by Bryan Smith
Aubrey was right behind her and seemed to sense her thoughts. “I’ve seen this before. Wood-tipped bullets.”
“Where the fuck have you seen this shit before?”
Aubrey gave her a less-than-gentle push in the back to get her moving again. “During the war. Keep moving.”
“War?”
“World War II. In Europe.”
Right. Of course. Aubrey looked like a gorgeous young woman, barely more than twenty. But she was a vampire. Which meant she could be hundreds or thousands of years old. But the ongoing rattle and chatter of the guns was a powerful reminder that existence as a vampire could easily be cut short.
So she picked up her pace as she followed Jenna’s enticingly nude backside down the long hallway. The gorgeous vampire’s long red hair trailed backward behind her, a flowing vision of beautiful crimson, as she shifted to a run and met the first invader successfully able to breach the third floor.
The enemy combatant’s lithe figure marked her as female. She screamed as Jenna grabbed her and lifted her above her head. The masked woman whipped her arm outward, raking the railing with a wild hail of automatic fire. Kira and Aubrey cringed back against the wall, miraculously avoiding being struck by ricocheting bullets. Jenna let out a shriek of rage and flung the woman back down the staircase, bowling over three more masked assailants in the process.
Kira and Aubrey followed her as she got moving again.
As they passed the staircase, a stray round fired by one of the fallen assailants ripped through Aubrey’s skull, sending a spray of red arcing through the air. Kira stopped in her tracks and stared in paralyzed shock as the body of her beautiful servant tumbled dead to the floor. Then she glanced down the staircase and saw one of the fallen assailants struggling to get to his knees. He paused for an instant and looked right at her. His eyes looked dark and hateful behind the holes in his mask.
Kira was briefly possessed by a wild impulse to fly down the stairs and rip him apart. She was enraged. She hadn’t known Aubrey long at all, but she had nonetheless felt a very strong sisterly connection with both her and Jenna. They were sisters in blood. And now that connection was gone. Dead. A beautiful creature’s long existence wiped out by a single fucking bullet.
The assailant shoved the body of a fallen comrade away from him and began to bring his weapon to bear. Another second longer and she might have been just as dead as Aubrey, but Jenna grabbed her by an arm and pulled her out of range just in time. Wood-tipped bullets thunked into the wall behind where she had been standing an instant before.
They continued down the long hallway, Jenna pulling her along at a pace nearly faster than she could match, until they arrived at a metal door.
Jenna let go of Kira and yanked at the handle.
The door didn’t budge.
Kira grimaced. “Locked. Shit.”
She glanced behind her. More men and women in black masks had reached the top of the staircase.
Jenna saw them, too. Her hand was still on the locked door’s handle. “I’ve got this. Duck.”
“Huh?”
“Duck, goddammit!”
Kira dropped to her knees and cringed again as Jenna ripped the door off its hinges, lifted it above her head, and sent it flying down the hallway. To Kira’s astonishment, the door flew as straight and true as a missile fired from a silo. Its bottom edge slammed into the midsection of the lead invader with tremendous force. The impact killed him instantly as blood exploded from his mouth. The door then flipped over and crashed into more of the black-clad invaders coming up fast behind the dead man.
Jenna took Kira by a hand and pulled her through the space formerly occupied by the metal door. The short passage beyond was cloaked in darkness, but Jenna seemed to know exactly where she was going. Seconds later they were ascending an equally dark set of stairs.
“Where are we going?”
“To the roof.”
An explosion resounded somewhere behind them as they banged through another door and out into the crisp, cool night air.
Final Intermission
There had been no time to ponder his expectations of whatever was waiting for him beneath the phony cineplex. However, had there been sufficient time, he doubted his mind would have conjured visions of anything remotely like what he actually saw.
As the translucent floor panel continued its slow descent, a winged albino monkey floated past him. The monkey laughed when it saw his expression of bug-eyed wonder. Then it zipped away into the neon purple sky. A sky that appeared to stretch on forever. The clouds drifting lazily through the air above him were a radioactive shade of green.
Greg knew what he was seeing couldn’t possibly be real, but it sure as hell looked real. The only flaw in the illusion was the rectangular black hole in the sky directly above him, which corresponded in size to the floor panel upon which he was still standing. It looked sort of like a horizontal monolith floating in midair and was out of place with everything else.
All very trippy, no question.
Enough so to stir serious doubts regarding his sanity.
But questions of sanity gave way to queasiness when he glanced down and noted that the still-descending floor panel appeared to be many hundreds of feet above the ground. Perhaps as much as a thousand feet. Or higher. This was another thing the rational part of his mind recognized as almost certainly being illusory. No way was there an underground world of such scope and bizarre wonder lurking beneath the little college town he and some one hundred thousand other souls called home.
Or anywhere, for that matter.
Again, though, the illusion was so perfectly rendered it challenged the things his rational mind insisted it knew. An intense attack of vertigo assailed him as he stared at the ground far below. He was overcome with a nearly irresistible impulse to get down on his hands and knees and cling to the panel for dear life.
Bile touched the back of his throat and sweat formed on his brow.
Oh, fuck it.
