Dearborn’s depth of knowledge is impressive, but is he overreaching? Who’s to say that all those stories about monsters weren’t just created by the ancient horror authors of the time, spreading their tales through oral tradition rather than the printing press? “Maybe it’s just that a dead finger isn’t that scary? Or the mythological heroes who fought back were born like me. I can’t be the only one in the history of mankind to be born with deformed amygdalas.”
The old man twists his lips back and forth, which I now know means he’s thinking. “I believe we’ve answered enough questions for now.” He stands over me, breathing.
“You sound like Darth Vader,” I point out.
He grins. “Most overweight men do.” The operating table groans when Lyons leans over and uses it to support his weary-limbed girth. “Now then, tell me what you saw.”
While I haven’t been told everything, Lyons has been forthcoming. I decide to keep the exchange of information going. “I can see them in several different ways. First, in our world, or dimension, or frequency. Whatever you want to call it. Then there is the world between. It looks similar to the real world, but is intercut by glowing green veins, which also cover the Dread. I think it’s blood, like an external vascular system. The sky is purple. There are also black trees, some intermingling with the trees from our world. Basically, all the really solid, immovable stuff from both sides is there.”
“It all matches his previous description,” Katzman says.
“Yes, yes,” Lyons says, nodding quickly, moving his hand around in circles, urging me to continue on. “Stationary objects of concrete reality tend to stretch between frequencies further than living, moving matter, overlapping with the next fully realized frequency. We know all this already.”
I pick up the ice packs on my stomach, flipping them over one by one. They’re getting warm.
Lyons loses his patience. Snaps his fingers at me. “The mirror dimension. That’s where you went, isn’t it?”
“I killed it there, yes.”
Lyons steps back a bit, finds a chair, and sits. He doesn’t seem surprised, and I think I know why. Despite his claim that all the specimens were trapped while entering Neuro, some of them came from me. I’ve killed them before. “Good,” he says. “This is good. Give me details.”
“I’ll give you the whole story,” I say, and I break the details down for my entranced audience, telling them about the trail of green blood, the veined trees and earth, and my crash with and travel through the pine tree, and the muddy landing in the Dread’s world, which I describe in detail. I tell them how I killed the bull but leave out the pugs and colony. We’ll get to that soon enough. I finish with an explanation of how my pendant made the leap between worlds with me, confirming that all matter can change frequencies; oscillium just does it more easily.
“Show me,” Lyons says.
“Show you what?”
“Look into the world between.”
“Isn’t this old news?” I ask.
“You were very private about this before,” Lyons says. “Didn’t want Maya to know. Or Simon.”
With a flex of my new eye muscles, I feel the shift in my vision into the world between. The pain caused by this subtle shift—though slightly less intense than my previous experiences—forces my eyes shut, but I grit my teeth and push past it, opening my eyes again. The room’s structure is the same, but the people are gone, as are the less solid elements of the room—chairs, supplies, papers. I focus on my vision, shifting back to my home frequency without instigating a physical change, seeing the real world with Dread eyes. The room appears again. Everyone in the room, minus Katzman and Lyons, has taken a step back.
“What?” I ask.
“Your eyes,” Winters says.
Katzman is the least shocked, and Lyons just looks interested. He produces a small flashlight and shines it back and forth between my eyes. “Have you noticed any other changes? Perhaps less overt. Increased strength, or stamina, or—”
I shake my head. “I didn’t even know my eyes could look different.” There’s a mirror above a sink at the back of the room. I slide off the table, letting the now warm ice packs fall away, and head for the mirror. I can see something is wrong with my eyes, even from a distance. Up close, the truth is revealed. My once-circular pupils have split into two vertical rectangles, connected by a small dash. Like the bull. But they’re not glowing from within. My blood, it seems, is still human.
Not all of me, though. I really am part Dread.
But how much?
I still feel human. Like myself. My experience of the string-theory frequencies I call home hasn’t changed at all.
Except that I can choose to change that experience. I can see, hear, smell, taste, and feel what a Dread can, but can I really do those things like a Dread? And if so, are there other things I can do?
Only one way to find out. I decide to make the others my guinea pigs. I turn, face the group, and try to intimidate them. At first, nothing happens. Everyone just stares.
“You’re kind of freaking me out, man,” Cobb says.
“What are you doing?” Winters asks.
Katzman, hand on his sidearm, is nervous but tries to relieve it with humor. “Looks like he’s trying to shit his pants.”
Cobb steps closer to me, hand reaching out. “Are you feeling all r—”
A vibration slips from my limbs and into my core. My gut twists with agony, and I suspect the pain might be caused by the physical changes taking place, tapping underused muscles, or organs. But I turn the negative feelings outward, willing them toward the others … until five voices shout with surprise—and fear.
That’s when I hear it, in my head. The whispering. But it sounds more like static, lacking the cadence of the Dread whispers.
