Outcasts

by Nick Wisseman

  And then something triggered her memories, her memories of Pausanias’s memories. Which she could now control, adjust, and focus as she liked…

  …The young man fingers the bone bead around his neck, nods at another of the soldiers—who looks equally tense—and runs.

  Past the other five soldiers, onto the stage, and up behind the old man as the scene lurches forward. The crowd’s noise changes from adulation to alarm…

  …That must be Alexander on the other side of the stage; according to most accounts, he’d walked on with another potential heir before the procession of statues. Rewinding the scene, Aliah zeroed in on his portion of the background…

  …From his closer vantage, the regal, dangerous looking youth seems to catch sight of the coming assassin before most of the crowd. His face tightens in shock as he realizes what’s about to happen…but he doesn’t shout a warning, opening his mouth only slightly before closing it, as if changing his mind. The knife falls, and the scene moves frantically forward…

  …So. Aliah set down the remote to contemplate this revelation. It didn’t look like Alexander had been in on the plot…But he didn’t seem to have been opposed to its outcome.

  She chewed this over for several minutes before another stray thought intruded: that morning she’d overheard one of her Muslim co-workers speculating that the new moon would be sighted in the evening, signaling the end of Ramadan. If that proved to be the case, then Eidu eul-Fitr, the festival breaking this year’s month of day-time fasting (which, as usual, she hadn’t observed) would be happening the next day.

  After another moment’s pause, Aliah reached for her backpack and rummaged through its outer pocket until she found her cell phone.

  “Hi, Mom…Yeah, it’s me…Do you mind if I come home for dinner tomorrow?”

  SPLINTERED

  The bleached blankness of the ceiling started to fold in upon itself. White tiles bent, collapsed, and vanished; rocks, clouds, and a second sun appeared. What had been dimpled monotony was fast becoming picturesque mountainscape, marred only by a thin tendril of smoke winding skywards.

  Jason slammed his eyes shut in disbelief. Hours of blandness didn’t—couldn’t—just become a new world, no matter how much he needed one. He was imagining things again. If he concentrated, the illusion would be gone when he opened his eyes. Focus. He needed to focus.

  He tried, but knew without looking that he’d failed. That the forms above him were still swirling, still coalescing, still…there. Then the pressure in his head returned and resumed squeezing his thoughts like a vise.

  Until something hit his face.

  “…out of it, Jason.”

  Was that a woman’s voice?

  “Snap out of it! There’s no time for this.”

  He reopened his eyes in time to see a second slap descending on his cheek. After the hand rebounded and withdrew, he found himself looking at his ideal woman. Lines delicate and refined, curves smooth and full…A green-eyed goddess.

  “Move, Jason. Now.” Her arm was poised for another swing.

  Jason’s eyes narrowed immediately. “How do you know my…” The still-morphing surroundings registered again; not just the ceiling but the whole room was being superimposed by a ghostly background now, a translucent, volcanic landscape complete with shadowy magma and transparent rock. This secondary image suffused even the dazzling stranger, and…himself.

  He understood her urgency.

  But when he struggled to rise, his limbs were uncooperative, sluggish to the point of feeling drugged.

  “Move, dammit!” The stranger gripped his shoulders and hurled him off the bed and through the window.

  * * *

  Jason regained consciousness to another “Move, goddammit, move!” He leapt to his feet, his arms and legs functioning as if the paralysis of a moment before had never been. A shower of glass fell from him as he rose, but he seemed to have no major injuries aside from the still-growing pain in his head.

  Recoiling as she placed one of her deceptively dainty hands on his shoulder, he balled up both fists to strike. But she preempted him by gesturing to the building they’d just escaped, and he watched as the volcanic vista began spilling out of the structure’s confines and into the surrounding area. It was like a new photograph developing over an old one…

  And all at once, there were two competing realities straining to coexist. The building, the trees, the air itself seemed to swell, to distort, to bulge at the seams. New matter fought with old for the same space; a bursting seemed imminent.

  Turning back to the stranger, Jason followed without hesitation when she began sprinting in the opposite direction.

  * * *

  From roughly three miles away, Jason and the mysterious woman witnessed the annihilation of the place they’d just fled; in a shower of lava, brick, and charred organic substance, the two planes all but cancelled each other out.

  “One of the worst I’ve seen.” She said this casually, sounding nowhere near as horrified as Jason felt. He couldn’t find the words to reply, but the sirens and screams did their best to speak for him.

  Rising, the stranger motioned for Jason to do the same. “It should have stabilized now, though. Enough that we can go back.”

  Jason blinked and halted mid-stand.

  “Hard to fathom, isn’t it? But we don’t have any other choice.” She smiled and started walking.

  “No.” He sat back down, his gaze still fixed on the fountain of debris ahead.

  “Jason…” The woman shook her head reproachfully, but when she turned back to him, her face was smiling sweetly. “You have to trust me a little further. I got you this far, didn’t I? Just a little further, and then I’ll tell you everything.” She smiled again, even more dazzlingly. “Trust me.”

