"Hold on." He shrugged out of his pack and pulled out a couple of MREs.
"Where the hell did you get those?" she asked.
"Like I said, I'm not from around here." He handed her one of the meals.
"Just like that?" she asked, holding the package. "You don't want anything in return?"
"You did save my life with the vaccine."
She shrugged. "That was my civic duty; this is something else. You're good looking and all, but I don't really want to fuck you, even for a meal like this."
Harrison felt himself blushing, and sickened a little. It was sad that she had been reduced to this – that anybody had. He had no desire to take advantage of her.
"Ah, look, I didn't mean anything by it. I have food, and you don't, so let's just share that."
She nodded. "Gratefully accepted, then." She tore into the pack and began eating in a way that suggested she hadn't had much to eat in days.
"Do the JMC teams come around a lot?" he asked.
"Once a month or so. Sometimes they bring food. Most of the time, they just clear out the ferals that have moved in."
"You mentioned a commonwealth."
"The Commonwealth," she replied. "The provisional government that has taken over. Based somewhere up north, Kentucky or someplace. The food and other supplies come from them, distributed by the JMC."
"I'm curious as to why you stay here. Wouldn't it safer, closer to them?"
"This is where I'm from. I like Florida, and besides, I've heard the winters are terrible up there."
They sat in uncomfortable silence after finishing their shared meal.
Harrison stood and put on his pack, leaving out another MRE. He wanted to give Tilly more, but he had only three left, and he had no idea how long it was going to take him to get back home.
"I should be going. Tilly, thank you for telling me about this place." He handed her the other MRE. "I wish you luck." She walked with him back down to the street.
"I kind of wish I hadn't spoken out earlier. You could stay, if you wanted," she said shyly.
"Thank you, but I need to keep going." He kissed her forehead. "Take care of yourself."
"You too, major."
"Sorry about leaving this mess out here."
She shrugged. "The dogs, rats, and ferals will be out tonight and clean it all up. By morning, you wouldn't even know it had happened."
Harrison shuddered. He couldn't wait to leave this place, but he hated to leave her here alone.
"Goodbye." He triggered the device and fell out of the world.
Chapter Thirty
Harrison double-checked the device. The world he'd arrived in appeared almost like the one he'd left. He looked around, but it was a little bit different. The bodies were all gone, and there was no sound except the faint howling of the cold wind.
The cars along the roadway were rusted hulks and looked as if they had been that way for some time. A closer inspection revealed bones in the cars, picked clean by scavengers. The sky was turbulent and grey, but at least it wasn't raining. Harrison wasn't sure what would fall from those clouds. The devastation around him looked like the result of a nuclear war.
A noise like rustling leaves drew his attention on his right, but he couldn't see anything there. He was starting to feel uncomfortable, standing in the middle of the road. His position was too exposed. He took out his notebook and jotted down the code for this world, along with a brief description. He didn't want to return here accidentally.
The noise came again. This time it was louder and from multiple directions. Harrison climbed onto one of the cars to look around and was rewarded with a glimpse of what was making the noise. Giant cockroaches the size of housecats were converging on his position. He suspected they must be hungry to venture out in the cold; there couldn't be much left alive in this chilly, ugly world.
Nope, he thought. That, I am not dealing with.
He triggered the wrist device.
He sank half a meter into snow as he arrived in the next world.
Harrison stumbled through a blinding blizzard and forced his way into a building. Once inside, he watched through the window for some sign of the condition of this world. It was much like the others. He could see ruins and dead cars jutting up from under the snow. Here, it was just a more advanced nuclear winter. He didn't seem to be getting any closer to home. In fact, he suspected that he had entered a cluster of worlds where war had devastated everything. He wasn't sure which of them was the worst.
Maybe he wasn't doing it right. He studied the faintly glowing screen of the wrist device. The code on the screen was five nine one three seven seven seven. Maybe he needed to change a number other than the last one. He changed the next-to-last to a zero and pressed the activation button.
He was no longer inside a building – or cold. Hot rain soaked him in seconds. Hurricane-force winds threatened to bowl him from his feet. It the distance, volcanoes spewed ash and fire into a sky violent with lightning. A pack of things that looked to him like velociraptors stalked an apatosaurus in the distance. There was no trace of any civilization. He hurriedly keyed the device to the next number and jumped away before the dinosaurs decided to dine on him.
Bright light blinded Harrison for a moment as he arrived in the next world. The sun was high in the sky over familiar-looking buildings. The road lay empty of cars or people. He stood and dripped as he looked around. The ground trembled periodically, but he couldn't tell what was causing it. This world could be his own.
Of course, there was a disturbing lack of people for a town the size of Miami, if that was even where he was. He was beginning to suspect that this was another dead world, when he heard a distant crash as of something big falling, like a building. He began walking in that direction. If he could understand what made each of these worlds different from his own, maybe he could find a way to use the wrist device more efficiently. There had to be a reasoning behind the codes.
