by Glen Krisch
“Nothing,” he said, feeling like a deflating balloon as Kendra gave him a relieved smile of thanks that turned into a pained wince. “Yeah, it was nothing,” he added.
They drove the rest of the way in silence. Tanner steered through the last curving stretch of road. The windshield panned layers of trees and underbrush, as well as the chain-link fence. In the obscured distance, there was movement—chaotic, violent—and a dark haze drifting through the air. He unrolled his window to the sound of buzzing.
“Those are flies,” he said.
“What are you talking about?” Tanner said, squinting. He stared so intently on their final destination that he nearly drove off the narrow road and into the ditch. A rusted cry from the suspension, and then he righted the truck; once he had it back on the road, he hit the accelerator.
“Flies,” Billy said. “The horde is covered in a blanket of big, black horseflies.”
“That means they’re at the fence,” Kendra said with alarm. “Hurry, Blake!”
“I’m trying, babe. I’m trying!”
The truck reached the final straight stretch, and Tanner stomped the pedal to the floor. The muffler coughed a black, sooty gasp. Trees whipped by as the engine rumbled.
“Help me! Please. Someone! Help me!”
Billy heard his brother’s screams before he saw him. Then they crested a small rise, where they found Charlie standing on a branch about ten feet up the old oak tree Billy had been resting against not more than an hour ago.
“Oh. My. God,” Kendra said.
An undulating mass of rotting corpses writhed mere inches from Charlie’s heels, their arms outstretched, their hunger and longing and loneliness unmistakable.
“Fuckin’ A,” Tanner said. “Look at those freaks!”
Charlie waved as they approached.
“Yeah,” Kendra said, somewhat hopeful. “Just pull in under that branch and Charlie can jump down.”
“God damn, God damn, God damn!” Tanner repeated over and again, his eyes glittering with glee, fear, expectancy.
While the very thought of the undead sickened Billy, Tanner seemed to be enjoying it, while Kendra had become a gibbering mess between them, spouting nonsensical half-prayers.
The mass of zombie bodies continued building below his brother. The more aggressive ones clambered upon the backs of their fellow undead, clamoring for his flesh. One took hold of Charlie’s pant leg and tried to pull him down. Charlie cried out and smashed his foot into the vice-like grip; the impact crumpled its fingers to pulp and the zombie fell back, landing amongst the throng. The body was soon swallowed by the whole, until another wave subsumed the one previous, the horde shifting and growing like a cancerous nodule.
Charlie couldn’t climb any higher—there were no branches close enough to reach. He could do nothing more than stomp on the wretched gray-black appendages swiping at him.
“Do something!” Kendra cried.
“I am!” Tanner said, hunching over the steering wheel. “Better shut that window, kid.”
Billy did as he was told. He looked for a seatbelt, but the truck was so old it didn’t have any. The truck barreled down on the horde and he held his breath.
“What are you doing?” Kendra asked, taking hold of Tanner’s right arm.
“Just what you asked: something. Let’s see what those fuckers think of good ol’ American steel.”
The truck plowed into a body wandering the outside of the attack zone, which exploded against the fender, showering the windshield in black blood and unrecognizable viscera. The side view mirror clipped another in the head, sending it spinning until it fell over in a heap. Another zombie slammed into the truck’s grill, and another …
“Fuckin’ A, you better clear a path, shitheads!” Tanner shouted, giving an enthusiastic fist-pump when a group of undead disintegrated at once.
The truck rumbled over battered remains, the tires skidding for a moment on the rotten gore before catching hold and spinning them closer to Charlie.
“We’re almost there!” Kendra said, as if anyone inside the truck cab needed a play-by-play of what was happening right in front of them.
The truck quickly lost speed as it slammed into, over, and through a number of zombies. Starved, ever-rotting faces leered against the windows, closing in, enveloping them until they blocked out the sun. They pounded the still-moving truck with nerveless fists, shoved against it, seeking a weak point of access.
Billy had to turn from the ghastly sight, shying away from the door.
Kendra practically forced herself into Tanner’s lap as he drove. She had her eyes closed and was trembling as she muttered against his chest.
“Pretty fucking cool, huh, kid?” Tanner said.
“I should have never left him,” Billy whispered. “This is all my fault.”
The horror outside was nothing more than a quick glimpse into hell. Cracks spider-webbed across the passenger door’s glass. The truck lurched hard—either from a divot in the road or from bodies under their tires, Billy didn’t know—and headed straight for the oak’s gnarled trunk. The tires gripped a patch of ground unsullied by gore, sending the truck hurtling faster, and Tanner, even with a doomed look on his face, reached out to touch Billy’s sister’s arm, but never quite breached the small gap between them.
And then the truck crashed into the tree trunk and time slowed enough for Billy to experience every last chaotic second: the speedometer at thirty miles per hour and then zero; Tanner’s head slamming against the steering wheel, the force of the impact pulping him like a hammer bludgeoning a cantaloupe; Charlie falling from the branch and into the waiting arms of the undead; Kendra screaming and quickly silenced as she crumpled into the windshield; glass shattering; his thoughts reeling I should have done something … something more … something more about the glass shattering … when I came to Tanner’s cabin. I really should have—before he too, became a violent projectile.
