Mind's Horizon

by Eric Malikyte

  "Why?" Mathias asked, adjusting his glasses. "It's not like there's anyone besides us who’s survived."

  "We don't actually know that," Eddy said. "And, you know, better safe than sorry."

  "I'm fairly certain that this is not the case." Mathias smiled, smugly. "It's statistically improbable at best."

  "Keep your educated guesses to the realm of science, where they belong, and let me worry about survival," Nico said. "You've got guard duty, end of story."

  Mathias crossed his arms and scowled.

  "Lena," Nico said.

  "Yes, Master, do I get to clean toilets or do you want me in the kitchen preparing you men a hearty feast for your return?" Lena asked.

  Lena’d had few skills before Nico and Ira came along, and Eddy hardly considered her bitchy attitude to be among them. The one skill she did have, she always pissed and moaned about having to do.

  "No, Lena," Eddy said. "We've found a med bay on the third level; you're going to go through and get acquainted with the machinery, and take inventory of all the medical supplies that are left."

  She sighed, obnoxiously. "Why don't you just have Ira do it for a change?"

  "Ira's not a nurse, moron," Nico said.

  "Ira's also working on decoding the files in the mainframe in order to understand what happened here," Eddy said. "I'm sure you'd hate to find your skin boiling cause your bed was infested with Measure 86."

  "Don't even joke about that!" Lena shouted.

  "Who said I'm joking?" Eddy's shit-eating grin faded when he saw how Nico was looking at him. "Right, I'll shut up."

  "In any case, Ira is not to be disturbed," Nico said.

  "How convenient." Lena said.

  "Ahem." Ira's voice boomed through the chamber. "Is this thing on?"

  "Speak of the devil," Lena said, coughing into her hand.

  "We read you, sis." Nico said.

  "Cool, get your asses up here. You need to see this."

  5

  Ira sulked back into her chair and watched the others gather round in the dim blue light of the mainframe room. Lena stood in front of Hugo, arms crossed, complete with resting bitch face; Mathias lurked at the back of the room like a ghost; Eddy came next to her and grabbed a chair; and Nico split the pack and stood in the middle.

  "Let's see it," Nico said.

  "Hope you didn't eat lunch today." Ira pushed play.

  A small, slender man sporting a lab coat and a large messy black beard with interspersed gray stared back at them. Dark circles and bloodshot eyes accented his face, like he hadn't slept in days. He cleared his throat.

  "After numerous unmanned tests of the equipment on apes and smaller animals, today marks the beginning of our human trials. This is the last hope for us avoiding this disaster... The equations are solid, all we've got to do now is test them for real.

  "Soon, with any luck, we'll be able to open the gateway to another reality."

  "Another reality?" Lena asked.

  "Shush." Ira fast-forwarded to another part of the video.

  "Experiment 5A," the scientist said.

  The camera panned around to an observation room, similar to the one Ira had seen the day before. There, in the center of the room, was an operating table, and a man strapped to it. His face was painted with worry. Tubes and readout wires were taped to various parts of his naked body, just like they’d seen on the corpse.

  "Daniels, are you ready?" the scientist asked.

  "Yeah, doc, I guess."

  "You're going to experience some pain, Daniels, but it'll pass. Remember your training in the deprivation chamber."

  "Just flip the damn switch, doc."

  "You heard him. Commence experiment."

  An opaque green liquid filled Daniels' veins. His face tightened. His body jerked with intense violent convulsions, testing the tensile strength of his restraints. His screams filled the testing chamber; but the scientists remained calm.

  The glass pyramid lit up, until all but Daniels' body was obscured by its light. Artifacts crept into the video, like a VHS tape getting chewed up.

  Daniels' eyes clouded over. A high-pitched whine spread through the room, and Daniels' screams rose in octave to match it.

  Ira wanted to avert her eyes.

  "Remember your training, Daniels. Transference does not come from the drugs or the machinery. It must come from inside, at the mind's horizon!"

  A white substance foamed around Daniels' mouth, stifling his screams into an incoherent gurgling. But the worst was yet to come. Daniels' body began to calm, and his breathing returned to normal.

