by J Boyd Long
“You are such a drama queen. You can’t do anything simple, can you?”
“I have an appreciation for depth and substance, and color, and it’s unfortunate that you can’t appreciate those things. It must be very gray and bleak in your world.” Quentin tried to look aloof and sympathetic at the same time.
“I have an appreciation for expediency,” Eissa said, with a bitter edge on her voice. “Especially when I have just been chased through a magic fucking door by a gun-toting security guard into… whatever the hell this is, and I don’t know how to get back.”
“Alright, a time and a place for everything, I get it,” Quentin said. “Can we go inside now?”
“Okay, but I’m doing the talking,” Eissa said. “You like to make stupid jokes when you’re nervous, and that’s the last thing we need right now. You keep your depth and substance mouth shut.”
Quentin flushed, embarrassed that she saw through him so easily, but managed to keep silent. She’d been calling him out since he was six years old, and she was usually right, even if her delivery was questionable. As he turned toward the door, he noticed a small hand-painted sign in the corner of the window.
Pop’s Place. Serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner since 1993.
He pointed to the sign. “Well, I guess that answers the language question.”
Eissa sniffed but didn’t say anything. He opened the door and held it for her, and they went inside.
Chapter 4
A bell tinkled overhead as they opened the door, and the delicious aroma of warm stew enveloped them as they walked inside. There were a dozen tables and chairs set up about the room with red and white checked tablecloths, and a set of double doors at the back separated the seating area from the kitchen. It reminded Quentin of the old greasy spoon restaurant that his grandpa had taken him to for breakfast as a kid, with the wooden chairs and the smell of past meals still hanging in the air. Windows down both sides of the room let in ample light, though a candle lantern burned on the counter.
There were two men at a table in the back corner, but the room was otherwise deserted. As the door closed behind them, a young woman came in from the back and walked around the counter. She wore a simple blue dress that hung below her knees and a white apron tied around her waist. Her blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail.
“Hi there,” she said. “Dining in?”
“Um, sure.” Eissa glanced at Quentin, then back to the waitress.
“Just have a seat anywhere.” She grabbed two sets of silverware wrapped in white cloth napkins out of a basket on the counter and walked towards them. “We’ve still got stew on the stove, and I’ve got a few slices of cornbread left. I’ll get you some water in just a minute.”
She placed the silverware in front of them as they sat down at a table near the door, and turned back towards the kitchen.
“Well, that’s a good start,” Quentin said. “It seems like I shouldn’t actually be hungry though, since it’s really the middle of the night.”
The waitress was walking back towards their table with two glasses of water. Quentin tried to act nonchalant as she approached them.
“Here’s your water,” she said, placing a glass in front of each of them. “Your food will be out in just a minute.”
“Thanks,” Eissa said with a smile.
The waitress started to turn away, but paused.
“I’m sorry for being nosy.” She blushed, and wrung her hands. “I get yelled at for it, but I just can’t help it sometimes.”
She hesitated, and Quentin looked up at her with a mix of interest and alarm. Had she seen them come through the door? They hadn’t prepared a story for that possibility.
“I was just wondering where you folks are from, and if you had any news, or stories about what it’s like there. I’ve hardly ever left Gainesville, except to go to Grandma’s house when she passed away back in 2012, and it’s not very far, just in the next town over. Anyway, I know pretty much everyone in town, so I figured you must be travelers, and I was just curious, that’s all.” She stared at the floor, casting furtive glances at them.
Quentin carefully kept his expression neutral, hiding his surprise. If this was some other town named Gainesville, it was one hell of a coincidence, but it certainly wasn’t the same one they had left.
“We’re traveling,” Eissa said, smiling up at the waitress. “Just, you know, around the area. Nothing very exciting to report. So, you don’t get to travel much, huh?”
The waitress shook her head. “No, there’s nobody to serve food here at Daddy’s restaurant except me, and he couldn’t do without me for more than a day. I dream about it, though.” Her eyes met Eissa’s with a hopeful smile. “Have you seen the ocean?”
“Oh sure,” Eissa said. “I’ve been there lots of times. It’s probably my favorite place to be.”
“What’s it like?” the waitress asked, a dreamy smile on her face. “I bet you can see forever.”
“Oh, it’s pretty awesome. There’s always a breeze, and there’s millions of little shells everywhere, and seagulls and pelicans flying around. It smells salty, but clean at the same time, if that makes sense.” Eissa paused, and took a drink of water.
“It just sounds amazing,” the waitress said. “I’d love to go see it someday.”
“What’s it like around here?” Eissa asked. “You ought to know some good stories about Gainesville, if you’ve lived here all your life.”
“Let me go grab your food,” the waitress said. “I’ll tell you about it while you eat lunch.”
“Nicely done,” Quentin murmured, as she walked back to the kitchen. “It looks like you’ve gained her trust.”
