by Brian Hodge
“I think speed’s our only hope.”
Ellen got on her bike, turned it around and prepared to escape. “What if we meet up with the Humvees?”
“Ellen, the only direction I’ll go is forward.”
“Into that? We’ll be killed for certain.”
“But we might be able to do some damage.”
Under the grass and weeds around them, she began to notice purple flashes and sparks. It was coming, moving like a wave out of the dark, changing everything it touched.
From behind them on the road there came a series of wet snarls, loud enough to be heard over the forest’s agony. A bend in the road made it impossible to see what was there. Ellen heard Brian take out his pistol, did the same.
An enormous creature on four segmented legs came stalking around the bend. The legs were at least fifteen feet long. Lurching like a sedan chair in their center was a boxy body that had once clearly been a Humvee. Beneath it gnarled, troll-like shadows humped along, seeking the protection of the great beast. They bore long, thin arms. The ruins of the uniforms and chemical protective gear of these creatures who had once been ordinary American soldiers hung in tatters from various appendages.
Where the lights of the Humvee had been, the head of the creature had compound eyes that glowed with purple fire.
This light struck joy into their hearts. They did not expect it, and they cried out with the pleasure. Brian stomped his feet and yelled. Ellen staggered in circles, wailing, impotently waving her gun.
It was like being burned to death in glory.
But Ellen also felt it as rape, and the single, tiny spark of anger that this produced was enough to cause her to turn away for a moment.
The thrall broke. Beside her Brian was on his back, supported by heels and shoulders, bellowing and thrusting his pelvis at the oncoming monstrosity with the fury of a sex-maddened rodent.
She leaped on him, pressed her face to his and screamed out his name with every ounce of strength in her body.
Then they were rolling—and not a moment too soon, for the huge walker with its phalanx of trolls had positioned themselves not a hundred feet away. As Brian and Ellen scrabbled, stumbled, finally ran deeper into the forbidden zone, the monstrosity poured purple light into the two ATVs, which belched yellow smoke and began to grow legs.
Ellen, who had been terrified beyond words, now reached another place entirely in her heart, the place where men in battle go, that is beyond pain, beyond fear, beyond hope, beyond everything.
She was a body, bone and blood and brain, sweat and flying hair, racing between bloated monstrosities through foul purple air, behind a man in a tattered T-shirt who was waving a pistol as he ran.
They went toward the judge’s vine-encrusted house and beyond it, now running, now climbing through curtains of vine that shuddered when they were touched. When Ellen slowed for a moment, she felt these vines begin slipping stealthily around her legs, felt leaves plastering themselves to her arms, her thighs. Stifling a scream, she snatched them away. More came, and she could feel all the limbs and twigs and leaves bending toward herself and Brian, could see the fat bodies of the trees beginning to pulsate.
But then they reached the area of the root cellar, and suddenly conditions changed again. Here there weren’t so many of the monstrous plants. The brush that had choked the cellar’s entrance had given way to sheets of the slick fungus. This had the effect of increasing the opening rather than narrowing it.
Brian sat down on the stuff, began inching toward the hole.
“Brian, don’t!”
“We’ve got to go where we’re least expected. There’s no other way.”
She looked back. With the strange grace of a spider, the enormous machine marched after them. The shadows of the trolls were fanning out, cutting off all escape. Two dead black piles of what appeared to be gleaming meat jerked and heaved in the background: the remains of the ATVs were continuing to mutate.
“We need flashlights, Brian.”
“Oh, Christ, you’re right.” He peered across the seething lawn. “We’ve gotta try the house.” He sounded sick.
Crossing the heaving, tortured earth, they crouched like soldiers under fire. They kept their faces carefully averted from the oncoming juggernaut, but now even the purple flickering in the subsoil had become bright enough to deliver pleasure.
Every time they as much as slowed down for breath, the grass itself came spinning up around their ankles, the blades having taken on the configuration of thousands of busy, tapered worms.
By the time they reached the porch, these creatures had covered their shoes with a substance so slippery that they could hardly keep on their feet. They entered the quiet, inky black kitchen, feeling their way, unsure of anything.
When Brian inhaled, he noticed a strong odor. “What’s that smell?”
“Sweat, I think.”
“Is it us?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Where would an old man keep a flashlight, Ellen?”
“A cabinet, a drawer?”
She heard a scrape, then clinking. Brian had opened a drawer. Flailing ahead, she found the refrigerator, opened a cabinet above it. Her hands swept the shelf. She snatched them back. There was something slick. It felt… organic. She listened, but nothing moved. Licking her paper-dry lips, she stuck her hand in again. “Brian, I’ve found some candles!”
“Matches?”
“No… Yes!” She pulled down a familiar box. “Kitchen matches. Big box!” Holding them, she grabbed the candles. “Four candles.”
He came close to her. They fumbled with their booty like excited children opening Christmas presents. Then he struck one of the matches and held it high.
