by Jon Sauve
He stood head and shoulders out of it, reaching his great arms to try and grab Dillis and Clarice. Shatsberg had found his knife again. He dashed forward and plunged it into the giant’s arm.
Even with eight inches of steel through his tricep, Jibson found the power to grab Shatsberg and yank him butt-first into the slime. The two of them sank down into the murk. The surface of the slime jiggled and waved with the concussion of whatever battle was ensuing beneath the surface.
With a lion’s roar, Stooge grabbed out his knife and dove headlong into the fight. He vanished as well, and for two long minutes Cary and the clowns waited.
Finally, the buzz-cut head of General Stooge emerged, bearing the humongous head of Jibson. Shatsberg’s dog tags were strung over his knife blade.
Stooge climbed free and stood, straight-backed and dripping with goo, to salute Private Shatsberg.
“You died too soon, soldier!” he barked. “It should have been Donahue! An honor, Shatsberg!”
“That bastard tried grabbin’ my feet,” Dillis said. “But Shatsberg stopped him.”
Stooge looked over at the clown with his chest puffed out. “He was a hero!” His voice dropped to a somber level. “A goddamn hero. Now what do I have? Donahue, and two clowns, and some little pipsqueak. I hate to admit defeat… Hell, I’ll never admit defeat. But maybe a little break is in order. To restock, and all.”
Stooge turned away and started walking. Everyone followed him.
Cary looked over at Donahue. He wasn’t crying anymore, but he looked like he was trying to hide under his helmet. He was walking right up against the buildings, carrying his rifle and avoiding looking at Stooge.
“Somethin’ strange I noticed,” Dillis said. “If this virus or whatever the hell it is has such a high infection rate, how come we ain’t seen anything but clowns, huh?”
Just then, Donahue screamed and everyone heard a loud plop.
Donahue had gone into the slime again. He was still floating at the surface, thrashing his arms and fighting to get out. Stooge growled and ran over.
“You useless, whiny, sissy, girly sack of rotten-”
Stooge planted his foot on Donahue’s head, just as he’d promised. Six hands, all gray and bloody, reached up out of the slime to grab his leg. Stooge went in, howling like a wolf. In midair, as he fell, he whipped out his knife and one could already see the desire to kill in his eyes. Then he was gone. Muffled screams drifted up out of the slime.
“Let’s get the hell outta here,” Dillis said.
“General Stooge! No!” Clarice had her hands over her mouth again.
“Hey, sunshine, don’t ya know when to run?” Dillis asked.
She turned around, delivering a sharp punch to his red-painted nose. “Shut up, buttface!”
Dillis reeled back, grabbing his nose, and before he could recover Clarice was running toward the slime pit. Cary fell down, covering his head. He didn’t want to see what came next. He felt someone grab him, and the next thing he knew he was flying down the street. He heard people screaming behind him, and he finally opened his eyes. Dillis was carrying him, and there were fifteen or twenty kids chasing them. Zombie kids.
Dillis started coughing and they almost fell down.
“Jesus Christ, kid,” the clown said. “Lay off on the sausage boys, will ya? How many are back there?”
“Lots!” Cary yelled.
Dillis looked. The kids were running a lot faster than him.
“Ah, shit,” he said. He slowed down enough to drop Cary on the ground. “Run, kid, I’ll hold ‘em back!”
“No!” Cary said, hugging Dillis. “No, don’t do that!”
“I’m too old and crusty to make it, anyway,” the clown told him. “Come on, you look like a fast runner. Get the hell outta here. Don’t stop until you’re outta the park, got it?”
Cary nodded. Dillis gave him a shove, and he started running. He didn’t look back.
A week had gone by since the incident at Happy Birthday Land. Out of the six hundred and twenty-two children who had gone in that day, only fourteen had made it out alive.
One of them was little Cary Pickle, who was trying to fall asleep but couldn’t because he kept wondering if he should have looked back to see if Dillis had made it.
Downstairs, his father sat hollow-eyed by the TV and watched hour after hour of news broadcasts. Most of it was about General Stooge, the hero who had been the lone survivor of the army squads sent into the park. He had emerged with his knife dull from killing zombies, covered head to toe in green goo and dried blood. It was estimated that he had single-handedly destroyed over two hundred of the infected clowns and children.
Mr. Pickle started to fall asleep, but snapped awake when he heard the loud booming sound the TV station used to signify breaking news.
“This just in!” a reporter said. A helicopter view showed a team of medical technicians carrying out a very exhausted looking man with smeared paint on his face and a red, curly wig. “Another survivor has been found! It was previously thought that all staff of Happy Birthday Land had deceased, and a count was made difficult by the state in which we found the bodies, but it turns out one man rode out the storm!”
Cary had a bad dream. He went downstairs to sleep on the couch next to his dad. When he saw the TV, he stopped.
Dillis was on the screen, wiping his face off with a wet cloth with one hand and holding a beer and a cigarette with the other. Under all the makeup, he looked like an old, scary guy who liked stealing kids.
“Sir, how did you survive so long on your own?” the reporter asked. “Apple City officials only just managed to kill the last of the infected!”
