“No,” C.J. said.
It took seven stitches to hold the wound closed, and Chris was happy to see that the bleeding had fully stopped as well. He dug a less dirty shirt out from their belongings in the trunk and helped C.J. put it on. Poor kid, he thought. He was so close to making it. I just wish he was with his mom and sister.
“So, at least we got them through the portal,” Mike said. “It would have been nice to get all of us through, of course, but at least progress is being made. The question is, what's the plan now?” He reassembled his medical kit and threw it back in the trunk of the car.
“Maybe we should look at the laptop again, and see where the next two or three are, to find the most feasible? What do you think Brent?” Chris said.
“I remember that Guernsey made the most sense as the backup plan. But it never hurts to double check,” Brent agreed. Steve remained offset from the group, his face awash with frustration. Chris knew he was upset that he didn't get to use the portal, but he had to understand that Sarah and Tammy needed it more. They had been so withdrawn ever since the ordeal, and the sooner they were able to reach somewhere safe and pleasant, the better.
Brent retrieved the laptop from the trunk and lowered himself to the ground, leaning against the car. He pressed the power button, and the laptop fan began to whir as it booted up. Mike and Chris sat down in the grass next to C.J.
After the computer had finished booting, Brent clicked around and turned the laptop to face the group. “Here are our options,” he said. Steve walked over to join them and stood between Mike and Chris, looking down. “Guernsey is the only portal that we could reach in the next day, and after that the next candidate would be in Denver, six and a half days from now.”
“Openings in the city are always so hectic,” Mike said. “I vote the sooner the better, so Guernsey works for me.”
“I agr–” Chris started. The worry on Brent's face stopped him mid-sentence. “What is it Brent?”
“He's understandably concerned,” Steve said behind them, “because there is a gun pointed at him.” Chris turned his head slowly and noted that yes, he surely did have a gun pointed at him. What the hell is this guy doing now? Chris thought. Can't things just go smoothly for once?
“What are you doing, man?” Mike asked. “What's the problem?”
“The problem is you idiots stopped me from reaching the portal but didn't have a problem with your women going through. I'm not taking the chance of you screwing things up again, so I'm going solo. I'm going to need that laptop,” Steve said, stepping around Chris and Mike in a wide arc and approaching Brent.
“Oh, come on,” Chris said. “Seriously? Can't we catch a break? Are you seriously just going to leave us out here without the laptop?”
“I told you I wasn't here to make friends,” Steve said. “I'm here to find a portal, and all you are doing is hindering that, so I think it's best if we part ways.”
Brent jumped to his feet; Steve turned quickly and the gun erupted. Brent looked down and clutched his left hand to his stomach. When he pulled it away there was blood spreading and dripping between his fingers. He raised his face in a horrified expression, “Why? Why did you shoot me? I was just giving you the laptop.” He slumped back to the ground with the laptop still clutched in his right hand, his head bumping awkwardly against the car door.
“Ah crap,” Steve said. “Why do you have to be so damn awkward Brent? It wasn't supposed to go down like this.”
“Dad?” C.J. asked, his voice trembling with fright.
“Everything is fine, C.J.,” Chris said. He slowly scooted a little further in front of C.J. in the hope of protecting him. Chris looked from Steve to Brent and then back to Steve. “He needs help. Can we help him, or are you going to shoot us, too?” Steve bent and pulled the laptop from Brent's hand. He began a slow walk backward toward Mike's car.
“I'd advise you to stay away from the Guernsey portal,” Steve said. “I don't want to see you again, and you don't want to see me.” He glanced to see where the car was and stopped next to the driver's side door. He dropped the laptop through the window into the front passenger seat, and he used his now free hand to open the door. He climbed into the vehicle, keeping the gun leveled on them, and started the engine. “Seriously,” he said. “Don't go to Guernsey.”
The vehicle pulled away, and the group watched as it crossed the campground. It pulled onto the road, continuing back the way they had come. With the vehicle out of sight both Chris and Mike moved to help Brent. “He’s losing a lot of blood,” Mike said. “I wish I hadn’t put my kit back in the trunk. I had some gauze we could have used to pack the wound. Do you or Brent have any rags, or old clothes we can use in Brent's car?”
