Breaking in the plastic front was harder than he imagined it should be. He tried using a three-hole punch as a bludgeon, moved on to a stapler, and then worked for a while with a chair. One corner of the plastic was starting to crack when he collapsed from exhaustion.
“What are you doing over there?” Tina called.
“Getting us breakfast.”
After a rest, he resumed his work. When a small section of plastic large enough to reach through finally broke, he grabbed at the closest rack and produced two packs of honey-roasted peanuts. He went to the doorway and threw one to Tina. He tore open the other pack and almost choked as he swallowed them down.
“Is there more?” she asked. She had a stack of rocks prepared next to her and was keeping an eye on the dogs.
“Yeah. Water too.”
“Let’s fuel up and thump these doggies. I want to go home.”
***
By the afternoon it was stuffy in the upstairs spaces of the town hall. They had eaten their fill of salty and sweet snacks and had each drunk three bottles of water. Brendan leaned against a wall. He woke up with a start, surprised he had nodded off. The air around him still felt hard to process, but less so than before.
Tina had curled up on her section of the other doorway with her head on her arm, but her eyes were open and looking at him. Brendan filled a plastic wastebasket full of water bottles. He threw in a few packs of peanuts, M&Ms, and Slim Jims for good measure, although just the thought of eating any more junk food made his sour stomach lurch. He managed to pull a metal stacking chair from the wreckage and dropped it down below. Then he lowered the wastebasket and let it go. It spilled most of its contents.
“Are we ready?” he asked.
Tina stood up with a rock in her hand and gave Brendan a nod. He swung his legs down. The dogs were up in a flash and moving towards him. Tina began throwing, nailing one dog after another with resounding smacks. The dogs yelped, spun, and retreated.
Brendan dropped down and tumbled but caught himself. He picked up the chair and charged towards the dogs that waited in the nearby lobby just out of Tina’s throwing range. They hesitated as if deciding what to do. Then as one they fled out the front, barking as they went.
Tina slid down and collected the water and snacks. She picked up a few pieces of debris and tested their heft, finally kicking a leg off a crushed wooden table.
“You feel it?” she asked.
“Yeah. Don’t forget we’re still under par with this place, but the food has helped.”
“I hope the dogs haven’t had to take down anything able to fight back in a while.”
“Me too. But if they’re starving, they’ll try for us.”
They emerged from the town hall, Brendan hauling the chair along behind him. The dogs had spread out and were watching. The ground provided plenty of ammunition for throwing. Tina and Brendan chucked a few rocks at the closest dog but it kept out of range. They began their trek back towards the academy.
The dogs followed. At least one stayed ahead of them at all times, scampering away every time Brendan and Tina got close.
“It’s as if they know where we’re going.”
“Is this even the right direction?” Tina asked. “It’s hard to tell.”
Brendan stopped. He had assumed that they were walking towards the campus, but there were no landmarks he recognized. A haze hung over the morning. The school buildings weren’t in view. The bent and buckled street was no help. Finally he spotted a familiar patch of exposed sewage lines and decided that they were indeed heading in the right general direction.
From behind, three of the dogs watched from the shadows of a collapsed wall. The large black dog remained perfectly still as Brendan kept an eye on him.
As they tried to find the same path back through the broken street, Brendan expected to see the remnants of the green belt and the trees around every corner and every pile of asphalt, but it was as if someone had moved the entire boulevard, or the town itself had turned into a shifting puzzle. A leaning billboard that had fallen from the top of a gas station was in their path. They hadn’t passed it before.
The dogs were right behind them. They heard the occasional yip in other directions.
When they passed the gas station, the dogs attacked. The pack had split into two groups of four and they came from both sides. Tina quickly launched a couple of rocks and her throws hit their targets. Each dog she struck let out a pained cry.
Brendan’s chair proved to be an unwieldy club but it kept the dogs from getting close enough to bite. The animals’ eyes were set and desperate, their mouths foaming with dry spit. The lean lines of their bodies spoke to their hunger. Mouths snapped and teeth clicked. Tina had backed up to Brendan and was now swinging her table leg. One of the dogs was barking at her but the others remained silent, vigilant for an opening.
One younger mutt came forward first. Tina clocked it across the face, and it stumbled back.
Tina shouted a wordless scream at the rest. Another moved in. She was able to wind up her swing. Again she connected with a solid thud. The dog fell, and she stepped over it and clubbed it again. The rest of the dogs were barking now. The ones around Brendan couldn’t get past the thrusts and jabs he made with the chair.
He grabbed a pack of peanuts and threw it behind the animals. They ignored the offering, but the circle around Tina and Brendan grew wider. The dogs seemed keenly aware that they had lost one of their number. As if by some imperceptible signal, the dogs backed off enough to allow Brendan and Tina to break away.
