Velocity

by V. B. Larson

  “He’s gonna make it,” Ray grunted at me.

  “What?”

  “He’s gonna step out, just like he would’ve done if he hadn’t of been so stupid as to wait for us to catch him,” he jerked and heaved, pulling the man back presumably for another try. “Come on, you dumb bastard,” he muttered.

  “He’s dead, Ray,” I said gently. I was standing next to him, and thinking that he was going over the edge. Ray was losing it, even while I watched.

  “I’m tired of lookin’ at him, and I don’t feel like digging a hole,” Ray explained.

  “I’ve got a lighter,” said a voice. The voice chuckled when I jumped and then Steve stepped out of the shadows from behind the Beamer we had joy-rided to death earlier. He was wearing his crazy gold helmet as always, and seemed amused by the two of us.

  “We could burn him. I’ve got a lighter and we can use the gas from the Beamer.”

  Ray suddenly stood and got right up in my face. His arms were cocked back and he was ready to go for me right there, I could tell.

  “You gonna stand there and watch, or are you gonna help?” he asked me.

  I looked at him for a moment, then without even a glance at Steve I reached down and helped Ray with the body. We lifted him up Ray working his legs and me working his arms. The head lolled and flopped as we swung him to and fro. With a mighty heave we sent Kevin Simpson through the rip. The fields rippled and loomed a bit like a fire that is fed a dry stick of tinder. I wondered what the people on the other side, if there were any such people, would think of their latest immigrant.

  “Oh man, you guys are dog meat,” laughed Steve, holding his rifle to his belly and bending over it a bit. “When Kyle finds out you tossed him through, you’re both friggin’ Alpo, man.”

  “Why’s that, Steve?” I asked.

  “Because you tossed old Senor Simpson through the rip.”

  “So what?”

  “So you were about to take the stuff out of the Beamer and step out with all of the loot,” he explained, as if we were simpletons. “You were stealing from Kyle, stealing from the gang. At least, that’s what I’m telling Kyle. You guys have been acting weird lately anyway, he’ll believe me.”

  “Yeah, well-” began Ray, casually turning a bit and laying his big black hand on his shotgun, which protruded over his shoulder.

  “Hold it right there, man,” said Steve, instantly grim. He held his rifle confidently, aiming it from his hip. It was pointed at Ray’s chest, and all of us knew that he wasn’t likely to miss. He was good with that rifle, he was forever stalking around in the fields and vacant lots, shooting at everything that moved like a ten-year-old with a BB gun.

  Ray let his hand ease away from the shotgun, while I took a nonchalant step forward. “You too chick,” barked Steve, swinging the barrel to cover me. I froze. “You are two of the sorriest nuts I’ve ever caught out farting around in this parking lot,” he laughed, shaking his head. “Now both of you will drop your guns and kick them over here, nice and easy,” he said it just like a gangster in an old video, which is where he got most of his ideas.

  “Hey now,” I said after we had kicked away our guns, forcing a jovial smile. “We’re all buds, Steve. Let’s go have a sixer in the store and talk it over.”

  “Not anymore,” said Steve, shaking his head with grim finality. He was obviously more relaxed now that we were unarmed. He glanced to the One-Way sign we had knocked over while tossing Simpson through the rip. He frowned, walking over to it while keeping an eye on us. “You guys even kicked over our mascot here, just to prove you’re traitors.”

  He looked down at the sign for a moment, a good long moment, but not quite long enough for us to get to him. He got his rifle up in time to check us, and the look of shock in his eyes was good to see. Ray had stepped quickly and silently up to within five feet of him, and I was right behind him. He could see the deadly intent in our eyes, and we could see a moment of fear waver through his. He and Ray were practically face to face, with Steve’s back up against the fields. We were all very aware of how close Steve was to going into the rip. One step back, maybe two, and he was stepping out for sure.

  “I’ll blow your guts out, Ray. You back off now.”

  “And I’ll jump you Steve, you skinny little psycho. I’ll rush you and we’ll both go steppin’ out together, just like we was dancin’,” Ray told him in a low, gutteral voice.

  “I know what you need right now Steve. You need a little chemical courage, a little crank or smack or maybe a good dose of blur,” I said, baiting him. “You’re a scared weasel without a little bit of blur, aren’t you Steve?”

