Harbinger

by Jack Skillingstead

  “How far is it?” I asked.

  “At this speed, about ten hours into the Deadlands.”

  “Does the Harbinger have a name?”

  Laird turned his head and looked at me but didn’t reply.

  “I’m just asking.”

  “Probably,” he said.

  “Probably what?”

  “Probably it has a name, but I have no idea what it might be.”

  “What does it look like?”

  “You’ve seen them.”

  “Whenever I saw them it was in a dream, or some kind of vision. I don’t know if I ever really saw one. I mean, I always had the impression that their appearance was, I don’t know, kind of a metaphor.”

  Laird percolated noisily.

  “In a sense,” he said, “they are more idea than being.”

  “You’ll have to explain that one,” I said.

  “I can’t.”

  We drove on. I cranked my seat back and tried to focus my mind. One thing that worried me was the possibility that I would suffer another cognitive lapse and not even remember my encounter with the Harbinger. And now that I’d decided to seek this one out I was intent on it.

  Then Laird said: “Something up ahead.”

  I sat forward. “What is it?”

  “Don’t know.”

  He slowed the Bus down. We stared at the monitor. A shape emerged out of the blowing dust, dead ahead in the middle of the road. Laird slowed the Bus further and came to a full stop. We zoomed in on the shape and could see it was two vehicles tangled up in an apocalyptic wreck. One of the vehicles was a Bus similar to our own. The other was alien in design, though it was difficult to discern its original features out of the mangled heap it had become. But I knew it was alien. I picked up its vibe like a signal fired straight into the center of my brain.

  Laird started to drive around it.

  “Wait,” I said.

  I uncovered the window so I could see it directly, without the intervention of the monitor.

  “Move closer,” I said.

  “That isn’t a good idea.”

  “Just do it, okay?”

  He rolled us up to the wreck and stopped again.

  “There was a woman in the hospital with me,” I said. “She had been in some kind of accident involving the Trau’dorians. It killed her son and almost killed her. I wonder if this is the wreck.”

  “We should be moving on.”

  “I want to have a closer look.”

  “If you wish my advice—”

  “I don’t.”

  “My advice is you forget about this accident and turn back to the Dome. If you won’t turn back to the Dome, then at least allow me to drive around and continue on to the Harbinger.”

  “I’m going out to have a closer look.”

  “No.”

  But I was already out of my seat. I donned a pair of goggles and went to the door. “I’ll be right back.”

  “We mustn’t stay here. This is exactly what I feared would happen.”

  I thumbed the open switch. The door at the rear of the Bus raised up, admitting a blast of furnace wind and stinging particulate. I hopped down to the road and closed the door. The wind staggered me until I found my balance and began moving along the side of the Bus.

  At the front of the Bus I halted a moment then stepped forward, leaning into the wind. Up close to the wreck I saw no indication of fire. Dust hissed through the twisted and punctured vehicles. They looked like two metal monsters in savage copulation.

  I looked into the passenger cabin of the crashed Bus. Definitely no fire. And that seemed to support Mrs. James’ version of events.

  A hand touched my shoulder and I jumped, ripping my tunic on a sharp jag of metal.

  “Sorry,” Laird said.

  I touched the tender skin around the fresh cut on my upper left arm.

  “Don’t creep up on me like that, okay?”

  “I didn’t creep.”

  We were shouting over the howling wind.

  “There wasn’t any fire,” I said.

  “It doesn’t appear so. Let’s get back to the Bus and move on.”

  “The officials told Mrs. James that her son had been burned to ashes. They lied.”

  Laird stood statue still in the gale.

  “And look at this,” I said. “The Trau’dorian vehicle wasn’t even designed to carry passengers. It’s a drone, probably operated by remote control. Deliberately crashed into the Bus. Just like Mrs. James said.”

  “Come on now,” is all Laird said, and he stumped back to our Bus. I followed him. Inside, the comparative quiet was deafening, like cotton wads cranked into my ears. And my ears were clotted with wind-driven dust. I was sweating, and every inch of exposed skin was coated with dust.

