A Soft Barren Aftershock

by F. Paul Wilson

  Willie looked a Mick the Mick with wide eyes. “Did you hear that? A scepter of power! Is that like He-Man’s Power Sword? He-Man was really strong, but he had hair like a girl. Is the scepter of power like a power sword, Mick?”

  “No, it’s more like a magic wand, but forget—”

  “The less sophisticated among you might refer to a scepter of power as a ‘magic wand,’ and in a sense it functioned as such.”

  “A magic wand! Like in the Harry Potter movies? I love those movies, and I’ve always wanted a magic wand! Plus, I get crazy hot thoughts about Hermione. She’s a real fox, Mick. Kinda like Drew Barrymore in E. T. Hey, why does the wand have a deep groove in it?”

  Mick the Mick looked again and noticed the deep groove running its length.

  “Note, please, the deep groove running the length of the scepter of power. The eminent archeologists and anthropologists here at the Arkham, Pennsylvania, Museum of Natural History and Baseball Cards believe that to be what is known as a fuller . . ."

  A fuller? Mick thought. Looks like a blood channel. “. . . which the less sophisticated among you might call a ‘blood channel.’ The eminent archeologists and anthropologists here at the Arkham, Pennsylvania, Museum of Natural History and Baseball Cards believe this ancient scepter of power might have been used by its shaman owner to perform sacred religious ceremonies—specifically, the crushing of skulls and ritual disemboweling.”

  Mick the Mick got a chill. He hoped Nate the Nose never got his hands on something like this. “What’s disemboweling, Mick?”

  “When someone cuts out your intestines.”

  “How do you dooky, then? Like squeezing a toothpaste tube?”

  “You don’t dooky, Willie. You die.”

  “Cool! Can I have the magic wand, Mick? Can I?”

  Mick the Mick didn’t answer. He’d noticed something engraved near the end of the far tip. He leaned closer, squinting until it came into focus.

  Sears.

  What the—?

  He stepped back for another look at the scepter of power and—

  “A curtain rod . . . it’s a freakin’ curtain rod!” Willie looked at him like he was crazy. “Curtain rod? Didn’t you hear the man? It’s, like, a magic wand, and—hey, what’s that over there?”

  Mick slapped at Willie’s kidney as he passed, but missed because he couldn’t take his eyes off the Sears scepter of power. Maybe they could steal it, return it to Sears, and get a brand-new one. That wouldn’t help much with Nate the Nose, but Mick the Mick did need a new curtain rod. His old one had broken, and his drapes were attached to the wall with forks. That made Thursdays—spaghetti night—particularly messy.

  “WELCOME!” boomed the same voice as Willie stopped before another display. “What you see before you is a rate artifact that once belonged to an ancient lost race that dwelled in the Arkham area during prehistoric times. This, like every other ancient artifact in this room, was excavated from a site near the Arkham landfill.”

  “Hey, Mick, y’gotta see this.”

  After some biblical thinking, Mick the Mick spared the rod and moved along.

  “We know little about this ancient lost race but, after careful examination by the eminent archeologists and anthropologists here at the Arkham, Pennsylvania, Museum of Natural History and Baseball Cards, they arrived at an irrefutable conclusion: The artifact before you was used by an ancient shaman of this lost race to perform surrogate sacrifices. (For those of you unfamiliar with the term ‘shaman,’ please return to the previous display.)”

  “I know what a shaman is, ‘cause you just told me,” Willie said. “But what’s a surrogate—?”

  “A surrogate sacrifice was an image that was sacrificed instead of a real person. Before you is a statuette of a woman carved by the ancient lost race from a yet-to-be-identified flesh-colored substance. Note the head is missing. This is because the statuette was beheaded instead of the human it represented.”

  Mick the Mick stepped up to the display and immediately recognized the naked pink figure. He used to swipe his sister Suzy’s and make it straddle his rocket and go for a ride. Only Suzy’s had a blonde head.

  “That’s a freakin’ Barbie doll!” He grabbed Willie’s shoulder and yanked him away.

  “Jesus, Mick! You know I got a dislocating shoulder!”

  Willie stumbled, knocking Mick the Mick into another display case, which toppled over with a crash.