  “You shut up, or I’ll blast off you-” I never heard what part of my anatomy Steve was going to blow off, because right then Ray hit him. He had swung his gun to the side to aim at me, and Ray took this opportunity to shove him into the fields. The rifle went off and missed me, although I suppose it was just luck that it did. We saw him fall back into the fields and try to catch himself on the edge of the transfer point, at the point where a man’s molecules are spread half-here and half-there. He fired his rifle again, and it made a distant popping sound, as if he had fired it into a king-sized foam mattress. The muzzle flashed, but we never felt or heard the bullet strike, I have no idea where it went.

  We could see for a second that his vocal chords strained, his mouth gaped open and his hand stretched toward us, but it was all silent, his voice never reached us. Just before he disappeared, his helmet slipped back and I saw his pimply face one last time. In that moment he wasn’t a gang-member or a vicious bully, he was a sixteen-year old kid and he was scared out of his mind. Then the fields rippled and he was covered up, like a man drowning in a vat of swirling paints.

  Then Kyle came out. He was very rational. He was almost always calm, even when he was tearing chunks out of your face with his visegrips. “So let me get this straight, team,” he told us in that fatherly voice I hated. “Mr. Simpson had wanted to get through our rip so badly that you felt sorry for his corpse and tossed it through. Then Steve came along and accidentally stumbled through after the body?”

  “Nothing like that, Kyle,” I said, watching him slap his goddamn pliers into his palm like a school master’s paddle. Slap, slap.

  “I pulled Steve out of his drug scene, you know,” Kyle said quietly. “I pulled Stevie up and out and then you guys tossed him into oblivion.”

  Slap, slap.

  “He might not be dead, Kyle,” I said, feeling a bit defensive. “He’s probably better off than we are. No one knows what’s on the other side.”

  “I do!” shouted Kyle at me suddenly, glaring with those intense big yellow eyes of his. Then he looked down at his pliers again and I followed his gaze. The light from the fields shimmered and glinted on the shiny metal. Dark blood stained the jaws and ran down to smear the grips. I wondered briefly if Simpson’s blood still felt tacky in Kyle hands and cold fingers of nausea tickled my guts.

  Kyle lowered his voice, all calm and reason again. “We all know why nobody comes back out of the rips. Because there’s nothing on the other side now, nothing but death.”

  “He pulled his gun on us, Kyle,” I said.

  “So you iced him, nice and neat. You guys are a pretty pair, alright. Couldn’t have just tripped him, could you Ray? Couldn’t just give him a nice judo throw, knocking the wind out of him and some sense in? No, you had to make an interstellar iceball out of him, you had to turn him into a sixteen year-old popsicle, zits and all.”

  Ray stared glumly into the dancing colors, silently brooding. When he finally spoke he didn’t take his eyes away from the colors. “You know what I want to know, Kyle? I want to know what’s with you and those friggin’ pliers. Did your daddy beat your lil’ butt with his handtools, or somethin’?”

  “No Ray,” said Kyle quietly, the snake tattoos jumping on his forearms the way they did when he was pissed. “No, but I bet your daddy beat your butt good, didn’t he? Too bad he never got a lit
tle carried away and tossed you over a cliff or out a window, like you did for poor old Stevie.”

  Then Kyle stalked over to the Beamer, lifting the trunklid and dug out something that crackled like paper out of the darkness. He returned with a long paper sack in his hands, the type that liquor stores used to put booze bottles in so that drunks could pretend they weren’t booze bottles-back when there were liquor stores. He walked back to us and held it out a sack to Ray, grinning.

  “Would you like a drink, Ray?” There was something funny about the way he held the bag. It was upside down, with the open end covering his hand. Ray’s eyes slid to Kyle’ side, to his holster. My eyes followed his, and widened. Kyle’s holster was empty.

  “You gonna shoot or what, Kyle?” asked Ray in a dead voice.

  Kyle waved the gun under his nose a bit, chuckling. The bag slipped half off, revealing black metal.

  “Not a drinker? On the wagon, Ray?”

  My hand slipped down to my gun, and Kyle caught it.

