by V. B. Larson
He opened his mouth, but before he could speak, Raymond had shoved the roughcut barrel of his shotgun in his open teeth, corking his words. Raymond was part black, with one of those wild razor-cut hair-dos to prove it, but you could hardly tell with all the dust covering his skin. When the salesman tried to close his mouth, Raymond stuck his thumb in the man’s lips and pried his jaw open, working the barrel in there.
Everyone but me chuckled at this. I knew what that barrel tasted like. I knew how it depressed your tongue and scraped the roof of your mouth with the flanges of steel the hacksaw had left on the crudely sawed-off tip.
They always loved the look of surprise on someone’s face when they first tasted Raymond’s shotgun. Steve, the third man of our gang, pulled out his regulation police handcuffs and snapped them on the salesman’s upraised wrist.
“You’re under arrest, bud,” Steve said. The man’s eyes got even bigger when he looked at the helmet that sat on top of Steve’s pockmarked cheeks and crooked teeth. Steve always wore a gold CHP motorcycle helmet that he had picked up along with the handcuffs from some dead cop. He was only sixteen and a geek. He enjoyed playing Highway Patrolman. He chuckled at the man’s comic surprise.
I stood to one side and gripped my revolver nervously, rubbing the handle with my thumb. Inside I hoped, no I prayed that we were just going to rob this guy, that when we had whatever we could use from him, whatever we felt like taking, we would toss him past the sign and let him run for the ripper.
But Kyle had that yellowy gleam in his eyes, the light that meant trouble.
We did rob him. We took the keys to the Beamer, driving it around the deserted parking lots and up and down Geer road for fun with the sunroof open and the stereo cranked up all the way. He had all the usual shit that people try to take with them to the other side, money, booze, camping gear, even a coffee can full of old coins and jewelry. He had a little. 22 caliber target pistol in the trunk too, which Kyle later used to shoot out the beamer’s tires for a laugh. I looked through his wallet, although money was useless these days and credit cards were nothing but curiosities. I learned that his name was Kevin Simpson, and he had a wife and a little girl somewhere.
I think he knew that Kyle was going to kill him even before I did. I think he knew because he kept muttering prayers to himself, under his breath. Hail-Mary type stuff. Riding around the parking lot in the cushy leather backseat of his car, I looked at him, but he just kept his eyes shut and muttered his prayers. Raymond kept his shotgun pressed against the man’s cheek and had his fist wrapped double in the man’s red tie.
It was when we were done having fun, when we had everything that the Kevin Simpson could give us, that things went bad. The old way, the way we used to do things, we would take the guy and put him just past the One-Way sign, just at the edge where the fields started, and give him a quick kick in the ass to give him a proper send off. Then he would fall forward, tumbling into the new world wearing his butt for a hat. It was a great laugh.
But then Kyle had gotten into his pliers and things had changed. The last two people had gone through bleeding, and Kevin Simpson was never going to make it at all.
“You’ve got to do something,” Beth sobbed to me again. “Let’s step out, Paula. Let’s just do it. There has to be something better than this.”
She followed me into the wreckage of the furniture store that had become our home for the last several months. It was convenient, as there was plenty of furniture to go around and there was no way for travelers to get to the fields out in the parking lot without walking in plain sight of the big front windows.
“Just do it yourself,” I told her. “You don’t need me.”
“I can’t do it alone,” she told me, her hand gripping my wrist, her eyes bright. “I’m afraid to go alone. What if it’s something bad. What if something really bad is on the other side? I don’t want to die alone, Paula.”
“Then don’t go. I’m just not ready yet,” I told her in a gentle voice. I reached up to push the hair out of my face. She jerked her hand away from my wrist.
“You owe me, Paula!” she yelled, suddenly furious.
“Go tell your cats about it,” I hissed at her. My eyes flashed with anger and slapped her, slamming my hand over her big mouth. Kyle, Steve and Ray could be anywhere, and all I needed was for her to blab about me stepping out or maybe even turning on them. Kyle was not likely to take to either idea. Once you were in his gang, you were his property.