  “WELCOME! What you see before you is a rare tome of lost wisdom that once belonged—”

  Screaming, Mick the Mick kicked the speaker until the voice stopped.

  “Look, Mick,” Willie said, squatting and poking through the broken glass, “it’s not a tome, it’s a book. It’s supposed to contain lost wisdom. Maybe it can tell us how to keep Nate the Nose off our backs.” He rose and squinted at the cover. “The Really, Really, Really Old Ones.”

  “It’s a paperback, you moron. How much wisdom you gonna find in there?”

  “Yeah, you’re right. It says, ‘Do not try this at home. Use only under expert supervision or you’ll be really, really, really sorry’ Better not mess with that.”

  “Oh yeah?” Mick had had it—really had it. Up. To. Here. He opened to a random page and read. “ ‘Random dislocation spell.’ ”

  Willie winced. “Not my shoulder!”

  “ ‘Use only under expert supervision.’ Yeah, right. Look, it’s got a bunch of gobbledygook to read.”

  “You mean like ‘Mekka-lekka hi—’?”

  “Shaddap and I’ll show you what bullshit this is.”

  Mick the Mick started reading, pronouncing the gobbledygook as best he could, going slow and easy so he didn’t screw up the words like he normally did when he read.

  When he finished, he looked at Willie and grinned. “See? No random dislocation.”

  Willie rolled his shoulder. “Yeah. Feels pretty good. I wonder—”

  The smell hit Mick the Mick first, hot and overpowering, reminding him of that time he stuck his head in the toilet because his older brother told him that’s where brownies came from. It was followed by the very real sensation of being squeezed. But not squeezed by a person. Squeezed all over by some sort of full-body force, like being pushed through a too-small opening. The air suddenly became squishy and solid and pressed into every crack and pore on Mick the Mick’s body, and then it undulated, moving him, pushing him, through the solid marble floor of the Arkham, Pennsylvania, Museum of Natural History and Baseball Cards.

  The very fabric of reality, or something like that, seemed to vibrate with a deep resonance, and the timbre rose to become an overpowering, guttural groan. The floor began to dissolve, or maybe he began to dissolve, and then came a horrible yet compelling farting sound and Mick the Mick was suddenly plopped into the middle of a jungle. Willie landed next to him. “I feel like shit,” Willie said.

  Mick the Mick squinted in the sunlight and looked around. They were surrounded by strange, tropical trees and weird-looking flowers with big fat pink petals that made him feel sort of horny. A dragonfly the size of a bratwurst hovered over their heads, gave them a passing glance, then buzzed over to one of the pink flowers, which snapped open and bit the bug in half.

  “Where are we, Mick?”

  Mick the Mick scratched his head. “I’m not sure. But I think when I read that book I opened a portal in the space-time continuum and we were squeezed through one of the eleven imploded dimensions into the late Cretaceous period.”

  “Wow. That sucks.”

  “No, Willie. It doesn’t suck at all.”

  “Yeah, it does. The season finale of MacGyver: The Next Generation is on tonight. It’s a really cool episode where he builds a time machine out of some pocket lint and a broken meat thermometer. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a time machine, Mick?”

  Mick the Mick slapped Willie on the side of his head.

  “Jesus, Mick! You know I got swimmer’s ear!”

  “Don’t you get it, Willie? This b
ook is a time machine. We can go back in time!”

  Willie got wide-eyed. “I get it! We can get back to the present a few minutes early so I won’t miss MacGyverl”

  Mick the Mick considered hitting him again, but his hand was getting sore.

  “Think bigger than MacGyver, Willie. We’re going to be rich. Rich and famous and powerful. Once I figure out how this book works, we’ll be able to go to any point in history.”

  “You mean like we go back to summer camp in 1975? Then we could steal the candy from those counselors so they couldn’t lure us into the woods and touch us in the bad place.”

  “Even better, Willie. We can bet on sports and always win. Like that movie.”

  “Which one?”

  “The one where he went to the past and bet on sports so he could always win.”

  “The Godfather?”

  “No, Willie. The Godfather was the one with the fat guy who slept with horse heads.”

  “Oh yeah. Hey, Mick, don’t you think those big pink flowers look like—”

  “Shut your stupid hole, Willie. I gotta think.” Mick the Mick racked his brain, but he was never into sports, and he couldn’t think of a single team that won anything. Plus, he didn’t have any money on him. It would take a long time to parlay the eighty-one cents in his pocket to sixty grand. But there had to be other ways to make money with a time machine. Probably.

