by Brian Harmon
His name was Jeremy. Somehow, this felt important. In his current state of delusion and shock, he found himself clinging to this. His name. His identity. The fact that he was.
Chaos bled through the ringing in his ears. Awful, wailing things swarmed over him, screaming at him. He could not see them, but they howled and shrieked into his ears, their terrible voices drilling into his pounding head, moaning and hooting with inhuman tongues.
He lay there, motionless, listening to the awful voices of these invisible demons, unable to do anything else. The sky above him seemed to dim a little before his eyes, the serene blue pulsing with waves of indigo. It was lovely, yet threatening, and he felt certain that it meant permanent, soul-swallowing darkness was soon to descend upon him. But it was just an illusion brought on by staring unblinking at the bright sky in his shock.
“Mister? Are you okay?”
There were voices all around him. People were shouting. He could hear them even through the cacophony of howling demons. But this one was closer than the others. Just beneath him, it seemed.
“Mister? Oh shit, do you think he’s dead? Mister?” Soft and feminine, almost angelic.
The sky began to shake and pain tore through his head with the motion of it. Then a face appeared against the brilliant sky above him, gazing down at him. Raven black hair, short and tousled. Pale green eyes. She was young and lovely. She stared down at him for a moment without speaking, her expression wavering somewhere between horror and awe. It was during this silence that he was finally able to catch his breath. The air felt like broken glass in his aching lungs.
“Are you okay? Can you move?”
He could. He turned his head and gazed at the scene around him.
He was lying on the roof of a Ford Explorer, sunken into it as though it were nothing more than soft rubber. Most of the windows had shattered with the shock of the impact. The awful wailing noise he had heard was not some horde of vile reapers swarming to claim his soul, as he’d first imagined, but the vehicle’s security alarm, attempting to alert its owner that it had been violated.
“Mister?”
“Yeah. I think I’m okay.” His voice sounded odd to him, as if he had never heard it before. Wincing at the pain, he lifted himself onto his elbows and looked up at the building in front of which the Explorer was parked. Most of the windows on this side were blown out. Broken glass, glittering in the bright, early-afternoon sunlight, littered the sidewalk all along the front of the building and as far away as the opposite sidewalk. Just moments ago he had been on the second floor of that building, just behind one of those shattered windows.
“What happened?” the girl asked. There was an unmistakable girlish wonder in her voice.
Jeremy shook his head. He didn’t know. It all happened so fast. He was in that small office. The woman was sitting there behind the desk. She had just stood up when…
God, his head hurt.
“Come on.” The girl took him by the arm and helped him sit up. She was sprawled across the shattered windshield. The shaking of the sky that he’d perceived just before she appeared had been the rocking of the vehicle’s shocks as she clambered onto the hood to check on him. “You’ve got to be the luckiest guy in the world.”
Jeremy hardly considered being blown out of a second floor window and landing on the roof of a sport utility vehicle very lucky. But he certainly understood how he could have been less lucky. He supposed he could’ve landed on a fire hydrant instead. That could’ve made for a gory, if not darkly humorous scene. At least the vehicle’s roof had absorbed most of the impact. It was the only explanation he could conceive to justify still being alive.
The girl was wearing a leather jacket, faded jeans and slim leather boots with tall heals. She was very petit, little more than five feet, he imagined, with such small hands that he felt reluctant to let her hold very much of his weight.
“Do you need to go to the hospital?”
“No. I don’t think so. I don’t think I broke anything.” This was the truth. Amazingly, he didn’t seem to have any broken bones. Although, judging by the pain that penetrated every part of his body, he’d wager that he might have cracked at least half of them.
He looked around as he eased himself down onto the hood. There was a small crowd gathering, but very little of it seemed to be concerned with him. Most of the onlookers were staring at the building, from which had begun to pour a steady flow of evacuated occupants.
“Help him down,” said the girl as Jeremy eased his legs off the side of the vehicle’s hood. When he turned away from the crowd, he found himself looking down at a huge, round face.
