Slick rocks bruised their shins as they stumbled through the storm, and the cold rain battered them. In between the deafening thunder and the shelling, they could now hear sporadic gunfire. Someone else was using the ruins as cover, and yet another somebody was trying to take it. Who or what that might be was anyone's guess.
"Come on!"
They found a path of sorts that led up into the ruins. The crumbling rock walls blocked some of the fierceness of the storm, but not the noise. Turning to look back the way they'd come, Harrison could see figures coming through the Door into the storm. The Door emitted a little flash of light each time someone came through. There were a lot of little flashes.
He checked his device, but it couldn't get a fix on his location. The numbers just kept bouncing. At least he had a signal, though. Now if he just knew what it meant... He led his companions deeper into the jumbled stone ruins.
A figure stepped out of the darkness to his right, and Harrison almost shot her before he realized she wasn't dressed like the JRC's security forces. She wore a long coat and goggles, and a breath mask hung loose at her neck. The bulky rifle she carried was of an unfamiliar design, but Harrison was getting used to that.
"You're not Urkenze!" she said.
"You speak English!"
"Yeah. Come on! Get under here!" She gestured for them to follow her into the ruins, to a crumbling room with a window looking out into the night. It wasn't dry in the ruined room – the wind carried the rain in through the empty window and the shattered wall – but at least it was shelter of a sort. Harrison couldn't tell what sort of building this might have been, or even how long it had been in its current state.
A dim lantern tucked behind a rock shed little light, but it was enough to see that there were three bodies in the room: two near the window and another slumped against the wall. Anton helped Raven find a place to sit and then went to check on the man by the wall.
"What's he doing?" the woman asked, her voice not concealing her suspicion. She didn't quite point her rifle at Anton.
"He's a doctor," replied Harrison. He was worried about the JRC forces. They hadn't been far behind. Not that anyone could track them in a storm like this one, but... He shook his head at the thought.
The woman nodded. Harrison noticed that she kept a close eye on the window.
"You said we aren't Urkenze. What's an Urkenze?" he asked.
"This." She used her rifle to flip over one of the bodies by the window.
It wasn't human.
The body appeared humanoid, but that was where the resemblance ended. It looked like a nightmarish hybrid of insect and machine in a trench coat. The corpse was riddled with holes. The wounds oozed a thick, greenish fluid, not unlike radiator fluid in color and texture. Harrison was almost glad the lighting was so poor.
"What the hell is that?"
"Urkenze," she replied. "Kind of like an evil, fascist cyborg insect with an attitude problem and Realm-hopping technology. You know what a cyborg is, right?" She continued before he could reply. "They followed me on my last jump, so I called up the biggest reality storm I could find to slow them. They won't follow me through this one."
"Called up? Reality storm?" Harrison had thought the JRC was beyond his comprehension, but what she was saying didn't even make sense.
"You're not Storm Riders?"
"Ah, no." Storm Riders?
"Then how'd you get here?"
"Believe it or not, we came through a Door."
"Oh, one of them." She shook her head in obvious disgust. "You people do more harm than good, you know." She glanced out the window again.
"Actually, I'm not with them, either," said Harrison. "They used to be." He gestured at Raven and Anton. "But not anymore. Turns out you can't just resign. The people from the JRC are after them, and me, too, because I'm helping them. I'm from someplace else."
"You have a way to get out of here? The storm is going to peak soon, and I'm away with it then. You're not going to want to be here when that happens."
"I've got a device, but I can't get a lock on the current location."
"That's the reality storm. Screws with most electronics."
"Then no, we don't have a way out."
As if to punctuate his words, gunfire erupted outside.
"Sounds like the people chasing you just found the Urkenze," the woman said. She grinned suddenly. She was quite pretty in the dim light. "I'm Gillian, by the way."
"Michael Harrison," he replied. "The big guy is Anton. The wounded one is Raven."
Anton got up and walked over to them. He shook his head. "I am very sorry. He is dead. I could do nothing. He had lost much blood."
Gillian nodded. "I'd guessed as much. I'd already written him off."
"That's a bit cold," said Harrison.
"I didn't know him well. He was being held by the Urkenze. He just hitched a ride when I left their Realm. His name was Lance." She shrugged.
"Do you want that I should bury him?" Anton asked. "There are rocks..."
"Not much point. The reality storm is going to level this place when I jump. You all should get moving if you want to live. You'll need to be at least three kilometers from the focal point, or better yet, a few Realms away. Where're you headed?"
"I wish I knew," said Harrison. "We don't even know where we are. We just picked a Door at random and ran through."
"Hmm. You're just north of the Dancing Mountains here. Things get stranger to the south; go north if you're looking for stability."
"I have no idea what any of that means."
"How long have you been traveling?"
"Not long."
"Where did you start?"
"A place called Earth, the United States."
"What year?"
"Twenty fifteen."
"That would be on track for near where I started. I went to college at Georgia Tech on an Earth. My Earth was a bit further along."
"No shit?"
"Yeah. So is that where you're trying to go? You're a long way from home."
