by B. V. Larson
I looked toward the west and I began walking that way, the direction the hands on his watch had indicated. McKesson made a sound of exasperation and followed me. It was dark now. The pale orange sodium lights flickered into life, illuminating the streets and the apartment complex.
“You should keep your nose out of this one, Draith. We have rules in place.”
“Rules?” I asked. “Since when are there rules in this game?”
“They aren’t written down. But we have a mutual understanding. Like two dogs growling at each other on either side of a fence. As long as we don’t mess with each other, there is peace. But the minute one dog digs a fresh hole and sticks his snout into the other’s territory—well, all bets are off.”
We were out in the alley now, behind the apartments. There wasn’t much here other than dumpsters with green chipped paint and a few discarded, moldering couches.
I saw something there, a bright spot in the alleyway. I figured it was the final gasp of the dying day, a last sunbeam not blocked by trees or buildings. But I was wrong. McKesson headed for the bright spot and I followed. There was something slowly twisting in the alleyway. A shimmer in the air. It affected only a small area this time. It was just a crack.
I realized in wonder that the light I was seeing wasn’t from our own sun. It was from somewhere else. The small, vertical warp in the air had let through light from another time or place—or both.
I paused there, studying it. McKesson stood beside me.
“A second one?” I whispered. “So close?”
“It’s an echo,” he said. “A smaller variety of rip in space. It happens sometimes when they force one through. Have you ever pushed your finger through a sheet of paper? It never makes a perfect hole, you know. There are always splits, folds, and tears.”
I took a step toward it, then another.
“What the hell are you doing?” McKesson said behind me. “Be careful, man. You can’t go stepping out through an echo, they aren’t stable.”
“Does this lead to the home of the Gray Men?” I asked him.
“I don’t know—probably. They are the ones fooling around at the moment.”
I stepped forward again. Three fast steps. I didn’t want to give myself or McKesson time to think.
“What the hell?” shouted McKesson, angry now. “You can’t step out! Get back here or I’ll have to drop you, Draith.”
I looked back over my shoulder. I felt strange. The twisting air around me was hot. It felt like my body was charged with static—as though a rainstorm were blowing up and filling the air with electricity. McKesson was close behind me. He’d followed me to the very border of the anomaly.
“What do you care where I go?” I asked.
“It could be seen as a breach.”
“Unwritten rules again?” I asked. “They seem to break them at will.”
“Our side does too, but I don’t.”
I took a step away from him, and he reached for me. His hand grabbed up a wad of my sweatshirt. In his other hand I saw something that looked like a black, wriggling fish. I figured it was his gun. It was like being at the bottom of a swimming pool and looking up at someone standing on the edge. His image wavered and distorted even at this close range. I could see him, but his face was twisted and almost unrecognizable. His voice was reaching my ears with much less distortion, however. Sights were more disrupted than sounds.
I can be impulsive at times. It’s a personality flaw to which I freely admit, something I figure must have gotten me into a lot of trouble in my hazy past. I also don’t like being grabbed. I didn’t reach for his gun, or my own. I didn’t want to give him a good excuse to shoot me. Instead, I pulled his hand off my shoulder with both of mine.
“Get off me,” I said.
McKesson was much too slow to catch on. As I held his wrist, I pulled off his watch and tossed it into the rip.
When he realized what I’d done, I thought he really was going to shoot me. He did a very good impression of rage. There was a lot of cursing. The gun was in my face, close enough to make out the black circle of the muzzle despite the blurring.
“Settle down,” I said. “All we have to do is step inside, grab it, and bring it back.”
“It doesn’t always work that way, moron,” he said. “I said I was going to blow you away if you didn’t listen. If I do it now and push your sorry sack into this echo, no one will ever know. Do you realize that? There won’t even be any blood.”
“If you come with me instead, we’ll get the watch back together,” I offered.
McKesson hesitated, and then serenaded me with a fresh stream of curses. I peered ahead into the rip. Was the unstable opening getting smaller? It seemed that way to me. I wondered what would happen if this rip between existences closed while I stood halfway in and out of it. I knew it couldn’t be anything good.
“Are we going to go get your watch, or not?” I asked. “I think the echo is getting smaller.”
Instead of answering, he shoved me through ahead of him, with his gun pressed against the back of my head.
I stood in the open desert, with mountains in most directions, stark and timeless. The apartment complex was gone. The alley was gone. Las Vegas was gone. I was surrounded by sifting sands, spiny trees, flowering weeds, and other desert vegetation. I held my breath for a second, worried the air here might be different. But the temperature of the night, the look of the sky—it all seemed normal enough.
Then I looked up. The night was falling, darkening the east. The first stars were popping out—but they were wrong. I knew that, without picking any particular constellations. That gave me a chill, but it was the red disk on the eastern horizon that really upset me. It was a moon, but not our moon. It was a small, reddish circle of light. It was as if Mars were hanging up there in the east. And that wasn’t all, because the moon wasn’t alone. It had a nearby companion: a thin crescent of bone-white.
“We’re lucky,” McKesson said. “The rip is still here on this side.”
