White Space

by Ilsa J. Bick

  “Bode, do something. Get us moving!” Chad screamed. “The things are almost here, man, they’re almost here!”

  But they may not be able to get to us. Rima saw that, further away, the snow seemed to be pulsing, the swells widening in ripples like a pond after you heaved in a heavy stone. Like Tania’s face, her neck. She eyed a swell, saw how fast it raced under the snow. Even at this distance, she could see Tania, who’d now linked up with the creatures, stagger.

  “Can’t!” Bode yanked the truck’s gearshift, dropping them into first and pumping the accelerator, fighting the black lava’s grab, trying to rock them the way you might try to jump a car out of a deep rut. The truck’s engine whined, its growl rising to a high howl, and still they were only crawling over the snow, going nowhere fast. Now Rima could smell something burning. The pistons, the engine block itself—it didn’t matter.

  “Is there anything we can do?” Eric asked, tensely. “Bode?”

  “I got nothing, man,” Bode said, tersely, teeth bared. Sweat beaded on his forehead. “We’re sitting ducks. I don’t know what else I can do. I’ll keep fighting this hunka junk, but …” There was another tremendous grind of gears. “How you and your brother set for ammo?”

  “My gun’s dry,” Eric said. “Case is out, too.”

  “Which leaves the Winchester with five”—the Dodge bucked as Bode fought the stick—“and eight in the Colt. Plenty to go around.”

  “Plenty? Aw, man, you crazy?” Chad moaned. He’d clapped both hands to his head. “Thirteen measly shots or thirteen hundred, there are too many of them, man.”

  “He’s not talking about enough bullets for them,” Eric said.

  There was a moment’s trembling silence, which the birds’ shrills filled, as the Dodge’s engine muttered a basso counterpoint. “Oh no,” Chad finally said, shaking his head. “Bode, you are out of your mind. If you think I’m gonna eat a bullet …”

  “Better than them eating you,” Bode said.

  “We’re not there just yet,” Eric said.

  But we will be soon. Rima felt Casey’s hand find hers. “Do you know what’s happening?” he asked.

  She shook her head. But God, she thought this might be her fault. She knew Tania; she knew about Father Preston, the church. And for a while, that world was so real, as if she had pulled something together out of her mind, or memory, or both, knitting a world as surely as those creatures could remake and mend their flesh.

  Then stop this. She closed her eyes. Please, Fog, or whatever you are … please stop or show me how. Even if I have to stay. Please. She pushed out the thought as hard as she could, wondering if there really was anything to hear it. Let the others go. I don’t want Casey to die.

  “Hey, hey.” She opened her eyes to find Casey staring, her hand clutching his in a death grip. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t let go.”

  “Casey.” She swallowed. “I think …”

  “Guys?” Eric broke in. “Look.”

  About fifty yards away and all around them, the creatures were at a dead stop, gathered in a silent, milling throng at the edge of that advancing flood of coal-colored goo. Rima could see Tania pacing back and forth, looking for a way across, as the black tide lapped and gurgled around her ankles. Several of the man-things were actually backing away, and most were stumbling as the snow continued to fracture.

  “Man, you know,” Chad said, “if it’s not hurting them, maybe be better to take our chances.”

  “I wouldn’t base anything on what happens to them,” Eric said. “I blew holes in that girl and she—”

  All of a sudden, Tania let out a bawling screech so loud it cut through and over the birds’ cries. Rima heard herself gasp as Tania gave a sudden, violent lurch, as if she’d been grabbed around the ankles. Her hands flew up as she dropped, straight down, the dark liquid instantly closing over her head.

  “Jesus,” Bode said. “Like quicksand.”

  “No, it’s too fast,” Casey said. Outside, more and more of the creatures had wheeled around to try and run, but what was left of the snow was breaking apart under their feet, the surface crumbling and collapsing. Silent before, the creatures now brayed in rusty barks. Black sludge steamrolled over the snow in a remorseless juggernaut, slopping over and slurping up the white. The crazed, ravening birds were so low now, they swarmed directly overhead, thick as blowflies over dead meat. “They’re not sinking,” Casey said. “It’s like they’re being pulled back.”

