The Walls of the Universe

by Paul Melko

  John put the pistol next to Grace on the table, within reach, and began to work on the leather buckles binding her arms and legs. His rage boiled when he saw what they had done to her.

  “Grace! Grace!”

  Her eyes were closed, but she breathed. Her bloody chest rose and fell. John could not bear to look at the savage cuts on her body. This was all his fault!

  He undid her arms and then her legs.

  “Grace, are you okay? Can you hear me?”

  Her eyes fluttered, then opened. She didn’t focus at first, and then she smiled with a smile missing one front tooth. “Johnny,” she croaked.

  “Everything’s okay, Grace. Are you okay?” He realized he was babbling.

  Grace grinned. “I’m not dead yet,” she whispered. “It’s just a flesh wound.”

  John’s eyes burned as the tears came, and his sob turned into a foul-sounding guffaw.

  “Goddamn it, Grace. Don’t make me laugh.”

  “Got to,” she said, sitting up on the table.

  John pulled the lab coat off one of the technicians and draped it around Grace’s shoulders. She looked shaken and pale, but her eyes were focused now.

  “Grace, we need to find Henry,” he said.

  She looked around the lab, then grabbed John’s shoulder to steady herself. “I feel woozy.” She pointed to one of the doors. “They brought me through there. I never saw Henry, but I guess he was in a cell near mine.”

  She glanced down at the gun next to her. Then she took it in her hands.

  “Can I have this?” she said.

  “I have another one,” John said. Corrundrum’s gun was in his other pocket. “Do you know how to shoot?”

  “I’m a city girl,” she said. “All I can do is dial nine-one-one. But I’m willing to try it today.”

  “Be careful, but if it isn’t one of us, then shoot,” John said. “And John Prime is in the building too.” He made sure Corrundrum’s gun was loaded.

  “John Prime? You went back to get John Prime?”

  “Yes. I needed help.” Grace’s face was pale. “Are you okay?”

  “Don’t worry.” She knelt down to turn over the corpse of the second technician. She spat on his face.

  John saw her ferocity. He knew that she was a competitor, that she could be angry and fierce. But not till then did he recognize the stamina that bolstered her, and it made him fear for any Visigoths they came across.

  “Grace, I’m sorry for getting you into this.”

  She stood and said, “Not as sorry as these fuckers are going to be.”

  He helped her across the room, and while Grace rested against the wall John listened at the door that she had indicated. He heard nothing. There was no window to look through.

  “Out of the way of the doorway,” he said, motioning to the left side. He turned the knob and flung it open. Nothing.

  John slipped into the corridor. It went about ten meters before a right turn. Three doors lined the right wall.

  “That one’s mine,” she said. Grace pointed to the middle cell. John tried the door on the left, but it was locked. He pounded on the door.

  “Henry?”

  Nothing.

  He tried the one on the right, but there was no response there either.

  “They’ve taken him away,” John said. “Let’s go.”

  John led Grace down the hall. The right turn was into a short hallway ending in double doors. John listened, then kicked the doors open. Beyond was another lab.

  Visgrath stood in the middle of it with Henry in front of him, a gun pointed at his temple. Henry’s lip was crusted with dry blood. His eye was black-and-blue. He looked tired, as if Visgrath was holding him upright. Prime, his hands cuffed behind him, lay at Visgrath’s feet.

  “Nobody move,” Visgrath yelled. “I want the transfer machine,” he said simply. “If I don’t get it, this man dies. And then this other one dies. It’s your choice.”

  The man was five meters away and the path between them was clear. He was dressed in a lab coat and dark trousers.

  John said, “Calm down. I have the device here and I’m willing to trade.” John pointed the handgun away from him.

  “I am exceedingly calm. Now put your gun down.”

  John slowly lowered the gun to the ground. He saw the man visibly relax. The gun lowered a centimeter from Henry’s temple.

  “You have chosen wisely. Now hand me the device.”

