But the majority of them just watched themselves. And watched themselves watching themselves. Brendan tapped his foot on the ground. It felt solid. He bent down and touched it. It was smooth and warm like a window in sunlight. He noticed the hairs on his hand and arm were standing up.
“I’m going to step back.”
Tina nodded and followed. They were again in the office. They both paused for a moment to catch their breath.
“Now we know we can return back here,” he said. “That’s a start. Whatever we did with the ring downstairs must have set the gate into some kind of neutral mode.”
“Like a car that goes in drive and reverse?”
“It’s the best I can come up with. But we need to learn more.”
He knelt to the floor and began to collect items knocked down from the shelves during the quake. Tina did the same. His arm was soon loaded with books, a statue of a man riding a bronco, and a vase. He went back to the gate and Tina followed, holding a few other items. They went through.
They were joined by hundreds of themselves, some already standing by their doors, others a few moments behind. The variety of objects was different. Brendan set the bucking bronco statue by their door.
“From what we saw with the headmaster, meeting ourselves isn’t fatal, is it?”
Tina went to her closest reflection. In this mirror the other Brendan was trying to hold the other Tina back. Brendan almost said something but paused. They had to start learning the rules to this place. He stayed close to her, ready to grab her if anything happened. Tina touched her reflection, and her other self touched back. A barrier existed between them, like a perfectly clear pane of glass. What was first a finger-to-finger connection became palm to palm as the girls examined each other. The other Tina was the one with the braided hair. Black ribbons were twined throughout. She also had a tiny bright diamond piercing in her nose.
Tina pointed and gave a thumbs-up. The other Tina touched her nose and pointed back.
“Sorry, no tats or piercings,” Tina said.
The other Tina and Brendan were speaking, but no sound came through. Tina prodded at the mirror’s surface. Brendan touched it too. It felt much as the floor did, smooth and warm. Through the rest of the corridors around them, many of their counterparts did the same. Some had withdrawn. Brendan set a book down and walked to the next mirrors down the lane. One was empty and dark. So were several more heading along the same side. The lane split just ahead, with a multitude of tributaries twisting away and out of sight.
He set down another book. Behind him, Tina was still trying to communicate with her other self. She laughed. Whatever crude sign language they were managing seemed to work. He noticed a new intersection right next to the mirror where the statue waited. Had that been there before? The bewildering nature of the space around him made him feel dizzy again. He closed his eyes for a moment.
“You okay?” Tina asked.
He nodded. Down the lane were more dark mirrors. Two more books went to the floor and he came to the first mirror without anyone waiting on the other side.
“The other us seem pretty cool,” Tina said.
“I wonder how many of them are about to do something stupid.”
He looked at the ring. It was supposed to be the key to it all. What had the headmaster done to get it to lock on his world so the gate could open? Had he discovered this space, the place he called the vault, first? Charlotte’s glove seemed to be a direct connection, but the machine in the office could open to here and his world, thus perhaps all worlds. If the ring dictated which world, Brendan knew he had to be more careful with it.
Their own gate seemed further away, as if more mirrors had appeared and the hallway had elongated. Tina pushed at the barrier to the dark gate.
“It’s solid like the other one,” she said. “Maybe they all are. That means we can look at ourselves and our other worlds but can’t go through.”
Brendan held up the ring for her to see. “I think with this we can.”
Tina set down the rest of her items from the shelf. “This will mark it.”
“Here we go.” He put the palm of his hand to the barrier. It didn’t change. He then pressed the ring up against it. Nothing seemed to happen. He knocked a few times but it made no sound.
Tina pointed back towards their own gate. The corridor was even longer. Their counterparts were no longer visible behind many of the other mirrors. They jogged back to their gate and stepped through.
Again they needed a moment to compose themselves. Brendan’s stomach settled once the solid floor was beneath him.
“Maybe the other us have figured something out,” Tina said. “We really need to talk to Charlotte or the headmaster.”
Brendan checked the ring. It had no controls or display of any kind. What a horrible UI. But if his hunch was right, it possessed some kind of memory. If it was akin to a magnetic key, then resetting it had allowed them access to the vault. Had touching the mirror in the vault tuned it?
He turned off the machine.
“Is that enough for now?” Tina asked. She went to look outside. More lights shined up from the campus. “They’ve set up some sort of triage. Looks like a good portion of the school is out there. A lot of them look hurt. Maybe we should quit while we’re ahead.”
Brendan turned it all back on. He moved back and raised up the ring.
A shimmer of air appeared, this time without the silvery threads. It was a gate to another Earth, but which one? Tina came up next to him and confirmed she was ready with a nod.
“We step through and step back,” he said.
They moved forward, and then the floor underneath them was gone. They were falling.
9. Through the Dark Frame
Brendan struck something solid with the upper half of his body, knocking the wind from his lungs. He tried to hang on to what felt like concrete, but momentum pulled him along and he tumbled further, hitting his butt, knees, shoulder, and head before sliding to a stop on a jagged pile of debris. He took a moment to gain his bearings. He could see little but walls of gray around him and horizontal beams of concrete and steel above. Beyond it all were stars.
