by Andy Monk
Symmons walked over to the first of the riders who dismounted to meet him. There was something odd about the man’s movements, the slight jerkiness of a clockwork toy.
“Stay with Audley,” he whispered to Laura.
“Those men…” she muttered, eyes wide in the shadows of the doorway.
“I won’t go far,” he smiled and moved closer to the riders as the road was closed off once more.
Symmons was talking to the lead rider. The Mayor’s man wasn’t short, but the newcomer towered over him, seemingly having to stoop to listen to him.
“You have brought what the Mayor wanted?”
The rider nodded, between his hat and glasses there wasn’t much of the man’s features to be seen other than his dark, trimmed beard.
“Leave one here then head to the square.”
Again, the tall man nodded, before turning on his heels and moving stiffly back along the line of motionless riders towards the wagons. Symmons fell in at his shoulder and as no one seemed to be paying him any attention, he followed too.
“Mr Calhoun, we have a gift for you,” Symmons announced.
“Guess we need all the help we can get,” Harry replied. He’d climbed up into the bed of the wagon they were using to block the road and he didn’t seem to be particularly inclined to come back down again.
“This is Alp,” Symmons indicated the tall rider, who made no gesture of acknowledgement as he stood motionless by the second flatbed, “he’s in charge of security at the Mayor’s ranch. He’s going to be helping us slaughter the Scourge when they show up.”
There were a few half-hearted whoops, but Sye had got a more enthusiastic response than Alp had. Clearly, he wasn’t the only one unsettled by the tall rider.
“Mr Alp, if you will…” Symmons’ waved a hand towards the flatbed as he stepped aside.
Alp undid the ties securing a heavy tarpaulin over the flatbed to reveal wooden crates piled high beneath. He took one long crate and lifted it seemingly without effort. He placed it on the ground before retrieving a crowbar from the flatbed.
The defenders gathered around, craning their necks to see what was inside. He glanced at the other riders, but they were all facing front. Silent and unmoving.
The sound of splintering wood brought his attention back to Alp. The man twisted and replaced the crowbar in the wagon before bending down, pulling off the lid of the long rectangular crate and lifting what was inside up for all to see. It was metal, consisting of six tubes fitted around a central cylinder. It was a gun of some kind, but it was longer than a rifle and looked an unwieldy beast.
“It’s called a Gatling gun,” Symmons explained to the underwhelmed onlookers, “one of Alp’s men will set it up for you. It sits on a carriage, it can fire continuously by the turning of a crank and can discharge up to three hundred rounds per minute,” he cast a dark eye along the defenders, “in other words, this piece of brass and steel can turn men into mincemeat very efficiently. I’m sure you’re all gonna enjoy introducing it to the Scourge…”
Now he did get a cheer.
As Alp placed the gun back in its box Sye moved in for a closer look. He tried to imagine what three-hundred rounds a minute would do to a group of Scourge riders, he couldn’t quite picture it, but he was damn sure he’d like to see it.
The gun barrel returned to its box, Alp straightened up and turned around, too fast for him to sidestep, making the big man pull up.
“Sorry…” he muttered.
Alp stared down at him, his eyes hidden behind smoke blackened glass. Who wore darkened spectacles at night?
“No worry,” Alp grunted. The man was huge, he had to be nearly seven-foot-tall and broad with it, so he wasn’t going to mention his breath, which stank like some critter had crawled into his gullet while he’d slept and died down there. Days ago.
He shuffled back up along the patiently waiting column of riders, pausing by one of the men at the back to give instructions. The man nodded, dismounted and hobbled his horse before moving back towards the wagon. He wasn’t quite as big as Alp, but a prudent man would be extra careful not to spill his beer all the same.
He moved with the same slight jerkiness and his eyes were hidden behind blackened glass like all the other Ranchmen. He had no beard, just a little dark stubble colouring his skin of his rather long face, which looked waxy in the flickering torchlight.