“Easy, peasy,” Dillis said. “I hid my clown ass in an access tunnel. There was lotsa water there. No beer, though. Sheesh, ya’d think they would stock up for us clowns, huh? The kids are less annoying when they’re zombies, for chrissakes.”
“I’ll let you get back to it,” the reporter said, “but first, do you have any interesting stories for us?”
“Hell, no. But I have a question. There was this one kid, I think his name was Picklepuss or something. I tried to help him get outta the park, but I never knew if he made it…”
Cary smiled and ran back upstairs. He decided he could fall asleep, now.
THE EVENT
The disaster, later called the Event, occurred around two-thirty on an afternoon in August, 2015. An area roughly four miles in radius surrounding the Blue Fluid Horizons research center in Denver, Colorado was suddenly jumped forward in time and cut off totally from the rest of the world.
The barrier, known collectively as the Time Wall in literature published after the Event, was an impenetrable transparent membrane. Beyond it, the affected area could be seen as it would stand roughly fifty years in the future. People inside the area at the time of the Event were transported forward in time, cut off, except by sight, from everyone in the present.
Anything alive caught halfway between present and future vanished without a trace. Anything inanimate caught similarly was merely frozen and immovable, as though stuck partially in cement. Anything inanimate caught totally within was aged suitably to resemble its future self.
A woman named Marsha Gilpin was separated from her dog. The dog’s leash was suspended in the air between them, trapping the poor creature who, after a full hour of struggling and trying to chew through its leash, was found and rescued by one of the human exiles.
Men and women on the inside of the Time Wall were able to walk around in this city of the future. It was immediately obvious that this vision of the times ahead was a negative one. Buildings were abandoned and overgrown with weeds. The animal population was unhealthy at best. Windows and doors were stuck and very difficult to open, or broken. Other than the exiles, there was not a single person around.
After the initial panicking was out of the way, the exiles came together and discussed the importance of what they were seeing. The fact that the city was abandoned seemed v
ery dire indeed, but there were optimistic reasons why it might be so. One woman suggested that drought and natural disaster may have forced people at last to leave the place and settle somewhere else, that the world of fifty-years-from-now might be just as heavily populated. Someone else had the wild idea that we had discovered and developed interstellar travel and moved to a better world. But everyone knew, whether they said it or not, that the most likely possibility was also the darkest. That the bad day had finally come, whether by war or disease or something else.
One young man, later identified as twenty-four year old Sam Lima, had an idea to check the wreckage of old cars and stores to try and determine when Armageddon had occurred.
This particular group of exiles, one of many, consisted of around twenty people. They rallied around Lima’s idea, and went to gather their evidence. It quickly became clear that whatever it was that had caused the city’s abandonment, it must not have been anything extremely violent, such as nuclear war; the cars were simply derelict, like they had been parked and left untouched for decades. Some had trunks open, windows broken and gas caps removed, but that was it.
The stores that were searched had all suffered different fates. Food stores were utterly ransacked; there was nothing left but piles of trash. Other stores were mostly untouched, with the exception of a sporting goods store, which had been cleared of almost everything.
Some of those sporting goods were later found scattered around the city; tents set up in the covered bus parking area of the Greyhound station, RTD buses modified and outfitted and made livable. An elaborate water-catching system was found set up on the roof of a building.
The group, having gathered their evidence, convened near the intersection of 19th and Arapahoe.
Everyone talked in turn about what they had discovered. It seemed that everything, from the packaging of the food to the make of the cars, pointed to one conclusion; whatever had happened to Denver, it had happened very soon after that day in August, 2015.
The group decided that they had to warn those outside the Wall. They ventured together to the Wall, caught the attention of some onlookers, and took turns pointing at various potato chip bags and soda cans. It didn’t take long for someone outside to receive the message. The crowd of spectators grew even more anxious. Women were seen crying and banging at the unseen wall, screaming the names of their trapped loved ones, unheard.
“We need to find out what caused this,” someone said.
Again, it was Sam Lima who had the idea; whatever the cause, it must have originated at the very center of the bubble they occupied. At least, it was worth supposing so, since they had nothing else to go on.
Inevitably, the majority of the exiles had worked their way outward, to the Wall. The farther the group led by Sam Lima went, the more lonely and quiet their surroundings became.
“It’s been decades,” someone said. “Whatever made this happen, it’s probably not there anymore.”
Everyone had their own ideas about it. Sam had his; the cause was surely something wholly unnatural, that did not necessarily heed the dictates of time.
A short while after the group had reached the approximate center of the area, they became aware of another group up ahead. These were mostly men and women dressed in white coats. The rest of the group was made up of menacing figures with guns at their hips.
The two groups met. Sam Lima, who had by accident became the leader of his own group, met the leader of the other and shook hands with him.
“I’m Edward Young,” the other man said. He was middle-aged, and looked more like a lawyer than a scientist. “I’m head of the TRE project at the Blue Fluid Horizons research facility.”
“Never heard of it,” Lima replied.
“Then everyone did their jobs right. But I guess there’s no longer a reason for discretion. You look like a civilized bunch, so I will tell it like it is.”
