by James Axler
The pulsations coincided with the beating of his heart.
With everything moving to the same pulse, his pulse, for a glorious moment Doc felt the scope of eternity.
Then the membrane that surrounded him began to close in. The ceiling lowered, forcing him to his knees. As the walls drew in, he put up his hands. He could not stop them from molding elsewhere to his form. When the next contraction occurred, he was propelled headfirst down the tubule. He traveled at great speed for a short distance, then stopped. There was a pause, then he shot forward again. When the motion ceased, he tried to see through the membrane. All he could make out were vague shapes, colors, a confusion of lights.
On the fifth contraction, something on the other side of the membrane moved against him, sliding up over his feet, his legs, his chest.
He found himself palm to palm, knee to knee, with a cherry-colored being. Its humanoid features were distorted, flattened by the pressure of the intervening film.
When the next pulsation came, they scooted along together.
Whatever the strange creature was, it seemed to desire communication with its Victorian counterpart. Through the membrane, the sounds it made were muffled, garbled, a soft liquid growling.
Doc was shocked when the film that separated them dissolved and their palms touched. Not just touched, but began immediately to flow into each other, disappearing as they did so, one hand eating the other. The sensation was electric. After their hands merged, the wrists followed, swallowing each other up. Then the arms. Then chests, legs and heads, cheek to cheek. Doc and the red creature passed completely through each other, and at the moment they were entirely joined, he felt a terrible suffocating panic. In that instant, they knew each other’s thoughts.
“I am lost” came into Doc’s mind.
Not spoken words. Not written words. Just there, undeniably there.
And along with it, a sense of sadness more profound than anything he had ever felt, or dreamed he could feel. A tragedy deeper than any mortal soul could bear.
I am lost.
I am lost.
When the two bodies had passed through each other and come out on the other side, the membrane reformed behind Doc’s back. He shot forward alone, pushed by another wave of peristalsis. Like a pistol ball down a barrel, he rushed toward the closed end of the tube.
What lay before him was not an oculus or a doorway, nor was it a shimmering split in the fabric of reality that conjoined two worlds. It was something animate and profane. A tiny circle of light, bounded by dense rolls of pink muscle.
He couldn’t tell if he was dreaming this cosmic sphincter or not, if the nightmare had ended. The world shuddered and changed before his eyes. With a start, he awoke to find himself on his back on the violet armaglass floor. The violet walls surrounded him. The door to the chamber stood widely ajar, and tendrils of gray fog coiled over the jamb. The journey appeared over, and he felt no nausea, only a slight weakness in his knees.
Doc rose to his feet and moved to the door. He couldn’t see three feet in front of his face, but he could hear a high, child’s voice, a voice that could have been his daughter’s.
“You saw it, Father! You saw it! You saw it, did you not?”
The exclamations touched a deep and treasured memory, and brought back a flood of intense and detailed images. It was Rachel. His Rachel. A terrible burden lifted from Doc’s heart, and pleasure and delight flooded in to fill the void.
Then came a man’s voice, as familiar as his own.
“Aye, perhaps I did see…something.”
“More eyes from heaven?” said a woman in a cheerful, mocking tone.
“Emily. Oh, Emily,” Doc murmured.
“The eye! God’s eye! Look, Father! Do you see it? Do you see?”
A hard wind began to blow across the doorway where Doc stood. It tugged at his coat, howling.
“Theo!” the woman cried.
“Father!” the child called.
“Thunder and damnation!” exclaimed the man. Then he added, “I love you.”
Doc watched a young man tumble past the doorway, his frock coat aflutter, hair wildly blown, eyes wide with disbelief.
“Believe,” Doc admonished him.
Then he heard the reply that he missed when he was trawled so long ago. The woman answered back as her husband was torn from her, “I love you, too, my dearest Theo.”