Chris opened the trunk of the car, and grabbed an old college t-shirt of Sarah’s from their pack. He had bought this shirt for her at a baseball game in college; she wore it to bed at least once a week. He sighed and handed it to Mike. “She won’t need this anymore, I suppose. C.J., why don't you run down to the reservoir and throw some rocks into the water? Just make sure not to move your left arm too much.”
“Okay,” C.J. said. He stood carefully, cradling his left arm with his right, and walked toward the water.
Mike took the shirt and placed it against the pool of blood on Brent's stomach. “How does it look?” Brent asked, pale as a sheet.
“It's bleeding a lot,” Mike said.
Tears welled in Brent's eyes and he sniffed. “I just don't understand why he shot me, I didn't do anything. I was trying to help and do what he said. I'm a nice person; I've never even been in a fight!” Chris and Mike caught each other's eye, and Mike shook his head. Chris knew what the signal meant. Brent wasn't going to make it.
Brent must have noticed the look as well, and concern flooded his tear-covered face. “I'm going to die, aren't I? Oh my God, I'm going to die.”
Chris and Mike sat in silence, unsure of how to respond.
“Am I going to Hell? What if I go to Hell?”
“Do you want us to pray with you?” Mike asked, trying to be of some help.
“Would that be too weird?”
“No. If it makes you feel better, then let's do it,” Chris said. Brent nodded slowly, and they all bowed their heads.
“Dear Lord, please give Brent the strength to walk back into your arms. We've faced many difficulties that could not have been overcome without the sacrifices made by Brent. Please give him your blessing and love. Amen,” Mike said.
“Thanks. My Grandma used to pray with me each night before bed. My parents died in a car accident when I was just in Kindergarten, and she raised me. Oh man, I know I'm babbling. I'm just so scared, you know?”
“It's fine,” Chris said. “We understand.”
“What are you guys going to do? Are you going to go to Guernsey or back home?”
Mike responded, “I think we'll have to talk about it. Steve is obviously dangerous, that much we know for sure. I'm not sure it would be smart to put C.J. at risk. Steve has a gun now, and we don't have any weapons.”
“Denver will be so busy though, and six days is a long time to wait,” Chris said. “Trust me, the last thing I want is for C.J. to be in danger. If we keep a good distance away from Steve, and we wait until he goes through the portal, we should be safe. I highly doubt he'll make it through anyway, but in either case, we could make our move after him.”
“You're C.J.'s dad, so of course you get to make the ultimate choice. I'm up for that plan, but let's just talk about it.” Chris noticed that Brent's eyes had closed. The hand Chris held loosened in his grasp, and he laid it down slowly on Brent's chest. Mike placed two fingers to Brent's neck, met Chris's gaze, and nodded solemnly.
Just like that, Chris thought, everything can change. Sarah, Angie, and Tammy made it, thank God, but C.J. is still here with stitches, and now Brent is dead. There's a selfish bastard out there with a gun trying to stop us from taking the one certain way out of here. What the hell are we going to
do?
Chris remembered seeing a folded blue tarp in the trunk. He retrieved it and unfolded it over Brent's body. Mike helped him roll Brent to each side to get the tarp under him, and they tucked it under as well as they could. Chris looked around for somewhere to place his body, but there didn't seem to be a decent enough place. He really didn't want to put him in the car and bring him along, so leaving him covered on the campground seemed to be the most respectful option. He found some landscaping bricks nearby, provisioning off a flower bed that was no longer maintained, and brought several over. He placed them around Brent's body, in hopes of forming a watertight seal with the tarp.
They met C.J. down by the reservoir, lowered to the grass, and watched him throw rocks for several minutes. “C.J.,” Chris started, “do you mind sitting for a minute, and taking a break?”