“Isn’t it always?” I asked, staring fixedly at the moons. I’d spotted another moon. It was high and small to the north. I couldn’t even be sure it was a moon. It could have been a companion planet or star. Whatever it was, it was clear proof I wasn’t in Nevada anymore.
“No,” McKesson said. “Sometimes these rips are one-way.”
I spun around slowly, trying to take in the entire alien sky. Up until this point, I hadn’t really believed there was another place behind these distortions—that I could step through a shimmering rip in space and instantly be someplace else.
“Seen enough?” asked McKesson. He was walking across the sands and kicking at a tumbleweed. “Did you throw the watch this far out?”
“I’m not sure,” I said, not even looking at him. I was too busy staring at everything around me. “So, this is it? Just a spot in the desert?”
“This place is pretty similar to our world. But don’t be fooled, there are always differences.”
“I can see that. There are at least three moons here. But essentially this is our Nevada desert without the city.”
“Look south,” he said, waving his hand vaguely.
I gazed in the direction he’d indicated. I squinted, realizing a structure stood there. It had looked like a mountain formation, but as I studied it, I came to understand it wasn’t natural. It was a stack of cubes. I swallowed, tasting grit.
“Is that some kind of building?” I asked, my voice hushed.
“That’s their kind of city. They build them like stacks of bricks. Very neat and orderly. No sprawl.”
As I watched, I saw a grouping of lights flash and move away from the jumbled mountain of cubes and rectangles. It had to be a vehicle of some kind.
“Why don’t they light up the exterior of their city?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “They don’t seem to like windows. Why don’t you go ask them?”
I realized, staring at their strange habitat, that I was the
alien here. I was the green man who’d mysteriously appeared in the wilderness. If I approached them, I doubted things would go well. I continued to stare at the dark structure while I questioned McKesson further.
“How many places like this have you been to?”
He shrugged. “None. They are all different.”
“Give me a number,” I said. Somehow, I really wanted to know how many worlds I was dealing with.
“Hard to know,” he said. “Sometimes, I can’t tell if they are the same place or not. I mean, if you visited Earth and walked on Antarctica’s ice, then later visited the Outback of Australia, would you think you’d seen one world or two?”
“How many have you visited—best guess?”
“Maybe a half dozen. But I know there are more of them. Some people think there are an infinite number of places like this. They are supposedly alternate realities, or versions of our own universe spun around a little bit. I have no idea, but don’t like stepping out somewhere unknown without good reason. They are freaky—and dangerous.”
Stepping out. I realized he’d used that term before. I looked at the surrounding desert floor. It didn’t look overly strange to me, not at the moment. Only the sky hinted I was far from home.
In the distance, in the direction I assumed was to the west of us, the sun had dipped below the horizon. It was getting darker by the minute, the mountains just shadows now. They looked more or less like the mountains that had always surrounded Las Vegas. As close as I could figure, this was what Vegas would have looked like a century ago, before people had decided to build a city on the sand. Apparently, the Gray Men weren’t as crazy as we were.
“Found it,” said McKesson. He held the watch up like a trophy. “You really owe me, Draith. Thanks for all the help.”
“Sorry, I was just so stunned.”
McKesson pushed past me moodily. He walked back into the rip, as he’d called it. I watched his wavering form shimmer away to nothing. I peered at the rip—was it smaller than before? Or did it simply look smaller on this side than it had from home? I didn’t know which it was, but the thought that it might be vanishing made my heart leap in my chest.
McKesson was gone. I couldn’t even see him on the far side. I felt an immediate, soul-wrenching sense of loneliness. You can’t really feel alone until you are standing on unknown, alien soil with the only way home fading away nearby. I couldn’t withstand that feeling for long. A minute later I stood in the alley with him. I could see the anomaly was indeed shrinking. It was only a shimmer over the asphalt now. Barely noticeable unless you walked right up to it.
“You took your time,” he said.
“It seemed pretty safe.”
“It wasn’t,” he told me. “Things are different in those places. That one is pretty normal looking, but sometimes they are very different. Different people, different physics, even.”
“What do you mean? Like lower gravity? Thicker air?”
“Worse than that,” he said. “They aren’t exactly different planets, they are different—I don’t know. Different existences, the Community people say. Different versions of our world.”
He’d started walking toward the street, and I followed him. I had McKesson talking now, and I didn’t want to let him go. I eyed his watch, which was back on his wrist again. I’d missed my chance to bring it back to Jenna. I wasn’t sure how I could manage to steal it now without killing the man. The more time I spent with him, the less I wanted to do that. McKesson was anything but a friend, but he was dedicated to patrolling these strange phenomena, and I wasn’t sure his methods were the wrong ones. Did our world really want to know what he was doing and why? Physicists didn’t like being wrong any more than the rest of us. If I went around talking about these vortexes, even with some evidence, I was unlikely to be met with enthusiasm and praise. Sometimes people just believed what they wanted to believe.
“Damn,” McKesson said, stopping in the breezeway.
I walked up behind him and saw what he was talking about. Holly’s landlady lay sprawled on the concrete. He stooped over her, checking her neck for a pulse.