As Doc braced himself against the door frame, preparing to make his exit, the fog thinned a bit. Straining his eyes, he saw two backlit dark shapes coming toward him, growing more and more distinct as they approached. One was of medium height; the other had the stature of a small child. The taller one was wearing a long dress and carrying something bundled in its arms.
It had to be little Jolyon, his precious son.
It is time, Doc told himself. Time to reclaim your beautiful life.
“Theo?” the woman said.
“Father?” the child said.
The two figures stepped out of the swirling mist, hand in hand.
Doc Tanner froze in midstep, his heart pounding in his throat. Like a gong, the words rang in his head.
I am lost.
I am lost.
I am lost.
Chapter Thirty-One
Antoine Kirby was greatly relieved when he rose from the floor of the chamber with his stomach contents on the inside of his body and not all over his shoes. In his lab coat’s side pocket, he had tucked Colonel Bell’s family photos. They were all he had left of his friend and colleague.
Outside the chamber door, the fog was lifting. It was time to take the measure of their success.
Kirby waited until he could see the ground before he stepped out. It was paved. It looked like polished concrete, and it had a decided slope to it, angling down to the right. He hopped down and watched the fog disappear completely, fading into rough-textured concrete walls and ceiling.
A parking garage ramp was his first thought. It made sense. His intended destination was Los Angeles. A place choked with similar structures. This Los Angeles was a vast improvement from the one he’d seen from the decks of the Taniwha tea. But as he looked around, he saw it was not the L.A. he remembered.
Down the slope, attached to the ceiling was a sign that read: Slime Zone 100 Yards. The term had no meaning for him. It didn’t sound like something pleasant, though. One hundred yards, give or take, from the sign, the fog still lingered, blocking the passage. A smell of ammonia wafted up from below, and it was dark down there. Uphill, it was light.
He heard noise coming from that direction—shouting, banging and what sounded like music. Yes, it was definitely music, and with a lively beat. Aside from the bass and drums, he could make out guitar, saxophone, piano, congas and the sexy sounds of a female singer.
There was no doubt about it, the world and its complex, intermingled human cultures had been restored. This was Colonel Bell’s moment as much as his.
“Graydon, we did it!” Kirby shouted. Then he laughed and corrected himself, “Or should I say, we undid it.”
As he walked up the ramp, he hummed along with the song. The words were impossible to pick out. Empty foil packets about the size of paperback books blew down the ramp, end over end. Littering, it seemed, was still a problem. He snatched up a couple of the wrappers. There were two varieties: Beefie Cheesies and Tater Cheesies. Obviously some kind of fast food. Curious about the diets of people in the twenty-second century, he read through the list of ingredients. At the top of the list he was stunned to find peridotite and olivine. Rock sandwiches? Clearly that had to be some kind of typographical error.
Kirby was hoping to see some skyline when he neared the end of the ramp. There was neither sky nor cityscape. Overhead was a solid gridwork of structural concrete. The ceiling was two stories high, taller than any parking garage had a right to be; mercury vapor lamps set in it, and protected by metal cages, provided all the light. It was impossible to tell whether it was day or night. From the end of the ramp, t
he noises sounded less happy, less friendly. Kirby cautiously peered around the corner.
What he saw was people. People everywhere. The sidewalks were overflowing. The streets were clogged, not with vehicle traffic, but with more people. All along the sidewalk, bonfires raged in fifty-five-gallon drums. Facing the sidewalks on both sides of the street were wall-to-wall two-story buildings in various states of disrepair.
Savage fistfights spilled from the sidewalks onto the street. Dirty, ragged, skeletal men, women and children were doing their best to kill each other with their bare hands. There was not a policeman in sight. Those not involved in the melee moved aside and ignored it.
Looking the other direction, Kirby saw a massive video screen and sound system hanging down from the ceiling. That was where all the music was coming from. Now he could make out the words to the catchy little song.
“Buy, buy, buy, eat, eat, eat, that’s what makes life so swee-eeeet.”
