The Beautiful Land

by Alan Averill

  The city in which Tak finds himself is a massive thing that must have once teemed with life. Surely the people who lived here wouldn’t recognize the silence of the place now; they probably never knew a time when things weren’t loud and bustling and wonderfully alive. Judging by the height of the buildings that tower around him—as well as the occasional fine suit he sees shrouding a skeleton—Tak appears to have landed in the financial district. Cars litter the streets and sidewalks, and a few have even slammed into the sides of buildings. These broken wrecks are marked with odd, unrecognizable names: “Solaris,” “Technic,” “Fananza,” “Grin.” They look similar to cars from the solid timeline although most have four or five tailpipes where there should be one. When Tak peers into the passenger’s-side window of one accordioned Fananza, he sees a joystick instead of a steering wheel.

  His legs are coming back to him now, so he picks up the pace. At the next intersection, he finds an overturned tractor trailer with a picture of a young woman on the side. She’s holding her hands to the sky as happy-faced pens and pencils dance like maniacs around her head. YOU WON’T BELIEVE THE SAVINGS! claims the tagline at the bottom of the image. The rear of the trailer has been shorn off by the crash, revealing a collection of soggy cardboard boxes scattered around the interior. When Tak clambers inside and tears one open, he’s disappointed to find a computer printer staring back. He looks through a few more boxes on the off-chance they contain bottled water, Cheetos, or some other staple of the modern white-collar diet, but all he finds are sodden electronics and a discarded beer can.

  Abandoning the truck, he continues down the street, eyes roaming the city as he searches for possible shelter. Some buildings are little more than crumbled heaps of concrete and steel, as if a giant child destroyed them with a tantrum. Others are simply too dark and foreboding, and these he passes on as well. He stumbles upon a small corner deli that looks promising, but when he tries to open the door, a pile of skeletal remains pushes back against him. Rather than try to clear the bones and fight his way inside, he just moves on.

  As he travels, Tak picks up anything that could be helpful. His treasures include a can of grape soda from the bottom of a garbage can and a length of chain purloined from the trunk of a smashed car. At one point, a plastic bag emblazoned with the words GAS & MUNCH blows past him. He snatches it out of the air and stuffs his finds inside, then ties the handles around one of his belt loops to create a makeshift purse.

  The buildings are getting smaller now, but if anything, the disaster seems more widespread. Most of the dwellings are covered with a thick layer of soot and ash, reminding Tak of the postapocalyptic video games he used to play in high school. The bodies are also more numerous, and some have clearly been felled by their fellow man. He passes one with a power drill sticking out of the rib cage, another with a machete embedded between the eyes. At some point he turns a corner and finds a gigantic pile of bones stacked into a grim pyramid. They are covered with a black substance that looks like motor oil, but when Tak attempts to run a finger over it, the entire stack wobbles precariously. Not wanting to hear the sound of a hundred collapsing bodies—or discover what such a thing might smell like—he quickly skitters around the side of the structure and moves on.

  Finally, he comes to a stop in front of a grey building perhaps twenty stories high. The glass front doors are miraculously intact, and he can see faded gold lettering beneath a layer of dark, dusty ash. When he approaches the door and runs a sleeve across the front, five words appear as if by magic: riverside steps at the pearl.

  “The Pearl?” muses Tak. “Am I in Portland? No, wait, this can’t be Portland. Portland’s full of hippies. They wouldn’t kill each other with drills…. Right?”

  The empty city does not reply, so rather than think about it, he pulls one of the front doors open and steps inside. Once in the lobby, he is immediately greeted by the sight of a skeleton with no head nailed to the far wall. Next to the body, someone has spray painted a rough drawing of what appears to be a vulture, along with the words RUN BITCH RUN.

  “Well, hell,” says Tak. “I was afraid of that.”

  He worms his way through a makeshift barrier of moldy, broken furniture—taking special care not to disturb the art-deco wall hanging—and locates the stairs. His goal is to get to the top floor, then take a few hours to rest and figure out his next move. The penthouse will give him a good view of the city, and if there happens to be water or food there, well then, so much the better.

