by Adam Moon
The nerd nodded. “We should barricade the doors then.”
No one made a move but the nerd was right. Sandy came out of the kitchen with a broken board in her hands. She locked the front doors and then slid the board between the handles.
The cook, Steve, came out of the kitchen. His mouth dropped open at what he beheld outside the diner window. He was twitchy and sweaty and Neil hated that he prepared their food but he was also a large man who might just come in handy given their new circumstances. He asked everyone, “Where the hell are we?” like he thought any of them might know.
Neil said, “We don’t know.” Then he asked the room, “Did anyone else see the faces of the people who attacked the diner?”
The gutless young man and his wife stood up from behind the counter. He said, “I saw them.”
“What were they?”
“They looked like mountain men, armed to the teeth.”
Neil bit his lip. He considered telling them that their humanoid attackers were not men at all, but they had enough to contend with already so he kept it to himself, at least for the time being. Their view of reality had already been shattered and he didn’t want to make it any worse than it already was.
He asked, “Does anyone know how this could’ve happened?”
No one answered but a few heads turned towards the nerd, assuming, or hoping that he was a science buff. He cleared his throat and offered, “I don’t even know where we are so trying to guess how we got here is impossible.”
“Do you think we went back in time?” Neil asked with no humor in his voice. The woman with the coffee stain looked up at him and nodded her approval.
The nerd leaned forward and looked out the window. “I don’t think so. The fossil records don’t have anything even remotely like that bird that flew past the building.” He pointed up at the faint outline of the moon. “The further back in time you go, the bigger the moon would look because it was actually closer to the Earth. It moves away from us by an inch a year, so if we’d gone back in time it would look a bit bigger. I don’t think it looks any larger than normal so we’re not in the past or the future.”
“Then where the hell are we? Are we on another planet?”
“I already pointed out the moon,” he said with just a hint of annoyance to his tone. “That’s our moon. Just look at it. This is Earth.”
The teenager, hugging her knees in the booth, said, “Nowhere on Earth looks like this. I think we jumped to an alternate dimension.”
Her mom turned on her. “What does that mean?”
“It means I think we might be on an alternate timeline. But we’re in the same slice of time we lived in back in our universe.”
Her dad furrowed his brow and then turned to the nerd like he might be able to clarify.
The nerd shrugged so his daughter added, “Some people believe that all possible realities coexist side by side. The world could look much different in an alternate reality. Maybe in this reality the dinosaurs never died off. Or maybe a volcano that erupted on this Earth didn’t erupt on ours. Even a subtle difference in the past could lead to a very different present. If I’m right then we got really lucky. We could have been transported to a reality where the Earth didn’t even exist.”
The nerd nodded and added, “Nothing makes sense about all of this, but her story is at least plausible. Based on the size of the moon, this place is around the same age as our Earth. That means we must be on Earth but not the Earth that we know.”
Neil shook his head. He thought about countering with a more reasonable argument but he couldn’t come up with anything that didn’t sound nuts.
The nerd said, “My name’s Henry, in case anyone was wondering. You’ll have to excuse me. My stomach is acting funny.” He walked towards the bathrooms and Neil called after him, “Don’t flush. I’m pretty sure we don’t have sewage lines anymore.”
The younger couple took Henry’s lead and introduced themselves as Jack and Stacey. The middle aged couple said they were Jim and Pam and their daughter’s name was Kara. The woman with the wet coffee stain on her pants mumbled that her name was Valerie.
Neil said, “I’m Neil and this is Kim.”
The older man with the gun was too lost in the scenery outside the window to offer his name so Sandy said, “His name is Larry.” She pointed at her nametag and said, “Some of you already know me. I’m Sandy and the cook is Steve. He’s my brother.”
Steve added, “Well, technically I’m her half brother.”
That was news to Neil. He adored Sandy but Steve creeped him out. It was a surprise to find out they were related.
Everyone nodded uncomfortably to one another. Kim went around shaking each of their hands vigorously, except for Sandy’s. She gave Sandy a hug and said, “It’ll be alright. My dad will fix this.”
Neil avoided the gazes that fell upon him. There was no way to fix this and he knew it. Just minutes ago they’d seen an elderly couple netted and dragged off by dog-faced men and now they were on an alternate Earth. To say he was out of his element was an understatement.
Jim said, “We should offer a moment of silence for the elderly couple we lost.”
Neil shook his head. “We don’t know if they died. They could be fine for all we know. I’m not trying to be insensitive, but now might not be a good time for that. We have too much to consider.”
“You’re right. Did anyone know them?”
Sandy nodded. “They were nice. I didn’t get to know them too well but they were always kind to me. It’s a shame. They didn’t deserve that.”
Neil said, “We’re lucky we ended up here because if the diner hadn’t moved us we could’ve ended up captured too.”
He knew that what had happened with the diner was more than simply serendipitous. It seemed calculated. The diner vanished from their Earth because of the attack which meant someone or something had saved their lives.