“Is he dead?” C.J. asked, skipping a rock along the water. He lowered himself to the ground using only his right hand to support himself. His left arm visibly pained him. “Steve killed him, didn't he?”
“Yea he did,” Chris said, following C.J.'s gaze over the water. “Steve isn't a good person.”
“He helped Mom though. Tammy, too, when the bad cops came. So he isn't all bad.”
The kid is right, Chris thought, these sure are complicated times. We all have an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other. At any given time it could be a coin flip deciding which is in charge. “He shouldn't have shot Brent. Brent didn't try to hurt him like the cops were hurting your mom and Tammy, and they were going to hurt the rest of us as well. Sometimes bad people do good things for bad reasons, just like good people can do bad things for good reasons.”
“So Steve could still be good? He could have just done a bad thing for a good reason? A reason that we don't know?” C.J. asked, looking to his dad hopefully.
Chris kept his gaze focused on the water. ”I don't know C.J. I do know that he doesn't want us to reach the other portal near here. If we try, he'll probably do his best to try to kill us. I think he wants to make it to a portal so bad that he's willing to do whatever it takes to reach it.” Would he kill C.J.? Is he really so selfish? Do I even want to find out?
“What your dad and I are trying to figure out, is whether we're going to try to reach it anyway,” Mike said. “The problem is, if we skip the Guernsey portal, the next opportunity isn't for another six days. Not to mention that it will be in Denver. When portals open in the city, it's crazy, and everybody flocks toward them. It becomes chaos and unless you happen to be fortunate enough to be walking by when it opens, you're probably just out of luck. Not to mention there is a very limited window before the sentinels appear, making things even more difficult.”
“We also don't have the laptop anymore,” Chris added. “So these are the only two portals where we'd have some advance notice. Otherwise we'll be rejoining the ranks of the merely hopeful.”
“Steve can't take the laptop with him through the portal, right?” C.J. asked. “Can we just get the laptop after he goes through?” Mike and Chris looked at each other and smiled.
“That's a really good thought, C.J.,” Mike laughed. “You're right. We did tell him that it wasn't worth trying to take a car through. He'll probably just leave everything sitting in the car.”
“So if we head there carefully, keeping our distance, and we see him go through the portal, we can try to make a run for it ourselves. If we can reach it before the sentinels appear, fantastic. If not, we just grab the laptop and supplies and head back home to figure out the next plan? That sounds like something I can be on board with,” Chris said.
A wave of loneliness coursed through Chris, and he was aware once again of how much he missed Sarah already. It's going to get very difficult with Sarah gone. Especially tonight, he thought. C.J. seems all right for now, but it's going to hit him at some point. I'll have to watch him and make sure he handles the grief process okay.
“So are we saying that we are going to stay here tonight?” Mike asked.
“I don't see why not. It's probably more secure than being back in town. We can find an unused cabin and lay low,” Chris said.
“Can we camp out?” C.J. asked.
“I don't think so, buddy. I still don't want to be sitting out in the open and vulnerable. At least in a cabin we can lock the doors and windows.” C.J.'s shoulders sunk but he didn't argue. “How does your arm feel?”
“Just sore. Kind of like a charley horse.” Chris pulled the collar back from C.J.'s shirt and peered at his arm. The stitches were holding, but the wound looked darker as the bruising had increased. It could be getting infected, too, Chris thought. We'll have to watch it, and if we have to head back to town maybe we could find some antibiotics as a precautionary measure.
They walked back to the vehicle, and Chris forced himself to not look at Brent's tarp-covered body. They drove around the park until they found a picnic area with tables and decided to have an early dinner. They ate peanut butter sandwiches, washed down with a can of soda each. The soda was a good relief from the stress of the day. When the cans were empty, Mike filled them with water and made sure they each drank the entire can. The sun had begun to set; they sat around the picnic area talking until it fell below the horizon.
“It's odd how quiet it is,” Chris said. “I'm used to the city, where there's a constant white-noise of gunshots and screams at night. Here, other than the animals, it's just silent.”
