Then, as I pass what’s normally a vacant lot, I see it. The red punch buggy, gleaming in the sun like fresh-erupted magma, a flame from the pits of Hell bursting through the ground to say hello to its future denizens. Can’t see the driver through the gleam of the windshield but I can feel his stare punching right through to me. I imagine his forehead still steaming blood, pouring waterfalls of crimson down his glowering face.
I almost pull over to see if he’s okay, but the guy behind me is tailgating to the point I’m afraid to slow down. Don’t want to get rear-ended. But when I peek at my side-mirror, do I see the red bug skittering out of the lot, falling into line in the traffic behind me? Hard to say.
“You better watch out.” Not sure why the radio is playing Christmas music in July, but I’m too shaky to fiddle with the dial. “You better not cry.” Santa is still ho-ho-hoing as I park at my work, his jingle bells chiming louder than ever. Or maybe that’s a rattle in my engine. I’ll take my car to the shop this weekend, see if I knocked some important internal mechanism out of place.
I get out only to be hammered by the sun. Need A/C! Flee to the shade of the building, gasping a sigh of relief to be bathed in shadow. Traffic roars around me, cars honking messages in Morse code while I wait for the world to stop spinning. When I finally make it through the front door, I’ve lost half my water weight in sweat.
“Look what the cat dragged in,” says Jane, the worst secretary in the history of secretaries. Blabbing as she runs a gigantic file across her sharp pink claws, “Does someone need a shoulder rub?”
I’ve given up on reminding her I’m gay. If she wants to flirt with a human brick wall, she can knock herself out. “Need coffee.” Eyes playing Where’s Waldo? across the office. “Where’s the pot?”
“Broken.” She yawns. “Should’ve hit Dunks.”
Except I was too busy hitting a red punch buggy. One I almost swear flashes past outside the window to the parking lot. I rush to the glass, whip the blinds aside. Is that a flash of red to the right? Something edging out of my line of sight, tucking itself away into the parking nook by the dumpster? Can’t crane my neck far enough to tell. Should I go outside and check?
“Spaz much?” asks Jane as she stomps a spider once, twice, thrice. “Quit bird-watching and get to work.”
“You aren’t my boss,” I grumble as I follow her orders anyway.
Speaking of bosses: enter Mr. Morris. Red tie dripping down his front like a bloodstain from a slashed throat. Charcoal suit that seems to sink into oblivion, a black hole in my vision. An odd duck, but he pays great. Dude hired me without an interview; apparently, he knew my grandfather through some sort of social club. “Top of the morning,” he booms, never a fan of indoor voices.
“Ditto,” I say, pretending I’m too engrossed with work to offer more.
Entering interrogation mode. “How are those spreadsheets looking?”
“They’re well-spread. And they’re definitely sheets.”
“Mmm-hmm.” He nods like a bobblehead. “And how about the numbers from Tokyo?”
“Hard to say. I’m bad with yen.”
“Understandable. Keep up the good work, kid.”
Pen scribbling manic spirals. “I’m not a kid.”
“You only graduated high school a month ago!”
And college can’t come soon enough—assuming I save enough money to afford tuition.
The morning dance plows onward. Papers fly, computers bleep, and eraser crumbs get stuck in the webbing between my fingers. When Jane screams that she saw a hand pressed against the window, Mr. Morris and I yell that it was only a tree branch. She starts crying, so the boss turns up the radio. Nothing like moldy oldies at max blast to make the day drag. I pop in headphones, drowning out Elvis with a hip-hop jam that urges bitches to move, get out of the way. The song features a guest verse from a rapper who did jail time for sexual battery.
“Russia just emailed,” says Jane through sniffles. “They want to know how many crates we’re sending.”
“So tell them,” Mr. Morris snaps.
“But I don’t know the answer!” This kicks off a minor apocalypse. Luckily, like most movie apocalypses, we save the world at the last minute when a presumed-lost file turns up under the mini fridge. We wipe sweat from brows, pat one another on the back for keeping the machine called a company from imploding.
That’s when the power goes out.
