An explosion of hot, humid air assaults me as I tumble onto muddy ground. My hands sink into a quagmire. Rain pelts at my head and back. I scramble up, vines and branches sliding, slick and wet across my skin and face. In front of me is a tree, its trunk as thick as a house. Above me is a canopy made of twisting branches as thick around as barrels. It is light here, but the light is so diffused from the rain and tree cover that the time of day is impossible to determine.
Where the hell am I?
Dim images of faces and whispers of names float to my consciousness. Vance? Jane? There were two others, but I can't remember their names.
I turn, seeing only more massive trees, thick underbrush, and trailing vines. Panic grips at me. Where is this? Not California. Not even America. I almost expect to see an impossibility––a concrete wall standing in this jungle landscape, with a hole cut into its surface leading back into the safe confines of Camton’s Psych building. But there's no wall. No Camton.
“Ellis…” The voice sounds distant. Far away. I turn to see a man standing behind me. He’s tall, with long dark hair and dark beard. Is that Vance? Everything is unclear. Fuzzy.
“It’s me,” the man says.
“Who are you?” I sputter, stumbling backward.
“Vance. Your old college buddy. It’s okay, Ellis. The confusion will go away in just a moment.”
So it is Vance. There are two other figures behind him. One is Jane, I think. I’m having trouble remembering the other’s name. Allie? No, Aleisha…
“Vance, where the hell am I?”
He steps forward, arms out and palms open in a welcoming gesture.
“You’re in another time. Another place.”
I stumble backward and fall onto the ground. Above me, I hear a bird cry, alien and unfamiliar.
Vance leans down, reaching out a hand for me. “Is any of this familiar? Is this what happened to you last time?” But I don’t answer, because behind Vance, another figure is materializing from the air. At first it’s a dark smudge, then the air seems to ripple like when a stone drops onto the surface of a still pond. Then there’s a rush of air and a man falls onto the ground.
“What the hell?” I scramble backward.
Jane glances backward. “It’s just Quincy.”
Aleisha rushes over. She bends down, holding out a hand. “You’re okay. We’ve done this hundreds of times.”
I take her hand and struggle up. My legs feel like jello. The air feels thick in my lungs, making me lightheaded.
“Hundreds of times?” I ask.
Aleisha smiles. “that’s right. You’ll be just fine.”
I hear a rustling. Something close by is moving through the undergrowth.
I look back at Vance and the others. “What—what is that?”
“What is what?” Quincy asks.
I point through the trees.
They follow my gaze. A creature, eight feet tall, feathered, yet reptilian in shape, lunges from the trees.
Vance’s shoulders sag. “Well, shit.”
Behind him, Jane reaches under her jacket and pulls something from her waistband. A gun?
I don’t know.
Because I’m running.
“Ellis!” It’s Vance. The others are shouting my name as well.
I glance back. The monster-bird-dinosaur-whatever it is leaps after me, screeching and snapping its jaws.
Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.
I am going to die here.
Gunshots ring through the air. Someone screams. Is it me screaming? One of the others? The monster?
There’s a high pitched shriek. No, that would be the monster. I glance back to see it gaining on me, bouncing over the bushes in quick lithe steps.
A crash of thunder. Flashes of lightning. I am blinded and stumble into a copse of bushes, falling hard onto—nothing.
Tumbling, spinning, crashing down a steep incline. Glimpses of a cobalt sky spin above me.
I roll to a stop. The fall was only a few seconds, but it felt like it had lasted an eternity. I lie there and moan.
Above me, I can see the crest of the hill. The creature, whatever it was, is nowhere in sight. I stand, every muscle protesting, and examine the hillside. It is steep and caked in mud with massive knotted roots jutting out of it at odd angles.
Another shriek sounds from my left. I spin, just in time to see the monster—leaping after me down the hill.
I scramble back in the mud. The creature lunges down at me, mouth gaping, revealing rows of jagged teeth. I yank my feet back, escaping amputation by a few centimeters as its gaping maw snaps into the mud.
