by Peter Clines
He grabbed jeans and a shirt from his trailer, then walked back up to the main building. The first aid kit by Anne’s printer wasn’t as well stocked as the big one. It had more gauze pads and tape, but no actual bandages. He glanced at the hall, toward the door that led out onto the main floor. Tape and pads would have to do.
He passed the kitchen and saw Anne sitting at the small table. She had a cup of coffee in her hands with no steam coming off it. Three packets of Advil sat near her wrist.
“Hey,” he said. “You okay?”
She stared past him with wide pupils. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, I’m fine. I just…I’m fine.”
A squad of ants ran by with memories of Villette and his conversation with Reggie held up for view. “It looked like it hit you pretty good.”
“I’m fine. Just a few bruises.” Then she blinked twice, focused, and saw him shirtless and bloody. She looked at the bandages on his stomach. “Are you? Okay?”
“I think so. I just need to wash up and change these.”
She opened her lips to say something else, but changed her mind. Her gaze drifted back to the wall, in the direction of the main floor.
There was a fresh box of pastries on the counter. He wondered when they’d been brought in. He pushed the box aside without opening it. It felt heavy and he realized he’d been riding an adrenaline high for almost half an hour. There was a crash in his very near future.
He headed into the bathroom.
Mike washed his hands, wiped them with a couple of alcohol swabs, and unwrapped himself. The gauze was all red under the bandage. Red blood seemed reassuring. Almost cheerful. He tugged at the tape, and his stretching skin reminded him there wasn’t anything cheerful about it. Threads of gauze clung to the wounds, and he winced as they popped loose one by one.
He looked at his gut in the mirror. The skin around the gashes was shiny from all the ointment Jamie had slathered on. The cuts were wet, but the bleeding seemed to have stopped again. If there had been any of the creature’s blood near his wounds, it had vanished with the rest.
Just a few more millimeters and the talon-like nails would’ve left three big rents in his skin. His intestines would’ve pushed out, forced the wounds even wider. If the creature had stretched its toes, his guts would’ve spilled onto the floor.
The room lost focus for a moment. The walls tilted. He’d reached the crash. He braced his hands on the sink and forced himself to take a few slow breaths. He counted to ten, then opened the first aid kit. Fresh gauze was taped into place. This roll of tape was thinner, and it took half a dozen pieces to make each pad feel secure.
He glanced at the bathroom door, then unbuckled his belt. The hem of his jeans was still sticky with blood. So was the front of the crotch and a few spots on the legs. He pried his sneakers off, pushed the jeans down, and kicked them off. There were a few spots along his boxers, too. The creature wouldn’t be the only thing going commando today.
Mike caught sight of himself in the mirror. The gauze across his stomach was brilliant in the bathroom’s light. His hair was a mess. Shock and a bit of blood loss made his skin pale. With the tired rings under his eyes, the transformation was complete. A very skinny Severus Snape stared back at him from the mirror.
He shook his head and chuckled.
He pulled on the clean clothes, wiped down the belt, and threaded it through the loops. The sneakers were too tight to slip back on, so he untied and retied them. He sealed the first aid kit back up and tossed the bloody clothes in the trash.
Anne hadn’t moved from her chair in the kitchen. She still held the cold coffee. Her eyes flitted to Mike as he entered, and she managed a weak smile. “Much better.”
“Thanks. I feel a lot better.”
He dropped the first aid kit on the counter and tore open the pastry box. The room wobbled, just for a moment, from the effort. He tossed a scrap of paper tape in the trash and a green roach skittered away from the plastic barrel.
The box was packed full of donuts, muffins, and other pastries. Mike saw two of all the usuals. He picked up one of the chocolate croissants, and then eyed the second one, wondering if he could eat two without making himself sick.
“Do you want anything?” he asked Anne. “Might help settle your nerves.”
“I’m good.”
He tapped the box lid. “Looks like someone screwed up the order. Double everything if you change your mind.”