Billy’s spine snapped when he hit the tree trunk. He never felt that pain, nor the various other injuries he’d somehow managed to survive during his initial impact, as if he’d fallen onto a deep, downy pillow. Even with the background sounds of rending and tearing and grisly chewing, he felt at peace, overcome by warmth and sleepiness. He blinked once, and again, before his eyes remained open for his last few breaths.
An outline of his sister’s body—cast in golden light—lifted above the wreckage, above the decay, above the abuses of this shallow land, until her glowing effervescent form was joined by that of their brother. Charlie took her hand, and together they both looked down at where Billy lay among the feeding undead. Somehow Billy reached out to his siblings.
CHAPTER 5
Dr. Soto: In the Null
Few people knew about the supercollider buried deep beneath the southern Illinois woodlands. Certainly, there would’ve been mass protests if word had gotten out when construction began in 1977. After all, to build a three-mile-long supercollider to intentionally weaken the barriers between universes had to be a sign of madness. Only Dr. Hellickson knew the full scope and potential of the Institute’s collider; everyone else involved—brilliant scientists all—thought they were seeking to discover evidence of the next smallest particle ever witnessed by humans.
When he’d still thought they were attempting to prove the existence of the Higgs boson particle, Dr. Elliot Soto had naïvely presented the idea of using antihydrogen in the next round of collisions. He had no idea the damage his naïveté would cause.
It turned out antihydrogen not only weakened the walls between universes, but the collisions produced microscopic black holes that, once cast off from the collision point, played havoc with the natural fundamentals of time. These temporal anomalies spiraled away unpredictably, punching holes through space-time where the veil between timelines was thinnest.
Through one of these undetected ano
malies, an unknown mutagen slipped to this new sister-dimension. Those infected presented typical symptoms of influenza, but of a highly deadly variant not witnessed in a hundred years or more. Nothing was seen as particularly unusual until the dead began to rise a month into the outbreak, and all within a period of twenty-four hours.
No one had considered a containment protocol for such a result, not even Soto. Worst of all, no one had expected a viral contagion to be the first multidimensional traveler.
~
Dr. Soto opened his eyes and pressed the security bar on the steel door and shoved it wide. He tasted phantom tomato on his tongue.
Keely, I’m getting closer.
An alarm blared as he stumbled out to a narrow concrete sidewalk surrounded by a patch of lawn, the woods twenty feet beyond. For the first time in all the todays he’d already lived and died through, he’d reached sunlight and fresh autumn air. He nearly wept as he eased the door shut behind him, muffling the alarm, and crept toward the woods.
After countless attempts to escape the lab—his mind a muddled mess and with Keely his lone focal point—he’d finally found a path to freedom through a small janitorial closet. Surrounded by mops, buckets, cleaning supplies, a hose reel, and a utility sink, he’d thought he’d reached another dead-end.
The undead waited just outside, pawing the door and heckling him with their groans. He came close to giving up and offering himself over to their insatiable hungers, to once again start the day over, but as he tilted his head back against the wall in frustration, he spotted a vent grate above the utility sink, big enough for him to crawl through.
The vent shaft led to a maze of other shafts crisscrossing the entire Institute campus. He’d traveled on his hands and knees for countless hours over his countless todays to finally discover the main HVAC utility room. To his surprise, he’d only found a single zombie inside the room, a man wearing a janitor’s uniform. Soto read the ID badge hanging from his pocket—Travis Paulsen—a moment before he clobbered him in the skull with a pipe wrench he’d found on a nearby workbench, killing him for a second and final time. The HVAC room had a steel exit door, and it was from this room he knew he would find the path home.
Now, as he tried in vain to get his bearings as he stepped into the woods, he couldn’t help but wonder how things would’ve turned out if he hadn’t hounded Hellickson after his commencement address at M.I.T. for a job at the Institute of Applied Temporal Mechanics. While many of his fellow graduates had sat restlessly in caps and gowns, waiting for this last formality of their education to finish, Soto had hung on Hellickson’s every word, seeing a clear path into his future.
Afterward, Soto had cornered Hellickson in the parking lot as he tried to unlock his car. After a few false starts, Soto had finally blurted out that he wanted to work for him.
Hellickson had twirled his ring of keys around his index finger, annoyed.
“You want to work for me? Do you know how many people would like the same?”
“I don’t see anyone out here asking you. But I am. My name is Dr. Elliot Soto, and I’m going to be your protégé.”
Smiling from one corner of his mouth, Hellickson had said, “Tell me about null time theory.”
Soto had rambled on for a good ten minutes about Hellickson’s own theory as the other recent graduates filled the parking lot and drove off.
When Soto exhausted his knowledge on the subject, Hellickson, with one eyebrow cocked, had then asked: “Tell me about multiverse differential theory.”
After twenty minutes of Soto detailing the latest research into temporal mechanics, Hellickson had merely nodded. “Are you free on Monday?” He’d said.