“Dammit, Jane,” says Mr. Morris. “How did you forget to pay the electric bill?”
“I didn’t! I set up automatic payments after the last time.”
Outside, the sun is brighter than ever, filtering into the office in giant rectangles of light. Wonder if this means I’ll get to go home early. I could use a nap. Or a hundred. Who am I kidding? I’ll be playing video games until midnight like usual.
“Too bad about the power,” I say, trying not to smile too blatantly. “I’ll come back tomorrow when it’s all squared away.”
“Not so fast,” Mr. Morris roars at his normal speaking level. “I’m going next door to see if they have electricity. We need to know if this is a town-wide blackout or if it’s only happening to us.”
It’s only happening to us. Jane and I learn this when Mr. Morris crosses the room, rips the front door wide in the middle of telling us how the show must go on, only for another man to walk through that open door and block our boss’s path. A hulk of a man, his figure blotting out the sun that tries to squirm in around him. A man whose face has been painted red.
“Excuse me,” says Mr. Morris, “but this is a private office, not a hospital. Please depart at once.”
The man smiles. Flashes blood-gunked teeth. Raises an arm.
Bonk!
I don’t realize the man is holding a tire iron until he’s already demolished Mr. Morris’s forehead with it. One blow is all it takes to take the fight out of a man who preaches daily the benefits of a go-getter attitude. Manager material, now barely managing to keep his brains from materializing on the floor as he shakes, twitches. Until he stops.
The intruder’s smile is practically spilling off his face. He scans the room before locking eyes with me. Winks. Red crust flaking from his brow, he says, “Thank you.”
Then Jane goes absolutely batty, and shit gets slightly nuts. She’s screaming, the psycho is charging, and I’m wishing more than ever that I had some coffee in my system. I grab Jane, or Jane grabs me; either way, we’re flying as one into the depths of the office building.
Shadows swallow us, one backroom emptying into the next. Bare shelves shake with laughter, but surely it’s a trick of the light—or the lack thereof. All the while, pursued by a doglike panting, a voice calling, “Wait!” A bulky body slamming into every table, corner, and doorway in the dark. A demented holler: “I want to reward you for freeing me!”
When my flip-flops try to trip me up, I kick them off and proceed barefoot. As Jane drags me deeper into the intestine of the building, she hisses, “Is this guy an ex of yours?”
“No! I just rear-ended him.”
“Yeah. Your ex.”
“Rear-ended with my car!”
We pass one perfectly good hiding spot after another. Empty bathrooms and shadowy nooks under desks wave to catch my attention, whispering, “We’ll conceal you.” As much as I’d love to stop and cower for a while, Jane isn’t letting up in her flight. She mutters that there’s a rear exit, has to be, she knows she’s seen it, dammit, if only Mr. Morris would tidy up once in a while. If memory serves, cleaning is her job, but now’s not the time to broach that subject. Pretty sure she’s not even talking to me but rather to some invisible third party.
“Fools!” comes a shout overloaded with a preacher’s righteousness. “I only want to open you up.” Even he must realize this sounds wrong because he adds, “To new ways of thinking.”
Well, mission accomplished, because I’m thinking all sorts of new things today. Like, who was the first person to punch a buddy over a punch buggy? Did t
hat mythical first blow set off a chain of events which directly led to my current plight?
Jane kicks a box from our path, sends pamphlets scattering. Titles range from do you have spies in your attic? to germany deserves a third chance. Wasn’t I supposed to mail those out last week? Whoopsie-daisy. I bump my skull on a lamp, and while trying to course-correct, a cluster of pens almost strips me of my balance.
“Here.” In the dark, Jane’s hiss sounds like a cigarette being extinguished in a glass of water. “The exit is through this next room. Has to be.”
Lo and behold, she’s right. Broken clocks, twice a day, yada yada. The exit: our big, strapping savior in the wooden flesh. We fly towards it, shoving one another out of the way in attempts to be the first one through. Jane wins; I’m a video game lover, not a fighter. And yet.
