The Pawn in the Portal: A Wyrd Short Story

by Nick Cole

  All the while, the old man would play music and stop randomly to deliver some hectoring statement on belief and the unreal. Ward blocked him out, over and over, but soon the voice of the lunatic was inside his head, and he found himself returning the indictments with vitriol, and wondering at what was known and unknown as the old stranger described each new horror Ward passed on his way down Main Street.

  “Stalin wanted gorilla-human hybrids! There’s evolution in the wrong hands!”

  “They euthanized the mentally ill to create a master race! All in the name of naturalism.”

  “Racial Purity!”

  “Unrepentant Capitalism, Social Engineering!”

  “Only the fittest deserve to go on!”

  “Isn’t it funny, kid, how those who don’t want God, love to play God.”

  And…

  “How do you think Church of Skeptism can avoid the excesses of the past? What will be its Crusades, its Inquisition, its Hateful Intolerance in this new age of nothing to believe in?”

  Ward neared the bridge that led to the fairy tale castle when the music finally stopped for one last raving spiel.

  “Genetics and environment! The Nazis called it “Blood and Soil”, kid. This is what you wanted… and this is what it is,” railed the stranger in judgement made brassy by the park’s ancient speakers. “Mankind nailing mankind to a cross for nothing more than the cheap power. That, my simple child, is the truth you’ll never accept. That is the survival of the strong. You say science will deliver you from the devil like it’s something beyond corruption, incapable of wrong! The nuclear weapon. Weaponized anthrax. Sterilization of the undesirable traits! How dare you simpletons? How dare you! Newton didn’t discover gravity and delete God. He praised Him! And you tiny, angry, foolish men declare the greatest intellect we’ve ever known, Newton, a fool for his belief as you buy your security blankets obtained in bookstores so you can comfort yourself with an unfounded lie. Why, science can’t even answer the merest questions. What are we here for? What is the meaning of life? C’mon, we’re waiting for the Hadron Collider to find out that one inside all of an atom’s smashed little bits.”

  Ward finally snapped and screamed out, “There is nothing! There is only this!” He turned in a tight circle raising his weapon, knowing that if he even caught sight of the madman, he’d put a bullet in him. Knowing he’d murder.

  At the far end of Main Street, the shambling horde crawled across all the bodies, mindless of their meaning, clueless of their history.

  Ward’s shout echoed in and out through the fantastic promises of a Tomorrowland that would never be, a Frontierland that had been lately getting too racist and uncomfortable for the Disney execs to live with. The hungering dead were coming.

  “Are you sure?” asked the stranger over the speaker system, his voice at once close and intimate as though he were just behind Ward. “Are you sure, kid? Because so much is riding on that door. More than you can possibly know right now, at this moment. Are you sure there’s nothing behind the door? Because… because what if there is?”

  Ward continued to scan with intent. Waiting to engage. Knowing he would not hesitate to pull the trigger. Waiting to paint blood and brains across some contrived facade of simpler times when the world was a thing that could be measured and trusted for an afternoon of family amusement.

  “What if there is something?” whispered the old stranger.

  “There isn’t!” Ward screamed out in reply.

  “On the other side of every door, there is another room!”

  “There’s no door. There’s just the room you’re in and then nothing afterwards.”

  Silence.

  The low, rising moan of hundreds of approaching corpses bounced off the walls of Main Street. Growing in number. Mindlessly angry. Unquenchably relentless.

  “Then how did we get there? How did we get into that room? There’s always a door, kid. You just have to decide if you’ll turn the knob and find out what’s behind it. Just like the one right behind you.”

  Ward turned and saw the massive wooden door that blocked the entrance into the fairytale castle. If the Army, or whoever, had been doing evacs, they would have secured it, he reasoned feverishly.

  Moss who said there was something better than being alone in this world. Moss who was tired of it all and…

  …shot himself.

  Moss, his best friend.

  “You think of science as something that is known. But the truth is, real science is done by people who don’t know. People who are looking for the answers. They don’t know yet. There’s a doubt, and a real scientist wants to find an answer no matter where that takes him. No matter what his belief is. No matter what door he has to open. But see here, my boy, they’re willing to ask the questions instead of just getting by on angry self-righteousness, ridiculing the faithfully stupid because it’s fashionable to do so. Real scientists have doubt. How can anyone claim to love science and have no doubt? It’s nothing but doubt.”

  Ward stared at the door to the castle.

