The Pawn in the Portal: A Wyrd Short Story

by Nick Cole

  They walked on.

  “You should think about that,” the old stranger continued. “You should think about the gardener and the darkness before you say there’s nothing. Because there just might be something on the other side of that door, and wouldn’t that be a hoot? Wouldn’t you be catastrophically wrong if there was actually a something, or someone who…”

  Ward held up a hand. Over the rooftops, they could see the top of the park rides. Some tall tower. The Matterhorn. The tracks of the monorail. Disneyland.

  Moss had said, just before dying in the sand, “I’m going to Disneyland, buddy…”

  “Shhh…” whispered Ward.

  “You should think about that,” continued the stranger in the kerosene-breath of a close raspy whisper, disregarding Ward. “Because here’s the thing…”

  “Shhh…”

  “You don’t know what’s out there in the darkness, do you? You don’t know who. And they do, now. All those flaming, flying dead you just killed. They know now what’s beyond that door, and what if, just what if there’s something to be afraid of?”

  The silence surrounding Disneyland was unreal. It was thick and quiet, and in the gloaming of the blue twilight that seemed to smother the last of the bloody red day, a lone raven crossed the night, its leathery wings beating out a summons.

  ***

  That night they hunkered down in a nearby motel. Ward pronounced it relatively secure and they blocked the front door to the small room that overlooked the motor court. There was a back window they could beat feet out of into a long empty alley. Darkness came in full and they waited to hear choppers coming in low and the whump whump beating of their blades to make landings somewhere inside the park under cover of darkness. But none came and an unearthly silence lay over everything like a smothering blanket.

  In the quiet, lying on the stiff dusty gold bedspread a million families since 1956 had lain on before and after a day at the park, the old stranger began to speak to the popcorn ceiling.

  “Evolution isn’t the catchall you think it is, kid.”

  Ward moved away from the curtains and finally lowered his ruck and weapons to the floor. He needed sleep and he was fading fast.

  “Darwin would be shocked. He was worried the wrong kind of people would stretch his theories to serve their own ends. He was a fool. I’m not saying he wasn’t brilliant, but he was naïve. He wanted to know the origins of man and yet failed to see man for what man is. A power-mad monster. And those monsters used Darwin because they wanted to lessen the power of the church so they could grab it up for themselves.”

  And…

  “You blame belief for all kinds of evil and you’re right to. But see, what you believe in, is an evil also, and all kinds of bad has been done in the name of evolution as well. Eugenics. Racial purity. Survival of the fittest.”

  Ward sat on the edge of the bed and stared into the scratched mirror on the far wall. There was only darkness and the dim outline of his dirty face there.

  “People used to get up to all kinds of fun with that one. Survival of the fittest y’know, so let’s go ahead and sterilize the undesirables.”

  “Didn’t make it right,” mumbled Ward and lay back on the bed. “Just ‘cause it was done, it didn’t make it right. Crusades did a number on a bunch of people for sure.”

  The old stranger sat up on his elbows and reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a different flask. Leather bound. Copper plated. A fine old thing or something simulated to look such. He held it out to Ward and waggled it, making what was within slosh about in some sort of drunken come-on.

  “What did right and wrong ever have to do with evolution?” he exhaled after a gusty swallow.

  Ward took the flask and put it to his cracked lips.

  “There’s always right and wrong.”

  And then he drank.

  “Is there? Says who? God?”” asked the stranger.

  Ward said nothing.

  “Who’re you, or for that matter, who is anybody to decide what’s right and wrong for anyone else? You threw the God-people out the door for telling you what was, and wasn’t, sin. You didn’t want any of that. What gave you that right to decide what’s right and wrong? Or more importantly, who gave you that right?”

  The stranger took the flask back and drank, his lips smacking in savage satisfaction.

  “What I mean is,” continued the Stranger. “If you arbitrarily decide someone’s wrong, well, what’s to stop someone else from doing the same to you? No, kid, you have no claims to right and wrong when you choose time plus chance plus matter. Then there’s no judge to decide right and wrong that can’t be overruled or countermanded by some other judge. Try again. Pick a new selection on the old hit jukebox. And remember this; your crusades… a tiny little number compared to the one hundred and thirty million dead in the 20th century at the hands of the supposedly godless and intellectually enlightened. One hundred… and thirty million. Richard the Lion-Hearted never got anywhere close to Mao, my child. That old crusader was an amateur.”

  Ward sighed. He wasn’t as annoyed as he knew he should have been. Had been in the past. The truth was, in a way, it was comforting to have the old guy around. Maybe these were the last conversations he’d ever have with anyone, and then… nothing.

  His eyes closed as the stranger continued, rambling intermittently to himself. Murmuring about long-gone times and people he’d seemed to once know. Telling Ward he was wrong— that there was something else out there. There was an “other side” to be considered. To be afraid of even.