“It won’t open,” she wails, shaking the knob, throwing her body against the barrier. “Why the fuck won’t it open?”
“Because I don’t want it to,” the man answers—the man who is already in the room with us, so close that his spittle splashes my ear. Jane screams, and the surrounding dark rushes for her, shouldering me aside with the ease of a shark gliding between a swimmer’s legs in the ocean.
Bonk!
Jane isn’t screaming anymore. I don’t need my sight to know she’s become another crumpled ball on the floor. I clamp my hand over my mouth, hold my breath, convinced the man doesn’t know I’m here and will ignore me now.
No such luck.
“Finally.” The man yawns. “I thought I’d never get rid of those pests. Now it’s just the two of us. How I like it.”
The heat in the black room feels like being smothered beneath a thousand blankets. I want to run but can barely summon the strength to say, “I’m sorry I hit your car, but you didn’t have to kill Jane.”
“She’ll live,” he says with a sniff. “Or she won’t. That’s in the universe’s hands. For, you see, the universe does have hands. And I have become one of its fingers.”
Talk of “fingers” and “just the two of us” has my stranger danger alarm ringing at top volume. I miss the time when I only thought he wanted to murder me. A hand caresses my cheek and my fight-or-flight instinct hits absurd new heights. Flight wins, obviously.
“Stop!” His massive body fumbling in the hall behind me sounds like tentacles blindly groping for prey. “I thought you understood!” As I propel myself back towards the front of the office building: “You did it to me—I only want to return the favor!”
It’s time to blow this clambake. I haven’t even started college; I’m too young to die for my job. Now I know how Peter Rabbit felt with the demon-eyed Mr. McGregor hot on his heels. I’m gonna get chopped into stew and fed to this psycho’s punch buggy! Papers rustle their agreement in the gloom.
When the hand lands atop my skull, I’m almost not surprised. Almost. “Let go of me, you fucking freak! I’ll kill you! You’re dead!”
“Dead?” he hisses, fingers tightening around locks of my hair, pulling me in for a lover’s embrace. “Death is a myth. A lot of things are. And I never would have known if you hadn’t opened me up to it. Loosened my mind. Helped me re-learn how to think and interpret my surroundings. There are so many lies we allow to become facts. Mind over matter is what matters. But words aren’t enough to explain it.” A rush of wind as he jerks in the dark. “I’ll show you instead.”
Bonk!
“We’ve got a live one here!”
Fingers squirm into my armpits, drag me across a hard floor. “No,” I beg. “Not again.”
“It’s okay, kid,” a voice insists as multiple hands hold my writhing appendages in place. “You’re safe now. He’s gone.”
That’s not what I’m scared of. I want to tell him this, but my head goes a bit funny, leaving the next few minutes blurrier than a piece of stereogram art. EMTs and police buzz about, uniforms rendering them red-and-blue husks. They check my pulse, probe the massive lump that used to be my forehead. Say I’m lucky to be alive, that Mr. Morris is dead. Sounds like Jane is in the same boat as myself, fluttering in and out of consciousness. I wonder if she saw what I saw.
“His name was Joseph Stone,” a cop says. “By the time we arrived, the 7-Eleven cashier had him subdued. Not before he smashed eight customers’ skulls, unfortunately. From there, we followed the trail of dead and unconscious victims back to your office. Do you know this man? Or why he targeted your place of employment to begin his rampage?”
I know, all right. Know too much. And I can explain it all to this cop if I so choose, but why bother? As the red punch buggy driver said, it’s much easier to show than tell.
When I pick up the tire iron that my new friend left behind for me, my mind flashes back to the cascading oceans of white I witnessed while unconscious. Flesh tingles as I recall the sensation of unseen fingers probing through the milky gulfs, the tickling as my brain rewires itself beneath the weight of the knowledge they impart. And that voice! A siren’s song that melted my eardrums like butter, dripping into my brain, splashing my synapses with the forgotten history of history, the truth behind the truths around which humanity has spent their entire history building vast mental walls. Mental walls that a manic punch buggy driver somehow toppled.