A weirdly mournful, ululating cry almost deafened him. It had come from the next street over and sounded liked a freight train was mating with a fog horn. The ground was shaking more now, and he couldn't help but think that the two were connected. The buildings weren't quite as they should be, he decided. They looked older, more archaic, Victorian.
"Are you crazy? Get out of the road!" a man yelled to him.
A pulsing hum could now be heard, and Harrison decided that it might be a good idea to follow the man's advice. He ran over to the door where the man had stood and entered the building. It was filled with huddled people. They were obviously terrified, although not of him.
The man who'd called to him pushed the door shut and braced it. The windows along the front of the building had been blacked out, although there were gaps where Harrison could look out. He couldn't see what was making the noise.
"You military?" asked the man. "You're dressed funny. Have you figured out a way to stop them?"
"Stop who?" Harrison asked cautiously; the man had a fire axe.
"Them monsters – who else?"
Harrison almost laughed. Almost. There was something about the look in the man's eyes that told him it would be a mistake. "I'm just trying to stay alive," he answered.
The man sighed. "Yeah, you and everybody else. I thought when I heard that crash that maybe the military had found a way around their armor. I guess not."
"If they have armor, then what's with the axe?"
"This part of town has been occupied for a month. We've got red weed growing in the gutters and on rooftops. The monsters have been collecting people for a while. They don't seem to have a way to communicate over a distance, though, so if you kill them quick and quiet, they can't call for help."
The loud cry repeated outside as the ground shook and long metallic legs came into view through the window. The people remained quiet; only a few muted whimpers expressed their terror. The three-legged machine came to a halt outside the building.
"Oh, shit," the man with the axe whispere
d.
"What will it do?" Harrison asked, just as quiet.
"It'll either cook us or send out those metal tentacles and try to capture people."
"What do they want people for?"
"Where the hell have you been, man? They drink us dry, that's what."
Harrison felt his bile rise. Other than the specter of atomic war, invasion by flesh-eating aliens had been one the common fears of his childhood. Vampire aliens, or whatever these were, were just as bad. Harrison and his friends had spent many days discussing what they would do if such an invasion happened. The discussions had been childish, untempered by the knowledge he'd gained as he grew older, but the fears underneath lingered, primal. He knew he could always get away with the wrist device, but he'd never forgive himself if he left all these people to die without at least trying to help.
The alien war machine stood outside the building.
"What's it doing?" he asked.
"I don't know," the man replied. "I never seen them just stand there."
The machine let out another deafening, ululating cry that sounded even more mournful than the others had. Then it started to topple. It fell down the length of the street, crashing through part of a building, and lay there, still and quiet. The shaking was gone from the ground. There must not have been other machines around.
Harrison opened the door and looked out.
"What the hell are you doing?"
In the distance, a war machine stood motionless against the sky. Birds were landing behind the cowling and picking at something. They were being quite noisy about it. Harrison stepped out and walked the length of the ruined machine. It was just as he'd imagined them from his childhood. Birds were already descending onto the fallen machine.
As Harrison watched, a low, greyish-brown form heaved itself out of the wreckage, too weak to fight off the birds that pecked at it. It was covered with boils, and pus ran from its gasping mouth. The aliens had succumbed to the germs of the Earth. There was a lesson there, somewhere. After everything that Harrison had seen, he didn't care to think too hard about it, though.
He set the wrist device and activated it, not caring at that point what the locals thought of his sudden disappearance.
Chapter Thirty-One
A searing flash cut the sky and blinded Harrison as he arrived at his new location. For a moment he thought he'd made some mistake and gone back to the cyborg world. Then strong winds shifted direction without warning, and ice-cold rain pelted him, but at least no one was trying to shoot him. No death and destruction, either. That was a nice change of pace.
Harrison stood within a worn stone archway. He could hear a raging and frenzied sea somewhere out of sight, and the ground shook beneath his feet with the force of the waves. The display on his arm read five nine one three seven zero zero. That wasn't what he'd typed into the device. Belatedly, he wondered if it had zeroed out because he tried to jump too close to a universe that was locked out.
Nothing seemed familiar about this strange island of rock.
He corrected the number and tried to jump again, but the display showed him a charging icon with only nine percent power remaining. He tapped that, and it told him that it would require six hours before it had recharged, from wherever it drew its power.
Great. Just my luck. At least I can rest a little, he thought. I might even get a few minutes without anything trying to kill me. He tried to think of how many times he had used the device, but he didn't know about the cyborg before him. The device might only be usable a few times, or many. The implications of the places he had visited were staggering. How was he ever going to explain this when he got back home?
Half an hour of searching in the cold rain brought him to a narrow cleft in the rock, with a door hidden in it. The door was old wood, slimed with mold. The metal hinges and latch were as green as the wood, and in nearly as bad a condition. The door opened with surprisingly little sound, and Harrison ducked inside, out of the rain and wind. Drain holes kept the space beyond from being inundated, which suggested the rain was a common occurrence.