“It wasn’t me,” said Anne. She managed another weak smile.
Mike took a bite out of the croissant, and the butter and sugar and chocolate melted on his tongue. He pictured it rushing into his bloodstream to help stabilize him and calm his overtaxed system. He slumped against the wall, closed his eyes, and took another bite.
The front door hissed open in the distance. Footsteps echoed in the hall. He opened his eyes in time to see Anne straighten up.
Jamie appeared in the doorway. Her hair was still damp, and her T-shirt had wet spots on it. It was inside out, and stitches wrapped around her shoulders. There were wet trails on her cheeks that stood out against the dampness from the shower.
In her arms was something bundled in a towel. It twisted for a moment, then settled down in her hands. He caught a glimpse of tan fur and a thick claw. She marched forward and set it down on the table in front of Anne. Anne pushed herself away, and Mike had to set a hand on her shoulder to keep her from tipping over backward.
“It’s still spreading,” Jamie said. She took a step back from the table. The bundle shifted and wiggled.
Mike put the pieces together, but needed confirmation. “The instability?”
“Yeah.”
“How far?”
The bundle yipped and shook itself. The table rocked a bit. The towel slid and fell away to reveal even more fur.
“Pretty damned far,” announced Jamie. “The trailers. Which means it’s hitting most of the campus. Glitch is gone.”
“He got out?”
“He’s gone,” she repeated, looking anywhere except at the animal on the table.
The mutt was small, fifteen pounds, tops, with floppy ears. It eyed Mike and Anne curiously, yapped at her twice, then got distracted by the coffee cup on the table. Its tail wagged back and forth.
Mike stepped past Anne and crouched down to look the dog in the eye. It glanced up at him, then pressed its wet nose against the table and snorted up a few stray particles of food.
“I was getting dressed in the trailer,” said Jamie, “and Glitch was on the bed, and then I turned around and…” She shook her head and nodded her chin at the dog.
Mike reached out and took the nylon collar in his hand and worked his way around to the bone-shaped tag. He already knew what it was going to say.
Jamie leaned her head against the wall and crossed her arms over her skull.
“Hello, Tramp,” murmured Mike.
FORTY-SIX
Mike opened the door and found Jamie in the hall, leaning against the wall. She’d turned her shirt right-side out and pulled her hair back again. “Hey,” she said.
“Hey. How are you?”
“Now that I’ve had time to think? Even more freaked out.”
“Yeah, me too.”
He glanced back into the conference room as the door eased shut on its hydraulic arm. Olaf and Sasha were checking over Tramp. Both of them still looked more than a little ill at the dog’s reappearance. Arthur stood at the head of the table, leaning on his cane. He stared at the dog with flat eyes.
After a few hours, Anne had still seemed to be in shock from the creature’s attack. Arthur had called a cab and sent her home. She’d flinched away when he touched her arm to say goodbye. She’d glared at him and climbed into the cab without a word.
Jamie glanced at the book in Mike’s hand. It was half an inch thick, with a dark cloth binding and ragged pages. “Koturovic?”
“Yeah. I got it from Arthur when they came back.”
She looked at his stomach. “Did you g
et fresh bandages?”
“Yep.”
“Good,” she said. “I threw up in the shower. Twice. And I think I took off a layer of skin.”
“Did it make you feel better?”
“A little.”
He tilted his head over at the bathroom door. “I came pretty close in there when I was getting cleaned up.”
“Are you hungry, too?”
“I had a couple mouthfuls of croissant before you showed up with…with the dog.”
“It’s Tramp,” said Jamie. “I get it. I think dicking around about it is just going to waste a lot of time.”
“Agreed.”
“And I’m starving.”
He nodded. “Probably crashing like I was after, well, after everything. You had more shocks than me.”
She shrugged and managed a smile. “Disemboweled by a monster versus finding a dog. I don’t know.”