The man started unloading more crates from the wagon – the rest of the Gatling gun presumably – as Alp heaved himself onto his horse, which threw back its head and whinnied once he was aboard. Without a signal Alp rode forward and the rest of the Ranchmen in the column followed, save the final wagon.
“Glad they’re on our side,” Harry Calhoun whispered, appearing at his side.
“Anything that helps us kill the Scourge.”
The Ranchman looked up, though they’d both spoken in little more than a whisper.
“Scourge will all die…” he hissed, his voice wet and raw, before returning to the crate he was lifting off the wagon.
“Well, let’s hope so,” Harry said, with a pronounced gulp, “Ok boys, get back to work. This needs to be finished by dawn remember!” The baker patted him on the back, “Now go get yourself and that young girl to Doc Rudi. That’s an order.”
“Thanks Mr Calhoun,” he nodded at the crates being piled onto the road, “and if you need someone to fire that thing, let me know.”
“Be my guest. Three hundred rounds a second…” Harry sneered in disgust, “monstrous.”
He didn’t see much wrong with pumping lead into the Scourge. The faster the better as far as he was concerned, but he nodded and headed back to Laura and Audley. There was a sweet sickly smell hovering in the air, too faint to readily identify, but still strong enough to catch the back of his throat.
Laura was propped up in the doorway, trying to keep her weight off her damaged leg while Audley entertained her with what sounded like his best chicken anecdotes. As if the girl hadn’t suffered enough.
“C’mon, let’s get you to the Doc,” he managed to summon a reassuring grin from somewhere.
Laura nodded and looked grateful.
“You need me to come with you?” Audley offered.
“Thanks, but I think they need you here.”
Audley nodded, “True enough. Never know when those no goods will show up and need both my barrels.”
Once Audley had scurried off with his antique shotgun he helped Laura towards their horses.
“Can we walk a bit?” Laura asked.
“Your leg good enough?” he paused, remembering the jagged white bone that had sprouted from her flesh that afternoon.
“It’s sore, but I can walk a little. The horses have got skittish, best let them calm down a bit.”
She was right, both the Scourge horses where shuffling and pulling on their tethers.
“Something spooked them.”
“It was those men, from the Ranch…”
“You think?”
Laura nodded and pushed some greasy strands from her face, “Didn’t you smell them? They make us seem like we’ve been bathing in rosewater all week!”
“I guess…”
“And what was it with the blackened spectacles?”
“Dunno.”
“Creepy…”
He patted the horses and scratched their ears till they settled down a little. He took both reins with his good arm and winced as he put his bad one around Laura’s shoulders so she could lean into him as they began walking slowly towards The Tear and the town proper. Either side of them, burning tar torches had been set along the North Road to mark the way into Hawker’s Drift.
“Amos and the others have gone to the Mayor’s ranch, haven’t they?”
“Yeah…”
“I think I’m glad we came here, even with the Scourge coming… those men… there’s something wrong about them…”
“They’re on our side, that’s all that matters.”
“I
s it?”
He looked down at the girl who’d seen and suffered so much in the last few days. She’d lost her family and seen the brutality of the Scourge up close, seen what they did to the older girls and what they would, eventually, have done to her if they’d made it back to the Host. She’d seen the dark hearts of men and the cruelty they could inflict upon the world.
And yet the Mayor’s Ranchmen had scared her more.
“Maybe best not to mention them going to the Ranch, eh?” he whispered, though there was no one around to hear.
Laura drew a finger back and forth across her chest, “Cross my heart…”
He nodded and they carried on walking into Hawker’s Drift. The town loomed above them, the buildings glowing from thousands of lanterns and torches that had been set to burn through until dawn, as if their meagre light was somehow enough to keep evil at bay.
The Gunsmith
“There are four hundred billion stars in our galaxy and one hundred billion galaxies in the universe. Give or take. The universe’s size is so immense it is beyond the capabilities of the human mind to truly appreciate…” he looked down from the star-scattered sky at Dorry and Amos “…in other words, it’s damn big.”
