The Law of Three: A New Wasteland (The Portal Arcane Series - Book II)

by J. Thorn

  The exaggerated western accent Todd used felt cynical to Joey. He wondered what Duke would say about it and if he’d correct the dialect.

  Todd checked the chamber for a single shell, slammed it shut, and spun it hard. When it came to a stop, Joey could feel his heart beating in his ears.

  “I’ll go first,” Todd said. Before Joey could say anything, the young teenager put the end of the barrel against his temple and pulled the trigger. “Click,” Todd said a second after the hammer struck empty air inside the chamber.

  “You’re one crazy fuck,” Joey said. He thought his heart might explode inside his chest. He felt the moisture in his palms and tried swallowing several times without success.

  “Your turn,” Todd said.

  Joey took the gun and held Todd’s gaze for longer than he should have. He felt as though he could see right through his best friend, and his insides were broken. Joey knew that not all of the cogs turned anymore, and Todd’s smile froze into ice, chilling his bones.

  “I know, dumbass,” Joey said.

  Todd waited, not taking the verbal bait that might prolong the first round of the game.

  Joey raised the gun to his head. He heard his dad’s voice, the lines he had repeated a thousand times on the range and deep in the woods on their hunting trips.

  Never aim it at anyone, whether it’s loaded or not. Keep the safety on at all times. Think before you shoot.

  He felt a tear coming from the corner of his eye, rushing down his face on the momentum of shame and disappointment he felt for ignoring all of Duke’s guidance.

  “Pussy.” Todd let the word hang while Joey shook the lingering reverberations from inside his skull and placed the tip of the barrel against his temple.

  The touch sent a shiver down his spine and his hand shook. It was only metal, yet his instinct screamed at him to remove it from that place. Joey closed his eyes for a second, and in that time he saw his brothers and sisters playing on the beach in Maryland. He saw his mom smiling over a tray of chocolate chip cookies right out of the oven. And then he saw Duke. His old man stood in the middle of the living room wearing his Stetson down low over his eyes with his arms crossed. Joey saw the fringed, leather vest sitting overtop a cotton shirt that fell below the man’s blue jeans. Duke’s hat and head were slowly moving back and forth. Joey saw all of that dissipate when he opened his eyes again. He looked at Todd, hoping his friend would provide an out. When it did not happen, Joey knew he had to go through with it.

  “You get three more seconds, and then I get to pull the trigger on your turn.”

  Joey could not remember that being the rule, but then again, it was not as if he could ask Duke about the regulations. He would have to abide by Todd’s rules, and he would have to do so quickly or he would forfeit the chance to determine his own fate.

  With one final breath, Joey pushed the barrel hard to his temple and pulled the trigger.

  Click.

  Joey heard Todd laughing before he opened his eyes.

  “Man, you shoulda seen your face. Did you shit your pants?”

  Joey gasped, drawing as much air into his lungs as he could. He had yet to recover enough to respond to Todd’s taunting and insults. Adrenaline raced through his bloodstream, and Joey felt a euphoric high buzzing through his veins. He giggled. The laughter blossomed until he lay on the floor, engrossed in uncontrollable fits.

  “Act like ya done this before,” Todd said, not enticed into joining the outburst.

  Joey regained his composure and rubbed a finger underneath each eye. He sat up straight and smiled at Todd before shoving the firearm back into his friend’s outstretched hand.

  “Done. You’re up, asshole.”

  “Sure,” Todd said. “One pull and now you’re king shit.”

  Before Joey could reply, Todd spun the chamber, placed the barrel to his head, and pulled the trigger. He flipped the gun around and handed it right back to Joey.

  “Done. You’re up,” Todd said in a high-pitched voice that mimicked Joey’s.

  He grabbed the pistol from Todd’s hand and smiled. With a slow, exaggerated motion, Joey spun the chamber, placed the tip of the barrel to his head, and pulled the trigger.

  Click.

  “Eat it, fucknut,” he said to Todd. “That’s two rounds. Done. Top of the third?”