  His lips started to form another denial, but the words never came; something inside him silenced the dissent. That same something then began to urge compliance, whispering that only catastrophe could result from further obstinacy…

  By the time they were halfway back, Jason had completely forgotten about resisting.

  * * *

  Ash dominated the destruction, coating the twisted fusions that remained: volcanic rock merged with cracked concrete; scorched tree blended with broken brick; steel consumed by lava from the inside out. And where the strain of superimposition had been too much, there were only craters.

  The impossibility quickly became overwhelming. Jason lowered his eyes…And bumped into his guide, who’d stopped without warning.

  “Look.”

  He forced himself to follow her gaze and, despite how winded he was, found the breath to gasp: stretching before them was a blasted mountainside that receded to an endless plain. For the length of a house, the image was whole, complete with no overlap. But at its borders the combination and its unsightly consequences began.

  Jason’s face broadcast his question.

  “It’s a conduit now. A joining of the two planes.”

  He frowned.

  She smiled. “We cross. I’ll help you, though soon you’ll be able to do it on your own.” Gesturing ahead with one hand, she placed the other on his shoulder.

  He snarled and shook her off, a guarded look overtaking his expression.

  “Jason…”

  That same compulsion arrested his defiance, and without any further struggle, he let himself be led onto the mountain and out of the chaos that had so recently been his home.

  * * *

  When he finally looked back, Jason found his old world still struggling with the scar of superimposition. Destruction made up the forefront, but just beyond New York stretched unsullied.

  The merging hadn’t spread.

  At least from what he could see; the window to life as he’d known it was only twenty meters wide. Picking up where this “conduit’s” borders left off, his new environment was completely independent of his old one…Aside from the catastrophic point of overlap.

  With a sharp reprimand, the st
ranger jerked Jason’s attention back in front of him. That look behind was the last he managed; she kept him hurtling down the volcano-side at too reckless a pace to risk another glance—he was near to collapsing when they reached the slope’s base. Gesturing that he could finally rest by a small, scraggly tree, the woman continued on with a brusque “I’ll be back shortly.”

  An hour after she’d vanished into the distance, Jason decided he should try to find her. Part of him rose out of a desire to protect her pretty smile if it was in trouble; another part whispered that she could only be trusted if he could see what she was doing.

  Advancing at a brisk walk, he cleared the last roots of the volcano and entered the endless plain with fists clenched in readiness. A few steps later, his hands tightened even further as he noticed movement some miles ahead: the motion of a great, heaving mass.

  Jason approached as stealthily as the open plain would allow, crouching low to take advantage of the waist-high grass. After a half-hour of creeping, he drew close enough to appreciate the sheer enormity of the beasts before him.

  Thousands of an immense breed of buffalo ate, bred, and slept for as far as he could see. A teeming horde whose magnitude he couldn’t begin to comprehend…He fell to his knees, suddenly overcome by all that had happened to him.

  The rumble of countless hooves brought him back; the gigantic animals were advancing. Not directly towards him, but at such an angle that the herd’s margins would pass over his position. They were approaching slowly, but their sheer numbers meant he had little time.

  Jason began to rise, but halfway to standing he was frozen again, this time by the glittering effect the parting clouds had on the buffalos’ backs. As the sun shone through, its rays caught the beasts’ fur, and the rippling hairs formed a sea of illumination…

  As irrationally as any moth, he made for the light.

  * * *

  Jason was sprinting by the time he reached the first buffalo. As he ran past them, the horde began to turn in on itself: those in front started to shy away; those in back pressed on obliviously. Within moments, he was surrounded by a sea of panicking giants. Finally realizing how much danger he’d put himself in, he panicked with them.

  Freezing in mid-stride, he instinctively tried to make himself as small as possible…Until a frantic buffalo brushed against him. Even more terrified now, Jason screamed and jumped back at the same time the animal leapt back from him. He kept screaming, unable to stop as the buffalo around him started retreating again. Hopping from foot to foot and flailing his arms, he started making as much noise and motion as he could. It worked: before long, the horde was stampeding away in every direction. Miraculously unharmed, he collapsed, relief flooding though him and chasing out the adrenaline. He lay there for a long time, enjoying the receding thunder he could feel through the trampled earth.

  “I thought I told you to wait for me.”

  Jason narrowed his eyes as soon as he’d opened them. “Where have you been?”

  “Making sure of the path ahead,” the stranger said. “Get up. We have a lot to do.”

  “Not until you tell me what the hell is going on.”

  The stranger shook her head and laughed. “I wondered when you’d stop snarling and ask.” Settling in beside him, she let her knee press carelessly against his side as she plucked one of the few unbent blades of grass. “You know, I might miss this plane the most out of all the possibles. That is if we fail, which we won’t. Not if you do more listening and less sulking.”

  Thrilling at her touch despite himself, he angled his face to look into hers. “Possibles?”

