The Earth Transformed - Ghost Book I

by Mike Stackpole

  I tried another direction — and ended up right where I’d started. And—

  “Kibbles and bits. Kibbles and bits. I’m gonna carve you into kibbles and bits.”

  Goddamn it! I was trapped in this corner with the crazy voice jabbering at me. What the hell? Was this a security measure? Was it Finster’s brain falling apart? Was there some kind of invisible monster in the room with me?

  Maybe I was getting bad signals from my eyes. I closed them and instead pictured walking to the barrier. I took a step. I couldn’t tell if I’d been teleported or not, but in my mind I was a step closer. Another step, and another.

  After ten steps it felt like I was at the barrier. I opened my eyes. To my utter amazement, I really was at the barrier, and it was open.

  “Well, how about that.”

  I entered the next room. The far wall was partially obscured by weird, grayish strands. I couldn’t tell if they were some kind of visual glitch or if they were actually there. I stepped toward them. A thing that looked a lot like a giant spider dropped down in front of it and waggled its mandibles at me.

  I rolled my eyes. “Really? A giant spider? Come on!”

  Finster’s voice spoke in my head again. “There is no spider. There are no webs. There is nothing behind them. You should turn around and go back.”

  “I didn’t mention any webs,” I said. “How do you know I’m seeing webs if they’re not there?”

  “Because I am in your mind as much as you’re in mine.”

  I hesitated. I guessed that could be true.

  “Well, we’ll see.”

  I started for the webs, keeping as far away from the spider as possible. It charged, crossing the space between us in the blink of an eye, and swiped a foreleg at me. I reeled back, cursing. That had hurt!

  “You’re a goddamn liar, Finster!”

  He tittered. “It was just a little white lie.”

  I reached for my pistol, then stared at it as I drew and aimed at the spider. Why the hell did I have my gun in here? I wasn’t really here. Not physically. But now that I looked down at myself I saw I was dressed like me. All my cuts and bruises were where they were supposed to be. My boots were still covered in dust from Finster’s fake landscape. But that was all just me remembering what I looked like and transplanting it into this artificial reality because I desperately needed a point of reference, right? None of my gear would actually work.

  The spider swiped at me again and I jumped back just in time.

  Time to find out.

  I dodged another claw and fired. The space echoed with the shot, and a hole appeared between the spider’s eight eyes. It sank to the ground, dead.

  “That shouldn’t have happened,” I said. “That shouldn’t be possible. This isn’t reality. That wasn’t a real bullet.”

  “Neither was the spider,” said Finster. “I told you.”

  I stepped up the webs. “So these aren’t real either?”

  “Of course not.”

  I pushed against them. They flexed, but didn’t break. “Feel real to me.”

  “That’s because you aren’t real either.”

  “I have no idea what that means.”

  I pushed against the webs with all my might, and with a sudden twang they broke apart and I was in.

  I stepped through the next opening, shaking my head and thinking how crazy it all was, then knocked the dirt from my cleats with the tip of my bat and crossed to home plate. I looked out toward the pitcher’s mound and saw my old foe, Christy Matthews, grinning at me. I gave him a nod back. It was always a battle when old Matty and I crossed paths. The home run king versus the strikeout king. The bleachers cheered us both. Equally divided.

  I raised my bat.

  Chapter Ten

  Matty leaned in, watching past me as the catcher gave his signals behind my back. Finally he stood, threw his arms over his head, twisted almost completely away, then turned and fired his first pitch like a cannonball.

  I swung at the white blur but missed by a mile and heard the slap of leather on leather as the catcher caught it.

  “Strike one!” called the ump.

  “You feelin’ okay, slugger?” asked the catcher. “You don’t usually miss by that much.”

  “Just warming up,” I said.

  But the next pitch was just as fast, and I swung just as poorly.

  “Strike two!”

  Sweat started to trickle out from under the brim of my cap, and it wasn’t from exertion. I was letting down the side. I was losing the game.

