Lincoln, Fox and the Bad Dog

by D Roland Hess

  Boom

  “How does that help us?” said Gwen. The panic I’d seen on her in the physical world was starting to creep in.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “We need more time.”

  I decided that down the next alley there was a bank with a huge, very secure vault. Inside the vault was a nice laptop with an Internet connection.

  Would that work? Who knows. But it was worth a shot. Maybe we could somehow get a message outside of this state to… who? I didn’t even know. But when in doubt: Internet.

  I jumped ahead of Gwen, and this time pulled her to the right, down the alley toward my bank. It was there like I’d willed. I turned my head and caught a glimpse of something very, very large coming into view.

  Brigit, a good twenty-feet tall and looking mean as hell.

  She was smashing things as she came.

  I poured my will into the fact that there was a rocket launcher behind me. I turned around, and picked it up.

  “Get inside!” I shouted.

  Gwen moved behind me, but didn’t leave. I could feel her hand on my shoulder.

  “Light her up,” she said.

  I hefted the rocket launcher, but when I went to sight it in, the scope wasn’t real. I squeezed frantically at the trigger, but it was just a single piece with the handle. The whole thing seemed like a big, molded plastic prop.

  Brigit picked up a parked car and threw it toward us.

  We ran inside the building.

  “Did you do this too?” said Gwen.

  I just nodded and headed for where I knew the vault was.

  I hoped the vault had better engineering than the rocket launcher.

  I had a picture in my head of little kids playing war. Shot you. No you didn’t. Yes I did. Nyu-uh, force field. But I have anti-force-field bullets. But I have armor that’s proof against those. No you don’t. Yes I do.

  Is that what we were about to do? See whose imagination was stronger?

  There had to be more to it than that.

  We ran into the vault. I closed it and set the elaborate locking mechanism behind us.

  The computer sat in front of me. A beautiful little terminal with a blinking cursor.

  I typed one word.

  help

  “That’s your plan?” said Gwen.

  The ground shook.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sorry.”

  And now I realized just how stupid it was. I’d been able to do one thing, sort of control the environment, and instead of summoning mountain ranges or tanks or giants, I’d trapped us.

  “It kind of sucks,” I said.

  She looked at the floor.

  “It’s not your best, but it’s okay.”

  “No, it’s not even okay.”

  She hugged me.

  “Lincoln,” she said into my neck. “I meant it’s okay that you did something that kind of sucks. And this sucks.”

  “Oh.”

  The whole vault slammed to the right, and we went down. Empty safe deposit boxes went flying from their slots in the walls.

  There was a massive shock like someone had slammed a bus into the top of the vault. Which may have been what happened. We couldn’t see though because we had stupidly trapped ourselves in an imaginary bank vault.

  The concussion happened again. Then again and again.

  The vault held.

  I found I’d lost the strength I’d had when we were running. My muscles were jello again.

  I tried to imagine a fifty caliber machine gun mounted on the floor near our feet but nothing happened. Maybe that only worked while you were moving. I had no idea.

  Gwen sat on the ground with me. She held my hand. The pounding made it too loud to bother trying to say anything.

  After about a dozen times, it stopped.

  The power had gone out inside, leaving us in complete darkness save for the dull green bit of luminescence cast by the word on the computer monitor.

  Then, a crack of light showed around the edge of the door. It grew.

  Brigit was pulling the door away from the vault.

  There wasn’t really anything we could do to stop her, so we watched it happen.

  The vault door broke free, and a giant hand sent it sailing away into a gathering mist. Looking out, I could see that the city was mostly gone around us. Some rubble here and there. Some rebar. But in general, it was just grey nothingness all around, a completely non-directional light having replaced what had looked like sunshine before. It felt like a layer of realism had been peeled away, and we were seeing things on a more elemental level.

  I glanced at Gwen, and she looked different. I could still tell it was her, but I’m not sure why. She literally looked like a different person. Her Gwen-ness was there though. I could tell from the look on her face that she was probably thinking the same thing about me.

  Brigit looked to be maybe thirty feet tall now, but perspective was suddenly hard to judge. Maybe she was a mile high and very far away. Like I said, it was hard to tell. Her face was wildly distorted with strange spiky bumps along her jawline. No eyebrows. She didn’t have eyes. I blinked, and she did. Then they were gone again.

  She said something to us, but when she spoke, her voice sounded like a screaming wind and I couldn’t understand the words. I didn’t need to.

  We were going to die.

  The horrible gigantic Brigit dropped to her knees so that she could reach into the vault. When she hit the ground, a deep and subtle rumbling began like she’d triggered some kind of tremor.

  Distracted by it for a second, she raised her chin and turned her head around, trying to locate the source of the sound.

  I noticed instantly that there was a rhythm to it. It came in fours, with a brief break between the sets.

  babababoom

  babababoom

  Brigit stood up, putting her hands out at arm's length to the side like she was feeling the air.

  I gave Gwen’s hand a squeeze.

  “Come on,” I said to her, and the sounds that came from my mouth weren’t recognizable.

  Gwen nodded.

