by Peter Clines
She smiled.
Mike looked at her again. At the lines of their suits. The buttons. The stitching. The ants carried out a series of images. Both the man and the woman were wearing off-the-rack suits, not tailored at all. He’d seen the man’s jacket before, two weeks ago at Target with Bob. They’d walked past menswear on the way to pick up a mini-fridge, and there’d been a rack of suit separates next to the aisle.
“Which agency did you say you were with?”
The woman crossed her arms and smiled. It wasn’t an entirely friendly expression. “I never said we were with the government.”
“Nice job,” said the man, walking up behind Mike. He held up a bright green phone for the woman to see. “Just heard. Everything’s going back to zero.”
“So what’s that mean?” asked Mike. “ ‘Everything’s going back to zero’?”
The big man thumped him on the shoulder. It made his ribs throb. “Means you just saved the world, dude,” he said. “Cool feeling, huh?” He gave the woman a nod and then walked back toward the building, snapping pictures with his phone.
Mike and the woman stared at each other for a moment.
“I’m sorry about all this,” she said. “That all of you had to go through it and get hurt.”
“People died,” he said. “Nineteen people. Dead.” The ants swarmed out of their faces. Sixteen Marines, including Black, Weaver, and his former student Duncan. Olaf. Neil. Bob.
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
“So who are you?” he asked.
“I doubt you’ve heard of us,” she said. “But we’re government subsidized. Sort of. Did you see anything?”
“Sorry?”
“You were doing some kind of dimensional experiments here, right? Based off the work of a Victorian mad scientist?”
He furrowed his brow. “How’d you know that?”
“I’ve seen this a few times before. That’s pretty much always how it goes.”
“Is that supposed to be a joke?”
“I wish. What did you see before you blew the place up?”
He tried to read her expression. “I’m not sure you’d believe me.”
“You’d be surprised.” She looked over at the building. “Let me ask you this, then. Did you have a roach problem?”
His brows went up. “Yeah.”
“Green roaches?” she added. “Kind of strange ones with an extra leg?”
“You’ve seen them before.”
The woman nodded. “Them, and what comes after them.” She looked past him to the building. “Again…I’m really sorry.”
Another moment passed.
“Who are you?”
“I had a long drive to read personnel files,” she said, ignoring him. She nodded her chin toward Sasha and Dasha. “I know all about you, Leland Erikson, prefers Mike, but I didn’t know they had twins working here.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, they do.”
The woman pressed her lips together and nodded. “That’s new,” she said after a minute. “You’re sure she’s not an evil twin or anything?”
“Pretty sure, yeah.”
“I think I can help clear that up, then,” she said. “That they’re just twins. Who’ve always worked here.”
“Thanks.”
“Not a problem. At least we can help a little.”
The spray of water from the fire hoses loosened a pair of cinder blocks. They plunged off what was left of their wall and shattered against the concrete floor. According to Mike’s internal diagram, they hit right where the collection of tool chests had been.
“So,” he said, “what was all this about?”
She nodded after the big man. “Like Roger said. Saving the world.”
“You do this for a living? Stop alien invasions from other dimensions.”
“Now and then. Most of the time, my job’s more about historical research. And some hacking.”
“Sounds interesting.”
“You have no idea.”
A fireman walked up and talked to Jamie and the twins for a moment. Sasha and Dasha relaxed. Jamie smiled. She glanced over at Mike, judged the conversation he was having with the Indian woman, and gestured at the path down to the trailers. He nodded. She nodded back and walked off with the two identical women.
“So,” the Indian woman said as Jamie walked away. “You’re not an English teacher anymore. They started advertising for a replacement a few days ago. Are you going to work for your friend at DARPA?”
“Doubtful.”
“No job. Sounds like no place to live, either.”
“Are you going somewhere with this?”
She tilted her head to one side and stared at him for a moment. Then she pulled a bright green phone from her pocket. Her fingers swooshed back and forth across the phone’s screen. “We’ve got a vacancy. Two, if you want to bring your girlfriend. We can always use somebody else with computer skills, because I’m sick of doing everything.”
“Vacancy?”
“Yeah.”
“Which means…?”
“I can’t tell you that. Not yet. But you know what I can tell you?” She turned and headed back toward the Tesla.
He took a quick step to keep up with her and his ribs ached. “What?”