  Grace took three strides and was face-to-face with him, her own gun muzzle touching his nose. John realized that the man had paid no attention to Grace, had not even regarded her being armed as a concern.

  “Put the gun down,” the man said. “Or I shoot your lover.”

  Grace smiled. “The choice is no longer mine. If you shoot Henry, I will shoot you. If you let him go, I will not shoot you. The choice is now yours.”

  John picked his gun back up, unsure of what would happen. Grace had raised the stakes with her brave move.

  “Grace?” Henry said weakly, but she ignored him.

  “You’d risk your lover’s life?” the man said, but his face had paled.

  “No, I’m not risking anyone’s life. You’re risking your own.” She pushed the muzzle against the man’s nose. “If you don’t lower the gun, you will die. It’s that simple.”

  “And him with me.”

  “No. I think that as this bullet passes through your brain, you’ll have no inclination to pull the trigger on your own gun. In fact, as this bullet cracks your nasal facial bone and shatters your ethmoid bone into a hundred razor-sharp shards that explode through your brain, into your frontal lobe, which controls your abstract thinking, aggression, and sexual behavior, into your medulla, which controls your heart, into your hypothalamus, which controls your breathing, in that fraction of a second while your brain is disintegrating I am betting that you will not contract your finger. I’m betting you will simply wet your crotch and shit your drawers, because your body will be dealing with more important matters. Your last thought as your personality implodes, as your occipital lobe erupts out the back of your head, will be ‘I’m a little teapot’ and ‘I want my mommy’ and nothing-not one blessed thought-will be about shooting your gun.” Her finger whitened on the trigger. “So, what do you choose to do?”

  The man’s eyes were locked on hers, and John could see the sweat shining on his forehead.

  Slowly he brought the gun away from Henry’s head.

  “We have a draw.”

  As Henry turned and backed away, Grace smiled coldly and said, “You have chosen poorly,” and fired into the man’s forehead.

  “Grace!” John yelled, but it was too late. Visgrath’s face was pulped, a mess of red, as he tumbled, stumbled into a lab table and over it.

  John’s heart hammered.

  “Grace,” John said. She seemed focused on the corpse.

  Henry gently spun her around and placed his handcuffed arms around her neck. John helped Prime to his feet.

  “How are you guys doing?” John asked.

  “I’ve been better,” Henry said. “I think that corpse has the keys.”

  John rifled through Visgrath’s lab coat pockets and found a set of keys. He unlocked Henry’s cuffs, and then helped Prime.

  John said, “We have to get out of here now.”

  Prime handed Henry Visgrath’s handgun. Henry looked at it oddly, then put it in his pocket with a shrug.

  “Are you all right?” John asked Henry. “Did they…?”

  Henry looked away. “I’ll be fine. What’s the plan? I mean, there’s more to this plan than just rescue Henry and Grace, right?”

  The ironic smile caused John to choke back a laugh. “We need to leave here,” he said simply.

  “Obviously,” Grace said. “We can’t stay in the bad guy’s lair.”

  “If we have to, we can leave this universe,” John said.

  Grace looked at Prime, her eyes going wide. “John, you built a device! You had to or e
lse you couldn’t have gone back for him.”

  “I did.”

  She hugged him. “I knew you could do it.”

  “Come on, guys,” Prime said. “Let’s put some distance between us and this place.”

  John picked a door out of the lab at random, and he kicked it open into an empty hallway. Slowly, they worked their way down it, checking the doors they passed, most of which were locked or led into small laboratories: dead ends. One opened into a greenhouse that had a door to the outside.

  “Here.”

  They ran through the rows of plants. John stopped and looked suddenly at the fruit-covered vines. “What fruit is this?”

  He grabbed one off the vine. It was red at the top and blue at the bottom, fading between the two colors in the middle. It was about the diameter of an apple but had indentations around the outside, giving it a six-pointed star-like shape. John pocketed it and ran on.

