by Неизвестный
“I thought you were him!” shouted Lope. “Get out of there!”
“Nuts to you,” I called and sent a round for good measure into the creek bed. “You stole him from my room!”
“My mother’s room! You would have done the same.”
“Yeah? Well, I woulda told him I was taking him to the Project. He wouldn’t have jumped.”
“He didn’t jump!” Lope said. “We saw what he is and he killed Eustacio!”
“What the hell are you talking––”
I felt the touch of steel on my neck.
“No, no, don’t drop your gun,” Abraham whispered in my ear. His breath was strangely cold, and seemed to vibrate even more with tension. “Put it out straight…”
I pictured a slug from Eustacio’s little gun tearing through my jugular and my neck bones, and I did as I was told. “Now lean out over the gully…”
I hesitated, but the press of the cold steel forced me forward. I looked over starlit rocks and the edge of the gully…and saw Lope’s terrified face.
“Now shoot him.”
I did.
Lope grunted, and fell in a tiny slide of rocks, and was still.
“Now,” said the voice at my ear, and I realized then it didn’t sound quite human. “You’d best put that gun down.”
I did, and slowly turned around.
The thing that was Abraham was behind me. It held Eustacio’s pistol in one human hand. But from its other sleeve extended a bifurcated tentacle. His lower jaw quivered with great effort…and then it fell off into the dust. It sizzled there, and vanished. Where it had been on his face was a spiny collection of smaller, seeking tentacles around a lipless maw.
“Go down,” it said. “And get it.”
I didn’t ask, ‘Or what?’ The bodies around me answered that plenty. I slid down to Lope’s body. I fumbled into a pocket, and found the little round metal gadget. It was hot, now, like a boiled egg.
“Bring it up,” said the creature. Without its ersatz human jaw, the plosives ‘t’ and ‘p’ were hisses. I looked among the rocks for Lope’s gun, but the creature said, “Don’t be silly.”
My heart was hammering, now. I crawled back up the steep side of the wash, using sharp rocks for handholds.
“What now?” I asked.
“Now?” The creature stood. It was two heads taller than Abraham had been. It let out a sound that was either a chuckle or a sob. “Same as ever. Take me to the Project.”
The Chevy’s headlights cut through the darkness. After Marseillaise, it felt like a nice car, but I didn’t want to die in it. It smelled now, and I realized my pants were wet. But there was another smell, something ancient and utterly foreign. The scent of a deep sea from a faraway place—somewhere much farther than Stadtilm.
“What happened to your disguise?” I asked.
For a moment, the creature didn’t answer. “Time,” it said, finally. It’s voice hissed and trembled like wind through bamboo. “Running out of time.”
“Then why didn’t you drive this yourself?” I said.
“I don’t know these things,” said the creature, and I saw a greenish-gray tentacle stroke the dashboard.
I dared a glance over at it. Abraham’s almost-handsome face had split and hung like grotesque barn doors over a nest of variously sized tentacles that tasted the air, seeking and retreating. I felt my already empty bladder let go again.
“You’re not a Big Head,” I said. “What are you?”
The creature turned its abominable head to me, and one half of Abraham’s face slid off and fell onto the bench seat where it sizzled into gas. There was a coppery metal object running up the side of the creature’s head, and from it I could hear a low, muted buzzing. The hole that was the creature’s mouth moved. “What do you know about us, or what we really look like?” Something about its inhuman voice made me think it was smiling as it said that.
Ahead, I saw a glow above the next low rise. There was something out there. The lights of a small town. Or a large camp. The Project.
“And what is that thing?” I asked, indicating the metal sphere the creature held.
It said nothing. It didn’t have to.
“We don’t have to do this,” I said. I could hear the choke in my own voice. Through smeary eyes, I could see the outline of the camp materialize. Fences. Towers. A brightly lit boom gate.
I put my foot on the brake pedal.
