by Charlie Wood
The reporter continued her story. “The only good news, the president said today, is that it’s estimated that 99% of the people inside of the dome have now been released. By whom and for what purpose, we do not know, as it seems those inside the dome during its initial appearance were kept in windowless, artificial structures during the invasion, before ultimately being set free outside the perimeters of the dome.
“Unfortunately, endless questions remain: we have no idea what is going on inside of the dome, there is apparently still no way to get into the dome from the outside, and there is still no explanation about how the otherworldly dome was created or where it came from. We can now only wait to see if these mysteries are ever solved.”
Chad sat back on the couch with an exhausted sigh. He glanced to his right at Jennifer next to him. She was sitting quietly, with her eyes toward the TV but her thoughts clearly on something—and someone—else. Out of all of Chad’s family and friends, Jennifer talked about the dome the least. Only Chad knew the reason why, because only him and Jennifer knew the truth.
From the kitchen behind Chad and Jennifer, Chad’s father stepped into the living room, with his bowl of ice cream in one hand and the sports section of the Bridgton Herald in the other.
“I don’t know why everyone keeps saying we don’t know where the dome came from,” Chad’s father said, shaking his head. “We know damn well where it came from.”
“Well, Dad, we don’t know for sure,” Chad replied.
Chad’s father sat down in his recliner. “Sure we do! That cabeza de nob Strike put it there!”
Jennifer knew Chad’s father only used Portuguese insults when he was really angry, but she couldn’t help but speak up. “I really don’t think it was Strike, Mr. Fernandes. There’s no proof, and I just don’t think he would do that.”
“You don’t?” Chad’s father said. “I saw it with my own eyes—millions of other people, from all around the world, saw it, too! Strike stood in the middle of Boston and the next thing we knew, it was the end of the damn world.”
“But why would he do that after helping the people of Boston and fighting crime all this time?” Chad asked, growing frustrated.
His father shrugged. “I never liked that guy anyway. Running around in that outfit, being a vigilante, going outside of the law. Clearly this was his plan all along.”
Chad closed his eyes. “Dad, I really don’t want to get into this again. I’m not gonna fight with you about this every day for the rest of our lives. All I’m gonna say is, I know—for a fact—that the person who did this wasn’t Strike.”
Chad’s father laughed. “Oh, yeah? Really? Okay, then, if it wasn’t Strike, if he’s not in that dome, then where is he?”
Jennifer looked to Chad. Each of the two friends knew the answer, but both of them knew they could never tell a soul.
***
A world away, across the universe, Tobin Lloyd sped down a cracked, deserted highway, with his gloved hands gripping the steering wheel in front of him and his eyes fixed on the dark road. The eighteen-year-old boy was dressed in his Strike costume—with his black cape on his back, white lightning bolt on his chest, and blue mask over the lower part of his face—while his vehicle—the transforming, aqua, 2002 Ford Escort station wagon known as the Bolt Racer—was currently in its “Ion Speeder” form: it was a sleek, midnight blue, ultra-fast sports car, which could reach speeds of up to 200 miles per hour while still handling like a BMW. This feature of the transforming vehicle was perfect at the moment, because Tobin knew where he was headed, he was going to have to get in and out as fast as he could.
Traveling on the empty stretch of highway that apparently hadn’t been paved in over a century, Tobin was in a virtually unknown area of Capricious, surrounded by foreboding dark mountains, endless canyons, and a roaring ocean. After traveling for over two hours, the boy finally saw the faint light of a settlement in the distance up ahead. Reaching forward, he pushed a blue button on the Bolt Racer control panel in front of him.
“Scatterbolt, am I coming up on my destination?”
The face of Tobin’s robotic friend Scatterbolt appeared on a rectangular screen near the steering wheel. The little boy made out of purple and green, shimmering metal was very worried.
“Yes, Tobin, you are, but I need to remind you to please be very careful. You’re heading into a part of Capricious that is barely on any kind of map. It’s incredibly dangerous to ever go there, never mind alone.”