  I removed my goggles and bent over the little wash basin, splashed cold water on my face, rinsing the dust away.

  Laird started the Bus.

  “Wait,” I said. “Hold on.”

  “If you want to see the Harbinger we must go now,” he said.

  I came forward, drying my face with a towel. “The Harbinger has been out there meditating for decades. I doubt if he’s going anywhere soon. I want to check something out.”

  “Ellis—”

  “The Trau’dorians live underground. If what Mrs. James said is true, they must have come up out of one of their holes and taken the boy down with them. That’s my guess.”

  “Even if it’s true,” Laird said, “of what use is it?”

  “The Dome authorities don’t want to pursue the issue. They want to call it an accident and forget about it. If Mrs. James’ son was taken down, we’re the only ones who will bother to even look.”

  “I strongly encourage you to abandon that idea,” Laird said.

  “Turn on the thermal imager. Let’s look for the tunnel opening.”

  Laird hesitated a long moment. I was about to reach across him and do it myself. But then he moved his hand over the panel, and we both watched the T.M. screen survey the immediate vicinity. Nothing. I desperately wanted to see the tunnel. It was hot outside anyway, but a hotter spot suddenly appeared, a dark red blotch.

  “I bet that’s it,” I said.

  “Perhaps. Can we go now, please?”

  “Are you kidding? We have to get down there.”

  “No, we don’t. Ellis, this is the danger I spoke of. This is the danger of your mind not fully prepared and distracting you.”

  I stopped listening to him. He wasn’t human and couldn’t understand that I needed to find out about Mrs. James’ boy. And perhaps Mrs. James herself. Dr. Tamara had told me the woman had been released and was living in the Dome. But I’d never seen her in all the years.

  “I—”

  I stopped.

  “My God,” I said.

  “Yes, Ellis.”

  “By now the boy has to be long dead, and his mother too. It’s been years and years.”

  “Yes,” Laird said.

  A tidal surge of unreality moved through me. I shut my eyes and felt I was tumbling in the dark. I held onto the back of my seat and rode it out.

  “I’m not creeping this time,” Laird said, and touched my shoulder comfortingly. His hand was surprisingly light and . . . human.

  “It might be best if we returned to the Dome now,” he said. But it wasn’t his voice, wasn’t his voice at all. It was a female voice, soothing, gentle, infinitely empathetic.

  I forced myself to turn my head and look.

  But it was only Laird in the RODNEY biomechanical body, his heavy hand like a gauntlet weight on my shoulder.

  “I’m going down there anyway,” I said.

  “There’s no reason to,” he said.

  “There is a reason. I want to know what happened to Mrs. James and her son. Even if they’re dead now, I want to know. They deserve that much, don’t they?”

  Laird remained mum.

  I equipped myself with a flashlight, a clean pair of goggles, a water flask, and
a sidearm.

  “Are you coming?” I said.

  He shook his head. “I cannot accompany you into that place. All I can do is beg you not to go.”

  “Suit yourself,” I said, but it hurt. My only friend in the world was cutting me loose. And he wasn’t even a human being.

  *

  Outside I pointed myself in the right direction and started walking. The wind buffeted me, tore at my clothes. With all the blowing dust it was difficult to even see the ground, let alone locate what I hoped would be a tunnel opening.

  Suddenly a bright spear of light stabbed through the churning dust. I looked over my shoulder. Laird had turned on the searchlight attached to the roof of the Bus. He waved at me through the window, pointed and nodded. I got it: he was showing me the way to the hotspot. I waved back.

  The searchlight beam terminated at a patch of ground about thirty meters ahead of me. When I got there all I saw was more hardscrabble. I hunkered, balancing on the balls of my feet, and placed the flat of my left hand on the ground. It was hot, all right.

  I stood back and un-holstered my sidearm, took aim, and fired. An energy flash instantly scoured away the hardscrabble, revealing a dull metallic surface. I nodded, fired again, holding the trigger down, releasing continuous pulsations of plasma energy. The metal superheated and began to melt. A big hunk of it fell away and clanged noisily. I released the trigger.