  "Alpha and beta waves are where they should be, Doctor Weber."

  "Good," Weber said. "Turn it on."

  Things seemed to calm down for a bit... Then the outer ring of the experiment chamber began to glow white-hot, and the walls vibrated with a terrible mechanical whisper. Daniels' body twitched and writhed in place; his eyes rolled back into his head, and the lights pulsed on and off, on and off.

  The glowing glass pyramid around him started to shake, rattling like an old rusted Chevy in its death throes.

  Daniels' convulsions managed to shake the whole table he was on; the bolts securing it to the concrete exploded. His mouth opened wide, as if something unseen had grabbed his jaw and yanked it open. Out came an impossibly loud, guttural repetition of spoken words, something like a Buddhist chant, but if Satan himself had done the chanting. His mouth remained open, but his lips did not move, as if his mouth was being used as some kind of fleshy speaker.

  The chants caused terrible things to flash through Ira's mind. Her nightmare came to life, and she could almost feel the air of that dead place embrace her. The beast was still staring at her. Seven glowing gray eyes opened, regarding her with nothing but contempt.

  She almost screamed, but Daniels' chants stopped, and with that, her visions of that hellish place faded like a memory.

  "Sir, he's flatlining," one of the technicians said. "If we don't turn it off and administer the sedative, he'll die!"

  "Don't you fucking touch it," Doctor Weber said. "We're so close."

  The painted symbols around the pyramid started to shake, lifting off the ground as if they were composed of some viscous material—then wavered, tore themselves to pieces, like fracturing pages, and were sucked into the light emanating from the pyramid.

  There was a loud explosion. Sparks flew from the machinery, and the glass pyramid shattered into thousands of deadly shards. Those shards fell, stabbing into Daniels' body like a pincushion. Daniels stopped twitching for a moment. His eyes were open, his chest rose and fell, but something was missing in his stare.

  "Shit!" someone screamed.

  "Someone get in there and take his damn pulse," Weber said. "And cut the recording, you imbecile!"

  The lights continued to flicker... Then everything went dark, and the footage stopped.

  "What the fuck did you just make us watch?" Hugo asked.

  "I dug ahead to another video,” Ira said. “Daniels died in that experiment.”

  "The mind's horizon," Mathias said, as if he were rolling the words around in his mouth.

  "Yeah, what is that?" Eddy asked.

  "I can't be sure," Mathias said. "I've never heard of anything like that. But from what the scientist said at the beginning of the video log, it seems as if they were using this base to experiment with some form of dimensional transference. Though this method doesn't make any sense to me, and frankly, smacks of the occult rather than the scientific. Truly strange."

  Ira nodded: for once she agreed with Mathias.

  "We need to be careful here," Eddy said.

  "Yeah..." Ira turned to Nico. "Still think we should stay here?"

  Nico's eyes found hers, and she saw no fear in them. She wondered if he was even paying attention. "This changes nothing. So what if these scientists were experimenting with dimensional travel? They're not here now. So, either they left, or they succeeded. Either way, we still need to survive, and t
his place is as good a shelter as we're going to get."

  "But that wasn't just any experiment," Ira said. "Did you even watch the video? Did you hear that chant?"

  Eddy nodded. "He wasn't even moving his lips."

  "I have to agree with Nico here," Mathias said. "This place is a goldmine for resources, not to mention knowledge. What if these people found a way off this world and onto another?"

  "I can't believe I'm hearing this!" Ira shouted.

  "I'm surprised the opportunity doesn't excite you, Ira," Mathias said. "The chance to get off this icy hell and live a normal life?"

  "Drop it, Mathias," Eddy said. "We're not looking to break any dimensional barriers, just trying to survive here."

  "That's right," Nico said. "I don't want you screwing with anything in those experiment chambers. I don't care how smart you think you are, I won't have you unleashing a flesh-eating bacteria or blowing the damn place up on us."

  Mathias crossed his arms.

  "As for the rest of you," Nico said. "We've got work to do. Lena and Mathias, get to it. Eddy and Hugo, follow me."

