Hollow World

by Michael J. Sullivan

  Ellis was shaking his head in broad swings. “Sorry, Warren. This isn’t going to happen.”

  Warren looked at him sadly. “Already has, pal.”

  “I’m going to put a stop to it.”

  “Really?” Warren chuckled, a sound that made Ellis cringe. “How? Bombs are already in place. We’re just running out the clock. Besides, you seem to have misplaced your pistol. Or do you plan on fighting me and the rest of the Firestone Farm?”

  Warren put up his fists like he was John L. Sullivan and laughed.

  Ellis glanced at the three working at the table.

  Warren noticed the look. “Trust me, everyone here—everyone on the farm—is in this one hundred percent. You’re not going to change their minds. They’ll do anything to stop being the five hundredth or ten thousandth of someone. After the bombs go off, they’ll each be one of just a handful, and after some plastic surgery, they’ll each be unique. They’ll each be special.”

  Pax was right. Warren was planning on doing something much, much worse.

  Ellis took a step toward the door and stopped.

  “Where you gonna go? You don’t have a portal. Weather is getting colder, and not as many baldies are coming up here this time of year. There’s nothing but wilderness beyond this village. Trust me, I know that well.”

  Ellis hesitated.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Warren said in his old, barfly-friendly voice and clapped him on the back. “I’ve been working with Yal to build a still. We’ve made a few quarts of this awful moonshine from corn—you know it’s not just for fructose syrup anymore.” He winked. “Tastes like gasoline, but does the trick. What do you say the two of us go get loaded like that time when we snuck the Kool-Aid rum punch into the Bob Seger concert at Pine Knob. They don’t need me here. We can take a few bottles and hike up to the old Rouge River. I know a spot, a hill that looks down so that you can actually see old Detroit. The city ain’t there no more, but you can see where it used to be. You can see the Detroit River and a smidge of Canada where the Ambassador Bridge once was. We’ll get hammered on corn juice and remember the old days when we used to be rusted gears bound for the trash bin. C’mon, Dex has a book around here of pattern variations. It has pictures. We can pick out what we want our future brides to look like.”

  Ellis felt boxed in. Warren was right—what could he do?

  Fact is, people aren’t the same. You’re smarter than I am. I’m stronger than you are. These are facts.

  Ellis couldn’t argue with facts. Warren had aged about a decade beyond Ellis, but he’d had work done too. Maybe a lot of work. With his broad chest, thick arms, and a neck the size of Ellis’s thigh, Warren looked like the football star he’d once been. And even if he could subdue him, Warren was right, Ellis was outnumbered. If they all joined forces, and there was no reason to think otherwise, they would overwhelm him easily.

  You’re smarter than I am. These are facts.

  “What do you say, Ellis?”

  “If you don’t mind, I think I’d prefer to drink alone,” he replied, feigning frustration and not having to act too hard. “You say Yal knows where this battery acid is?”

  “Yep. Strong stuff. Don’t kill yourself. We just got done putting you back together.”

  The distance between the Menlo Park complex and the Firestone Farm hadn’t changed, but the trip back took forever. Ellis jogged a lot of it and discovered Wat hadn’t been joking. He was hardly winded. He might actually be able to do a marathon if his leg muscles weren’t still fifty-eight years old.

  Warren had him trapped. Maybe at one time there had been a dedicated portal booth back to Hollow World from the village, but just as cellphones had turned public phones into ugly, broken-down eyesores, the Port-a-Calls had made portal booths obsolete. Without a portal maker he couldn’t get back to Hollow World, and if he couldn’t get back, he couldn’t warn anyone.

  There had to be a way to communicate, but Ellis hadn’t ever seen a Hollow World cellphone. Still, when he had first woke up on Pax’s bed, Alva had said she had contacted Pax, and that Pax had replied. So, communication was possible. Maybe the Port-a-Call was multifunctional like a smartphone. Any way he looked at it, Ellis had to get his hands on one.

  Yal was still busy cooking, shoving new splits of wood into the burner through the top of the big iron stove. No one else in the kitchen—hopefully no one else in the house.

  “Master Ellis.” Yal grinned at him.