It snaps again. I kick at it, the heel of my Vans connecting with the side of its head. It shrieks, pulling away, and then lunges back at me, shrieking again. An array of feathers fans out on its neck.
I kick back in the mud until my back hits something solid.
The creature rears up. It cocks its head to stare at me with one eye. The damn thing looks like an oversized chicken. After all the chickens I’ve eaten for dinner in my twenty-four years, I guess it’s time for revenge. Poetic irony and all that. I squeeze my eyes shut. Time to wait for the inevitable.
There’s a crack of thunder—or was it a gunshot?—a shriek of fury and the sound of the creature scrabbling through the mud.
I crack open and eye. The creature is retreating into the undergrowth.
“Ellis?”
Vance is standing at the top of the hill. Jane stands next time to him holding a small handgun.
I rise to my feet, feeling shaky. “I’m fine,” I shout. But my voice doesn’t sound convincing.
Quincy and Vance climb down the steep hill and then help me crawl back up using the vines as handholds. It takes only fifteen minutes but feels like hours. The others are there to meet me in the clearing where I had arrived, and even after several minutes of leaning against the tree, I am still gasping for breath, feeling my heart jack hammering against the cage of ribs, looking for an escape.
“Am I the only one that almost became chicken food moments after coming here?” I ask.
“We buried Terrance, a student of mine, on a nearby hill," Aleisha says.
“And we never found Jenny . . .” Vance says, looking away for a moment. Then snaps out of it. “So, yes. We knew the risks.
Jenny . . . Vance’s last girlfriend was named Jenny.
“You're all crazy,” I mutter. Jane doesn't respond.
“It’s drier over here,” Vance gestures toward a large tree.
It is still raining. We all look like drenched puppies, out of place in this wild landscape. I join them near the trunk of the tree where the rainfall is lightest. “Where are we?” I ask. “When are we?”
“It’s hard to know,” Quincy says. “Judging by the size of the predators I would guess it to be late Jurassic or Cretaceous. I’ve asked around to some paleontologists I know, and feathered dinosaurs, they say, is a fringe belief and not at all a mainstream opinion.”
“Quincy is a paleontologist," Vance says. “He was the first person that I brought on after we saw Big Bird.”
“Big Bird?” I ask.
Vance points back in the direction we had come from. “Big Bird,” he repeats.
Anger wells up inside of me. I point toward the hill I had fallen down. “That was real,” I say. “As real as anything I’ve ever experienced.”
Jane nods. “Did it trigger any more memories of your first experience? Anything more specific?”
“No, it didn’t,” I say. “And I want to go back. Tell me how to get back.”
Aleisha raises an eyebrow “We are tens of millions of years in the past and you want to go back? Already?”
“I almost died,” I say. “And the longer I stay here, the chances of me dying will only go up. So, yes. I want to go back.”
I burst out of the door and into the dark night and the cool open air. My head feels syrupy. My thoughts move slow as ancient glaciers. I hear a door open and footsteps rushing tow
ard me. I walk faster to increase my distance. The normalcy of Camton is a bracing shock to my system.
“Claymore!”
Vance is sprinting now, his long dark hair streaming out behind him. His face is still wet from the rain. I glance back. Quincy, Jane, and Aleisha are all running after me as well. I don’t know why, but I feel the desperate need to escape.
“Ellis!” Vance shouts again.
I don’t answer. A kid wearing a backpack darts out of my way, giving me a wide berth. My clothes are still soaked and stained with mud. Despite washing as much off me in the Psych building’s bathroom as I could, I still feel the hot, slick moisture from the mud and the rain on my skin. The kid must think I look like a madman.
I ignore him, struggling to make sense of, of, of... of reality. I fell through a filing cabinet and into an ancient jungle where I was nearly killed. This must be one of those dreams. The kind where you have to take a test you never studied for or an act in a play but you don’t know the lines. I stop walking, squeezing my eyes shut.
Wake up, wake up, wake up.
I open my eyes.
The campus is still here. The kid with the backpack—he looks like a Freshman—is staring at me with wide eyes. He sees me staring back and turns around, rushing away from me. An arm grabs my elbow. I spin around to face Vance.