A dark cloud appeared over the hills in the distance. At first he assumed a storm was rolling in. That was terrifying enough considering he had no idea how violent a storm could get on this world, but as the cloud thickened and moved in he realized it wasn’t a cloud at all, but a swarm.
Red winged insects as big as dinner plates flew at the diner. The first of them hit a window and cracked it. If one could do that much damage the swarm would overrun the place.
Neil yelled over the buzzing of the swarm, “Reinforce the windows. Use anything you can find, even if it’s your own body. If any of these windows break, those things will get in here with us.”
The diner was alive with movement as everyone secured their respective windows. The middle aged couple, Jim and Pam, used their backs on one and Sandy held two big serving trays against another. The sound of the bugs smacking the walls and windows was deafening, and the chittering sounds of agitation that came from the fallen bugs was enough to make their skin crawl.
A full five minutes of pure terror later and the swarm passed. A couple of windows had fresh cracks in them, but none had caved in.
Just as everyone gave a sigh of relief, the building rumbled and their vision swam in and out. The world outside slipped away like a wraith and was replaced by something else entirely.
They’d jumped again.
Larry, the old man, gripped his gun like he was choking it to death and stammered, “Where the hell did it take us? I need to get the hell out of here, man. I can’t take any more of this shit.”
The world outside was lush and overgrown like before but it was different. The foliage was dense and animal life was nonexistent so far, but there were signs of civilization, albeit faint signs, reclaimed by nature. A brick wall stood a quarter mile away. It had crumbled and the adjoining walls had all toppled. It was covered in clin
ging vines.
It was bizarre but somehow familiar.
Neil knew he had to do something to calm down the only guy with the gun so he put a hand on Larry’s shoulder and said, “Let’s take a walk and get some fresh air.” He hated to wander from the diner but he had to get Larry to relax.
The teenager, Kara, cautioned them, “Just be sure the air is breathable before you take in any deep breaths.”
Neil nodded. She was right.
He slid the board out and unlocked the door. The room gasped aloud when he opened it and walked out.
Kim started to cry. “Come back. What if the restaurant goes without you?”
“I’ll be right back. Trust me, honey.”
Sandy reassured her. “He’s just going to have a quick look around.”
Neil noticed two things right away. The air was freezing cold, and the place was eerily silent.
He let the door close behind him and took a quick walk around the diner, with Larry in tow. Around the side, he saw a distant bridge, but he saw no traffic crossing it. But the most curious thing he saw was the area surrounding the diner. It appeared that more than just the diner had been whisked away because a nearly perfect circle of parking lot and lawn had come with them from a previous earth. It was as if a bubble had been erected around the diner to transport it away. But there was a spot on the other side, where the circle was imperfect, and a part of the parking lot had been shaved off.
He had an idea. He ran back inside and said to Kim, “It’s safe out there, honey.” Then he said to Sandy and anyone else listening, “It looks like a little bit of the area surrounding the diner travels with us when we move so we’ll be safe as long as we stay within that area.” Then he went into the kitchen in search of a tape measure. When he came out with it, Valerie asked, “What do you need that for?”
“The area around the diner is nearly a perfect circle but there’s a bit where it looks like it’s been cleaved off. I might be way off base here, but what if there’s an epicenter somewhere in here?”
“I see. But that can’t be right or else the circle would be perfect.”
“Not if the epicenter moved from the first jump to this one. What if it was a perfect circle the first time, but then the source moved, and the new circle sliced off a chunk of the original circle?”
“Sounds crazy to me. If the source is in here, you’d think we’d have seen something controlling the jumps.”
“Maybe the source is invisible. I don’t know yet. It’s a hunch. Let me see where it leads me. I’ll be right back.”
Larry followed him back outside, clearly pleased to have something to do to keep him preoccupied. With Larry’s help, they marked out a perfect square around the inside of the circle, careful not to include the missing part so it didn’t throw off their results. Then they measured halfway across one side of the square and, at a right angle, drew a line in towards the diner that would bisect halfway across the opposite side of the square. Neil used a permanent marker to mark a spot on the window and another spot on the frame of the back door that led out of the kitchen. When he connected that line in the diner, he’d have his first reference point. Then he did the same to the other two opposite sides of the square and luckily both bisected windows.
He was pretty pleased with himself, and so far, the world hadn’t changed while he was outside. All he had to do was join the marks in the diner with string to see where it crossed and he’d know where the source was. He still had no idea if finding it would help them but he had to do something or he’d lose his damn mind.
Larry clapped him on the back and they started to go back in when they heard a ferocious thundering noise overhead that made them both crouch low to the ground. An aircraft of some sort swooped above them and then turned on its axis to face them. It hovered for a few seconds and then it descended. It would’ve been completely out of place on their Earth but it was especially ominous on a planet like this, where civilization was an ancient relic.
