by Alan Averill
• • •
samira is crying again. She’s so tired of crying. She shuts her eyes as tightly as she can and tries to block out the tears, waiting for another memory to force its way into her mind. For a long while nothing comes, but she keeps her eyes closed and waits. It will be here soon enough. Maybe the small girl in Fallujah, or the old man in the market, or more of her friend Heidi, the one who swapped patrols and came back wrapped in a black plastic tarp.
“Sam?”
Even worse is the face of a scared young man begging her to spare him. She has spent every day trying and failing to bury this memory, and now it’s the only thing she can see.
“Oh my God, Sam. We did it. We’re here.”
The voice belongs to Tak, in a scene eerily reminiscent of the moment forever ago when she found herself strapped to a table with wires streaming from her brain. He’s telling her that everything is all right, but it’s a lie. It always was.
“Sam, come on. Open your eyes. This is…Oh my God, it’s amazing. You have to see this.”
There’s another noise behind his voice: the low, steady throb of something large cutting through the air. She focuses on the sound, wondering what it is about it that she finds so oddly comforting, before a slow realization dawns in her mind. The sound is repeating at regular intervals, a low, bass thrum every few seconds.
Whoosh.
Whoosh.
Whoosh.
Samira opens her eyes and finds herself lying in a field of brilliant green grass. Above her, a handful of white clouds drift across an impossibly blue sky. The sound comes again—whoosh—and by turning her eyes to the left she is able to spot the source. It’s a long row of modern, power-generating windmills, each as high as a skyscraper, slowly turning their blades against the backdrop of that flawless sky.
Tak stands a few feet away with his arms in the air and a stupid grin on his face. And the moment she locks eyes with her friend and feels a smile begin to come, something breaks inside of her. All of the heartache and all of the pain and all of the terror of her previous life just kind of…dissolve, as if the massive blades of the windmills somehow reach inside her mind and carry her demons away.
“T-Tak?” she asks. “Tak, is this real?”
“Oh yeah. It’s real.”
“We’re not in the Machine?”
“No. We made it. We’re done. We’re out.”
She slowly struggles to her feet and lets the cool breeze play on her face. She sticks her tongue between her lips and senses the faintest taste of salt water. Tak crosses over to her and takes her hands in his. He seems ready to laugh or cry or do both at once, and Samira can only assume that he is experiencing the same lightness as she.
“Are we dead?” she asks.
“No.” Tak laughs as the grin on his face grows wider. “We are so fucking alive, you have no idea.”
“What do you mean? Where are we?”
“We’re in the Beautiful Land.”
the beautiful land
chapter twenty-seven
The ocean beats against the rocks like it has always done: slow and steady and perfectly predictable. Wave after shimmering blue wave rises and falls against the stones, wearing them down a millimeter at a time, building the sand that will eventually be dragged back to sea to start the process all over again. They come and go like clockwork, and sitting on the edge of the shore watching it happen brings tears to Samira’s eyes. She doesn’t mind these tears; they are happy ones, and welcome. Right now, everything is as perfect as she can allow herself to hope.
They’ve been in the Beautiful Land for almost two days. She spent most of that time curled into a tiny ball in the grass, letting the crash of the ocean and rumble of the windmills lull her into a deep and dreamless sleep nearly five years overdue. Tak had dedicated himself to searching for water and food, so their makeshift campsite now contains a large pile of lumpy purple fruit, as well as clean water stored in scavenged clamshells. Only after securing all these essentials did Tak allow himself to rest, and now he was back at the campsite with his mouth hanging open and his lungs snoring away. Samira was prepared to let him snooze until doomsday if it came to that; she’d stolen away an hour previous to sit by the ocean and watch the birds soar overhead and enjoy the feeling of just being alive.
She reaches down for a piece of fruit, brushes away a few stray grains of sand, and takes a bite. It’s sweet and delicious, like an especially good pear. Halfway through the meal, a curious black bird hops across the sand and takes up position a couple of steps away. She tears off a small piece and tosses it over; he catches it in the air and flies off to enjoy the snack.
“Never thought I’d want to see a bird again,” she says to herself. This makes her think about the thing she saw back in the solid timeline, the twisted and terrible creature that Yates had become, but she quickly shoves the image away. Such dark thoughts seem out of place in this world.
Samira finishes the rest of the fruit and utters a small belch, then stands and brushes off the seat of her dress. She needs a shower and a change of clothes in the worst possible way, but there will be time for that later. Despite the random nature of the Machine, she thinks they have some time left in this place. She doesn’t know how she knows that—only that it feels true.
The breeze blows through her hair as she clambers up the rocks and back to the campsite. The vegetation near the beach is little more than wispy strands of dry, dead grass, but as she moves inland, deep green stalks the size of ripe wheat begin to fill in the cracks. Soon she finds herself swimming through a field of the stuff, the smell of rain and chlorophyll rich in her nostrils. It reminds her of childhood—of a time where everything seems bigger and deeper and more alive—but also of how she used to sit on the back porch of her house and watch her father mow the lawn in his dusty brown slacks and a sleeveless white T-shirt. When he was finished, he would look over to Samira and clap his hands together, at which point she would leap off the porch and run squealing onto the lawn, rolling over and over from her back to her belly until she was covered in freshly mown grass. Usually, her father would light a cigarette and lean against the house to watch his daughter giggle while she stained her clothes and skin, but on rare occasions he would dive onto the lawn with a roar, tickling her sides as he called her the Grass Monster.