  “The infinite number of planes representing every branching in time. A reality for each of history’s options. Every option its own universe, every choice its own manifestation. Components of the multiverse, if you’d prefer the sci-fi term.”

  Jason snorted. “Sounds like impossibles.”

  “Clever.” Her smile took the sting out of the sarcasm. “But whether you accept it or not, the possibles are collapsing, and everything that ever was or could have been will die if we don’t reverse the process.” She smiled again.

  He didn’t. “We?”

  “You’re marked for this, Jason, even if you don’t know it yet…Look at your hands.”

  Slowly, grudgingly, he did so…and immediately sprang to his feet.

  The stranger laughed again, longer this time. “Don’t be so alarmed. You’re not a bigot. It shouldn’t bother you that much.”

  He stared at his skin, darkened to a healthy brown and still darkening. His forearms also seemed to be thicker, expanding a little more with every heartbeat. And in the back of his head, a ball of emotions was forming and overlapping with his own.

  Jason screamed and flailed even more violently than he had with the buffalo.

  “Jason. Jason! Calm down. You’re just blending with this plane’s version of you. It’ll stop once we cross into the next possible, which is why we need to keep moving, so there’s less to reverse. Jason…God damn her. Don’t tell them anything.”

  “Jason!” a new voice called.

  Curious despite his revulsion, Jason refocused just enough to register that his guide was running in the opposite direction of two more strangers dressed in white.

  * * *

  “Jason! Jason, calm down!” The new male stranger seemed to want to say more, but his breathlessness overcame him.

  The new female seemed in better shape, despite her doughy figure. “Don’t be alarmed, Jason. We’re here to help. I need you to sit down and relax for a second. Just sit down and relax, please…Jason?”

  He could hear the pair, but only barely: their words seemed to come from a distance rather than just a few yards away. He did stop moving, though.

  “All right, Jason, you can stay standing if you prefer. But I think we’ll sit.” The couple sat down slowly, eyeing Jason concernedly.

  He kept his gaze on his hands as they clenched and unclenched at regular intervals.

  The male stranger cleared his throat and wiggled his mustache before beginning. “Jason…”

  “How do you know my name?” Jason raised his head and looked directly into the man’s brown eyes.

  “What’s wrong, Jason?” The woman answered for her partner, who seemed a bit taken aback.

  “My hands…My body…How, god dammit, HOW?!?”

  The woman looked worried now too. “Jason?”

  He made a broad, encompassing gesture at the alien horizon. “What in the hell is all this?”

  “This?” She seemed legitimately puzzled.

  “That,” he gestured again, before marveling at how familiar she suddenly looked. And then he wondered why on earth they were pretending not to see the insanity around them, why they were trying to deceive him like everyone else. “And how do you know my God damn name!?!”

  The woman glanced over at her partner for help, but the man was totally at a loss. “Jason…what’s bothering you? You’ve been so nervous lately.”

  His expression reverted to blankness. The foreign emotions in his head were solidifying, and he could hear a whisper now: the beginning of someone else’s inner monologue, in a language he couldn’t understand.

  “Jason.” The man tried his best to reenter the conversation. “We’re just a little concerned by your behavior the last few days. It’s been…less than appropriate, and we were wondering—”

  The unmistakable staccato of gunfire cut through Jason’s confusion.

  * * *

  Whirling, Jason scanned the idyllic landscape for the shooter and found what looked like a marine a hundred yards distant, blazing away at…nothing. And then suddenly it was something, another spectral scene coming into focus. A wasteland filled with ghostly warriors killing each other with weaponry he’d never seen before. Upon closer inspection, the marine he’d seen first was slightly transparent as well…but not enough to protect his torso from the bullets that churned it into red mist.

  Turning back to the pair o
f strangers in white, Jason found to his even greater bewilderment that the two hadn’t even batted an eye at the phantom madness coalescing just a football field away. They still looked concerned, but they were gazing only at him.

  “Jason?”

  He stared at the new woman with open disdain. She was either unbelievably oblivious, crazy, or both.

  Swiveling back to the battle that was raging with increasing clarity, he immediately spotted the first stranger. She was beckoning from the epicenter of the violence, amidst a storm of men and metal…

  Jason had already sprinted ten yards before the pair behind him found the breath to try and call him back.

  * * *

  The soldiers who stopped to ponder their surreal circumstances were shot down almost immediately. The rest, exhibiting extraordinary discipline, ignored the planar limbo and kept killing; they were still shot down, but not as quickly.

  Too far in now to turn back, Jason could only grit his teeth and keep running when his path was blocked by the sudden materialization of a soldier in red. The marine should have eclipsed Jason’s view of anything in front of him, but even as he drew nearer he could still make out the plains of the current possible through the man’s translucent body. And even when the soldier was shot through his left breast, wind-blown grass was still discernible behind the rush of crimson…

  The bullet passed just over Jason’s left shoulder, causing him to stumble. Righting himself before he fell, he kept running and started screaming.