They ran and emerged out into a relatively intact intersection. Brendan saw a turn-in sign for one of the academy’s parking lots. He could see the top of the admin building. The dogs were nowhere in sight.
“At least now they have something to eat,” he said.
Tina just nodded, her face grim.
They walked onto campus and climbed to a good vantage point above the first floor of the humanities building. They didn’t see the dogs. Brendan passed Tina a bottle of water, and they each drained one.
“There’s no sign of anyone,” Tina said as she mopped her brow. The day’s growing heat clung to them. They were both covered in a film of dust.
Brendan kicked at a cabinet and checked its interior. “It’s not like we were trying to find people.”
“Is it possible the entire world here is just gone? And what caused it?”
“It could be a million things. An earthquake is the only thing we know for sure, but maybe a comet hit the Earth or someone started dropping nukes.”
“Oh god. I hadn’t thought about that. All this could be radioactive.”
“No way to know right now. Put it on the list of things to ask a doctor, right after getting checked for otherworld diseases.”
“The gates could have done this,” she said. “If one gate destroyed our L.A., imagine if someone kept opening them without rhyme or reason. Or did it on purpose. Maybe that’s what’s happening on Not-Earth. What if Charlotte understands this? Do you think she does?”
“She must have some idea. She really didn’t want me involved.”
From the distance, they heard a howl. They both perked up and collected their things.
“Let’s see if we can get out of here,” he said.
They crossed the campus grounds towards the ruined admin building. From this angle, it looked like a hand sticking up from the ground. They ditched their makeshift weapons and slung their packs, full with the water and food from the vending machines, over both shoulders. Climbing in daytime was easy and they were at the top in no time. The shimmering gate stood at the end of a horizontal I beam. An aura of frigid air hung around the remains of the fifth floor.
Balancing on the beam wasn’t hard…until Brendan looked down and saw how far he could have fallen if he had come through the gate from a different direction. Tina leaped through first. Brendan hung back a moment and took in the view. It struck him that he might be the last person to ever see thi
s world.
He jumped.
10. Broken Trail
Brendan barely had time to register that he was back in the headmaster’s office before someone attacked him. Hands grabbed his sweatshirt, and it took him a moment to see it was Charlotte.
“How could you use the machine?” she screamed.
Brendan pushed her away. She fell backward and would have crashed into the bookcase, but Tina caught her. Charlotte pushed at her and Tina let her go. Brendan realized he could have accidentally hurt Charlotte now that he had upstream snacks and water in his system.
“You lecture me on responsibility and then ditch me outside of some nursery so you can open a random gate? Do you have any idea of what you could have done? Where you could have ended up? And you took the ring and my unfinished glove. What happened to us working together?”
Brendan took the glove out of his pack and handed it over. Charlotte snatched it. He didn’t offer the ring and she didn’t seem to care that he had it again for the moment.
“Calm down,” Tina said. “Jeez.”
“Don’t tell me to calm down. Do you see what’s happening outside? This is what I’m here to prevent. What did you do?”
“Hey!” Brendan said. “We didn’t cause the earthquake. We didn’t do anything. It struck just before we turned anything on.”
Charlotte took a deep breath. “You weren’t inside the lab when it hit?”
“Okay, we had just gotten in there, but we hadn’t touched anything. The earthquake nearly took the building down. What’s happening out there?”
“It’s bad.” She went to the window and looked outside. “I don’t know how extensive it is. I headed straight here once I woke up.”
“Sorry about leaving you. I thought there might be some easy solve to this, that we could figure out how to close a gate. The vault thing wasn’t exactly intuitive. But we found it.”
“From his notes, I don’t think my dad ever quite understood it. He knows its potential, but he might not ever have even set foot inside. He got a reading off the closest world and used it to set the machine. That allowed the gate to your world to be opened, kind of like setting coordinates. But there’s an infinite amount of possibilities. Finding your world again might not even be possible with the current setup. Every moment that passes causes a split.”
“So our only way back is through the gate in the park,” Tina said.
“Yes. You can still make it home.” Charlotte took a good look at them. “You guys are a mess. Where were you?”
Brendan told her about the dead world and the dogs. He checked the window. In the daylight he could see the damage that had been done to the campus. The ground was covered in dust. One of the dorm buildings was indeed not there. Much of the rest of the school still stood, although there was visible damage to all the structures.
“They’ve set the gym up for the students as it seems to be sound,” Charlotte said.
“How many dead?”
“I don’t know. Quite a few injured. I don’t imagine the local hospital will be able to handle this. If there’s only one earthquake, we might be okay. So far no aftershocks.”
“Isn’t that a little weird?” Brendan asked. “That’s what happened with our big one. It leveled L.A. and then there was nothing. That was your dad’s machine coming online and connecting to our world.”
“I’m not a seismologist. They said they’ve had daily quakes.” Charlotte turned the machine off. The gate vanished. “Like my dad said, he made adjustments. I don’t know what exactly since I’ve never been back here long enough to double-check his work. His machine makes a stable gate. Mine do too. But we need to know what caused this. Something’s opened up somewhere.”