  We pulled ourselves to our feet and ran out of the vault. Brigit, distracted by the growing rumble, did not notice us.

  We ran.

  The sound that had been just a directionless tremor at first was becoming more localized. More distinct. I decided that whatever it was, it was almost certainly inconceivably huge, and we should be running away from it.

  And then it didn’t matter because the something was here.

  I could sense it, and I guessed that Gwen could too because she stopped running at the same time that I did. We turned together, and I saw that Brigit had also turned. We all faced in the same direction - toward the source of the oncoming sound.

  It was slowing, and its cadence changed from four strikes and a pause to an evenly spaced cacophony. Each strike felt like a massive burst of ordinance going off underground.

  Then, they stopped.

  A silence fell over the world.

  The mist that made up the horizon and sky swirled. It crept toward us, seeming to materialize out of the ground.

  Something emerged.

  The perspective effect happened again, but this time it made it seem like the thing that had arrived was quite possibly the size of a planet and very far away or maybe only skyscraper-sized and right at our feet. Regardless, it towered over all of us, and its scale was dizzying. However big its body seemed to be though, its sense of presence was even larger. All encompassing. I knew that no matter where I looked, somehow it was big enough that I would still see it. Even if I tore my eyes from my head.

  HELLO, it said, and the voice came from everywhere. The mist, the rubble and even the light around us seemed to shout the word from all directions at once. My legs buckled under the force of the sound, and I found myself on my knees once again.

  Gwen was too. Her hand grasped the air between us, trying to find mine, and I struggled to lace my numbed fingers with hers.

&
nbsp; It had put Brigit down too, but she was pushing herself back to her feet already.

  I felt no need to do likewise.

  Whatever the massive, terrifying thing was, I had been unable to get a good look at it. The scale, the mists, the bizarre perspectives and probably some property of this weird place had prevented any kind of pattern recognition from kicking in.

  But now that the mists shifted again, it resolved for me like I’d put on a pair of glasses, and I was filled with the knowledge that I recognized it only because the thing was allowing itself to be recognized.

  Towering above us, above this entire plane of existence, stood a black, winged creature. Its feathered front legs ended in ebony talons. The leathery tail was tipped with a structure that resembled a spade from a deck of cards. The wings spread upward and at some point became indistinguishable from the sky. The rest of the body and the head was that of a massive black wolf.

  I recognized the eyes.

  THANK YOU, it said. The everywhere-voice terrified and elated me at the same time.

  Brigit turned away from it and tried to run. She ran and ran, but it didn’t seem that she was moving at all.

  THANK YOU FOR BRINGING THEM, it said, WHERE I AM UNBOUND.

  There was hunger in the voice. Horrible, bottomless hunger. It awoke feelings inside me that I didn’t know were there. I had bizarre mental flashes of eating, tearing, everything. I could tell that my breath was ragged, and my heart was beating with a strange arrhythmia. There were tears on my face.

  Babd extended her right front leg and with a flick, knocked Brigit to the ground, face down. She placed the point of one talon—was it the size of a javelin? the Washington Monument? Everest?—against Brigit’s back. She squirmed like a bug, but couldn’t get away.

  Babd wiggled her talon back and forth, playing. I wanted to not look but couldn’t close my eyes. Brigit writhed and kicked and strained.

  The talon raised, and Brigit struggled to her feet.

  Babd put her down again.

  The fabric of reality began to laugh all around me.

  Babd placed the black talon in the middle of Brigit’s back gingerly, like a mother soothing a waking baby.

  Mortal girl, said the world in a whisper that could shatter continents, these are my friends.

  Babd drove her talon downward, and Brigit ceased to exist.

  The leg retreated slowly, and I was struck by the sense of impossibility that anything so huge could be alive, let alone move like she did. No sign of Brigit remained.

  And suddenly the snout, the teeth, the face of the wolf were right against my own. I can’t describe how it’s possible because of the scales involved, but there it was. A wolf’s face the size of the moon, nose to nose with me, and somehow I could still see the whole thing.

  I felt an exhalation wash over me, followed by a great drawing in, and it was like my soul wanted to follow the retreating hurricane around us, flow from my body to mingle with the dust of the universe within its massive lungs.

  And then it was gone. The presence vanished, leaving in its wake a psychic vacuum that reverberated inside my head like a nuclear shockwave.

  I looked at Gwen. She sat dumbstruck on the ground, eyes closed and tear-stained, her mouth moving slowly as if she were praying.

  A few seconds later, I heard the padpadpad of paws from ahead.

  Plain, normal-sized paws.

  A dog, small and black, trotted out of the mist. It picked its way across the small bits of rubble that remained.

  She came up to us and licked our faces. The smelly, doggy wetness of it did something to me, restoring my senses. Things seemed to normalize. I felt almost like myself.

  In the distance, I heard the call of a crow.

  Babd licked Gwen too.

  Then, she sat down in the rubble in front of us. The grey everything started to retreat, and hints of blue appeared in the sky. The light began to coalesce into something more directional.

  “That…” I said, and my voice sounded like a voice again.

  I could hear Gwen beside me, breathing irregularly.

  I felt it, too. We had touched something incomprehensible, and now it was gone.

