Hellworld

by Tom Leveen

  No. He needs something. He pulls out a small white-and-red box and dumps the contents onto the counter. They bounce and clatter, several red cylinders spilling onto the floor.

  Shells. For the gun.

  Riley still holds the shotgun in one hand, where it dangles from his fingers. With the other hand he tries to pick up any one of a number of the shells.

  Charlie looks wildly around the room, then lunges at one of the chairs at the kitchen table. He picks it up in both hands and swings it hard over the old man’s back. Riley lurches forward over the counter, dropping the cartridge he’d managed to get hold of.

  The chair hasn’t broken, and Charlie uses it to prod the zombie away from the box. Riley stumbles backward, dropping the gun. Charlie grabs it and swipes a handful of shells off the counter and toward me, like his hands are too numb and clumsy to fit the shells into the shotgun. He trips over his own feet and heads back toward me.

  Charlie falls at my feet and manages to get the shotgun cracked open. Two green shells pop out. I smell something smoky. Charlie grabs two of the shells he’d knocked this way and stuffs them into the chamber. Dimly, I hope he knows what he’s doing.

  Riley gets back to his feet. Instead of rushing for us, he turns toward a butcher’s block and pulls a cleaver out of it. He starts tottering in our direction.

  He doesn’t make it far. Charlie, from a crouched position, fires the shotgun.

  The old man’s chest bursts apart and scatters pulp throughout the kitchen. It sends him reeling back several feet into the garage door. There he stands for a moment before falling against the tile.

  And something else comes out of him.

  A viscous, nearly liquid smoke pours from his mouth. It moves first languidly, then quickly, jerking back and forth like a silken scarf or an anxious school of fish. It’s not the only time I’ve seen this happen, I realize suddenly, but it’s the first time it’s been in full daylight.

  The first time was in the cave, before the pit opened.

  The black cloud swims before us for a moment, then slips out through the hole where the window had been. Charlie and I both instinctively follow, stopping at the window, watching the black thing hesitate outside the RV.

  “No!”I scream. “Stay away from her!”

  The black cloud whirs and dances, cobra-like, before bolting up into the air and out of sight.

  The side door to the RV opens up. Selby stands in the doorway, bracing herself against the frame.

  “Uh, what the hell was all that noise?”she says, pressing her right hand against her wound.

  I race outside and look into the sky, trying to track the black cloud. It’s already disappeared.

  “Are you okay?”I call to her.

  “Still stabbed,”Selby says. “Otherwise, yes. Hungry. Isn’t this that professor’s house? What are we doing here?”

  I back up to the RV door before turning and offering a hand. “Come on. We’ll get you some food. You can get cleaned up inside.”

  Selby takes my hand and lets me help her to the ground. We step slowly toward the porch.

  “Where’s the prof?”she asks, wincing. “And what the hell happened to the window?”

  I glance at Charlie. He meets my eyes, then looks at the gun in his hands as if surprised to see it there. He tosses it onto the couch with a look of fierce disgust.

  “This way,”he says to us, and joins me and Selby at the steps up to the porch. We go inside, and I realize Charlie is keeping Selby positioned in a way to prevent her from seeing the professor’s body in the kitchen.

  We escort her to the bedroom, where she gives her arms an obligatory shake to get us to let go of her. “I brought in your clothes,”I say, trying to control the shaking in my voice from leftover adrenaline. “If you want to shower or something.”

  “Yeah, okay.”Selby reaches for the hem of her shirt, but sucks in a breath. “Ow. Can you . . . ?”

  “Oh. Sure.”

  “I’ll go, um . . . clean everything up,”Charlie says to me.

  I nod quickly. He leaves, shutting the bedroom door on his way. To Selby, I say, “Why don’t you sit down. I need to clean up my hands.”

  “You’re bleeding,”she says, gingerly taking the edge of Riley’s bed.

  “Yeah. I . . . yeah.”

  I go into the bathroom and run water over my palms, biting my lips together. The damage isn’t awful, but the glass hurts something fierce. I find a first-aid kit in Riley’s cabinets, and bandage my hands as best I can before returning to Selby. She’s still sitting on the bed, motionless, her shoulders slumped.