  And when Ward awoke in the morning, the stranger was gone.

  ***

  Ward turned over to a chromatic morning glare coming through the open window. Some breeze disturbed a knocking wind chime made of wooden blocks. Like those made of bamboo he’d seen and heard on deployment in Southeast Asia. He rolled over and all trace of his traveling companion from the previous day was gone. The disturbed place on the other bed was all that remained of the stranger.

  “You’re shot,” he’d told Moss in the dream, again.

  And then Moss said…

  “I’m going to Disneyland, buddy…”

  Ward rubbed his face, chastising himself for sleeping straight through the whole night. Wondering where the old guy had gone off to, forgetting the dream and the memory as best he could. Getting up, he splashed cold water on his face from the tiny sink and then drank some. His mouth was dry and sandy. He filled his canteens, checked his rifle and weapons, and strapped on his harness and ruck system. Gloves, helmet, boots laced up. He was ready to rock and roll.

  He knew, sensed, deep down inside that the old stranger was gone and he’d never see him again. He looked at the closed door that guarded the motel room. Waited. Listened for sounds of the roaming dead beyond and the low growls of the New Kids on the Block somewhere out there.

  Silence.

  Listen.

  Wait.

  Make a plan.

  There’s no Tarragon. No United States. Nothing. Just genetics and environment. Genes and what you’ve got to work with.

  Ward had a thought. One that had been there all along without ever really making a show of itself inside his consciousness.

  Evolution is the ultimate game of Survivor.

  He turned its weight over and over and liked the clarity and simplicity it brought to his mind. To his future. He decided that whatever the world had become, it had become something other than what it once had been. And maybe whatever it thought it was all along, that was just a lie it told itself to play the game of Survivor. What it was now, was what it had always been, a game. A game of survival. Same rules. New playing pieces.

  Survivor.

  And now he was going to get to play on expert.

  “How long…” he asked himself with a chuckle. If you’re meant to be, meant to
survive the onslaught of the walking dead and the New Kids, then now’s the time to find out how long you can last.

  There’s no such thing as “meant to be”, he corrected himself and reached for the doorknob and all the tomorrows beyond it. A portal to the future.

  There just is.

  He left the parking lot, legs working, head swiveling. He knew that however long he lasted, this would be how he would spend the rest of the days that remained to him. Moving. Nomadic. Head swiveling. “Safety” and “danger” questions that must be asked and answered ceaselessly. Probably more danger, less safety from now on out.

  He would survive only because he was strong.

  And in time, the biological imperative…

  Silent Disneyland loomed in the morning sunshine. It seemed blank and empty and waiting. He made a plan to check the area and try to pick up supplies or even information that the evacuees and rescuers may have left behind. He’d seen evacuations in the past and he knew a lot of good gear got left behind in the name of mercy, pity, and extra cargo space.

  He breached a high mesh fence covered in shrubs with a pair of bolt cutters he always carried. Once through the cut, he emerged into the wide seeming-endlessness of the Magic Kingdom’s gargantuan parking lot. It was empty. In the distance, he could see the front gates. He raised the scope of his rifle and scanned. Near the gates to the park he could see a few dead bodies. He moved the scope over the ticket booths and turnstiles. That’s when he saw the soldier nailed to the wall. Blood had run down in rusty streaks along the creamy yellow paint of the ticket booths. His eyes had been gouged out.

  Ward set off at a trot as the sun began to raise the heat across the sprawling blacktop sea. It was better to double time out here in the open even though he didn’t like advancing into the unknown so swiftly. Halfway there, the mob of zekes he hadn’t seen clustered around some battered Humvees at the main parking lot entrance off to his right, surged out toward him with their deathless groans.

  He sprinted for the park’s turnstiles, his breath controlled yet ragged in the morning air. He reminded himself he’d need to PT more if he was gonna put up any kind of numbers in this final, ultimate game of survivor “for all the marbles.” He gasped as he sucked in a lungful of the hot morning air.

  He went over the turnstiles, passed the ticket booths and emerged into the famous courtyard garden, the red brick train station standing guard above. The place was waist-deep with bullet-riddled corpses. He stopped. He had to. The sheer scope of mangled bodies was unimaginable.

  “I’m going to Disneyland, buddy…”

  His mind wanted to add. To calculate. To know the numbers of the dead-again. Then it told him not to want to know. That this number was nowhere near a hundred and thirty million. Which was so, so much… That there was no need in this new reality to pay attention to the numbers as evolution played its little game of winners and losers. That it didn’t increase his chance of survival by the merest percentage. That the lake of dead corpses below the iconic train station was meaningless, had always been meaningless, and was just something that needed to be for life to make its way forward into the future. Time plus matter plus chance. And yet, he told himself, I must crawl over all of them to get to that future.