“Brendan?” Tina called.
She was above him somewhere. Her shadow moved from a support pillar and along one of the beams. They were inside the remains of the admin building. The gate was somewhere above the ruined interior.
“Wait there,” Brendan said. His head hurt and he felt bruised all over. His wrist felt numb inside the cast. A coughing fit passed and he spat out grit. Standing on the slope of debris was too risky. He turned to sit as best as he could and examined himself. Nothing permanently damaged.
Tina leaped to an outcropping of concrete above him and made her way down. “You hit hard.”
“Nothing’s broken,” he said. “I’m fine.”
She took her phone out and used the light from the screen to examine him. “Some scrapes and such, but yeah, you’ll live.” She looked up at the broken building and her breath caught. “Did we just do this?”
“No. There’s no dust in the air. Listen how quiet it is. The building was like this before our arrival.”
“So are we upstream or downstream?”
“Up, I’d guess. I can feel it in the air. But I don’t think this is Torben’s world. I don’t think there were any tall buildings left there.”
“That means climbing, doing anything, is going to be hard. Getting back up to the gate won’t be easy. It’s too dark.”
Chunks of concrete shifted as Brendan got up. He made his way to a twisted metal beam and steadied himself. He could just see the slope of the ruined building descend into darkness. There was no moon, but he longed to have solid ground beneath his feet.
“We can try to make it down here,” he said. “Just be careful.”
They climbed down the heap of ruins.
Not much of the school remained, and the other buildings were beyond recognition in the dark. The lawns between the struct
ures were completely covered in a layer of dust and grit. A bench in the middle of it all was intact, and they sat. They remained there until the sun began to rise.
***
Daylight showed them just how little of the admin building had survived. The top floor was gone, and Brendan estimated most of the fourth had collapsed as well. The rest of it looked like some giant child had dumped a bucket of rocks and gray sand down on top of an array of girders and rebar.
Brendan was shivering. The air had been too cold to nod off, and the bench did nothing but sap his heat. A breeze cut through his sweatshirt. Tina stiffly tried to stretch and work her limbs. The air around them was devoid of sounds. Even Torben’s world had birds.
The rest of the campus’s structures looked even worse than the admin building. Two of the dorms were completely collapsed, the remains nothing more than uneven dunes of concrete rubble with a few steel beams sticking up like bones from a decayed carcass. The east parking garage was also gone. Beyond lay the green belt that ran around the campus. The few trees that remained stood in a crooked row, their branches bare. The asphalt of the street was a frozen ocean of black jagged waves.
They made their way along the street, in some places having to climb over broken sections of earth. What had once been water and sewer lines stood up in the air as if they had been rejected by the ground.
“All the homes…” Tina said.
They had crossed over to the residential side of the boulevard. Dry weeds obscured much of what had once been houses. The sign of a 7-Eleven stood relatively intact while the actual convenience store was nowhere to be seen. Brendan kicked through the layers of concrete and dust and found the top of an air conditioner unit. The roof had fallen flat onto the store, and the ground itself had sunk and completely swallowed the structure.
“We can’t stay here,” she said.
He nodded and they kept walking. A depression near an intersection was filled with a dozen shattered cars, as if they had all been gathered and dumped there. Several other vehicles lay on their sides, bent, broken, and filled with layers of earth and sand. In one of the vehicles a skeleton was pinned in the collapsed space between seat and steering column. The airbag sprawled around it like a partially peeled-away shroud.
Tina was shaking her head at the sight. “I don’t think there’s anyone left.”
“Let’s go look at the town hall.”
Most of the town hall’s façade had collapsed, but the building itself looked mostly intact. Little remained of the rest of Dutchman Springs’s downtown. Brendan had to crawl to get through the front door. The wind carried through the interior hall, lifting up swirls of fine powder. He coughed as he tried to breathe through the material of his sweatshirt.
Inside he found a clutter of broken furniture, shattered glass, and large portions of the ceiling that had dropped down from above. Papers and books from the adjoining library were scattered about. Whereas the town hall in Torben’s world had borne witness to that community’s death throes by means of hundreds of messages left for loved ones, here there was no sign of life after whatever cataclysm had struck, which testified to the sudden violence of the event. The destruction was nearly total.
“Everyone’s dead,” Brendan whispered.
The wind outside picked up. It blew through the broken skylights of the rotunda in the center of the hall. It seemed to howl, as if the world around them was mourning.
A more acute baying cry joined the wind. As the wind subsided, the baying increased in volume, the noise doubling as more voices added to the chorus. To Brendan it sounded like every wolf he’d ever seen in a movie had come to life and were gathering all around them. But he saw nothing.
“What is that?” Tina whispered.
Brendan picked his way carefully though the debris towards a high window. He had to climb a mound of rubble and found it impossible to not shift any of it. He pulled himself up to the bottom of the sill, keeping as low as possible. A flash of motion outside to his left. He froze. Whatever it was had rounded the corner towards the back of the building. Something low and fast.
Tina removed a fire extinguisher from a plastic wall case. She tested its heft.
