The Portal in the Forest

by Matt Dymerski

  Chapter Five

  I awoke instantly, my senses blazing. By rote, I traced back the sound still caught in my auditory sensory memories: a creaking floorboard.

  My eyes were already locked on him as he came around the corner in the dark. He didn't see me for several seconds. A little jump signified the moment he became aware of my silhouette sitting against the wall.

  "You're hard to find," Thomas breathed, nervous.

  I nodded, aware that he could see my outline by the vague glow of house porchlights outside. "By design. Never let the enemy know where you sleep."

  He hesitated. "What enemy?"

  A heavy sense of reality descended upon me, and I entertained a light disappointment in myself. "None, I guess. It's hard to leave behind certain paranoias."

  "My big sister went to war," he said. "She… came back a lot like you."

  The kid was wiser than his years. I had to give him that. I could only nod again.

  He came and sat beside me in the dark. "I've been looking for you for hours. I had no idea there were so many abandoned houses in the neighborhood."

  "That's half the reason I've stuck around here so long," I laughed quietly. "One world falls apart, and another seeps into the cracks." My own words gave me pause; like some kind of accidental prophecy. I'd only been speaking of his suburb, overworked parents, and inequality-strained society, but the words themselves reflected something of our conflict with the portal.

  "What's the other half?" he asked.

  "What?"

  "The other half of the reason you stay."

  "Oh." I stared around the empty shadow-lit room for several seconds. I'd been running from it for so long… it felt like time to release my wound; cleanse my infection. Recent events had permanently damaged my internal armor. The scars I'd built up had been stripped away, leaving raw, bleeding pain in their stead. "I had a daughter once. She was about your age when she… well."

  It was his turn to say it. "Oh." He took three deep breaths, not sure what to say. "What was she like?"

  "Tough," I admitted. "Awesome, really. She had simply endless willpower, and always found a way through every problem in life. She grew up to be very pretty, too, even despite the condition she was in."

  He made a confused noise. "I thought she-"

  "Right, yes," I corrected myself, my head fuzzy with regret. "I saw her. She gave me the iWorker device you're training. But it wasn't her… just a version of her from that reality."

  "That must have been very hard for you."

  Wiser than his years? This kid was more of a respectable adult than I!

  "Are you still going to help us?" he asked, after two or three quiet minutes spent thinking.

  "I don't know if I can," I replied honestly. "The last time I tried to-" I shook my head, choking up. "No matter how much you anticipate, no matter how smart you are, or how fast you are… sometimes it just doesn't matter. Sometimes, there just isn't a way out."

  He sniffled. "I don't want to believe that."

  "What's the alternative? Believing that, if my daughter had just made different choices, she'd still be alive? That it's her fault she-"

  "Is it your fault, though?" he interrupted. "Or should you blame the thing that… got her?"

  To that, I had nothing to say. This boy - this young man - had somehow hit right to the heart of the issue.

  He slumped down. "I'm starving."

  But, apparently, he was still a young man, and moments of wisdom were fleeting in young men. "Don't you have any food at home?" I asked.

  He didn't reply.

  Reaching over to rummage around in my oversized travel backpack, I reached past my laptop, various sundries, one saved shoe with special dirt on it, and spare clothing to fish out a ten dollar bill. I placed it in his surprised hand. "Take it. Get something to eat."

  "Really?"

  "Really."

  "Thanks," he said, sincere. "I'll go in the morning." He curled up against the wall, preparing to sleep.

  I frowned, but… I couldn't stop him sleeping where he wanted. Did he not feel safe at home? By the ambient light drifting in from the windows, I could see an ugly bruise around his right eye. "Make sure you eat 'til you're practically sick. Really glut on some heavy fast food."

  He laughed. "I sure will."

  Sometime late at night, I'd intended on initiating my plan to safely view the objective image of the problematic book, but it didn't seem fair to leave the boy unprotected. I kept the paper with the deadly schematic rolled up safely in my backpack, and waited up while he slept. It was a simple matter to stay awake and alert for hours on end -

  ... I coughed and started, suddenly awake… and oddly rested. It felt like I'd had a soul-weary weight lifted, at least for a little while. How had I fallen asleep like that? If anything had happened, it would have been unforgivable…

  A scream of absolute terror resounded in the cul-de-sac outside.