Beth gave me a hurt look and ran away, deciding I guess that I was just as bad as the others. Maybe I was. I watched her flabby rear as she ran away, thinking that she was crazy to want me to go through the fields, to step out with her, just because she had helped pull a few guys off me one time. Who wanted to cross over? Earth was bad, but who wanted to take a chance on whatever was happening on the far side? Some said that the fields didn’t really work anymore, that if you stepped into them you didn’t get through the wormhole to Tau Ceti Minor. Some said that you were just stepping out into empty interstellar space, into a void where you froze solid in seconds. Some said that when you went through, aliens grabbed you and turned you into a slave, or shot you out of hand. Others said that if you went into the fields, it was random where you might end up, that the physics were unpredictable.
The only thing that everybody knew for sure was that you didn’t come back. You bought a one-way ticket when you stepped into the shimmering colors at any of the ripper points that dotted the planet.
I turned and walked through all the trash we had thrown around since we had taken over the store and sat on a coffee table next to the front windows. Absently pulling a candy wrapper from the sole of my shoe, I watched the shimmering fields outside, where they hung and twisted in the air a few feet above the parking lot. They leaped and danced like a rainbow-hued bonfire.
The sun was setting behind the building, and the colors in the ripper were shifting down from the yellows and oranges into the reds and violets, as they usually did in the early evening. Did that mean you would come out someplace else if you went through now? No one knew.
Silhouetted by the ripper’s strange, moving light, the salesman’s body was a dark lump on the asphalt. Next to him, the One-Way sign pointed into the colors, looking like a mailbox.
“He’s a deader, alright,” said Steve, coming up next to me and putting a hand around my waist down low, just an inch from grabbing my rear.
I shoved his hand away automatically. He smelled like spoiled meat.
“You should know,” I replied coldly.
He ignored me, his deep-set eyes fixed on the salesman’s lifeless form. His gold helmet glinted, reflecting the light from the rip outside.
“When I get close to the rip, I freak out a bit,” he told me. “The fields have an unnaturalness about them that fires up your instincts, you know? It makes your movements stiff and makes your skin crawl as if static tugs at every hair on your body. You know, when you are that close, that if you just take a few steps, or stumble, or somebody pushes you, you are on your way into nothingness.”
Steve was our resident ripper-baiter. He liked to go past the sign, every once and a while, and run back at the last second, but for the fields could suck him in for good. He had been closer that anyone I knew of.
Outside, the fields sparkled and shimmered, playing like cold fire on the asphalt. My family had gone through when the rips had worked both ways, but I had been in college then and had decided to wait. I pondered the dancing colors with the same old wonder they invoked in everyone.
“I remember climbing up to Nevada falls in Yosemite when I was a kid with my dad and my brother Tom,” Steve told me. “I stood out on the brink, looking down thousands of feet into the valley, with my sneakers placed side by side at the edge. I closed my eyes and it felt as if I were going to get sucked off, to fall into an endlessly deep pit. The fields are like that you know, only more scary, more alien.”
“Did you have to kill the guy?” I blurt
ed out.
Steve shrugged, as if it were no big deal. He gave a nervous, adolescent laugh. “It was kinda fun. We always scare them, give them the old treatment with the shotgun in the mouth and the handcuffs. We just do it to soften them up some, get them in a talkative mood. But this time Kyle decided to snuff the guy,” again he shrugged. “It’s the same to us either way. If he’d gone into the rip, he’d be just as absent from our world.”
“No, it’s not the same.”
Steve was quiet for a while. Then he changed the subject. “You think the Berkley boys at the Livermore Labs were really the ones who started all these rips?”
“I guess. That’s what they say,” I said, taking a half-step away from him. Sometimes it was creepy just to stand next to Steve, and this was one of those times.