  They filed out of the doorway; Nico turned back to Ira.

  "What?" she asked.

  "Good work, sis," Nico said, and then he was gone.

  The hatch closed behind him, and Ira felt as though she had made things worse. Why didn't they feel the all-encompassing sense of dread that she did?

  Mathias was right; it wasn't science that those people had been practicing. Not with those strange symbols. It was some horrific mash-up between the occult and science.

  It was madness.

  And yet, Mathias's suggestion about the occult had not been made out of fear; rather, it’d sounded as if he was intrigued.

  She shuddered and drew Woobie tighter around herself.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Eddy's boots sank deep into the snow. The weather was as calm as he could hope for, given the circumstances. Blue skies and only a slight stinging breeze to contend with. He almost felt like removing his facemask. How long had it been since he'd felt the sunlight on his naked skin?

  Nico had managed to find an incline of snow that snaked its way around to the entrance of their newfound home. He'd parked the snowmobile at the top, but the one Eddy'd rode in on was still at the base of the cliff. Nico was busy reattaching the battery to the snowmobile and Hugo was busy standing around looking useless. There was no sense risking a climb back down the cliff, so he took the twisting path—what might have been a dirt road leading to the facility before the ice age—instead.

  He stopped and took a quick glance around. He was near the bottom, and the snowmobile was just a hundred feet away, blanketed by a dusting of snow. Nico and Hugo drove past him and halted to a stop, kicking up a cloud of ice.

  "You'll ride with Ramirez," Nico said.

  Hugo dismounted from the snowmobile and stood next to Eddy.

  "I got you, B," Hugo said.

  "Try not to fall behind, Ramirez."

  "Right," Eddy said.

  Nico revved the engine. It stung the air with its harsh buzzing. His snowmobile took off across the snowy landscape toward Riverside.

  "Why's he gotta' be such an asshole," Hugo said.

  "You're asking the wrong guy, man," Eddy said.

  Eddy turned back and continued to march his way through the snow toward the snowmobile. They both spent a few minutes brushing the loose snow off of it, then took their seats. The engine buzzed and Eddy took off after Nico.

  He made his way over the next hill, and the decrepit and frozen skyline of downtown Riverside crept into view. Nico was just a klick ahead of them; Eddy noticed him look over his shoulder at a distance.

  They continued on into the ruins of the city. Collapsed buildings, covered in sheets of ice and snow, cascaded toward the horizon on either side of their view.

  While most of the destruction was the result of the incredible weight of snow and ice forming around and above the city, some of it had been left in the wake of the battle for the Mission Inn.

  Eddy remembered it well. He could almost see the ghosts of those long-forgotten soldiers, their boots slapping against pavement, their guns rattling and flashing into the night, the screams of civilians and soldiers alike, echoing through the whole city like phantoms in the night.

  The Revolutionists had been using the Mission Inn as a base of operations during a large-scale lockdown of the city. The hotel had been deserted for months since the outbreak of the war, as had been true for most of the downtown area of Riverside. It had been, in many ways, their last stand in Southern California. Many had speculated that, if the war had continued any further, the Feds would have won.

  Eddy followed Nico up to one of the auxiliary entrances to the old shelter and brought the snowmobile to a stop. A plume of icy crystals filled the air in their wake.

  They were on University Avenue, near the old performing arts center. This entrance to the tunnels was housed inside an old bar called Lake Alice, one that had seen some traffic from celebrities before the war erupted.

  "Here we are," Eddy said.

  Nico kept his engine running. " Hugo can help me with Cache A, B and gather up the weapons. Ramirez, head inside and grab the supplies in Cache C. Make sure you get to the west wing and grab all the batteries and miscellaneous supplies you can think of. We'll meet back here in an hour."

  Eddy glared at Nico for a few moments longer than he should have; Nico's eyes focused through his goggles on him.

  "Got something to say?" Nico asked.