  Yal was wearing the standard nineteenth-century white-shirt, black-pants ensemble that everyone at the farm favored. Yal kept the top two buttons open, revealing a V of skin. Nothing else was visible, causing Ellis’s hopes to sink.

  Peggy—who hated carrying a purse—always used to complain how women’s clothes never had any pockets. She constantly misplaced her keys and wallet. For a time she kept her license and credit cards in a little plastic pouch that she wore around her neck like a security badge. It worked until she lost that too. But in a world where clothes were optional, Ellis imagined Peggy’s onetime solution would be commonplace. Hal had worn Geo-24’s Port-a-Call that way…maybe a lot of them did.

  “How’s dinner coming?” Ellis asked, clapping Yal on the back and leaving his hand on the cook’s shoulder near the neck. He pretended to give Yal a friendly rub while using his thumb to feel through the shirt for the bump of a chain or strap.

  Nothing.

  Pax always kept the Port-a-Call in a vest pocket. Maybe Yal did too.

  How much does Yal know? Will he fight me or obey his master?

  Ellis spotted the cast-iron fry pan sitting idle on the sideboard. One solid hit with that and Ellis wouldn’t need to worry about winning Yal’s cooperation. How ironic that just a few minutes ago he was fuming about Rob beating Yal with a little stick.

  Let’s call that plan B.

  “Yal?”

  “Yes, master?” Yal halted fueling the stove in order to give undivided attention.

  Yal…the name finally triggered a memory from his first meal in Hollow World. “Yal…you’re a cook,” Ellis said stupidly.

  “Yes, master.” Not surprisingly, Yal looked confused.

  “No, no. I mean you were a real cook, before coming here, weren’t you? I ate…something called a minlatta—I think?”

  “Minlatta with tarragon oil sauce,” Yal said. “That was one of the last patterns I designed.”

  “It was wonderful—really wonderful.”

  Yal tried but couldn’t suppress a smile. Ellis imagined Yal didn’t get much praise around the farm. “Thank you. That’s very kind. Cooking is a lot harder without a Maker.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Ellis said. “I can boil potatoes, but I wouldn’t have a clue how to boil water with a Maker.”

  Yal shrugged, but the smile was still there, and Ellis saw his chance. “Yal? Do you have a Port-a-Call?”

  “Me? No. Master Ren collected them from all of us during the initiation ceremony.” Yal glanced down at the white bandages still on the stumps of his missing fingers. “It’s part of our commitment to the farm.”

  “How do you leave then?”

  “We don’t.”

  “I’ve seen Pol and Dex leave.”

  “Well, if Master Ren wants us to go do something, he provides us with a POC, but we have to give it back afterward. No one leaves without Master Ren’s permission. I think Pol is the only person who has one all the time. That’s because Pol is always jumping back and forth.”

  “Where does Master Ren keep the devices he takes from everyone?”

  Yal shrugged. “In his room maybe?”

  Ellis abandoned Yal to his boiling pots and went up the farmhouse stairs. He found it easy to locate Warren’s room—it was the only one locked. He tried kicking the door like in the movies, but either modern-day doors weren’t built very well or they were all props because all Ellis got out of his kick was a sore foot. He might have broken a toe, but the pain wasn’t that bad.

  He had to get
through the door, find a Port-a-Call, figure out how to use it, and get back to Hollow World in time to find someone to ring the alarm and send in the cavalry. Somewhere in the shadowy corners of his mind were questions: What cavalry? What alarm? And who exactly could he get to ring it? One of the things Ellis liked about Hollow World was its lack of central authority—its lack of any authority at all. No one tells anyone else what to do, he remembered Pax saying, as if the very idea of giving or accepting orders was inconceivable. Now, however, that was a problem, but it was the next problem. Small steps, he reminded himself. He also remembered to slow his breathing to avoid hyperventilating.

  He ran back down the steps, drawing a look from Yal, and spotted the fireplace poker. He picked it up and with a reassuring smile at Yal, he raced back up the stairs. Once again he thanked the ISP for his new and improved set of lungs, even though his leg muscles and injured toe were not so pleased.