“What are you doing?” the creature hissed. The gun it had held was dropped, and faster than a snake, a long, strong tentacle whipped out and wrapped around my throat.
“You won’t get in,” I said, choking. “They take one look at you through the windshield, and they’ll fill us both full of lead.”
“We must get in!” the creature hissed. “We must!”
Through the front glass, I could see the uniformed figures of guards moving. They’d seen us. Behind them, rows of newly constructed buildings. Dorms and laboratories for the finest scientific minds in the world, our last chance to make something that would kick Big Green off the planet and back to wherever the hell they came from.
“I’ll kill you,” the creature said. I could hear the panic in its voice, and I felt the tentacle about my throat tighten like a boa constrictor.
“That won’t get you in,” I gasped.
One of the guards was motioning to a nearby tower, and a spotlight up on it began to swivel toward us.
“Is that a radio on your head?” I asked.
“Why?” the creature asked.
“Tell your Big Head bosses I‘d like to make a deal.”
They stopped me at the gate. Armed guards and flashlights and M3 Greaseguns. I played all aw-shucks-I-musta-took-a-wrong-turn…then floored it and busted through. Everything seemed to slow down, then. Somewhere, as if from far away, I heard a machine-gun rattle. I threw myself out of the car in much the same way that creature that had called itself Abraham had lied about. I hit the well compacted gravel and rolled. But all eyes by then were on the creature, and the glowing device it held. Maybe it was a bomb. Maybe it was a transmitter. I saw a bunch of green lights streak overhead, and suddenly it seemed like a thousand spotlights were on me, and I expected to die. Maybe, I even thought I was dead. Because then, I was ascending, like a saved soul or an angel. Up to the heavens.
It’s funny. Places get in your blood, and they call you back. After Marseillaise was repaired, I found her wheels steering me back to Phoenix. There I discovered that Surprise lived up to its name again; the person who’d bought my old house was selling again, and cheap. Maybe it wasn’t a surprise; rumors were, that the Big Heads were creeping West even faster. There’d been an explosion deep in the desert near Shiprock, and after that, the skies had been full of green jet trails. Lots of people were in a panic—not me. I bought the house back, and was I not surprised, then pleased, to see my old chair and coffee table still there. Money was not a problem, and I bought some more furniture and a refrigerator and a new Golden View TV set and two cases of Dickels.
I could walk to get the paper these days—no pain in the legs, no squeaking. A spring in my step, you might say. The papers were full of doom and despair and news of cities like Budapest burning in green flames. But my mood was good.
I still did my runs out to Indian country—loads of tobacco and finer alcohols, but mostly for something to do. There aren’t so many people to buy from and sell to, and Bellamy itself is a ghost town now. I don’t mind. I once even drove Marseillaise down the old bridge road to its end, but where there had been a camp and boom gates and towers was now a low, burned out hole the size of four football fields. I try to remember my first and last flight since the war, the one in the Big Head ship, but my mind just slides over it like a bootheel on black ice. All I can recall is a long sense of joy, of being in a fighting plane once more.
I turned away from the burned out Project, turned Marseillaise’s wheel, and with pleasant daydreams of Dickels on the rocks, I headed for home.
> She’s a good car, Marseillaise. She’s reliable. She might be a Citroën, but you can trust her.
THE ROAD OUT OF
ANTIOCH
By J. H. Ivanov
Day Zero
The postcard in Steve Myers’s hand looked normal enough, considering that most of the people who could have sent it to him had died in a field in France. On the front of the stiff square was a painted scene of Hunstanton Beach, which the artist must never have visited as evidenced by their use of color and a glowing yellow sun in the corner. However, the back of the card was where things really got interesting. The tightly composed cursive spelled out all the usual vacation platitudes and wouldn’t have seemed remarkable to anyone else who read it. For Myers, though, the sight of the thin piece of cardboard and the writing it contained made his skin crawl like something had just slithered up his pants’ leg. It was bad enough the card had been signed with the name of a man Myers had watched die in the war and postmarked the place it had happened, but the author had also used an intricate cryptogram to hide a date, time, and address within the writing.