  The edge of the burn-through glowed orange. I pointed my flashlight down the hole. There was a short vertical drop and then a tunnel. I jumped and landed on my feet. The opening I’d made was low enough that I could reach my hand up through it.

  Flashlight in one hand, sidearm in the other, I started down the tunnel. The deeper I went the hotter it became. I’d thought it was too sultry on the surface of the planet; True to their appearance, the Trau’dorians must thrive in Hellish swelter.

  The tunnel was crude. I’d burned my way through a trapdoor fixed to a framework, but the tunnel itself was hard packed earth. The walls gleamed, coated with some kind of resin. I toiled onward through perfect darkness, except for my flashlight.

  I’d been walking for about five minutes when I heard a frightening sound. It reminded me of barking seals and was so bizarre in the present context that it raised hackles on the back of my neck. Afraid, I switched my flashlight off. But that was worse. The barking sounds seemed louder. And nearer. I pointed my sidearm down the black throat of the tunnel.

  “Whatever you are, stop!” I shouted.

  Whatever it was didn’t stop.

  I pulled the trigger, once. A brilliant plasma flash, like Tinker Bell on heroin, streaked from the muzzle. It kept on streaking and then disappeared without ever striking a target.

  Seal barking laughter was the reply.

  I fell back, then I ran back, then I sprinted back—all the way to the melted trapdoor. I jumped, caught the now-cool edge, and hauled myself out of the tunnel. Kneeling there, breathing hard, scared, my mind roiling with fear and panic.

  The wind had subsided, still blowing but not a gale.

  I wiped spit off my chin and stood up, knees trembling. Damn it. I walked back to the Bus. When I was almost there I kicked something and sent it scaling over the road to clang against one of the big balloon mesh tires. I leaned over, picked it up, and immediately dropped the thing and staggered back. Something verging on madness skirled through my mind. The object I’d dropped was a dented rectangle of metal with a series of numbers and letters stamped out on the reflectorized face.

  A Washington State license plate, circa mid-twentieth century.

  chapter twenty

  I raised the door and ducked into the Bus. The door sealed shut behind me. I blinked sweat out of my eyes. Laird sat in the driver’s seat, motionless, arms hanging at his sides.

  “There was something down there,” I said. “It scared the hell out of me. I guess you’d say I got what I deserved, right?”

  But Laird didn’t have anything at all to say. I forgot my fear momentarily and placed my full attention on his immobile figure. Presently a new fear rose up in me. Of course, Laird often sat or stood stock-still. But I knew this time it was different.

  “Laird?” The cabin of the Bus smelled like burnt plastic. “Laird?”

  I approached him, spoke his name a couple of more times, but was not rewarded with a response. When I stood beside him, I knew he was gone. The disagreeable odor was strong. There were no percolating sounds. I leaned over him and listened at the breastplate, my ear hovering above the name: RODNEY. Inside, faintly, something went: wheeze, click, wheeze, click, wheeze click . . . then stopped and there was nothing.

  A great drafty loneliness enclosed me. I knew that in all probability the human essence that had been Laird Ulin had ceased to exist more than a century ago, back on Infinity, that the individual with whom I’d shared conversation and innumerable games of chess, wasn’t an “individual” at all, but a compact collection of imprinted memory engrams doing a sort of inspired imitation of Ulin. Nevertheless, his departure left me alone. If he had been pretending to be alive, I had been pretending to care about him. And if you pretend something long enough the line between pretend and reality blurs to the point of meaninglessness. Fake it till you make it, the AA people used to say. I looked at the RODNEY shell and knew I’d finally arrived at a funeral I couldn’t skip.

  *

  Laird was gone but RODNEY was in the driver’s seat, all three hundred or so pounds of him. I hauled him onto the deck and dragged him to the back of the Bus, grunting and straining for every inch. I thought about covering him up, but unlike a human body, this biomechanical puppet did not possess the dignity of “remains.” It was merely a thing. A heavy thing.