  “I can’t even take off my shoes,”she says.

  I kneel in front of her. “It’s okay. I got it. It’s your core—everything moves from there. It makes sense that you can’t do much.”

  I begin unlacing her blue, now-dusty boots and slide them off her feet. Next, I peel off her socks, which are cold and damp with old sweat. If I hadn’t had to take Dad’s shoes off so many times while he was passed out on the couch, maybe it would have grossed me out. Plus, after today, is there anything that could gross me out?

  “Here, stand up,”I say, pulling her to her feet.

  “I can do my own goddamn zipper,”Selby grouses.

  She braces herself on my shoulder while she gets undressed.

  “So how long have you guys been going out?”This question pops out of me like a bubble. I couldn’t have stopped it even if I’d wanted to.

  Selby rolls her eyes a bit. “Few weeks.”

  Fortunately, I manage to bite back my first response, which would have gone something like, That’s it? Are you freaking kidding me?

  “That’s not very long,”I say.

  “I just moved out of my mom’s place. Long overdue, really. We don’t, uh . . . get what you’d call along. So I split. Took a bus to Los Angeles to stay with Charlie for a while. We’d been talking on the phone and online. You know, usual stuff. Then you called.”

  Those last words come out even, but I can tell it’s hard for her to make them sound like it.

  “Don’t you want to go back? I mean, to see if your mom is okay?”

  “No.”

  “It was that bad?”

  “It was that bad.”

  “But—”

  “Abby.”

  I shut up.

  “Let me deal with my own shit,”Selby says, but somewhat kindly. “Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  I help her crawl out of her shirt as she gasps and swears through the whole thing. “That’ll do,”she says, and limps over to the bathroom. As if an afterthought, she adds, “Thanks.”

  “No problem.”

  I let myself out, closing the door behind me. Charlie’s in the kitchen, staring at what’s left of Dr. Riley.

  “Yeah, so, we’re getting out of here,”Charlie says.

  “Right,”I say. “Told you.”

  He holds my hand.

  24

  Then

  * * *

  “So I guess that’s what they call reality TV,”I said to Alex as we walked to the RV.

  “At its finest,”Alex agreed, grinning.

  “Certified can of nuts,”Selby announced as we got into the RV. “That’s all he was. People like that are in desperate need of a Darwin Award.”

  “You know what you sound like right now, Sells?”Alex said, climbing into the driver’s seat. “An extremist. You sound like a person who would happily behead someone who did not share your beliefs, or who doesn’t come around to accepting the way you say things are. Just sayin’.”

  It’s outdated, I know, but the first word that came to mind after Alex said that was Snap!

  We all got inside and Charlie shut the door. Alex started the RV.

  “Know something, Alex?”Selby said. She snatched up yesterday’s newspaper she got from the café and sat on the couch. “You might think I’m this ice-princess atheist bitch. And you’d be right. But you know what else? I loved my dad. A lot. He was a good guy
. And made living with Mom easier to deal with. So I miss the righteous holy hell out of him, but I’m not about to go pinning any hopes to some lame-ass professor living in the middle of nowhere who’s so drunk and senile he thinks there’s an afterlife.”

  “Technically, he didn’t say that,”Charlie said.

  “He implied it with his crazy talk, come on.”

  “That’s fair,”Alex said, steering the RV back to what passed for a road. “But just because you don’t know something yet, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible, does it?”

  “Uh, in this case? Yeah, it does.”Selby folded the paper to the obituaries page and flung it onto the console between the two front seats. “Look at these people. They died, but the world moved on. I moved on. All of us did. That’s all I need to know.”

  “But that’s not proof of anything,”Alex said. “I thought you were scientific.”

  “And pragmatic.”She slapped a hand on top of the obits. “These people, they didn’t matter.”

  Alex said, “Yes, they did! They mattered to the people who are still here.”