“This is going to keep you up at night,” she said. “It’s going to gnaw at you. Because that’s what happened to me. And Roger. And some other people. We found clues. We saw things. And we wanted to know more. We needed to know more. Just like you need to know more.”
“Says who?”
“Says me. Now that you’ve seen what’s out there, your only two options are deep denial or finding the rest of the answers. It sucks, I know, but that’s it.”
He felt the corners of his mouth twitch. “I’m not really built for denial.”
“Exactly.” She held out the phone. “There’s one number in it. Think about it and give us a call. You’ve got a week.”
Mike took it from her. “And then what happens?”
“Then the number gets disconnected and the phone turns into a paperweight. You never get any more answers, and you lose a lot of sleep.”
The man—Roger—walked back from the building and around the Tesla. He dropped his own phone in his coat pocket and pulled open the driver’s door.
The woman opened her own door. “One week,” she said. “Don’t forget.”
The Tesla made a tight turn inside the circle of emergency vehicles, slid between two barricades, and then headed off down the street.
FIFTY-NINE
The path to the trailers was clear, but clogged with smoke from the main building and the overgrowth. Mike walked the long way around. It was hard on his ribs, but he’d live.
He tried to slip the green phone into his back pocket while he walked, but reaching his arm back and up made his ribs flare again. He pushed it into his front pocket instead. It was a bit awkward there, but it would be in his hand again soon enough.
Mycroft wouldn’t call the number on the phone. But Sherlock would. Really, if Mike was going to be Sherlock now, he’d call the number he’d seen when Roger held up his smartphone after talking to his boss. The ants carried out an image of the screen with CALL ENDED and the 323 number belonging to NATE. He expected it would be an interesting conversation.
The first trailer, Olaf’s, was a burned out, soggy husk. Bob’s wasn’t much better. Puddles spread around them, soaking into the gravel.
His own trailer had lost its roof and part of one wall. That had opened it up enough for everything else to burn. No more futon. No more tablet from Reggie. He’d also lost his clothes and his duffel bag. And all the reports about the Door.
All the paper copies, anyway.
The Astroturf between the trailers had burned in some places, melted in others. Water from the fire hoses was pooled up on it. From lawn to swamp in one day.
Jamie’s trailer had lost its windows in the pressure blast and had a few dark spots where heat had
discolored the paint. Sasha’s had black walls and broken glass, but looked overall intact. The trailer with the seraph skeleton, farthest from the main building, looked fine.
Jamie stepped out of her trailer, and something burst past her ankles. Tramp raced across the gravel, his tongue waving in the wind, and ran circles around Mike. “He okay?”
“Yeah,” she said. “He got out but he was under my trailer. Soaking wet from the hoses. I just finished drying him off.”
“Ahhh.” Mike walked closer, and Tramp bounced around him.
“It’s where he used to go, y’know, before anything happened to him.”
Mike nodded. “I think I just got a job offer.”
“From the Indian woman?”
“Yeah. You did, too.”
“Cool. Doing what?”
“We can talk about it later, but I think you’ll be interested.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yeah. I’m taking it.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.” He nodded at the burned-out trailers. “Everything okay here?”
“It’s great,” she said. “Know why?”
“Why?”
She waved him inside.
He smiled. “I like where this is going.”
“Please. I don’t want to hear you crying about your ribs while I’m trying to use you for my own filthy needs.”
He laughed and winced as his ribs stretched and contracted. She helped him up the steps into the trailer.
There was a lot of broken glass, but several clean spots. There was some water, but none of it seemed to be on computer components. “What am I looking at?”
She beamed and pointed behind him.
Mike didn’t see it at first. There were so many differences that it took pattern recognition almost four seconds to isolate the ball of fur on top of the bookshelf. Glitch yawned, showing off a mouthful of white teeth, stretched out his paws, and then settled into a new position.
Mike grinned. “Holy crap,” he said.
She laughed. “You’re not a teacher anymore. You can swear.”
“It’s just who I am. Deal with it.”
“So if the Door’s shut down and they’re both here,” she said, “is this…permanent?”
“I think so.”
“And Sasha? Sashas?”
He smirked. “Yeah. That’s going to be a bit weird for them. Her.”
“And us?”
“Us?”
She wrapped her arms around him, careful not to put pressure on his ribs. “Where does this leave us?”