  “Hold it right there, Paula,” he said, darting a glance my way. “I’ll shoot you both before you’ve got it out.”

  I froze, but tensed to go for the gun if he shot Ray.

  “You two were going to leave me, you were gonna step out. No need to deny it. You were going to leave me here, alone. ” he hissed the words between clenched teeth.

  He pulled out his pliers then and reached up to grab Ray’s cheek with them. “Well, I’ve got just the thing to keep you around.” The tattoos on his arms did a snake dance as his muscles tremored with tension.

  Sweat popped out on my skin and I could see sweat on his face and arms too, glistening oily beads that reflected the shimmering colors of the fields. I heard Beth coming up from the store, her sandals slapping on asphalt and crackling in the dead ivy that had once grown on the cement islands in the parking lot.

  “Don’t kill each other,” she said, her voice sounding desperate. Her fear for our safety had finally overwhelmed her fear of the confrontation. “I know what’s wrong with you Kyle. You’re afraid we’ll all leave you here.”

  Kyle laughed, his eyes snapping over to Beth, then back to Ray, who flinched at the touch of the bloody pliers.

  “He’s nuts Beth,” I said quietly. “Over the edge.”

  “I think he never wanted to see anyone leave,” Beth continued. “Perhaps each time he saw our fiery rip eat another one, a strip of his sanity came loose and burned with them. We’re all incredibly lonely. We all grew up in towns, where people and cars filled the air with noise and smells. How long had it been since you saw a movie Kyle, or caught a whiff of diesel fumes?”

  “Fuck off,” growled Kyle, his lips lifting away from his teeth in a snarl.

  “You don’t want to kill us, Kyle,” Beth said gently. Her face came into the light now, dusty tear-streaks and all. “We’re the only friends you have left now.”

  This last struck home and Kyle looked at her, his mouth gaping like a fish, his eyes wide and lit with insanity. It was all the chance that Ray had, and he took it. He knocked the gun aside and it went flying away, firing inside the brown paper sack. The blast blew out the back of the bag and the sack gave birth to the black pistol in midair, like an alien bird. Before the gun clattered onto the dusty asphalt, Ray pulled out his shotgun. He struck Kyle just below the ear and he went down.

  We stood there for a moment, guns out, panting and sweating. A breeze came up and glued grit to our moist skins. Blood trickled down Ray’s cheek and ran into his mouth, staining his teeth red. It looked like a terrier had taken a bite out of his face. Staring down at Kyle’s motionless form, all of us felt a new freedom. With this feeling came decision. Moving quickly, hardly speaking, we gathered together the camping gear from the BMW and what other belongings we wanted. Like parents on Christmas night, we shuffled past Kyle with muffled steps, hoping he would not wake up until we were gone. It would be harder to leave with his crazy eyes boring into our backs.

  Standing at the brink of the rip with our backpacks full, we took a last glance at old Earth. Just over the horizon the moon hung high, looking white and clean over the dirty world. The parking lot was barren and empty, the rusting hulks of cars everywhere like a slaughtered herd of metal beasts.

  Kyle slept peacefully on the asphalt, unconscious and undreaming. A clear spot in the dust had appeared before his blowing nostrils. Ray’s cheek had stopped bleeding, and he had his shotgun in his hands. Beth had a struggling cat tucked under each arm. We were ready.

  “Let’s make sure that wherever we end up, we’re together,” I said, and put my hand on each of their arms. Together, we took a step forward. Swirling liquid color closed over us, and we left old Earth behind.

  Although as years passed and Beth, Ray and I lost track of one another under the yellow sun of the new world, none of us ever forgot the man who had tried to hold us back. In the frontier boomtowns that dotted the wild landscape of Tau Ceti, I often wondered what had become of Kyle. Had he gone completely mad? Had he eventually stepped out? Or was he still back on old Earth, possibly the last man there, a beetle rattling about inside the ribs of an ancient behemoth that had long since died and rotted away?

  I tended to think the latter.

  Rusted Metal

  Tom Riley, the brewery’s night watchman, was just arriving at work. There was a touch of corn snow in patches on the ground and Tom’s boots crunched as he headed down the backstairs to the employee’s entrance. It was Wednesday night and it was a cold one. The wind blew hard and had an icy edge to it that stabbed deep into your lungs. It was normal weather for mid-January-but not for the end of October.