People on the street and sidewalk swayed to the insistent Afro-Cuban beat, staring up slackjawed at a twenty-foot-tall, impossibly beautiful, impossibly statuesque blonde woman in a green crocheted thong. She was tanned, overfed, overpampered, overjoyed, everything the spectators weren’t. As she sang and danced at a sunsplashed poolside, her naked breasts with their pink bull’s-eye nipples bounced and swayed, as did her smooth buttocks.
While the band took an instrumental chorus, the singer took a jumbo shrimp break. She ate from an iced dish at overloaded buffet table under gay red-and-white striped awning. Her expression said, “Yummy.” She danced as she chewed, her lavish hips rolling. She washed down the shrimp with a long sip of something from a hollowed-out pineapple with a paper umbrella.
As the music returned to yet another chorus, she bounced across the gleaming white patio and opened the door of a two-seater red sports car. The engine was five times the length of the passenger compartment. She started singing again as she squirmed her bare butt across the custom leather.
“Buy, buy, buy, eat, eat, eat, that’s what makes life so swee-eeeet.”
The car started with a ferocious twelve-cylinder roar. Although the blonde stroked the shifter knob, she didn’t put the car in gear. She just sat there and gunned it, burning fuel for no reason, her long, pearl pink fingernails tapping out the beat on the steering wheel.
This was a different kind of porno, Kirby realized.
Consumer porno.
You can’t have this, but you can watch me have it.
The mathematician scanned the length and breadth of the squalor. There was no reception committee of distinguished scholars. Perhaps Tanner hadn’t passed on the microfilm? But if he hadn’t, all this would not exist.
It was hard to believe that this was the world he had saved.
The world Bell died for.
Perhaps it was some kind of ghetto, even a prison. That would explain everything. Determined to find out, he left the cover of the ramp and accosted the first person he came across.
“Where am I?” he said.
The answer was less specific than he’d hoped. “You’re in the wrong fucking place, whitecoat.”
“Whitecoat!” someone else cried. “Get the whitecoat!”
Kirby hadn’t brought any weapons with him. He had figured he wouldn’t need them in a world without the Apocalypse. He was wrong. As several men attacked him, the big man was forced to fight with his fists. On the first punch, he split the back of his lab coat right up the middle. He also split the eye of the grimy, greasy, ponytailed bastard who tried to club him with a roundhouse right. The blow sent the man spinning to the ground, blood spurting from between his fingers.
None of the attackers had Kirby’s size. They didn’t have his Deathlands experience, either. Kirby didn’t mess around. He broke one man’s windpipe with a karate chop and snapped another’s neck with a neat, left to right twist.
The cry of “Get the whitecoat!” drowned out the over amplified strains of consumer porno.
Before he could move off the sidewalk, he was surrounded. Somebody jumped on his broad back, trying to strangle him from behind. Kirby shot a hard elbow in the man’s ribs, heard the crack as they snapped, then the weight fell away from his shoulders.
There wasn’t any point in trying to reason with them. They were a mob, and they were out for his blood.
When his kicking and punching opened a seam in the throng, Kirby launched himself between the gap. Covering his face with a forearm, he jumped through a dirty plate-glass window. He landed in what once had been a hotel lobby. A shabby hotel lobby. Now it was a wall-to-wall crash pad.
As he turned to engage the denizens pouring through the broken window, someone hit him in the back of the head with a two by four. Everything went black.
Kirby woke up stuffed into a fifty-five gallon drum set in the middle of the street. His wrists and ankles were hog-tied behind his back. Liquid sloshed around his ankles; from the smell, it was gasoline. Thousands upon thousands of people pressed in around him.
The chant had changed.
Now it was, “Burn the fucker! Burn the fucker!”
A tall, rangy looking man with a mane of past shoulder-length greasy brown hair was prepared to do just that. He held a flaming torch in his hand.
“Why?” Kirby demanded of him.
“Because you bastards did this to us,” the man said.
