On The Surface Tension

by Dietrich Biemiller

  LaGrue shook his head. “Oh, I’m counting on that. And walking into the next room or a hallway wouldn’t solve that problem, either. Eiffelia doesn’t need a prayer globe to know everything that goes on in this city: Every wall and road and roof is all part of her organic cellular structure. Just like that organic spaceship hull we were studying at White Mountain. You didn’t know that? No, I mean get out of here as in ‘from this world.’ Go home. To Earth.”

  Valentina’s eyes grew wide. “How? How the hell can you do that?”

  “The same way I got in here. I have a rift generator.”

  “Like the Horribles?”

  “Exactly. We can talk all about it at my house. You must leave everything and come immediately.”

  “I’m not leaving my daughter. And there are…others who may want to come as well.”

  LaGrue’s face soured. “Very well. Your daughter. Any others can be discussed later. But her soldiers are on the way as we speak.”

  Valentina grabbed Mandy by the arm and stood by LaGrue, who produced a small device from his pocket and pressed buttons.

  They dematerialized with a yellow flash, and Valentina opened her eyes to find that they were on another planet. It could not have been Earth, though.

  At first she thought that they had landed in the middle of a stone field, with some low hills and rock outcroppings in the distance. Then the scale of what she was looking at struck her. The rock outcroppings were columns supporting the upper reaches of a vast building. The field was actually paved stone, made with massive blocks. She turned around to look behind her and saw an oval-shaped bed, the size of a sports arena, surrounded by building-sized statues of LaGrue, in various heroic poses. Flanking each side of the gigantic bed were replicas of Egyptian Sphinxes, whose heads were replaced with LaGrue’s visage. She was struck with the symbolism of his head sewed to an artificial, alien body. Mandy clung to her leg in abject terror.

  She spun to look at LaGrue and found him beaming with pride.

  “Welcome to my bedroom,” he said, with a little arch of his eyebrows.

  Overwhelmed with the ridiculous enormity and terrifying oddity of the surroundings, she burst into laughter. She did not notice the flash of shame and disappointment that crossed LaGrue’s face. He recovered quickly.

  “I am sure you have many questions. It has been a long time since the White Mountain days and that disastrous expedition to the Sea Tribes in the alternate universe line. Let’s see…we parted when we were raided at that water treatment plant, and you were taken to Cambria to launch your…television career, correct?”

  Valentina nodded and started wandering towards the edge of what looked like a cliff a few hundred yards away at the edge of the bedroom.

  “And there you remained until now. Let me catch you up on the rest of the team. And this may be hard to hear. You remember Spinks was shot? Well, unfortunately, he succumbed to the wound and died shortly thereafter. Ron and Tracey were captured by Eiffelia, and Tracey was executed. Ron was kept prisoner in some universe somewhere, used for his Pangborn gene to keep it from collapsing. I have looked for him, but no luck. He could be anywhere.”

  “What about Smithson?” she asked, stroking Mandy’s hair as she walked.

  “Ah, that is the most unfortunate story of all. I know you were rather fond of him, in spite of his unfathomable blindness about it. I’m sorry to report that Eiffelia put him on an island to try to glean his knowledge for training her soldiers. She made him fight and recorded it. He lasted over a month before one of them finally got him.”

  She hung her head, lump in her throat, and quietly kept walking.

  “My story, thankfully, was more fruitful. Eiffelia knew my value as a theorist and designer, so paired me up with my counterpart in that universe to work on her technologies. She made the mistake of assigning me to work on improving the rift generators.”

  As they neared the edge of the cliff, Valentina began to hear a curious murmuring sound. She could not place it in her mind.

  “I told her I only needed one of the units for one day, for a mere twenty-four hours. She knew I was on the Milk, under her thrall, so she allowed it. I wanted to test its operation and decided to make a jump to whatever coordinates had last been input. Quite by accident, it just so happened that the last jump had been back to our universe. My counterpart and I made the jump, and of course I immediately reverted back to my real self, the one from our universe line. It was at that moment I realized what I had. My counterpart from that universe realized it too, of course, and attacked me! I fortunately was able to kill him.”