  I sat on one of the passenger seats to rest a moment. A dark haze passed over me, and I slept—I think. In any case I eventually sat up out of something like a nap to see firelight dancing on the interior roof of the cab. Something was burning outside the Bus.

  I got up and walked to the front. Night had fallen. The mangled wreck was in flames. Three Trau’dorians stood watching the conflagration, their devil faces red as blood, their mouths open, black inside. They were laughing. Two bodies hung out of the smashed Bus, their flesh charring, bleeding, falling off the bone. And the Trau’dorians were laughing! I could hear them on the speaker, those seal barks.

  Instantly I was angry beyond restraint. I grabbed my sidearm and barged outside. The aliens turned toward me, and I discharged my weapon repeatedly, releasing searing flashes of plasma energy.

  The Trau’dorians went down.

  When my weapon was empty so was I, and I pitched over onto my face. As I lay there the flat hardpan of the road underwent a transformation, and I found myself spread-eagled on rain-damp macadam.

  More Quantum Core fantasies or stasis dreams.

  Anyway, the misting rain was cool relief on the back of my neck. I pushed myself up on hands and knees. I was on an empty stretch of road, two lanes bordered by scrub pine. It was raining lightly. Directly in front of me was the aftermath of a cataclysmic collision. Was a theme emerging? A hubcap rolled wobblingly across the road and fell over on the gravel shoulder.

  I stood up.

  The wreck was silent now that the last hubcap had fallen over. Silent and full of death. I knew the Plymouth was my mother’s car and the Duster belonged to a drunken teenage boy named Mark Snyder. I couldn’t remember the other two boys’ names, but the driver was Mark Snyder, seventeen years old. My mother and brother had been on their way home from the supermarket with a couple of bags of Halloween candy. Mark and his pals were on their way to a party. Of course they’d been doing some serious partying already, a case of Rainier between the three of them.

  I didn’t want to, but I moved closer to the wreck.

  Gasoline smell, scorched rubber, beer. A few empty cans were in the street. A figure slumped over the wheel of the Plymouth. I looked away.

  The Duster’s windshield was smashed out. The driver had gon
e through it. No seatbelt, of course. He lay sprawled in the street, thirty meters beyond the mangled vehicles. Good old Mark Snyder. Drunk and driving with his mask on.

  His leg twitched; he was alive.

  But when I reached him I wasn’t so sure. Even the dead have muscle spasms. And this boy looked as dead as they come. Then his fingers twitched on the wet macadam. Not dead.

  I squatted beside him. One eye of his red rubber Devil mask leered at me. I grabbed the mask by the horns and pulled it off. The thick rubber had protected Snyder’s face. There was bruising around his eyes but no cuts or abrasions.

  “It hurts,” he said. “It really hurts.”

  And he was sobbing like a much younger child. He looked spitless and scared. Not at all like the cocky picture that had appeared in the newspaper, taken of Snyder and his friends the week before Halloween, all of them with shit-eating grins on their faces, all of them holding their Devil masks up like severed heads.

  “Yeah it hurts,” I said.

  “I don’t wanna die,” he said.

  Who does?

  A horn honked behind us. It sounded like a regular car, but when I turned I saw it was a big fucking anachronism: the Bus from Planet X. I started to get up, but Snyder grabbed my arm. He didn’t have much strength; I could have easily pulled away. But maybe not so easily.

  “Please,” he said.

  I knew he was going to die. No one had survived the wreck. Not Snyder or his two pals. Not my mother. Or my brother Jeremy. No one. And besides, this wasn’t real, so it didn’t matter if I stayed to comfort the dying boy, or stood up and kicked him in the teeth. Part of me wanted to kick him in the teeth. But it was a diminished part, a retreating part. I was tired.

  The Bus flashed its lights at me, but I turned back to the boy.

  “Take it easy, kid,” I said.

  “I’m scared.”

  He clutched my arm weakly, and then I started to cry, too. It wasn’t just Snyder lying there; it was all the funerals I’d missed, all of them.

  chapter twenty-one