“Big…” Dorry nodded.
He suspected that might be the only word he’d uttered that she’d been able to grasp. She was a smart kid, but when your education didn’t run much beyond learning to read the Bible, writing your own name and working out how many cattle you had if you started with ten and had two stolen, cosmology and quantum physics was always going to be a stretch.
“Stars, like our sun, planets, like our Earth, moons like… erm… our moon, comets, asteroids, dust. Matter seemingly without end. And that’s before we even throw in the stuff we can’t see like dark matter… but… erm… let’s not worry about that.”
“There’s a lot of stuff up there,” Dorry’s neck still craned upwards.
“Yeah. A lot of stuff. The universe. Your universe. But not mine. Or Cece’s. We come from a different one.”
“Uh-huh.”
“There isn’t one universe, there’s a multiverse, with more universes than there are stars in this universe.”
“How many stars are there in the universe?” Dorry was hugging her knees and still looking skywards.
“Three hundred sextillion. Give or take.”
Now Dorry’s eyes flicked back towards him, “What’s a sextillion?”
“It’s a one followed by twenty-one noughts.”
“Sheesh,” Dorry whistled and went back to looking at the stars. Hopefully she wasn’t trying to count them all.
“So, where is your universe?” Amos wasn’t looking at the stars, he was staring intently at him.
“Alongside this universe, but removed. Like all of the others.”
Amos shook his head.
Explaining their universe existed in another quantum branch of infinite-dimensional Hilbert space wasn’t going to get them very far. So, he went for a simpler approach.
“Imagine panes of glass stacked one on top of another. This universe is in one pane, our universe in another, but from your universe, you can’t see or be aware of any of the other universes.”
“Then how can you travel from one to the other?” Dorry was back to watching the sky.
“You can’t.”
“Huh?”
“It should be impossible, and it would be impossible, if something hadn’t shattered the structure of the multiverse.”
“What?”
He followed her eyes to the heavens. You could see an awful lot of stars out here, but it wasn’t even the tiniest fraction of what was out there.
“We don’t know. Something cataclysmic. Actually, we don’t have a word to describe the amount of energy required to crack reality. Imagine someone hitting those panes of glass with a hammer, the glass cracks, shards from one pane embed in other panes, fissures run through the panes. And that’s what we have with reality. Simply speaking.”
“And who used the hammer… God?”
He smiled and tried not to look patronising, probably unsuccessfully, “No… we’re fairly confident it was a natural event, even though we don’t know exactly what.”
“Or it was Something Else…” Cece said, her voice a whisper on the warm night air.
Amos was chewing his bottom lip, his eyes narrow slits lost in shadow, “Amelia… Old Amelia… she said the Mayor… came from in-between, the world between the worlds.”
He glanced at Cece who was sitting cross-legged and staring at her boots.
“She called it Heaven...”
A chill ran through him, his skin tingling despite the warmth of the summer air.
“There’s no God and no Heaven,” Cece said eventually, still studying her boots, “trust me.”
“But Amelia-”
“I don’t know who she is or why she’s pretending she knows us, but she isn’t the same person as the little girl back in town with Molly. It’s impossible,” there was an edge to Cece’s voice he hadn’t heard much before. It took him a few seconds to pin it down. She was scared.
“So, why are you here?” Dorry asked, perhaps sensing Cece’s unease. Which was perceptive for a teenager who’d seen her life ripped to shreds in the last few days.
“Exploring. Exploring the cracks in reality and the other Earths they lead us to.”
“And to study your culture and history, to map the differences and the similarities,” he added, “there aren’t that many worlds with people, relatively speaking.”
“Why?” Dorry again. She was an inquisitive kid.
He sighed, evolutionary biology was another humdinger, “Because a million million little things had to happen between single-celled life developing in a tidal pool or lagoon billions of years ago and us. On most worlds, somewhere along the line, one of those chance things didn’t happen and humanity didn’t evolve. Or monkeys, or horses, or whales or dogs or birds… in most worlds there’s nothing but bacteria, in some not even that.”
