The Morph (Gate Shifter Book One)

by JC Andrijeski

  All around me shone that fathomless white.

  Fear clutched at me, paralyzing in its intensity.

  I wondered what the hell I was doing, why I’d risk something like this, when I’d just seen that guy vanish right in front of my eyes. Was I really so complacent that I’d think nothing bad could happen to me here, when he just told me this same thing would probably kill me?

  I saw myself trapped in time for that brief instant, stripped of embellishment, even of linear progression. I saw myself as someone who really hadn’t experienced very much at all, despite what I’d thought. I saw someone young, and yeah, kind of dumb.

  The forest around me faded, grew impossible to distinguish through that light.

  In its place, the universe grew luminous, tilting on a far greater axis above.

  I stepped into that greater space, both terrified and weirdly at peace.

  It was too late to go back, I knew.

  I didn’t just think it... I knew.

  It was too late to panic, too. It was too late to second-guess what I’d already set in motion. It was too late to wonder if I could have found another way to follow him to his other world. I knew all of these things, as unshakably as I knew that the guy in the scuba-shirt really had been trying to warn me, that he’d only meant to keep me safe.

  For a brief instant, everything grew blindingly bright.

  My heart leaped in an unnamed joy.

  Then, everything disappeared.

  5

  THE WRONG END OF THE RABBIT HOLE

  ... I OPENED MY eyes.

  Seconds, minutes, maybe even hours could have passed.

  I had no way of knowing what occurred inside that long-seeming flash of unconsciousness. I had no real concept of time, either, or even of my own person, meaning my body. I had no memory of where I’d been, not in those first, new beats of life in my chest, or that different mixture of air filling my lungs.

  I stood in a clearing.

  Above me, a stone arch darkened part of the sky. It reflected light, shimmering at me, blinding me briefly until I raised a hand.

  I saw hieroglyphics. Writings and pictures in that stone arch. They confused me more.

  I dropped my gaze, fighting to focus my eyes.

  On the edges of the clearing where I stood, I saw what looked like machines.

  Some of those machines emitted black smoke, like they’d recently been on fire.

  All looked foreign and weirdly alive, given their odd, twisted and rounded shapes. Tubes came out of their sides next to long, smooth bodies that squatted low to the ground, making them resemble something between boulders and hunkered animals.

  I looked back up at the stone arch. It hung over the whole clearing, immovable.

  Strangely quiet. Also strangely alive.

  In the distance, I saw trees that weren’t really trees, a long slope of rocks that looked unlike any rocks I’d ever seen. I couldn't take it all in at first... it was too much information, and too much of it was new. My brain fuzzed out in the excess of newness. Too many things I couldn't wrap my head around vied for attention. Too many of them defied easy categorization. Too many of them didn’t look right to me. Too many things I couldn’t understand, name, or even describe, screamed to be understood, named and described.

  Surrounding me, about the size of a large pond, stood a ring of basketball-sized white rocks.

  My mind latched onto those rocks.

  I’d seen rocks exactly like those before, only in a different place, a different time. When I’d last seen them, though, it had been night outside.

  Night...

  I looked up, suddenly understanding a least one of the many reasons I felt so completely disoriented. The sky no longer hung over me like a shroud, dark and full of indistinct clouds, shimmers of stars and moon barely glimpsed through the fog.

  A long, curved swath of blue led my eyes, instead.

  Thin, striped clouds colored that shockingly high dome, emphasizing a sky I absolutely did not recognize, not in any way. The expanse felt entirely too large to me... a cavern of space that made me feel strangely weak, yet also strangely claustrophobic, despite all of that space.

  When I looked down, my eyes focused on those odd-looking trees––trees that grew in a weirdly sentient-seeming jungle.

  That jungle started on a ridge up above the rocky canyon that housed the burnt-out crater filled with all those crouching machines. The machines began some twenty feet past the edges of the ring of white, basketball-sized stones.

  My mind calculated distances, but I still wasn’t fully absorbing any of it.

  Cliffs rose on either side of me, dotted with hanging fingers of green, like ferns only not, closer to what I imagined might have lived at the time of the dinosaurs. Water trickled down blue-green, scarlet and yellow flowers, making a cheerful sound that felt hollow in the silence of that freakishly large sky. That sound of water falling through dirt and rocks and fingers of plant was the first familiar sound or familiar much of anything that I could perceive in the landscape around me, though.

  The air. The air smelled like...

  I tried to take a step. I was breathing too much. I tripped over a shining white rock, one that stood so near to my foot that I hadn’t seen it from where I'd landed.

  Landed.

  My mind spun around the word briefly.

  I thought all of this, even as I stumbled over that same rock... nearly fell... moving so slowly, yet too fast to stop any of it...

  Below me, a ravine glimmered with smoky chunks of glass-like rock.

  Again, too much stimulus and information filled my eyes, but in fragments, pieces I fought to arrange back into some kind of logical order inside my mind. I saw the mystery guy I'd followed through that light door.

  He stood a dozen feet away, also breathing hard, and now staring at me, as if out of all of this unreality, I was the most unreal thing.