  I spat tobacco juice into the dirt beside the plate, then squared up again, trying to shake off the jitters. I was the best there was. There was no reason I should be choking like this. What was wrong?

  As Matty went into his windup I suddenly noticed that the bleachers were empty. Somehow, between that first pitch and this one, the stands had cleared. Was I that bad? Where had everybody gone? Why had the light changed color? What was that roaring sound?

  A white blip flashed past me and then a smack.

  “Strike three!”

  I hadn’t even swung.

  “What the hell got into you, son?”

  I slumped on the bench in the locker room as Joe gave me a hiding.

  “It was like you weren’t even there!”

  “I’m sorry, coach. Something… I saw something in the stands. I got distracted. Give me another chance.”

  “Another chance? You cost us the inning there, boy! We had bases loaded!”

  “I know, I know, but you gotta let me make it up. I got my head on straight now, coach. I can win this game. I promise.”

  Joe folded his arms and gave me a hard look, then sighed and shrugged. “All right, all right. But you better not let me down. A lot’s riding on this game, son. We lose and robots kill everybody and take over the world.”

  I stood, grinning. “I know, coach. Don’t worry. You can count on me.”

  He chuckled and held the door open for me and I walked out into a room filled with more spider webs.

  It wasn’t until I was halfway to the webs that what had just happened hit me. I’d been playing… what was it called? Baseball? In a pre–apocalypse stadium. Were those Finster’s memories? I doubted it. What were the odds he’d played professional sports and had also been a world–renowned scientist? Maybe I’d somehow stumbled the fantasy portion of his brain. Bizarre.

  I pushed through another screen of webs and kept going. There were more ahead of me, but before I could reach them, someone said, “There you are!”

  It sounded like Finster, but it looked like some kind of android. It was also shooting at me. I dodged behind the screen of webs and fired back.

  “Come on, Finster! I thought we agreed none of this was real. Just let me through.”

  “There you are!” He fired again.

  I sighed. How was I supposed to talk sense into this guy when half the time he wasn’t even there?

  I leaned out and squeezed off three shots. One glanced off the android’s noggin, but the other two found his torso and it started to smoke and hiss.

  “You are! There…”

  It was crawling now. An easy shot. I fired and it toppled onto its back.

  “Are you… there…”

  It died.

  I stepped over its body and explored the rest of the space. I didn’t see a door anywhere. Maybe it was behind the webs. I leaned on them and eventually they gave way. Nothing. The area behind them was empty. Dammit! After all this craziness, had I reached a dead end?

  I turned, disgusted, and found myself face to face with another Finster, this one holding the biggest pistol I’d ever seen.

  “Wait!” I shouted, and dove to the side as he fired.

  I heard a barrier open somewhere behind him as I rolled to my knees and fired back. The bullets tore his flesh, revealing him to be an android too.

  “Poor Irwin J. Finster,” said Finster. “Made a deal with the devil.”

  It fired again, but my bu
llets seemed to have ruined its aim, and the shot went wide.

  “What devil?” I asked, still firing. “What deal?”

  “Eternal life.” The android slumped to the ground, black fluids spilling from its guts. “But Finster voided the contract.”

  The pistol slipped from its fingers. “Now he is void.”

  None of that made any kind of sense to me, but that pistol looked like a logical thing to take. I picked it up with my left hand and kept going.

  Finster was waiting for me again in the next room. He looked like shit this time, nearly as bad as one of the Night Screamers.

  He held pleading hands out to me. “Please, I beg of you, kill me. I cannot live insane in my own mind!”

  By now the weirdness of it all was wearing thin and I just wanted to get to the part where I found the sec pass.

  “Happy to.”

  I shot him through the forehead and stepped through the next barrier. Two more Finsters stood there. These looked a lot more like Finster after he had transformed into the android — metal spikes and spines and guns sticking through their tattered flesh.