Chapter Thirty-Nine
The storm seemed to be quieting down, or else they were entering the eye of it. Harrison wished again that he had some idea of how to get his life back under control. It had been out of control since he'd woken up in Brownsville. He needed to find time to slow down and rest, or he was going to come apart at the seams.
"My Earth is where I'm trying to go," Harrison said. "Raven and Anton are hoping to find the Plaza of Worlds, I think they called it."
Gillian whistled. "That's really far south, into the Black Realms, or so I've heard. I've never been there. What the hell do you want to go there for?"
"Raven is looking for a woman he knew."
"Forget it," Gillian said. "Don't go down there. You'll never come back."
"I just want to get home. My people will be looking for me."
"You think they'd give me asylum?"
Harrison considered it for a moment. "I imagine so." He wondered if that was the right thing to say. They'd take her in, certainly. Allow her to leave? That was another story.
"All right. Come with me, then. I need some downtime, someplace safe."
"Anton! Raven! We're moving out!"
Raven struggled to his feet. "Where are we going?"
Harrison glanced at Gillian.
"Up," she replied. "We need to get as high as we can. The eye of the storm is almost upon us. We need to move."
"You heard her."
The lightning had moved on into the distance, but the wind and rain still lashed at them as they climbed the ruins. More security forces had come through the Door and were fighting a pitched battle outside the ruins with the Urkenze.
"Got a whole damn army down there," said Harrison.
"Several armies, probably," Raven replied between gasps. His leg was causing him a lot of pain. "We never did see all that went on in the JRC."
"We need to get higher!" shouted Gillian.
"We're trying, lady," Raven
grumbled.
"Where are we going?" Harrison called back to Gillian. "I mean, where is this going to take us?"
"Who knows?" She laughed. "You just ride till the storm dies out. A big one like this could take us anywhere from the Changing Lands to the Golden Circle. I'll do my best to steer us north, toward the Earth Realms, but no guarantees."
The rocks were rain-slicked and difficult to climb. The flashes of light from the storm and the artillery made it harder to see, not easier. The landscape appeared to Harrison like a twisted vision of what Europe must have looked like during the world wars, with burnt stands of trees silhouetted against the sky like crucified skeletons. The storm looked as if it couldn't decide if it was a hurricane or a tornado. The eye of the storm was over them now, and a funnel cloud was reaching down toward the top of the ruins.
"We need to be under that when it touches down," Gillian said over the sound of the wind. "It'll pick up and transfer any matter at the focal point. When it does, it'll cause a massive surge in the local amount of chaos. The blast will level everything with three kilometers of the epicenter.
"What the hell kind of storm is this?"
"You'll see!"
"You said you called this thing?"
"Yes!"
"How the hell did you do that?"
She shrugged, a gesture almost lost in the night. "I just kind of call them, and they come to where I am. I don't create them; I just ride them."
They reached the top of the ruins. The winds and slippery rocks made it difficult to keep from falling. In the flashes of light from the storm, Harrison could see the forces from the JRC falling back toward the Door. The Urkenze forces were also falling back, unfortunately toward the ruins.
"Who brought the artillery?" Harrison shouted.
"I don't know," replied Gillian. "I think it was local. The shelling was going on when we arrived. I think they're having some big war here. Listening on the radio earlier, I could hear orders being passed in three different languages, but I couldn't understand any of them."
"So you travel this way all the time?"
"Well, usually not in reality storms so large, but yeah. Listen. When that funnel cloud touches down, we need to jump. It has to be done at the exact instant the cloud touches ground. We only have a split second."
"You've got to be kidding me," Harrison said, looking down. It was a long drop to the rocks below.
"You have to trust me, if you want to live. This is the only way."
Harrison sighed. They didn't have much choice. He passed the message on to the others.
"Grab hold of my belt and don't let go," said Gillian. "If we want to all end up in the same reality, we have to be physically touching. Have the others hold on to you. It won't be long now."
The winds howled violently around them. It reminded Harrison of the sound the portal device had made when it ripped open the hole in the air. He hoped the transition to a new universe wouldn't be as painful as the using old portal, but looking at that funnel cloud, he didn't have much faith. No matter what happened, he could tell he was in for a hell of a ride.
He slipped his hand under Gillian's coat and got a firm grip on her belt. She was lean and athletic under the coat, and he tried unsuccessfully to repress his natural response. She was quite a woman. He wondered what her story was, and if he'd have time to find out. Hell of a time to be thinking about that.
Anton had a good grip on Harrison's web belt, and he was holding Raven with his other arm. Raven appeared unconscious. Harrison made sure the buttons on his pockets were snapped closed and his weapons strapped down. He wrapped the rifle sling from the SCAR around his arm and gripped it tightly. He had no idea what to expect from the storm and no idea what conditions they would find when they landed – however they landed.
He opened his mouth to ask about that, but at that moment the funnel cloud dropped down around them. Gillian jumped, and Harrison followed, dragging the others with him.
The winds tore at them, tried to tear them from each other. Harrison's shoulder ached, and when he looked down, he wished he hadn't. He couldn't see the ground through the clouds and the swirling debris. The funnel cloud was lit from within by periodic flashes of lightning.