“Something’s out there,” he mouthed.
She nodded. He could see the exertion wearing on her. She looked as tired as he felt. Their journey through the gate and the morning’s walk in the oppressive upstream air, combined with a lack of food and rest, weighed heavy.
There came the sound of shifting rocks at the front of the building. Tina hid around the corner, the extinguisher held close to her chest. Brendan looked above them and saw a collapsed hallway had fallen in and down, but an office door lay open with an accessible space beyond it. The slope of debris appeared climbable.
From somewhere outside came a yip-yip-yip, which was answered with a similar cry from further away. Brendan hissed to Tina and pointed upward. She nodded. He waited for a moment until he realized she wanted him to go first. He had a sense of rustling and movement all around the building, but heard nothing but the whisper of the wind. He climbed.
The roof of the second-floor office had dropped down but not completely, leaving enough space to crawl forward.
“Come on,” he said.
Tina set down the extinguisher, and just as she began moving towards the pile of debris a large black dog came bounding around the corner. Its head dropped low and it paused to stare up at Brendan and Tina. It barked, a sharp, precise sound. Four other dogs appeared and charged forward. Brendan lay on the floor and dropped a hand down.
“Hurry! Take my hand.”
She scrambled up, but slipped. Her feet caught the slightest edge of a solid toehold. The other four dogs weren’t as large as the first, but they moved as one and didn’t stop at the bottom of the rubble. One white-muzzled beast lunged upward and almost caught Tina’s dangling foot, but she retracted it at the last second. The other dogs barked and circled beneath her. Tina swung to a larger jutting section of broken wall and pulled herself within reach of Brendan’s hand. He pulled her up.
The dogs split the air with their barking. The white-muzzled dog even tried to climb, but it slid back down after each jump.
Brendan led Tina through the office. Towards the back it opened into what once had been an extravagant bathroom. A few rays of daylight came through the broken ceiling and shined off marble tiles that were still visible amongst the detritus.
Tina was looking at the fallen-in ceiling. Her breathing was coming faster and faster.
“It’s okay,” Brendan said. “They can’t get up here.”
“No, it’s just…I have to go back. I can’t take this.”
She broke off away from him and crawled as fast as she could back towards the office entrance. It looked like she was about to go over the edge, but she stopped. The barking intensified. Obviously the dogs saw her.
“It’s too tight up here,” she said as she looked down.
“There’s nowhere else to go. Maybe if we hide, they’ll go away.”
“I’m fine here.” She drew her legs up and leaned back against the listing wall.
He saw in the barely controlled panic on her face that she wouldn’t be swayed otherwise. They waited.
***
The dogs waited too.
Three of the animals settled in beneath them and were soon lying about, only giving Tina and Brendan the occasional glance or bark. They scratched and dozed and were in no hurry to be anywhere else. The big black dog and the one with the white muzzle left and appeared again about an hour later. Those two stood apart from the others and stared up at them. More dogs followed behind, as if their entourage also wanted to take a look at their treed prey.
“It’s like they’re thinking, or planning,” Tina said softly.
Brendan picked up a rock and threw it at one of the dogs below. It missed, but the dog switched locations. It lay down again on the other side of a broken decorative fountain and stared up at them. The dogs whined. None of them
looked like the overstuffed canines from Brendan’s Earth. Perhaps at one time they had been pampered pets, but now they were lean hunters that knew how to survive a cataclysm, and their owners might have become their supper.
Across the fallen upstairs hallway was another door. The slightest remains of a ledge crossed the space.
“You’ll fall,” Tina said, as if reading his mind.
“I’ll be fine.”
Enough of the ceiling had dropped that he could reach it and find handholds as he put his foot on the ledge. He now had the dogs’ undivided attention. One barked. They closed in beneath him and waited in anticipation.
He put gentle weight on the ledge. It held him. He moved his next foot forward and a portion of ledge broke off beneath his toes. The dogs began to bark and circle as he held tight to some metal framework. He stepped wide across the broken portion. He would have to shift his full weight to get to the next section of ledge, a short hop, nothing he couldn’t easily do on his own world under calmer circumstances. But a slip meant falling into the mouths of the waiting pack.
Tina stood up and began throwing anything within reach at the dogs. Her throw was true; any that stayed close got nailed. They scattered but didn’t stray far. Brendan knew if he fell there wouldn’t be time to climb before they got him.
He hopped. The ledge held, but one of his feet slipped. He grabbed a support beam. It shifted and almost dumped him. He clung tight and got both feet secured before shimmying to the doorway and crawling in.
The fallen ceiling had crushed most of the offices within the suite, but not all. A breakroom was still intact. A refrigerator and a pair of vending machines lined one wall and appeared to be holding the ceiling up. He opened the refrigerator and a stench of rotted food and mold assaulted him. A white and green crust lined every inch of the interior and all of its contents. He closed it. The first vending machine featured soda and water bottles on the glossy ad on its front. Refreshing! it boasted. The second machine had chips, candy, and other snack foods.
The Supervillain High Boxed Set: Books One - Three of the Supervillain High Series Page 51
