

Matt Dymerski

The Portal in the Forest

Proximate Publishing, LLC

Smashwords Version

All rights reserved.

Copyright © 2014 by Matt Dymerski

http://MattDymerski.com

@MattDymerski

Proximate Publishing, LLC

Cover Art:

Miller Creative Consulting

millercreativeconsulting.wordpress.com

Image courtesy of:

U.S. National Park Service

Redwood National and State Parks

This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part

without permission.
Proximate Publishing Books by Matt Dymerski

Psychosis

The Asylum

Creepy Tales

Aberrations

The Final Cycle Series

World of Glass

The Portal in the Forest Series

The Portal in the Forest

The Desolate Guardians

#  Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

About the Author

Other Works

Preview of The Desolate Guardians
Chapter One

I'd instinctually noticed something wrong with the neighborhood for several days before my brooding focus lifted long enough for me to truly grow curious.

Standing and walking out from the porch where I'd been sitting, I approached three children that were huddled around some sort of object.

"What do you have there?"

Immediately, the children dropped their object of interest and bolted.

I scanned the street, but nobody else was around at this time of day. The object they'd dropped was a _book_ \- and that was the odd thing. I'd recently seen children walking around with half-hidden books, magazines, and even _newspapers._ That might have been normal in my day, but modern children were obsessed with their phones and video games. Why were they all walking around with artifacts of the written word?

A Tale of Two Cities... I dusted it off, flipped it over, scanned the front and back... opened it up, nothing inside... flipped to the first page...

It was the worst of times, it was the best of times, it was the age of foolishness, it was the age of wisdom...

I frowned. It was technically correct, but the phrases were out of order. "Hey! Where did you get this?"

The darting children rounded a distant corner without more than giggles and screams.

Patience. I had it, they didn't. I watched from the porch for the next several days, waiting for the right moment. It came without much fanfare: an older boy walked past with several of his friends in tow. None of them looked down the row of bushes in the yard that led to me; none of them were concerned by my presence.

I followed them nearly a block behind. They did look back at several points, confirming my suspicions about a neighborhood secret, but I casually evaded their worried scans. They turned into the old Dodson lot, now overgrown with heavy brush, and I followed them beyond into thicker Virginia woodlands that lay untouched past the edge of our suburb.

It sat right off the edge of an old trail, flanked by centennial trees. There was no weird device, no flaring energies, no fanfare at all - just an odd and highly irregular oval of blurred space. Beyond sat a suburban street lined by houses.

I actually wasn't too surprised. I'd had several days to think and guess, and what else could it have been but a portal to another dimension? Neighborhood kids weren't about to order books printed with strange malformations, but they would certainly trade around oddities from another universe. The boys ahead had disappeared into the vast breach, and I'd seen children acting oddly for weeks, so I assumed there was little threat from biological contamination. We'd have all been dead much sooner if there was any threat of that.

I hadn't seen any suspicious activity at night. Best to be back by nightfall. The kids might have found out something about the behavior of the portal, and they'd probably spent weeks poking at it before daring to go through. There was every chance it disappeared at night, or... maybe it changed destinations, stranding anyone on the other side. I hadn't heard of any missing children, so I guessed that they'd taken the appropriate precautions.

Peering beyond, I tried to notice anything out of the ordinary before crossing the threshold, but it looked like any other suburban town.

I stepped through, noting no unusual sensations. The bridge between dimensions seemed to be stable enough.

The moment I crossed, I realized that there was a problem: the portal back was a ten-foot-long jagged oval, and it was sitting in the middle of the street.

There was no commotion... no hub-bub... no one had noticed a portal to another universe hanging around and blocking traffic. That meant that this portal was new to this location, this suburb was newly built and empty or very old and abandoned, or... everyone here was already dead.

Straining my ears to listen to the absolute quiet, I gradually began leaning toward that most grim analysis.

The closest houses to the portal had broken windows. What time was it? A little past noon? The neighborhood kids had clearly begun systematically looting, but it was impossible to tell whether this was a new daily location, or whether the portal only went here.

And why had the portal been created at all? There seemed to be no significance on either end.

I heard the older kids smashing about in one of the nearby dwellings, so I chose a quick direction, and I soon came to houses that had not been broken into. Carefully eyeing the vector of the portal's backwards emanation, I came to a split-level house that was unremarkable... except that a hole had been carved out of one wall of a size that matched the expanding cone of the rift.

A strong breeze at my back, I approached the repeatedly swaying front door. If it wasn't already closed by the wind - yes, the wood near the knob had been ruptured by someone who had been very desperate to either escape or get inside. I stepped across the threshold... only to crunch across glass. After clearing several corners in the living room and kitchen beyond, I backed into a safe area and looked up. As I'd guessed, every light bulb that I could see had been purposely broken.

What the hell had happened in this house?

"I know you wrote it down," I said to the still and silent darkness. "You always do."

As if in response to my cynicism, the darkness offered up a book sitting quietly among shards of broken glass. Carefully picking it up and cleaning it off, I flipped through half of it, skipping past random illustrations and musings to find the most recent writings.

***

48

65

47

185 101 84 very slight change between

99

48 Jeffers

62

47

~45 seconds?

Moves no sooner than 45 seconds ✔

first appeared at 2 am? 1 am but slow

hide, break all light sources done

wait

write down _everything_

[tear drop stain]-omething is outside our house. We're sitting now. Nothing more can be done. All we can do now is wait.

We first noticed it somewhere around 1 AM in the morning. David came over right about that time, and he says he saw something weird with one of the neighbor's houses, but he didn't know what to make of it. Ryan and I were here housesitting, but did not notice anything strange until 2 AM. It began with an eerie sense of unease. We were in the basement watching a show on a laptop, playing cards?

David felt it too, and thought he heard something. We went to the windows. It was a very dark night. Clouds covered the moon. The back yard was lit only by two floodlights from the property across the way, and very thick fog rolled across the long expanses of grass and bushes. We saw a few lit panes in the house directly opposite ours, and, through other windows, we saw a few lights on in a neighbor's house. Something seemed off about the shared back yards - something horribly and innately _wrong_ \- but it was impossible to say what.

We went around the house closing and locking every window and turning on every light. For a while, it made us feel safe. We clung low, peering out between the blinds, each of us trying to figure out why the back yards terrified us so.

I had the strangest idea, before it even happened, that there was something wrong with the lights outside. I watched the two flood lights far off and to the left, and then I watched the lit window directly opposite us that seemed to be weirdly bulging and changing shape as I stared. Was it just a trick of the light? The crossbar seemed to be moving up and up and up until... there was no way I was imagining it...

We knew for sure when our neighbor two houses down came out to let out his dog. We heard it barking, and we rushed to the side windows, watching from total darkness. Ryan slid the window open just enough to shout _go inside! It's not safe!_ , even though we didn't know for sure...

A third floodlight came on abruptly three houses down; an angled and bright light that usually lit up many of our backyards. The back porch light our unaware neighbor had turned on.... suddenly went dark. A strangled cry rang out, the dog squealed in horrible pain, and we slammed our window shut in terror.

There was something out there.

Ryan suggested that it was some large and fast-moving creature that had been lurking between us and the third floodlight.

David peered out the window, offering no ideas.

I sat in a corner, trying not to hyperventilate. We'd been afraid, definitely, but there'd been no proof until... until...

"There!" David whispered. "It moved again!"

We practically planted our faces against the glass. Our hapless neighbor's porch light was back on, and... the middle floodlight across the way was out. Darkness dominated the space between our backyards.

"What's it shaped like?" Ryan asked, confused.

David just shook his head as he peered intently at the night.

To block out that high-set floodlight, the _thing_ out there either had to be very tall, or... very close...

Gasping, I pulled them both down just as the windows began to rattle.

We hid in the corner beneath the windows, not daring to move until the rattling stopped.

Eventually, David peeked.

As he did so, screams rang out from the house opposite ours. We peeked, too, and we saw that the weirdly morphing window had gone dark. All the other lights outside were on at full strength.