“Sure, absolutely!”
“There’s something I’d like to talk to you about.”
“What … what is it about?” Soto had said, hoping to get a heads-up on the subject matter.
“It’s a surprise, until it isn’t.” Hellickson shut his door, and then filled the car’s interior with his own laughter.
Soto had stood, shocked, exhausted, afraid and elated, as Hellickson drove away.
Now, he cursed himself as he stepped over fallen branches and pushed past underbrush, trying to get as far away from the Institute as possible. He heard them in the near distance—the undead—the countless people he’d killed through his own ignorance; and, worse yet, his arrogance. He pressed on, hoping this today would finally find its sunset.
~
After two years under his tutelage, Soto began having doubts regarding Dr. Hellickson. He sat across from him one day in his mentor’s office, his desk piled high with papers and notebooks with no discernible order.
“I’m sorry you’re having doubts,” Hellickson said. “I never thought you’d be one of the weak ones.”
“We’re supposed to be working on detecting the Higgs boson particle. Not only are we not finding it, there’s evidence the antihydrogen collisions might be causing microscopic black holes.”
“It was never about the Higgs boson.” Hellickson steepled his fingers and stared at them, as if the answers to everything was at his fingertips.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
When Hellickson lifted his gaze, he was suppressing a smile.
“So that’s what we’re doing here?” Soto said, flabbergasted. “It’s not a side effect, it’s a … a desired outcome. Is that it?”
“Finally, you see the light.” Hellickson chuckled. “Applied science is rarely pretty.”
“We’re not talking about breaking a few eggs to make an omelet. We’re talking about tearing our universe apart. We’re talking about the end of us. Everything, just … gone.”
“Not likely. The universe, or should I say, the multiverse, seeks order. We might cause a few ripples, but everything gets smoothed out in time.”
“And what if time doesn’t act the way you think it should?”
“My work isn’t to theorize. My work, my duty, is to apply the science. The product of my work is all around us. As it has been. As it has already happened and will happen again.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Everything … it’s already happened and will happen again. And it will until the multiverse finds and reestablishes its desired path. There are ripples, multitudes of moments, that echo and rhyme.”
“You’ve gone mad, surely,” Soto said.
“Perhaps,” Hellickson said. “Perhaps I have, Dr. Soto.”
~
After the HVAC room, he’d made several excursions into the surrounding woods. He’d never found the clear path, at least not yet; every path led to death and temporal reset.
Again he opened his eyes, and found himself running down Hallway F at the Institute of Applied Temporal Mechanics. He’d apparently just destroyed the antihydrogen accelerator—too late, once again—and his mentor would be calling for him at any moment, ready to kill him for his treachery.
“Soto, you son of a bitch! You ruined everything!”
The hallway—from the atoms of filtered air to the very walls themselves—shimmered before Dr. Soto like water rippled by a stout wind. The affect awakened a flash of déjà vu. And he knew exactly what would come next: the security alarm.
~
Shortly after learning they were never seeking the Higgs boson, Dr. Soto walked with Hellickson down the long gray hallway. They were alone, passing the wide window of the control room with its technicians and monitors a hive of activity.
“Choices … is it really a matter of making the right choices?” Soto said. “Taking the right path?”
“You act like we have options, that it’s either do or do not. It’s not that simple.”
Their shoes clicked on the gleaming tile floor.
Soto contemplated then said, “What do you mean?”
“We’ve already done both, and m
uch more. We’ve already gone through every permutation imaginable, even those beyond belief and our current understanding.” Hellickson stopped, turned his attention to the technicians inside the control room, all playing their roles in a game they didn’t understand. “The choices have already been made,” Hellickson continued. “All of them. Simultaneously. Those choices exist around us in different universes. We’re just trying to tap into those choices, to see the other outcomes.”
“What you’re proposing is far too dangerous,” Soto said.
“My boy,” Hellickson said and chuckled, “it’s already been done. A million times over.”
“If we find evidence of microscopic black holes, the project is doomed,” Soto said. “All that work, your life’s work, it will’ve been a waste.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Hellickson said, glaring at Soto. “Don’t you see that?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“What if I hadn’t agreed to hire you after you’d cornered me at M.I.T.?”
“I guess I wouldn’t be here.”
“But you have been here. And you haven’t.” Hellickson smiled, too wide and with too many teeth showing. His madness was now evident in his every word and action. “It’s all been done and not done. You are correct to see the implications, the dangers,” Hellickson said with a sage nod. “But we also need to consider the vast potential in learning how to harness the choice of determining our own destinies.”
No matter what, Soto couldn’t let him have free rein; no matter his conflicted thoughts, he had a responsibility to witness what would unfold, and if need be, to put a stop to it.
“The best case,” Hellickson said, “—my goal in all this—is to find a way to not only identify our best possible path moving forward, but to choose that path. Imagine: running computer simulations to the point that we never make the wrong decisions for our futures.”
“You’re going to destroy the world.”
“But it’s already happened!” Hellickson said with a guffaw. “It’s happened, and it hasn’t. It will happen again, until it won’t!”