I thought about the way the rips had started. The Government Service boys had been playing with the theoretical physics of wormholes. No one knew just what they had done, because the biggest field had appeared in the middle of the labs and many of the Ph. D. s and their pale, spectacled grad assistants had vanished. At the same time, over six hundred other known spots had flared up all over the globe. Some were no larger than campfires, others had swallowed a city block. There were more of them in California and under the ocean on the shelf just off the Pacific coast than elsewhere, but there were enough around to let everybody get to one who wanted to. The first brave adventurers that had stepped through these rips to Tau Ceti Minor and returned to tell of the wonders they had seen.
They had pictures, too. Digitals movies that played on every house on the net. Tau Ceti Minor was a dream world. Green and lush, its surface was three-fourths land and only one-fourth sea. Once the population learned that a fresh new planet with virgin forests and oceans and without pollution was on the other side, people had flooded into the rips in droves. The fleeing population brought on a worldwide depression, which only served to accelerate the flow of humanity out of their old worn-out world and through the rips in space to the new one.
“I remember when they all switched around on everybody,” said Steve with a wheezy snort of laughter. “It was right after Christmas in December when the solar flares started in both systems and I remember that’s when all the weird shit started, like the people seeing the northern lights all the way down to New Mexico. Remember that?”
“Sure I remember. Messed everyone up, because they were all with their families on one side or the other, then the door slammed shut. I’ve never seen my parents since.”
“My folks were gone too. I was a kid then,” he said, ignoring my look which said: And you aren’t now?
“The people stopped coming out of the fields. People still went in, and disappeared, but they never came back out. I remember thinking that Santa Claus had taken back his gift.”
After that, with the earth population cut nearly in half, the world rapidly declined and many areas fell into anarchy. Few nations still stood as organized powers. Dictatorships and petty civil wars flourished. For years the steady, silent exodus continued. Like lemmings leaping from a cliff into the unknown, like forest creatures running from flames, the people continued to step into the shimmering fields and vanish. The bleeding never stopped, and soon the Earth had slipped into a new age. I suppose they would someday call this a dark age.
“This last year has been a weird time,” Steve said, tracing the outline of a face on the dusty store window. “Evil things have happened that nobody’s ever going to know about later. I think it’s kind of fun, it feels dangerous. ”
He left and I let go a breath of disgust. I felt an involuntary shudder go down my spine, and tried to control it. I grabbed an ugly green ottoman out of the nearest family room display and pulled it up to the window. There was a bullet hole through the cushion and as I watched an ant crawled out of it, feelers waving. I flicked the ant away and sat on it. A few minutes later the trash rattled and crunched as Raymond walked up to join me at the window. He leaned up against the glass.
“You thinking about steppin’ out?” he asked me. I glanced at him but he wasn’t looking at me, he was staring out at the fields and the dead salesman. “Sure is weird shit, ain’t it?” he added.
I noticed his 12-gauge was slung over his back, so I casually holstered my gun before speaking. “I think it’s going to go all purple tonight.”
He nodded, but didn’t repeat his first question. We watched as twilight set in and the flaming colors darkened and deepened into their cooler, more ominous night hues. In the violet glow the saleman looked less like a lump and more like a corpse, perhaps one that would animate somehow.
“Looks like he’s going to stand up and come for us, huh?” Ray asked me. The unwelcome image of Kevin Simpson’s corpse standing up and staggering toward the furniture store to exact his revenge on us sprang into my mind. His eyes would be two bloodshot orbs staring from the gray-brown dust that caked his face. I could see him dismembering each of the One-Way gang, including myself, while Beth cried for us all.
“Why did you do it?” I asked, suddenly wanting to know. Raymond had been the one to finally squeeze the trigger on his shotgun and ventilate the back of Kevin Simpson’s head. “Why did you kill him?”