  Before I could form words well enough to communicate anything to him, movement jerked my eyes to the side, where I saw a small creature with hooked claws gripping the trunk of one of those fern-like trees. I stared at its white face. More movement jerked my eyes upward, allowing me to catch a glimpse of a bird caught in flight.

  Not a bird.

  I stared at the human, baby-like face, heard it scream.

  My legs collapsed.

  Buzzing filled my ears.

  I sprawled on the ground, but had no idea how I’d gotten there.

  Over me, a human face appeared.

  Light reflected from his dark blue irises. Dark brown hair contrasted his oddly-symmetrical face, the dark grey eyes I could see... or were they brown? Now green... they seemed to change every few seconds as his face contorted in some intense emotion over me.

  I heard words, but it took me more seconds to recognize them as coming from him.

  It took a few beats longer to make sense of them.

  "Why are you here?” he shouted. He clutched my arm, his fingers frantic, filling me with fear. “Why? You should not be here! You are in the wrong place... !"

  Here, the sun was shining.

  The air smelled like...

  Flowers. But also smoke.

  I fought to breathe, lost in a sudden grip of emotion, more than I could stand. Even in the midst of my mind essentially cracking, the more logical threads ran in an undercurrent below, strangely calm, and asking some of the more relevant questions.

  Was this shock? Was I in shock right now?

  Was I dying? Was the air here killing me as I breathed it?

  Or had I died earlier... when I first stepped inside that ring of white stones?

  He said the process would kill me. Was it killing me? Would I die?

  But I didn’t die. Somehow, realizing that slowed my breathing, but not enough to dim the emotions that still warred in my chest. I calmed, but not enough to relax that suffocating need to survive that lit a hotter flame in my belly. The latter made me ready to sprint into the trees or get in a fist fi
ght. Or maybe do both at the same time.

  I could hear other voices now.

  Meaning, I could hear voices apart from the voice of the man in the strange black clothes, the man whose eyes continued to change colors while I watched. I remembered him now, more or less. He’d taken me on that crazed motorcycle ride on the Enfield, evading aliens with blue-white laser cannons... not long after he'd tried to rescue me from that homicidal mark in that alley near Pioneer Square.

  Pioneer Square, which was in Seattle.

  Seattle, which was in the state of Washington.

  Washington, which was part of the United States of America.

  ... In the general vicinity of Earth.

  My mind tried to process all of that, too.

  More specifically, it tried to avoid the thought that I no longer resided anywhere near any one of those places.

  The survival thing remained the loudest, though.

  It jangled nerves and adrenaline through my very bones. Those other, different voices, worried me. Truthfully, they worried me a lot more than this guy did, no matter how tense or upset he seemed.

  I fought to breathe, gripping the man's shirt, maybe for balance.

  He held me equally tightly in his hands and arms, but I saw that worry intensify in his eyes, growing into an overt fear as he looked around where we crouched like a feral animal. He looked like he expected us to be attacked. Normally, that wouldn’t have bothered me so much, mainly because he clearly had a twitchy demeanor in general.

  But here, given everything, his fear was too much for mine.

  My survival instincts tried to identify the danger he clearly sensed, to incorporate it into my new reality. That part of me looked for solutions, countermoves, strategies.

  It didn’t find any.

  I struggled to my feet, and he helped me... but it was already too late.

  A line of forms appeared at the edge of the largest ring of white stones, just in front of that tall, shimmering archway.

  They held sticks in their hands, or what looked like sticks... or maybe poles.

  Really, they were long, straight, possibly-metal, rod-type things, unlike anything I had ever seen before. They didn't look like guns, or like the fighting staffs I’d used in martial arts classes. The people standing there clearly held them like some kind of weapon, however.

  The man holding me tightened his grip.

  His hair looked black now, but I saw streaks of blond in the front, what might have been the beginnings of a fiery, coppery-red on one side. His fingers remained firm around mine and I clutched him back, feeling suddenly as if I'd known him for a lot longer than I had. I sensed his confusion, as well as a near protectiveness towards me that didn’t do a lot to reassure me that we weren’t both about to get our asses kicked.

  He closed his eyes, then opened them slowly, as if using them to think. His irises had turned a light, smoky color now, mirrored chunks of glass that reflected the sky’s depths.

  Above, I felt that sky pressing down on the two of us.

  I felt the stone arch looming over us, too.

  I didn't feel safe. Even without that crowd of armed people staring at us, I didn’t feel safe here at all.

  "This is a bad place," I muttered, holding him tighter.

  He didn't disagree with me.

  "What do we do?" I said, maybe just wanting him to talk.

  After all, what could we do? We were surrounded. I could barely breathe here, and those cliffs looked too steep to climb, at least in any kind of hurry. Still, it wasn’t really like me to defer that particular question to someone else.

  Asking him seemed to make the most sense, though.

  He glanced at me, as if reluctant to give me a truthful answer. His eyes looked resigned, even below that worry.

  "We wait," he said.

  For the first time, probably because I’d only been around him in the dark before now, I realized his words didn't quite match the movement of his lips.

