by Sean Platt
“Hey, anyone in heah?!” Roman shouted. His Brooklyn accent echoed, but was barely audible over the wind’s scream.
“Well,” Roman said, looking at Renny and Will, “looks like our pilot ain’t here.”
“Wait a sec, guys.” Otis walked toward the cave’s rear, “Check this out.”
They all followed, lights on. Each beam settled on the same discovery: a hole in the ground, vomiting wide into an endless pit of nothingness.
“Hello?” Renny shouted down.
They cast their lights into the hole, trying to pierce the gloaming. The black was so black, and the pit so deep, their lights were but drops of rain in an oil barrel.
Renny looked at Will. “Well, Sparks, you got anything?”
Will hated Renny’s new nickname for him, but if Will said anything the name would stick, and he wanted it gone, like all of Renny’s idiot nicknames before it.
“I dunno,” Will said, closing his eyes to concentrate. “Lemme see.”
Will’s mind floated from his body. He reached out, into the darkness, searching: Hello? Lt. Harmon?
Will waited, his mind open like the pit.
The men around him shifted, impatient. Their thoughts were accidental drizzle in his head: They didn’t think Harmon was here; they were annoyed, wondering when the blizzard would blow over, wishing they hadn’t followed Will into nowhere. A few thought they might die, freezing to a stupid death in the gut of a cave.
Will tried barring their thoughts, reach deeper into the open mouth, when suddenly he felt someone below … staring into him.
Harmon?
Nothing.
He couldn’t shake the feeling that something was prying into his mind.
As many times as Will had peered into others’ thoughts like open medicine cabinets, he had never felt someone on the other side looking back. It was cold, a horrible slither that poured ice water inside his skull.
Will tried to sever the connection and return his attention to the unit’s men, but whoever it was wouldn’t let go.
Not whoever — whatever.
The whatever, Will was suddenly certain, wasn’t human.
A shrill, almost digital scramble crackled through the howl. Then it was a whistle in his brain, exploding into shards of pain throughout his body.
Will thought his soul would crack; death sounded OK.
He fell to the ice, screaming as he clutched his head.
Tears froze on his face and bit him hard. Suddenly, the wind howled as it stormed the cave, as if the blizzard was searching for them. The harder it beat his unit, the louder it howled.
Men screamed. The ground shook, then collapsed.
When Will finally came to, he was in a bright-blue room.
No, not a room, but deeper in the cave.
His head pounded through clouded thoughts. He stumbled onto wobbly feet and saw the rest of his unit standing and staring, eyes as wide as their mouths.
Will was about to ask them what in the hell they were looking at, then saw his shadow. The light was behind him, yanking their attention.
He turned, slowly, then saw it: a box the size of a phone booth, black and metallic. Strange glyphs dotted its surface, oozing the same bright-blue light that seemed to hum all around them.
The air quivered like a mirage; energy thrummed in a low drone and caromed the cavern in echo.
“What is it?” Norberg asked. Blue smoke plumed from his mouth — despite his full ski mask — like hot breath on a freezing day. Each word floated in a wisp, then, like a match lit to the smoke, turned into blue fire before fading away.
“Whoa!” Otis said, then saw it from his own mouth.
While the men took turns speaking, experimenting with various words and sounds, and watching like awed children as every breath danced with a physical manifestation, Will felt the prying return.
It was coming from the box.
What are you? Will thought.
The weird, alien sound — like digital distortion — was back: communication without a language he could make out. Will turned, trying to discern the cave’s depth, and to hopefully see if there was another way out. He saw light from the cave above, where the ground had crumbled. It was hard to tell how far they’d fallen in the darkness, particularly with the light coming from the box, but it seemed like they might be able to climb out without much of a problem.
“I don’t like this,” Roman said, his voice shaky like the air. “We gotta get outta here. Feels like the walls are closing in!”
“Relax,” Renny said, “we can climb out. Get some pictures of this thing, first.”
“No!” Roman said, “No, we can’t tell anyone about it!”
“What?” Otis asked.
“There’s something wrong here, I don’t know how I know, but I can feel it!” Roman stared around the circle of men. “Can’t you?”
The men looked at one another, shrugging their shoulders, all except Will, who agreed — there was something seriously wrong.
Will spoke, “Can anyone else hear it?”
“Hear what?” Renny asked. “I don’t hear anything.”
Renny often ignored Roman, who tended to blow everything out of proportion, but Renny respected Will and his gifts.
Will had to back Roman up.
“I hear this hum,” Will explained, “something like a voice, but digitally scrambled, like it’s trying to talk. Nobody else hears it?”
“I do,” Roman said.
“Yeah, right,” Otis laughed. “You ain’t got the sparks!”
“No,” Roman said, hands out and pleading, “I do hear it! And I don’t like how it sounds! I can feel it … in my head, crawling like a roach, all twitching and shit. This isn’t good, guys; we need to get the hell outta here. Now!”
Renny looked at Will, “You think we should leave?”
Will looked at Roman; his eyes were already haunted. Will wasn’t frightened, but he was anxious. He agreed. “Yeah, I think we should leave.”