She glances up at the sun—which is larger than she’s used to, and almost red in color—then back to the grass. She doesn’t possess Tak’s gift for overland navigation, and she’s having trouble spotting their campsite amidst the rolling green hills. Finally, she sees a small tendril of smoke drift up toward the horizon and makes for it. Two minutes later, she moves into a small clearing and finds Tak cutting open a piece of fruit. He has a small fire going, and its warmth feels good against the early-evening chill.
“Hey,” she says quietly.
“Oh, hey, Sam,” he says as he takes a massive bite out of the fruit. “Mmmmrgg.”
“What?”
“Mmm…Sorry, hold on.” He chews for a minute, then swallows with comic abandon. “God, this shit is delicious.”
“You’re an idiot.” Samira giggles. “And you just sprayed juice all over your shirt.”
“Yeah, well, it’s an old shirt anyway.” He finishes the fruit in three bites, then wipes his arm across his face. “Man, that’s good. I gotta go find me some more. So how long have I been out?”
Samira shrugs, then holds out her wrists as if to prove that she isn’t wearing a watch. “I don’t know. Six, seven hours? Maybe more?”
“I should teach you how to read the sun.”
“Yeah, let’s get right on that.”
She sits down next to Tak and presses close, holding her hands toward the fire. After a brief hesitation, he places his arm around her shoulders. She can feel his pulse quicken when she moves against him, and notices the way he keeps glancing at her out of the corner of his eye.
“I still make you nervous, huh?” asks Samira after a pause.
“Muh
?” replies Tak. “What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.”
“…Yeah, I guess I do.”
He drops his hand from her shoulder to her hip and begins to move his thumb in a slow, steady circle, an action that makes electricity race inside her. She burrows her head against his thin chest and lets the warmth of the fire play across her face. Eventually, the sun starts its descent toward the horizon, causing the shadows of the windmills to stretch closer and closer to their campsite.
“I don’t get the windmills,” says Samira as she moves her hand down and meshes her fingers with Tak’s. “I mean, there’s nothing out here. No roads or power lines or anything, so why build a wind farm in the middle of nowhere? And who put it there?”
“You did,” says Tak.
“I did what?”
“You put the windmills there.”
Samira looks up at her friend with a quizzical expression. “Tak, what are you talking about?”
“This is you, Sam. The windmills, the ocean, the grass. All of this comes from you. That’s how this place works.”
“I don’t understand a thing you just said.”
Tak grins. “The reason Yates was looking for this place is because it’s different. Special. There’s not another timeline like it in all of reality. Judith says it’s ‘flexible,’ and that’s about the best word I can think of. Every other timeline comes with rules attached: atomic particles are always going to interact in the same way, there are a set number of elements that compose all forms of matter, blah blah blah. But that’s not how the Beautiful Land works.”
“This is a little confusing.”
“Okay, remember the pancake stack?”
“Yates said the pancake stack was stupid.”
“Yeah, well, he’s a big bird now, so fuck him. Anyway, I think it’s like this: every other timeline is a pancake—it’s a certain shape and a certain size, and it’s in the same place every time. But the Beautiful Land is more like the syrup. It flows. It can shift in and around other timelines. It can change its location. And because of that, it’s constructed from the thoughts of whoever happens to be there at the time. The reason that we’re seeing all these things is that you want them to be here. Basically, this is your perfect world.”
Samira thinks about this for a while as the sun dips below the horizon and a few crickets begin to chirp. “So that’s why I feel so happy here? Why all the sounds are regular and I can sleep and the whole cleaning thing doesn’t bother me?”
“There’s nothing to clean here, unless you wanna sweep dirt.”
“Says the guy with fruit smeared all over his shirt,” says Samira, dragging a single finger down his chest. “Normally, this would drive me crazy, but right now, I just…I don’t know. I don’t care at all.”
“Yeah, that’s probably the reason,” says Tak. He licks a finger on his free hand and scrubs at the dirty shirt for a few seconds. “It’s funny. When Judith told me about this place, I thought she was totally off her nut. But whadaya know? She was right. She and Yates were both right.”
Samira takes her other hand and places it on Tak’s knee. “But we have to leave. Don’t we? Because even if this place is outside time or whatever, Yates knows about it. And that means he’s going to come here.”
“I think so,” says Tak quietly. Despite the heaviness of their conversation, he seems much more entranced by the small hand currently resting on his knee. “I mean, the Machine is going to pull us back at some point, so it’s kind of a moot issue, but yeah. We need to meet Judith. We need to fix this before that bird destroys reality.”
“Why do we have to find Judith?” asks Samira.
“She has a timeline in her head. We can hook her up to the Machine and use it to overwrite the solid timeline, the same way Axon did. In theory, it’ll prevent all of this from ever happening.”
“But what happens then?”