The vibration stops quickly as the pain becomes so intense that I nearly buckle and fall to the floor. When I look up, sweat dripping in my eyes, everyone in the room has backed away. I only managed to conjure up and project a brief moment of fear, but it’s had a clear effect on the others. Cobb is on the floor, scrambling to his feet. Katzman has his weapon drawn, aimed at me. Allenby is pale. Winters looks ready to fight, which I admire. And Lyons has a hand over his heart, not acting this time. Sweat on his brow.
“How?” Lyons says, before taking a deep breath. “How did you do that?”
Feeling winded, like I’ve just run several miles, I sit down. The pain begins to fade as I let my body become its old self. “Maybe I’m more Dread than you thought.”
Lyons pushes past his fear, and the others. With excited eyes, he says, “You’ve certainly never done that before.”
“Could his DNA have continued to change over the past year?” Allenby asks, sounding more concerned than scientifically interested.
“It’s possible, but it’s also likely the old Josef never thought to try.” Lyons looks at me. “Or perhaps he just kept it from us. Show me more.”
“I’m not sure what else a Dread can do.”
“Enter their world,” he says. “I want to see it happen.”
“It hurts,” I tell him. “A lot.”
“Does the pain linger?”
“Fades over time, but the initial shift is like getting kicked in the nuts. If you want to see it, you’re going to have to answer one more question for me.”
Lyons nods. “Anything.”
“What do they want? Aside from dominance. Because from what I can see, they’re moving away from primal dominance and closer to a kind of psy-ops war.”
Lyons leans back against a counter, twisting his lips, eyes on the ceiling.
“It’s a simple question,” I say.
“With a complicated answer, in part because we’re not entirely sure.”
“So let’s skip to the end game for now. Ignore the why. They’re spurring on violent mobs around the world, building a fear-fueled frenzy between governments, turning the whole world on itself. But to what end?”
“Isn’t
it obvious?” Lyons says. “Fear is one of the strongest emotions. Enough of it can destroy logic and fuel paranoia. When this happens en masse, we see genocides, mass murder, and war.”
“They’ve done this before?” I ask.
Lyons nods. “Undoubtedly. But not at this scale. The human race will soon be at each other’s throats. Brother against brother, neighbor against neighbor, nation against nation. There will come a point when world powers fear each other more than they do the mutually assured annihilation their nuclear arsenals provide.” He pauses for a breath. “Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
“They want us to do their dirty work for them,” I say.
Cobb, still steadying himself, asks, “But why? Two weeks ago, the world was fine and dandy. Then everything went nuts. What changed?”
Lyons turns to Cobb. “I have no idea.” Back to me. “But it started when you took that finger all those years ago.”
“This is my fault?”
“How would you feel if the animals in the slaughterhouse suddenly understood why they were there and who was responsible for it? They know we know. That we can detect them.” He raises a hand toward the Documentum room. “That we can collect and study them. Kill them. Consider what we do in less severe situations. When an animal population gets out of control, maybe it’s predators attacking livestock, or deer wrecking cars, what do we do? It’s a tradition going back through all of recorded human history, and is likely responsible for the extinction of several ancient species as well as several more recent extinctions—wolves in the U.S., sharks off of Australia, deer in the Northeast.”
I see where he’s going, and in a horrible way it makes perfect sense. “It’s a cull.”
Lyons nods. “I think they mean to set the human race back. Reduce our numbers. Remove our technology, without which we have no hope of detecting them or resisting their influence. They’re going to return us to the Stone Age, and themselves to the shadows, where they’re safe from us.”
“From me,” I say.
“It’s a preemptive strike against humanity before we can really fight back.” He looks at me with deadly serious eyes. “Now, show me.”
I take a step away from him and focus my whole body and all of my senses on what is just beyond reach. I can feel it now, the change within my body and mind, as I let the Dread part of me, and its senses, become dominant. At first, it’s subtle, like the stretch of an elastic band that then snaps, painfully. I feel the shift to the world between, and then, with a shout of muscle-shaking pain, darkness. I’m fully in the other realm but still inside the oscillium confines of Neuro. The building is jet-black in all directions, lacking any kind of light. There are no interior walls—and no floors.
But in this mirror dimension, where physics are the same, there is gravity. And it tugs me downward. My stomach lurches as I fall from a height of seven stories.
28.
I reenter the dimension of reality I call home, seven feet lower than I’d been standing, just in time to collide with a desktop. The internal discomfort of shifting between frequencies is temporarily overpowered by the external impact. I hit the surface hard, crushing stacks of paper, a lamp, a stapler, and other odds and ends. Momentum carries me and most of the desktop debris over the side and three more feet down to the floor.
Pens spill from a jar and roll across the cold linoleum. I watch them race away and stop against a pair of white shoes. An African American woman dressed in white pants and doctor’s jacket stands a few feet away, leaning back against a counter, where she must have leapt upon my arrival. Her hands are covered by blue rubber gloves and her hair is tied up in a tight bun. A glass slide is clutched between her fingers. She might be cute, or not, but I can’t really tell because the eyeglasses she’s wearing, with round, light-blue magnifying lenses framed by LED lights, make her look like some kind of sci-fi cyborg.
