by Peter Clines
The patchwork man froze. Its expression softened and its eyes widened, even the tiny ones. The shredded lips quivered and flexed on either end.
“At last,” it whispered. “My Lord has arrived.”
Under the sound of wind, Mike could hear something else. A thrumming, rippling sound, like air pounding against a huge kite or flag. As it increased, the wind picked up.
The patchwork man turned to the rings and Sasha cracked it across the jaw with the rifle stock. The blow wrenched its head around. It straightened back, and she hit it again. This time a few teeth pinged against the toolbox.
Mike struggled to his feet.
Sasha tried to swing a third time, and the patchwork man grabbed her arm, squeezing the line of stitches and bandages. She screamed. The rifle clattered to the floor. The creature grabbed her by the throat, sinking its jagged fingernails into her flesh.
Mike grabbed his empty rifle by the barrel and swung it like a baseball bat. It cracked into the back of the patchwork man’s skull. Mike ignored the pain in his side and swept the rifle back to hit it again.
The patchwork man staggered. Sasha dropped to the floor and slapped her hands over her throat. Her fingers were wet and red.
It turned to look down at Mike. Its human eye was dilated. “I will beg my Lord’s forgiveness,” it muttered, “for having no worthy food for his arrival. You are not worthy of joining with him.”
Mike drove the rifle stock up into its face. The patchwork man stumbled back and crashed against the toolbox. Then it tumbled to the ground and tipped the steel case over on top of itself. A rain of fuses spilled over it.
It didn’t move. It was still breathing, though.
Sasha wheezed. Mike dropped the empty rifle and kneeled by her. “Did it cut an artery? Your windpipe?”
“Can’t breathe,” she croaked.
“It’s the nitrogen in the air. Try to be calm.” He touched her fingers. “Let me see.”
She shook her head and flinched back.
“Can you feel it pulsing against your hand? If it cut your carotid, it should feel like you’re blocking a hose.”
She shook her head again, a little slower.
“Trust me,” he said. “Let me see.”
Sasha closed her eyes. Her fingers pulled away from her throat. They were sticky with blood, and more of it ran down to stain the collar of her shirt.
It was a steady stream, though, not a pulse.
“You’re going to be okay,” he said. “It looks a lot worse than it is. Come on.” He pulled her to her feet.
She pressed one hand against her throat and pointed at the patchwork man with the other. “What about Frankenstein?”
“Why didn’t you just shoot it?”
“Because unlike some supposed fucking geniuses,” she said, “I wasn’t going to spray gunfire in the direction of one of my friends.”
“Sorry.”
“Forget it.”
“So now we’re friends?”
“Fuck off. What are we doing with him?”
“Nothing for now. We’ve got four minutes nine seconds until that charge blows.” Mike hobbled toward the Door. The new wave of adrenaline and endorphins were helping to hide the pain.
She glanced at the patchwork man, scooped up her rifle, and followed Mike. “It’s not enough. It won’t destroy the Door.”
“I know. But we need to get Jamie first.”
“How?”
He crouched down and grabbed one of the nitrogen hoses. The blast had flung most of it to the far side of the room, but the heavy flange that had connected it to the rings was still near the ramp. He stood up and dragged more of it over. The far end was ragged from the explosion, but there was still over forty feet. “I’m going after her.”
Sasha looked at the sand and dust whirling out of the wasteland. The winds on the other side of the Door weren’t hurricane strength, but they didn’t look much lower. She’d read stories about sandstorms cutting people apart and wondered how much truth there was to them.
And then the light shifted in the wasteland. She looked up through the shimmering haze around the rings and saw something dark stretch across the sky. It could’ve been a cloud, but it seemed too solid and too fast. Under the noise of the wind she thought she heard something, like a rumbling voice, and it was—
“Take this,” Mike said. He shoved the end of the hose closest to the flange into her hands.
She blinked and looked at it. “What? Why?”