  He shoved the point of the poker into the doorjamb and pried back the wood, splintering it. He jabbed it in again, splintered more. On the third try, he caught the metal faceplate of the lock and bowed the metal pole as he threw his full weight on it and prayed Archimedes was right about levers and worlds. The latch popped, the door swung open, and Ellis raced in.

  Like the rest of the house, the bedroom was vintage Old West. Floral wallpaper competed with a just-as-busy diamond-patterned rug. White-lace-covered windows looked like three square ghosts standing vigil around the simple wooden bed. A mirrored dresser, complete with washbowl and pitcher, a wooden trunk, and two nightstands filled out the bedroom. Ellis laid into the locked trunk with his trusty poker. He didn’t so much open it as bash and rip it apart. Inside he found an old familiar high-school yearbook, an empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s, Warren’s football jersey—old number forty-eight—and what looked like a watch battery and a microwave. No bag of Port-a-Calls. No guns.

  He searched the rest of the room and found nothing useful. There was a Bible on the nightstand that looked new. Thinking how books sometimes were hollowed out to hide things, he flipped through it. Ellis found nothing except that the bookmark ribbon lay somewhere in Leviticus.

  Warren had anticipated the others looking for the POCs and had hidden them.

  He looked under the bed and through the drawers of the dresser.

  Nothing.

  Disappointed, Ellis returned to the footlocker and pulled out the little appliance. Thinking there might be POCs inside, he shook it.

  “That’s a Maker.”

  Ellis’s heart skipped as he looked up to see one of them standing in the doorway, the name tag covered by a black wool coat that went perfectly with the wide-brimmed hat. Ellis froze, guilty as sin, caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

  “For such a back-to-basics fellow, it’s interesting that Ren has a Maker and a Dynamo hidden away, isn’t it?”

  Ellis was worried the sound of his heart pounding was audible. What would Warren do when he found out? Lock him up, probably. Chain him in the chicken coop or something. He set the Maker down, and looked for the poker.

  The coat-wearing intruder took a step toward him, and Ellis was just about to reach for the poker—which he’d left on the floor—when his visitor stopped, turned, and carefully closed the door, providing them with privacy.

  Something in the person’s movements and expression was familiar. There was a gentleness around the eyes, concern in the line of the jaw, and the mouth was on the verge of a smile.

  “Pax?” Ellis said the name as a wish with equal parts hope and disbelief.

  The smile exploded into a giant grin. “You recognized me!”

  Ellis physically wavered. He hadn’t expected the response. As much as he might have hoped, as much as he prayed for it to be true, it wasn’t really possible…was it? “Is it really—”

  Pax rushed forward, wrapping him in a tight embrace. “I’ve been waiting for you. Thought you’d never get back.”

  “Oh my God!” Ellis whispered, smelling the scent of cinnamon. “It’s you—Pax, you’re alive!”

  “Of course, I’m—”

  Ellis returned the hug, squeezing as hard as he could, and then, without thinking or caring to think, he kissed Pax—a long, hard kiss on the lips. A tear slid down Ellis’s cheek, and he said, “Oh Jesus, Pax, I thought—I thought that you’d killed yourself. I thought I had—God, you’re still alive!”

  “Yes, Ellis Rogers, I’m fine—a lot better, now that…that…”

  “What?”

  Pax looked at him grinning, showing off those perfect teeth. “I can’t believe that you recognized me.”

  “Listen, Pax, we need to leave. We need to go right now.”

  “Together this time, right?” Pax smiled at him hopefully.

  “Absolutely.”

  Still holding on, Ellis felt Pax’s body stiffen. The arbitrator pulled away and stared intently into Ellis’s eyes. The bright smile was snuffed out and replaced by horror. “Oh no—oh…” Ellis felt Pax begin to shake. “They’re going to concrete Hollow World.”

  Ellis nodded. “Three nuclear bombs. I think they’ve already placed the first two. They’ll go off in less than three hours—at precisely 14:54 Hollow World core time.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “We still have a chance,” Ellis said. “If we can find the bombs, we can use your Port-a-Call and shove the warheads through to give your PICA company.”