Mike glanced at the conference room door. He was tempted to say the small dog bothered the scientists far more than either the fold in space or the three-armed monster. He wasn’t sure if that was funny or disturbing. Probably a little of both.
Jamie nodded at the door. “How’s it going?”
He weighed his words. “It’s creepy and fantastic that Tramp’s back, don’t get me wrong. But you’re right. He’s distracting us from the big issue.” He held up the book. “You’ve read this, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I think I’ve figured a bunch of stuff out.”
Her stomach rumbled.
“Speaking of distractions…”
“Sorry,” she said. “Just let me grab a cruller or something before we go back in. I’m going to pass out if I don’t eat something in the next five minutes.”
They wandered to the kitchen and Jamie rooted through the box of pastries. “Double donuts,” she said. She pulled out the two crullers and wrapped them in a paper towel. “Thank God for screwups,” she said.
“It’s not a screwup.”
“What?”
“Anne didn’t double it. It’s more bleed-through, like when we tried to pull the bolts on the ring housings.” He pointed at her small bundle. “We could call those quantum donuts.”
She studied the cruller for a moment, then shrugged and took a bite out of it. “I’m starving,” she said. “I’ll deal with it if I grow another arm.”
“It’s just from an alternate universe, it’s not magic.” Mike pulled open the fridge. “There. See?”
On the top shelf was Anne’s usual apple and lunch Tupperware. Except there were five apples piled on the shelf. Four were red, although the produce sticker on one was written in German. The apple farthest to the back was green. The words on its sticker were in Japanese.
“Great,” she said. “So if we don’t figure out how to shut it off, we’ll be smothered in donuts and apples.”
“And maybe dogs,” said Mike. “It could be a self-correcting problem.”
She snorted out a laugh and he pushed the fridge shut.
Unbidden, the ants pulled up his layout of the complex and added labels for the donuts, the refrigerator, Glitch’s disappearance, and the reappearance of Tramp. A thought crossed his mind, and they added distances. A red circle blossomed on his map, centered on the remaining set of rings.
One last ant skittered out and placed a label just outside the circle. He focused on it, and it set up a trail of time stamps from the rings, through the label, and into a trailer. More ants carried out memories to fill in the path.
“Huh.”
Jamie swallowed a second mouthful of cruller. “What?”
“I used your trailer and the donuts to mark out an area of effect. A map of how far away from the rings things are changing.”
She raised an eyebrow. “My trailer?”
“For Glitch and Tramp. The bugman’s corpse started to shrivel up as we got it near the edge of that area. And it fell apart just a few yards past your trailer.”
“Really?”
Mike studied the layout and the trail of images. “Yeah. Not sure what that means. Maybe it’s tied to the rings somehow.”
“We’re not. We’ve all left campus.”
“You’re still alive. And you’re not a bugman.”
“Thanks for noticing.”
He shrugged.
Jamie filled her massive coffee mug, and they headed back to the conference room. Tramp barked at them and wagged his tail when they opened the door. She managed to hide most of her cringe at the sound.
Sasha and Olaf stood on either side of the table. They were at the end farthest from the door, farthest from the rings. Spread out across the table were blueprints and mathematical models.
Arthur hadn’t moved. Both hands were still on the head of his cane. Behind his glasses, his eyes focused on Tramp.
Sasha tapped one of the blueprints. Her arm had half a dozen stitches and some bandages that looked much more professional than the ones Mike had taped into place on his stomach. “Maybe it’s tapping into the Earth’s magnetic field, somehow?”
“That’s sci-fi nonsense,” Olaf said. A line of small butterfly bandages stretched along his cheek. They made the side of his face stiff when he talked.
“It’s what an electrodynamic tether does,” Sasha pointed out.
“Hypothetical science at best, sci-fi nonsense at worst.”
Mike waited for them to finish and set the book down on the table and counted to five. “I think we may have a big problem. Really big.”
Tramp leaped to his feet, yipped, and spun in a circle. He flopped back down, and his tail thumped against the table leg.