He got down on his hands and knees and peered over the edge of the panel. A panoramic view of a gorgeous countryside extending toward the magnificent, gleaming spires of a distant city took his breath away. Gently rolling hills and a vast expanse of lush forest dominated the landscape. More winged creatures swirled about in the sky above the towering treetops. Some resembled the flying albino monkey he’d already encountered, while others were reptilian with fearsome wingspans. The winged reptiles resembled drawings he had seen of pterodactyls. Only larger. These creatures looked fully capable of snatching a man up in their jaws and flying away with him. Greg couldn’t help whimpering at the thought. Some of the creatures weren’t very far away.
Not real, he told himself. They are not fucking real at all. Just remember that and you’ll be fine.
He whimpered again as one of the winged reptiles peeled away from the forest and swooped into the air above him to wheel about like a vulture circling dead meat. Except that wasn’t quite right. Because vultures had nightmares about creatures like this thing. Not real, not real, not real. The creature squawked and flapped its long wings, causing a gust of very real-feeling hot air to rustle Greg’s hair.
Fuck. I am seriously gonna pee my pants in a minute.
He closed his eyes and prayed for the thing to go away. Minutes passed. When he opened his eyes again, the creature had vanished. Wow, magic. He was also much closer to the ground, a few dozen feet high instead of countless hundreds. Seconds later he sat up again as the panel at long last completed its descent. It landed near a single set of railroad tracks winding away toward the distant city.
Greg frowned as he wondered what his next move should be. Perhaps he should follow the railroad tracks to the city and see if he could find any answers to this mystery there. Or he could just stand here a while, maybe wait and see if the panel would rise again and return him to the abandoned lobby of the faux cineplex.
Because in the last few minutes he’d had ample reason to reconsider his resolve to so
mehow help Lashon. He was up against a power beyond his comprehension. Things had seemed hopeless before, but now he had a fuller appreciation for how well and truly fucked the situation was.
He decided to attempt something. He jumped straight upward, as high as he could, hoping the release of pressure would cause the panel to ascend again. It remained right where it was, an incongruous translucent white slab pressed flat against the dusty ground by the railroad tracks. He frowned. Well, there was something else he could test, at least. He knelt at the edge of the panel and pressed the tips of his fingers to the ground. His frown deepened as he moved his fingers in the dust, feeling the grit of the dirt against his skin. Well…it certainly felt real enough.
The implications deeply disturbed him. As he saw it, there were just two possibilities. The first was that this strange realm was real after all, which would mean he had somehow been dropped into a world straight out of some warped fairy tale. Such places were fun for children (and some adults) to read about in fanciful stories, but the notion of one of them rendered tactile and real was kind of terrifying.
The lone other possibility was no less unsettling. And that was that he had been right from the beginning and everything he was seeing here actually was part of some comprehensive and powerful illusion. The technology necessary to create an illusion so thorough, right down to all the textures, sights, and smells, had to be advanced beyond anything humans could even begin to fathom.
Which meant—
He was jolted out of this line of thought by the toot of a train whistle. A glance to his right showed a train engine trailing a single coach and approaching at a moderate speed. He hadn’t even heard the damn thing coming up, yet it was almost upon him. Also audible was the unmistakable chug of a steam engine. Yet no steam emerged from the chimney at the front of the locomotive or from anywhere else. So here, at last, was a chip in the otherwise perfect veneer of a masterful illusion. The train slowed as it neared him, rolling to a complete stop as the passenger coach pulled up alongside the floor panel.
Well, this was weird.
No weirder than anything else so far, but still…
A door opened in the side of the coach and a midget with green skin dressed in a tiny tuxedo appeared at the top of a short set of steps.
Greg couldn’t help gaping at him.
Oh, come on. You’ve gotta be shitting me.
The green midget grinned broadly and called out to him in a jocular voice. “Greetings, Greg Nelson! Dr. Ominous requests the pleasure of your company!”
Greg said nothing. He just stared.
The midget’s jolly grin faltered slightly. “Did you not hear me, Greg Nelson?”
“Oh, I heard you. Listen…are you a fucking leprechaun?”
“No, I am not a fucking leprechaun. I am a little green man with a rapidly dwindling sense of humor. Now, will you please board the train? You do not want to keep Dr. Ominous waiting.”
“Dr. Ominous? Seriously?”
The midget sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I didn’t want it to come to this, but I suppose force will be necessary.”
“Whoa, hold on. No no no. Here I come. No force required.”
Greg stepped off the floor panel and approached the train. The little green man didn’t look like much of a threat, but appearances didn’t mean much in this strange place. He had no doubt the diminutive green person could unleash an impressive degree of force and fury should circumstances warrant it. And that was a scenario he’d rather avoid.
The midget stepped aside as Greg climbed the steps and boarded the train. The door squeaked shut behind him and the train started moving again. A man sat behind a large wooden desk at the rear of the coach. Greg couldn’t see him because he was reading a newspaper held open in front of his face.