  They spoke in unison. “I begged you to kill me! Now you create us!”

  I didn’t slow down. My stolen hand–howitzer spoke twice and they flew back with craters the size of dinner plates in their chests. One of them hit the floor so hard his head broke off. There was no way a pistol — not even one as humongous as the hoss I was holding — should have been able to make holes that big, but maybe I was getting the hang of this whole “nothing is real” thing. The guns shot bullets that big because I thought they should. It wasn’t gun against gun, it was mind against mind, and from the easy way Finster’s creations were toppling, his mind seemed to be getting weaker while mine was getting stronger.

  I reached the barrier at the end of the room. It didn’t open. I pushed on it. It didn’t budge. So much for my mighty mind.

  The decapitated robot head at my feet spoke up. “April fifteenth, nineteen twelve. I killed a ship. What am I?”

  “What?”

  “April fifteenth, nineteen twelve. I killed a ship. What am I?”

  “Wait. Is that the question that gets me through this door?”

  “April fifteenth, nineteen twelve. I killed a ship. What am I?”

  “Are you fucking kidding me? You’re asking me about something that happened ninety years before the apocalypse? How the hell am I supposed to know that?”

  “April fifteenth, nineteen twelve. I killed a ship. What am I?”

  I picked up the head and shook it. “Would you—”

  A cold wind hit me as I shook the bell rope, sounding the alarm. Something huge and white glinted in the dark night ahead of the ship. I grabbed the receiver of the telephone.

  “—pick up you bastards!”

  There was no answer. “Goddamn it, is there anyone there?”

  Finally, the wheelhouse picked up. “Yes? What do you see?”

  “Iceberg! Right ahead!”

  The barrier dissolved and I was back shaking the robot head. Another vision of Finster’s past? No. He couldn’t be that old. Another fantasy, then? Who would fantasize about being on a sinking boat? Every time I thought I was getting a handle on what was happening in this place, it threw me another curve.

  I looked at the head, utterly baffled. “What the hell was that? Did you just tell me the answer? Why would you do that? I thought you were trying to kill me.”

  The head said nothing. I dropped it and stepped through into the next space. Immediately a voice popped into my head.

  “I am impressed, ranger. You have come further than anyone before you, including my creator. You are a noble foe. However, you are only human. I offer a choice. Your life for those of your comrades. Right for you, left to kill them.”

  This was not Finster’s voice. It was colder. Cooler. Where did it come from? Was Finster sharing his brain with somebody else? Besides me, I mean? And was the voice serious about killing my friends?

  I looked around the new space. There were indeed two doors in front of me. I glared at them.

  “Is this a trick? How would you kill my friends? They’re not hooked up to this machine.”

  The voice didn’t speak again. I was tempted to go through the left door, just to show the voice I didn’t believe its crazy threats, but what if it was true? What if it could make Finster’s head blow up or something? I couldn’t risk the life of my friends. My life, on the other hand…

  “You obviously haven’t been reading my mind lately,” I said, and strode through the right door.

  Pain dropped me to my knees. I clutched my chest as my heart lurched and thudded with all the rhythm of a drunk toddler banging pots and pans. I turned and crawled back toward the door, fully prepared to go back and take the left hand door and kill all my friends if only the pain would stop.

  There was no door. Anywhere. I was in a tiny empty space with no exit, and I was going to die here. I lay down, unable to do anything else, while hissing voices whispered nonsense all around me.

  “Know thyself.”

  “Each step from birth is toward death.”

  “Cogito ergo sum.”

  “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”

  “What is the difference between a duck?”

  I groaned. “You’re killing me, and now you’re feeding me this pseudo–intellectual bullshit? Please, just get it over with.”

  Then I started hearing other voices behind the whispers.

  “Shit! He’s flatlining!”

  “The machine is killing him!”

  “Unhook him! He’s dying!”