  “Yeah, but in a hundred years, they won’t matter either. Even if you had a kid right now, just popped one out, in a hundred years, it won’t matter, he’ll be dead too. The Earth will still be torn apart by humanity, but you’ll be long gone, and so will your kids. Maybe even grandkids. It doesn’t matter.”

  I shook my head and stared out at the desert whipping by outside the passenger window. “You’re a great big ray of sunshine, anyone ever tell you that?”

  “Yeah.”Selby sat back on the couch again. “My dad. How’s that working out for me?”

  I’d had it with her. On a number of levels, one of which was—maybe she had a point. In any case, I just wanted her to stop.

  “Wow,”I said, spinning the captain chair toward her. “That was like a . . . like a little zing there, wasn’t it?”

  Well, that clearly wasn’t the reaction she was looking for. She kept her bitch face on, but I saw something deeper in her eyes twitch. Plus, I saw Alex stifling a sigh and Charlie rubbing his eyes. Geez. They didn’t need me contributing to the mobile bitch factory.

  “I’m sorry,”I said right away. “That wasn’t cool.”

  I thought I saw Selby’s shoulders spasm upward, like she didn’t want to shrug a No big back at me but couldn’t help it. I took that as a good sign.

  “I’m just saying,”Selby said. “We play with death, and I’m sick of it. We fetishize it, glorify it. Movies, books, video games. We treat it like this great drama. Like when it’s our turn, there will be this great orchestral swell and there will be a fade to black, and the credits will roll, and it will all be nice and dramatic and touching. Maybe a slow pan across the faces of people who loved you. Maybe even some slo-mo, ooo! But we’ll see that actor again. We can reset the video game or reread the story, and nobody ever dies. Except that’s not how it really goes, now, is it.”

  Nobody had anything to add. I thought of my dad, and wondered if maybe Selby had a pretty damn valid argument.

  “You were paying attention to some of the stuff Riley said,”I pointed out. “How come?”

  “Because he wasn’t totally stupid. His bit with the glass dish was mildly entertaining.”

  “Okay, I did not understand that even a little bit,”Alex admitted, slapping a hand against the steering wheel. “How can a three-dimensional object be a shadow?”

  “Things get weird when you start adding dimensions,”Selby said. “Here, hold on.”

  She went to the fridge and helped herself to a Diet Coke. Coming back up front, she said to me, “Trade me places?”

  It might sound funny, but it was the most polite, civilized tone she’d had so far. I gave up my shotgun seat in a hurry, anxious to keep her going down this unbitchy road.

  Selby sank into the chair, which now faced toward the driver’s side of the van on a swivel, so the three of us could see her.

  “Okay,”she said. “Imagine a perfectly flat world. Everything is in two dimensions. We can move side to side, up and down, around and around. But there is no out or back. We lack that third dimension. Okay?”

  Alex and I both nodded. I actually found myself enjoying this side of Selby. She was enjoying herself.

  “Now one day, we find a circle. We can move all around it and measure it, say this is a circle. Then we find a rectangle. We can move all around it, measure it, just like we did the circle. We know this is a rectangle. No problem, right?”

  “Sure,”I said.

  “Great. Now here’s the twist. Can a circle ever be a rectangle?”

  “Um . . .”

  “Not a trick question, Abby. Can it?”

  “No.”

  “Right. A circle can never be a rectangle, and a rectangle can never be a circle. So far, so good. But what if we take this soda can—”

  She set it on top of the console.

  “And we draw an outline of it on top of our flat world. The outline is a circle. A two-dimensional circle. But if we tip it on its side . . .”

  She chugged the last of the soda and set the can down lengthwise.

  “And we draw an outline of it, what do we get?”

  “A rectangle,”Alex said, starting to smile.

  “Aha, and presto,”Selby said. “A circle can be a rectangle if you add another dimension.”

  “That’s kind of cool,”Alex said. “How’d you come up with that?”

  “I didn’t. A guy named Edwin Abbott did, a long time ago. It was a story called Flatland. It was actually a social satire, but there’s this physics aspect too, whether he meant it to be or not.”