Neil grabbed Larry and pulled him inside. He barricaded the door, knowing just how foolish such a feeble act was, but he did it anyway.
Jack said hopefully, “Maybe they’re here to help us?”
Neil wasn’t so sure about that. The aircraft looked menacing and entirely alien to him.
The second it touched down, a door opened and heavily armed and very hairy men jumped out of it. The sight of them made Neil’s skin crawl. They looked exactly like the creatures that had attacked the diner back on their Earth. In fact, he was reasonably certain they were the same dog faced men. They ran at the diner ferociously, screaming incoherent battle cries as they got close. Larry panicked and fired off two rounds through the window, missing both times.
And then the building vibrated and moved out of that reality just in time because those dog-men looked like they wanted to tear their heads off.
Neil took a deep breath and said, “Those are the same people who attacked the diner back on our world. They followed us, somehow.”
Jack backed away from the windows and said, “You’re right. I thought they were just bearded men at first but I didn’t get a good enough look at them. Those things aren’t human. What should we do if they find us again?”
No one had an answer to that.
Sandy was shaking and Larry had his gun in a death grip. If the dog men were chasing them then it was only a matter of time before they were caught. None of them gave voice to their concerns but they all knew it was true. They were being hunted for some reason none of them could fathom.
They were so relieved to have left the dog-faced men behind that it took several seconds for it to sink in that the world outside was bereft of life. The land was barren and the skies were green and birdless. The air tasted funny, like it was bad for them.
Neil said, “Cover up the broken window with some cling film. I’ll find some tape. If the air out there is as rotten as it looks, we won’t last long here.” He noticed that the window that Larry had shot out while defending them from the dog-men was one of the windows he’d marked with the permanent marker. He marked a space halfway down the wrecked window in his mind’s eye and decided he could still get an approximate epicenter, if in fact the jumps were being controlled by some type of weird technology within the restaurant. But first they had to trap the air inside with them and seal out the noxious outside air. He just hoped they made it to the next jump, whenever that might occur.
The teenaged girl, Kara, asked, “Has anyone thought to time the jump intervals? Maybe we jump at a predetermined time, like fifteen or twenty minutes apart.”
None of them had thought of that. Kim pressed a button on her watch and said, “I think we’ve been here for a few minutes already so I’ll add that to the time I get when we jump again.”
Jack pulled his cell phone out and started a timer too. Neil wanted to wring his neck. Kim had finally found a purpose as part of the group, despite their weird predicament and Jack had unwittingly undermined it. Luckily Kim didn’t seem to notice or just didn’t care.
Jack said, “It’s no surprise but I don’t have any bars. Do you think if I called in to work, the signal would travel across dimensions and get picked up by my boss’s answering machine?”
His wife Stacey laughed but no one else did. She said, “You could give it a shot. But I don’t think you can be excused from work because you’re in another dimension. He might not believe you.”
Sandy said, “My phone turned off right before we jumped away from our Earth. The clocks all reset too. Maybe some sort of weird electrical occurrence is causing us to jump.”
It was a theory, but not one that got them any closer to a solution to their predicament.
The windows were sealed airtight and the door jambs too so they waited for the next jump, hoping the d
og-men didn’t find them first.
Neil had to keep busy so he picked up where he left off with his theory. He found a spool of twine in the kitchen and attached one end to one of his marks. He ran it across the dining room to the mark on the opposite window. Then he ran another string from the mark at the back door to the spot he remembered on the shot-out window.
Everyone watched his progress, curious to see if he was right.
Jack said loudly, “We’ve been here for twenty minutes now. We were only at the last place for half as long. I don’t think the jumps are timed.”
Kim frowned and turned off her timer.
Neil walked to where the strings crossed one another. They intersected over a booth. He checked under the table and then felt along the benches. He flipped the padded seats over but he found nothing unusual. Then Valerie suggested checking in the ceiling. He slid the drop-ceiling tiles away but all he found was dust and mouse droppings. “I guess I was wrong. There’s nothing here.”
Larry said, “Didn’t you say it had probably moved from the first jump to the second and that’s why a piece of the main circle was chopped off? Maybe someone moved it or has it on them.”
He turned to Sandy. “Who was sitting here right before we jumped from our dimension?”
She pointed at the nerd and to everyone’s surprise, he took off running toward the bathroom, but this time it wasn’t because of an upset stomach.
The Source
✨
NO ONE REACTED right away because none of them had expected that.
Jack asked, “Is that punk responsible for all of this? We need to catch him. What if he strands us here?”
Neil held his hands up to quiet the room before everyone yelled. “I’ll go and talk to him. If he’s responsible for the dimensional jumps then the only reason he’d leave us here is if he feels threatened.”
Jack balled his fists and countered Neil’s proposal with, “Don’t bother. I’ll kick the shit out of him and force him to talk. If he’s hiding some kind of device, I’ll get it from him.”