They both screamed at once, shrieked, really. Standing in the doorway was a seven-foot-tall insect with gigantic, glaring eyes. Lying before it on the floor were five supple arms of the type that had destroyed the Dick Kellys and the Huygenses. They emerged from an unseen source in the dining room. With the easy stealth of a cobra, two of them rose from the floor. Both were carrying purple crystalline eyes.
The insect’s mouth parts vibrated and it emitted a buzzing caw. They could hear the excitement.
Then the match went out.
Brian fired his pistol into the dark. In the first flash, the thing’s eyes glared, filled with malevolence. In the second, it had spread great, sheet-like wings that looked like black, veined plastic.
In the third, it was gone.
“Let’s get out of here,” Ellen yelled. She was thinking of those arms.
This time they did not stop at the edge of the root cellar: there was no time to stop. The Humvees were in the yard; something was crowing angrily from the roof of the house; the arms were snaking out the kitchen window, their surfaces gleaming in the last failing light of the moon.
Ellen landed on Brian, both of them sinking a foot into the spongy, giving surface that had replaced the earthen floor of the root cellar.
Working with furious haste, Brian lit another match. The room was empty, and the entrance to the mine gaped unattended. They lit candles and went in.
Ellen was so scared that her nervous system was beginning to betray her. She could hardly walk, let alone keep the candle lit in the stinking draft that exuded from the tunnel. “Brian.”
“I smell them.” He sighed. “If only we had flashlights,” he muttered. He was cupping his hand around his guttering candle, leaning into the opening.
“I can’t go in there!”
“Where else is there?”
For the first time in her life, the idea of suicide crossed her mind. “Why did I come back? Am I crazy?” She sobbed a ragged sob. It made her mad when she cried, and she choked it back.
“Look. I came back because there’s no place in the world I’d rather go. And I have a chance of doing something in here. Out there, none.”
“What sort of a chance?”
“There’s bound to be something we can do.”
“Don’t make me think there’s hope if there isn’t any. Because I think I want to blow my own head off before I get made into one of those… things. I don’t want to miss my opportunity, Brian.”
“If somebody opened a door into another universe—a parallel reality—then the door can be closed. My theories suggested this possibility.”
“It’s science fiction.”
“The Many Worlds Interpretation is accepted physics. Parallel universes are real, I’m afraid.”
They went down the mine. The walls were iron, but the floor was mushy. It was like trying to walk on raw dough.
They went down twenty feet, then fifty.
And they encountered an elevator. “Goddamn that Nate Harris.
He’s a liar!” Beyond the elevator a tunnel went off toward the surface, no doubt to the main entrance to the facility, which would be hidden well back in the woods.
“The project was classified, Ellen. They probably didn’t even let him come down this far.”
“They? You mean people?”
“Of course. The scientific team that was working on this.”
“They oughta be thrown into the deepest dungeon in the world and left to rot.”
He thought he might know the fate of two members of that team: one might have died screaming in the mound, another could have been the woman disinterred from her living grave near Towayda.
To one side was a glass-fronted box with an elevator key in it. Brian broke it with the butt of his pistol and they got the shaft open. Down one side there was a row of ladder rungs. The car was nowhere to be seen.
Without a word, Brian started down, his candle dripping wax into the gloom below. Ellen followed him. She’d never much enjoyed heights—bungee jumping was good copy, no more—and she fought to keep her vertigo from making her lose her balance.
Perhaps an impossible task. “Brian?”
“Yeah?”
“How deep is this?”
“Could be hundreds of feet.”
They were now lost in the gloom, two people in a tiny pool of fluttery candlelight, dropping down and down.
“Hold it,” Brian said crisply.
She stopped. Her blood was blasting in her ears, her breath snapping.
“Now come ahead. Be careful.”
She hit a surface. There were cables going up. “Where are we?”
Brian pulled open a hatch. “We’ve gotta go through the elevator car.” He dropped down inside, making it bounce. “Shit, lost my light!”
Carefully, she put out her candle and thrust it down in her pocket with her other two.
The darkness was now absolute. “Brian?”
“I’m right here. Just drop.”
She slid into the hatch, let go. An instant later she hit the rocking floor of the car. She flailed, felt Brian, then grabbed something thick and cool and wet. “Jesus, it’s full of that ick!”
“Strike a light!” His voice was high with terror, and that made her fumble.
Her right hand was covered with goop, so she used her left. “I can’t find the matches!”
“Jesus, Jesus, I hate this stuff!”
Her hand closed around the box, drew it out of her pocket. Her candles scattered on the floor. “Brian—” She thrust the matches into his hands.
There was a scrape, a spark, then the small sound of dozens of matches hitting the floor. He scrabbled. “It’s OK!”
The match lit, revealing his gray, sweat-sheened face, his bulging, glistening eyes. She looked down at the material on her hand. Black gel. As best she could she rubbed it off against the wall.
Filling the back of the car was a thick, black mass of the material she had touched. It looked like a wet, lumpy garbage bag slathered with ooze.
They stared at it for a moment without comprehension.