  The door from the greenhouse opened onto a larger garden. John said, “This way,” leading them to the northeast. He figured they’d circle around to the parking lot and try to steal a car.

  “Ow!” Grace said, and he realized she had no shoes. Henry helped her, taking an arm to lead her over the ground.

  To the west, about fifty meters away, was a loading dock where a tractor trailer sat. To the east, the building curved into the darkness.

  “This way,” Prime said, pointing to the east.

  Hugging the cement wall, they ran to the corner of the building. John peeked around, blinking in the bright spotlights of the parking lot. Three security vehicles were sitting at the entrance to Lab One. Men with nasty-looking weapons were entering the front.

  He saw a group of three spread out and head toward them.

  “Here they come. Everybody down,” John whispered.

  They crouched in the darkness near the building. John was ready to shoot, ready to kill if necessary, but through luck the two guards passed within three meters of them and didn’t look in their direction once.

  They waited until the two guards disappeared into the greenhouse.

  “Let’s try for one of those Jeeps,” John said.

  They ran through the grass, and as they approached, a gun barked, sending a bullet zinging off the hood of one of the Jeeps.

  The team that had entered the lab was coming back out, joining the search outside the building.

  Henry fired his gun wildly at them, his face a mix of horror and glee, and they dropped for cover. Henry helped Grace and John into the back of the Jeep. Henry took the wheel and Prime took the front passenger seat.

  Henry dropped it into reverse and backed away from the lab. Prime fired his gun again, then reloaded. John laid down a spray with his pistol.

  “I’m out,” he said. Henry tossed him his gun as he bucked the Jeep over a rise and toward the front gate.

  “Gate’s closed,” he said.

  “Ram it,” Prime yelled.

  Henry pressed the accelerator as John saw the spike stripes. The Jeep hit them and seemed to collapse. Smoke rose up from the shredded tires, and the Jeep lost momentum, bouncing weakly against the fence.

  “Crap.”

  Gunfire from the guard shack shattered the windshield, and Henry cursed, grabbing his hand.

  Prime pulled him out of the Jeep on his side, away from the guard shack. Grace slipped to the pavement as well. John fired three rounds into the hut, shattering its windows and sending the guard for cover. Behind them John heard the approach of more Jeeps.

  “Pinned down,” Henry said. There was no way through the fence while the guard was there. And the rest of the security force was approaching in Jeeps. John looked around for some avenue of escape.

  John said, “I’d hoped we could get out the old-fashioned way. But, Henry, we’re not pinned down.”

  Grace understood instantly and said, “John has the device.”

  “Well, you can get out of here at least,” Henry said. “What about the rest of us?”

  “We’re all going.” John pulled up his shirt, wincing, as he struggled to do it with one arm. He realized his shoulder had been grazed at some point in the escape. John turned the dial that specified the field radius as high as he could. Then he set the device to 7651.

  “We need to gather close,” he said.

  “Don’t!” Prime yelled. “There’s no way for me to get back to my universe if we do this!”

  Lights from the approaching Jeeps lit his face for a second.

  “What choice do we have?” John asked.

  Prime cursed.

  Huddled behind the Jeep, the four hugged one another.

  “Here we go,” John said.

  CHAPTER 40

  John approached the old barn with trepidation. Bill and Janet had said there’d been a break-in. John knew what that meant, but he had to make sure.

  They’d been gone six weeks, enough time to convert his gold to local currency in Universe 7651 and build a bridge device from scratch. Luckily, 7651 had been advanced enough in electronics for it to be a relatively easy job. No detailed breadboard soldering. They’d just designed the circuits they wanted and ordered them in bulk.

  They’d sent John Prime home first, John and he traveling together to 7533, along with Prime’s huge trunk.

  “What have you got in here? A body?” John had asked.

  “You promised not to ask,” Prime said.

  “Yeah, but…”

  “You know me. Books and toys and gimmicks,” Prime had said with a shrug. “I used up all my ideas from my last trip between universes.”

  “It doesn’t seem fair,” John said.