  These were things his rational mind told himself as he crawled.

  He crawled and waded and climbed over the unmoving head wounded corpses, even as the living dead that had pursued him from the parking lot washed clumsily over the turnstiles and clawed their way through the masses of dead-again to get at him. He climbed the grass embankment on the far side and waded through the still-pristine flowerbeds and crawled up toward the train tracks and the red brick station above. Panting for breath, he stared back down at his pursuers and knew that the lake of dead-again corpses would buy him only so much time.

  Not a lot.

  He headed into the cool shadows of the Yesterday train station, then down onto Main Street below. That’s when the music started.

  ***

  Main Street was a nightmare.

  Literally.

  “I’m going to DizzKneeLand” blared out its anthem to shoegazing nihilism over hidden speakers within the park.

  Someone had turned wonderment and childish imagination into a charnel house of horrors, a series of staged allegorical tableaus about the end of the world and the things that lead to that dark place on the map of history. Featured attractions for the legions of unseeing dead-again corpses that lay sprawled along the street, the grass, and the sidewalks of Main Street, U.S.A.

  “Welcome… welcome…” cried the familiar voice of the stranger over the pop and crackle of park speaker boxes already struggling to emit the strained chords of a long-lost grunge indictment of times gone by. Ward surveyed the frozen playlets of death and destruction.

  Mutilated corpses hung from the trees like puppets. Electrical wire, rope, and various bungee cords held their sagging dead frames in some sort of marionette parody of an orgy, or the last rave on earth.

  Near the far side of the circle, beyond the old timey-time train station, other corpses were arranged along a wall while still more corpses held silent machine guns out toward them. Tongues lolled. Eyes permanently rolled back into sockets. All had head wounds.

  Firing squads forever firing. The condemned forever dying.

  “Welcome to the very final end!” crowed the old stranger as the singer of the song crooned, “Shot my gun into the night…”

  Chaos and death and the silent, staged productions continued on toward the end of the street and the distant fairytale castle that loomed above it all.

  “There isn’t much time left to believe, kid,” shouted the stranger. “This is death… and it’s your last chance before we open the door. This is everything you ever wanted. This is what happens when man goes a-exploring all on his own without considering that he might not like what he finds when all he sees is what he watches in the mirror. Ask any drug addict, it’s easy to start… not so much to stop.”

  The song began again.

  The old stranger warbled and crooned about many, many apocalypses unfolding across worlds without seeming end. And then suddenly the music stopped and there was only his bombastic travelin’ show snake oil salvation voice.

  “You’re doubting. I can see it from here.”

  Ward scanned the rooflines of the old-time facades the Imagineers had envisioned would take people back to a place they’d never known. Was he up there on the hot rooftops somewhere, drunk to the gills behind a cut-out facade? Had he come here first and found all this and finally gone nuts?

  Or…

  Ward shuddered and could not help himself.

  Had the crazy old man in black staged it all himself knowing that Ward would be here eventually?

  Had Ward been traveling with a lunatic through a zombie-filled wasteland headed for a nightmare made real?

  He told himself not to think about that. It wasn’t important now. It didn’t concern the is of now.

  “You said we don’t need fairytales. Science has explained the garden!” shrieked the stranger madly. “Well, how does your science explain this little garden of modern mayhem made to order?!?”

  The music cranked to full and just before it did, Ward heard the moaning chorus of his approaching parking lot pursuers coming from beyond the old red brick train station Walt Disney had imagined would convey the sense of coming to someplace magical. Someplace old and new all at once.

  Someplace safe.

  Someplace other.

  “Forward,” Ward muttered, thinking there had to be something, somewhere on the other side of all this that was safe and not mad.

  Forward was the only way left to go.

  Ward stepped over a corpse and cast a wary eye at the sea of hundreds more lying along a Main Street that led further into the park and to the castle at the far end. If there had
been an evac of some sort, that castle would have been the inner ring. Ward knew if there was gear to be found, he’d find it there.

  He passed the posed corpses of huddled children displayed underneath the plastic “Gift Shoppe” sabers of those who would cut their heads off.

  He thought of Moss whose life had not been taken.

  He passed dead drug addicts. Countless needles adorning their arms, a lone TV erected in the center of their throng like some pagan altar. One drug addict even wore a park-themed souvenir t-shirt. His face, even in death, was pure bliss.

  Moss who had traded nothing for nothing.

  He passed naked corpses that had been perversely arranged while other corpses blindly gathered and stared listlessly down upon them, as though watching some endless and unmoving pornographic performance performed unenthusiastically.

  Moss whose wife had left him and was everything to him… over there in Iraq.