  “Or down,” Eric said. “Like something’s grabbing—” He broke off as a violent shudder vibrated through the truck. “Oh boy. Bode, Bode.”

  Chad’s eyes bugged. “What the hell?”

  “Oh God,” Rima said, and then screamed as the vehicle suddenly jolted downward, canting at a crazy angle. “It’s happening to us.”

  “We’re sinking!” Chad braced himself against the dash. “Jesus, it’s got us, we’re sinking, we’re sinking!”

  “Can you get us moving, Bode?” Rima said. The boy shook his head, and, as the truck rose, Rima’s stomach swooped, then tried cramming behind her teeth as they plummeted on the other side of a swell. “Then what do we do?”

  “I know what I’m doing!” Chad popped his door. “Bode, we got to go, we got to go, we got to go go go!”

  “No, Chad!” Bode and Eric screamed at the same time. “Chad, stop!” Bode shouted. “You can’t go out there!”

  “Well, I’m not dying in here!” Chad shouted, and then he was flinging himself out of the truck.

  “Get him!” Rima shrilled, even as Chad tumbled out. She tried springing over the backseat, but Casey grabbed her waist and held her back. “Casey, no, we have to get him! Bode, don’t let it touch him, don’t let it—”

  But Chad was out. The moment his feet hit the churning black, Chad … didn’t sink. The surface actually stilled, as if it were holding itself steady in order to make sense of this strange new taste. Maybe I was wrong. Still hunched up against the Dodge’s ceiling, with Casey’s hands battened onto her waist, Rima stared as Chad cautiously straightened. Maybe it will let him go. Maybe it senses that we’re different.

  Then she saw how the surface shuddered, just a bit, and what echoed through her mind then wasn’t a sight but a sound: that squeaking, wet-fingers SMEE-smee of Father Preston’s meat inching over glass. “Chad!” she said.

  “H-hey,” Chad exhaled, as if suddenly realizing what he’d just done. Turning, he looked back and spread his arms. “L-look, man, it’s coo—”

  Flashing out from the murk, a black tendril shot out like the sticky tongue of a chameleon unfurling to snatch a moth on the fly. Chad shrieked as it roped around his left leg.

  “Chad!” Bode bawled.

  “God, get it off, get it off!” Chad wailed, struggling to pull himself free. His clothes were cooking, the steam rising not in white but black curls. As he bent to snatch at the black tongue around his leg, another spun out to wind around his right wrist. “JESUS GOD!” Chad threw back his head in an agonized scream. The first tentacle had coiled all the way up his leg to his groin, and Chad’s pants were shredding, dissolving to threads. The flesh of both his left leg and right arm began to bubble, as if Chad were a plastic bag filled with water reaching the boiling point. Then, all of a sudden, fountains of blood jetted in pulsing red ropes from where the flesh had been burned, and Chad let go of a wild shriek: “Bode, it’s burning, it’s burning, IT’S EATING ME!”

  Of them all, it was Eric who reacted first. “Oh my God, oh my God.” He swept Rima out of the way and scrambled into Chad’s seat. “Chad, Chad, grab my hand, grab it!”

  “Eric!” Letting go of Rima, Casey lunged for his brother, and just in the nick of time, because Bode, wide-eyed and ashen, was still paralyzed, seemingly unable to move. As if sensing what Eric meant to do, the inky tarn gave a mighty heave, and the truck dropped again with another stomach-churning lurch. Off-balance, only inches from the open door, Eric pitched forward. With a yell, Casey made a snatching
grab, hooking Eric’s waistband, and then he was working his way up Eric’s back, hugging Eric in a tight embrace. “I got you, but hurry, Eric, hurry!”

  “Chad!” Eric had stretched himself on the seat until his chest hung over the pulsing muck, now less than a foot from his face. Maybe a taste of Chad was all it had needed, because the black goo had morphed into a writhing sea of muscular, ropy tentacles that coiled over and around Chad to burn into his skin and draw out his blood. Everywhere they stung Chad, fresh black steam smoked, drifting up in an inky cloud toward the birds, which were so close and thick, it was as if they were all that was left of a sky.

  “Chad!” Eric shouted again, and thrust out both hands, straining as far as he could. “Chad, grab my hands, give me your hands!”