  “You did it with pinball.”

  It was true. John had stolen an idea from one universe and made a lot of cash off it in another. How could he fault Prime? They’d done the same things.

  “Fine.”

  They’d built the gateway device on the site of the abandoned quarry pit in 7651. The result was that they were only a few hundred yards from the farm when they transferred through.

  “You gonna be all right?” John asked. Prime was hyperventilating.

  “I hate it,” he said. “Every time.”

  “Do you want me to help get this over to the farm?” John said, nodding to the trunk.

  “Naw.” Prime pulled out his cell phone. “I got it taken care of. I missed a court date, but I think it’s all going to work out.”

  “I can drop you anywhere,” John said. “Any universe. Maybe even back where you came from…”

  Prime seemed to think it over. Then he shook his head. “No, thanks. This is where I live now. Unless you want it back.”

  “No, not anymore,” John said. “Up till a few weeks ago, I’d have taken it all back, but…”

  “It’s a big universe out there.”

  “Yeah.”

  Prime stepped away, dragging his trunk across the bare stone.

  “Get back to your own Casey. I bet she’s worried,” Prime said.

  “Yeah, I bet she is.”

  “Just do me a favor,” Prime said. “Check in on me in a few months. I might need a ride out of this dump.”

  “You think?”

  Prime shrugged. He reached out his hand, and John took it. They shook once solemnly.

  “Good luck.”

  John had then used the portable device to transfer back to 7651, where Henry and Grace waited with the newly built transfer gate.

  “Not too bad,” Henry had said. They’d smoked the nearest transformer the first time they’d powered up the transfer gate in 7651. They’d lost a week while the electric company fixed it. “It was the range module, like we thought.”

  John glanced at Grace, sitting in the corner of the quarry office. They slept on cots in the same room with the transfer gate, so John knew she’d had nightmares since the death of Visgrath, since her torture. John had broached the subject just once.

  “There’s probably, uh, psychiatrists in this universe-”

  Grace had shot him a
hard look.

  “-or, you know, drugs to help you sleep, at least,” John said.

  He thought she was going to bark at him or, worse, turn away in silence. Instead, she shook her head and said, “John, I just need time and distance.”

  He’d not asked again.

  The only times she left Henry’s side were to take a pistol into the shallow quarry and fire at a row of cans she lined up meticulously. John hoped getting her back to 7650 would solve her problems, but there was no telling what Charboric had done while they were gone.

  “Ready?” John said.

  Grace nodded, standing up. She was dressed in army fatigues they had bought, along with all the electronics, machine guns, dynamite, and bulletproof vests. She hefted a duffel bag full of munitions near the transfer gate.

  Just like the gate that John had first built, the transfer gate in 7651 was a fixed structure that transferred anything within a few-meter radius between 7651 and any other universe. A cantilever hung above the transfer area, and duct-taped to it were the electronics that projected the spherical field below. The field was not as subtle as the one from the portable device; it seemed to wrap around whatever it was attached to. But the subtlety of those circuits had been sacrificed in the drive to finish the device in time. The spherical field required them to be careful that nothing was outside the radius of the field when it was activated.

  John and Grace slid a wood platform into the field area. The platform-half in and half out of the field-would keep their feet firmly in the field radius. Anything outside the radius-arms, feet, legs-wouldn’t be going along for the ride when they transferred to 7650.

  “Let’s go,” Grace said.

  “Do you really think we’ll need all the ammo?” Henry asked again. “We’ll just be able to call the police, right?”

  “Do you want to take that chance?” Grace asked flatly.

  John nodded, though he worried at Grace’s willingness to kill. “Until we know for sure what has happened there…”

  Henry started the timer-big LED numbers counted down from 30. They hunkered down on the platform with their gear. At 0, John heard a rising buzz that suddenly cut off. Bright daylight, and they dropped a foot as the platform-once a rectangle, now a circle-collapsed. John, ready for the drop, steadied Henry and Grace with a hand.