  Rushing forward on my hands and feet after telling Thomas to remain quiet, I peered out through the corner of one window.

  A boy I recognized ran from house to house, knocking on the door of each.

  Frowning, I darted over and threw open our front door. "What's going on?"

  The boy saw me and ran up to me, shouting his fearful message. "They're in trouble!"

  "Run with me," I ordered quickly, dashing toward the old Dodson lot, and the paths beyond. The exhausted boy followed suit as best he could, and Thomas was not far behind. "What's the situation?"

  The panting, red-faced boy let out his story between ragged breaths. "Danny tried to take the book through the portal on his own."

  "I don't have the book with me?" I asked, furious at the eighteen-year-old's misguided bravado.

  "No, he stole it from you…" he explained, starting to lag behind. "But the portal suddenly got bigger, and they all fell through…" Falling to his knees, he shouted his last information. "And they were all on the other side screaming and running from something!"

  My heart seized. Why wouldn't they just go back through the portal? Something had clearly gone wrong with the main egress in a fundamental way. Thomas kept pace with me a few feet behind as I ran. "Go to Suzie's portal and tell them to start unburying it," I ordered, giving no time for debate.

  Thomas nodded and sprinted off in another direction.

  I soon crested the final hill, curving up above the Virginia forest and back down beneath the canopy in seconds… only to tumble to a painful and wrist-spraining halt.

  The portal had ruptured even further.

  Space hung like a sheet flapping in the wind on an invisible clothesline. No semblance of the original ten-foot portal remained, nor the thirty-foot gash I'd last seen. Instead, the path and brush on both sides had been consumed by unstable rifts… a clearing of deadly anomalies nearly three hundred feet in length, by my best guess. Ten feet… thirty… roughly two-seventy… the portal energy wasn't expanding geometrically. It was growing exponentially. By that same comparison, tomorrow the corrupted space would be…

  A mile and a half wide.

  The day after that - I clutched the gritty dirt beneath my hands tightly for a moment - a hundred and eleven miles. As far as I'd seen, the portals had clung to the surface. I had no way of knowing if the rifts were underground in a spherical area, too, but this area of spatial disturbance seemed largely rebuffed by the density of the ground beneath.

  But a hundred and eleven miles… and the day after that… the numbers began escaping me, but at least… twenty-five thousand miles…

  Which happened to be almost exactly the circumference of the Earth. The numbers might have escaped me, but the neatness of that value did not. This was a darkly ironic challenge from forces beyond comprehension: save the world in two days, or lose it on the third.

  In this exact moment, all I could worry about were the thirty-odd children stranded in another reality. The portal had been stable for weeks before I'd interfered. Was all this somehow my fault? A dark g
rip caught my chest. How many children had to die because of me?

  Eyeing the maelstrom of spacial contortions, I waited, waited, waited… and leaped.

  I slid through a small oval barely big enough to fit me, and the blinking rift took one of my shoes at the last, barely sparing me my foot.

  Already tired from the run, I pushed myself wearily up, and then observed the world that the children had thought safe enough to visit briefly.

  A ruddy sky swirled high over an endless plain of cracked obsidian. The sun hung huge and red in the sky, seemingly much older than the star I knew. My shoed foot crunched as I moved, and my bare foot fought for purchase among smooth flat stones that were dully jagged along the sides.

  Glassy black spread out to the horizon. What had the children been running from?

  I turned to look behind me.

  The main portal was a mess of little blinking rifts, and clearly unusable, but that was not the problem. Not in the least.

  A wall of fire approached across the endless obsidian plain, perhaps half a mile out. It came as a sheer smooth curtain of flame, horizon to horizon, cast down from the sky itself by glowing little glints in what looked like low earth orbit. Satellites? For what purpose? Why would this planet be… I looked down at the obsidian beneath my feet.

  Continually cleansed…

  Fuck logic. Fuck explanations, my brain screamed. A wall of fire is coming for you! Run!