“And not report this?” Otis asked, “You’re kidding, right? This could be some Russian spy shit, or alien technology, and we’re just gonna pretend we didn’t see it? I don’t think so.”
Renny looked at Otis and Roman, then turned to Will. “Otis is right. We need to document this.”
“No! Nobody’s documenting shit!” Roman said; his gun was drawn from nowhere. Though his gun wasn’t aimed at any of them, his posture made it clear he would shoot dissenters.
“Whoa!” Otis said, “Calm the fuck down, Rosetti!”
“No, I see bad shit. This … this thing … it ain’t right. Can’t any of you see it?”
“See?” Will asked.
“Yeah, I’m seeing things, stuff that ain’t right. You don’t see it?”
Will shook his head, not sure if his abilities were letting him down, if Roman’s had grown, or if the man was simply losing it. Of their unit, Roman had bitched the loudest about their assignment; the harsh weather had clearly cracked him.
“I don’t see anything,” Will said. “What do you see?”
Roman screamed, “Get out of my head!” He raised his gun and fired at the black box.
Three things happened at once: Renny screamed, “No!;” the thing that was prying in Will’s head screamed, sending a sharp pain through his skull that sent him to his knees; and Roman fell, dropping his gun and clutching his head.
Roman hadn’t been lying. It was in his head, too.
A flash of white light drowned everything, like a detonation, but without any sensation of heat or pain. One minute they were in the cave, then, the next, they were above ground in the blizzard, with the cave missing.
What the hell just happened?
Will looked around at the men trading stares. Roman stood, shaking, gun dropped in the snow.
Renny decked him.
Nine
Brent Foster
Manhattan, New York
September 2013
Brent stood outside the apartmen
t door, nervous, hoping like hell he wasn’t making a mistake.
From the other side he heard a muffled TV — a good sign he hadn’t driven all this way to find no one at home. It was 7:30 p.m., later than Brent would have liked to come, but he’d slept late after finishing his last two articles. He couldn’t fail his clients; repeat business kept him from starving.
He looked at his phone’s screen and matched numbers on the door: 516.
He glanced up and down the enclosed hallway, which reminded him of his former apartment building’s halls: narrow, dimly lit, and desperate for fresh carpet and paint.
Stop stalling. Knock!
Brent knocked, hoping he was right and would see Luis alive.
It felt like an eternity since he was forced to watch Black Island Guardsmen murder an infected Luis; few nights settled without Brent staring into the memory. His heart pounded as he waited for the door to open. He felt odd, hanging so many hopes on Luis being alive. It wasn’t as if this Luis, if he were in fact here, was his Luis. The man he had known — his friend — did die on the other Earth. And he was never coming back. This Luis, assuming Brent’s theory on the 215ers was correct, had no clue who Brent was.
Still, Brent felt a flickering joy at the chance of seeing Luis. When no one answered, he knocked again, louder, his eyes on the glass peephole in the center of the door, eye level. Brent thought he saw movement behind the glass, but couldn’t tell for sure.
A moment later, a man’s voice. “Yeah, who is it?”
Brent couldn’t be sure if it was Luis or not.
“Luis? It’s me, Brent Foster.”
“Who?”
Brent repeated, “It’s me, Brent Foster,” even though he knew that name meant nothing to this Luis. Saying his name as if Luis did know him seemed a decent ploy that might get him to open the door.
“I don’t know any Brent Fosters.”
Brent stepped back, trying to show as much of himself as he could to the peephole viewer and reveal himself as a harmless guy. He decided to take a chance, and say something that might make zero sense to this Luis. Because if it did, it would be impossible for him to keep the door closed.
“We met on October 15, 2011,” Brent said.
Silence …
“Luis?” Brent said after a moment.
The door opened, and the man — it was Luis, or rather his twin on this world — stepped into the hall, gun drawn and aimed at Brent. He looked up and down as if he expected federal agents to start charging towards them at any moment. “Who the hell are you?”
“My name is Brent Foster. We met on October 15. Well, I met another version of you. A you on another world.”
Luis stared at him, expression still confused and cautious, in that order.
“You were with Stan and Melora, part of the 215 Society, I believe you called yourselves. Any of this ringing a bell?”
“If this is a joke, it ain’t funny,” Luis said.
“I swear to God, I’m not joking,” Brent said. “I need to talk to you, I don’t have anyone else. They all think I’m crazy. Listen, Luis, I know about the dreams you had — the ones about the world ending on October 15.”
“The dreams didn’t mean anything,” Luis said. “They didn’t come true.”
“But they did. Me and several other people were snatched from here and wound up in another world, identical to ours. Nearly all the people on that world either vanished or died. There were aliens — these big, ugly, black things that infected people. I know it sounds crazy as hell, but you, the you over there, told me a lot.”
As Luis stared, Brent shared details gifted to him by another version of the same man: dreams, his daughter, a wife dying of cancer. He watched as Luis’s eyes filled with water. His chin trembled, slowly losing a battle to crying. Brent wondered if the tears were from joy in knowing he wasn’t crazy, or liquid fear to think he had escaped the prophecy of October 15, only to have Brent knocking with the truth that he hadn’t.