"It's... jumping from light to light..." David breathed, looking rather sick. We watched intently as his guess proved true: one light came on, another went out, and our neighbors within that light screamed in pain and terror... and went silent.

"Turn off all the lights," I whispered, my heart pounding. "We have to break all our lights."

David stayed at the window and brought out his cellphone to call the police. Ryan and I hurried through the house, smashing light bulbs with shaking hands.

"I'm so sorry," Ryan said quietly as we met up back in the kitchen, now cloaked in darkness. "I just wanted to hang out with you, and then... this..."

I touched his arm. "It's crazy, I know, but it's not your fault. There's stories, always stories..."

I remember our words, because... screams came from the basement, and we rushed through the house -

Pitch black radiated from a rectangle on the floor, darker even than the non-light of the basement at night. I realized our mistake at the same moment that I saw half of David lying in silhouette on the floor: with all our other lights broken, the entity had jumped to the glow of his cellphone. An expanding rectangular cone of utter darkness lined the space from the phone on the floor to the ceiling.

Ryan and I froze, not daring to move. What _was_ this thing? Could it see? Could it think? Was it aware of us at all?

Time wore on, and every muscle in my still body began to burn to its limit. If we made no sound, if we made no move, would we survive?

As I felt myself about to break, light flashed by our windows.

"Police!" someone shouted. "If there's anybody back here, identify yourselves and step out!"

A few moments later, the void was gone from our basement, and bloodcurdling screams echoed outside. A loud gunshot followed.

Ryan and I plugged up all the windows with blankets and pillows as best we could, then huddled in the basement.

I thought to peer out with just my eye exposed and watch the thing leap from light to light in search of more victims. Forty-five seconds. It never jumps sooner than forty-five seconds since the last. It barely missed Mr. Jeffers, our neighbor, who I can see hiding in the basement next to ours. If it could have jumped sooner and _gotten_ him, it would have...

It revels in the play of light and dark outside. That is its strength: it needs light, but, without darkness, it has no place to hide.

We just have to get to morning, and everything will be alright...

The half of David that was outside the cone of blackness... is starting to smell...

5 AM

6 AM

Almost sunrise

come on

No... no, it couldn't

I can see the sky lightening, but... it couldn't...

It couldn't jump to _the Sun,_ could it?

oh God

We're going to try to get it to jump to a cellphone again, then trap it in the laundry room - no windows, no escape

I'm so sorry

***

Sorry for what? I would never know. I dropped the journal, as the rest of it was blank.

Moving further into the house, wary of unwarranted darkness, I quietly descended the steps into the basement. All the high and narrow windows within sat plugged by pillows and blankets, except for one.

Half of a rotting corpse lay decaying in one corner. Covering my mouth and nose with my shirt, I moved further in.

There it was: a single door, shut, with no other means of access. That must have been the laundry room.

I opened the door carefully, even though I knew the entity was already gone. A single rotting hand lay within, holding a dead cellphone. Grey cinder blocks formed the walls - a small beam of light filtered through a crack in the foundation. That was how the thing had escaped.

"Ah, you never really had a chance..."

I took a towel from the dryer and threw it over the remaining hand, the best burial these people would ever get.

I left the house without another word, and proceeded back toward the rift. Had the darkness entity somehow bored through the wall and opened the portal? Perhaps that was how it had arrived here in the first place... but if it had come to our world, it'd only entered straight into a cloud-covered forest at night, found itself without a light source, and evaporated on the spot. A miscalculation in the most ironic degree...

Or so I assumed, since neighborhood children were playing with the rift instead of being annihilated.

Or, perhaps, the rift on this side had gone somewhere else at the time. It was impossible to say, at least until tomorrow.

I didn't normally entertain such grim thoughts, but I couldn't help but wonder, as I stepped back into my own universe, what it must have been like for the people on this world to look up and see their Sun turning black... only to find themselves disintegrating a moment later. Friends, family, neighbors, all screaming in terror and confusion...

And the rest of the world, slowly rotating into a lethal sunrise with nothing but silence to warn them...

Curious. I thought I'd dropped this journal back at the house... shrugging, I tucked it under one arm and began walking home, my thoughts bitter and brooding. Hopefully, tomorrow, the portal will go somewhere new... and I'll have something to occupy my time.
Chapter Two

After carefully applying my thumb to the red glass surface to leave several natural smudges, I carefully pressed the panel into the metal frame I'd devised. Once the transparent crimson rectangle was firmly in place, I tapped the center.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

That one did it: the glass cracked right up the middle, offsetting each half by a barely perceptible degree. It was a very slight malformation, but that was the point. I attached the framed glass to a metal rod and positioned it just so... measuring the placement of the nearby mirror and camera, I made sure everything was in place.

I stepped out of the room and closed the door behind me. The string attached to the door pulled the covering away, revealing my object of study only once I'd left the room.

A lanky and bespectacled boy of about thirteen stood in the next room, clearly surprised to see me. "What are you doing here?"

"What are _you_ doing here?" I asked back, glancing around at the empty and dust-filled chambers of the abandoned house I'd slipped into.

"Is this your house?" he asked.

"Absolutely not. That wouldn't be safe at all." I moved to a single rickety table I'd salvaged as a place to put my laptop and reader device. I gave the system one more run-through before I turned on the camera in the next room.

He stepped a little closer, looking at my laptop screen from afar. "What's that?"

"It's a journal I found in another universe," I replied, carefully directing the makeshift page-turner I'd created. "But I suspect it's a cognitive hazard. I dropped it, but then still had it with me later. I even brought it back here to our world... very stupid move."

"You're weird." After a small nervous laugh, he took one step closer. "Why's it red like that?"

"Don't read it directly," I warned him. "The book is in the next room. I've reflected its image off of a mirror, through a smudged and offset spectrum filter, into a camera, which sends the image to this computer upside down... remember, it's backwards, too, because of the mirror, so what we see here has many obfuscations and errors to protect our minds. Finally, I built a custom OCR program to translate the malformed text to this device."

Eyes wide, he came fully forward and touched the rather battered device directly. "What's it do?"

"It's a Braille reader."

He laughed for real this time. "That's an awful lot to read some book, right?"

"You can never be too safe. I suggest you tell the other kids in the neighborhood about this technique, given their habit of stealing things from other universes."

He took a step back. "I don't really talk to the other kids much..."

"But you've been through that portal in the woods?"

"Yeah..."

"Can you tell me anything about it?" I asked, running my hands along the Braille reader as I did so.

Christ.

menace butler outvoice snubbiest pigsticker unallayed nephrectomising reappropriation nefarious peninsularism commence psychedelia osmeteria guthrie

Even through all the safeguards, errors, and translation into Braille - which was normally the holy grail of hazard filters - the book was insane gibberish. I'd first seen it as a journal filled with diary-like musings and random doodles... it was only pure luck that I hadn't read anything but the last entry. That account had made sense of the empty world I'd visited, and its apocalypse by hungry darkness entity. Had that part of the book been fake, too? What, then, had killed everyone?

But I'd seen the half-disintegrated corpses. That much, at least, had to have been true. Had the unknown girl who'd written those things somehow added to the end of the book without realizing what it was? Or had it acquired cognitohazardous properties after she was already dead?

"The portal was just _there_ one day," the boy explained. "I was walking and ran into a bunch of younger and older kids throwing things into it. Guys dared each other, sure, but nobody was that stupid. We threw stuff into it, even made a big rope and let a stray dog run around in there. It seemed safe after a while. Only thing, though. It goes somewhere new every morning. We don't know what would happen if we were still inside at night."

So, it was as I'd suspected.

Holding a box, my eyes closed, I crept into the next room and closed the cardboard flaps around the book. I only opened my eyes once it was safely sealed within.

"Is it safe now?" the boy asked.

"As safe as it can be, with barebones tools," I told him, heading for the front door with the box under my arm. "Well, are you coming along?"

He was, apparently. He followed maybe ten or twenty feet behind me as I headed through the old Dodson lot and back into the old-growth forests beyond the last row of suburban houses. The Blue Ridge Mountains towered on the horizon as I crested the abrupt hill just shy of the portal. For a moment, I could see above the treescape, and I scanned the distance out of habit - but noticed nothing anomalous.