  Saturated with blood, blind with pain, his skin steaming and bubbling and tearing open, Chad tried. He was crumpling now, not sinking so much as being eaten alive, dissolved in a vat of black acid, but his left arm was still free. Twisting, Chad made a frantic grab—and missed.

  “No!” Eric shouted. Rima thought he would have leapt from the truck if not for Casey and now Bode, who finally seemed to have snapped out of it, was dragging back on Casey to keep them both from falling. “Chad,” Eric screamed. “Chad!”

  Shrieking, Chad fell, dropping into the embrace of a thousand stygian tentacles. One snaked over his eyes, and yet another probed at Chad’s mouth and slid inside—and then Chad was no longer screaming but choking as the tentacle worked and wormed into his throat. Chad’s skin was turning, going from white to a deep plum and shading to black, as if the tentacle were a hose, pumping ink—or dissolving Chad from the inside out.

  The truck jolted, the engine died with a gurgling rattle, and now, groaning, the Dodge listed in an excruciating slow roll, like a boat beginning to founder. Crying out, Rima jammed her left foot into the back of the front seat and the other against the raised ridge running up the center of the floor. The truck was too old for shoulder harnesses or hand loops, so she spread her arms and flattened her palms on the roof. The truck was now canted at a forty-five-degree angle, far enough that she was afraid to let up with her legs. As it was, if they tipped much more, she’d be practically standing straight up.

  “Oh Jesus.” Both Bode’s fists, trembling with strain, were clenched in Casey’s parka. “Kid,” he grunted, “I’m slipping, can’t hold you! Eric, shut the door before I lose him, man! Shut it before those things get a taste of you, too! Come on!”

  “Can’t!” Beyond, Eric had planted his boots to either side of the open door and was bracing Casey, trying to keep both his brother and himself from falling out. The waving, searching tentacles of that black anemone were probing the bottom right corner of the truck door, as if deciding whether they liked the taste, the sound a moist but hollow splot-splot-splot-splot. Chad was completely gone now. Either swallowed or dissolved … Rima thought it didn’t much matter. “We’ve rolled too far,” Eric said. “It’s too heavy, I can’t do it.”

  “Man, we’re done, it’s over,” Bode said, and yet his body didn’t seem to believe that, because, if anything, he pulled even harder on Casey, eking out every last second of life. “Come on, kid, help me. Pull.”

  “I’m trying.” Casey’s voice was as gray as his face. He flicked one quick look back at her. “Rima, if you can, pop your door or unroll your window and climb out, get on top of the truck.”

  “He’s right.” Sweat coursed down Bode’s cheeks. “Get outta here, Rima. Maybe you can find your way out of this.” When she made no move to do so, he barked, “Rima, damn it, go!”

  “Forget it,” she said, thinking she sounded braver than she felt. “I’m not leaving you guys. There’s no point.” Even if she could bully the heavy door or lever herself out the window, she could picture herself balancing on an ever-diminishing island of metal until the ooze finally took her, too. Worse, she would hear the others—hear Casey—as they died before her, and know she was powerless to help.

  “Hey, we’re not sinking as fast,” Eric said. He sounded breathless, like he was churning through wind sprints. At his feet, the tarn kept on sampling the truck, the splot-splot-splot-splot of little black tongues flicking along the bottom edge of the door, working toward the hinge, as the truck slipped deeper by slow degrees. Eric managed another inch back. “You feel it? We’re still going down, but …”

  “Good.” Bode’s teeth were bared. “Hope it’s got a stomachache. Hope it chokes.”

  “But it was so fast before,” Casey said in as breathless a tone as his brother. “What’s it waiting for?”

  “Maybe it’s playing around.” And then Eric grunted at the splot-splot of a tentacle over the door’s running board. “Maybe it likes it when we scream.”

  And then, out of nowhere, Rima thought she heard something: slight, airy, the thinnest sliver of sound. What? That wasn’t a scream. Craning, she looked to her right and through the truck’s rear window. It was now very dark in the truck and outside, the coil of birds blotted out whatever sky remained. If anyone could look through all those birds—say, the way you could through the clear glass shell and into the intricate design at the heart of a paperweight—it would probably seem as if the truck were a small bubble of metal and glass, and they, the creatures trapped inside. Like one of those old-fashioned diving bells, the ones open at the bottom but filled with air. Other than the birds, there was no one out there.