“Yeah, so don’t get weird and fuck it up,” Eissa said. “I’m going to pick her brain as a curious traveler, not as a CIA agent, so don’t over-think the conversation. Remember, we really are traveling, and we don’t know much about this place. Stick to the truth, like I said outside.” She leaned back and smiled as the waitress came back carrying two steaming bowls.
“Wow, that smells fantastic,” Quentin said. “I didn’t realize how hungry I was until now.”
The stew was thick and hearty, and he dug in and let Eissa run the conversation. It might have been the middle of the night in his world, but his stomach seemed to be going with the flow, even if his brain was struggling with it.
“Have a seat,” Eissa invited. “What’s your name, anyway?”
“Becky,” she said, sliding into the seat beside Quentin. “That was my grandma’s name on my mom’s side. Grandma lived way over in Hawthorne, and my mom’s a nurse in the Army, and she hasn’t been home since I was a kid.”
“Wow, that’s terrible about your mom,” Eissa said. “Do you know where she’s at?”
“No, not really. You know how it is. There’s a million Indians on their side of the Mississippi, and the army on our side, and the border war is in a different place all the time. She used to send letters, telling us about how different it is up north, or how she was getting sent to Tennessee, or wherever, but we haven’t gotten anything in five years or so.”
Quentin tried to piece the information together into a scene that made sense. If the Mississippi River was the boundary between the Europeans and the Natives in this place, and it was modern day, then there were some giant holes in his understanding of where they were. It was an exciting puzzle, and he needed more facts to fill it in.
He spoke up cautiously, screening his words and his tone in an effort to sound casual. “So, what do you hear about the war these days? Do you get regular news?”
“Oh, we get newspapers from different places now and then. The last thing we heard about was the Sioux team that attacked Atlanta, and killed all those people in the governor’s office. The paper we saw called them the “Sioux-icide Squad” since they knew they weren’t going to get out alive. I just think it’s awful, having a border war with your neighbors for so long. When I think about how many people have been killed on bot
h sides of that stupid river, it just makes me sad. Why can’t people just get along?”
Quentin glanced at Eissa. Her jaw was set, her eyes dark. She was always sensitive about Native American issues, and he was afraid she might give them away with some outward reaction to what Becky was saying.
“That’s a question we wonder about all the time,” Eissa said, her voice calm. “Some people are just wired different than we are, I guess.”
Becky glanced around the room, and leaned in towards them, lowering her voice. “Speaking of people getting along, you need to be careful around town. Some people don’t trust Indians, even if they’re on our side. You’ll probably be okay since you’re with a white guy, but I just wanted to warn you.”
“It’s like that, is it?” Eissa asked.
Becky nodded. “Just with some people, not everyone.”
“Fucking racism, everywhere you go.” Eissa blew air out of her nose. “What is it with people?”
Becky raised her eyebrows, but didn’t say anything.
Quentin cringed at Eissa’s anger. He would have almost preferred an anxiety attack, or even a panicked run out the door and into the woods.
“Thank you for letting us know about that,” Quentin said, cutting Eissa off before she could say more. “We’ll keep our eyes open for trouble.”
“You’re welcome. I’ll bring you another bowl if you want,” Becky offered, sliding out of her chair. “I need to go check on the other table, anyway.”
“Sure, that’d be great,” Quentin agreed. “The stew is fantastic.”
As soon as she walked away, he started whispering furiously to Eissa.
“What the fuck is happening? Border war with the Indians? The US only goes as far as the Mississippi River?”
“I’m trying to make sense of it,” Eissa whispered back. “It’s a fucking lot to take in all at once, right? And I’m suddenly in the awkward position of being five hundred miles behind enemy lines. This is serious.”
“Agreed. We need to wrap this up, get back outside, and figure out how to get the DimGate to come back, post haste. This just stopped being fun.”
“She’s coming back. Let me see what else I can find out while you eat.”
Quentin hesitated. He wanted to get out of there, but they needed more information. They still knew next to nothing, and she hadn’t mentioned a portal on the porch. “Well, stay calm, no matter what she says. Don’t make a scene.”
Becky returned with another bowl of stew. “So, where are you folks from? I got so busy carrying on, I forgot to ask you.”
“We live down south a little ways, sort of out in the boonies,” Eissa said, swallowing a bite of her biscuit. “We don’t hardly ever get news, since we live out in the country. That’s why we decided to come up here and see what we could find out.”
“Oh, I see,” Becky said. “I thought you’d be from St. Augustine or someplace, since you’ve been to the ocean so much.”
“Well, my dad used to take me to the ocean when I was younger,” Eissa said. “I might have made it sound like I still go all the time, but I haven’t been there in a long time.”
“Oh,” Becky said. “Well, I hope you get to go again someday.” She smiled as she wiped her hands on her apron. “I need to go get busy washing dishes. You can just leave your dollar on the table when you get done. It was sure nice to meet you folks. I hope you and your husband have a nice trip back home.”