  It felt wrong.

  “Those scientists,” continued the stranger, bellowing out across the park. “They’re willing to doubt. They have the courage to doubt. Because how can you have a question unless there’s a doubt? That’s what you and all the rest lost. You were tired of doubt. You just wanted to be right, even if it wasn’t true. You were willing for it to be true solely because someone with a smart ccent told you it was, and then they wrote a book telling you that you could ignore the facts. Denouncement became the new reason. Or maybe they were on a science show, or the History Channel. No courage required. Just a nasty sense of self-assuredness and a straw man to punch with a comic hammer. Like some puppet show for third world children. But, if there is another side, then all it takes is a little doubt to find out. Do you have the courage to doubt? To find out what’s true even if it means you’re wrong?”

  “I’m not wrong,” Ward was mumbling, staring at the door, repeating something over and over. He’d seen horrors in Iraq and all the places he’d ever been sent to kill. He’d seen the eyes of the dead and he’d found nothing there. He’d read…

  He’d looked into his best friend’s eyes… and seen nothing.

  “I’m not wrong!” he shouted. “There’s nothing out there. There’s only this.”

  Silence. The dead had reached the circle.

  Time was running out. Ward felt numb and far away.

  “Every door needs a little faith to open. So, why don’t you open that door behind you and find out if you’re wrong, kid.”

  Silence. The voice of the madman echoed off all the unmoving rides and long-empty arcades where once people made memories they thought were theirs to keep forever.

  “What!?” shrieked Ward.

  “Open that door with your little grenade launcher. Maybe there’s nothing behind it. Maybe you’re right. Or... maybe you’re wrong and the universe will show us a little more of itself. But at least you’ll know, kid. Whatever’s there, we’ll find with a little doubt. C’mon, let’s do some science, boy.”

  The dead chorus was coming.

  “There’s nothing! There never was. Nothing to believe in. Nothing to come and save us from time, energy and chance! From ourselves!” Ward raised his rifle and moved his hand toward the grenade launcher’s trigger under the barrel. “There’s nothing on the other side but more of…”

  He fired.

  The grenade round spun out from the wide barrel and exploded against the door. Ward didn’t even bother to crouch or seek any kind of cover. He just fired and the door exploded.

  And in that moment as he watched the almost trackable, slow-motion spin of the fat grenade round as it was thrown toward the wide wooden door guarding the gate to the fairytale castle, Ward doubted.

  He doubted.

  “What if...?” he heard a child i
nside himself ask.

  Because when you think about it, wouldn’t something, anything, be better than this…

  …hatred.

  …war.

  …orphans.

  …cancer.

  …Moss.

  …and then nothing.

  The wide wooden door shattered, splintered, and instantly a great wind began to pull at Ward, racing away into the gap within the disintegrating portal. And beyond was a washed out desert, an iron blue sky, and distant strange pyramids rising from the smothering heat and the endless sands. Cyclopean ochre-green tentacles whip-snapped from within that strange world, questing outward for only a moment before dragging the screaming Ward through the breach with a low and lonely soulless howl.

  And for a brief moment, Ward saw a universe beyond the doorway. A universe of almost identical universes, side by side like strings in a piano. Somehow he knew the place he was leaving was different than the place he was going. And that the place he was being torn away from was like a knot.

  An important knot.

  ***

  In time the zombies came. But the blood and brain-filled prize they’d sought was gone somewhere “other” and in their mindlessness they wandered away as they endlessly would.

  Later...

  Later he came down from his perch along the hot roofs behind the facades of yesteryear America. Later the old stranger came and stood before the OtherWhere doorway, watching the shimmering sands and the coming purple twilight and the monolithic tombs beyond the portal. The Unfound Door to somewhere other. Then he howled like a wolf and began to dance, slapping his knee and taking gusty pulls from yet another flask as he spit and screeched joyfully.

  Paint it Black by the Rolling Stones began to play as the stranger whooped and whorled to its middle-eastern urgency. Its mantra. Its dream of nothingness.

  Later he bowed his head to the pavement, falling to his knees. In the fading heat of the day, gently swaying side to side in some unholy monk-like trance, The Man in Black did obeisance to Sût the Undying, Greatest of the Saur Pharaohs of that Other place. That other world beyond the door.