Harrison wiped the water from his face and pulled out his small maglight. The LED bulbs gave more than sufficient illumination to the bare stone chamber. Corridors branched off from either side, but Harrison felt no desire to explore further. He was hungry and tired.
The place was as quiet as a tomb.
He settled down with his back to the wall and fell asleep, his rifle cradled in his arms.
Harrison awoke a few hours later to the sound of footsteps coming up the left-hand corridor toward him. He barely had time to draw his pistol before whoever it was had come into the room with him.
Silence.
He was glad he had his back the wall. He kept imagining an unseen foe sneaking up on him under the concealing cloak of darkness and slitting his throat. He switched on his flashlight.
Nothing. The room was empty.
"What the hell?" he muttered.
He got up and carefully checked both corridors. Empty.
Then he heard the footsteps again, much further down the right-hand corridor.
"Oh, no, you don't."
Harrison limped down the corridor after the fleeing footsteps, now running from him down into the ancient stone of the island. He was stiff from his injuries and from the cold. He passed signs of habitation, a lit torch and a room full of crates, but never any sight of his quarry. He couldn't even say why he was chasing the mystery person, except he hadn't liked being stalked in the dark and wanted to see whoever had been doing it.
The footsteps led him into a room, and he followed. But here the trail went cold. The room was empty, not even any place to hide. The person had vanished.
He stepped back out into the corridor. Standing at the end of it was a man holding a torch. "Don't go," the man pleaded. His voice was rough, as if it had been some time since he had spoken aloud. There was the faintest trace of an accent, possibly New Englander or Canadian – if they even had those countries here.
"I heard footsteps," Harrison replied. He kept his pistol at his side.
"I hear them all the time."
The man wore a dingy white button-up shirt with a ragged hem, and slightly faded blue jeans. He had strips of cloth wrapped around his hands, as if he'd burned them recently. His black hair was long and unkempt, giving him a slightly wild appearance. The long scar on the right side of his face added to the look. His black combat boots were worn but serviceable.
He appeared unarmed.
Harrison suspected this man might be a survivor from a shipwreck. He had that look, and the rock they were on certainly would produce them – shipwrecks, that is. He didn't see how anyone could have survived those waves, though.
"How did you get here?" the man asked. "Through the Door?" He put an odd emphasis on door. "Are you here to kill me?" he then added without waiting for an answer to his previous question.
So he'd been exiled. "I'm not here to kill anyone," Harrison replied. "I'm here by mistake. I was trying to get home and ended up here."
"So you're not from the JRC?"
"Look, I really don't know what you're talking about."
"My name is Raven. And if you aren't from the JRC, then we're both in great danger."
"Major Harrison, USSOCOM. What kind of danger?"
"I'm sorry – what did you say after your name?"
"Doesn't matter. Tell me about the danger."
"Will you come with me? I was about to eat dinner. I'd be happy to share my meal with you while we talk."
"The danger?"
"It's not immediate. Please come with me. Don't leave."
Harrison rubbed at the stubble on his chin. He was hungry. "Sure, what the hell, but I've got a couple of MREs with me. I don't want to eat all your food."
The man laughed; there was a touch of madness in it. "Don't have to worry about that. They take care of all my needs. No, they wouldn't want me to starve."
"Right." Harrison kept his pistol ready as he fo
llowed the man.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Raven led him deep into the island, and Harrison noticed that Raven seemed to be trying to conceal a limp as he walked. The room they entered was lit with a battered lantern. Old blankets formed a makeshift pallet on the floor. A crate held a cup and a candle stub. An iron tripod sat over a metal bucket filled with flat wood, such as from a crate. The smoke rose up and flowed out through a hole high in the ceiling.
The food in the kettle was some kind of beef stew – from cans, it looked like. It didn't smell very appetizing, but Harrison didn't want to insult the man by refusing his hospitality. It might be all the civilization the poor bastard had left.
Harrison accepted the bowl of stew and sat down on the bare floor with the SCAR across his knees. He noticed that Raven handled the pot and utensils with great care.
"I've got a good burn ointment, if you need it."
"I'm sorry – what?"
"You've got your hands wrapped because you burned them, right?"
The man gave him an odd look. "I've got them wrapped so I don't burn them."
Harrison shrugged. The stew was better than it smelled – not that it would have been all that difficult. He'd eaten worse.
"I'm in exile here, you know. You probably guessed that."
"Yeah."
"I've been imprisoned for no good reason."
"Okay."
"You doubt me?"
"It doesn't matter what I think. I'll be leaving in –" Harrison glanced at his chronometer "– fifty-three minutes."
Raven tensed. "How is it that you got here?"
"How did you?"
"I was cast through the Door, into this place. The Door closed, trapping me here. There is no escape other than death."
"I have a device. I came here from another universe."
Raven was nodding. "I thought it had to be so."
"You don't seem surprised at the possibility."
"It's not as if I'm a local, either."
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