In the strobing light, Harrison caught glimpses of debris that must have come from a dozen different worlds. Parts of houses and trees were the most common, but sizable rocks were swirling around, too. Other people were also caught in the storm. Most of them were dead, broken bodies tossed around like ragdolls, but a few of them still lived, clinging to a tree or part of a house with terrified determination. At one point, he thought he saw a red Chevy convertible fly past, the occupants hanging on for dear life.
Harrison felt like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. He kept expecting the wicked witch to ride by on a broom.
Gillian rode the storm like a skydiver, shoulders back, arms and legs held straight. She guided them around the most dangerous pieces of debris. Harrison did the best he could to hang on and not flail around. He'd never been fond of skydiving, and the idea that he was doing it without a parachute scared him as few things ever did. He felt sick and disoriented, and he wondered what the oxygen content was within the storm. From the way his head felt, it couldn't be very high. Only belatedly did he remember the mask Dixon had given him.
After what seemed like hours to Harrison but probably wasn't more than a score of minutes, he noticed rents in the clouds. He could see patches of sunlight and other worlds through those holes in the air. Some of the worlds looked achingly like Earth; others were alien, blasted landscapes with nightmare growths and too many moons. Gillian was consistently guiding them closer and closer to a particular hole. The world beyond appeared Earth-like, forested and with blue skies.
"Hang on!" she shouted. "There's going to be a lot of turbulence!"
That was an understatement.
The winds grabbed hold of them and shook them like a dog shaking a rabbit. Anton, still holding onto Raven, was torn loose from Harrison, and he had one glimpse of Anton's face, scribed with terror, before he was twisted around and around. Harrison felt his wrist break and his fingers slip from Gillian's belt. He dropped his rifle and grabbed for her leg with his other hand, but he missed. Gillian twisted around in the air and caught him.
They fell together, face to face, tumbling. Harrison felt a strange intimacy with this woman. She is lovely, he thought, now that I can see her better. Her icy eyes were slightly tilted, her eyebrows delicately arched. She had a small, straight nose and full lips, now curved in a Mona Lisa smile, as if she was aware of his thoughts. He had no idea what her ethnicity might be, maybe Ukrainian, if they had that place where she was from. Her golden hair was flying wildly around her like a halo.
"Focus, Michael," she said. "We're going to hit soon."
That brought him back to reality. "What?" He turned his head to look down just in time to see the tree.
Chapter Forty
Harrison flinched as cool water trickled down his neck. His eyes were covered with something, and he reached up to pull it away. The pain in his head was almost unbearable. There was a taste in his mouth that he didn't want to think about too much.
"Easy, Michael. It'll be okay. I think the worst is over."
Some distant part of his mind thought he recognized the voice, but he couldn't think clearly, and he had no idea where he was. "Where?" he managed. His throat was dry, and his lips felt cracked.
Soft laughter met his question. "Safe for now. Just try to rest. Drink this."
Some warm and mildly salty liquid was poured into his mouth. He almost choked but managed to drink it down. It had a bitter aftertaste, and he wondered as he drifted back into unconsciousness if it had been drugged.
When he awoke later in the night, his head felt clearer, although it still hurt. His eyes were gummed shut, and his hands felt oddly disconnected when he reached up to rub them. At least it didn't hurt to move his arms. He tried his toes, just to be sure they were still attached, and
was able to move his feet and bend his knees.
The light was dim, but he could tell that he was indoors. A shuttered oil lamp provided the illumination in the small room. He was in a four-poster bed, propped up with thick pillows. A nightstand held a pitcher of water and a glass, but he couldn't quite reach them. He was feeling very weak. He wasn't sure if that was from his injury or from whatever drug he'd been given. Gillian was curled into a chair next to the bed with her legs tucked up under her. Asleep, she looked quite vulnerable and innocent. A few strands of golden hair lay across her face. Harrison wondered if she was the one who had been taking care of him.
As the fogginess lifted from his mind, he noticed little details about the room that puzzled him. The glass in the windows behind the thin curtains was slightly warped, and all the furniture was wooden and appeared handmade.
There was nothing electronic or even electric in sight.
The walls were painted a non-descript beige, and the floor was bare wood except where covered by a small, dark blue rug. The mattress felt like it was stuffed with straw. The sheets were natural cotton flannel, with a hand-quilted comforter on top. The room was cozy and domestic, and he wondered again where the hell he was and how he had gotten here.
The last thing he remembered was a close encounter with a tree.
Based on how he felt, the tree must have won the fight.
He was naked under the sheets. His head was wrapped with a bandage, and so were his left wrist and hand. There were lighter bandages on his left arm and leg. He vaguely remembered breaking the wrist, and blamed the head injury on the tree. Nothing else seemed overly damaged, and the bruises were still visible on his torso from when he'd been shot, so he couldn't have been unconscious for too long.
Gillian stirred and then sat up quickly when she saw he was awake. "How're you feeling?" she asked.
Project Brimstone Page 14
