The Switch

by Hill, A. W.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off it, even as the gunmen forced us to jump down with our hands tied. Mose and I stumbled and wound up in the dust. But I kept looking, and especially at the cross that rose from the battered little blue dome on top of the church. The dome was cratered with bullet and shrapnel holes. The cross wasn’t quite like the ones back home, but definitely a cross, and that messed with my mind. Where were we? The front of the church was bullet-pocked, too; its whitewashed clay was grayed with smoke and its arched windows shattered. And from what I could see from this angle, there wasn’t much left of the back of it. I wanted to take some hope from the fact that they’d brought us to a church. Churches are supposed to be sanctuaries. But judging from the look of our captors, mercy wasn’t on their minds. Even with the lump on my cracked skull, I still had that strange clarity of thought. I looked up and saw a sky of such a dark and solid blue that it almost matched the color of the dome, and when I looked back down, I saw Jemma. Our eyes met.

  She was being taken off the second truck, which had arrived just behind ours, and it seemed that Mose had been right, because she was in the company of a cohort of female guards. Still mean looking, but female, which was some small relief. I gave her a sign as best I could with my hands tied. She couldn’t bring herself to smile, but she gave me a nod and a look that said, “I’m okay, so far—”

  I counted eighteen of them, including the women—who weren’t any older than the men. You couldn’t be sure, because everyone’s face was covered, but their voices and movements told me that the oldest of them probably wasn’t more than twenty. I couldn’t even be sure they had faces like ours. For all I knew, we might have been on the planet of the apes. One guy, shorter than the others but powerfully built, began shouting orders in that throaty language. The others prodded us into single file and began marching us toward the rear of the church. Jemma fell in behind. I didn’t like being lined up this way. Not at all. It felt like they were preparing us for a firing squad.

  As we came around a corner of the building, the rock-strewn hill behind it came into view, and on top of the hill was a sight that will be in my nightmares for as long as I live. Steel rods were set into the ground like spikes on a medieval gate—maybe thirty or forty of them. Each rod was about twelve feet high, high enough to sway to and fro in the breeze that blew across the hilltop, and crowning each spike like some demonic ornament was a human head.

  They say the mind does all sorts of things to protect itself from melting down. I once asked my dad how people caught in the middle of wars keep from going crazy when they see their friends or their families killed. He said, “The mind denies horrible things until it’s ready to accept them.” I suppose that’s why my very first thought was that the heads couldn’t be real.

  They paused the procession for just long enough to send the message that this was what could happen to us. It’s strange how even in the face of something so awful you can still believe it isn’t going to happen to you. I guess that’s just another way we protect our sanity.

  We were marched through a shell-battered stone archway, into a small courtyard, and then down a set of ancient steps into a sub-ground chamber right below the chapel. We could see up into it through the blast holes in the ceiling. That hard blue light poured through into our little catacomb. We were made to sit against the far wall, and our hands were tied above our heads to spikes that had been hammered into the old stone.

  The leader stepped down into the basement and stood in one of those columns of light. His hood was off, and he was human. I almost wished he hadn’t been. Then he did the oddest thing. He spoke English.

  “Where you come from?” he asked.

  Mose shot a look at me, but it was Connor who blurted.

  “Chicago.”

  “She-caw-go?” the leader repeated. “Al Capone!” Then he raised the muzzle of his AK-47 and swept it back and forth, making the “eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh” sound like a gangster mowing down his enemies.

  “From another part of this…world,” I said, trying to cover it.

  “You come to kill us?” the guy spat. “Spy on us? Or join with us?”

  “Join,” Mose said. But I think he regretted it a second later, because the world pivoted around on that second.

  “Ah,” said the guy. “Black man tired of the white man’s power, eh, rafiq?”

  I’m sure Mose was trying to figure out what the hell was happening and whether he’d made a mistake because he didn’t say a word.

  “And you?” the guy said to me. “You too? You pissed off at Daddy because he cut your game budget? You don’t come here because you are pissed off. You come here because it’s righteous. Because you wanna bring it all down. We gonna break the world, rafiq. We gonna break it, and then we gonna take it.”

  The way he spoke was a weird combination of different accents and attitudes. I could tell English wasn’t his native language, but some of the stuff he said was straight from a hardcore hip-hop record or a movie. And all the “wannas” and “gonnas.” What was that? I knew without a doubt that he could be laughing with me one second and killing me the next. All I could do was look at him, my eyes steady but my mouth quivering. I couldn’t make myself say it.

  “Okay-dokay-smokay,” the leader said. “In fifteen minutes, I come back. We go out there.” He pointed toward the Hill of Heads, then at Mose. “You. Black Man. You want to join with us? You will shoot your white friend here.” He put the muzzle to my forehead and pretended to shoot. “Bang. Just like that. That will be your taslim. Then we will know you are ready to break the world.”

  He got up and walked out, and left behind an echo that swallowed all of us.

  After enough time had passed for the position of the sun to change the light in that cratered out basement, Jemma said:

  “Well. That’s not going to happen, so we have about ten minutes to make a plan.”