Rather than answer, Tak moves his hand from her hip to her side. She waits to see if he’s going to move it any higher, but for the moment, that’s as far as it seems ready to go. She can feel nervous energy burning off him in waves, and it makes her smile.
“Look, let’s just not talk about that anymore,” he says. He tries to say it with nonchalance, but his nerves are working against him, and the final word hits a high note before cracking.
“How’s puberty working out for you there?” Samira giggles.
“Great, thanks. Maybe one day I can grow a mustache.”
“You’ll never grow a mustache. I have more hair than you.”
“That’s because of your dad. He was like a shag carpet with legs.”
He smiles as he says this, but Samira just looks away. She catches a glimpse of his panicked expression and grabs for his hand again. “It’s okay,” she says. “I’ve just been thinking about Dad a lot. When I saw him in the Machine, it was like he was still here. I could smell him and feel the hair on his arm and…I don’t know. It just makes me sad, I guess.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Do you think…” she begins. “Do you think I could bring him back to this place? I mean, if I thought about it really hard, could I bring him back?”
“I’m not sure. I mean, you could probably bring back something that looked and smelled and acted like him, but I don’t know if it would really be him. It might just be your memories of him given some kind of physical form.”
“But that would be enough. Wouldn’t it? I mean, aren’t people just whatever we remember of them to begin with?”
Tak makes a gun with his thumb and forefinger and presses it against his temple. “Dude, Sam, my head. Look, I don’t know. This is way too deep for me. I’m just a guy who jumps through time and knows how to not get killed.”
“You’re more than that,” she says as she finds her hand moving away from his knee and up his leg. “You’re funny and you’re sweet and you’re my best friend in this world or any other. You always have been, ever since the day I met you.”
“Um…” says Tak.
She moves her head up and presses her forehead to his. “We’re in a bad way. I know that. The world is ending and there’s a giant bird flying around eating everyone and pretty soon we’ll be back in a place where I’m going to start freaking out all over again. And that makes this a terrible time to say the things I want to tell you…. So I’m not going to say them. I’m just going to sit here and let you figure it out.”
“I…I think I know.”
“Good,” she says as she moves her head down until her lips are just inches from his. “Then you should know what to do.”
As it turns out, he does.
chapter twenty-eight
“Just try it,” says Tak. “What can it hurt?”
“I feel dumb,” says Samira. She’s standing at the base of a windmill and staring at a small circle of earth where Tak has pressed the grass flat. “It’s just such a bad cliché, you know? Stare at the empty circle and think really hard about something until it materializes in front of me. It’s like a scene from Star Wars.”
“That never happens in Star Wars.”
“Nerd.”
“Look, Sam. Any minute now, the Machine could decide to pull us back. And when it does, we’re gonna be dropped in the middle of the Pacific Northwest with no supplies or weapons of any kind. The only thing I’ve got is my flint, and even that’s a bit sketch.”
“What about your knife?”
Tak licks his lips and thinks about his pocketknife—as far as he knows, it’s still stuck inside the neck of an old woman somewhere back in the solid timeline. “Uh…Yeah, I lost it somewhere between here and there. But if we can use you to conjure up some supplies, we’re going to be in a much better position than we are right now.”
Samira sighs and turns her head to the sky, watching the massive blades of the mill continue their never-ending journey. It shocks her to think her subconscious mind could be responsible for something so big and real and…there. The thoug
ht of doing it again seems laughably impossible.
“Okay,” she says at last. “Fine. I’ll try it.”
“Great!” says Tak. He scrambles behind her and puts both hands on her hips, pressing himself close. “Okay, so what we need to do—”
“I am not going to be able to concentrate if you stand there like that.”
“Huh? Oh, shit. Sorry.” He takes a couple of steps back, then extends one hand past her head with a finger pointing at the flattened circle of grass. “All right, so you see that spot, right?”
“Yep.”
“Okay, so just look at that spot and think about something being there. Start with something small, like…uh…I don’t know. A canteen.”
“A canteen?” repeats Samira doubtfully.
“Yeah. You know. Like one of those metal—”
“I carried a canteen for years, Tak. I know what it looks like.”
“Right. Yeah. Okay. I’m just gonna…stop talking now.”
Samira giggles before returning her attention to the patch of grass. At first, all she can think about is Tak, but eventually she gets her mind into gear and the image of her friend begins to slip away. She stares at the grass intently, watching how the shadow of the blades cross it in a steady rhythm. Eventually, individual pieces of grass begin to come into focus and grow clear in her vision. She squints and concentrates more intently, trying to see the grass the way a person might look for a single brushstroke amidst the chaos of a painting. Canteen, she thinks to herself. Small and metal. Small and bright. Desert camo pattern. Canteen. Canteen.
A canteen is on the grass in front of her. It doesn’t materialize like she was expecting, doesn’t fade into existence or warble into being amidst a shimmer of sparkling lights. It’s just…there.
“Christ played the banjo!” screams Tak. He races up behind Samira, wraps his arms around her, and shakes her gently from side to side. “That is the coolest fucking thing I have ever seen!”
“I did it,” says Sam, as a smile breaks out on her face. “Oh my God, I…I did it.”
