by Eddie Patin
“No he’s not!” she snapped. “Zombies aren’t real! Shush!”
Randy looked back at Arthur. “Do you think there are more? Will more come??”
Arthur sighed and looked around, pulling an extra shell out of his pocket and pushing it into the tube. The mechanism bit the tip of his thumb a little.
From two of the houses around him, he saw his neighbor’s watching—some peeking through cracked blinds, one standing in a pulled-open curtain.
“I suppose so,” Arthur said. “Yeah, I’d say. There’ll be more...”
The caretaker blanched. The big man looked so scared, standing in the rain, holding his bleeding arm.
“What do we do?” he asked.
Arthur pushed another shell into the tube.
“It’s gonna to be dark in a couple of hours. I guess ... you might want to board up the windows and stuff and be real quiet through the night...”
“Is that what you’re gonna do??”
“Yeah,” Arthur said. “I guess that’s what I’m gonna do, too.”
With that, he turned away, and looked back at his own house. Did he even have any nails? Would his drill even work? If all of the flashlights and his phone and other electronics were dead, his drill was probably dead too...
Looking behind him at the sound of the door closing, Arthur saw Randy going inside with Delores, and put another round into his shotgun, stepping back into the street. He stepped around the dead zombie with the exploded head that was sprawled out on the asphalt, and made his way home.
As he crossed the street, he looked over at his neighbor, Gill’s, house, and expected to see the strange hermit looking back at him from a darkened window.
But Gill wasn’t anywhere to be seen. The house was dark, buttoned up, and showed no signs of life within. No glow of candle-light—nothing. Arthur’s eyes swept over the shuttered windows...
Then he stopped.
Each window was covered with rolling steel shutters—some sort of metal security covers that extended down from a retaining container above each frame, locked shut at the bottoms.
Were those windows like that yesterday??
Even the garage was covered with a steel shutter—a massive, industrial-looking metal blind that Arthur expected to see rolled down over the windows and doors of a liquor store or gun shop...
He definitely would have noticed that...
The man’s windows and garage door were totally normal before. Were those shutter containers always there, at the top of each window and door, holding those security covers rolled-up and hidden before?
Did Arthur just never notice??
That means that at some point between when Arthur left for Seth and Maggie’s on his bike and now, Gill had lowered the shutters all over his house...
So that kooky dude was in there, somewhere.
Or maybe he packed up into his Ford Bronco that normally resided inside the garage and left for the mountains. Perhaps he just secured all of his windows and such before he left to protect his house from break-ins...
With those shutters down and no light coming from inside, there was no way to tell.
Arthur’s eyes flicked up to Gill’s chimney, but didn’t see any smoke.
The cold rain pattered on his face.
With a shrug, Arthur put the shotgun on one shoulder and walked back to his house. He was hopeful, but had a feeling that there was a long night ahead of him. He’d have to find whatever lumber he could from inside and protect his windows in case any more zombies came...
Was that it, now? Zombies?
He was already relegated to thinking of the terrifying, blue fire-eyed creatures as zombies...
Arthur didn’t have the luxury of steel security shutters over his windows and doors.
Filling up the shotgun’s tube until it wouldn’t take any more rounds, then flicking the safety on, Arthur put the gun on the table and made his way through the dark kitchen toward the garage.
Pulling out his cigarette lighter and lighting a candle, he grabbed his drill.
Pulled the tool’s trigger.
Dead.
The electronic mechanism that operated the drill was dead too.
“Fuck,” he said, then opened the first drawer of his tool cabinet to get a hammer. “It’s going to be a long evening...”
2 - Chad Murray
Inside Portal Zero...
Chad fell into the space in between...
It was more like falling than walking...
As soon as his front leg slipped inside the perimeter of the huge metal-alloy ring of Portal Zero, the young cameraman didn’t know what to expect...
How could he??
What did it mean to step into a portal?
There was no floor for his foot to connect with. Instead, the rippling field of energy spanning the outer surface of the gateway, stretched tightly across the inside of the ring, washed over his foot, his leg, his hip and shoulder as he tipped inside. A crackle of electricity tickled his skin as he broke its surface, making his clothes feel rough like wool.
Once Chad’s body was half-way past the tipping point, his other foot picked up from the concrete floor of the Geneva UEA lab, and it felt like he fell into a swimming pool with no temperature...
Not hot; not cold.
There was nothing but the crackling of static all around him, and a muffled, warbling boom, rolling over his eardrums like constant waves...
Was that his heartbeat?
Chad tried to feel the cold plastic handle of the aluminum dog crate in his right hand. He pressed his fingers in hard against it, and thought that the crate might be still there...
Looking down to see for himself felt like a monumental effort, but Chad’s eyes settled on the metal crate full of air holes, wreathed by the darkness of the void and the zipping, arterial lights of pulsating red and purple colors that flashed all around him.
He wondered how the dog felt...
The puppy—what was his name?
Melinda’s voice echoed back into his mind...
“It certainly is! He’s a young Jack Russel Terrier, and he’s so cute! We’ll all be rooting for little Max, for sure!”