  “That is horrible,” said Valentina distractedly. The murmuring noise was growing louder as they neared the cliff edge. She could not see a valley beyond the edge but could make out a mountain slope beyond where the valley must be. It was terraced with stone buildings, columns, and further terraces.

  “Yes, it was dreadful. But in that moment, I realized that I had a rift generator. And knowing what it was, I knew what an immense power it was. The ability to travel to the past, or to other universes, allowed me limitless knowledge, limitless time. Do you remember back to that meeting with the Mods, back in Seattle after Cornish Bob and his goons shot the town up? Before all that babble from them about ‘Cheat Codes?’ You recited the words to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” so sweetly and beautifully. Do you remember?

  He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave,

  He is Wisdom to the mighty, He is Succour to the brave,

  So the world shall be His footstool, and the soul of Time His slave,

  Our God is marching on.

  “And so it struck me, like a fateful lightning bolt, a terrible swift sword—the song was about…me!”

  They were nearing the edge, and Valentina could just begin to see over it. The murmuring was growing louder, and it dawned on her what it was: whispering. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of whispering voices.

  “Yes, Valentina. It was me who was destined to destroy Eiffelia and take her place as God. It was I who was coming like the glory of morning, it was I who was the wisdom to her might and would succor my own bravery to make myself mighty. The world would be my footstool, because I had the rift generator—the Soul of Time—as my slave. All those years, the coded signs from the flashes of light, the birds teaching me to fly…that was what they were trying to tell me! So I went back in time, in as many universe lines as I could, and began building my power, my wealth, my influence, and my armies, with whatever intelligent races on whatever planets I could find. I knew I had the ultimate ‘Cheat Code.’ None of her other slaves knew what they had or how to use it. You know the first thing I did? I knew I had to give myself the idea of where to put the nuclear bomb in the trench, using the mud volcanos. I knew once they took me back to that universe, I would be traveling along a certain road in a certain car, at a certain speed, so I bought a ten-mile strip of land along that road and hired a small army of workers to install telephone poles at certain intervals, knowing that the shadows from this would communicate this coded message to myself. It was in this way that I started the war with Eiffelia! That war that she has been fighting against what she calls the monster aliens? That is me. Going further and further back into time to fight it. Soon, I will defeat her, and the universe will be ours.”

  Ours?

  They reached the edge of the bedroom, and Valentina could see over the stone edge into the valley. The hillside beyond the edge was terraced with stone, terrace upon terrace dropping into the valley below. Each terrace was filled with people, a vast throng, thousands upon thousands, all wearing some kind of white toga. Valentina noted that they were not all human beings: There were oddly-shaped alien races mixed in as well. Some of the people close to the edge on the top terrace caught sight of LaGrue, and their excitement rose like a spreading wave.

  LaGrue! LaGrue! they chanted. Soon, the chant spread down the valley, and before long the cry was deafening. LaGrue! LaGRUE!

  He ba
sked in the worship of the millions. Mandy screamed and held her fists to her ears, eyes screwed shut. Valentina lost control of her legs and slumped to the ground.

  LaGrue laughed and extended his hand. “Rise, my queen! Your people have been waiting to receive you.”

  —7—

  Without knowing exactly when it had happened, Ron and Strong realized that they had left the Dream Plains and were in some other region. The dream whirlwinds had stopped.

  The dusty, brown landscape remained, but every now and then over the past day they had noticed a crumbled wall here and there, a crater, or some piece of twisted metal machinery. Off in the distance they heard what sounded like thunder, complete with flashes of light. As more time passed, they heard jet aircraft and occasional gunfire. Green and red lasers traced the sky. They stood, eyes squinting, inspecting a grayish smudge on the near horizon.

  “It looks like rock,” Strong said.

  “Maybe. Or concrete. Not much else to do but go look.”

  They trudged on. The closer they approached, the clearer they could tell that it was some sort of blasted fort or battlement made of stone or concrete slabs. Ron saw something moving at the top of the structure, grabbed Strong’s arm, and stopped him. Jack had stopped already. It appeared to be some kind of pole, with a protrusion at the end, and it moved around erratically. They stood watching it for a minute, unsure of what to do.