“Oh-“ Quentin started, but Eissa cut him off.
“Thank you,” she said, smiling at Becky while glaring at Quentin out of the corner of her eye. “I hope you get to go see the ocean someday, too.”
Becky disappeared into the kitchen, and Eissa and Quentin sat in silence for a moment. Quentin ate his second bowl of stew quickly, and thought about everything that Becky had told them. When he finished eating, he put a dollar on the table, and they walked outside.
“No door,” he noted, looking around the porch. “And Becky didn’t mention anything about it.” Eissa moved up beside him, staring at the spot where they had stepped through to this strange version of reality, just an hour before.
“What made the door appear here?” she asked. “I mean, I can’t imagine that something like that just pops randomly in and out of existence, right? You told it where to go, or something.”
He tried to remember what all was listed on the control screen. There were a lot of fields that he had barely glanced at. They didn’t seem all that important at the time, but now he wished that he had taken a picture of it, or at least read them all.
“Well, to be fair, I thought I was activating some kind of digital library, or something. I wasn’t expecting to go running inside of it two seconds after we got there.”
“I’ll give you that, but how does it work from this side? How do we reactivate it?”
“I don’t have a lot of experience with portals,” Quentin said. He started to go on, then paused, frowning. “I was going to say that nobody does, but I guess someone knows. Although, as primitive as things seem to be here, I can’t imagine that we’re going to find an engineer that maintains it, or whatever. I think I activated the portal, and it automatically deactivated as soon as we came through it. I put in your favorite number, remember? That was in the Dimension field. I think this is Dimension 444.”
“So, do you think we’re stuck here?”
“I’m not jumping to conclusions, but I don’t think we’re going to get the door to reappear here. They don’t even have electricity. Speaking of which, do you think the rest of the world is equally primitive, or do you think the US has remained a third-world country?”
“That’s a good question,” Eissa said. “I guess it depends on whether this is a local war, or if other countries are committing resources to it, as well. If I remember my history right, the French supported the Indians in their war against the English. I’m pretty sure Spain was involved too, but I don’t remember for sure. American History was about a thousand years ago, and I didn’t pay that much attention to it, anyway. There was this girl, Jessica, who sat in front of me, and she was hot, and her shampoo left a wonderful peach residue in her hair-”
“Yes, yes, high school lesbian porn, et cetera, let’s try to stay focused here. Oh, and for the record, the war was between France and England, it just took place here. They both wanted to claim the territory since nobody lived here. Well, except for twenty million people, but other than that, it was basically up for grabs.” Quentin walked over to the exact spot that they had stepped through the door. “Now then. We came through a portal from one dimension to another, but it wasn’t like a swirly vortex of space and time, right? It was a door, made by people. Maybe it’s an accident that we wound up here, but it can’t be an accident that it exists. Agreed?”
Eissa nodded.
“So, I think we should reconnoiter,” Quentin said. “We know that there were DimGates in several places in our dimension, mostly at oil refineries and logging operations, if I remember right, but there was also the one we came through in IBZ Headquarters. If we can find one of those here, we can probably get back to our home dimension. Carl Holt’s activity record said he was accessing Dimensions 1 and 165, so it’s got to be one of those.”
“That doesn’t sound impossible at all,” Eissa said.
Quentin went on, ignoring her sarcasm. “I also think that we need to keep a low profile. Becky knew right away that we were outsiders, so we have to assume that everyone else will know, too. We don’t want some small-minded asshole recognizing you as an Indian and trying to hang us, so we should avoid going inside any other businesses.”
“Native American,” Eissa corrected. “So, how do we do this? Do we just walk across the country, looking for logging operations? Because I’m not going to make it very far like that.”
“Let’s start by looking around town. Maybe we won’t have to go very far. I mean, there was a DimGate in our version of Gainesville, right? Maybe they’re in the same towns across multiple d
imensions, who knows? We might just need to find the place that looks the biggest and most prosperous, and sneak inside and look around.”
Eissa nodded slowly. She didn’t always respond to logic the way he did, but he didn’t know how else to reason with her. He gave an inward sigh of relief as she seemed to accept his idea, and turned toward the stairs and the road beyond.
Chapter 5
They stepped off the porch of the restaurant and walked out to the dirt road that marked the edge of town. There was a store just down the street, but most of the other buildings appeared to be homes. As they moved past the restaurant, the back side of a row of rundown houses on the next street over became visible. There were broken windows and sagging roofs, and weeds dominated the yards between them.
Twenty minutes of walking brought them to the end of town on the east side. It was a residential area filled with ramshackle houses, clotheslines covered with laundry, and a few kids playing in the field across the road, and no place that even hinted at having a DimGate inside. In a distant part of town, a hammer rang as it struck an anvil, and a few dogs barked. No one paid any attention to them as they walked by.