Then Brian doubled over, retching loudly. In the semi-opaque gel floated parts of a human being. There were eyes suspended in the mass, connected by tangles of nerve endings to a dark, shriveled appendage, the congealing remnant of a brain. A face, stretched to extremes of distortion, the eye-sockets wide, the lips like red rubber bands, the cheeks crazed by horizontal wrinkles.
“Jesus Christ, it’s Bill Merriman! He was our security director.” He pointed down into the complex mess. “On his belt—that’s his pager!”
“Got a page from hell, I guess.”
“Poor guy.”
They found the hatch in the floor, and pried up the sunken handle with Ellen’s pocketknife, a pitiful little thing with two blades and a fingernail file.
They went on, descending another thirty feet before they reached the bottom of the shaft. The floor was littered with gum and candy wrappers and other familiar debris: lost coins, a half-empty pack of cigarettes—things people had dropped on their way in and out of the elevator. There were stacks of cinder-blocks, coils of wire.
“This is only half finished, Brian. It’s a mess.”
“Yeah.” His voice was bitter. “They didn’t have enough time. Not quite enough.”
A moment later they stepped out into a hallway. Ellen held up her candle. “This part’s finished.”
The hall was short, the ceiling low. Brian looked around at the blue pipe that lined the walls. “This is all very familiar. It’s a waveguide. The visible part of one. The rest is buried.”
“What’s a waveguide?”
“When you create an extra-temporal particle, it flies off through time and space both. It leaves a sort of track in time. This guides it, so you can detect its passage. But somebody with superior understanding could use its track to literally climb through the ages to reach you.”
“From the future? These things are from the future?”
Brian shook his head. “If they’re not from some sort of alternate reality, then they must be from the past.”
“The past? How?”
“I don’t know. Except when you consider that the earth existed for billions of years before the first sign of what we define as life appeared, you can see that there’s plenty of room for whole worlds to have come and gone and left not even a fossil behind.”
Then they saw a figure lying in the farther shadows. As they went toward it, Brian at once hoped and feared that it was Loi.
It was a young man. The uniform told them where the judge’s soldiers had come from: they had been facility guards like this one.
Ellen turned to Brian, put her hands on his shoulders. They held one another in silence, two very frightened and lonely people.
From deep within the complex came a rattle, followed by a long sigh. A wind rose from below, this one foul with odors neither of them had ever smelled before, thick, sour odors, complicated by dense sweetness. It stank like old meat, like rotted fruit.
Then the direction of the air flow changed. What came down from above was fresh by comparison. “What gives, Brian?”
“A ventilation system.”
“There’s no electricity.”
“It isn’t our design, Ellen. We vent with fans.”
The whole place was quietly breathing.
2
The first contraction confused her. Despite all the years she’d spent on her back, she’d never given birth. At the Blue Moon Bar girls who didn’t get aborted got taken down to the banks of the Chao Phraya River, and they didn’t come back.
She’d been aborted seven times, and that was the secret reason she was so fragile inside. Only the doctor had known. “Dr. Gidumal,” she moaned, staggering along in the blind dark. “Sanghvi… Sanghvi Gidumal…”
Now she held her belly, encircling it with her arms. Memories came to her aid, gentle and vivid, of the few good times she had known. But even these memories contained betrayal.
When she was eight, her uncle had dressed her in a beautiful white bao dai that was scented with flowers, and taken her from the Chu Chi tunnels to Mai Thi Luu Street, with the Saigon Zoo at one end and the Emperor of Jade Pagoda at the other. Behind the pagoda flowering weeds
choked the banks of the Thi Nghe channel, and their aroma scented the grounds. There had been small bells that tinkled peacefully, and incense that filled the air with the scent of old memories, and the gleaming bald heads of boy monks who had watched her with wide, calm eyes.
In that pagoda was a very special and terrible place, the famous Hall of the Ten Hells. All the torments of the damned were portrayed there, the suffering of those so weighted with karma that they had fallen from the wheel of life forever.
Her two years in the tunnels had taught her about maneuvering in wet and dark, and that training was indispensable now.
She’d been touched all over by those terrible rough hands, and they had left something runny on her that had congealed and become sticky. More than bearing her contractions, she thought now about getting this stuff off her skin.
She did not believe in the contractions.
Brian Ky Kelly would not choose such an inauspicious time for his arrival. He was a glory child, intended to come at the very moment of dawn, under the protection of the sun and the morning star.
Her legs seemed to weigh a thousand pounds, she didn’t know where she was, where she was going. There were sparks in her eyes but nothing else, no light.
She must have sinned too much with the perverts who visited the Blue Moon Bar. She had done many things repugnant to heaven and nature. But she had a baby! “I am with child,” she cried, a shout she had often heard in the smoky dawn, when the American planes had sailed high and the firebombs had fluttered to the ground with the motion of silver leaves.
She heard a woman sobbing, knew it was her, for there was no other woman here, nobody else so bad she had been sent to the black bottom of the Ten Hells. She knew she would burn soon, she could smell combustion in the air, hear fire rustling in the walls.
Something brushed against her shoulder, then small threads began dragging across her chest. Reflex caused her to jump away, and the threads disappeared.