“I’m going to run the hose through the Door.” He pointed at the whirling sand. It seemed to be dying down, but there was no way to be sure. “I’m hoping it’ll act like a lifeline. Give me something to follow through all of that. Maybe it’ll help keep the Door open, too. Keep it from switching to another reality.”
“And if it does switch?”
“Then I guess we’ll end up somewhere else.”
There were five dead Marines near the ramp. None of them had a sidearm. Mike didn’t trust himself with a rifle. The ants had enough reference pictures to switch out the magazine on Black’s pistol, but the pistol was two yards to the right, Black’s body was to the left, and Mike didn’t have time to search for the magazines.
He took a deep breath. The air by the rings smelled dry and dead, but there was more oxygen in it. He took another breath and his head cleared. He hadn’t realized it had been fuzzy.
“Three minutes, forty seconds,” he said. “If I’m not back in two, you should run for the parking lot. Maybe keep running.”
“I’ll be here,” she said with a firm nod. She wrapped one hand around the hose and held her rifle one-handed with the other. “Go.”
Mike gathered a loose coil of hose under his arm. He took three quick steps up the ramp and took one more breath. Sand was pouring out of the rings and sifting down through the expanded steel of the pathway. He tasted dust and concrete on his tongue.
He stepped through the Door.
FIFTY-SIX
Mike stumbled in the sand. It was two feet higher on this side. The wind was burying the rings.
He marched forward. He didn’t run. He didn’t have the time or strength to fall and pick himself up again and again. When he had something to run to, then he’d run.
The hose stretched out behind him. It was eight feet, four inches from where Sasha stood to the threshold of the rings. He had just shy of thirty-four feet on the wasteland side, depending on if there was any stretch in the hose.
Pattern recognition kicked in fourteen feet from the rings. His eyes passed over a series of ridges and folds in the sand. The ants conjured up models and extrapolations based on wind direction and accumulation. There was a body buried there, just a few inches down.
It had three arms. He considered the possibility that it was the rifle Jamie had grabbed, but all three limbs were crooked. And the body was too long.
He moved through the sand. The wind was dying down, but visibility still sucked. The wasteland had been drained of all color. All life.
Thirty-four feet of hose ran out very fast. He looked back at the rings and then out at the desert. The sandstorm was rolling off toward the horizon, but it was still dense enough to hide the canyon.
Something moved in the sandstorm. A shadow up in the air. He tried to reconstruct the glimpse he’d seen, but the ants kept shredding the images. Nothing could have wings that big.
“Jamie!” He counted to three and yelled again. The wasteland swallowed it up without a single echo.
A pair of black ants held up the mental timer. Three minutes, thirteen seconds.
He let the ragged end of the hose drop and kept walking. When he last saw Jamie she’d headed off to the left, so he headed that way, too. The ants kept track of steps and angles and direction. The few landmarks were mapped and cataloged.
The sun was in the wrong place. It was too high in the sky for late afternoon. And too far south. He didn’t trust it for figuring directions.
He trudged through the sand
. Jamie had been wearing a white shirt and faded jeans. Not an ideal combination to pick out of the wasteland, but he was pretty sure the same mental skills that let him pick out camouflage would let him spot her.
In the distance, the sandstorm swirled into a series of dust devils the size of tornados. The ants focused on certain lines and shadows near the twists of wind and sand. He felt a twist, thinking he’d found her and she was too far to make it back to the rings in time. Then he realized there were too many figures.
Eleven seraphs stood off in the distance, all but hidden in the wasteland by their cloaks. Some stood, others seemed to be kneeling. Their arms were held up to the sky, toward the sandstorm that had just blown over them. They were all facing away from him. The winds died a little more and he realized there were another dozen of the creatures past the first line he’d seen.
The ants replayed moments of the seraphs running across the sand as they charged the Door.
“Jamie,” he shouted again. He looked behind him and saw nothing.