“Daddy?” a girl called from behind. His daughter — Gracie! — who had vanished on the other world, and whom Luis had missed so much.
“Stay inside, Honey!” Luis snapped before she reached the door. He closed it, but kept his gun firmly on Brent.
“Why are you here?”
Brent said, “I was gone for six months, and my wife thinks I’m nuts. I was told not to tell anybody what happened, and for the most part I listened, but I’ve lost everything — my wife, my son, and my job. I need to talk to someone who would know I wasn’t lying. You and I were good friends over there. I trusted you with my life. Hell, you saved me. I’m assuming I can trust this version of you, too. Please, I just want to talk. I know you must be at least a little curious about what your dreams really mean.”
“Meant,” Luis corrected Brent. “I haven’t had the dreams since October 2011 came and went with nothing around it. I was hoping to keep it that way.”
“I’ll tell you everything you want to know,” Brent said. “And I’m hoping you can help me.”
“Help you what?”
“Get my life back,” Brent said.
“Okay, let’s assume you’re not insane, we can talk,” Luis said through a deep exhale that sounded like he’d been holding something in. “But not now, and not in front of my daughter. Give me a call later, after 10, but before midnight, okay?”
“Thank you,” Brent said. “I knew I could count on you.”
Luis looked like he wanted to say something back, but only nodded, then said, “Talk to you later,” and went back inside.
10:40 p.m.
“Jesus, that is the craziest shit I’ve ever heard,” Luis said once Brent finally finished detailing everything from the moment he woke on October 15 to when the other Luis was killed by the Black Island Guard, then everything that followed, all the way until he was back in Ben’s bed, exhaling beside him.
“Do you believe me?” Brent said, not wanting to ask, afraid Luis might think him crazy, like Gina.
Luis said nothing for a while, adding to Brent’s apprehension. If Luis didn’t believe him, Brent wasn’t sure he had any chance with the others. Stan had been friendly enough on the other world, but the Earth-Stan ran when Brent tried to talk to him. And the other Melora was icy to start with, Brent had no reason to expect a warmer version on this world. Luis was his best — his only — hope: his friend. If one Luis trusted Brent with his life, Brent had to believe this one might, too.
Finally, Luis said, “Yes, I think so. But I’m not sure what good that will do you. I mean, you were there, not me. All I have are a few dreams that never came true.”
“That’s why I want to talk to the others — Stan, Melora, and the other woman who didn’t make it.”
“What do you mean the other woman who didn’t make it?”
“On the other world, when I met the 215ers, it was the other you, Stan, and Melora. They said there was another member of the group who was supposed to meet them and wait for The Event. But she never made it.”
“There’s no other woman in the group. But there is a man. And he didn’t make it, either.”
“What’s his name?” Brent asked.
Luis hesitated before answering. “Roman Rosetti, but his name don’t matter,” Luis said.
“Why’s that?”
“Because you’re not gonna be able to talk to him.”
“Why not?” Brent asked.
“Because on October 14, he walked into a veteran’s administration building and opened fire, shooting six people before turning the gun on himself.”
“Jesus!” Brent whispered. “And? He’s dead?”
“No, he ran out of ammo, oddly enough. Before Roman could reload, he was tackled. He’s locked up in Harrison Psychiatric Hospital, last I heard. We tried to visit, well, Melora did, but they wouldn’t let her see him.”
“Why do you think he did it? It must’ve had something to do with The Event, or the dreams, right?”
“I don’t know,” Luis said. �
��Roman hasn’t been right for a while, ever since his wife killed herself six years ago. I mean, he was already messed up from his time in the Air Force, so this pushed him over the edge. He started talking about black helicopters, aliens, government agents following him, tin foil hat shit … well, it seemed tin foil hat at the time, anyway.”
Air Force? Maybe he knew more about the aliens than just some dreams.
Brent’s journalistic wheels started spinning as he thought back on people he could contact for help getting to Roman. He had interviewed the hospital’s newest director, Mindy Benson, when she first took the job three years ago. They had hit it off, and she had reached out to Brent for a number of features. He wasn’t sure he had enough juice to see Roman, particularly since he was no longer a reporter or in any way valuable to the director, but he could certainly ask.
“Tell me, Luis, if I could get us in there, will you go with me? Would he talk to me with you there?”
“I don’t know,” Luis said. “He was kind of in and out of our group, never really opening up all that much. I don’t think he trusted us. What do you think he can tell you?”
“I don’t know, but my gut says if anyone knows something, it’s him.”
Ten
Ed Keenan
Black Island Research Facility
Ed and Sullivan stared into open laptops as they sat at a long table in the bright-white light of the main communications room, waiting for Frank Bolton, the Black Island Research Facility Director.
Bolton was the man who arranged for the expunging of Ed’s crimes the Agency had trumped up, in exchange for helping Sullivan track the alien threat. Bolton was in his early 50s, short and built like a brawler. His rock-like shoulders bookended a stone-cold, don’t-fuck-with-me stare. He never minced words and called shit like it was: exactly why Ed liked him. After dealing with too many silver-tongued bureaucrats in the Agency, Ed couldn’t stand the politics of bullshit.