  Then, she heard that sound that almost wasn’t again, and this time she recognized a word.

  “Do you hear that?” she said.

  “Hear what?” Casey asked.

  “Someone just called my name.” She twisted a look over her left shoulder, craning up through the passenger’s side door. More birds. “I think it was Emma.”

  “What?” Bode said.

  Rima. Still tentative and evanescent, but now somehow more intense to Rima than simply empty air, as if Emma was honing in on them. Then: Eric.

  “What?” Eric said. His head jerked up. “Emma?”

  “You heard that,” she said. “You heard her?”

  “What are you guys talking about?” Casey asked. “Where?”

  “I don’t know.” Rima threw a wild look around. “Emma?” she called. “Emma, where …” She listened again, and then heard Eric answer: “Bode and Casey.”

  Another pause, and then Emma’s voice again, so insubstantial you might mistake it for the sough of a light breeze that held no meaning at all, saying something else.

  “Jesus,” Bode breathed, at the same time that Casey said, “God, I heard that.”

  “Yeah, but what’s White Space?” Eric said. “And what does she mean, think my hand?”

  RIMA

  The Thickness of a Single Molecule

  1

  “MAYBE THINK ABOUT it?” Casey said.

  “I don’t think that’s what she means,” Rima said. Was White Space something on the other side of this place? She looked at the way this world was shuttering: the birds, drawing down death, obliterating the horizon, as if an eyelid were closing. “Maybe what she means is we should think her hand; not what it is,” she said, “but what it does. Like it grabs, it …” She felt the rest wick away on a gasp. “Oh my God, look.”

  Just outside her window, hovering against all that blackness as if suspended from an invisible string, was a luminous silver-white slit so bright it almost hurt to look.

  “Is that the fog?” Bode said.

  “No. I think it’s a door,” Eric said, still stiff-arming the frame to keep from falling out. The tentacles had swarmed past the running board, and were now licking at the interior edge of the foot well. The outer corner of the door was already under. “That’s what she means by White Space.”

  “Okay, but so what? How do we get through? It’s not wide enough; it’s a nothing,” Bode said. “We can’t even get there. It’s not a single step. So what would we hang on to?”

  “We hang on to Emma. We let her pull us,” Rima said, and looked bac
k down at them. “We’re inside something or on the other side of a mirror, in the glass, looking out like Alice in Wonderland. What we see through the slit is the … the wrapping paper, the skin, like on a baseball or a clean sheet of paper with no words on it yet. That’s where she pulls us, onto that page, where she is.”

  “What?” Bode said. “How do you know this?”

  “I don’t, okay? It’s just a guess. But Bode, do you want to stay here?”

  “She’s right,” Casey said. “I almost see it, too. But Rima, I still don’t understand how we can use it.”

  “Me neither,” she said, and then popped the lock of her door.

  “What are you doing?” Bode said.

  “What does it look like?” She shoved as hard as she could, felt the door open by six inches. Heavy. “Help me,” she said to Bode.

  “What?” Bode turned a swift glance back at Casey. “Can you hold him?”

  “I guess I’d better,” Casey said.

  “Go, Bode,” Eric said, with a tense jerk of his head. “I don’t understand this, but I know we’re all dead if we don’t do something.”

  “Go. I can hold him,” Casey said. “Just do it.”

  “All right, I’m letting go,” Bode warned, and then took away his hands. At the end of the seat, Eric’s legs, spread in a wide V, suddenly quivered with the additional strain, and at Casey’s hard, sudden gasp, Bode said, his voice rising with alarm, “Kid?”

  “Got him.” Casey’s voice came out strangled. “But hurry. Do it, guys, do it now.”

  Without another word, Bode turned in his seat, bunched his arms, and gave his own door a mighty shove.

  “Wait,” Rima said, “what about—”

  “Faster this way than the back door.” The words squeezed out on a grunt as Bode heaved. There was a loud, piercing, metallic yowl that Bode matched with a drawn-out jungle yell of his own, and then the door was open and he was swarming over his seat, turning around until the weight of the door rested on his back. “Come on,” he panted, and extended a hand. “Come on if you’re coming.”