Several children, ranging from young to upper teens, sat around the portal. They all froze as I approached, clearly fearing that their secret had finally been discovered by the adults, but I ignored their apprehension. "What do we have today?"

The oldest boy, probably seventeen or eighteen years of age, stood slowly. "It's a bad one." Instinctively responding to my implicit authority, he waited.

I peered through the vast oval rift.

This time, the portal had opened into an area too small to contain it. Before me, I saw three spaces: a gloom-filled and empty restaurant, a rain-filled alley filled with strewn trash, and the back section of some sort of office - also dark and empty. The sky, visible only above the alley in the middle portion, sat opaque and stormy. The entire scene was eerily quiet, and I realized that sound did not travel back through the rift. "What's so bad about this one?"

"Wait for it."

I did wait. A moment later, lightning flickered quietly, revealing the terrible secret of this new world. "I see." I looked down at the box under my arm. This thing needed to go before it had a chance to do... whatever it was capable of. I began running through scenarios in my head, judging the likelihood of an active threat this long after every human on that planet had died horribly.

Grimly, I stepped through the rift.

I looked back and saw the forest and the assorted kids. Their images ran hazy from the rain pouring down the front of the portal. It wasn't lost on me: matter and energy native to this world seemed to have a passive inability to cross to ours.

Staying close to the alley wall to dodge the worst of the rain, I stepped gingerly over the places the lightning had shown me to avoid. I paused once I reached the street, and peered both directions for a few moments.

Another flash of lightning struck, this time followed by tremendous thunder that shook my very bones. Under this second round of flashing, I saw them again: corpses, strewn all about the alley and street. Huddled masses had fled this direction and been cut down without mercy. Tragic enough, certainly, but odd for another reason... their rotting remains were invisible when not under direct illumination.

I crept into the restaurant with a pounding heart. An ancient and decayed smell filled the humid gloom. I moved through an empty dining area and searched through several cabinets in the back until I found a flashlight. Knocking and turning it until it finally came on, I shined the light around.

Under the beam of my flashlight, almost every seat in the empty dining area held a corpse, either hunched or yawning depending on the direction it had fallen. I had only managed to avoid touching them by sheer luck. Little twisting blackened strings of fungus and rot were all that remained on their plates, a fitting feast for the dead.

Almost every position had been served a plate of delicacies now long past identifiable. I chose a chair that had not been served and carefully placed my box down. The box had grown warm the moment I'd entered this world, and I was curious.

Scooting the cardboard aside, I laid the book out on the table and flipped it open from the back to avoid any hazardous contents in the front. I sought only the last entry, which I knew from experience to be reasonably safe to read. I'd had a suspicion that its contents would be different here... and I was right.

***

I was on a date at my favorite restaurant. I was even having a good time. I... don't know what happened... she and I ran into Jen. Now, she'd never liked Jen, but she put on a good face for the conversation. If I hadn't been so oblivious, I would have guessed she didn't really want to change our plans and go to that stupid party with Jen.

I've never _really_ liked parties. Not _really_. I always get self-conscious, and my brain gets all tired trying to keep up with all the things I keep imagining other people are thinking or saying or expecting. Pretty soon, I always just want to go home. I can't go home, though, because I need a good _excuse_ to leave... a believable one, so that people won't secretly judge me.

I got my excuse, I guess, when Jen died.

I wasn't sure what happened. Nobody was sure. She was always a party girl - had she overdosed? She was bleeding pretty profusely from the nose, and she'd fallen and gotten terrible slashes up her back... but she'd been locked in the bathroom, and nobody had found her until it was too late.

My date insisted we leave when the commotion started, and I agreed wholeheartedly. On the way out, I heard a very odd cry: " _She's gone - her body's gone!_ " - but I wasn't sure what to make of it.

On the walk home, I apologized profusely, but she just seemed scared. Two blocks down, we saw a group of people huddled around another body.

It was then that I felt something chill and sharp move by me - but I turned, and saw nothing. I had the inexplicable sense that I was very close to something large and menacing, but the night-darkened street seemed normal, save for the worried people calling emergency services.

Another few blocks down, my date and I stood under a streetlight and waited for the bus.

We decided to keep moving when a homeless man on the other side of the road seemed to fall rather roughly. Blood splattered up as if he'd... but it didn't make sense... why were all these people having terrible accidents?

Just after we kept walking, I looked back, and - for a split second - I thought I saw something moving toward us. It was a mere blink against the streetlight we'd just abandoned, and it was gone almost immediately, but I quietly insisted we walk a little faster.

Four police cars surged past us, lights afire and sirens blazing. In the rotating red and blue, I thought I could make out a weird blur behind us on the sidewalk, but my eyes just couldn't make sense of it.

***

I looked up from the book. The boy I'd talked to earlier had followed me. "You shouldn't be here."

" _You're_ here," he replied, standing by the door and peering out into the storm.

I shrugged. As long as he didn't come further in, he wouldn't risk running into the rotting bodies dotting the restaurant. How far behind me had he been? Did he know about them?

I looked down to find that the story had skipped part of the narrative. There was a small gap where I'd stopped reading, and no text in between. Odd... but, then again, this wasn't just a book, and these weren't just written words...

***

She slammed the door behind us just as something bashed angrily on the other side. She couldn't help but scream hysterically. "What the hell is going on?"

I had no answer for her.

I helped her force the door shut, and I locked it with a relieved sigh. "I have no idea, but we can hole up here until... until the police do something." The door to my apartment was solid and sturdy, containing a heavy sheet of metal as a form of security most campus houses shared. I had no windows on the first floor; instead, stairs went straight up to my apartment on the second floor. Never was I more thankful for my cramped brick-and-metal entryway.

Dashing upstairs and closing and locking the door to the stairwell, we took refuge in my bedroom and turned on my small television.

Static. There was only static.

Our cellphones didn't work, either, and the Internet was out...

It was then we really started to think we were screwed.

Deciding to turn off the lights so as to avoid drawing attention to our location, we sat and peered out the windows into the night.

Clouds covered the moon. Trees swayed in chilly autumn winds. Nothing living seemed to move...

"There!" she whispered, pointing down the street.

I saw nothing.

"It was under the streetlight for just a second..." she said, trembling as she clung to my arm.

I had to confess, despite the terrible things happening, part of me was still happy... "Wait, I saw something under a streetlight, too. And when the cops passed, and the lights -"

The lights. Something had brushed past me in the dark, and something had pounded on our door just as we'd gotten inside... but I had no porch light.

Intently, I stared at the closest streetlight until it happened.

Something horrible and twisted shambled past, visible only under the strongest part of the streetlight's glow. It was gone almost as soon as I realized I was really seeing something.

"Do you smell that?" my date asked, almost at the same time that I realized we'd made a terrible mistake in turning off all the lights.

In the very dim orange glow from the streetlights outside, I noticed a dark stain on the carpet near my roommate's bed. What if one of those things _had already gotten inside here before we'd arrived?_ I jumped up and flipped all the lights on, illuminating each room in the apartment with a heart-freezing moment of terror.

The last light, the one in the kitchen, finally revealed it. It'd been on the other side of the apartment from us, and we'd stayed quiet, but... now it knew we were there. It came for me with a demonic and wholly inhuman grin.

I shouted, ran for the front door, and pulled my date through as she came to meet me. I knew what these things were, now, and I knew we were doomed... but I still managed to grab the emergency flashlight from the front staircase.

We burst forth from the heavy door, shoving the creature there aside, and I hesitated only long enough to shine my flashlight at it and get a good look.

I'd guessed right.

We took off running into the night, but screams were already ringing out from multiple nearby streets. We could seek shelter, seek food, seek safety, but... from the horrors I'd seen, I knew there was nowhere to hide.

That, and it wasn't cloudy at all. From out here, we could better see the reflected glow from the city's lights. There was no Moon, not because of clouds, but because something massive was blocking out the entire sky. The dim twinkles I'd mistaken for stars were in fact the city's own light reflected from some sort of massive structure arching over us from horizon to horizon. Not a ship, not a building... it seemed more like... _a leg..._

But none of that mattered, after what I already knew. I didn't have the heart to tell my date as we picked a basement to huddle in, but we'd seen the creature pursuing us before.