  “But how will we find them?” Pax pulled the POC from a vest pocket.

  “They’ll be at the Geomancy Institute.”

  “I think that might be a big place, and they’ll have hidden them, won’t they?”

  “Probably, but that’s okay. I know a way to find them. We just need to make a stop on the way.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  END OF TIMES

  The forest was not as Ellis had remembered. He recalled his journey as frightening—a trip through the unknown. It had been night and the woods were intimidating. This time the soaring trees seemed majestic. Angled shafts of sunlight pierced the high canopy with angelic elegance, dappling the cascading river of moss-covered stones.

  He and Pax scrambled up the rocks, following the river. The two had ported out of Firestone Farm back to the hill where they’d shared the stew. From there Ellis took out his compass and notepad, and made general guesses that Pax worked into the Port-a-Call. They performed a series of upriver jumps until Ellis felt certain they were close. Approaching from the opposite direction was more confusing than he expected, and he couldn’t find the marks he had carved in the trees.

  That boulder looks familiar. Did I stumble on that?

  They were running out of time.

  “Yes, any Geo. Ask Vin. This is an emergency. Listen, just let me talk to Vin, okay?”

  Behind him, Pax was speaking to Alva, although it looked as if Pax were talking to the sky.

  “How are you doing that?” Ellis asked. “How are you communicating? Is it through the Port-a-Call?”

  “No. Just a con…what? No, I wasn’t speaking to you, Alva. I was talking to Ellis Rogers…What? We’re sort of busy at the moment…Okay, all right!” Ellis heard Pax huff. “Alva says hello.”

  “What’s a con?”

  “Huh? Oh, it’s a microscopic receiver-transmitter implant. Just about everyone has them.”

  “So, what? You just think about who you want to talk to and then talk?”

  “Sort of, yeah…Vin? Yeah, I’m with Ellis Rogers, and we have a very serious problem…Of course, I’m alive. Listen, I need your help…Thanks, I knew I could count on you. I need permission and coords to the Geomancy Institute, and I need them right now…Yes, I’m serious…No! Don’t talk to Pol-789! Don’t talk to anyone on the Council. Go right to the institute…Yes…Yes…Tell them it’s for me, and that I’m bringing Ellis Rogers. Tell them—tell them the sky is falling…Yes, that’s what I said. The sky is falling. Tell them that…You don’t need to understand, and I don’t have time to explain. Jus
t do it, Vin.”

  “The sky is falling?” Ellis asked as he trudged up the riverbank.

  “It’s a code phrase geomancers use. It indicates the most dire of circumstances. It means drop whatever you’re doing and get on this, because if you don’t, the world will end.”

  “Code red,” Ellis said. “That’s what we used to say.” He saw it then, the bright pale scar cut into the bark of the giant tree—a crude arrow pointing to the right. “There!”

  He pointed up the slope. “Up here, I think.”

  They climbed, and Ellis was becoming desperate. Just as he thought they wouldn’t be able to find it, he caught a glimpse of bright red and blue.

  “There it is!” he shouted as they ran to the pile of plastic milk crates surrounding his old van seat.

  “This is your time machine?” Pax asked, stunned.

  “I told you it wasn’t much to look at.”

  Ellis ran to the cooler.

  His sweater was still where he’d left it. Throwing it over his shoulder he popped the top off the cooler. More cans of food, bottles of drinking water, and the Internet-purchased Geiger counter were still with the rest of his gear. He had no rational reason to expect it wouldn’t be—just the general nightmarish fear that the worst would always happen when he could least afford it.

  “This is it.” He picked up the little handheld and showed it to Pax. The Mazur PRM-9000 was the size of a thick iPhone and looked a bit like a garage door opener except that it had a green digital display and a red LED warning light in the design of a radiation symbol.

  “And that can find the bombs?” Pax asked.

  “It should. Warren wouldn’t even let me get near the one they had at the lab because it was leaking radiation. The website I bought this from said it had excellent sensitivity for detecting even low levels of radiation in food, which was why I paid six hundred dollars for it. So it ought to be able to pick up a plutonium-leaking nuclear warhead.”