The young man had to have been almost four hundred pounds. He was extremely plump, but also very big at his core, standing at least six and a half feet tall. He reached up and seized Jeremy in hands that might’ve been large enough to palm a good sized bowling ball with ease.
“That was cool,” the heavy stranger told him as he lowered him gently down off the hood and onto his feet. “Like a movie stunt. Awesome.” That said, he turned and reached for the girl. He did not so much help her down as pick her up and place her on the ground, as if she weighed nothing at all. She looked like a doll in his enormous arms.
“Can you walk?” asked the girl. She took his hand and squeezed it. The gesture was strangely absurd, as though she were speaking to a small child who had just fallen and skinned his knees on the playground. At twenty-nine, he was hardly a child. But then again a two-story fall was hardly a scraped knee, either.
He nodded. “Just a little sore,” he lied. In truth, he had never imagined that he could hurt so much.
But the heavy young man slipped his fat arm beneath his, taking almost all of his weight, and began to lead him away as the girl walked along on his right, still holding his hand as if the giant on his left was incapable of supporting his measly one hundred eighty pounds.
“Is he all right?” an elderly woman asked as they led him away.
“He’s okay,” the girl assured her.
As they walked past, Jeremy heard the woman as she turned and spoke to a man who was standing nearby: “That man fell right on that car over there! I saw him hit it! I thought for sure he was dead!”
He didn’t care for hearing someone talk about him like that. He didn’t want to be that guy who fell out of a building and onto a car, like some nameless victim in a tasteless viral video.
“I’m Violet,” said the girl. “This is Corey.”
“Jeremy Gleer.”
They led him to another SUV parked nearby, this one a Jeep Liberty. “Sit and rest here,” Violet instructed as Corey helped him into the passenger’s seat. He felt certain that he could manage on his own, but he didn’t refuse their help. He ached from head to foot, after all, and now he was beginning to feel shaky. He was probably at the very least still in shock.
“Do you work there?” Violet asked as the first sirens began to rise over the voices of the crowd.
“Job interview,” Jeremy replied. The building belonged to a distributing company. He had been trying to procure a copyrighting job. He had just finished the first of three interviews with the human resources director, had stood up from his chair and reached across the desk to shake hands with the woman when… Well, he didn’t know what the hell happened then. It was as if the universe suddenly let out a sneeze right there in that tiny office. He shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts. “Probably a boring job anyway. Thinking up descriptions to go with pictures in a catalog… Would’ve been nice to get a salary job, though…” He sighed and closed his eyes against the throbbing in his skull.
“We were driving past when all of the windows exploded,” Violet explained. There was an unmistakable excitement in her voice, a slight quiver of an adrenaline rush. “There was this big, hollow boom, like an explosion underwater or something. Felt like my ears popped. Then we saw you fall onto that car. I thought you must’ve been dead.”
“Like a movie,” Corey said again.
“All the windows blew out when you hit.” He made an exploding gesture with his huge hands, complete with a “TSSSSHHH” sound effect. “It was sweet.” Then his big, gentle features suddenly sank into a concerned frown. “Wouldn’t’ve been so sweet if you’d died, though. That wouldn’t’ve been cool.”
A police car turned onto the street and pushed its way through the gawking crowd.
“What happened in there?” Violet asked.
Jeremy shook his head. He honestly didn’t know. All of a sudden the world just went wonky. He remembered reaching across to shake the woman’s hand…and then the world before him, woman and all, just sort of…puckered. The whole room seemed to pull away from him, as if inexplicably sucked into the wall. It was like a funhouse mirror effect. The woman’s hand snapped away before he could wrap his fingers around it, and before he could comprehend what had happened, before he could even react, everything reversed itself. There was a sort of shrug…and what had been pulled in was now thrown violently out.
There was indeed a sound like an explosion deep underwater, a hollow, reverberating boom. His ears popped. The windows shattered. He was hurled backward through the broken window before he could see what became of the human resources woman. He felt the chilly autumn wind clutching at him, had time to realize that he was falling, and a mere instant later there was the bone-jarring stop and the sound of crunching metal and breaking glass that was bound to be somebody’s nightmare of an insurance claim.