It had followed us from the party.

It was - or had been - Jen.

Twisted, bloody, and visible only in direct light... but it was her, no doubt, without any trace of humanity left within.

***

I looked up as the implications of that statement sank in. "Hey kid," I whispered, as quietly as I could. "What's your name?"

"Thomas..." he whispered back, emulating me out of worry. "What's up?"

"We really have to go, and... you can't make a sound..."

"Why?"

I stood slowly, shaking my head. I couldn't tell him that we were sitting in a room full of invisible corpses that were anything _but_ dead. Ever so slowly, I stepped between the tables, heading for the front door.

Creaks echoed around me as unseen joints began snapping, cracking, and... moving.

Although I could see he was terrified, Thomas knew better than to make any noise. I listened carefully to the movement around me: were they simply reacting, or were they certain of my presence? I took one quiet step at a time until I saw chairs began to move back as their unseen occupants stood.

I broke into a run, and I pointed toward the door. Thomas wasted no time in rushing out and into the rain, but he almost immediately tripped on invisible rotted piles of flesh. Picking him up, I waited, heart threatening to thump out of my chest, until the next flash of lightning revealed a path forward.

He saw the bodies strewn about - he saw that they were starting to move and awaken - but I grabbed his mouth and kept him from screaming. Now that he knew, I used my flashlight, shining it hurriedly around us to - _shit!_

The beam shined across a moving circle of decayed flesh; hundreds of unseen corpses approached through the streets, like ghosts in the rain. I shined the flashlight ahead, illuminating our path, and we splashed through heavy puddles and leapt over clawing rotten hands.

Pushing down the alleyway as the rain intensified, we ran back through the portal at full speed.

Pausing in the safety of the forest to catch my breath, I turned and looked back.

The alley sat clear and empty... until a flash of lightning illuminated an endless legion of living corpses, all standing still and gazing at us. They made no move to enter the rift, but that didn't make me feel any better. Beyond them, up in the sky... I'd made the same mistake as the doomed man and his date. Those weren't clouds - just the reflection of other parts of the sky on vast metal, impossibly high chrome, and it began moving as we watched...

The children all around screamed and flinched as a silent but tremendous impact on the other side threw mountains of rubble across the portal. Moments later, it was buried, and showed only onto the impenetrable blackness of layers of rock and dirt. We, however, remained perfectly safe. Only the other side of the portal had been buried, and I was certain it would simply open on a new destination the next day without interruption.

"Are you alright?" the oldest boy asked me.

"That was so cool!" the other kids exclaimed, gathering around Thomas. "What did you see over there?"

Enjoying the attention, he began smiling and telling them exactly what had happened. There was no need for embellishment.

"I'm fine," I told my lone listener, shaking water out of my hair. I looked down as I did so. "Goddamnit..."

Without realizing it, I'd brought the book back again. Had it been in my hand through the whole escape?

I set my jaw. I'd try again tomorrow.

Chapter Three

I crested the last hill and immediately noticed excited energy among the neighborhood kids crowded around the portal.

"We got a good one today?"

The children parted, and my unofficial second-in-command stepped forward - the eighteen-year-old boy who often corralled the others. "Looks like it."

Peering beyond him, I found a rather surprising sight.

Each day for the last week, the random destinations had been non-starters. One world had been completely on fire - from the closest flaming ground to the distant smoldering mountains - and there'd been no sign of abatement.

We'd spent another whole day staring in horror out across a vast ocean of what seemed to be thick blood. The smooth and endless crimson surface had been interrupted only by a few massive bone-like protrusions, and a sunless sky of carved ivory presided over the inexplicable sight. Weird ripples had moved in that blood ocean, as if hidden creatures lived beneath. The portal had never shown anywhere but alternate Earths as far as anyone had seen... I'd warned the kids not to think too much about how our Earth had become like that ungodly place. That way laid madness.

It had definitely been a relief to find the portal showing onto an open green pasture the next day, and we'd almost gone in - but my second noticed it at the last moment: an eerie lack of parallax. The green pasture was an illusion, almost like a perfect television screen displayed across the rift, and what truly lay beyond was impossible to know. Such a deception hinted at far worse intentions through that particular portal than in most worlds. Most worlds didn't seem to know or care about us.

Every Earth we'd glimpsed in the last week had been anathema to human life in some way or another. Every world had been dead or dying. I'd figured that this was all somehow related to the otherworldly book I was trying to get rid of, and its inexplicable penchant for detailing the final stories of the doomed, but I couldn't be sure. I didn't know if it controlled the portal, or whether it was merely connected to it somehow, but the children reported that the destinations were definitely getting worse. The first few weeks they'd observed it, there'd been nothing but pleasant forests, open plains, and innocuous oceans.

But today's sight changed our data set. Today, the portal opened on a busy street in a city that looked much like New York. We watched people drive past in recognizable cars and trucks. Many passersby were on foot, hurrying with very human impatience.

It didn't occur to me until I'd already stepped through - nobody on the other side had given the portal any heed.

Suddenly surrounded by the hustle, movement, and engine rhythms of a busy city street, I turned and looked back. Yep, there it sat: a ten-foot-wide jagged oval in space showing a forested path and a crowd of children watching from the other side. None of the suited busy-bodies on the sidewalk gave even the slightest glance at the portal.

Or at me, for that matter. They bumped against me and pushed past in an ongoing series of collisions. None so much as flinched. None apologized. They weren't completely unaware of me - they just didn't care.

Given that we'd not yet seen a world where any human being was still alive, I had the distinct concern that these people were nothing more than marionettes. If they were dead... if they were just emulating life... then that meant, in the middle of a busy big city street, I was actually completely alone. I'd seen many things in my life, and almost nothing truly got to me anymore, but I'd never been able to handle p-zombies. Something about that kind of soulless fate just struck me as existentially horrifying in a basic and gripping way.

Forget this.

Placing the book down on the sidewalk, I darted back through the portal.

"What happened?" the kids asked. "What's wrong?"

I looked down. The book was in my hand again. "Damnit." I watched their expressions. "Did I put this book down on the sidewalk?"

"No," they reported in unison.

"So, the book doesn't teleport back to my possession," I realized aloud. "It's a mental diversion. A trick of perception and memory."

Steeling myself, I went back into the portal a second time, and shoved the book into the large purse of a passing businesswoman.

I pressed myself up against the wall of a building, waited a few seconds, and then closed my eyes. I took a deep breath, analyzed my own thoughts, then looked down... yep, the book was still in my hand. "Son of a bitch."

The damn thing was intent on preventing any simple method of getting rid of it. I studied the passing oblivious people, and I soon began walking along with the flow. Could there be some device, creature, or power here that might help? Experience told me that, when facing a threat beyond human capability, the best bet was to find an even worse threat and pit them against one another; between the balance of two terrors sat a sliver of hope. It was the same principle as the nuclear standoff between superpowers during the Cold War - the future of the human race had been predicated on the careful opposition of conflicting armageddons far more often than most people would care to know.

A haggard female voice interrupted my growing panic. "Don't move!"

I'd long ago learned to instantly follow any desperately shouted warnings. Freezing in place, I waited as the shouter continued making noise and approaching me from behind. She might have been coming to attack me, sure, but true human desperation was hard to fake. Not like that.

"Oh God!" she said again, grabbing the end of my jacket and pulling me directly backward. "I thought there was nobody left..."

"Can I move now?" I asked her. "What's the danger?"

"Yeah, yeah, just don't go that way," she said quickly. "How've you made it this long?"

Looking ahead surreptitiously as I slowly turned to face her, I saw nothing ahead on the street except a few office entrances, a coffee shop, and a sandwich place with a bright red light out front that shone down on passersby. What unseen threat lay ahead that needed such warning? The stream of business men and women seemed to face no threat.

I froze. For a moment, a shadow passed over my soul.