“Maybe God hasn’t got around to putting people on those worlds yet.”
“Maybe…” he could spend all night, and all the nights of the rest of his life, teaching Dorry about how this one universe worked and all the wonders it contained, but they didn’t have the time for that. Best to stick to basics.
“Next question?”
“Why were you going to the Mayor’s ranch?” Amos’ questions were much more practical.
“I’m looking for a way home,” Cece answered before he could.
“And you think there’s one there?”
“I don’t know. My… equipment tells me there’s something there, fractures and fissures and resonant radiation from the in-between. So, my guess is that there is a portal there for accessing the multiverse.”
Amos’ forehead crumpled into a frown and he took a second or two before asking, “I remember you in Jack’s the day I got to town, trying to get a job from Monty, it was pouring with rain outside, but your coat was dry. You must have… appeared close to the saloon. Why don’t you go home the same way you got here?”
Cece’s eyes swivelled in his direction, the coldness in them seeping like meltwater into her voice as she said, “Why don’t you take that one, John…”
Shit… can’t we go back to cosmology and evolution?
“You want the short or the long answer?”
Amos nodded and glanced at the sky before replying, “We still got a few hours and I ain’t feeling sleepy.”
Pity.
He rubbed his temples and tried to work out where to begin.
“To me, Cece came here fifty years ago. As she said, to explore and learn, that was what The Facility did. Send people – special people – out into the multiverse to explore.”
“Special people?” Amos asked.
“Some people can travel a lot easier than others, most simply can’t at all. Being attuned we call it. Cece is highly attuned, so it is much less traumatic for her to acc
ess the fractures via The Facility’s portal and travel through them.”
“And this portal is a machine?”
It was a somewhat underwhelming description of fifty billion dollars’ worth of technology, but he nodded. Best to keep the explaining down to a minimum.
“But Amelia didn’t come here through your portal, did she?”
He shook his head again.
“So, how’d she do it?”
“We don’t know. There’s anecdotal evidence some people, very attuned people, can slip through the cracks, particularly the young and especially at times of extreme stress, but we’ve never been able to prove it.”
“And there’s no evidence whatsoever anyone can do it at will,” Cece chipped in.
“Amelia got sick because of travelling here?” Amos asked.
He pushed at some flattened grass with the tip of his boot. They were getting pulled off subject here and he really wanted some quiet time to gather his thoughts, but from the intent faces of Amos and Dorry watching him in the soft light of the stars, he didn’t think he’d be getting any of those yet.
“Phase Sickness,” Cece explained, “sometimes the body can’t quite synchronise with the new reality it finds itself in and the multiverse tries to pull it back. We have meds that can deal with that now, thankfully.”
“So, she’d have been pulled back home if you hadn’t intervened?” Amos pressed.
“No,” Cece shook her head, “She’d have been sucked back into the in-between and would, effectively, ceased to exist. We lost some good people that way till we figured it out. Though you must be at least partially attuned in the first place, otherwise they won’t work.”
“One thing I don’t understand,” Dorry said, after they’d lapsed into silence. He’d be mightily impressed if there was only one thing, “going exploring all these worlds… that must be dangerous… so why just send one girl on her own?”
Cece stiffened slightly at being described as just a “girl”, especially by someone who was still a kid herself. He suppressed a smile.
“The fractures are unstable. They aren’t things specifically designed for matter to transit through. Initially, when we first got our portal phased into the fissures we sent small teams carrying a lot of kit, at least until a fissure collapsed with seven people in transit…” he sighed “…it became clear sending too much matter through any given fissure could destabilise and collapse it, and not just that fissure, possibly other connecting fissures. Even sending people and kit through singularly could have a cumulative effect. The worst-case scenario was a reaction that could cause the entire structure to collapse, which could cause whole realities – whole universes – to collapse with them.”