Tobin laughed. You could always count on Scatterbolt to worry. Although this time, Tobin knew the robot actually had a reason to be concerned.
“I’ll be fine, Scatterbolt. Don’t worry about me, just remember one thing.”
“I know, I know: don’t tell Orion where you are.”
“That’s right. I’ll see you soon, buddy.”
“Yeah, great,” Scatterbolt said, rolling his eyes. “I’ll just be sitting here with my terrible secret, worrying myself into an ulcer. I don’t know if it’s possible for a robot to get an ulcer, but if it is, I’ll definitely be getting one.”
Tobin chuckled and turned off the communicator. Looking out his windshield, he saw a line of wooden buildings ahead, resting in the middle of one of the canyons, before looking down to the map screen on his dashboard. “Yup, there it is,” he said to himself. “Daxtonville. A hellhole at the end of Capricious.”
To be truthful, to call Daxtonville a “hellhole” would be an insult to both the word “hell” and “hole.” It was a horrendous little town—a long, grimy street with dingy, wooden tenement buildings on either side of it, with both the street and the structures untouched for decades. Most of the buildings were abandoned—or appeared that way, anyway, with broken windows and doors hanging off their hinges. There wasn’t a tree, or a blade of grass, in sight.
It was a place you went to if you never wanted to be seen again, because you had done things you didn’t want people to ever know about. The people of the town—and when speaking about Daxtonville, that term was used very loosely—milled about the dirty street, in various stages of drunkenness, illness, and death. To live in this dark corner of the world, it was pretty much a prerequisite to have either murdered or maimed someone, possess less than half of your teeth, and bathe less than once a month, and it was exactly these type of people that Tobin saw as he drove the Bolt Racer closer to the city limits.
It was a group of a dozen men gathered around a burning trash barrel in the middle of the road, entertaining themselves by tossing grimy glass bottles and firing their pistols at an unconscious elderly man lying in the gutter. Tobin knew these were the men he was looking for; once known as the Bronk Gang, decades ago they had been a group of world-famous bank robbers—even folk heroes in some parts of the world—but now they were simply a sad squadron of has-beens and low-lives, devolved into a state of putrid filth thanks to a lifetime of drugs, booze, and increasingly violent and desperate criminal activity.
As Strike stopped the engine of the Bolt Racer and stepped onto the dirt road, the leader of the gang—a dark-haired, grimy-faced man named Sal—turned away from the old man they were tormenting and faced the hero. Laughing loudly, he pointed his gloved finger at Strike.
“Hey, look who it is, fellas!” he shouted. “It’s the hero boy from Earth! Or, wait—maybe that’s his evil twin?”
The rest of the drunks turned and laughed at Strike, swinging their bottles of booze in the air and offering him a toast. Strike had no reaction. He simply stood a few feet away from the drunks and stared them down.
“What are you doing here, buddy?” Sal asked, taking a drunken step toward Strike. “Come to hang out with a few like-minded murderers like yourself?”
“No,” Strike replied. “I’m here to tell you two things. One— bathing. It’s refreshing, it’s easy, and it can even be a lot of fun. Two—and most importantly—one of you is going to tell me where I can find Charlotte Vendorsworth. And, as a bonus, whoever steps forward, I’ll even let th
em in on the secret world of teeth brushing.”
One of the gang members behind Sal—a skinny guy named Evan—piped up.
“Who you lookin’ for?” he asked with a confused snarl. “Man, we don’t know no Charlotte Vendorsworth. I got a couple other girls you can have some fun with, though, if you’re interested.”
The drunks all laughed, falling over each other and gulping from their bottles of whiskey.
“You know Charlotte Vendorsworth,” Strike replied. “She calls herself the Time Queen.” He grew angry, raising his voice. “Where can I find her?”
Sal laughed. “Man, you ain’t been paying attention, Strikey. None of us are scared of you anymore. We know what’s going on on your other world. Word gets around fast in our community. We know what the Daybreaker’s doing, we know what you’re capable of: taking over entire cities, enslaving people, shooting helicopters full of cops out of the sky—you’re practically one of us. We ain’t afraid of you—we wanna have a drink with you.”