Myers checked the numbers on the house in front of him for the third time and was disappointed when they stubbornly continued to match those concealed in the note. A squat, brick affair with rotted shutters and a broken stoop, it was hard for him to picture the structure as it had probably looked before the war and the subsequent invasion, but not impossible. He guessed a young couple had lived there, dreaming about what their kids would grow up to do and the sunsets they would watch as they got old together. Nevertheless, if they had survived the Nazi shellings, it was clear they hadn’t made it through the arrival of the green scourge. Most likely, the monsters had dragged the woman away to one of their horror camps, and the guy had died trying to fight them off. It was a story you could hear whispered in any pub in any city these days.
The dilapidated house gaped at Myers, the slits between its moth-eaten curtains pregnant with the kind of thick, unnatural darkness that was perfect for an ambush. Starting to lose his nerve, he tried to convince himself that the whole thing was too elaborate to be a Martian trap, but he was well acquainted with the invaders’ penchant for the cruel and theatrical. Still, it seemed inconceivable that he’d been made. After the big green men had shown up and blasted the Earth’s armies all to hell, he’d used every trick in the book to get back to London. Things had been just as bad there, though, so he’d fled to the countryside. He’d had a feeling that his past as a soldier would be trouble, so he took on a new identity and spent his time trying to find a way back to America and his wife, Nancy. Only later did he begin to hear the rumors that previously enlisted men had started disappearing or winding up in ditches with their throats slit. He hadn’t been sloppy or risked giving himself away, even though it meant he couldn’t send or receive any word to his wife. However, the postcard pressed between his calloused thumb and forefinger suggested his efforts hadn’t been enough.
Myers folded the stiff square in half and shoved it deep into his pocket where he didn’t have to think about it anymore. He checked his watch in the weak illumination of a nearby streetlamp, whose sickly rays barely managed to cut through the fog and gloom. Ten minutes. It was plenty of time to scout the place and see if he could determine with what exactly he was dealing. His eyes narrowing, he checked the deserted avenue with its rows of disturbingly quiet houses, whose occupants were too afraid to turn on a single light after dark for fear that they’d make targets of themselves. He didn’t see a soul, though. If anyone was following him, they knew what they were doing.
Ignoring the ever-present feeling he was being watched, a sensation he’d never quite gotten used to despite all the Martian ships that he’d seen patrolling overhead throughout the years, Myers crept around back of the deserted house. His knees loose and hands curled into half-cocked fists, he kept his eyes moving back and forth over the landscape, nervous that a pair of outreached claws might come at him from the shadows. On one such pass, his gaze picked up a glow from the ground beside the cottage that was so faint he almost ignored it as ambient light reflecting off something innocuous, like a rake. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, he realized the illumination was trickling through the slats of a deteriorating cellar door. He cautiously bent down and studied the wooden flap. Across its weather-beaten face, he found a barely visible chalk drawing of the shield that had represented the airborne unit of which he’d been a part. Unable to decide whether that made things better or worse, he slowly opened the creaking barrier a few inches so he could get a glimpse inside.
The cellar was rectangular and stretched the length of the house, its far end lost in a splash of impenetrable darkness. Against its west wall stood a simple table holding nothing but the desk lamp. It was the fixture’s weak light that had attracted Myers. Tall cabinets lined the room, their shelves cluttered with a seemingly endless supply of dirty mason jars and cobwebs. A couple of sets of shoeprints wandered across the floor, breaking up the thick carpet of dust that lay there. Grateful the tracks weren’t the eerie and unmistakable marks left behind by Martian feet, Myers pulled the door back a little farther and hesitantly descended the cellar’s rickety stairs. Despite the innocuous look of the place, he made sure to leave the exit wide open behind him, in case he needed to make a quick getaway.