  Todd smiled and looked at the Return of the Jedi clock hanging from a nail clinging to loose drywall. The hour hand swept past Luke’s light saber.

  “Duke and the posse will be rolling in at any minute. Let’s get this back into the box.”

  “Chickenshit,” Joey said.

  With a flick of his wrist, Todd snatched the gun from Joey’s hand. Without bothering to spin the chamber, he put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

  Click.

  “Odds are down to one out of four if you don’t spin it.”

  Joey nodded, winked at Todd. “I’m gonna man up and end this round straight, no spin.”

  “One of four? You sure about that, amigo?” Todd asked.

  Joey felt the stir in his stomach as he took the pistol from Todd. He hesitated, placing a finger on the chamber.

  “You spinning or not?” Todd asked.

  “I don’t know,” Joey said, shifting his legs underneath his body. “Maybe we call it quits for the night.”

  “Nope. It don’t go like that. I took three rounds. You have to take three rounds.”

  Joey saw Todd’s eyes narrow, and the tone in his voice was no longer playful. He abandoned the country-western slang he often used to indirectly make fun of Duke.

  “Maybe I don’t want to,” Joey said.

  “Maybe you do it or I do it for you,” Todd said.

  Joey found himself in a standoff, a modern version of an old western duel. Just need some tumbleweeds and a whistle, he thought.

  “Fine,” he said. “But I’m spinning. No rule says I can’t.”

  Todd raised both palms up, facing Joey. “No rule says that. But you gotta finish the inning. There is a rule on that.”

  Joey held the pistol firm, an agreement reached. He wondered if someday he would get to see the written rules of this game. For now, he’d have to acquiesce to Todd’s mastery.

  “This is it, though. We put it back in the box before Duke gets home and whoops my ass.”

  “This is it, then,” Todd said, waiting for Joey to finish the round before they could move on to other interests.

  Joey’s insides screamed at him. He felt the hesitation in his wrist, which made the pistol tremble against his temple. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

  “Almost forgot,” he said. He dropped the pistol to his lap and spun the chamber.

  “Back to one in six,” Todd said.

  Joey raised the barrel again and placed it on the same spot he had moments earlier. The voice inside reared up again, and Joey pushed it back into the recesses of his mind. He looked at Todd, sitting and grinning. Joey smiled and suppressed the remnants of Duke’s warnings. He pulled the trigger.

  Todd sat still, unsure of how to react. The usual click was more like a thump, followed immediately by Joey’s body slumping to the floor. Todd smelled the burning gunpowder and the sickly aroma of burnt flesh. Joey lay on the floor, eyes closed with his right hand limp, loose fingers releasing the pistol. The boy’s head also lay on the right side as if he were sleeping.

  “Quit fucking around,” Todd said. He stood up.

  The room felt tilted, and he grasped a bed post to keep it from tossing him to the floor.

  “Get up, Joey.”

  Joey remained on the floor. Todd could see he was breathing. He reached down and tapped Joey on the shoulder. With as much courage as he could muster, Todd lifted Joey’s head and turned it to the side, where a black circle oozed blood from a hole in his temple.

  “Shit,” Todd murmured. He slid Joey’s head back down, visually inspecting it for an exit wound he could not find. Todd scanned the wall, again looking for evidence
the bullet had left the flesh and embedded itself somewhere else. When he found none, Todd stood. He took a last look at his friend, motionless on the floor, and dashed down the hallway to the front door. Todd burst through the screen, jumped over the side fence, and ran into the woods. The path would take him several hundred feet into the valley before coming up the other side and dumping Todd into his backyard at the rear of his dad’s old tool shed. He glanced back at Joey’s house as he entered the woods and thought he saw the headlights on Duke’s minivan pulling into the driveway.

  “I saw it all from the window,” Jack said.

  Samuel waited, not sure what to say next.

  “I was coming over to Joey’s place, and we were going to hang out, throw rocks at birds, kid stuff. When I got there, I heard voices coming from Joey’s room, and for some reason I thought maybe he had a girl in there. Duke’s minivan wasn’t in the driveway, and, well, I was curious. I jumped up and grabbed the window ledge, where I could peer into the bedroom. I saw them both sitting on the floor with the gun, and I was scared. When Todd bolted from the room, I ran, too.”