  I spoke slowly, trying to sound the idea out. “So the point is that once you add another dimension . . .”

  “Things that shouldn’t be possible suddenly become possible,”Selby said. “Hey, there’s hope for you yet.”

  She said it in a way that made me feel good about myself instead of wanting to smack her silly.

  “So now, tie that back to everything Riley said,”Alex pressed. “I still don’t get it.”

  Selby’s eye roll returned full force. “Sounded to me like he was trying to argue that somewhere out in the middle of the desert is a fifth or sixth or bazillionth dimension. I find that mildly difficult to believe. I’ll admit that crazy shit happens at the subatomic level, but none of it extends to matter bigger than those particles.”

  “But is it possible,”Alex said.

  “Given the current laws of physics, no, it isn’t. We’ve never observed phenomena like the kind Riley tried to pawn off.”

  “The current laws, you said,”Alex replied. “Which can change, right? I mean, the more you learn.”

  “Sure, yeah. I mean, that’s what M-theory is. Trying to draw connections and overlaps between ideas to explain the stuff we don’t know. Like, there’s quantum physics, which is how things work on a very small level, and there’s gravitational physics, which is how things work on a huge level, like the universe. We know both of them work, but we don’t know why. They should cancel each other out, but they don’t. Some of the top minds the world has ever known look at some of the mathematics, and the best answer they’ve got is Uhhhhh . . .”

  “Hmm,”Alex said. “Sounds like physicists have to take a lot on faith.”

  Selby’s eyes wrinkled to slits. “No, it’s actually nothing like that.”

  “Take the next left,”Charlie said.

  I’d nearly forgotten he was there. He seemed lost in his own little world. I couldn’t tell if it was because of the stuff Selby said, or what Riley said, or if maybe he’d just had it with the whole goddamn lot of us.

  25

  Now

  * * *

  Selby calls for me after she’s done with her shower. She’s taken the bandage off, and I help her rebind it with stuff from the first-aid kit after she’s gotten mostly dressed. The wound is ugly, a yellow-blue bruise surrounding the dimpled skin around her stitches.

  “Does it hurt?”I a
sk, putting the last piece of tape into place.

  “No, it fucking tickles. Of course it hurts.”

  “Is your stomach . . . Can you tell if there’s any swelling?”

  “Maybe a bit, I don’t know. That’s probably normal, huh?”

  “Probably,”I say, not believing it.

  “I want to go home.”

  “We’re working on that,”I say, and squeeze her hand. I hand her a clean T-shirt from her bag. “There’s breakfast in the kitchen.”

  Charlie and I had wrestled Riley’s body out back, and done a good job of cleaning up the blood and . . . stuff. There’s no real evidence of what had happened by the time Selby comes gingerly sliding into the kitchen.

  “So where is the old prof?”she asks, lowering herself gently into a kitchen chair. “And what happened to the window?”

  “We don’t know,”Charlie says. He sets a plate of food in front of her, and for a moment, it feels like we’re all playing house. Here’s Daddy, home on a Saturday, making breakfast for his little girl. The image made me sick somehow.

  While Selby eats, Charlie and I stuff the Jeep full, with only barely enough room for us in the front seats and Selby behind the driver’s seat. We give the TV one last chance, but now all the stations are dark. Not what we’d hoped for. Then we sit down with our maps and try to find the best way to get me home.

  “What about you?”I ask Charlie once we’ve got a plan to get to Vegas.

  “What about me, what?”

  “Don’t you want to get home?”

  Charlie runs his hands backward through his hair. “Yeah. But Stephen’s probably already hunkered down in the woods somewhere. That’s his style. Once he sees how things are going, he’ll bug out, see what happens. In any case, I’m not leaving you guys.”

  We leave everything the way it is. I can’t help thinking that now two people are dead because of us. Two directly. How many more have died since the ark broke open? Maybe Charlie was right—staying at Riley’s house would be safer—but maybe, too, this is a risk I have to take. What right do I have to live, after everything I’d been a part of the past couple days? The least I can do is go out into the ravaged world and take my chances like everyone else.