  There was a whistling sound above them. From years of Ron using the sound in video war games and from Strong playing them, they both instinctively acted.

  “Incoming!”

  They both dove to the ground just as the shell hit somewhere behind them. The explosion was deafening, and a fine drift of dirt settled on their backs.

  “Shit!” yelled Strong.

  A second shell whistled by overhead. They covered their heads with their arms, and when the second impact occurred closer than the first, they were both off and running towards the tower before the last of the dust settled.

  There was a dark opening between the bottom of the broken concrete slab wall and the hardscrabble dirt, and they both scrambled through it as another shell impacted the area behind them.

  The fortified structure amounted to nothing more than a ring of broken concrete slabs formed into a wall, with mounds of broken rock and fill behind them forming a platform where one could stand on the battlements. A fifty-five gallon steel drum stood in the middle of the courtyard, with scraps of lumber sticking out of it. On the battlement on the far side, looking into the terrain beyond, was a man.

  He was dressed in an odd assemblage of clothing, weapons, and armor. He wore what looked like a combination of football padding, chain mail, and pirate pants. His feet were clad in hiking boots wrapped around the legs with filthy linen strips and animal fur. He wore a wide leather belt, into which was stuck an assortment of knives, axes, grenades, and pistols. He wore a steel helmet on his head, painted in a crude black and white camouflage. A large, antique-looking shotgun was strapped across his back, and he was holding what looked like a jousting pike with a camera attached to the end in the air. It was this that Ron and Strong had seen waving from the wall.

  “Hello!” called out Strong.

  The strange man froze, dropped the pole, and extended his arms.

  “Oh, you’re good!” the man croaked, his voice dry as the flinty landscape. “I didn’t see you coming, and I’ve been watching the plain for hours.”

  The man began crabbing sideways along the top of the wall, still extending his arms. Ron and Strong noted that where he had been standing, the stock of some kind of sniper rifle was laying on the top of the wall.

  “Keep going. Slowly…,” said Ron, suddenly realizing that there was a threat. He fumbled around for the space pistol that the Dwarf had given him.

  The strange man turned to face them, glacially slow. He had a dusty, black beard, and some kind of goggles or binoculars over his eyes, which he slowly removed.

  “Two of you? You couldn’t have snuck up on me with two.”

  “No, you would have seen us if we had come from your front. We just got off the Dream Plains,” explained Strong.

  Another shell burst just outside the wall. Ron and Strong flinched, but the odd man stood impassively. Ron saw the gears working in the man’s brain, sizing them up. He made sure the futuristic gun the dwarf had given him was aimed nearby, but not directly at, the odd man on the wall.

  “Well, welcome to the War Zone.” The man laughed, then snatched one of the pistols from his belt.

  Ron brought his gun to bear and fired, but not before the odd man rushed a shot at them. Ron’s gun unleashed a sizzling bolt of some kind of energy, which expanded as it traveled, striking the odd man’s torso. With a flash of sparks, he went down screaming, a blackened mass. Ron dropped the gun in shock.

  “Holy shit! I got him!” he yelled, turning to Strong.

  Strong was on his knees, touching a neat hole in his chest, which began pumping bright arterial blood. He collapsed to the ground, facedown.

  Ron turned him over, but it was too late to do anything. His eyes glazed over and he drooped.

  Shocked, Ron grabbed up his gun and charged the wall, intent on finishing the man if he was still alive. When he reached him, he realized there was nothing else he needed to do. The man’s entire body above the belt line was charred, melted. His face was mostly gone, his visage a blackened skull. He was obviously dead.

  Impossibly, however, the man spoke. “Nice shot,” he hissed, between skeletal teeth and jaw. “I’ll get you next time.”

  Ron was stupefied for a full minute. “What the hell do you mean, next time?” he finally stammered. He saw that the charred corpse’s jaw was starting to work, opening and closing mechanically. His fingers, no more than a blackened skeleton a moment ago, now had some kind of tarry sinew stitching itself around them.

  “You know, next time. Next round,” the thing hissed.

  “What, you’re not…respawning, are you?”?