He could imagine her face, smiling for the camera. He remembered the striking contrast of the bold, red blazer jacket she wore next to her made-up face and perfect, dark hair.
Chad remembered the darkness and fire, and the huge nightmare creature holding Melinda in its long-fingered hands like she was a puppet. As she screamed helplessly, the beast looked at her impassively, tilting its long, strange head to the side, then cut her to ribbons with its claws while she struggled. It casually leaned in and pulled a piece of her off with its beak...
“Cameraman!!” a voice called, long and slow.
Was it the dog?
He looked down at the crate in his hand; peered into the dark holes. The puppy was in there, somewhere, floating through the in between along with him...
“Hey, Cameraman!!”
Chad looked around and gasped, the strange, stretched quality of his intake of breath surprising him.
Being in the wormhole was like sliding through an infinitely-long waterslide tunnel, but instead of slipping through water, he was floating along as if in zero gravity, and the pulsating red and purple lights around him were doing the moving—sliding past him, sometimes at blinding speed, other times slowing down to a crawl...
Instead of friendly-blue, plastic tube walls of a waterslide, however, the bounds of this tunnel were black; space, stars and dark and infinite. The walls of the wormhole were only hinted at by the artery-like pulsations of light flashing through.
And nothing was holding still.
The entire wormhole and its tube-like walls of black space and red and purple light was tumbling around like choppy ocean waves, as if Chad was stuck inside a giant, cosmic snake having an intergalactic seizure...
In one direction was a crystal clear image of the UEA Lab in New York—at least he had to assume it was—ful
l of people dressed in white, peering at him from computer terminals, along with the shadowy forms of more soldiers standing in the back of the room.
In the other direction was a likewise clear depiction of the ruined lab he just escaped—dark, rolling with flames, piles of debris and pieces of human bodies. One of the creatures—presumably the last one they were running from—stalked across the scene, all sharp-angled arms and legs, until it disappeared stage-left...
“Oh my god,” Chad mumbled, his voice slow and weird.
Then he saw, partially concealed by the darkness of the void, the two soldiers floating toward him. One was closer, the other was nearly back by the gateway to Geneva. In their dark, green camouflage clothing and gear, he hardly noticed them, save for their bright blue helmets and the occasional glint of the purple and red lights reflecting on their weapons.
As he focused on the two men, the path of the flashing lights changed, slamming Chad with a sudden wave of nausea, and he suddenly saw the two men flying toward him at a great speed!
The lead soldier’s eyes widened as Chad came vaulting at them, and he raised his weapon out of the way just before their bodies collided.
Chad and the soldier grunted, slow and stretched-out, and the muffled sounds echoed in Chad’s ears.
“Sorry!” Chad said, pushing against the soldier’s vest with his free hand, untangling their legs, pulling Max’s crate out of the way. “I don’t know—”
“Get back!” the man exclaimed, shortly before the second soldier collided with them as well. Chad noticed that the slow sounds of his words weren’t in sync with his lips.
So weird...
“I don’t know how this works!” Chad shouted.
“None of us do, dumbass!” the soldier replied curtly. “I was trying to tell you to watch out for the red thing up there!”
As the trooper pointed with a gloved hand, Chad turned around to face the distant image of New York again, and saw the angry, red-rimmed tear in the tunnel wall, far up in the distance.
Was that the rip in the wormhole where the monsters came from??
“It’s far away!” Chad shouted.
“You were almost on it a second ago,” the soldier replied. “I think maybe we go wherever we’re focusing on!”
Chad paused, and thought about how he just slammed into the guy at an alarming speed.
“That’s how I—”
“Yeah, no shit, Sherlock!” the soldier called back with a weird, slow voice.
“Let’s focus on New York then!” Chad exclaimed, turning back to the dancing, bright image seemingly a thousand miles away.
“Good plan!” the soldier shouted back from behind him.
As Chad focused his attention on the image of the UEA Lab in America, he felt a strange connection with it, like the magnetic gaze you may sometimes get with a stranger, and the red and purple crackling veins of light started to fly past him!
Before long, the young cameraman felt like Superman, holding Max’s crate in one hand, but otherwise stretched out and zipping through the wormhole at an amazing speed, the pulsating lights in the void flashing by!
The red tear in the tunnel wall was quickly approaching on his right...
Chad couldn’t even remember—weren’t there two tears, the closer one on the left and the farther one on the right? With them flying through this tumbling, chaotic dimension in between worlds, was there even an up and down; left and right? He could very well be upside-down from where he was when he stepped into Portal Zero originally...
Fell into, he thought.
As he looked at the ragged edges, vicious and bright red and almost pixelated, like a video game, Chad found himself drifting toward the scary anomaly...
“No,” he said to himself in a slow voice. “Don’t look at it...”
Focusing instead on the image of New York again, Chad steeled himself against the fear of one of those monsters reaching out to grab him as he flitted past. He could distinctly imagine those extra-long fingers—broad, catching hands with several additional digits, topped with long talons of chiseled stone—stretching out from the tear in the wormhole, snagging him like a cat hooks a fish, and yanking him through the wall into...