“When the Door opens,” said Mike, “it reaches into a ‘nearby’ universe. By nature of being close to us, so to speak, they’re less divergent. That’s why all of you were able to get by without too much trouble once you switched universes. There were only minor differences.”
“Except for other-Bob’s world,” said Olaf. “And the dead world.”
Mike raised a finger. “But they weren’t that divergent, either. We know this building existed in both of those worlds. We know teams existed there that built Albuquerque Doors. Which means they were near-parallel until the past year or two.”
“And then one world started a war and the other one was wiped out,” said Arthur. He balanced his cane against the table and tugged his glasses off. “That sounds somewhat divergent to me.”
Mike shook his head. “Not if whatever caused those changes came from outside of the given universe.”
They all stared at him. Olaf shook his head. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Mike reached down and tapped the book. “Koturovic,” he said. “Appendix three.”
Sasha nodded. “That’s where he starts spouting all the History Channel stuff about dimensional barriers and the end of the world, right?”
“All the things that got him tossed out of his university,” said Olaf.
“Yeah,” said Mike, “except I’m not so sure it’s that crazy. In fact, a lot of things start to make sense when we take all of his theories into account.”
He slid a piece of paper toward himself and scooped up a pen. “Say this is the multiverse,” said Mike. He drew a dot at the bottom of the sheet, and then a dozen quick lines coming out from it in a tight fan. “It’s our local cluster, if you will. A bunch of realities that only recently split apart, in the big scheme of things. We’ve got a lot of common history. Enough so that if someone crossed from one to another, they might not even notice any major changes. Think of the lines as branches in a tree.”
He glanced around the room. They all seemed to be following him. Or, at least, humoring him.
“Now something comes along with a set of clippers or one of those big buzzsaw things.”
“Hedge trimmer,” said Sasha.
He nodded. “A hedge trimmer. And it starts cutting through the branches.” He drew a horizontal line halfway across the fan. “The Door is doing what it’s been doing all along
—opening to another branch close to this one. But we’re seeing universes that were hit by the trimmer. So they look different.”
Olaf tapped his fingertips on the table. His jaw shifted and the bandaged side of his face shifted with it. “And what’s the trimmer represent in your clever metaphor?”
“Just what Koturovic said.” Mike tapped the book again. “Some kind of super–alpha predators that eat everything. Something that would break through the dimensional barriers, hunt us, and wipe out humanity. An interdimensional locust swarm of some kind. He said they were from a universe outside our own, but if we accept that there are multiple universes, what makes ours so special? Wouldn’t the conditions that attract them exist in all those realities, too?”
Sasha crossed her arms. “So you’re saying something…what, ate the Moon-world?”
“Maybe,” said Mike. “I don’t know that it’s true, I just know that it fits all the evidence.”
“Wait…” Jamie glanced toward the main floor, then to the trailers.
“You mean there’s more of those bugman things?” asked Sasha.
“Maybe a lot more,” said Mike. “I think the rings punched a hole in that dimensional barrier he talks about. And if Koturovic’s right about everything, the more people there are around the hole, the bigger it gets.”
“And the more bugmen come through,” Jamie said.
Arthur pulled off his glasses, and reached for the tie he wasn’t wearing. “We’re in the middle of a major city,” he said. “We’re in a relatively deserted area, but if the instability keeps growing…”
“Yeah,” Mike said. “San Diego’s got a population of a couple million, right?”
“Yes,” said Arthur. “And then there’s Orange County, Baja, Anaheim, Los Angeles…we’re talking about ten or twenty million people, depending on how far it reaches.”
“And how many bugmen would that set loose?” asked Sasha.
“I don’t know,” said Mike. “Koturovic seemed pretty sure the alpha predators could wipe out humanity, and it seems like he was right about a lot of this.”
Arthur tapped his cane on the floor. “That creature was fast and strong,” he said, “but I can’t imagine even hundreds of them could stand up to a few platoons of Marines from Pendleton.”