  Silence fell between them as Lindsay made her way back. She had taken the time to walk off her temper tantrum and was returning for another go at Samuel.

  ***

  Samuel knew the bits of whitened wood would not last long because it was so dry. They gathered the pieces in the bottom of their shirts like oracle bones. Jack was able to use a few shreds of paper to start the fire, but the flame spewed the sickly, yellow flame Samuel expected. The three stood around it with their palms outstretched as if trying to coax the meager heat to their bodies. The starless sky held above with its suffocating blackness, and the mountain stood guard in the east, as it had for eons. Nobody spoke for hours as they watched the distant fire die off while huddled around their own.

  In its own way, the reversion knew they were no longer pinned inside the cabin and withdrew the storm of flames. The flashes of light against the western horizon fizzled, and the pools of fire on the sand evaporated. Samuel could not see the cloud, but he could sense where it met the empty sky, and knew the reversion was again swallowing this world and pushing him toward the peak. In his bones, he felt the importance of getting there ahead of the cloud in hopes of being released from his cycle instead of starting anew. Again.

  “How long?” Lindsay asked, breaking the silence.

  “Until?” Jack said.

  “Until that cloud gets us.” She spoke without emotion.

  “It’s hard to say,” Samuel said. “I think the degeneration picks up pace as the reversion comes east.”

  Jack and Lindsay looked at each other.

  “What’s going on, Samuel?” Lindsay’s eyes settled on him, letting him know she knew there was more to this than her own experience.

  “Reversion,” he said.

  “I don’t know what that is,” Lindsay said, drawing in the sand with her finger. “Or why you can’t seem to stop staring at the mountain.”

  Jack kept his head down, kicking sand at the edges of the fire. Lindsay and Samuel sat, but Jack remained standing.

  “Last time I was here, I had companions, too,” Samuel said. “They didn’t make it out.”

  “Died?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I do know when I arrived in this place, I was alone.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question. I really don’t care why the sun doesn’t rise here, or why there are no stars, or how I ended up in a desert. It doesn’t seem as though you two know that shit, either. I want to know what we’re going to do to get the hell out.”

  Samuel smiled at her. He guessed Lindsay to be in her early thirties. Her voice comforted him in a way he had not felt in a long time. He held her gaze for longer than he should have before feeling his face flush. Samuel laughed at himself and the fact that this even worried him.

  “The reversion, that cloud coming out of the west, wants to swallow us. It did last time I was here, and my instinct tells me the cloud either snuffs you out completely or sends you back into another cycle.”

  Lindsay sat up and squinted as if that would help her comprehend what Samuel was saying.

  “To have any chance of getting released—and again, I don’t know what that means exactly—I know I have to get to the peak of the mountain on my own terms. There isn’t a guarantee that will get me out, but I feel it, and it’s all I have to go on.”

  “What about us?” Jack asked. He faced the direction of the cloud and the withdrawing firestorm over the cabin. “Are we fucked?”

  “I don’t know,” Samuel said. “My fate was somehow connected to the others I met the first time, and yours probably is as well. But I can’t make you any promises. If we get to the peak together, we’ll see what happens. If we don’t, and the cloud swallows you, something tells me that would be worse.”

  “Bullshit.” Jack’s curse took on a venomous edge. “I’m not risking my life for the sake of your future without knowing about mine.”

  “When did I say I knew my future?” Samuel asked. “I’m going on instinct. I’ve been through this before and you haven’t. But you’re free to sail your own ship.”

  Jack collapsed into the sand and shook his head. He ran a hand across his scalp. “Sorry. I feel like my brain is mush. I can’t see well here, no smell, sounds are off. This place feels like a box, and I’m going to go crazy if I can’t bust out of it.”

  “I know,” Samuel said. “It sucks the life out of the locality before eating it whole. I get the feeling this has happened thousands–-maybe millions–-of times, like it’s the way the universe cleans house. We seem to be caught in it.”