The gang members laughed louder than ever, toasting their bottles and high-fiving one another. Evan and another gang member, Rusty, walked up behind Sal and patted him on the back, congratulating him for standing up to Strike.
Strike watched the gang for a moment, in silence, before rearing back and swinging his electrified bo-staff across Evan’s mouth. Evan bellowed in pain and grabbed his face, falling to the ground on his knees, with blood running down his hands and the few remaining teeth in his mouth dropping from his lips. The other drunks cringed, suddenly no longer laughing.
Infuriated, Rusty reached for his pistol on his waist, but Strike immediately extended his fingers and threw a sphere of ball-lightning at the thug; the snapping ball of energy hit the pistol and exploded in a blue flash, sending Rusty to the dirt, screaming, with his pistol destroyed and his hand smoking and covered in soot.
Taking advantage of Strike’s distraction, another drunk gang member approached him from behind with a broken bottle, but Strike swiftly spun around and kicked him across the jaw. Knowing his back was now to his enemy, Strike turned around, only to see another thug—a tall, muscular man in a torn motorcycle jacket—coming at him with a knife. Strike dodged the slash of the knife, grabbed the man by his jacket collar, spun him around, and, just at the height of his momentum, let go, tossing the thug like an Olympian throwing a discus. As the thug screamed, his body spun through the air in a blue flash, before crashing to the earth fifty feet away, tumbling over itself in the dirt of the canyon.
Completely unfazed by any of the attacks, Strike pushed forward through the remaining drunks, who were now standing away from him, with their jaws dropped open. Finally, Strike reached the leader of the gang—the no longer smug-and-smiling Sal.
“No, no,” Sal stammered. “C’mon, man...don’t…”
Reaching forward with both hands, Strike grabbed Sal by the lapels of his jacket and walked with him toward the end of the street. Reaching the edge of a cliff, Strike stepped forward and lifted Sal up, holding him out in the open air over the canyon. As Sal struggled to free himself, with his legs waving wildly, he looked down: the bottom of the cliff was hundreds of feet down, surrounded by jagged rocks and a raging river.
Sal was nearly in tears. “No, no, no! C’mon, man! No! Don’t do it! Don’t do it, man!”
Strike held Sal out over the abyss. Stepping forward, he brought the thug closer to his face.
“So,” Strike asked. “What’s this about you not being afraid of me anymore?”
Sal whimpered. “I’ll tell you anything you wanna know.”
Strike bellowed in the thug’s face, his voice echoing in the canyon. “Where is the Time Queen?”
***
Far from the outskirts of Daxtonville, surrounded only by tall, tan-colored rock formations and sparse trees, Strike walked down a dirt road and studied the electronic map in his hand. As he heard waves crashing against a shore, he knew he was nearing his destination, and, sure enough, his electronic tablet map soon beeped, his position on the map marked by a blinking, white dot. Turning a corner, the boy came upon a body of water—a massive, blue lake, extending far out from the edge of the canyon and shining with the moonlight.
Strike looked out at the lake in front of him: there was a long bridge extending from the sand, leading from the shore to an island in the middle of the water. Resting on top of the strange island there was a large, well-kept wooden house with a triangular roof, surrounded by windmills, wind chimes, and a beautifully landscaped yard full of yellow-and-pink rose bushes, flowing streams, and small ponds. Taking a nervous step forward, Strike walked across the long bridge, holding the ropes on either side of him as he swayed over the waves of the water far below.
Finally reaching the end of the bridge, Strike stepped onto the island in the middle of the lake and saw a stone path leading across the yard and to the front porch of the house. As he walked down the path, Strike was surprised to see silly wooden figures stuck into the grass of the yard: there were ostriches, coyotes, and men dressed in sailor suits, with the legs of each of the figures spinning from the constant breeze coming off of the water. Eyeing the figures with a confused smile, Strike reached the porch of the house and stepped up to its front door. Just when he was wondering if he should knock or look for a doorbell, the boy saw a wooden sign hanging to the side of the door. In immaculate, perfect writing, the sign read:
HI, TOBIN! WELCOME! I’VE BEEN WAITING FOR YOU!