  Tom paused before the employee’s entrance to listen to the wind whipping the trees like an enraged master. The trees creaked and groaned under the assault, lashing and scratching at the brewery’s gray cinder block walls with leafless branches. He worked to force his key into the frozen lock with numb hands. Finally he succeeded and the door opened, immediately the comparative heat of the brewery’s interior washed over him like hot breath.

  He stepped inside, stamping his feet and blowing on his hands. It was 11:30 pm precisely when he clocked in, and John Shepler, the night foreman, was waiting for him.

  “Barely made it tonight, Riley,” Shepler remarked while knocking a cigarette out of his pack with an experienced flick of the wrist. Shepler was a thin-armed man in his late thirties who smoked and sweated constantly. He wasn’t supposed to leave until Tom was on duty and he always resented every extra minute that he was forced to wait. He leaned back against the bulletin board next to the time clock and lit up.

  “But I made it, didn’t I?” Tom replied with a winning grin. Shepler didn’t smile back, so Tom added: “Sorry, it comes hard to get out of bed for the dead shift when you pass up fifty.” Shepler wasn’t supposed to smoke inside, but Riley was willing to let it go if it got the bastard out of the plant quicker.

  Shepler still wasn’t smiling. He crossed his skinny arms and puffed on his menthol cigarette. He gazed at Tom with dull, piggy eyes. Tom wondered whether the foreman was only an obnoxious prick at the end of his shift, or if he was like this all evening long.

  There was silence between them while Tom took his cap and gun belt out of his locker. He snapped his big, four-battery flashlight into place and checked the revolver. The pistol was supposed to be just for show, but Tom always kept a stash of spare cartridges in his breast pocket. When he was dressed he swung the locker shut. The unoiled hinges screamed in the silence of the closed brewery.

  Shepler still hadn’t said anything. He drew deeply on his cigarette and gave a brief, rumbling cough. Tom hoped he would just put on his coat and go. Technically, the foreman outranked him, but now that he was pushing sixty Tom was past the days of licking boots. Especially for piss-ants like Shepler.

  “There’s been a break-in downstairs. We think some kids did it.”

  “Where?” Tom’s tone became serious. This sort of thing was his department. Inwardly he smil
ed, this explained why Shepler hadn’t left for home the moment Tom had arrived. Shepler shrugged a hunched pair of bony shoulders and took another puff before answering. Tom cinched up his gun belt impatiently and with a little more purpose than usual.

  “They came in through a window-way in the back. I guess they busted up some cartons, took some stuff.” He took a faded bandana out of his back pocket and mopped the sweat from his brow. The brewery was always warm because of all the boilers and refrigeration units, but no one sweated as much as Shepler.

  “Did you call the cops?”

  “Nope, didn’t seem worth it. They didn’t get anything of value anyway. Just a pile of crap back there, everything from adding machines to antique bottle-cap presses. Hell, that stuff has been gathering dust back there for forty years or so.”

  Tom nodded and rubbed his lower lip against his teeth. The stuff was probably valueless, except possibly as scrap. He recalled too, that Shepler had had a few run-ins with the law in his time and was never one to be too fond of alerting the police. He reflected silently that it was just as well, at least this way word of it would probably never reach high management and cause some college boy with nothing better to do to try to make a name for himself by “tightening up plant security”. Tom knew that any changes in the security system were likely to begin with the removal of old fossils like himself.

  “Who discovered the break-in?” Tom asked.

  “Nick Moore did. He said he was looking back there for empty crates, but I say he was looking for a quiet place to sit on his lazy ass and smoke dope. Anyway, he’s the one who found the broken window.”

  Tom nodded and frowned down at his shoes while tucking his shirt in. Then he looked up at Shepler sharply. “Does anyone upstairs know about this yet?”

  “Nope. And they ain’t going to, either.”

  “Well, I think you ought to take me down there and show me where it happened.”

  Shepler took a deep drag on his cigarette, as if it were his last. The tip flared orange then dimmed. He exhaled in a big smoke-filled sigh. “Alright,” he said resignedly.