  With legs cranky and sore, Tak begins the long trek up. At the landing for floor seven, he finds a dry puddle of blood nearly an inch thick. It trails away up the stairs, occasionally leaping to the handrail, until it finally ends with a single red handprint smeared on the door to floor fourteen. Tak makes a mental note to never go to that floor, no matter how desperate things get. He just doesn’t even want to know.

  Finally, he reaches the end of the staircase and finds a door marked 22, as well as a ladder that leads up and away into blackness. The ladder is probably roof access, but he has no interest in such things right now; instead, he shoulders through the door and onto the top floor of the condominium.

  He emerges in a long hallway with plush brown carpet and tasteful, if somewhat generic, modern art on the walls. To his surprise, there isn’t a penthouse suite—instead, he has a choice between about a dozen identical doors. Tak moves down the hall, trying handles until he finds one that turns under his grip. He drops to one knee and puts his eye to the floor, searching for movement. When a minute passes, and nothing happens, he reaches into the plastic bag at his hip, withdraws the chain, and wraps two lengths of it around his hand. Thus armed, he stands up, twists the knob, and goes barging into the condo with his fist raised and ready for trouble.

  The front door opens directly into a kitchen/living room combo, the latter of which contains a black leather couch, a decent-looking television, and stacks of unfamiliar gaming consoles. A large set of windows on the far wall look out over the city, its structures tall and grey and utterly deserted. To the left of the windows, a glass door leads to an outside deck maybe ten feet in length. Tak drops his chain and steps outside for a breath of fresh air but quickly finds himself creeped out by the idea of standing watch over a dead city. Retreating inside, he explores the rest of the unit, finding a bedroom with an unmade bed, a closet with a handful of dark T-shirts, and a small, somewhat dirty bathroom. The toilet bowl is completely dry, but Tak is pleased to find a couple of gallons of water in the tank.

  He returns to the kitchen and begins opening shelves, shoving aside plates and cups and silverware in a quest for sustenance. After five minutes of rummaging, all he finds is a single box of something called Crisp Rite Crackers. They’re old and stale, but he takes out a couple and munches anyway. He’s not particularly hungry, but his stomach is still fairly angry with him, so at this point anything is better than nothing.

  Tak washes the meal down with the can of soda. Then, uttering a small belch, he wanders back to the living room, flops down on the sofa, and spends a few minutes trying to get his thoughts in order. After a while, the stillness of the place starts to get to him, and he begins talking out loud.

  “Jesus, you’re really in the weeds on this one,” he says with a forced cheerfulness that has never felt so false. “Okay. So. You found another dead timeline. That makes two in two trips, which is pretty damn odd. And it seems like both of them have something to do with big bird…. What are the chances, huh?”

  Tak figured the chances were pretty damn small. He’d made hundreds of trips during his time with Axon, but never before experienced anything like this. The idea that he’d stumbled into two dead timelines in a row felt far too coincidental. Also, unless the recent shift had changed the way the briefcase behaved, there was no way he could be visiting a new timeline. Which meant that he was in an old timeline. And since this was all new to him, that meant after his last visit, something had come into this world and killed absolutely everyon
e in it. The idea that this was happening not just here, but in multiple timelines, makes Tak’s heart race a little bit faster. Somehow, something was going terribly wrong with reality.

  Tak removes his shoes and curls up in the corner of the couch. He thinks about talking again, but the echo of his own voice is more disturbing than the silence of the city, so instead he just stares at the ceiling and wonders about his next move. How long has it been since I got some shut-eye? Was it the flight to L.A.? Was that really the last time?…God, I think it was. No wonder I’m piss-all tired.

  He feels the heavy weight of sleep begin to wrap around him and decides not to resist. He has a brief moment of panic when he wonders if he locked the front door, but then realizes it doesn’t matter; if something wants to kill him, it’ll just fly up and crash through the window. He has a mental picture of a dark creature hovering outside the condo like some kind of psychotic hummingbird and quickly shoves it to the back of his mind.