  Babd did the dog-shrug thing.

  “Sometimes, I’m a bad dog,” she said. “Let’s go back.”

  With that, my vision tunneled like I was about to faint, and suddenly I was in the foyer of Gwen’s apartment building.

  I could hear traffic outside. I looked around, and Gwen and I locked eyes for a second.

  I felt… normal. Real. Very, extremely real.

  On the ground behind us lay Brigit. She looked like she was sleeping, but I knew without a doubt that she was as dead as the tomato garden at my house.

  In the open door to the building sat Babd, tongue happily lolling out the side of her mouth.

  “Hello,” she said. “I got your message.”

  She trotted in toward us.

  Gwen and I both knelt down.

  Babd licked us and licked us, and I dug my fingers into her shoulders, scratching and petting. I nuzzled my face into the fur on her neck.

  “Good dog,” I told her. “You’re a good, good dog.”

  Chapter 15

  It used to be that I could see five steps ahead of everything. It’s why I was so fast and good at development and engineering tasks. I wasn’t always perfect, but you can cut so much time out of things when your first guess is the right one. Sometimes in the distant past, I’d felt like something in my brain was showing me all of the possibilities ahead like a panoply of parallel universes splayed out in front of me. The ones that had the most overlap would be the most distinct, and the most likely to actually happen. I’d look at them, and I could orient myself toward the ones I liked and start walking.

  I could go out drinking at night, something would spark a thought for me, and Monday I’d come into the lab and know everything I needed to do to make something new and brilliant happen. A lot of people loved it. Some people hated it.

  That was a long time ago. Since then, a lot had changed.

  I still went by my gut most of the time, but the certainty was gone.

  The part of my mind that had always worked overtime for me to sort through the chaos of probability had given up.

  I guess it figured that it had failed so massively to anticipate the disaster with my family that it had decided to pack its bags and head to Fiji for an early retirement.

  It used to be that once I had a critical mass of information, it was goddamn scary how right I could be and how often.

  Sometimes over the last few years, if I applied myself, I could get it back in a really focused fashion, like building SparkleOS and Fox. But I had to work like crazy for it, and I couldn’t rely on it for general guidance.

  But as of now, it was back.

  Maybe I’d just finally achieved critical mass on everything that had happened over the last year.

  Maybe being touched by what seemed to be Babd’s true form had restored something or sorted me out.

  Or maybe I was finally completely losing it. I certainly felt kind of high.

  But I could see it.

  Kneeling there on the floor with Gwen and Babd, Brigit’s body cooling behind us, I could see all the roads ahead. Everything. What was likely to happen if we fled. If we stayed. If I tried to work things out with Dan. If I went after him. The chaos of the future swirled in front of me and fell into resolution at the touch of my hand, like it had in the past.

  Probabilities only, I knew. But I could see them, and sort them, and deal them out like a deck of cards. And like so many other times, the ability to see it was followed immediately by the map through it.

  At long last, I had gotten my proverbial shit together.

  “We’re not running,” I said.

  “Like hell we’re not,” said Gwen. “Didn’t you hear her? Dan has a bunch of them out looking for us.”

  “We can’t run. They’re not our only concern. The other Praeca
nts -- they’ll be making their way here, and they’ll be coming after me. If you want to run, you’d be better off doing it on your own.”

  Gwen shifted on her haunches, kissed Babd on the head.

  “That,” she said, “sounds absolutely terrifying.”

  “It should,” I said. “They’ll find you and use you to get to me.”

  “You’re that important, huh?”

  “Yeah. I think I probably am.”

  “Wow,” said Gwen. “Let’s add narcissism to your list of pluses.”

  “Believe me or don’t,” I said. “It’s a fact. And if it makes you feel better about my self-opinion, how about we don’t call me ‘important’ so much as ‘high value target’.”

  “I can live with that,” she said.

  “Let’s hope so,” I said. “Here’s what we need to do: first, we get this body out of here. So start thinking.”

  “It looks delicious,” said Babd.

  “No,” I said. “You’re not eating her.”

  “Jay Kay,” said Babd.

  I was puzzled for a moment, then…

  “Oh,” I said. Great. The dog was learning IM slang.

  “Second, I need to set the Fox hardware up, somewhere safe. Then, I need to get in touch with one of my professional contacts.”

  “And that will do what?” said Gwen.

  “Help us locate Dan.”

  “At which time we’ll do what?”

  “We won’t do anything because you won’t be going. But he and I are going to have a serious discussion, and he is going to listen to reason.”

  “And if you’re only going to have a discussion, why shouldn’t I be going?”

  “Seriously?”

  “What do you mean, seriously?”

  “Is this a feminism thing?”

  She punched me in the shoulder, hard. It hurt.

  “You remember the park, right? And everything else? I do. You said you didn’t want any part of that kind of thing for very good reasons. I’m going to talk to him, but he’s a freaking psychopath, and there are no guarantees. That’s why you shouldn’t be going.”

  She looked pissed.

  “Listen to Past Gwen, who wasn’t high on whatever the hell just happened to us. Past Gwen is way smart.”