I push myself up, grunting from various ailments, and stand. “You’re not a cyborg, are you?”
“W-what?” the woman says.
I’m standing, but her eyes are still looking down. I follow the angle of her magnifying eyeglasses. “Ah,” I say. “It’s far less impressive without the magnification.”
That snaps her out of it. She looks up and lifts the lenses away from her eyes. “You’re naked.”
“You are cute,” I say, now able to see her wide, dark-brown eyes. And she’s right: I’ve once again left my clothing behind, taking only the plastic pendant and chain, the nonliving extension of myself.
She looks around the lab. It’s empty except for the two of us. “Where did you come from?”
I point to the ceiling. “Seventh floor.”
She looks at the laboratory door, then me. “You don’t have a key card. You’re naked.”
I smile. “Don’t get a lot of naked men in the lab?”
“Not live ones,” she says. “How did you get in here?”
“I’ll show you.” I point to the door. “That the way to the elevator?”
She nods. “Hey, wait, you’re Crazy, right?”
“With a capital C?”
“Yeah.”
I look down at my naked self, not a trace of embarrassment. “Kind of obvious.”
“Yeah,” she says again. “I’ve looked at your brain cells under a microscope.”
I step back toward the door. “How do my cells look in the macroworld?”
She smiles. “Far more interesting.”
“But not quite human?”
The smile fades. “There are … aberrations, but I don’t know why … Do you?”
“I’m starting to,” I say. “Ready for a demonstration?”
Buck naked, I sprint toward the door without getting an answer.
“Wait,” she calls after me. “You need a key c—”
I leap at the wall.
Focus.
Shift.
Pain.
The woman’s voice drops away as I slip into the mirror dimension. Just as gravity starts pulling my jump back down, I return to the real world and land on the other side of the wall.
Inside a lab table.
The sudden, jarring stop is like a punch to the gut, accentuating the systemic revolt created by slipping in and out of dimensions. I nearly vomit on the tabletop, but my surprise at being stuck inside a table helps distract me from the pain, which, if I’m honest, isn’t as powerful as before. In fact, most of the pain is now in my body. My head and eyes are mostly pain-free.
“This isn’t good,” I say, looking down. I’m waist-deep inside a black granite-topped table with two sinks.
A gasp turns me toward the door behind me. The woman scientist is there, hands over her mouth. “Oh my God, are you okay?”
“Not sure,” I say. I wiggle my toes. Can feel them. I haven’t been cut in half.
She rounds the table, squats down, and opens the cabinets.
“Am I there?”
There’s a pause, and then, “Uh, yeah.”
“Any blood?”
“Not that I can see.”
“Good news,” I say. “Matter moving from one dimension destroys matter in the other.”
Eyebrows furrowed, she looks up from the cabinet peepshow. “What?”
“Means I’m not going to die in this table.” I try to lift myself out of the granite slab, but the hole is perfectly conformed to my waist. I can’t squeeze my butt up or my ribs down. “What’s beneath us?”
She looks down. “The floor?”
“On the fifth floor.”
After a moment of thought. “Living quarters for the security teams, I think.”
“Thanks,” I say, and then slip into the world between, stretching that elastic band until I’m snapped into the mirror dimension. The whole process is fast now. Gravity yanks me down. I let a second pass, reenter the world, and brace for impact. My legs hit the squishy surface of a top bunk. The rest of me hits nothing. I’m flipped over backward, spinning to the floor and landing hard on my ass. Hurts
like hell but is nothing compared to the ache of snapping between frequencies so quickly. I’m not sure if it’s doing any permanent damage, but I don’t think so. The pain fades fast enough once I’m settled in one reality or another.
The bunk room is empty, which is probably a good thing. I’m not sure the guards would be as receptive to a naked man as the bespectacled scientist had been. I sit up on the side of the bed feeling like I’ve just gone for a run. I wipe my arm across my forehead and it comes away wet. I’m sweating. Using my Dread … self is a physical thing. And it’s currently out of shape. But it gives me hope that, with a little exercise, I can reduce or remove the pain associated with shifting. I head for the door, think about leaping through, and then remember how that had worked out last time. I turn the handle and step into a hallway.
Several people turn my way. Some of them gasp. One hurries away.
“Which way to the elevator?” I ask.
The distant chime of an arriving elevator beckons me past the onlookers, who turn and point to the opening doors. My scientist friend from the sixth floor leans out, spots me, and waves me toward her. She holds the door for me as I enter.
“You know,” I say, “most people would have brought something for me to put on. A blanket or towel or something.”
She clears her throat with a smile. “Seventh floor, right?”
“Don’t get out of the office much?”
She pushes the button. The doors shut. “I’m Stephanie, by the way.” She holds her hand out. “I’m a neurologist.”
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