“You caused this,” Lima said.
Young nodded slowly. “We did. Well, we certainly must have, anyway, though no one has any idea how. Out of all the people you see behind me, only four others were on the TRE project with me. It was a tiny outfit, a spare-time project we took on for fun. You know how the CDC developed an actual zombie apocalypse plan? It was kind of like that.”
“Time travel?”
Young at first shrugged and then nodded again, this time more readily and with a look of relief on his face. Possibly, it was relief at not having to utter that ridiculous phrase himself.
“Nothing like in the stories,” he added. “We weren’t trying to send people back to stop Hitler, or people forward to interface with aliens. We were trying to send particles. Light and energy. Forward, but not backward; there was nothing in any of our research to suggest that backward travel should be considered even a remote possibility. Our most recent test was attempting to send a stream of light photons forward by one hour. If successful, the result would be that we would see a spontaneous burst of light in our testing box, exactly one hour after the test was initiated. To give you a hint as to the actual result, the experiment was attempted roughly five hours ago.”
“Okay. So, what the hell’s going on here? How do we get out?”
“That’s exactly what we’ve been trying to figure out,” Young said. “But the problem is, the forward jump in time also affected our lab. All our instruments and materials... none of it is usable anymore.”
Lima considered, and soon developed a sick feeling in his gut.
“There’s no food here,” he said. “Not much water either, probably. If we don’t get out, we’ll die.”
Miles away, at the Wall, the majority of the exiles were acting on this very same fear. They were trying to break through, smashing chairs and bricks and other things against the barrier. Someone found a car parked at the top of a rise and set it rolling toward the Wall. People on the other side jumped out of the way, then watched as the car folded up like an accordion. The exiles were no closer to finding their way out.
Outside, those blocked out of the city were trying just as hard to break through. The police tried every weapon in their arsenal. After a while, the military arrived and were also unsuccessful.
Near the city center, well within the confines of the bubble, a bum was scraping around in the dusty ruins of a liquor store he frequented when he found a veritable gem; an unopened bottle of scotch, covered in a layer of dust. He scraped the grime away and stared at the glittering amber within, his eyes wide and full of wonder. In typical human fashion, he quickly set the bottle aside and went rifling around for more. His hand touched something unknown, and yet he understood very quickly what it was, even before he cleared the debris and saw it with his eyes. He had found a skeleton, holding an empty bottle, a skeleton dressed suspiciously like himself.
The Wall has never been breached. It never lifted. It stands there today. The people outside have watched as the exiles slowly wasted away and resorted to violence and other vile acts to survive, to live until the time they hoped for; the lifting of the Wall.
Though the exact cause of the Event hasn’t yet been determined, and likely never will be, certain things have come to light. Through observing the exiles, and interpreting the increasingly frantic and wild messages they sent through the barrier, we understand that the Event consisted of two timelines.
The one observed by the outsiders was that of the exiles, cast fifty years into the future to a dead city with no means of sustaining their existence.
The second, unseen timeline was that of the exiles in their own year, in the year of 2015, hidden by the overlapping bubble of the future. We will never know what they saw when looking out through the Wall, but we know that they were trapped in the city as it should have existed in 2015, the living city whose food stores and water supplies were seemingly bountiful. But they found themselves trapped and overpopulated, and died off over time, to have their bodies and doomed attempts at survival discovered by their future counterparts.
But there was more
evidence to support this than just the messages of the visible exiles. Not long after the Wall appeared, a police officer received radio communication from his partner, trapped in the city. He continued talking to the partner for some few days. At that time, his partner showed up at the Wall and was able to communicate visually with the police officer at the same time that his counterpart, in the other timeline, was talking to the officer through his radio.
From this, we can determine that electromagnetic radiation is the only thing capable of penetrating the wall. But after all these years, long after our police officer’s radio rang out with gunfire and then went quiet, this is the only thing we have learned.
PORTABLE HYPERSPACE
Sov looked at the readout on his Portable Hyperspace Unit. One hour might seem like long enough to someone inexperienced in hyperspatial covergence, but it might not be enough time at all. Or it might be plenty. You could never tell for sure until it happened. Once the convergence began, multiple timelines from multiple universes would mix, spawning a temporal and spatial chaos that could stretch time like a noodle going through a black hole. Worst case scenario, Sov might be ripped into a thousand thin slices, each one cast out across the multiverse like flat stones skipping over calm water.
Sov looked up. The land ahead was flat and covered in snow that had melted slightly on top and then refroze. The surface of it was a shiny glaze that looked unreal, and it made a crunch like thin caramel when he stepped in it.
He looked back. His prints, clearly showing the direction he had gone. It was time to get smart. He had to throw them off.
He set down his PHU and set to clearing a spot in the snow. When he had one, he sat and took off his boots. Now the tricky part, the part he had trained himself for; actually using the PHU. It wasn’t the first time he had done so, but this was arguably the most pressure he had felt beforehand.
The PHU was about two feet long and a foot and a half wide. Not quite a cube; more like a rectangle. But applying three dimensional shapes to it was ludicrous, considering what it contained, or rather what it gave access to.