  He glanced at Willie, who was walking toward one of those pink flowers, leaning in to sniff it. Or perhaps do something else with it, because Willie’s tongue was out.

  “Willie! Get away from that thing and try to focus! We need to figure out how to make some money.”

  “It smells like fish, Mick.”

  “Dammit, Willie! Did you take your medicine this morning like you’re supposed to?”

  “I can’t remember. Nana says I need a stronger subscription. But every time I go to the doctor to get one, I forget to ask.”

  Mick the Mick scratched himself. Another dragonfly—this one shaped like a banana wearing a turtleneck—flew up to one of those pink flowers and was bitten in half, too. Damn, those bugs were stupid. They just didn’t learn. He scratched himself again, wondering if the crabs were back. If they were, he’d be really angry. When you paid fifty bucks for a massage at Madame Yoko’s, the happy ending should be crab-free.

  Willie said, “Maybe we can go back to the time when Nate the Nose was a little boy, and then we could be real nice to him so when he grew up he would remember us and wouldn’t make us eat our junk.”

  Or we could push his stroller into traffic, Mick the Mick thought.

  But Nate the Nose had bosses, and they probably had bosses, too, and traveling through time to push a bunch of babies in front of moving cars seemed like a lot of work.

  “Money, Willie. We need to make money.”

  “We could buy old things from the past then sell them on eBay. Hey, wouldn’t it be cool to have four hands? I mean, you could touch twice as much stuff.”

  Mick the Mick thought about those old comics in Willie’s basement, and then he grinned wider than a zebra’s ass.

  “Action Comics’ number one, which had the first appearance of Superman!” Mick the Mick said. “I could buy it with the change in my pocket, and we can sell it for a fortune!”

  Come to think of it, he could buy eight copies. Didn’t they go for a million a piece these days?

  “I wish I could fly, Mick. Could we go back into time and learn to fly like Superman?”

  “Shh!” Mick the Mick tilted his head to the side, listening to the jungle. “You hear something, Willie?”

  “Yeah, Mick. I hear you talkin’ to me. Now I hear me talkin’. Now I’m singing a sooooong, a haaaaaaaaappy soooooong.”

  Mick the Mick gave Willie a smack in the teeth, then locked his eyes on the tree line. In the distance the canopy rustled and parted, like something really big was walking toward them. Something so big, the ground shook with every step.

  “You hear that, Mick? Sounds like something really big is coming.”

  A deafening roar came from the thing in the trees, so horrible Mick the Mick could feel his curlies straighten. “Think it’s friendly?” Willie asked. Mick the Mick stared down at his hands, which still held the Really, Really, Really Old Ones book. He flipped it open to a random page, forcing himself to concentrate on the words. But, as often happened in stressful situations, or even situations not all that stressful, the words seemed to twist and mash up and go backward and upside down. Goddamn lesdyxia—shit—dyslexia, “Maybe we should run, Mick.”

  “Yeah, maybe . . . wait! No! We can’t run!”

  “Why can’t we run, Mick?”

  “Remember that episode of The Simpsons where Homer went back in time and stepped on a butterfly? The point is, evolution is a really fickle bitch. If we screw up something in the past, it can really mess up the future.”

  “That sucks. You mean we would get back to our real time but instead of being made of skin and bones, we’re made entirely out of fruit? Like some kind of juicy fruit people?”

  Another growl, even closer. It sounded like a lion’s roar—if the lion had cojones the size of Chryslers.

  “I mean really bad stuff, Willie. I gotta read another passage and get us out of here.”

  The trees parted, and a shadow began to force itself into view.

  “Hey, Mick, if you were made of fruit, would you take a bite of your own arm if you were really super hungry? I think I would. Wonder what I’d taste like?”

  Mick the Mick tried to concentrate on reading the page, but his gaze kept flicking up to the trees. The prehistoric landscape lapsed into deadly silence. Then, like some giant monster coming out of the jungle, a giant monster came out of the jungle.

  The head appeared first, the size of a sofa—a really big sofa—with teeth the size of daggers crammed into a mouth large enough to tear a refrigerator in half.