Well…he had assumed this Dr. Ominous person was a man. But maybe not. He saw chipped black nail polish on the fingers curled around the edges of the newspaper. The newspaper itself had to be some kind of prop. Just another piece of the illusion. It was a copy of a 1960s edition of the New York Times. The headline was about a military escalation in Vietnam. It was an odd detail he might have fixated on if not for the wealth of vastly stranger things vying for his attention.
Prior to boarding the train, he had noted windows lining the side of the coach. Now there was no sign of them. Instead, there were several large screens displaying what appeared to be images from gruesome horror movies. On one screen, an attractive blonde girl was leading a group of frightened-looking people across a dark parking lot while trying to avoid zombies. Fascinated, he watched as she calmly and expertly blew away members of the shambling army of undead.
On another screen, naked women covered in blood were running down the hallway of a very large house, possibly a mansion.
And on another screen…
Greg’s heart almost stopped.
Lashon…
She was on her back in a dark room. She looked unconscious. The angle of the view changed and he saw other people in that dark space. Bodies.
Hanging from hooks.
A deeply resonant male voice spoke. “Have a seat, Mr. Nelson.”
Greg continued staring at the screen, his heart racing as he silently willed Lashon to wake up and get the fuck out of that hellish-looking place.
He heard a crinkle of newspaper as the man’s voice spoke again. “You want to help her, Mr. Nelson? Then do as I say. Have a seat.”
Greg reluctantly turned away from the screens and looked at the person seated behind the big desk. So “Dr. Ominous” was a man, after all. He looked about sixty and had a wild corona of puffy white hair ringing a shiny bald scalp. He had bright rouge on his cheeks and wore smudges of poorly applied green eye shadow. His eyebrows had been tweezed to flare in an exaggerated way. He wore a white lab coat over jeans and a Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster T-shirt. A stethoscope dangled from his neck.
Oh boy. We’re in full-on loony land.
Despite his misgivings, Greg crossed the room and settled into a seat opposite the desk. “How do you know my name?”
“Simple. An examination of your personal effects while you were unconscious in the theater.”
“I see. And let me guess. We’re not actually on a train headed off to Oz or wherever. Right?”
“Correct.”
“And your name isn’t actually Dr. Ominous.”
“It is as far as you are concerned.”
“Fair enough.” Greg cranked his head as far to the right as he could without actually getting out of his chair and watched the blonde girl shoot yet another zombie. Then he frowned as he faced Ominous again. “Those things happening on the screens…is any of it real or is it all as fake as that demented La-La Land you subjected me to?”
Ominous steepled his fingers and rested them on his ample chest. “It is all very real, Mr. Nelson.”
“And the danger they’re facing…that’s real, too?”
A nod. “Indeed.”
You son of a bitch.
“If they die there…wherever there is…then they die for real. Right?”
Another nod, this time accompanied by a very small, inscrutable smile. “Quite so.”
Greg felt tired and very confused. He wanted this to all go away. Wanted to wake up and have it all have been a bad dream, the way things sometimes happened on TV shows or in bad movies. Yet he had a feeling that wasn’t in the cards here. He had to see this game through to the end, for good or ill.
He looked Ominous in the eye. “How is that even possible?”
“Are you familiar with the Many Worlds Theory of quantum mechanics?”
“Vaguely.”
Ominous chuckled, though his eyes remained coldly appraising.
“Very simply, it posits that all possible alternate timelines and histories are real, each consisting of its own world. This is only highly debatable, unverifiable theory as far as most in the scientific world are concerned. I, however, know it to be truth.”
Another chuckle empty of actual humor.
“I confess to having an unfair advantage. No other human scientist has access to the dimensional-manipulation technology with which I have conducted my experiments. Using means that became available to me through a set of fortuitous circumstances, I have mastered the ability to open passageways to and from the alternate worlds. Do you understand, Mr. Nelson? Do you fully appreciate what I’m telling you?”
Ominous leaned forward now—rather ominously, Greg thought—and braced his elbows on the edge of his desk while keeping his fingers steepled. “I have solved many of the riddles of the fabric of existence itself, a fabric I can manipulate and bend to my will. I am become God.”
Greg nodded at this.
Rrrriiiiiiiiiiight.
“So…again, let me see if I have this straight…there are other worlds, say, where the Nazis won World War II or where the American Revolution was defeated?”
“Of course. And I have visited many of them. I can access them whenever I wish. It has been fascinating to witness the alternate ways human history and technology have advanced—or not, in some cases—along different timelines. But you are not yet grasping the true genius behind my discoveries. The level beyond anything imagined possible by any of the theorists.” Ominous gestured at the screens behind Greg. “Anything imagined and given some marginal degree of shape and form in our world—the stuff of low-budget cinema, for instance—can be made manifestly real along other planes of existence.”
Huh?
“Say what now?”
“It is as I have said. I am become God. I am a creator of worlds. And not partially formed pseudorealities or merely very advanced virtual environments, such as you encountered on your way to see me. I’m talking about actual worlds.” There was a manic, dangerous gleam in the man’s eyes now. He looked truly mad. “Fully realized worlds, Mr. Nelson, with millions of years of richly detailed history and countless billions of human lives lived out upon them.” He laughed at this. “All derived from the stuff of fiction.”