“Your dad mentioned someone used the machine before we arrived. That means he made a work-around for the ring and someone found it. The government scientists were all around here, and we found one of them dead down in the lab.”
“Show me.”
***
There were voices in the lobby. Brendan paused to listen. He held his hand up, ready to drop a signal that they would have to retreat. The men’s words were indistinct.
“We’ll check it out later,” a voice finally said.
When they entered, the lobby was empty. Two men stood just outside, and one spray-painted something on the side of the building by the entrance before departing.
The air felt hot and stuffy down in the basement. The sound of the building’s generators reverberated through the vents and corridors. Brendan made a detour to the security breakroom and looked inside a small refrigerator. It was empty but for a tray of ice.
The workshop looked like more of a mess then it had the previous night. The glazed windows in the outer hall let in enough light so that they could navigate. Charlotte immediately went to the box and examined it. Brendan put an arm over his nose. The stench of the corpse now filled the room.
“You figured it out,” Charlotte said. She went over every inch of the box, a look of approval on her face. She opened a panel on the side that Brendan hadn’t noticed. Numerous jumper switches filled the space underneath.
“Is it the same as when you were here?” Brendan asked.
“No. He’s made improvements. This whole box is redesigned. This was in my dad’s notes, he was always planning to implement it at a later time. But he did it. The ring is used here to set the gate to neutral. This serves as something of a lockout so the gate can’t be reset without his approval.”
“If he had gone through his gate and someone reset it, that would leave him trapped.”
She nodded. “From my father’s calculations, once a gate is reset the possibility of connecting again to the exact world from which you’ve left is so small as to be impossible.”
“But your dad’s machine only makes a single gate. There’s all the other gates out there not associated with any machine. There’s the one in the park, the one in the nurse’s pool that goes to Torben’s world, and the one above the body shop in the downstream Earth. It would be nice to know for sure where they’re coming from.”
“I keep hoping that my dad was the only one who got it right in all of the multiverse. Maybe it was luck, or maybe I’m not around in enough other worlds to make the necessary changes to his prototype which resulted in his initial success.”
“Can we talk about the body?” Tina asked.
Charlotte and Brendan made their way through the lab and over to the body, careful not to disturb it. He was trying hard not to breathe.
“ID’s gone,” Brendan said. “Someone didn’t want to be noticed.”
Charlotte picked up a small camcorder tucked in behind a toolbox. She turned it on and started examining footage of the lab.
“This isn’t something my dad would have. Let’s take this out into the hallway.”
The camera operator mentioned the date and gave his name as Second Lieutenant Howard, USAF. The digital video was a tour of the lab with a short narrative with basic observations: the naming of tools and their placement, identification of materials, and initial speculations as to what certain partially completed components might be. The footage ended without any clue as to the violent event or its perpetrator.
“At least we now know who the dead guy is,” Tina said.
“I get the impression that these guys were just starting to feel their way around here,” Brendan said. “They probably know less than us because putting your dad’s machine together wasn’t that complicated.”
Charlotte was rewinding and replaying the footage. She stepped back into the lab and looked around as the video continued to play.
“Should this be the part where we just destroy this whole thing so it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands?” Tina asked. “Worse hands, I mean?”
“Not yet,” Charlotte said. “We need to learn how to close the freestanding gates first and this could be helpful.”
“I think we need to take it all apart for now,” Brendan said. “The rescue workers are
going to be back. And if we get kicked out of here and the government people find it all, they might learn something we don’t want them to.”
“It doesn’t appear that anything significant is missing from the workshop, at least from comparing the before and after. Whoever killed that guy wasn’t interested.”
Brendan watched as she fiddled with the camcorder. She was deleting the footage. “Just in case,” she said.
From down the hallway someone shouted, “Hey, there’s people in here.”
Brendan looked out the door. A man with a yellow safety helmet was sticking his head through a broken window. Other voices came from outside, and shadows closed in, visible through the glass. A rope was dropped down.
“Just stay there, kids. We’ll get you out.”
Brendan looked at the girls. Neither appeared to know what to do except wait for their rescuers to come down and help them.
11. That Angry, Stupid Look
The young, somewhat portly man who roped down from the open window wasn’t law enforcement but rather a search and rescue volunteer. He attached a seat harness to each of the kids in turn. Others up above helped haul them up. Except for a firefighter, the people Brendan saw waiting for them all appeared to be locals.
Brendan assured several people that all three of them were fine. He said they had gotten stuck in the basement after heading down to respond to a cry for help. Tina elbowed him. He elbowed back.
“You kids will have to go to the gym with the other students so they can check you in and try to contact your families,” the firefighter said.
The Supervillain High Boxed Set: Books One - Three of the Supervillain High Series Page 52