  Eddy got off the snowmobile, shook his head. He watched Hugo walk over and take a seat behind Nico, then they drove off. Eddy pushed the war to the back of his mind and considered the entrance. The large metal K was still sticking out of the snow, its protruding bits covered in rust and frost, but the rest of the Lake Alice sign had been buried. The windows on both floors had long since been shattered; the interior was worse. The bar was still there, but it was covered in ice. The alcohol that had once sat behind the counter had been looted in the early days, and the stage off to his right was covered in ice and fresh snow.

  Eddy remembered going there a few times in his youth, trying to use a fake ID, and getting escorted home by the cops after getting caught.

  He walked through a long hallway, which used to be covered in celebrity placards. He heard a crunch and looked down.

  It was a placard.

  He bent down and picked it up.

  "Arnold Schwarzenegger," he said, chuckling. He leaned it back up against the wall and continued to the stairwell.

  After descending the stairwell, he passed the remnants of bricks and shattered, frozen bits of stucco used by the long-dead owners of the place to seal it off from the tunnels below. Now he found himself in the basement, where a locked gate blocked his access to the tunnels. He pulled out a key from his pants pocket and unlocked it. When he opened the gate, its rusty hinges creaked so loud it made his ears hurt, ice cracking around its frame.

  After walking for a while, he passed the red safety marker and removed his facemask. The smell of stale air, mold, and dust crept into his nostrils. The unique smell of home. His hand reached out and flipped a circuit breaker. Lights ignited above him, following sporadically along the path ahead, making a familiar plinking sound that filled every dusty crevice.

  Their old shelter had scattered offshoots throughout most of the downtown area. Due to the sub-zero temperatures, the only place they could live, even semi-comfortably, was underground. Downtown Riverside had a series of catacombs and underground utility passages beneath the streets that had made for the perfect hiding spot to survive the apocalypse.

  Eddy rounded the next corner. The food storage area was just a few hundred feet away. He passed one of the barricades to another part of the tunnel system. The chicken wire looked like it'd been torn up by something. A bad sign.

  Rats and cockroaches were a common problem down here, but the mountain lions and coyotes rarely ever made it past the chic
ken wire.

  Nico had killed the few that had made it through. Roast coyote and mountain lion ain't so bad when you've been living off of protein bars and MREs for months.

  Mathias had gone on once about how coyotes and cougars were the last true survivors of the previous ice age. That they would survive this one by scavenging the carcasses of those unlucky enough to have died in the icy tundra of the valley.

  As the population of prey animals dwindled, it left these animals fewer and fewer options.

  Human probably tastes better than rat, Eddy thought.

  He continued on to the cache. With every step, the sounds of crunching gravel echoed throughout the tunnel. Stealth was not an option.

  He rounded the corner. The door to Cache C was open already.

  His hair rose on end at the first sight of its silhouette, and, by instinct alone, he found his back slapped right up against the dusty stone wall. The mountain lion continued sniffing through containers, pawed at some protein bars that had been left lying around.

  Shit, he thought. Why do I always have to be right?

  Eddy's heartbeat intensified, adrenaline filled him, and his eyes frantically scanned the room for anything that might help him fend off the animal. The mountain lion sniffed through box after box, probably searching for something filled with a warm gooey center. The animal looked thin, emaciated, and its movements were slow and lethargic.

  This was what made them so dangerous: most of the surviving population in the region would be starving with the dwindling population of prey animals in the area, making them desperate for that next meal. Eddy's eyes locked on a broom in the corner of the room, not exactly an ideal weapon of choice. His hand found the nine-millimeter that was holstered at his side, slowly unlatched the fastener. He had two options; either he would scare it off by threatening it, or take a shot at it and hope he didn't miss.

  Eddy took in a deep breath and slowly drew his sidearm. The mountain lion's ears jabbed into the air, and its desperate, wild eyes locked onto his body. It began to pace around him, hissing quietly. His thumb cranked back the hammer, and his index finger slowly put pressure on the trigger.

  It leapt forward, and Eddy fired several times before it could pin him against the wall. It reared its head back and clamped down on his shoulder. He screamed, fire engulfing his left shoulder as he shoved the barrel of the gun to the animal's cranium.