The girl before me was as haggard as she'd sounded. Dressed in a tattered suit that had once been grey and clean, but which now bore dirt and rips in visible testament to homelessness, she seemed every bit the sole survivor I'd instantly envisioned upon hearing her desperate voice. Her wild shock of dirt-smeared hair hadn't been cleaned or combed in some time. "Christ, Christ almighty, I prayed, but I thought... I thought I'd never see another person again..."

Wary, I kept my eyes on her. "Are these not people?"

Underneath a furrowed brow, she narrowed her gaze. "Do they _seem_ like people to you?"

I said nothing.

"They're all in there, still," she stated after a moment. "I stabbed one or two out of frustration a few years back. They come out of it just as they die. They're all thinking the same thing in there."

"In there?"

"In their heads." She looked around with compassion and fear. "They're screaming. All of them."

So, another apocalypse... this world wasn't safe and normal after all.

While I hesitated, she looked to her right. "The hell is _that?_ "

Silently, but quickly, I ran a cold-hearted evaluation of this unknown girl and her situation. The consideration was thus: how likely was it that a species-ending threat would remain active and wary long after it'd dominated the planet? No matter how fantastical, extradimensional, or incomprehensible a threat, one rule of logic had to remain. Time was a resource, motivation was a resource, and the combination had to be right for a threat to remain dangerous. If almost all humans were dead or controlled, there was no longer any point in maintaining active surveillance or traps. I'd already recently blundered through two such worlds where living humans had not been expected. I'd even read a book for several minutes in a room filled with invisible animated corpses - and gotten away with it. They'd been completely caught off guard.

But this girl represented a Catch-22. She was alive, therefore traps and surveillance might remain. If she was a trap, though, that meant that there were probably no free humans, and no need for traps.

"It's a portal to another universe," I told her, gently holding her back as she eagerly moved toward it. I decided to only tell half of the truth. "It'll kill you if you try to cross without me."

She seemed on the verge of tears as she gauged my unreadable expression. "Please..."

"Quickly help me understand this world, and leave behind this book if I can," I told her, hefting the tome. "Then we'll go."

She pulled me into a nearby alley that I found to be disturbingly like the one I'd run through in the rain the week before. "It's -" she began, but she opened and closed her mouth in frustration without making any further sounds. "It won't let me talk about it."

I nodded slowly. It was never quite that easy, was it? I lifted the book. "This will tell me, then. I'm pretty sure it recounts, somehow, the final tales of those who've died nearby."

She watched with wide eyes as I began reading aloud. The tale of this unknown person might shed some light on the situation.

***

I remember the day the first one came out. People were lined up around the block to be the first to get it. It was just like any phone or tablet craze, except bigger. Who wouldn't want to erase the monotony of work from life?

I was never one for the latest trends. I decided to wait, and maybe save up some money for it.

You could tell the coworkers that were using it. They had slight half-smiles on their faces as they labeled, folded, typed, swept, and mopped. Any simple menial task became a time for lazy daydreaming as the iWorker took over basic motor functions. All you had to do was program it for the task by performing it yourself a couple times, and then, you could tune out, listen to a book on tape, or even sleep while your limbs worked.

It was a bit off-putting in a way I couldn't quite explain. Coworkers using the iWorker were zoned out or asleep, and the work floor got awful quiet awful fast. It was my job to direct the flow of boxes from our shipping warehouse, but I couldn't keep up with my unaware coworkers who worked on and on without getting tired, without smoke breaks, and without pauses for conversation or mental focus.

My gym, too, got weirdly quiet. People programmed their iWorkers for workouts, even they weren't supposed to, and happily got in the best shape of their lives without even being mentally present for the effort. Of course, a spate of people up and died who'd set theirs too ambitiously, but... it was their own fault, or so the television said. The next iWorker would hook a little deeper and automatically sense when the body was being pushed too far.

I'd just save up for that one, I decided. I didn't want to die on the job because some idiot device didn't know not to carry boxes for eighteen hours straight without rest.

The third generation came out before I even got halfway to my savings goal. This one integrated wirelessly with our relatively new driverless cars, and so you could fit your car into your routines. There were people automating the whole drive to work and their entire shift _while they slept_ , so they could wake up and have the evening and entire night to actually live.

Now that tempted me. I could have sold some stuff to join in on the trend. _I_ wanted to sleep through work and have sixteen hours a day to hang out! Sounded damn pleasing, it did.

It was so pleasing, in fact, that it really started going global. They made 'em cheaper, and smaller, and less invasive to your neck and nerves. I would have gotten one then, but I hurt my back at work, and the medical bill wiped me out and put me in so much debt I still couldn't afford it. Worse, I'd damaged my spine, so there was a chance I'd never be able to use one, at least not any of the current models.

It was about then that the shifts started getting longer. Sixteen hours a day was quite a lot to hang out and party and relax, so people started signing on for longer shifts. More money, more leisure, right?

When I came back from medical leave, I lasted maybe two hours before my boss came around with that kind of shit-sorry look. I knew immediately. Everyone else in the warehouse was iWorking, moving around all silently with half-smiles on their faces, and they were all working sixteen-hour shifts. Here I was with a hurt back, moving slowly, working _inefficiently_ , and I wanted the same pay as these diligent types?

I told him he could screw right off, even though I regretted my rudeness instantly. Still, I was out of a job, and I would soon have nowhere to go.

I spent the next few months at a shelter, along with many other injured types in my situation. The divide between those who could iWork and those who couldn't was huge - we were useless for modern jobs anymore. Those daydreaming types could work almost all day long without a word of complaint, and for lower and lower wages. What did you need money for when you were working almost all day long? What did you care what you got paid when you weren't even mentally present for the work? You just woke up for a few hours each night once you got home, watched a few TV shows, then clicked out again.

Repeat.

I'd been homeless for maybe a year when we heard the news: they'd invented an iWorker that anybody could use, regardless of injury. A lot of us saw that as salvation come to town.

By then, I hated the whole concept. Passion, that was me. Passion. I was the one standing on the corner shouting at sleepwalkers about their idiocies and inadequacies and iniquities.

Nobody heard.

Well, their ears heard, but there was nobody at the wheel.

Funny thing, though, this new model. It worked through the eyes. It was just _light._ You'd walk by one of these nodes on the street, or in a hallway, or at home, and it would program you the way you wanted. Visually stimulated neurons or some such science bullshit.

Well there's the thing. All the previous models needed to be recharged _eventually._ They were devices, just like a phone or a tablet, and they couldn't just go forever. These could. Suddenly, you've got these religious types advocating going on autonomous mode full-time - that's what they called it, then, because a bunch of other brands had come out by then, not just iWorker.

It was virtuous, they claimed, to work twenty-four hours a day. If you weren't present for the work, you avoided suffering, and if you were working, you were contributing. It's free contribution, you see? Perfect virtue. A world without suffering, but with endless productivity.

One by one, our little homeless community dwindled. I'd run into Jeff, or Sarah, or Jorge, or Yuya, and they'd suddenly turned into clean-cut model workers. They didn't recognize me. Of course not. They were asleep.

At some point, watching these light-programmers getting installed all over, it occurred to me: the companies that produced these things were all full of labor using the devices. Everyone at these goddamn hypno-crafters was asleep, walking around in bodies that were endlessly toiling away putting up more light-programmers, marketing light-programmers, building better light-programmers... it was a thing in itself. The thing would just keep going and going, and maybe it had been that way since the start, and we'd all just bought into it like fools.

Street by street, this city got quiet. I imagine they're all like that. Nobody talking, nobody interacting, nobody living - they're all just working. You got to work twenty-four hours a day to survive on a dollar an hour... and you can't work twenty-four hours a day without being on the Autonomous Mode.

I learned to avoid the lights. I don't want that shit in my brain. I steal whatever I need, because nobody cares. Nobody's watching. There are no police anymore, because there's no crime anymore. Other than me, that is. The whole world's running around with more hustle and bustle than ever before, but the whole world's asleep and deader than I've ever seen.

Two years. Three? It didn't snow last winter... global warming? I can't be sure what day it is anymore. They don't run on clocks and such anymore. All their Autonomous shit is wireless now. They sit near computers that don't even have monitors and just type on keyboards without even seeing.