  “Maybe this is how God cleans house, the way He sifts the souls of the worthy from the unworthy,” Lindsay said.

  “You could be right,” Samuel said. “God, or whatever force controls the universe, could be using the reversion that way. We might be getting what we deserve, having shit come back threefold.”

  “Bad karma?” Lindsay asked.

  “No,” Samuel said, shaking his head. “That word is misinterpreted by people. I’m talking about the stuff you put out to the universe coming back to you, for better or worse, multiplied. The Law of Three.”

  Silence dropped as the fire dwindled to a glowing ember.

  “I’m not really hungry, and I should be,” Jack said.

  “That’s part of it, and I have no explanation for you,” Samuel said.

  Jack shrugged and looked at Lindsay. He stared at the dark line spreading from her ear, across her throat and up to her other ear. He imagined running his hand down her neck and blushed. “Do you remember what happened?” he asked, nodding at her throat.

  “Yes,” she said.

  He paused, waiting for an answer that never came.

  Then Samuel spoke. “We should try to sleep. It’s tough to say when we’ll get the opportunity or how much of the reversion’s effects are magnified by lack of it.”

  Lindsay and Jack lay back into the sand, closing their eyes and hoping to dream of bright, blue skies. Samuel took his own advice and let exhaustion pull his body into the realm of nightmares.

  Chapter 5

  Samuel awoke first, images of a tormented dream slipping through his fingers like sand. Lindsay stirred next, while Jack pushed up to his elbows. Both rubbed sleep from their eyes, and Samuel wondered how long they had rested. It felt like minutes, but time was hard to measure in the throes of a reversion. Jack rubbed a hand across his face, and Lindsay pulled her hair back into a high ponytail. She removed a hair wrap from her wrist and slid it into place. Samuel could see his mates in greyscale contrast as the ambience crept up from the edges of the horizon to bathe the locality in colorless light. He looked at Lindsay and liked the way loose strands of hair curled down the side of her face.

  “Morning?”

  The word snapped him out of his daydream and brought him back to the moment.

  “Could be,” Samuel said to Jack.

  “How’d you s
leep?”

  “Dreams. Damn, the dreams. It would be easier to go without sleep.”

  Lindsay had yet to speak, but Samuel could see it on her face. He knew she had them as well.

  Jack nodded at Samuel. Lindsay stood, and her entire body shook. She ignored the men, looking past them with an outstretched arm pointing to the eastern horizon. Samuel followed her arm until he saw it as well.

  “Holy shit,” Jack said, backpedaling as if that could somehow save him from what was coming.

  ***

  “Grab your things,” Samuel shouted.

  The brown cloud rose from the earth, quickly eclipsing the night sky. Lindsay stood next to Samuel as the dust rushed toward them from the horizon.

  “It’s at least a mile or two out,” Samuel said. “But it’s moving fast, and I don’t think we want to be standing here gawking when it arrives.”

  He broke into a jog toward the east, where the mountain remained with its cold stare. Lindsay and Jack followed, the young man constantly looking over his shoulder.

  “Haboob.”

  “What?” Lindsay asked.

  “It’s like a killer sandstorm,” Jack said. “I remember watching the news when one hit Phoenix. It came without warning and swallowed the entire city.”

  “This way,” Samuel said, jogging to his right. The three kicked up the sand as they ran, and the advancing attack brought its own silent wind.

  “Pull the collar of your shirt over your mouth.”

  Lindsay and Jack did as Samuel suggested as the first wall of dust whipped through their hair, pushing them into a lopsided canter behind Samuel.

  Samuel felt the air pressure change and the fingers of the storm pulling at his footsteps, yet it generated little sound. Even during times of frantic activity, the reversion dulled the senses. He looked over a shoulder and saw the silhouettes of Jack and Lindsay a few steps back. The sand stung their skin and burned their eyes. It prevented him from yelling, and he wouldn’t have been able to hear them if they tried to speak. He slowed as Lindsay dropped to one knee. Jack reached over and pulled her up by the elbow with one hand while the other kept his mouth and nose covered.