SINCERELY, CHARLOTTE VENDORSWORTH – THE TIME QUEEN!
CURIOS AND FORTUNE TELLING!
Startled by the welcome, and realizing any element of surprise he had was clearly gone, Strike cautiously opened the front door and entered the house.
***
As he shut the door behind him, Strike realized the structure wasn’t simply a house—it was also some kind of bizarre shop. As he walked along its creaky wooden floor, surrounded by flickering candles and foggy gas lamps, he inspected the items for sale on the store’s dusty shelves: he saw old diamond necklaces and sets of faded silverware; stuffed creatures mounted on tree stumps, including a purple-spotted leopard and three-headed rabbit; and finally, most disturbingly of all, he saw algae-covered jars filled with reptiles and insects, some of which Strike was pretty sure were still alive, including a turtle who was looking at him with its blinking eye pressed up against the glass.
All throughout the dark shop, there was also a strong, wafting odor of burning incense, giving the air a smoky, sweet flavor, and as Strike moved deeper into the building, his ears were increasingly filled with the sound of ticking clocks. Soon, he realized why: moving beyond the jars filled with reptiles, the boy found himself in a section of the shop where there were no antiques or stuffed animals or jewelry; there were only clocks—hundreds and hundreds of clocks. There were clocks on the shelves, clocks on the walls, even clocks looking down on him from the ceiling. The clocks were all different shapes and sizes: some of them were circular and made from tin, some of them were giant, wooden grandfather clocks resting against the walls, and some of them were made of glass, with tiny, delicate porcelain bells on top that were painted with blue flowers. The most interesting clocks, however, were the cuckoo clocks—made out of oak and carved with the intricacy of a master carpenter, they showed elaborate scenes, such as a group of moose in a peaceful forest, striped tropical fish under the sea, and an old-fashioned puppet show, with a female marionette in a red dress standing in front of a yellow curtain that opened and closed. As Strike stopped to inspect one of the cuckoo clocks, he picked the perfect time: as the clock struck two in the morning, its bells chimed, and a small wooden door opened on its front. Out of the door, a tiny soldier emerged, holding a rifle. However, the soldier was quickly followed by a black-furred, gigantic, ape-like monster, which held its arms high in the air as it chased the soldier around the track outside of the clock. Usually with clocks like this, the figures continue chasing each other until the bells stop chiming, but that wasn’t the case
with this clock; as Strike watched, the giant ape caught up with the soldier and used its massive hands to rip the man’s head clean off his body.
“Hi, Tobin!” a voice suddenly shouted.
With a gasp, Strike turned to his right: there was a woman in her early sixties standing at the end of the row of clocks, with a thrilled grin across her face. She was dressed in red, orange, and yellow flowing robes, with long gold earrings that shimmered from the candlelight, a big chunky necklace of blue stones resting on her chest, and a mass of neatly-coifed, curly, grey hair atop her head. She also had several dozen gold bracelets on her wrists, which jingled like bells as she clapped her hands together in excitement.
“Oh my god!” she shouted. “I’ve been waiting for you forever! Look at you—you’re really here! And so handsome!” The woman reached forward and grabbed Strike, pulling him close with both arms and squeezing him, all while swaying him from side to side. “I went back and forth, for decades,” she said. “He’ll be here, he won’t be here. He’ll come see me, he won’t come see me. But—you came! Today, just like I thought you would! Oh, this is just great!”
The woman let go of Strike and walked across the shop. This was clearly the Time Queen, Strike thought to himself, though she wasn’t exactly what he was expecting. Puzzled, he watched as she walked to a little sitting area in the middle of the shop, with two large sitting chairs and a circular table resting in between them.
“Would you like something to drink, Tobin? Some iced tea, maybe? I have peach iced tea, your favorite. You can take off your mask, too, by the way—I already know who you are, Tobin Lloyd.”