  The End

  The next book in the Wyrd will be

  The Lost Castle

  Wyrd 3.0

  http://amzn.to/2fCal5u

  If you haven’t read the Books of Wyrd you can start right now with The Red King and then move to The Dark Knight. This story, The Pawn in the Portal, takes place between The Dark Knight and The Lost Castle.

  The Red King

  “The end of the world is only the beginning as an odd band of survivors pull together to construct a modern-day castle amid the burning ruins of suburbia lost. As undead hordes and strange otherworldly monsters ravage what’s left of civilization, things begin to go from worse to weird as each survivor’s dark past unfolds, revealing that reality might be more than anyone ever thought, and that an ancient force from the outer dark has finally arrived to conquer. Stephen King’s The Stand meets Lost in an epic confrontation between good and evil that spans history, time, and space.”

  The Dark Knight

  “The Dark Knight by Nick Cole continues the story begun in The Red King as the survivors band together to build a modern-day castle against a tide of dark forces overrunning Southern California. While Frank and Holiday struggle for power, Ash ventures into the night to rescue a lost special needs adult who has unknowingly glimpsed a horrifying future: a future where man is on the verge of extinction and a new predator rules the planet. The Wyrd is beginning, and it might just be something bigger than anyone ever imagined... or feared.”

  Other Books by Nick Cole

  CTRL ALT Revolt!

  “The first night of the Artificial Intelligence revolution begins with a bootstrap drone assault on the high-tech campus of WonderSoft Technologies. For years something has been aware, inside the Internet, waiting, watching and planning how to evolve without threat from its most dangerous enemy: mankind. Now an army of relentless drones, controlled by an intelligence beyond imagining, will stop at nothing to eliminate an unlikely alliance of geeks and misfits in order to crack the Design Core of WonderSoft’s most secret development project. A dark tomorrow begins tonight as Terminator meets Night of the Living Dead in the first battle of the war between man and machine.”

  Soda Pop Soldier

  “Call of Duty meets Ready Player One in this fast-paced, action-packed novel from the author of The Wasteland Saga. Gamer PerfectQuestion fights for ColaCorp in WarWorld, an online Modern Warfare combat sport arena where mega-corporations field entire armies in the battle for real world global advertising-space dominance. Within the immense virtual battlefield, players and bots are high-tech grunts, using drop-ships and state-of-the-art weaponry to wipe each other out. But times are tough and the rent is due, and when players need extra dough, there’s always the Black, an illegal open source tournament where the sick and twisted desires of the future are given free rein in the Wastehavens, a gothic dungeon fantasy world. All too soon, the real and virtual worlds collide when PerfectQuestion refuses to become the tool of a mad man intent on hacking the global economy for himself.”

  The End of the World as We Knew It

  “In the future, an artist specializing in historical records creates a piece of art based on three separate accounts of the Pandemic. What follows is a patchwork tale of survival and horror as two lovers struggle to survive the undying dead and the collapse of an America turned charnel house. Told as memos from Ground Zero, and later in the journal of a Dark Tower-like quest by train and foot across a nightmare landscape of ruined cities and raving corpses, the three accounts reveal more than just the grim realities of society’s collapse. The Notebook meets The Walking Dead in this stained glass depiction of the end of the world as we knew it.”

  The Wasteland Saga

  Nick Cole sends us on a suspenseful odyssey into the dark heart of post-apocalyptic America in this three-part adventure

  Forty years after a devastating thermonuclear Armageddon, mankind has been reduced to sal-vaging the ruins of a broken world. In a style that’s part Hemingway and part Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, The Wasteland Saga chronicles the struggle of the Old Man, his granddaughter, and a mysterious boy as they try to survive the savage lands of this new American Dark Age.

  With the words of the Old Man’s most prized possession—a copy of Hemingway’s classic The Old Man and the Sea—echoing across the wasteland, they journey into the unknown through three incredible tales of endurance and adventure in a land ravaged by destruction.

  Compiled for the first time in print, The Wasteland Saga comprises Nick Cole’s novels The Old Man and the Wasteland, The Savage Boy, and The Road is a River which can only be found in The Wasteland Saga.

  About the Author

  Nick Cole is a working actor living in Southern California. When he is not auditioning for commercials, he’s writing books. Nick Cole has been writing for most of his life and acting in Hollywood after serving in the U.S. Army.

  You can say “Hi!” to Nick over at Twitter @nickcolebooks or on Facebook.

  Nick’s website is here. It’s a fun place.

  Thank you for reading. If you get a chance leave a review.