He could not possibly describe all this. In fact, he must have imagined most of it. It all happened so quickly, after all. And he was still in shock. “I don’t know,” he said instead.
“No fire,” Corey observed. He was standing by the Liberty’s door, staring up at the damaged building. “No smoke, neither.”
“There was no fire,” Jeremy remembered. “Wasn’t an explosion. Not exactly.” He rubbed at his eyes, trying to clear his mind. He felt exhausted. “I should go. My truck’s parked in the lot behind the building.”
“You okay to drive?” Violet asked.
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know. You had quite a shock.”
“I’ll be fine.”
A pair of fire trucks emerged from the street beyond the building.
“You’ll never get out of that parking lot with all this chaos,” Violet decided. She walked around the front of the vehicle and climbed in behind the wheel. “We were on our way to McDonald’s,” she said as she fastened her seat belt. She looked absurdly tiny behind the wheel of such a large vehicle. “You can join us. Food’ll be good for you.”
“No. I can’t. I’ve got stuff to do,” he lied. The truth was that he had absolutely nothing to do.
“It’s not up for debate,” Violet insisted. “You’re lucky you’re still alive. I should be driving you straight to the hospital. I won’t have you collapsing at the wheel and running over some old lady on your way home.”
“That won’t happen.” But he wasn’t going to win this argument. Corey slammed the back door and buckled himself in. Wearily, Jeremy reached for his own seatbelt as Violet pulled out onto the street and inched through the growing crowd toward the intersection.
* * *
Corey snapped his cell phone closed and said, “Bill says they’re still investigating.”
“Do they know what happened?” Violet asked.
“Doesn’t look like it.”
As soon as Violet turned off the street where the action was, Corey pulled out his cell phone and began text-messaging everyone he knew. Jeremy had been impressed that someone with such bulky-looking hands could type so quickly on such tiny buttons. This Bill had either gone to check things out or had been in contact with someone who was there.
“That’s weird.” Violet had ordered only a Diet Coke and a medium order of fries. She took a tiny bite and chewed thoughtfully.
Jeremy had barely touched his Big Mac. He hadn’t wanted anything, but Violet insisted that he eat. And when he tried to refuse, she simply ordered for him.
“So strange that it only happened to that building,” she said, not really talking to anyone in particular.
“No fire or smoke,” Corey reminded her.
Violet nodded. “Not really an explosion.”
“Just a thing,” Corey confirmed, as if that explained everything.
Violet turned her deep, green eyes on Jeremy and studied him for a moment. She had insisted on hearing a full description of what he witnessed before his bruising plummet, and was no doubt going over it again in her mind. Specifically, she had been enthralled by his description of the phenomenon as something like a sneeze.
“Bet it was a wormhole,” Corey said around a mouthful of Double Quarter-Pounder. “Like a hole in space.”
“That only happens in space,” Violet told him, as though she were an expert on space anomalies.
Corey shrugged. “We’re in space. Whole planet’s in space.”
“You know what I mean.”
Corey didn’t respond. He took another huge bite of his burger and chewed happily.
Violet never took her dreamy eyes off Jeremy and it had begun to make him uncomfortable. He took a bite from his Big Mac, just to have something to do.
Corey’s phone rang again and he answered it without bothering to swallow. He listened for a long time, nodding absently while he chewed. “Cool,” he said at last. “Bye.” He hung up and crammed eight or nine fries into his mouth. When he’d swallowed most of this last bite he said, “Bill says nobody’s hurt.” Then he grabbed his large coke and slurped at it as though reporting casualties were something he did every day of his life.
“Well that’s good,” Violet replied.
Jeremy nodded. He was glad to hear that. He’d feared the worst for the human resources woman who seemed to have been standing right in the middle of the anomaly. What was her name again? For the life of him he couldn’t seem to remember. He’d been careful to take note of it at the time, intending to be a good little applicant and write her a thank you letter, but now he had no idea what it was.