He started forward again.
A full minute passed. One hundred-seventeen feet away from the end of the hose, one hundred-fifty-one feet from the threshold of the rings. He set his simple map of the wasteland against his memories of the area around the Door campus. He’d been heading north-northeast. He stood where an old east-west access road, not much more than a path, ran in his world.
Mike veered more to the north. Jamie hadn’t passed back into his line of sight, so she had to have gone farther that way. He made his way over a dune and called out her name twice. He marched for another thirty seconds. One minute, forty-eight seconds left on the clock.
Barely enough time to get back to the Door.
“Jamie,” he yelled again.
“Mike?”
He spun around. She lumbered over a dune through the loose sand with another woman. Someone tall with a bright red shirt and dark hair that had a white stripe.
The ants spent a few seconds figuring out hypothetical paths. Ways Sasha could have gotten into the desert and out to Jamie without his hearing or seeing her. Then she looked up and he saw the lack of stitches on her arm and her unmarked neck. Blood covered the white of her right eye.
Two identical chocolate croissants. Quantum donuts.
He brushed the ants aside and took long strides across the wasteland to join them. They were coming from farther behind the Door, as if they’d traveled in a wide circle.
“What are you doing here?” called Jamie.
“Looking for you.”
“The bomb didn’t go off?”
“We’ve got about a minute and a half.”
“Did you reset it?”
“What?”
“We can’t find the Door,” the other Sasha said.
The ants pulled up their map and rendered it in three dimensions. He glanced over his shoulder. The rings were sixty-three yards away in the sand-covered remains of Site B. The off-white housings blended with the wasteland, and the shimmer in the air wasn’t visible from this direction. He wouldn’t have found it again if he didn’t know just where to look. “This way,” he said.
They turned around, and the ants in Mike’s head went mad. The thing in the sky was turning, soaring out from behind the sandstorm in its wake. It was like watching a jumbo jet bank in the air, something that had to go miles out of its way just to turn around. Its wings thrust down again, and the far side of the canyon was swept clear.
He took in the size and the tentacles and the wings and the sheer impossibility of it. The ants scurried and flailed and came up with nothing to compare it to, nothing that could explain it.
More and more ants appeared and he forced them away. The ones that mattered were holding the timer. One minute, thirteen seconds. He’d wasted seven seconds staring at the thing in the sky as it swung itself around.
The seraphs on the ground seemed to shout and cheer at the thing even as the wind of its passing hurled them into the air or slammed them to the ground.
The dust before the endless sandstorm, the patchwork man had said. They are the tide going out before the wave comes in.
He traced the curve of the alpha predator’s path. It led back to the Door. Straight to it.
“I think we should go,” said Sasha.
He pointed the way again, and they ran for the Door. It was time to run. They stumbled and dragged one another across the sand.
Mike took a step, and the shimmer appeared in the air as if he’d walked around a corner and found it. Outside, without walls and a ceiling blocking the view, it was clear how big the rift had grown. The heat haze stretched almost fifty feet into the air and a hundred feet across.
Big enough for the thing in the sky to force its way through.
They found the hose, already slipping beneath the sand. Mike tripped over the buried cinder blocks, and his side flared hot and wet. They dragged him back to his feet and headed for the rings.
Twenty-eight seconds.
They slogged the few yards past the dead bugman to the fold in space. The air coming through it felt chilly. “Move fast,” said Mike. “There’s only one charge, but I think it’s still enough to kill us if we’re too close. Just run as far as you can.”
They stepped through the Door.
The steel pathway clanged under their feet. A wave of cold hit them. They danced around the body of the bugman and staggered down the ramp.
Sasha—the Sasha at the bottom of the ramp with the bloody neck and bandaged arm—swung her rifle around. The Sasha with the bloodshot eye held up her hands. “Whoa.”
“Fuck me,” Sasha said over her rifle.