“Ellis, talk to me!” Vance demands.
“What the hell happened?” I sputter.
“You went through a tunnel,” Jane says in a quiet whisper. “You told us that this happened to you before.”
“Not like that, it hasn’t!” I pause, remembering back to when I was eight. All that fear and uncertainty. “I don’t know. It was a long time ago.”
Jane turns to Quincy. “Maybe you were right?”
“Well, it’s too late now, isn’t it?” Quincy says.
“Come back with us. Let’s talk about this.”
I turn back way, continuing my walk toward the parking lot, searching for my car. I hear Vance running after me.
“Don’t do this, Ellis!”
“We went into a closet and then we were in a jungle. A—a jungle, Vance. That doesn’t happen. It’s not normal or natural, it’s—it’s impossible!”
“But it still happened. You felt the rain, saw the sun. You were there.”
I shake my head and squeeze my eyes shut again, trying to grasp onto something solid.
“It’s like waking up from a dream and not remembering where you are.”
I open my eyes and see Jane. I nod in uncertain agreement. “And not knowing what was a dream and what was real.”
A sudden fear grips at me. I grab Jane’s wrist. “What day is it? How much time has passed? A month? Two?”
“It’s not like the tunnel you went through!” Jane says, prying herself out of my grasp.
“Very little time is lost when you travel through this tunnel,” Quincy says. “Only about a minute.”
“It gets easier,” Jane says.
“Why would you want to go back?” I say, staring at them. “That was... terrifying.
Jane and Vance look at each other. Jane takes in a breath. “At first, the shock of traveling messes with your head. But there are things you can do that help.”
“How do you know all this?” I ask.
Jane glances at the others. They all nod, and she turns back to me. “The short version is that I’m not from this time.”
“Not from this time?” I say.
She shakes her head. “I was actually born this year. 1974. I could go and see my own birth if I wanted to. But that would be a bad idea.”
I shake my head. “What do you all want with me anyway?”
She looks away for a moment, then back to me. “I think you can help me.”
“You want to get home?” I say.
She barks out a small laugh. “You don’t want to know what would happen if I tried. No, I can’t do that.”
“So what do you want?” I ask her. I turn to the others. “What are you all even doing?”
“The short answer,” Jane says, “is that people did this to me and they need to be stopped. We think that you can help us stop them.”
I stifle a laugh. “How?”
Vance crosses his arms. “That will take some explaining.”
“Does anyone want to start?”
“Tomorrow,” Vance says. “We’ll talk more tomorrow.”
I run a hand through my hair, feeling strangely disconnected from my body. I turn back to Jane. “All of this sounds insane. You realize that, right?”
Jane smiles. “Try being me.”
I shake my head. “I don’t think I want to.” I look at the assembled group, then back to Jane. “I don’t know what you want from me, but… I can’t help you. I… I’d better go home.”
I turn away.
“Ellis, wait!”
I hear Vance running up behind me. He grabs my arm, but I twist away.
“Hear us out!”
I spin, turning on him. “About what? I still don’t know what it is that you guys are doing here!”
Vance nods, looking grimly at me. “Call me tomorrow. We’ll get coffee. I’ll tell you everything.
I shake my head. “Forget it. I don’t want to know. Whatever you guys are doing here, I’m sure it’s dangerous and stupid. Meanwhile, I’ve got plenty of my own shit to deal with.” I look at the others. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone about your little secret.”
None of them respond. Vance looks away.
I turn and walk to my car.
The cool Pacific air bites at my skin as I speed home along the Pacific Coast Highway, the windows down and Van Morrison’s “Moondance” blasting out of the speakers, passing late night surfers clustered around bonfires and the occasional lovers strolling along the beach. The normalcy is a shock to my system. The events of the night run through my mind.
I was in another time.
But that’s insane. Even if it was real and not some kind of dream, it was still insane.
The narrow twisting streets of Venice beach that surround the cloistered bungalows hugging the shoreline stream past me.