  Even in panic, I turned and looked for the children, quickly finding several multi-colored dots against black glass in the distance. I was already tired, but… not like this. I couldn't let them die like this.

  Go!

  Foot down, push, foot down, push, breathe, faster, faster, fasterfasterfasterfasterfaster -

  Breathe, breathe, breathe… come on…

  The kids were moving away at a pace fueled by fear, but I had to catch them. They were running directly from the wall of fire, but the portal manned by Suzie's crew was down an offset vector.

  I felt my personal top speed hovering back and forth before me; my legs pumped numbly, my feet crunched and bled, and my arms cut the seared air, but that intangible wall of speed danced just out of reach. I knew I could go slightly faster, I knew it, but I just…

  I stumbled and fell, falling onto a surprisingly whole plate of volcanic glass. My right wrist roared fire, and my entire body tingled with relentless weakness, but I stumbled right back to my feet. "Wait!"

  The shout rang out in clear air, barely audible over the low roar of oncoming flame.

  "Wait!" I screamed again, going for a high note.

  As I kept staggering forward, I saw the kids slow and turn. Exhausted themselves, they could only wait for me to catch up.

  I entered a circle of sweaty, fearful, drained, and smiling faces.

  "I knew you'd come to save us," said Danny, the eldest.

  I took a pained breath and tried to stand tall. "I don't know if I can save us, but… I couldn't let you face this alone."

  He gave a tired nod. "What's the plan?"

  "I ordered Thomas to run to Suzie's crew and tell them to unbury their portal."

  "That one's only -"

  "I know," I said, cutting him off before he told the other kids. "Come on, calculate the direction. I estimate we've gone two miles directly east of the main portal. Suzie's portal will be our escape, and it's four point nine miles southeast of the main portal, offset by twenty-two degrees from the line we've been traveling. Which direction should we head, exactly?"

  Faced by surprise math homework, the kids huddled in a massive circle and debated the numbers. I had an answer in mind, but it was important that they felt it by getting it themselves - and a second check never hurt.

  Finally, they all looked up and pointed.

  "That way?" I asked, slowly recovering my breath.

  Thirty-two children nodded in unison.

  "Alright," I prompted them. "How long have you been here? The wall of fire crossed the main portal when I was a half-mile away. I estimate it's still a half-mile away. How fast do you think it's moving? How fast do we have to move?"

  They huddled again, and the answer came forty-four seconds later. Danny stood tall above the others. "Best guess - we have to move four point one miles an hour toward Suzie's portal to outrun it."

  Another darkly ironic number. "Alright, we've trained for this," I announced, sloughing off the worst of my exhaustion. "Exactly this scenario, although it was a hypothetical gas creature then. It's possible, and you know that, right? We can survive this."

  Thirty-two grim faces nodded in response.

  "Then let's set out!"

  I took up the lead, walking slightly faster than the four-miles-an-hour rate that I simply knew by muscle memory. That gas creature had been anything but hypothetical, once, and I'd spent four days in Louisiana backcountry escaping it. I'd been sixteen then, in my first encounter with the supernatural, but that endless struggle had never left me.

  And I hoped that long-ago determination would transfer to these kids. They were all already depleted and terrified, but the human body had more to give than any of them knew.

  All they had to do was keep pace.

  Teenagers, boys, girls, and children walked together, pushing their walking stances to the limit. It was too fast to walk comfortably, and too slow to run easily, so we were caught at the worst speed possible. Still, we pushed on. The crunching of sixty-six feet filled the air, mercifully drowning out the sound of the approaching wall of fire.

  "Give it back," I told Danny, who kept the lead beside me. "What were you thinking?"

  Breathing hard, he looked away, clutching the tome in hand. "You left."

  "I had to," I told him. "I was wounded."

  "You didn't look hurt."

  I gulped. "I was, and I still am… inside. But I'm sorry I left."

  He set his jaw with resentment, but handed me the book.

  I took it with unhappy anticipation. This world was strange enough that I needed to know if any threats waited between us and our escape. After steeling myself, I opened the book to the back pages.