  “Why the hell did I say we were here to join? What idiot came up with that?” Mose shook his head.

  “Don’t beat yourself up, Moses,” I said. “It could’ve worked. In another world, maybe it did.”

  “Yeah, well,” he said quietly. “What we need in this world is a miracle.”

  “What we need is a switch,” said Connor.

  I watched Mose and slowly realized he was praying. I’d never seen anybody pray before. I mean, in church on Christmas and Easter, sure. But not like real, private prayer. Mose, I figured, had learned to pray when he was little, maybe when he was being terrorized by his mother’s boyfriend. People who have hard lives have to pray. Sometimes, it’s all they’ve got. And right at this moment, our lives were hard.

  It was that time of late afternoon when the sun seems to drop really quickly. A shaft of light penetrated the broken roof and brushed across the top of Mose’s head. I followed it to where it hit what was left of the whitewashed ceiling. It was a place where the ceiling was joined to the arch that held it up. I looked, and then I forgot to breathe.

  Scrawled with charcoal on the wall were the words:

  NIGHTSHADE WAS HERE.

  “Mose!” I whispered. “I don’t know what you said to God, but I think maybe you got your miracle.”

  How we had gotten to this place, my mind was way too scrambled to figure. I just remembered Gordon saying that certain worldlines were ‘connected by shared histories.’ That was his whole theory. That’s how he’d planned to get home.

  But our history was about to take another course. I had just turned to Jemma to show her the writing on the wall when there were bootsteps on the stone stairs, echoing through the underground chamber.

  “Time to choose, black man,” the leader shouted over the echoes.

  It hadn’t been fifteen minutes. But why should I have been surprised by the lie? This was a guy who wanted to break the world. What difference would the truth make?

  Our captor ordered his men to get us on our feet. They were rough with Jemma. I gritted my teeth and continued frantically searching my eyes over th
e room for a switch. It had to be here. This had to be the place. In Syria. Where Gordon’s parents had been aid workers, and Gordon had been a lonely kid who’d pulled a switch in a bombed-out church basement.

  They herded us out. For the first time, I paid attention to how they were dressed. Some wore jeans or combat pants, others—like the leader—had these loose, black trousers. All of them wore black robes that cut just below the waist, tied with a sash, and then with a gunbelt. Most just had t-shirts underneath the robes, but a few—like the leader—had bulletproof vests. All except the leader had their heads covered. The leader wanted us to see his face.

  The sun sat big and red behind the posts up on the hill, and the shadows of a hundred heads fell over the dusty courtyard. As a gamer, back in Chicago, I’d been in dozens of nightmare worlds, surrounded by monsters or terrorists, but it would take a monster to imagine a world like this one. Two of the hooded men took me to the old stone wall that bordered the courtyard and held me by the arms. The leader handed Mose a pistol, chrome with a long barrel. To my surprise, Mose took it.

  My brain still had that crazy clarity, and now it really was because I was about to die. I plotted out the possible outcomes: the vectors of possibility. Mose might have taken the gun because he planned on shooting the leader rather than shooting me. That would be heroic, but also a bad choice, because then everyone would die. Or maybe he planned on shooting himself, but I knew someone like Mose could never kill himself. He had survived too much.

  Jemma’s legs suddenly gave out. She went down on her knees and wailed like I’ve never heard anybody wail. “No!” she screamed. “Take me and do what you want with me. Just let him go.”

  “Get off your knees, little girl,” barked the leader. “The story is already written.”

  I looked at her and I swear my heart just flooded over with feeling. The rest of me was ice cold: my fingers, my toes, the tip of my nose. Ice cold with fear. But inside my heart—or whatever it is that we call a heart—it was warm, and I knew that even if I had to die, I would die with somebody giving a damn.

  There was a tingling in my ears that turned into a pain, like a dog-whistle kind of pain. Then whiny buzz a little like those remote-controlled airplanes that some people fly in the parks. Coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. An instant later, they all heard it and looked up, and by that time, it sounded like a giant speedboat in the sky.

  “Zenana!” one of them shouted.

  Even though all we saw was empty, dazzling blue, within seconds, all of them—including the leader—had shot off in different directions in response to that piercing drone. All but one, who stood before us and slowly unwrapped his head covering to reveal a kind face.

  “I would recommend,” he said, “that the four of you join me behind that wall.” And then he shouted, “Now!”

  He didn’t have to say it twice, and when I looked up into the blue again as I was running, I spotted the avenging angel that had saved my life and now might take it again. It swooped right over the dome of the church—sleek, silvery, and fast, and shooting out missiles like arrows from a bow.

  I grabbed Jemma’s hand and together we dove over the stone wall and hit the dust hard just as the first missile tore into the dome of Gordon’s church and blew it to smithereens. Chunks and shards of stone and tile and glass blew in all directions from the point of impact, smashing into the wall that was our only protection. In seconds, the church was gone, and I had to figure the switch was gone with it.

  When the roar of collapsing stone had quieted, I turned to our savior, who looked nineteen at the oldest, and said, “What the hell was that?”