  But then, just as he is about to drift into darkness, he hears a new sound. At first he thinks he’s imagining it, or that days without rest have finally sent him off the deep end, but then he hears it again. It’s coming from the street, low and long: the howl of a wolf lost in a forest of endless pines. But then he listens harder and realizes it isn’t a howl at all, but a voice, little more than a distant whisper that bounces and echoes off the sides of buildings before vanishing into the dusky grey sky of a dead world. He listens again, eyes closed, until he’s sure what he’s hearing isn’t some kind of mad fever dream. Because what he’s hearing should be impossible.

  It’s a human voice…. And it’s calling his name.

  He springs off the couch, catches his bare toe on a discarded game controller, and goes sprawling down to the carpet. More surprised than hurt, he scrambles back to his feet and throws open the door to the deck. The voice is much louder out here, and he can hear it with greater clarity. It belongs to a woman, and it sounds scared as hell.

  “Tak!” cries the voice, closer now. It’s coming from somewhere down below, most likely at street level. “Tak, where are you!?”

  The smart thing would be to say nothing because it could be a trick, or a trap, or worse. And even if it is an actual person, calling out would reveal his position to any birds that remained, making it likely his life would end with a hole punched in the top of his skull. But, of course, he can’t ignore the voice, because he knows who it might be.

  “Sam!” he cries, his voice trembling slightly. “Sam, is that you?”

  “Tak!?” shrieks the voice. It sounds on the verge of full-blown panic now, as if the owner is barely holding herself together. “Tak, where are you?”

  “I’m up here,” he yells, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Here! On the balcony!”

  Frantic footsteps echo down the street, followed by a metallic crash. The voice cries out in pain, but then the footsteps resume. He hears them approach his position at a furious rate, then a darkened figure with a small backpack rounds the corner and skids to a stop beneath his balcony like a gender-bending Romeo. Tak stares down, mouth wide, and tries to convince himself that he’s actually seeing the red-haired woman standing on the sidewalk below.

  “Judith?” he says finally, his voice rising to near-comic heights. “What the crispy fuck are you doing here?”

  chapter twenty-one

  When the plane finally touches down, Samira looks out the window and sees a flat, barren landscape covered with sand. She thinks back to what Tak told her in the diner and hazards a guess they’ve landed in Australia. The runway is little more than packed dirt, and the massive plane bumps and jostles as the air brakes deploy and the plane’s momentum gradually slows. She didn’t think it was possible to land a plane of this size on an unpaved runway, but clearly she was wrong. Just one more thing to add to the list of surprises.

  Once the jet coasts to a stop, things begin to move very quickly. Four large men hustle Samira down a portable staircase and out to a large SUV, which then takes off across a roadless desert. Looking back, she sees the plane get smaller and smaller before becoming just another speck on the horizon. The men to either side of her sit in stoic silence. The one time she tries to ask a question, they both turn and look out the window as if she never spoke at all. A braver or more foolhardy person might have pushed things at this point—yelling at them or demanding answers—but Samira is neither of these. Instead, she shrinks into herself, digs her fingernails into the palms of her hands, and prays for the rest of her life to be over with quickly.

  Several hours later, they pull through a pair of gleaming white gates and into a courtyard. Men with rifles lean out of guard towers and train their weapons on the SUV as it trundles into an underground parking garage, where it descends for what feels like forever before finally coming to a stop in front of a large, steel door. The moment the engine clicks off, Samira is lifted off her feet and escorted down a bewildering series of bare white hallways. Eventually, she and her captors come to a round, metal door that resembles the top hatch of a submarine. One of the guards reaches over and presses his thumb to a black pad, while another spins a metal wheel back and forth. After a moment, the hatch opens, and Samira is thrust through the hole and into darkness.