Another year after that... wandering around in a zombie city... I must have lost it for a bit.

I saw one die.

He came out of it just toward the end. All he could do was scream. He just screamed, and screamed, and screamed, at the top of his lungs...

But it was _what_ he was screaming that terrified me so: _thank you._

He was screaming _thank you._

I saw another one die. Soul-chilling shit. They're all in there, still, and they can't stop anymore. I don't even know when that happened, exactly.

But the system, see, it'd gotten self... perpetuating, that's the word. The cycle I'd recognized had been true, and growing stronger. And it didn't like people like me lurking around its edges, stealing things, stabbing people, and mucking up efficiency.

They grabbed me maybe a week after the second stabbing. Forced me into one of those bright red programmer lights on the street. By then it wasn't a choice anymore, and it could just straight tell you what to do in the name of efficiency.

I've been wandering the streets ever since. I've got a job I do twenty-four hours a day now. I do what I'm good at; what I did before. I'm just me, I'm just homeless, and I find other loose minds like my own and NO!

It didn't work. Not entirely. The old spinal injury kept me half-immune, and they don't know I know. I'm a horrible liar half the time, and a free mind the other half. Never listen to anything I say. My thoughts aren't my own. I sense it out there, a gigantic mind behind the control, with a plan beyond insidious and evil, and I can use its eloquent words sometimes. But that's not true, and the sad thing is, it's just humans who did this to ourselves. Efficiency, efficiency...

I wandered the streets for five years like that, so alone, so alone... so alone... I met someone who seemed free on the street today, and I was free for just a little bit, and I shouted -

***

I looked up at her.

Her jaw trembled, and her eyes ran misty.

This wasn't the tale of someone dead at all. I listened to the noises of the busy city street outside our alley, and, for the first time, I noted the complete lack of human voices. There was only the sound of machines and walking... a rhythm I now found to be completely lifeless and hollow. I stared at her for a long moment, unsure what to do. "Can I trust you?"

She tilted her head down a few degrees, screwed up her face, and let a few tears run free. "No."

"So it's probably not a good idea if I let you come with me."

She clenched her fists, and I saw a single drop of blood eke out from her excessive grip. "I'd try to build one," she gasped. "Eventually. The plans are... in my head... it wants me to..."

There was nothing else I could say... unless... "You can still help me," I said quietly, noting her intense strain to hold onto her own will. "I need a first generation iWorker device. The absolute most basic, no mind control, no networking."

She nodded, eager to be helpful in any way possible to any entity that was not the _it_ that controlled everyone else. She ran to a nearby dumpster and pulled at a rusty panel. "Here, here..." She pulled out several circular devices and picked at them until the least damaged remained. "You stick it behind your ear, right here, and just... do... and it'll pick up on it."

"Thank you," I told her, studying the device. If this thing could control a body without the mind interfering, perhaps it could help us leave the perception-altering book in another universe. I pocketed it, and then faced her. Never make promises, I knew. Never make promises. I couldn't tell her she would be alright. "I'm sorry..."

Blood poured from her clenched fists as she squeezed her long nails harder and harder into her palms, momentarily clearing her thoughts. "It's alright. I'm glad there are still free people."

I nodded, and then departed.

"Come back," she called, just as I rounded the corner. "I was lying. There's nothing weird about the lights at all."

Goddamnit.

"You still have the book?" my second asked as I stepped back into the forest. "Damn."

"Watch your language," I told him. I drew the iWorker out of my pocket and brought it up for the kids to see. "I couldn't leave the book, but - this just might be our ticket." I looked back and saw the homeless girl lurking at the other side of the portal, watching us with a neutral half-smile. I wished that I'd had the courage to kill her and free her from her invisible prison. If it had been anyone else, maybe...

Thomas, the younger boy who'd once followed me into another world, was also present. He was old enough to pick up on my momentarily visible sadness. "Who's that girl?"

I turned away, unable to watch her any longer. "Nobody..."
Chapter Four

It began when I found the neighborhood children still hanging around the portal on Thanksgiving. Apparently, no, they didn't have any place to be. Their parents were all working. The parents of every single child were holding down two or three jobs each.

It was small wonder the kids had such free reign over the suburb and Virginia backwoods, and why nobody else had found out about the portal. There simply weren't any adults around to watch or warn.

And, apparently, I filled that void. Repeated questions had led to the best answers I could give, and then to proposed preventative measures, and then... to more.

I crested Dead Man's Hill, so called by the local children for its cliffside rise. One wrong move meant a nasty fall into one of the large ravines that so plagued the foothills. For the last several days, while waiting for another habitable destination in the portal, I'd been using it to show the kids that horror and risk were _real factors_ in life, and that the fear they brought meant paralysis and death for the uninitiated. "Come on!" I shouted, waiting at the top.

In the lead, as usual, was my eighteen-year-old second. He ran up the steep and leaf-slippery incline with a dramatically red face, releasing torrents of sweat with each movement. "We've already run three miles," he huffed. "They're not going to be up for this."

I watched exhausted kids of various ages appearing behind him on the trail, and then I checked my watch. "Today's hypothetical gas creature moves at four miles an hour and doesn't get exhausted," I reminded him. "Everyone who doesn't reach the top here in the next three minutes just got killed because they _couldn't run the same distance as the portal back to the suburb_." As the sweat-drenched children came in one by one, I recited: "You're dead. And you're dead. And you."

They groaned and complained, of course.

"No fair!"

"Does this monster even exist?"

I watched them with a stern glare. "Absolutely anything could come out of those portals. The better shape you're in, and the sharper your decisions, the better chance you all have of surviving."

They quieted, and followed me through the woods in drained silence. I had no authority other than that they gave me, but the portals scared them, and they sensed a certain capability about me.

We came to the first of the new portals in short order. I approached several younger boys who were shoveling dirt ever higher underneath it in order to eventually bury it. "How wide is it now?"

"About a foot," a thirteen-year-old girl answered, one of the smarter ones I was aware of.

"About?"

"Thirteen point four inches," she said, patting the ruler in her pocket.

I nodded. Slightly larger than a basketball, and roughly oval in shape, the shimmering rift hovered in the air around waist height. It had been the first new expanding hole we'd noticed, but it had not been the last. Space around the main portal seemed to be fracturing in an increasingly wider radius.

I led my troop through the next bit of thick forest, where two boys hammered bits of junk wood around an inch-wide rift we'd found slowly cutting into the trunk of a tree. "How's this one?"

"It doesn't seem to be getting bigger," one replied nervously. "Yet."

"Good."

We moved on.

The ten-kid crew at the main portal had accomplished an impressive amount in just a few days. The pile of dirt, rocks, and boulders now rose slightly higher than the ten-foot-wide main portal adjacent to it. Carefully layered tree trunks we'd felled kept the static avalanche at bay. Soon, we would be able to release the earthen flood and bury the portal if we so needed.

I'd thought that would be enough, if we could get rid of the book, but I now considered the burying trap a last resort. Tiny rifts were appearing inside boulders, trees, and hills, only visible once they grew to a sufficient size, so I doubted burying the main hub would stop the tide.

All the portals, big or small, showed onto the same destination each day. The situation was becoming less like a punched hole in the dimensional barrier, and more like a dissolving curtain between realities. I had no way of knowing whether the breaches would grow exponentially, but I had to assume we only had a few days left before crisis.

And most of those few days were spent in stressed frustration, watching as each new daily destination became worse than the last. The week before the iWorker world, we'd seen burning and bloody nightmarescapes, but these worlds... these worlds ran incomprehensible at best, and mentally scarring at worst. I was considering taking the risky step of ordering the children not to look into the portals - risky because my authority over them only extended as far as this strange phenomenon. If they felt cut out of the process, they'd have no reason to listen to me, and I feared that might get them all killed.

In a small clearing near the bury-trap build, Thomas practiced with a normal book. I watched him place the iWorker on his neck, stiffen, then pick up the book, carry it twenty feet forward, drop the book, and then return to his original location. He took the iWorker off, waited a few moments, then did it all again, trying to get the needed time down to as few seconds as possible.