“You're right. I knew something felt off but I couldn't put my finger on it,” Mike agreed. “That's exactly what it is.”
“I can see the Big Dipper, Dad,” C.J. said, pointing. “Isn't that the North Star right there?”
“Yep. The North Star is also known as Polaris, and it's at the handle of the Little Dipper.” Chris turned back to Mike. “We never let the kids outside when it's dark, so they haven't really seen stars since they were really young. We did give C.J. a glow-in-the-dark solar system one year for Christmas though. He loved it. We measured out everything perfectly and placed each constellation and planet on the ceiling in his room.”
Mike smiled. “I bet he'd love a telescope.”
C.J.'s eyes widened. “That'd be awesome!”
“I wish I could get you one,” Chris said, “but that's just not a possibility right now. Well guys, should we go find a cabin?”
Mike stood, grabbed their empty soda cans, and dropped them in a nearby green trash can. They loaded back into Brent's car and drove slowly along the roads looking for an adequate place to stay for the night. The first two cabin areas they passed had already been looted and vandalized. Chris had assumed that nobody would have been in the park since it had closed, so the sight of the spray-painted cabins worried him. He realized it was a foolish assumption to begin with; he should have known that, of course, people would have jumped the fence. Whoever looted them is probably long gone, anyway, Chris tried to reassure himself.
At the back of the park they found two cabins side-by-side, which appeared to still be secure. Mike pulled the car onto a gravel driveway separating the cabins and shut off the engine. The cabins were painted green, but in the darkening evening they appeared brown.
Chris tried the front door of the cabin on the right but found the door locked. He walked around the cabin, trying each window, but found them all secured as well. They performed the same ritual to the cabin on the left and found it in the same state. “Which one should we use?” Chris asked.
“Doesn't really matter,” Mike said. “We'll have to find a way to fix whatever we break getting in. So either way we have a bit of work to do. Unless you can think of a way in without breaking anything?”
Chris surveyed the perimeter of the cabin on the right, hands on his hips, looking for an obvious solution. “Maybe we could find where they store the keys to the cabins?”
“That could take forever, though,” Mike said.
Chris sighed. “I guess we'll just have to break a window and climb in. I hate to do that, but maybe we can find somet
hing to block it with once we're inside.”
“Sounds good. I don't have any better ideas.”
“C.J., stand back,” Chris said. “I don't want any glass cutting you.”
C.J. backed away several feet and leaned against the wall of the other cabin. Mike picked up a nearby rock about twice the size of his fist and handed it to Chris.
Chris looked at the window. It slid along a track etched into each side of the frame, and a lock sat in the middle securing the two sections. If he was careful not to break the entire top pane, he could reach in and unlock it, leaving the integrity of the window mostly intact. He dropped the large rock and picked up a smaller one. He took a few deep breaths, aimed, and threw it hard through the top pane. It soared through the glass about two inches above the location where the two window panes met. A hole appeared hardly bigger than the rock itself, and Chris waited anxiously for the remainder of the glass to fall. Whether due to luck or skill the remaining pane held, and they all listened as the rock bounced around noisily inside the cabin. Chris walked to the window and placed his fingers carefully through the hole. The glass wrapped around his hand just below the knuckles, and refused to let it pass any further.
Damn, Chris thought. So close.
“I can do it,” C.J. said. “My hands are smaller.”
“That's true,” Chris said. “Come over here.” C.J. walked over to join his Dad at the window. He couldn't reach the top pane, so Chris bent, wrapped his arms around C.J.'s legs, and lifted him. “Be careful not to cut your hand or arm. Slow and steady, no quick movements.”
C.J.'s hand slipped through the hole in the pane, shaking a little due to the forced concentration, until his wrist rested comfortably in the middle of the hole. “Okay. Now undo the lock that is just below your hand. Just move that little lever to the side.” C.J.'s hand turned, contorted, and his fingers grazed against the lever. With a groan of effort, he flicked his hand one more time and the lever clicked. “Great job!” Chris said. “Now take your hand out, slowly, just like you put it in.”
Portals Page 9