  “Zenana,” he answered. “A drone strike. From your American friends.”

  “Did you say…my American friends?”

  “We don’t see them on the ground,” he said. “But we hear them in the sky.”

  “So…let me get this straight,” I said. “We are in Syria, then? On planet earth?”

  “Yes,” he said, “And not a good time to be in either place.”

  “But that means we’re home,” said Mose. “Sort of.”

  “If this is home,” Connor said. “Screw it.”

  “The pigeon always flies home,” said our rescuer. “But you are not home yet.”

  For an instant, I thought I’d imagined it. Then I looked hard at him, repeated what he’d said and asked, “Youseff?” I waited for a reaction. It came as a stiff nod. “I know about you. From Gordon. Gordon Nightshade.”

  “We should go,” he said. “Before they come back. And they will come back. I will take you to my place in the hills.”

  “But the switch!” I looked mournfully at the rubble that had been a church a few minutes ago.

  “My friend,” said Youseff. “I am going to show you something you have never seen before.”

  “Did Gordon have something to do with this?” asked Jemma, as much to me as to Youseff.

  Youseff gave her a look. “All things in time.” He threw his rifle over his shoulder and led us away. “First, we feed you.”

  e had to cross the Hill of Heads to get to Youseff’s village. He said it was a shortcut, and that it was the last place they would look for us, but I’d sooner have taken the longer way and the bigger risk. You can’t walk under a sky of human heads and not look up. And when I looked up, I saw what a face is like when there’s no life behind it, and it’s just a mask of skin. But it’s a mask on which you can still see the fear that came just before death. Whoever they were—the people who’d done this—were a different kind of human.

  “They can’t be from our world! Something must’ve gone seriously wrong in Gordon’s worldline.”

  “I hate to tell you this, Jake…” said Connor. “But—”

  “Shhttt!” said Youseff.

  Jemma drew close to my side as we crossed the hill. So close, occasionally her hips bumped against mine. That’s when my recently developed girl radar went off for the first time and I knew she was scared. And once I knew that, it was just instinctive for me to put my arm around her shoulders. It was actually a lot simpler than I’d thought. But then it isn’t every day you face death with someone you care about.

  Youseff’s mountain retreat was across a narrow valley, where an ancient river had once flowed in the cracked earth, and up another hill, this one craggier and steeper. Flying from every pinnacle or peak on the way was the black flag of our captors, with the same white insignia in what I now knew were Arabic or Syrian letters.

  “They control this whole area?” Connor asked.

  “Almost all of it,” Youseff said. “But not my village.”

  “What does it say?” Mose asked. “On the flag.”

  “It says, ‘We Are The Holy Fire of God’,” Youseff answered.

  Conversation stopped while we struggled up the final steep path to the village, and then I asked, out of breath, “Why were you with them, Youseff? Are you some kind of spy? Or double agent?”

  “Not anymore,” he said. “You blew my cover today.” He smiled, revealing two missing front teeth and a warm heart, and then, amazingly, we all smiled. It was contagious. Suddenly I understood how people who live in places full of violence and horror make it: it just feels so damn good to survive the day. And to still be with your friends.

  You could see that the “village” had been put together quickly. There were no churches or mosques and ancient buildings like the beehive huts. It was more like a camp with a few temporary structures made of timber, clay, and corrugated metal to ward off the sun and blown dust.

  “We have to be ready to move fast,” Youseff said. “My real village—the one I grew up in—they took it. The same guys. Killed the old people and the young men, took the girls away. Bastards. They don’t know who they’re messing with. I’m the angel of the bottomless pit. I am Youseff.” He paused for a second. “And you? Who are you?”

  I couldn’t come up with anything nearly as impressive, so I just said, “Jacobus. Jacobus Rose.”
/>   “Mose. Moses DeWitt. From Clybourn.”

  “Connor. Connor Brown.” He pointed to me. “He got me into this.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said.

  Youseff turned to Jemma. “And you, sweet princess…how did you come to be with these inexperienced travelers and young dogs?”

  I have to admit I bristled a little bit. But only a little.

  “I guess,” she said, “they kind of rescued me.”

  “Well, then,” said Youseff. “They have earned your company.”

  He led us into a big, shady lean-to built up against the hillside that was part living quarters and part donkey stable. It was good to be out of the sun. I could see from looking at the others how sunburned I must be. Youseff introduced a woman who looked way older than she probably was, but still had a prettiness around her eyes. “This is my mama.” He laughed. “The mother of angels.”

  We were invited to take seats on a rug that lay over the dust. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t luxurious. It just felt incredibly good to sit down. The ‘mother of angels’ made fresh flatbread on a small, makeshift griddle over a fire, and then as each piece finished, spread it with a jam that Youseff said was made from dates before handing it to us. The bread smoked and sizzled on the griddle, and I shot a look at Mose. We were both thinking of another griddle in another place, far, far away, and the smell of bacon.

  I took the first bite of that amazingly delicious warm bread, but I didn’t get it all the way down before Youseff spoke.

  “I have a message,” he said. “From the Duke.”