Hoping to find some clue as to why he’d been brought there, he began to scrutinize every musty inch of the place. The cellar seemed on the up and up, until he got to the most distant corner of the basement. There, on a cramped spot of floor just past the last shelf, he found what looked like a big, metal drain cover. Above the nickel-sized holes in its surface, various numbers had been seemingly scrawled at random, each set repeating a single time. One pair specifically caught Myers’s eye as they exactly matched that of the regiment he had been a part of during the war. Half-expecting something horrible to happen, he held his breath and slowly inserted his index fingers into the two openings. Though he tried to be as careful as he could, the jarring sound of metal scraping against rough concrete filled the air as he lifted the grille out of its housing. Cringing, he set the heavy lid aside and stared down into the cavernous hole its removal had revealed. He could see a series of iron rungs leading into a lit cell below. However, his awkward vantage point kept the majority of the room out of view.
No less uneasy, but feeling that he had come too far to back out now, he sat down and dangled his legs over the edge of the gap. Searching blindly, he wriggled his feet this way and that until his shoes’ soles came to rest against the steps. His elbows locked, he slowly began to climb down into the chamber. He’d only gotten waist deep into the room, though, when a familiar voice rose up to greet him.
“Be sure to put the grate back into place, son.”
Myers, moving with newfound assuredness, immediately did as he had been ordered and then finished his descent. As he turned around, he saw a middle-aged man tucking a pistol into his jacket pocket. It seemed likely to Myers that the gun had been trained on his back for at least half of his journey into the hidden room, but it didn’t offend him. In this day and age, you couldn’t be too careful. Exercising that same principal himself, he quickly looked the older man over. His crew cut hair was mostly silver, though a few thin veins of black stubbornly persisted. The ruddy skin around his mouth and eyes was creased like vellum paper. Though nothing to write home about, his clothes were perfectly pressed and spot-free. He leaned slightly to the side, his weight supported by a simple varnished cane he gripped in his left hand. At last, Myers met the man’s welcoming eyes.
“It’s good to see you again, Steve,” said the man with a tired, yet genuine, smile.
“Yeah. It’s been a while, Mr. Brickman,” Myers replied, purposely leaving out the man’s superior military rank while ignoring the tremor that rippled up his hand and through his arm, urging him to salute. “Who’s your friend?”
Brickman followed Myers’s suspicious gaze across the room to a figure obscured by ebony shadows. H
is dark hair an unruly wave that swept down over his ears and stopped just past the nape of his neck, the clandestine man stared back at Myers intently. A strange and impossible fire seemed to seethe at the edge of his irises, but Myers figured it was just a trick of the light. All the same, the man’s thin, peaked eyebrows and drawn face gave him a sinister bent that perfectly matched his inhospitable frown. Resembling some kind of wild gypsy, he wore loose, black pantaloons and a matching tunic with an open v-neck that revealed his chest. A gray sash encircled his waist, its knot fastened at his right hip and trailing two ribbons of extraneous cloth down the outside of his thigh.
“In this realm, I allow myself to be called Doctor Khresmoi,” uttered the aloof figure, his Eastern European-sounding accent enhancing the evident acrimony in his clipped words, “and make no mistake, I am friend to no man.”
“Back up a minute,” Myers declared, raising his hands in a gesture of cessation. “When you say ‘this realm,’ you mean Britain, right?”
“Hardly,” the Doctor spat with a harsh, solitary laugh. “I speak of nothing less than this entire wretched dimension, the sixteenth of a thousand, named Xor H’alesh by those outside and meaning Pit of Lies, as it is the only realm where creatures dream and imagine. You know it simply as ‘reality,’ though.”
His face pinched with confused exasperation, Myers turned to Brickman.
“Sir, I know you wouldn’t have gone through all this trouble to get me down here if there wasn’t a good reason, especially in such dangerous times, but I’ll be damned if I understand any of this.”
“You’re right, son. I owe you an explanation,” said Brickman with a nod, his mouth sagging uncharacteristically. “Come take a look at this.”