I pull up to the small garage behind my bungalow and climb out of my car. Reaching down, I grasp the garage doors’ handle and yank up.. a bottle shatters and I spin, feeling a rush of anxiety. Across the street I see a cluster of hippies, shirtless even in the chill of the night, no doubt flying high on some cocktail of illicit substances. I glance up and down the narrow lane. A beat up Chevy Malibu rolls by, its high beams on. Is it the same car that nearly caused a wreck chasing me through that intersection? No, that was a Lincoln. The Malibu passes and I see a man peering out at me through the driver’s side window. Short dark hair frames a furrowed brow and a grizzled chin. He has dark beady eyes. Shark eyes. A mottled scar runs down the left side of his face.
Make no mistake, Bob Carr always gets his man.
Bob Carr’s Fixer?
Maybe.
I hurry up the stairs to the front of the house. On the porch, I see Jim through the window, talking on the phone. He’s pacing back and forth behind the couch and getting tangled in the long cord. Shirt unbuttoned, phone under his ear, beer bottle in one hand while his other hand waves a cigarette wildly. The Bob Newheart Show is playing on the television and the mess of my failed writing session is still scattered across the floor. Steeling myself, I open the door.
“—don’t care what anyone else thinks about our future. What matters is what we think about our future. Goddamnit, Nance! Yes, I know how much most journalists make. Hold on, guess who just walked in.”
Jim sets down the beer bottle and holds the phone against his chest. He looks up, taking in my soggy appearance. His reaction does not disappoint: “Good god, Ellis, you look like something a sick cat puked up.”
“Nice to see you too.”
“Are you going to explain what all of this is?” He gestures around the living room.
I pause at the entrance to the kitc
hen to lean against the doorframe. “Writer’s block.”
“Your writer’s block is cluttering my living room.”
I grab a beer from the fridge and stalk back out to confront Jim. “Your living room? Aren’t we both rent paying members of this housing arrangement?”
Jim puts out his cigarette on the overturned side table. “You haven’t paid your share for the last three months, or have your forgotten?”
I chug down my beer, giving him my iciest glare. Tonight requires full-blown drunkenness, and as soon as possible. When I finish, I toss the bottle back into the open trash can. It hits the plastic with a satisfying clatter.
“That script will bring me enough cash to buy this pile of half erected driftwood outright.” The lie feels ashen on my tongue.
“In that case, I will gladly accept back pay.”
I grab two more bottles from the fridge and stuff one into each back pocket of my jeans. Then I return to the living room, tuck the bulky typewriter under one arm and begin to collect the scattered pages.
“Why don’t you count what I owe against my half of the security deposit.”
Jim stands, crossing his arms, and stares down at me with a worried expression. “You don’t have any more money coming, do you? Christ, Ellis. Okay, the way I see it, you have two choices. Either you go back to you father and ask for your allowance—or whatever you call it—to be resumed, or you get a real job. I don’t see any other option here!”
I stand, typewriter and pages precariously balanced in my arms. “This script will be done by the end of the week, and then I’ll return with a check bigger than you’ll ever see at your newspaper job.”
I turn on my heel. Exeunt.
“You're not a real writer!” Jim calls after me.
I stop in the doorway. “And six-hundred words a day about one more prostitute being arrested on the boardwalk isn’t real writing either!”
I slam the door shut with my foot and drop the typewriter and pages onto my bed. Regret comes swiftly. As much of a stubborn bore as he can sometimes be, Jim Gardner is a fellow writer. Even as a crime columnist for a tiny local paper, he still belongs to the same sacred fraternity as I do. Later, I’ll have to buy him a nice bottle of scotch to make nice. But with what money? He’s right. I’m broke. I’ve been swiping dollar bills from the rainy-day jar in Jim’s room for weeks to buy my cigarettes. The beers in my back pockets were bought and paid for by Jim. The rent has been covered by him for at least two months. Meanwhile, my agent says the director who bought my script hates it and I’m being followed by some Hollywood goons.
Dispersion: Book Two of the Recursion Event Saga Page 4