That was it. That was all he had to do - assuming we found a world safe enough that twenty feet of travel wouldn't mean instant death.

Rather than bother him, I turned back to my troop. "Go home, rest up. You all did great today. Tomorrow, our hypothetical monster is a sight-stealer, and we'll have to do the run blindfolded -"

A choir of groans and whines rang out, but I ignored them.

The portal was changing.

All tiredness forgotten, two dozen heads turned and stared.

Where once had been a vast aerial cloudscape filled with thousands of close and distant corpses hung by thin glimmering strands around their necks - an endless hellish wind chime - there now sat blank whiteness. The whiteness sharpened into a chamber; a long rectangular room eerily akin to a doctor's waiting room.

At the end, maybe forty feet away, sat a middle-aged woman. Her smooth ivory desk faced us across the blank white gap of empty floor, and she busied herself with several stacks of papers. After tapping a few collections into a neat pile, she placed them carefully down in one corner of her desk, adjusted her light wire-rimmed glasses, and looked up at us.

She waited.

"The portal's never changed in the middle of the day," my second commented. "Everybody get back!"

The kids wasted no time in listening. We'd already arranged a series of fallback positions; the first was in the lee of the large hill behind me, from which the nearby tops of the forest and the distant uneven horizon formed by the Blue Ridge Mountains could be seen. It was to this location that the children moved in an orderly stampede.

I remained, with one other.

The woman continued waiting, her gaze on me.

"Do I have the book?" I asked my second.

He looked down at my arm. "Yes."

And so I did. Lifting it up, I set my jaw. "Did I have it the whole run?"

"... yes."

"Well, then." I stepped toward the portal. "It looks like I have an appointment..."

"Be careful. It could be a trap!"

I peered into the portal. The woman did not seem overly excited or eager; she merely waited. "What does logic tell you?"

He gulped, his stance nervous. "I... I guess this isn't a trap. We are not interesting enough or important enough for someone - or some _thing_ \- to go through all the trouble of connecting to our portal just to kill us. I think they want something."

I nodded. "I agree."

"Still, be careful," he offered.

The genuine warmth and worry in his voice gave me slight pause, but I took a breath and carried forward.

Beyond the subtle vibration of the portal, the white room felt exactly neutral in temperature and character. I remained near my egress for a moment.

The woman spoke loudly enough to be heard from forty feet away, although that wasn't difficult in the deathly quiet chamber. "Truce is offered for sixteen minutes and eight seconds as a free courtesy. Please, sit."

Slowly, I moved forward, my eyes scanning every inch of the high ceilings and smooth walls. The rectangular room appeared to have no entrance or exit. Eventually, I found my way to a basic white chair waiting in front of her desk, and I sat, book in hand. "Can you destroy this book?"

She regarded it, and then me. "That information will cost you."

"Cost me what?" I asked, wondering at her motives. I had the distinct impression, from little pauses in her motions, that she was simply a front for something else.

She took a piece of paper from the corner of her desk and slid it forward.

one of the shoes you are currently wearing |

one of the hands you are currently employing

From the clues I'd gleaned, and this price choice, I had a vague idea of what was going on, but that meant only bad things... "May I ask clarification?"

She gave a restrained but appreciative smile, as if I'd done something correct. "You may."

"By hand, do you mean the biological structure attached to my arm, or one of the people working for me back beyond the portal?"

"The former."

"Oh, great," I replied, not liking either answer, but wary of another. "Why do you want my shoe?"

She tilted her head for a moment, as if listening. Her response came after a few seconds' delay. "That information will also cost you." She slid another piece of paper out next to the first.

the name of the army victorious in the Battle of Long Island |

one ocular organ from any source |

three liters of Xenon

The hell? I kept my face straight and calm, not wanting to betray any information to this... entity. Could the questions be an attempt to determine which universe I came from? If I expressed confusion over the Battle of Long Island, or the rarity of Xenon... would that give something away? I could just barely recall that Xenon was present at about 1 parts per million in the atmosphere, meaning that collecting three liters of it would require... 3 million liters of air... was that actually doable? I wasn't sure.

"May I return after I have gathered payment?" I asked.

"You may."

I paused halfway across the room. "Does my time of safety run down while I am gone?"

The woman watched me with a neutral expression. "Yes."

I took that as a cue to run the next twenty feet. Once back through the portal, I took only enough time to give an order to my second. He frowned, but ran off at top speed.

A few moments of sprinting later, I was back in the chair, the two offers still before me. Alright, what next? What else could I do in the time allotted?

Of course!

I lifted the book, and moved to open it.

The woman made a noise, and her face reflected a very subtle fear - the first emotion I'd seen at all. "A piece of free advice: if you open that device here, it will be seen as an act of hostility, violating our truce."

I froze, my fingers on the cusp of the cover... but I hadn't missed her use of the word _device_ rather than _book._ "Why?" I sat a little taller. "Wait, rather: what does the book do?"

Taking a moment to regain her composure, the bespectacled woman adjusted her sweater, pushed up her glasses, and then slid another paper toward me, resting it next to the other two.

|

|

one human soul

Growing agitated, I leaned forward. "Why are two of the options blank?"

"If you knew what the options were," the woman answered calmly. "It would give you vital information you haven't paid for."

"So I'm just supposed to _guess_ what my payment options are?"

"You can guess, or you can pay to know what the payment options are."

"Alright, what's the price to know the first payment option?"

She slid a fourth piece of paper forward. It had only one option.

your ability to love

I wavered in place for a moment, stunned to my very core. "You can take that?" I whispered.

"Yes, if offered as payment."

"Does it... extend to existing emotions, or just new ones?"

"All emotions of love would be included, and any consequent emotions you have as a result of those emotions."

I could, I _could..._ it would be so easy...

Footsteps clattered across the smooth marble floor behind me, and my second approached at speed, his goal in hand and wrapped in a thick layer of leaves. "Got it!" he cried, plopping down the dead bird we'd seen on our run. It squished onto the surface of the clean white desk under its own weight.

The woman did not seem amused, but she took the relevant offer paper, the corpse, and its ocular organ - and placed them in a drawer. "Payment accepted. The question was: why are your shoes valuable? The answer is: because something of value is stuck to them. To be exact, dirt from a very specific reality."

_Shoes_ , plural. That was extremely valuable information. Did the entity behind this marionette realize what it'd just given away?

I slipped off both shoes, intent on trading away one and keeping the other. I lifted the left shoe, but the woman did not react; I lifted the right shoe, and she still did not react. It seemed either shoe would do. Gently, I sat one shoe on the first offer paper, and she took the paper and the shoe both and placed them in a drawer.

"The question was: Can I destroy this book? The answer is: no."

I stood at that. "You'd have taken my _hand_ for _that answer?_ "

She did not seem threatened by my sudden anger. "Offers are offers. The game is the game. Your time is half gone, and little profitable trading has been done. I suggest you make wiser choices."

Muttering epithets, I sat again.

My second stood behind me, watching in confusion and concern. "What does she want?"

My frustration suddenly cleared. Of course! I'd been going about this all wrong. I'd been asking questions about the book, and not about the _woman_ , or the entity behind her. "Yes," I echoed. "What do you want?"

Another paper slid forward, coming up adjacent to the two remaining but untenable offers. This one had four options for payment, but all were blank. "Of course..."

"The game is the game," she offered, unprompted.

I switched tact. "How do we neutralize the threat this book poses?"

The resulting offered page contained no payment options at all. She bowed her head slightly.

That wasn't a promising sign.

Feeling my time diminishing to vanishing slimness, I struggled for something... anything... what wasn't I seeing?

I looked up. "What does this device look like objectively?" I asked, holding up the book.

"That one is free," the woman answered with a light smile. "As it serves both our interests for you to know."

The final paper slid across her desk.

I moved to roll it up without looking at it, but I wasn't quick enough. My second glanced down from his higher standing vantage point. I heard him gurgling painfully before I could react.