  “Of course I am!” the corpse hissed. “This bad, though, it might take an hour or two.”?

  Ron kneeled down beside the thing and disarmed it, removing each pistol, knife, axe and tossing them off the wall.

  “Fucker,” the corpse hissed. “Give those back.”

  It occurred to Ron that Strong might respawn too. He snapped his head towards him, and saw Strong sitting on the ground, rubbing his neck.

  “Holy Top-Hat Wearin’ Tap-Dancing Christ!” he spat, and trotted over to where Strong was sitting.

  “Give me a minute,” Strong said, rubbing his chest where the bullet had entered. “That hurt.”

  “Hurt? You were dead, muthafukah!”

  Strong ignored him.

  “Come on. We have to get back to that guy before he respawns too and tries to get even.”

  Strong struggled to his feet and shuffled along with Ron to the base of the wall, where they recovered the strange man’s weaponry. They approached him cautiously but determined that he was not even close to being fully re-formed.

  “You called this the ‘War Zone,’” Ron said, crouching next to him. “What is this place?”

  The charred man worked his jaw as the tarry black stuff slowly grew around it.

  “You’ll see. You are right on the leading edge of it now. Bad form using particle weapons against what is clearly a low-tech man.”

  “Bad form? You mean I broke the rules or something?” chuckled Ron.

  “Well, not rules,” the man croaked, his voice growing stronger. “More like Gentlemen’s conventions. If you have any sport in you, you might trade up and take one of my weapons, but only if you leave one in its place. And if you want to use that ray-gun, there are parts of the storm that allow that. In these parts, it is strictly projectile and explosives only. And if you don’t give my guns and blades back, I will have to start over again in the Hardcore mode, with hands and teeth only. Some might prefer that, but not me, brother.”

  “Look, we�
��re new here,” said Strong, his voice a bit burbly because his lung had not entirely healed. “And we won’t be hanging around. But we can’t have you shooting us if we give them back. We are on our way to the Gnome Sacred Mountain.”

  “It should be somewhere between Twentieth Century Suburbia Land and Pornlandia,” added Ron.

  The charred man froze for a moment, then chuckled. “Oh, right. The Storm just passed through that area. Now it is Post-Apocalyptic Suburbia and Post-Apocalyptic Pornlandia.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” said Ron, feeling like he had just been punched in the gut.

  The charred man’s newly-forming black lips formed into a smile, and he nodded. “Yeah, the War Zone isn’t fixed. It moves through Hell like a storm, and everything in its wake is ruined. Whoever is left, the survivors of whatever land the War Zone storm just passed through, now have a new story: Post-Apocalyptic versions of themselves. The old version of their book or movie re-forms somewhere else. The map of Hell is constantly shifting, you know.”

  “Yeah, the elf mentioned that,” spat Strong. “I thought he meant that it would shift when nobody was watching whatever movie or reading whatever book was making the map the way it was.”

  “That happens too,” croaked the man. “We get all kinds of things here.”

  “So if we wanted to get to that Gnome Sacred Mountain, which way?” asked Ron.

  “You gonna give me my weapons back?”

  “Less a few that we might need,” Strong bargained.

  “Fine. Not that I have much choice. But you hafta promise not to burn me again before you go. I won’t come after you. Wouldn’t be sporting.”

  “Agreed,” said Ron.

  The man raised a charred arm, pointed in the direction that they had been traveling.”

  “That way,” he croaked. “Through the center of the War Storm.”

  *****

  Jeremy thrashed awake. He was sore in every limb and disoriented. The sun was just over the horizon. He crawled through the cold mud to the edge of the pool and drank again. With a sharp intake of breath, he realized he was not alone. He scrabbled backwards to dry ground and stood, regarding the new arrival. His mind reeled to take it in, but it appeared to be a rotting corpse on a horse. It was not dead. It was dressed as a cowboy, complete with felt hat, duster, and coiled rope. His face was partially bone, the rest was rotting meat. It still had a bushy moustache. It still had both eyes, and the corpse used them as they regarded each other for some time, the cowboy chewing a stalk of grass in its lipless teeth.