I smile, thinking of the man’s other “victims.” The survivors must be waking to the same feelings I’m now experiencing. As I bring the tire iron down to crunch against the back of the cop’s skull, I’m hoping the others will feel equally passionate about spreading our new faith. After all, why should we be the only ones who get to bear witness to that glorious, never-ending light?
B.O.B. JENKIN was a best-selling author on his own Earth, but after the apocalypse, he was forced to relocate to this timeline. He is now in the process of trying to republish all the classics his old Earth knew and loved. At present, this anthology is his only publication.
* * *
Illustration by Solomon Forse
[File #351b]
[Property of Wichita Police Department]
--REPRINT--
[Date: October 10, 1941]
[Time: 14:15 - 14:24]
[Official Law Enforcement Transcription]
[Transcribed by: Howard L. Phillips]
[Session: 4]
[Doctor: Jay M. Landry, PsyD]
[Patient: Annie Ellis]
JML: It’s okay, Annie. Breathe. Let’s start over. Can you describe your feelings regarding your sister’s situation?
AE: Um, well. I hate it. I hate when she’s taken away. Barbara and Father console me by saying she will be back in no time, but she never comes back that fast. It’s always a while.
JML: I noticed this toward the end of our last session. Is there a reason you call your mother by her first name? She is your birth mother, correct?
AE: Yes . . . no reason.
JML: All right then. (Scribbles on notepad.) And when your sister is gone for all that time, do you feel alone? What goes through your mind?
AE: Well, yes and no. I miss spending time with her and having someone to talk to outside of my circle of friends. But I also cherish my alone time. Doesn’t everybody? But now, my skin crawls every time I have to stare at that empty chair at the dinner table.
JML: You and your parents still eat together at the dinner table? That’s good. I know you miss her often, but it is good to keep routines. Broken routines could lead to other things breaking apart. We should avoid disunity . . . besides, more leftovers for you, right?
AE: (Clears throat. Offers a forced chuckle.)
JML: I apologize. That wasn’t very professional of me. I know—
AE: No, no. It’s fine. You’re trying to lighten the mood. I get it. But no, Barbara rarely prepares dinner anymore. No sharp objects and all. Lately, we have eaten little. Father’s wallet can only stretch so far. Barbara has been ordering dinner from White Castle on Friday nights. We’ve been cutting corners where we can. Thank heavens the country is starting to recover.
JML: A
h, yes. President Roosevelt is doing wonders for us. I’m still sorry. You were saying you cherish your alone time. How do you use your time? Why the word “cherish”?
AE: Oh, I don’t know. I sing along to Crosby and Sinatra on the radio, draw in my notebook, or go on short walks. Pay no mind to that last part. My parents don’t let me go out anymore.
JML: Because of your sister?
AE: Neighbors stare at our house all hours of the day because of her—well, you know. They want us to leave the neighborhood, but I don’t think we can. My sister’s medical bills and my therapy with you must run their pockets dry. I reckon it’s all very expensive. I hate how they all stare.
JML: Right. Can we broach that subject today? The incidents, I mean. Do you need more time? I figure it’s the fourth session, and we’re already making so much progress. I understand if you’re hesitant.
AE: (Long pause.) I guess it’s okay now. I’ve been trying to avoid it, but maybe today is the day. Let’s proceed, then. Actually, could you fetch me some water, doctor? I’m parched.
JML: Um, yeah, yeah. Allow me to get you a glass.
(Dr. Landry exits the room. The door clicks shut.)
(Shuffling. A repeated smacking of skin followed by forceful breathing. Hurried and indecipherable speech. The utterances abruptly cease.)
(Door clicks open and shut. Dr. Landry’s chair swivels and creaks.)
JML: All right, here we are.
AE: (Gulps water. Slides glass onto table.) Thank you.
JML: Let’s start from the top.
AE: (Shallow sigh.) I never thought my sister would be capable of such things. When we were little, she would always set the best example: good grades, impeccable manners, and she never lied. Somewhere in our early teenage years, we switched. I got on the beam while she received bad marks in school and became a bit of an active crop.
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