“I shoved the gun in his mouth and all, but that was just part of the bit. Just to scare him, you know? After that though, it started gettin’ bad. Kyle… those pliers, man,” he looked down, shaking his head. His hand was a fist against the cool glass. “You don’t know, ‘cause you checked out early. It was all a waste.”
“He didn’t know anything?”
“Kyle kept sayin’ he did, kept sayin’ that he was holding out, but no, he didn’t know shit. Everything he owned was in that Beamer we trashed.”
“So you killed him.” Raymond gave a slow nod, his lower lip jutting out a bit and his eyes locked on Simpson’s body outside. The winds had picked up a bit and the dust was blowing heavy, coming in off highway 99. The highway had once been known as the Blowdirt, back in the 1920’s before irrigation had really gotten going. Back then, this section of California’s Central Valley had been a big windy dust bowl, and 99 had high mounds of dirt on both sides of it. Every car had left a billowing cloud of dust behind it, and the locals had called the highway the Blowdirt. Now the people were mostly gone, but the dust was back and the old name had come back with it.
“Kyle was pissed, wasn’t he?” I asked, breaking the silence.
“Tough,” snorted Raymond. “That really breaks me up, you know. I feel for him.”
I thought about my family on the other side. I wondered what they were doing on the new planet, how they were making out. I had always been afraid that if I stepped through one of the rips I would end up in some other place, some dead end that I couldn’t get back out of. I had always hoped that the fields would start working both ways again, that somehow I might have a chance to rejoin my family, without having to face the terrible unknown.
“Ain’t never killed a man before,” muttered Raymond. He gnawed on his fist now, rubbing his knuckles against his teeth. “Not like that. I guess it was a mercy-killing. You know, like if you found a run-over beagle in the road and it was all twisted up. You’d kill it maybe, to stop it from suffering.”
I nodded and got up off the ottoman.
“I’m going to bed.” Raymond didn’t say anything. He just kept staring out at the shimmering lights-they had gone purple now in the darkness, as I had predicted-staring at the man he had killed. I left him there and went back to my “room” an area formed out of fake walls and office dividers and filled with new luxurious furniture. Beth was there, folding down the sheets on her bed. She had stopped crying, but she looked at me reproachfully when I walked in. I didn’t feel like talking to her, so I went back out front, pushed a pile of dusty clothes off a loveseat and stretched out on the flowery patterned fabric. Eventually I fell asleep.
When I woke up it was still dark. I must have heard something and awakened automatically. Groping for my revolver, I w
iped my mouth and got up, blinking. I walked to the front of the store and saw someone was out there standing over the body, doing something. I moved quickly to the window, ready to sound the alarm if it was another gang, or maybe some friend of Mr. Simpson’s who’d come calling.
I squinted and recognized the outline of a shotgun slung over the figure’s back. It was Ray. I rushed out of the store and into the cool night air, doing the hundred yard dash across the parking lot. I was afraid that Ray would step out on me. So many people had, and for some reason I didn’t want him to go without saying something to him.
“What’s wrong, Ray?” I asked, panting a bit from my run across the parking lot. He didn’t answer. I noticed that the salesman was much farther into the field than he had been before. He had been rolled or pushed up almost to the point that he was sure to vanish into the ripper. I realized that Ray had done it, that he was trying to get the body into the fields for some reason, but he hadn’t pushed him quite far enough and couldn’t go in any further himself without risking getting snatched up by a flare.
Our One-Way sign was there to stop people from getting too close as well as to mark the rip as ours. Even though the fields generally stayed back a few feet from where the sign was, there was an occasional flare or ripple that could reach out and suck up someone standing too close. Without getting too close, Ray was trying to drag the man back by his heels, and first got nothing but his shoes. Then he was tugging on the dead man’s feet, his hands slipping on the socks. He looked like a man trying to retrieve something from the edge of a bonfire without getting burned. He became more daring and grabbed his ankles, giving a mighty heave that brought the body a foot or so closer.
“What are you doing, man?” I asked quietly.