“How do you mean?”
From his bookshelf perch, Glitch glared down at the canine intruder. Tramp bounced back and forth across the floor, eager for his new playmate to come down. The cat hissed at him.
“You’re not the Mike I fell for,” said Jamie. “I’m not the woman you fell for. Is it still going to work for us?”
“I hope so.”
“How do I know you’ve got the same quirks I liked? The same laugh? The same annoying tendency to spout off information?”
“I’m annoying in every reality. Honest.”
She laughed.
“The important clue, of course, is the chocolate croissant.”
Jamie looked up at him. “Okay, I take it back. You lost me.”
“They started bringing croissants for me the day after you crosswalked. But you ordered them the day before that.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So she ordered them, too. The other you.”
A slow smile spread across her face as her arms tightened around his waist. He winced. “Mr. Erikson, are you trying to imply that I fall for you in every possible reality?”
“I can only tell you, there are a lot of parallels.”
Tramp barked again, and Glitch sent a paperback tumbling down at the small dog. He yipped at the acknowledgment and bounced some more.
“So now what?” asked Jamie.
He kissed her on the forehead. “We save what we can. We go check on Arthur. And then…”
“And then?”
“We keep getting to know each other.”
AFTERWORD
Like some of them do, this book has been sitting in my head for years.
Back when I was in college, I wrote a short story called “The Albuquerque Door” for a junior year creative writing class. It dealt with several of the same ideas in this book, but with a much smaller cast of characters and on a much less talented level. Needless to say, it didn’t go over well with the instructor’s “literary” tastes, and while I didn’t agree with him on a lot of his points, it left me feeling bad enough about the story that I just filed it away.
It was around 2006 when I came across that story again and realized, through more experienced eyes, that it could be expanded into a novel. I put some work into it and ended up with about 30,000 words of a book tentatively titled Mouth. It was at this point that a few different things lined up and Mouth was put aside so I could work on this idea I had of superheroes fighting a zombie apocalypse.
Jump ahead to December of 2012. My lovely lady and I were driving home from a small Christmas party, and I was bouncing ideas off her for a possible sequel to a semi-popular book I’d written called 14. And it struck me that a bunch of elements from Mouth lined up with some things from that book, and they could go together quite well. Although, the more I thought about it, the more I thought it’d work better as a side-quel sort of story—more of a shared universe than a continuation of the same story.
And this took me to San Diego Comic-Con, where I had a drink with some folks from Crown and they asked what I was going to do next.
A lot of work went into this one, and—as always—there are a few people who deserve a lot of thanks for all their help. If you found a mistake somewhere, it was me twisting the facts and not them steering me wrong. In no particular order…
Mary answered countless questions about trauma, wounds, cancers, autopsies, cause of death, and more.
My dad, who used to work as a radiation protection consultant, explained some of the dangers of working with radioactive material and the various injuries and effects radiation can have on a human body. Say, if you were walking around after a nuclear war.
Tansey talked to me about the different types of testing that different technologies go through before being declared “market safe.”
There was a whole subplot that revolved around endurance running. It’s gone, for a couple of reasons, but SukGin helped a lot with it so she still deserves credit.
“Assignment: Earth” was always one of my favorite episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series. I felt exceptionally clever tying Gary Seven and company to the early life of Khan Noonien Singh, until I found out (around my third draft) that author Greg Cox had already done this in his two-part novel, The Eugenics Wars.
David, CD, and John all read an earlier version of this book and pointed out a few places I’d done things right and several more where I’d gone wrong. Craig let me ramble on about it for a few hours while he was visiting Los Angeles for his own book signing.
We struggled with a title for a while, so one day I bounced a bunch of options off the people on my Facebook fan page. So thanks to all of you who chimed in.
David, my agent, also gave me a bunch of valuable criticism and some good suggestions and let me bounce ideas off him during several long phone calls.
Julian, my editor, suffered through a much weaker version of this manuscript, then helped me break it apart and reshape it into the book you’re holding now. He’s incredibly insightful and patient.
Finally, many, many thanks as always to my lovely lady, Colleen, who listens while I talk for hours about things in vague terms, lets me whine for months about how things are going horribly, and doesn’t mock me too much when I finally come around to thinking someone might want to read this.
P.C.
Los Angeles, November 2014
Peter Clines, The Fold: A Novel