“Is she alive?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“You think it was the Gray Men?”
“Nah,” he said. “No marks on her. Heart attack, most likely. She was the nosy type. She probably followed us and saw us walk into thin air in the alley. The shock must have killed her.”
He bent down with a grunt and attempted some halfhearted CPR. He pushed down rhythmically on the landlady’s sequin-covered shirt. It rasped under the touch of his hands. She showed no signs of reviving. I was glad I wasn’t the one in medical trouble. McKesson wasn’t the nurturing type.
“We’ve got to call an ambulance,” I said.
McKesson gave a heavy sigh. “Yeah, but I’ll be filling out paperwork until Tuesday if I do it. You call it in, will you?”
I grimaced but pulled out my throwaway phone and made the anonymous emergency call. McKesson gave up after a few minutes of CPR. He shooed away passersby, which were few, by flashing his badge and telling them help was on the way.
“You haven’t asked me yet why I did it,” I said.
“Did what?”
“Threw your watch in there.”
“Oh, that,” he chuckled. “I know why you did it. You couldn’t stand it any longer. A man like you—you’re a bundle of curiosity. You’ve been investigating these things for years, and like the proverbial cat, you aren’t going to stop until you’re dead. Of course you wanted to see what was on the other side.”
“What was it like for you? The first time you stepped out of our world?”
“Bad. I wandered into a bad place while checking out a murder. I was assigned to homicide originally, you know. But when I got back home, I became a department of one. Now I’m in charge of investigating freaky stuff like this. I don’t have an official title or assignment. Everyone at the department knows they are supposed to call me when some really weird shit happens. It used to be once a month, maybe. Lately, it’s been happening every day.”
“Bad how?” I asked.
“What?”
“The world you walked into first. You said it was bad. What was it like?”
McKesson stopped and looked at me with guarded eyes. “All glaring, blue-white light. Like heaven maybe, except hot and uncomfortable. I think I might have gone mad out there, if I’d stayed much longer. The ground was reflective, like ground glass or diamond dust.”
“Sounds enchanting.”
He snorted. “It might have been with goggles and a gallon of sunscreen. What was really upsetting was the rip itself. It wasn’t in the same location on the other side, you see. That happens sometimes. I had to travel for miles across—I don’t even know how to describe it. The place was like an endless beach of blinding tiny mirrors. I came back with a severe sunburn. Radiation burns, the docs told me. My own primary care physician reported me to some Department of Energy people, suspecting I’d been playing with unshielded uranium or a similar substance. Maybe they still think that. I’ll get skin cancer in another decade, they told me. Sometimes, when I wake up, I taste metal in my mouth and my bones ache…and I know why.”
I hadn’t considered the possibility of a radiation dose. I decided to change the topic.
“What about these Gray Men?” I asked. “They’re coming through at will now, killing people in weird ways. Have they always been able to do that?”
“That’s all new. Usually, we get some kind of beast wandering through—not people like us.”
“Beast? You mean like a monster?”
McKesson shook his head. “No rubber suits. Just their idea of animals, I suppose. Natural enough on their side. I mean, if you opened a path to another time on Earth, you might get dinosaurs trotting out of it, right? Is a dinosaur a monster, or just another animal?”
“I suppose that depends on whether or not you’re selected for dinner.”
The ambulance showed up a f
ew minutes later. McKesson waved them toward the landlady. He gave them the impression he was a cop arriving on the scene and I was the discovering witness. When the paramedics were busy going through the motions with the corpse, he beckoned to me. I followed him. Together we walked out to his car, which was parked out on the street.
“We can take off,” McKesson said. “The old lady is their problem now.”
I found myself glancing over my shoulder at the dead woman in the breezeway. I wondered if I would end up like that someday. Maybe it would happen in an alien desert under three strange moons.
McKesson climbed into his car and pressed the lock button, just in case I got any ideas about climbing in with him.
“Now disappear quick,” he said, “or you’ll be stuck when a patrol car shows up.”
I didn’t disappear. Instead, I leaned near his driver’s-side window and kept talking. “We didn’t find Holly.”
“She’s gone, and I have to get going too. My best advice is to forget about her.”
“I can’t do that.”
McKesson checked his watch. “I’ve got to go.”
“What? Are you late for a wedding or something?”
He twisted his lips. “Police business,” he said.
“Just show me your watch for one second.”
He made no move to do so. In fact, he scooted his sleeve down over his watch, so I couldn’t see it at all. At that moment, I became certain he was heading to the site of yet another event.
“You’ve detected another rip, haven’t you? Somewhere else?”
McKesson shook his head and stared through his windshield. He put on his seatbelt.
“You might want to step back, sir,” he said out of the side of his mouth. “I don’t want to run over your toes.”
I had no idea where McKesson might go next, but Holly’s apartment was clearly a dead end now. I recalled that when searching for a kidnap victim, the odds of finding them were the highest in the first half hour after the crime. If McKesson knew of another rip showing up, I wanted to be there to check it out. It was the only lead I had.
“Come on,” I said. “I’ll listen. I’ll even follow your rules this time.”