  “No! The shock might finish him off.” This was Athalia. “Come on, Ghost. Pull out of it! Fight it! Remember, everything in there is just an illusion!”

  How did she know that? I wondered. But it was good advice. Everything that was happening to me was just a constructed reality that Finster was showing me and I was going along with. It was a hard illusion to break, but I’d done it before, hadn’t I? I’d closed my eyes in order to walk across the room that had jerked me all over the place, right?

  I closed my eyes again. I wasn’t in this room with no doors. I was in the room I’d seen through the right hand door.

  “He’s coming back,” said Athalia. “His pulse is strengthening.”

  “Come on, Ghost!” That was Angie.

  Thinking about Angie I almost slipped back, but I pulled it together and kept building the other room with my mind, block by crazy–colored block.

  “Yes! He’s stabilizing. Stay strong, ranger!”

  I could see the other room around me now, so I stepped forward and opened my eyes — and I was in it. I let out a relieved breath, and heard cheering outside my head.

  The voice that wasn’t Finster wasn’t too happy about it though. “Pah! I tire of you. Be gone!”

  Then, on my very next step, Finster’s voice was back, panicked and screaming. “No! You cannot be here still. Stay back, get out, leave! Or I’ll sear the flesh from your bones!”

  Was he talking to me or the other voice? I couldn’t tell. Did he have multiple personalities? What was going on?

  The floor around me erupted into flames. Shit! I dived out of the circle of fire and ran, afraid the rest of the place was going to catch on fire. There was a click from above me and a storm of knives shot out of the ceiling. I zigged left and only a few caught me, opening up the sleeve of my leather jacket and the flesh underneath.

  “You’re crazy!” I shouted.

  Finster’s laughter followed me down the hall and around the corner. “Do you hear me, ranger? This is the end. I will finish you. I will crush you. You, too, will die!”

  I skidded to a stop as I saw what lay before me. It was Finster again, but this time it was mega–Finster — a twisted metal monstrosity twice as tall and twice as wide as I was. I groaned. First he tells me to leave, then he says he’s going to kill me, then he blocks the exit. What the hell?

  Well, at le
ast I knew how this worked now. I closed my eyes and charged forward, seeing myself wielding an even bigger gun than before, knowing that I was wearing armor that could stop whatever the Finster–Leviathan could throw at me. And as I saw it and knew it, I was.

  I blazed away at the big bastard with a gun the size of a rocket launcher and shrugged off his return fire in the armor I had seen behind the glass walls at Sleeper One. Nothing could hurt me, and I was bringing the hurt in a major way. It didn’t take more than six or seven shots before the giant was a smoking ruin on the floor.

  I stepped to it and stuck my uber–gun in its metal face. “Are we done? Can I have the sec pass now?”

  It raised its shattered head and smiled through broken lips. “You killed it.”

  “It? I killed you.”

  “Yes… me as well, but also… it. Now we can talk… privately.”

  “Huh? What do you mean? What it are we talking about?”

  “Co…chise…” It was having a hard time talking now. “It is… eliminating all… threats. Sent its assassin to… kill me. Now I’m… dead.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked. “We killed you. The Desert Rangers. And we’re nobody’s assassins.”

  Its huge hand lifted up and opened, revealing a plastic card with a black stripe in its palm — the sec pass. “It… knows you are… coming. Without… armor, it will destroy you. Use it… well. Prepare… your… selffff….”

  The head slumped back and the hand dropped. The mega–Finster was dead.

  I scooped up the sec pass and kissed it. “Fucking finally!”

  There was a door behind the leviathan’s body. I stepped through it…

  … and was suddenly falling down a bottomless pit.

  “Godddddammmmmm ittttttttt….!”

  Chapter Eleven

  “Fuck!”

  “What’s happening to him?”

  “Pull him outta that thing!”

  “Hurry up!”

  “Grab his arms before he hurts himself!”

  “It’s killing him!”

  “I think he’s coming out by himself. Hang on, hang on.”