  “...We wait," he repeated. "They will come for us. Until then, we wait." He looked at my face, studying my eyes. "It could be bad before then.” His voice grew careful, but that regret grew more audible. "I am sorry,” he said, still watching me. “I am sorry, Dakota."

  I only looked at him. It occurred to me that I’d never told him my name.

  Compared to the expression on his face, however, that struck me as a detail.

  He looked afraid. The fear didn’t bother me too much... because, yeah, a bunch of people with weapons were walking towards us. He’d have to be a little thick not to be nervous about that. The emotion I could see beyond that fear bothered me a lot more.

  Behind the fear, my new friend looked resigned.

  He looked as though he’d already lost... or, at least, that he completely accepted our inevitable defeat. He looked at me like he saw our powerlessness as immutable fact. He also looked resigned to endure whatever he seemed to think would come next.

  That resignation scared me.

  I found myself remembering something Gantry said to me once, too.

  You cannot argue with gravity.

  My new friend looked like he’d discovered that truth the hard way... and more times than he could probably count.

  If he felt like that here, after what I’d seen him do... I was definitely screwed.

  My friend’s gaze swiveled as I thought it, aiming at the line of people approaching us with those weapon-like sticks. My eyes followed his, and for the first time, I realized the people standing there all wore the same dark-gray uniforms. Those uniforms looked similar to what the man next to me wore, but the complexions of the faces above the high-necked collars looked darker, and somehow wilder. Their hair all shone the same light color, nearly white, differentiating them from any ethnicity I’d ever encountered in the States. It also made their coloring look artificial... but the uniformity across all of them made me think it probably wasn’t, no matter how it looked to me.

  That weird, albino hair––with the faintest tinge of reddish-orange and most of it the consistency of dry straw––stuck out at different lengths all over their heads. Their reddish-brown skin contrasted their hair color strangely, even as it also seemed to go with it. The same was true of the black irises they all seemed to have been born with, which stared out from apparently lash-less and eyebrow-less eyes. Either way, not a lot of variation among this group.

  Well, unless I simply wasn’t looking at the right things.

  While they didn't look like any people I’d ever seen, they did look like people.

  Somehow, that made it more weird, not less.

  When my friend turned back towards me, the hardness had returned to his eyes. He looked openly hunted now, and some of that seemed aimed at me.

  He reached down, using his fingers to press my eyelids closed.

  "Do not open them," he told me. "Not for any reason."

  "Wait!" I said, opening them again, my voice close to frantic. "What is your name?"

  He gave me a surprised look. Then his expression softened. He looked down at me as if my question touched him somehow.

  "Nihkil," he said. "It is Nihkil." He touched my face again, softer, near to my eyes. "Close them," he said. "Please."

  That time, for reasons I couldn't understand, I did.

  Right after that, a sharp pain hit my neck, hard enough to make me gasp.

  ... after that, I felt nothing at all.

  6

  SUPERNATURAL BADNESS

  IT SEEMED LIKE hours later when something jostled me awake.

  My arms hurt. My neck hurt more, like an ice pick lay embedded somewhere deep between my shoulder blades.

  It took me a second longer to realize I was being dragged.

  My feet bumped and jostled along a hard, uneven surface.

  Shadows confused me, cutting up the sharper glints of light. I couldn’t see the sky. Only a water-like shimmer passed liquidly in front of my eyes.

  I tried to remember where I was.


  I remembered my friend. That part felt real. Nihkil.

  But I could hardly remember him, either, what with the pounding behind my eyes.

  I fought with things I understood.

  Things from my own world.

  Irene would be looking for me. She’d be frantic by now. Or... maybe not enough time had passed for that. Maybe she was still wondering why I was late getting back, what went wrong with the job.

  If that were true, she'd probably be back at the office, cursing me out for taking my sweet time, or worrying I sat in a drunk tank somewhere. She might be trying to decide if she should risk calling around to check. She’d probably assume I’d gotten picked up by the cops or maybe, if her imagination was really working overtime... she might worry the mark got to me, and hurt bad enough to end up in the hospital.

  She'd be worried, yeah. Even if she didn’t know I’d disappeared off the face of the Earth.

  Even if they hadn’t found the Enfield in that golf course yet.

  It would probably come out later as one of Irene's confusing and nonlinear lectures, the ones that didn't seem to have a lot to do directly with whatever had actually happened. She'd give me a hard time about how I drove my motorcycle, for example... or demand to know why I wore that particular purse to the job, when I knew damned well it might throw me off balance while I ran in those boots. Irene, queen of the non-sequitur.

  She meant well, of course.

  When I first met her, I rarely knew what the hell she was driving at until she’d been talking for a few minutes. I’d developed an odd sort of fondness for the way her concern tended to manifest itself, though... even if it could be maddening sometimes, too.

  "Just don't do it in front of the clients," I muttered under my breath, watching that light and dark liquid shimmer in front of my eyes.

  I’d said it to her about a million times.

  Like it did any good.

  Irene was Irene. She didn’t really have different settings for different social situations. When she tried to act normal, generally it only made things worse.