God-knows-where...
Chad flashed past the tear, continuing on to New York.
Soon he passed a second tear on the opposite side, also flashing with angry red light, and treated it the same way.
Safe...
Looking back to the soldiers, Chad saw the first soldier—the one with the working flashlight who he crashed into—fly past the tears as well.
No problem.
But the second man...
The other UEA soldier slowed down and arced toward the first red tear, as if passing by a planet in space and being pulled into its gravity. Chad saw the red light of the monsters’ world light up the trooper’s uniform; gleam on his rifle and his horrified face...
“No!” the soldier screamed, his voice slow and far away. “Help me!!”
Chad’s fears came true...
As the man drew close to the wall of the tunnel, closing the distance with the red-glowing tear into the other place, Chad saw the monsters emerge, like stone-skinned lizard men climbing out of a manhole. The creatures’ long, spreading hands wrapped over the torn, red edges of the dimensional rip, and they pulled themselves into the wormhole. In the dark cluster of long, wiry arms and claws, Chad thought he saw ... four creatures?
At least a couple of them wrapped their elongated fingers and claws around the screaming UEA soldier, and pulled him into the tear—into the other world, screaming as he disappeared...
“No...” Chad murmured.
The man was gone...
And in his place ... were a few more of the monsters! Their long heads swiveled around on their small necks until they faced Chad and the surviving soldier. Their many tiny eyes glinted in the red and purple lights One of them opened its mouth and hissed.
Chad heard that quite clearly...
“What are you doing?!” the soldier cried. “Let’s move it!!”
Looking around, Chad noticed that they had stopped.
They were watching the other soldier get pulled out of the wormhole, and they stopped!
The red and purple light flashed by like blood pulsing through the veins of the tunnel, and Chad saw that they were floating in space, totally still...
“He’s gone!!” Chad yelled. “They took him!”
“Let’s go!!” the soldier shouted next to him. “Focus on the lab! Let’s move, or I’ll fucking leave you!!”
Back by the tear, Chad saw the monsters making their way toward them—only they weren’t flying or floating...
The predatory creatures were running on the walls of the wormhole, fast, on all fours, all sharp knees and elbows, their long heads down, approaching at great speed!
“Oh god!” Chad cried, and he forced himself to focus on the gateway to New York. “Oh shit! Oh shit!”
They moved.
Bolting toward the gateway across space and time, Chad used every ounce of willpower he had to avoid looking back at the monsters chasing them down, and instead, focused on the image of the American lab!
Go there, he thought. Go there. I want to be there...
His eyes flitted for an instance at the UEA soldier flying toward the gate just ahead of him, and noticed how the red and purple lights played off of the soles of the man’s boots, then he focused again on the image of the lab when he noticed himself slowing down.
Up ahead, Chad could see the room even more clearly, but it wasn’t a perfect picture of scientists in lab coats working calmly at their computers, staring at him with interest; soldiers standing at attention on the far wall...
No, there was definitely some mayhem going on up ahead!
Was it dark? Did they suffer an EMP too?
It didn’t look dark, but light was different in here. Chad knew for a fact that the Geneva lab was pitch black inside, other than the light of th
e fires set by the monsters’ weird back venting. And yet, he was able to see the lab through the gateway quite clearly!
He saw the Americans in lab coats running around, from terminal to terminal, working over each other’s shoulders and holding each other up. One man tripped and fell, colliding with several chairs. The soldiers standing in the back were moving too, crouching, moving away from the back wall, leveling their guns at Chad...
Not me, he thought.
The portal...
He wondered what they must have been seeing. Chad remembered his own sights from Geneva, seeing the wormhole bucking around inside Portal Zero, the thunderclaps of the tears to the monsters’ realms opening, and the monsters themselves scurrying toward them shortly before the slaughter began...
Were they seeing him and the soldier flying toward them?
Or just focusing on the several alien monsters running along the wormhole walls after them—toward the portal??
“Should we slow down??” Chad shouted as the gateway vaulted toward them like an oncoming train.
The soldier ventured a look back at Chad, and the young newsman saw the man’s eyes flick past him and flash with fear.
“Do you want to slow down with those things behind us??” he called back. “They’re right behind us!!”
Chad gripped the kennel handle more tightly in his right hand, gritted his teeth, and stared at the oncoming image of the UEA Lab in New York. The gateway flew toward them with terrifying speed, red and purple lights pulsing and flashing all around them...
“Here we go!” he yelled.
Tensing his muscles, Chad prepared himself for whatever would happen when he reached the other side...
3 - Megan McKinney
Zion National Park, UT
“There’s something wrong with your eyes,” Megan said.
“What?” Ramon replied, his face twisting back and forth between expressions, not sure if he was being joked with or insulted.
“It’s not just you,” she said. She closed the hatch, locking the remainder of their gear—the tent, bags, and their other equipment—into the back of her car. Megan walked over to the picnic table, trying to ignore the other campers around them. Some of them were complaining quite loudly. “There’s something weird going on. You’ve got gold in your eyes. So did the ranger.”