the Moon.”
“It sure the fuck looked like it,” said Sasha.
He shook his head. “The Moon’s our only reference for images like that—a world with no life and no atmosphere. But the gravity was wrong.”
Arthur wrinkled his brow for a moment. “On the Moon,” he said, “all those items should’ve gone for a hundred yards or so.”
Mike nodded. “The lighter ones at least, but even the heavier ones should’ve gone farther than they did.” He pointed at the screen. “That was Earth gravity. One g. Everything was just moving a little strange because there was no air resistance.”
“So that was…what?” Sasha glanced from the screen to the rings. “A world where Earth was just some rock in space?”
He counted to three. The ants carried out numbers for him, like tiny ring girls at a sporting event. “No,” he said. “Well, sort of.”
Olaf frowned at him.
Mike turned to Jamie. “Can you bring the camera two footage back up. Time-stamp thirteen-eleven-twenty-three.”
She tapped the keyboard. “How fast do you want it?”
“Just freeze it there.”
The screen filled with the starry void. The dim image of the rings were visible behind it, and the gray horizon past that. The red fire extinguisher and the chair had both already come to rest. The first roof panel was a blur of motion, still up on its side like a wheel.
“Full screen?”
Two more clicks and the frozen image leaped to fill the flatscreen. Mike reached out and ran his fingers along an outcropping of rock on the left side of frame. “See that? How straight it is?”
Arthur squinted. Jamie pulled up the image on the screen in front of her and stared at it. “Okay,” said Sasha.
Mike traced a few faint vertical lines along the outcropping. They were straight and evenly spaced. “See these? This is the only point they really stand out. The light’s reflecting off the roof panel just right.”
“What’s your point?” asked Olaf.
“Those are cinder blocks,” said Mike. “That’s what’s left of the south wall of the main floor. Back there—” He pointed at a faint ripple in the gray sand past the fire extinguisher. “—that’s the west wall.”
Arthur pushed his glasses tighter against his head. “Are you sure?”
“Positive,” said Mike. He tapped the side of his head. “They all line up with the
regular view through the Door. I even overlapped it with previous crosswalks to be sure.”
“Fuck me,” said Sasha. She glanced down at the main floor and shook her head.
“That doesn’t make sense,” said Olaf. “If the main floor’s there, and presumably a Door, that means we were there working on it.”
“Maybe you were,” Mike said.
Jamie leaned back in her chair, still staring at the smaller screen. “So what happened?”
Mike counted to four this time. “There’s nothing there. No old weeds or vines. No sign of life at all. Sometime between finishing the Door and now, maybe in the last year or two, something wiped out all life on the planet. It even sucked away the atmosphere. And it did it fast.”
“A war?” asked Jamie. “People always say we had enough nukes to destroy the world a hundred times over, or something like that.”
Sasha frowned. “Could that burn off all the air?”
Mike shrugged.
“It looks too complete,” said Arthur. “Unless a warhead struck the lab dead center, we should see more than this.”
“There’s also the bigger picture,” said Mike.
They all glanced at him, then back to the screen.
“Metaphorical picture this time.” He waved his hand at the rings outside the window. “When all this happened at Site B, nothing happened here. This mouth was normal. Which would mean the Door only opened on one side. Or, at least, the two sides were open to two different realities.”
Arthur’s mouth flattened into a line. Jamie’s eyes went wide.
“Which means,” Mike continued, “we still don’t know how it works.”
“Or it’s working differently now,” said Sasha.
Arthur shook his head. “Nothing else has changed. Why would it be working differently?”
“Why would it be open when there’s no power?” she asked. “How the fuck should I know?”
Olaf gazed at the rings below and stiffened. He took a step to the left, then back. “Jesus,” he muttered.
Sasha pressed her head against the glass. “What? What is it?”
“The Door,” he said. He glanced back at Arthur, then at Sasha, and then back down to the main floor. “The damned thing’s still open.”
“It can’t be,” said Arthur. “The other rings were destroyed.”