Not that it really mattered anyway. He’d lost interest in working there.
“It’s not normal, whatever it was,” Violet seemed to decide. “I’ve never heard of anything like it.”
“Wormhole,” Corey confirmed.
Violet ignored him. “I wonder if Ricky’s ever heard of anything like it.”
Corey took another bite from his burger. It was almost gone now and he hadn’t even opened the twenty-piece Chicken McNuggets he’d ordered on the side.
“Call Ricky and ask him.”
Corey shook his head. “Still in class,” he mumbled. He swallowed and then popped the last of the Quarter-Pounder into his mouth.
Violet sighed. “So text him. He’ll get the message when he gets out.”
Corey chewed for a moment, not rushing to reply. “Already did. Earlier.” He swallowed the burger, gulped down the last of the coke and stood up as he pulled the lid off his cup. “He’ll call. Refill?”
She shook her head.
Corey turned and shook the ice in his cup at Jeremy, indicating the same question.
“I’m fine, thanks.”
Corey lumbered off for his refill, leaving the two of them alone.
“How’s your back?” Violet asked after a moment.
“Sore,” Jeremy replied. “But I’ll be fine.”
“You bruise easily?”
“I’ll bruise this time,” he assured her.
“I’ll bet.”
Jeremy took another bite of his Big Mac and chewed slowly, trying to ignore Violet’s penetrating eyes. “I should really get back to my truck,” he said after a long pause.
“What’s the rush? You don’t like spending time with us?”
“Huh? No. It’s not that. I’m just…” he shrugged. “I don’t know. I just need to get home. Stuff to do. Is he ordering more food?”
Violet looked up at Corey, who had finished refilling his cup and had app
roached the counter. “Roly-Poly? He probably got a craving for a fish sandwich. He does that.”
“He hasn’t even opened his McNuggets yet.”
Violet smiled. “He knows what he wants. I respect that about him.”
“It’s not really healthy.”
“Yeah. But it makes him happy.”
He wasn’t sure what to say to that. He supposed happiness was important, but a little restraint couldn’t hurt.
As if reading his thoughts, Violet said, “He’s only twenty-one. He’s young enough to live like he wants.”
“I suppose.” But when he turned to meet her eyes, she was gazing across the restaurant at Cory with a sad sort of expression. “You two seem like an odd couple,” he said, trying to change the subject. He had found her thoughtful staring distracting, but this new sadness was almost unbearable. “What’s your story?”
“We’re just old friends,” she replied. She reached for another fry. “We go way back.”
“I see.”
“He’s kind of like my adopted twin brother.” She turned her eyes back to him and asked, “What about you? What’s your story?”
He shrugged. “No story. I’m just me.”
“Okay.” She smiled a little, those green eyes locked intently on his. “So who are you?”
He stared back at her, not sure what to say. Who was he? He was Jeremy Gleer. He was just a guy. He didn’t have a story. “No one,” he replied. “I’m no one at all.”
“Everyone’s someone.”
“Not me.”
“How sad.”
Before she could press him any further, Corey returned to the table with another sandwich box. “Got a fish sandwich,” he declared happily as he sat down. Then another of those deep frowns crossed his gentle face as he looked from Jeremy to Violet and back again. “Sorry. Anybody else want something?”
* * *
Most of the emergency vehicles had vanished by the time Violet pulled into the rear parking lot and killed the engine. Only a couple of police cars remained. The absence of the large fire engines suggested that nothing had been found inside to warrant their continued presence, which would seem to rule out any hazard that would be of further danger to the building’s occupants. Most of the crowd had dispersed as well. The very few that remained had probably only just happened by and were curious about all the broken windows. Everyone else had obviously grown bored. Likewise, the Ford Explorer on which Jeremy had left a very literal impression was also gone. Only a glittering ring of broken glass on the pavement remained to prove that his fall ever really happened.