  “I think I’d take a few bites out of my leg or something, but I’d be afraid because I don’t know if I could stop. Especially if I tasted like strawberries, because I love strawberries, Mick. Why are they called strawberries when they don’t taste like straw? Hey, is that a T. rex?”

  Now Mick the Mick pee-peed more than just a little. The creature before them was a deep green color, blending seamlessly into the undergrowth. Rather than scales, it was adorned with small, prickly hairs that Mick the Mick realized were thin brown feathers. Its huge nostrils flared and it snorted, causing the book’s pages to ripple.

  “I think we should run, Mick. I don’t wanna be dinosaur poop.”

  Mick the Mick agreed. The tyrannosaurus stepped into the clearing on massive legs and reared up to its full height, over forty feet tall. Mick the Mick knew he couldn’t outrun it. But he didn’t have to. He only had to outrun Willie. He felt bad, but he had no other choice. He had to trick his best friend if he wanted to survive.

  “The T. Rex has really bad vision, Willie. If you stay very still, it won’t be able to . . . Willie, come back!”

  Willie had broken for the trees, moving so fast he was a blur. Mick the Mick tore after him, swatting dragonflies out of the way as he ran. Underfoot, he trampled on a large brown roach, a three-toed lizard with big dewy eyes and a disproportionately large brain, and a small furry mammal with a face that looked a lot like Sal from Manny’s Meats on Twenty-third Street, which gave a disturbingly human cry when its little neck snapped.

  Behind them, the T. Rex moved with the speed of a giant two-legged cat shaped like a dinosaur, snapping teeth so close to Mick the Mick that they nipped the eighteen trailing hairs of his comb-over. He chanced a look over his shoulder and saw the mouth of the animal open so wide Mick the Mick could set up a table for four on the creature’s tongue and play Texas hold ‘em, not that he would, because that would be fucking stupid.

  Then, just as the death jaws of death were ready to close and cause terminal death, the T. Rex skidded to a halt and squinted down at the dead little furry th
ing that used to look a lot like Sal from Manny’s Meats, but now looked like Sal with a broken neck. The T. Rex nudged it with its massive snout, as if it was trying to wake proto-Sal up.

  “What’s it doing, Mick?”

  Mick the Mick had no idea. The dinosaur nosed the furry thing back and forth, back and forth. Like playing with a toy. Then it gently picked up proto-Sal and flung it across the jungle, toward Willie. It landed at his friend’s feet.

  “I think it wants to play, Mick.” Willie picked up the limp animal. “Hey, you see this mouse thing? Looks like that butcher from Manny’s. But smaller. And with a tail. And it don’t got no tattoo that says ‘Fillet the World.’ ”

  “Throw it, Willie!”

  Willie cocked his arm back, aiming at Mick.

  “To the dinosaur, you moron!”

  “Oh. Fetch, boy!”

  Willie tossed proto-Sal, and the T. Rex snatched it right out of the air, crunching on it like popcorn.

  “He can catch, Mick! Let’s throw him something else.”

  Mick the Mick scanned the jungle floor, quickly overturning a large, flat rock. Beneath it was a family of small rodents who resembled the Capporellis up in 5B—so much so that he swore one even said, “Fronzo!” when he broke its little furry spine. Mick the Mick scooped it up, raising his arm to throw. But the lizard was no longer staring at them. Instead, the creature was bent over and sniffing one of the big pink, fishy-smelling flowers.

  “Throw it to me, Mick! We’ll play monkey in the middle!”

  The ‘saur stuck out its queen-size-bed tongue for a lick, and the flower chomped down on it. This sent the T. Rex into a screeching, stomping, spitting fit, crushing the flower beneath gigantic talons. Then it sniffed out a similar flower and gave that one a lick.

  “Now’s our chance to get away, Willie. Willie!” Before Mick the Mick could stop him, Willie yelled, “Catch!” and chucked a fallen tree branch at the dinosaur. It smacked against the T. Rex’s head with a painful-sounding thud. The T. Rex locked eyes on them and roared.

  “He don’t want to play no more, Mick. I don’t, neither.” They ran. The thunder lizard lunged after them and gained quickly—no surprise, what with it being able to cover a dozen of their steps with only one of its own.