  It takes all of her strength not to scream when the hatch slams shut and kills the light completely. Instead, she focuses on some of the relaxation techniques her psychiatrist taught her: standing in place, lowering her chin to her chest, and taking long, deep breaths. “Light as a feather,” she says, as the air enters and leaves her body. “Stiff as a board.”

  She repeats the mantra—some nonsensical rhyme from her childhood—over and over as she tries to slow her racing heart. Her eyes move rapidly around the space in front of her, desperately searching for even the tiniest point of light, but come away empty. For a while, she tries to imagine she’s somewhere else. She thinks about lying on a perfect yellow beach or wading through a stream in the middle of the forest, but the illusions eventually dissolve into an image of Yates standing over her with a cleaver in his hand and a mirthless grin on his face.

  “I’m going to be okay,” she says to the darkness. “It’s all going to be fine.”

  When her heart finally slows from its techno patter to a more rock-and-roll beat, Samira decides to check out her surroundings. Holding one arm in front of her like a sleepwalker, she shuffles forward until her index finger comes into contact with a cold, steel wall. She then puts her back to the wall and starts pacing forward, heel to toe, until she collides with the wall on the other side. By repeating this process on the other two sides of the room, she’s able to determine that her cell is perhaps ten feet across. She’s in the process of moving her hands across the surface, searching for a window or a door or any kind of a break, when a burst of static fires out from overhead.

  “Hello?” asks Samira hesitantly. “Is someone there?”

  “Stop moving,” says a voice. It’s crackly and distorted, as if coming through a cheap set of speakers.

  Samira freezes in place. She feels fear begin to rise in her belly and starts whispering her mantra furiously. Light as a feather, stiff as a board. Light as a feather. Light as a feather light as a feather lightasafeatherlightasafeather…

  “Look out,” says the voice. “We’re going to turn on the lights.”

  She closes her eyes as tightly as possibly until she hears the familiar hum of overhead fluorescents. She waits a moment, then puts her hand in front of her face and cracks opens her lids. Light pours in and burns her retinas, but she’s just happy to see again. Within a few moments, her eyes are fully open, and she’s staring at her new surroundings and blinking furiously.

  The cell is smaller than she guessed and completely featureless. The walls are painted a pale yellow color, which seems like an odd choice for a jail. At first she can’t find the hatch through which she entered, but then she finally notices the barest outline of a circle in the far wall.

  “Sit down,” says th
e voice in a bored tone. “Sit with your hands under you and don’t move.”

  Something about the voice makes Samira angry. Rage isn’t an emotion she’s used to dealing with, but she finds its sudden appearance on the scene a refreshing change from her usual states of panic or depression. She lets it stew inside her for a bit as she tries to figure out how Tak would respond to such a command.

  “I said, sit down and place your hands—”

  “No,” she says finally. Her voice is weak and noncommittal, but the word feels very good to say.

  “This is not negotiable.”

  “Go fuck yourself!”

  Samira has to repress a giggle as the words tumble out. God, I wish Tak could have heard that, she thinks. He would have been shocked. The voice behind the speaker seems equally shocked because it doesn’t say anything more for a time. Samira paces back and forth in the room before finally leaning against the wall and cracking the knuckles on her left hand. She’s wiggling the pinky back and forth, trying to get one more pop out of it, when the speaker squawks back to life again.

  “This is your last warning. Sit on the ground.”

  “Suck it, loser!”

  This sounds so stupid coming from her that it causes Samira to cringe, but before she can finish her shame spiral, a thick green gas starts filtering into the room. She pulls her shirt over her mouth and nose, but she might as well be trying to catch water with a sieve. A foul smell like warm pickles creeps into her nostrils, then the world turns sideways. Her senses begin to go loopy, but she thinks she hears the sound of the hatch opening. Somewhere behind her, the wall seems to wobble, causing her balance to flee in terror. She stands unsteadily for a moment, then slowly slides down the wall and into a little pile as a pair of men enter the room. She tries to fight them off, but there is no strength left in her body; she’s hauled up like a sack of grain, passed through the opening, and strapped to a metal gurney.