“Did what?”
“Made it so there’s nothing left to eat but rocks. So there’s nowhere safe to live.”
“What about the promise of science?” Kirby said in desperation. “It can feed the world.”
“Where have you been, whitecoat? That PR bullshit don’t fly anymore. All you bastards gave us was empty promises. And when they didn’t pan out you said you needed to do more research. All you wanted was to keep the fucking gravy train rolling. Hey, shithead, there’s no more gravy.”
The man swung at him with the lit torch.
The gas fumes were making Kirby’s head spin and his stomach heave. “I saved your world,” he cried. “You wouldn’t be here without me!”
“That’s why I’m doing this…”
With that, the greasy-haired man tossed the torch into the barrel.
Kirby ignited with a thundering whoosh and a plume of fire fifteen feet high.
Over his own piercing screams he heard the sound of cheering.
Chapter Thirty-Two
As the five companions staggered from the mat-trans chamber, something flashed behind the porthole window in a door across the room. At the same instant, the lights dimmed, then recovered.
As the door slowly swung open, Ryan unsheathed his panga and prepared to strike.
“Easy, dear Ryan,” Doc said, holding up his hands for calm. He was smiling ear to ear. “I am greatly relieved to see that all of you remain in good health.”
“You are a sight for sore eyes, too, Doc,” J.B. said.
“You had us sweating bullets,” Mildred told him.
“I am afraid I owe you all an explanation,” Doc said.
No one argued that.
“The two mutie hunters I met in Morro Bay turned out to be whitecoats,” he said. “Freezie whitecoats like you, Mildred. From predark times. They claimed to be in possession of certain facts. The most alarming of which was that I, alone, caused the Apocalypse.”
“You?” Mildred said. “That’s ridiculous! You were a victim of it.”
“Not so quick, my dear Mildred,” Doc said. “There appears to be some merit in their argument. They said they had detected changes in the fundamental nature of reality, the physical properties of matter after I was trawled the first time. They claimed they tried to warn the heads of Operation Chronos that a greater disaster was imminent if the trawling program was not immediately curtailed. The freezies told their masters that a second trawl would permanently damage space-time, and cause reality to collapse. They were ignored, of course, and I was sent here. Dr. Kirby and Colonel Bell were so convinced of the validity of their claims
that they entered cryogenesis to find me.”
“They found you,” Ryan said.
“And they offered me my life back…”
“Good God,” Krysty said. “That’s a time machine?”
“Of a sort,” Doc said.
“You left, but you came back,” Mildred said. “Why? None of us would have blamed you if you hadn’t. You know that for a fact.”
“Yes, dear friends, I do know that.”
“Did something go wrong?” J.B. asked.
“Their calculations were based on extrapolations from a single experience, mine,” Doc replied. “From the consequences of that first trawl, they constructed a theory that explained the nature of existence, and defined the structure of an external dimension, that they called supra-time/space. A theoretical viewpoint outside the human experience of time. And when that was complete, they went on to devise computer models to make predictions about changing the future. According to their theory, it was possible to undo the Apocalypse by reinserting me into the past at or near the moment I was taken. They gave me this capsule to carry with me, with instructions to see that it passed to the Operation Chronos whitecoats before they attempt a first time trawl. It contains an explanation of the whole catastrophe, its cause and effect.”
“What went wrong?” J.B. repeated.
“I returned to a past, all right,” Doc said, “but it wasn’t my past. For a brief moment I thought I was a spectator at the events of my trawling, but as I was about to join my family the veil suddenly lifted. I saw that it wasn’t my Emily. It was another woman, nothing like Emily. And my Rachel was another child, not mine.”
“I’m getting confused,” Krysty admitted. “If they didn’t send you back where you came from, where did they send you?”
“I believe I entered a parallel universe. It could have been the correct year, but it was not the same timeline as this. It was another Nebraska, a different Theophilus Tanner.”