“No time,” yelled Mike. “Go!”
“What? But you were barely gone a minute.”
Mike stopped short and almost fell. Jamie caught his arm. “What?”
“A minute tops,” said the Sasha with the rifle and bandages.
The ants spilled out. The relative distance. The bushes and the seraphs moving back and forth across the wasteland. He glanced up at the charge and looked at Jamie. “How long were you over there?”
Jamie shrugged. “Ten minutes, maybe.”
Bloodshot Sasha nodded. “Sounds about right.”
“Okay, then,” he said. “Just over two minutes to save the world.”
“Oh, fuck me,” said bandaged Sasha. “It’s gone.”
They all looked up. The plastic carapace that Dylan had chopped away with a hatchet had reappeared. It was smooth and pristine. The C4 charge had vanished.
“I think it’s inside the carapace,” bloodshot Sasha said.
Mike closed his eyes. The side of his shirt was wet. The air was stale with nitrogen. The ants were seething. Red and black, carrying facts and snippets and ideas. What was setting off the bleed-through? Was it the items themselves? Certain actions or temperatures or…
Or what did Koturovic say would help break down the barriers?
“It’s us,” he said to Jamie. “The more of us here, closer to it, the more possible outcomes. The more potential. The more potential, the more bleed-through. We’re making reality flip channels.”
“What?”
“It’s how we made the extra bolts appear, and how we brought one of the charges back when we all got too close. It’s why more tool chests appeared when the Marines got here and why everything calmed down when they were killed.” He stepped up onto the ramp. “Come on, get closer to it.”
Bandaged Sasha raised her eyebrows. “Closer?”
Jamie looked past him. The alpha predator had finished its huge turn and was heading back to them. It was over the canyon, maybe two miles away.
But time went faster over there.
She stepped up onto the ramp. So did the Sashas.
Mike watched for a ripple or a change. He blinked, then blinked again. When he opened his eyes the second time, Dylan’s rifle and the remote were back on the pathway.
“What are we doing?” asked bloodshot Sasha. She looked out across the wastela
nd. The alpha predator swelled in the sky.
“We’re looking for quantum donuts,” said Mike. The rings flickered. The carapace vanished again. One minute, twenty-one seconds. There’d been three of them by the rings when the first charge came back, and there were four now. The rate of change should be faster. Unless the Sashas counted as one mind. Or—
There’d been four people near the rings when the charge came back.
He looked across the room, then at the bandaged Sasha. “Did you kill him? Frankenstein?”
She shook her head. “I’ve just been stand—”
“Drag him over here. We need more minds. More potential.”
The Sashas ran across the room. They dragged the patchwork man across the floor. The slender figure left trails of dark blood on the floor. Mike could see three good-sized lumps and bruises forming on its head from the rifle stocks.
“He used to be human,” Mike explained. “I bet his brain still is. Enough to factor into Koturovic’s equations, at least. The more minds, the stronger the rift, the more bleed-through.”
They hauled the twisted body up onto the ramp. A few stitches broke open as they dragged it across the expanded steel. The fingers on one hand twitched and the lid over the human eye fluttered.
“I think it’s waking up,” said bloodshot Sasha.
Fifty-three seconds.
Mike turned his head and fishhooks of pain pulled at his ribs. The alpha predator filled the sky in the wasteland. It was less than a mile away.
Its tentacles splayed open like a green flower. Mike glimpsed huge amber eyes, each one twenty feet across.
Then the rings rippled in his peripheral vision. “Get back,” he yelled at them. “Get back fast.”
They leaped over the patchwork man and off the ramp. Mike’s side and stomach were on fire, and they flared up as the shock of landing shook his body. Jamie grabbed him and tugged him away.
The first ring had turned silver and lumpy.
“What…” said Jamie.
It was tape. Duct tape. The entire ring was wrapped in it. The loops covered the whole thing, wrapped back and forth across almost every inch of surface.