Blood spattered across my face, and across the desk before me. I leapt up and caught him as he fell, and gently lowered him to the ground as crimson leaked from his open eyes and mouth. He began seizing and thrashing violently, and I held him down as best I could while I turned my head to glare daggers at the woman. "Fix him!"

She began to reach for another paper.

"No bullshit!" I shouted. "If you can fix him, do it -" I hesitated. If the entity here had wanted to give me information that was beneficial to both of us, why hadn't it simply done so? Was it far more strictly bound by our game than it let on? "- or I won't leave."

"Your time is almost up," she replied flatly.

"The truce isn't for _my_ safety," I shot back, gambling the boy's life on a guess. "It's for _yours_. And this..." I looked down at him as his seizing began to slowly fade into dying. "You'll offer me a choice to heal him, and one of the payment options will be _leave._ Then we'll go our separate ways. That's your last resort, isn't it? No matter. If you don't give me that deal, I'll stay here, with that device and all its danger, consequences be damned."

The woman stopped completely for a full four seconds, all blinking, breathing, and shifting completely stilled. When she resumed moving, she slid a paper forward. As I'd thought, all of the choices offered had been premeditated, and this one, for healing the boy, had _leave_ as the only payment option.

Rolling up the objective image of the book without looking at it, and dragging my second by his shoulders, I pulled him quickly across the room as the sixteen minutes and eight seconds reached its end and the white walls began to dissolve into... seething masses of what looked like brain tissue.

I kept going until I could lay him out on forest leaves, but his blood was already receding back into his body. A light green glow hovered around his head, probably purging the memories of what he'd seen. A tide of children poured down from the safety of the hill, now eager to hear what had happened.

I looked up as the portal began to flicker back toward the day's original destination - the corpse-filled sky and its deadly inexplicable filaments that had choked an entire world of people and drawn them up into the clouds to die together.

The woman at the other end of the disappearing room screamed silently and struggled against chains of neural tissue... and, then, the image was gone. It hadn't occurred to me that the entity's puppet might really have been a human being. That could explain why subtle phrasings she'd used had given away so much vital information. She might have been trying to help me the only way she could. Had I had a chance to save her, and missed it?

But, of course, that was what it wanted: regret. The entire encounter had been designed to fill me with hurt and regret, or at least enhance what was already there. I'd heard a tale, just once, of a Regret Demon that offered trades for which every option, including doing nothing, would lead to remorse. It was called a Demon because it was bound by very strict behavior, not because it was necessarily related to religion... but the Regret part I now knew was exactingly true.

The ability to love... and all consequent emotions and pains...

"What happened?" he asked, waking with bleary eyes.

I held the book in one hand, and the rolled up paper in the other. "We got something very valuable," I told him.

He sat up weakly, his face full of concern. "What did you trade for it?"

"Peace," I replied quietly, unwilling to elaborate further. Another innocent had almost died because of me, and the risk was only going to grow. I looked past the children crowded 'round and saw Thomas still training his iWorker. What right did I have to risk the lives of these kids? Was I training them just to foolishly face the unknown and die, just like before?

At that thought, the ground trembled slightly underfoot - and the left side of the portal began to rip further out into the woods. I watched, stunned, as several trunks ruptured, exploded, and collapsed as the trees above fell. The wound in space unzipped the very air for another twenty feet - the portal had grown to three times its previous size.

"What do we do?" my second asked, terrified.

I had no orders to give. The Regret Demon had taken something very valuable from me; I found myself uncertain and wavering. Against forces like these, uncertainty and hesitation meant death. I knew something had to be done, but I was forced to admit to someone else, for the first time, that I was lost. "I... don't know..."

That answer was not the one the children wanted to hear. They didn't scream, or cry. They remained absolutely quiet, waiting for someone to take away their fear.

But I couldn't. Not in that moment. I could only walk away, book and paper in hand. Maybe if I just had some time to think...

"Where are you going?" my second - no, just an eighteen-year-old boy - shouted.

I had no answer for him. Instead, I departed, stumbling mentally if not physically. _Where am I going, indeed?_

Besides the trade I could have made, might have made, there was the astounding information implicit in one of the payment option's I'd been given. _One human soul._ That meant... souls were real. Humans had souls, and souls were real things. I had a sick, black suspicion that I knew what the book had been doing all this time.

But, first, it was time to see what it _really_ looked like...
Chapter Five

I awoke instantly, my senses blazing. By rote, I traced back the sound still caught in my auditory sensory memories: a creaking floorboard.

My eyes were already locked on him as he came around the corner in the dark. He didn't see me for several seconds. A little jump signified the moment he became aware of my silhouette sitting against the wall.

"You're hard to find," Thomas breathed, nervous.

I nodded, aware that he could see my outline by the vague glow of house porchlights outside. "By design. Never let the enemy know where you sleep."

He hesitated. "What enemy?"

A heavy sense of reality descended upon me, and I entertained a light disappointment in myself. "None, I guess. It's hard to leave behind certain paranoias."

"My big sister went to war," he said. "She... came back a lot like you."

The kid was wiser than his years. I had to give him that. I could only nod again.

He came and sat beside me in the dark. "I've been looking for you for hours. I had no idea there were so many abandoned houses in the neighborhood."

"That's half the reason I've stuck around here so long," I laughed quietly. "One world falls apart, and another seeps into the cracks." My own words gave me pause; like some kind of accidental prophecy. I'd only been speaking of his suburb, overworked parents, and inequality-strained society, but the words themselves reflected something of our conflict with the portal.

"What's the other half?" he asked.

"What?"

"The other half of the reason you stay."

"Oh." I stared around the empty shadow-lit room for several seconds. I'd been running from it for so long... it felt like time to release my wound; cleanse my infection. Recent events had permanently damaged my internal armor. The scars I'd built up had been stripped away, leaving raw, bleeding pain in their stead. "I had a daughter once. She was about your age when she... well."

It was his turn to say it. "Oh." He took three deep breaths, not sure what to say. "What was she like?"

"Tough," I admitted. "Awesome, really. She had simply endless willpower, and always found a way through every problem in life. She grew up to be very pretty, too, even despite the condition she was in."

He made a confused noise. "I thought she-"

"Right, yes," I corrected myself, my head fuzzy with regret. "I saw her. She gave me the iWorker device you're training. But it wasn't her... just a version of her from that reality."

"That must have been very hard for you."

Wiser than his years? This kid was more of a respectable adult than I!

"Are you still going to help us?" he asked, after two or three quiet minutes spent thinking.

"I don't know if I can," I replied honestly. "The last time I tried to-" I shook my head, choking up. "No matter how much you anticipate, no matter how smart you are, or how fast you are... sometimes it just doesn't matter. Sometimes, there just _isn't a way out._ "

He sniffled. "I don't want to believe that."

"What's the alternative? Believing that, if my daughter had just made different choices, she'd still be alive? That it's _her_ fault she-"

"Is it _your_ fault, though?" he interrupted. "Or should you blame the thing that... got her?"

To that, I had nothing to say. This boy - this young man - had somehow hit right to the heart of the issue.

He slumped down. "I'm starving."

But, apparently, he was still a young man, and moments of wisdom were fleeting in young men. "Don't you have any food at home?" I asked.

He didn't reply.

Reaching over to rummage around in my oversized travel backpack, I reached past my laptop, various sundries, one saved shoe with special dirt on it, and spare clothing to fish out a ten dollar bill. I placed it in his surprised hand. "Take it. Get something to eat."

"Really?"

"Really."

"Thanks," he said, sincere. "I'll go in the morning." He curled up against the wall, preparing to sleep.

I frowned, but... I couldn't stop him sleeping where he wanted. Did he not feel safe at home? By the ambient light drifting in from the windows, I could see an ugly bruise around his right eye. "Make sure you eat 'til you're practically sick. Really glut on some heavy fast food."

He laughed. "I sure will."

Sometime late at night, I'd intended on initiating my plan to safely view the objective image of the problematic book, but it didn't seem fair to leave the boy unprotected. I kept the paper with the deadly schematic rolled up safely in my backpack, and waited up while he slept. It was a simple matter to stay awake and alert for hours on end -

... I coughed and started, suddenly awake... and oddly rested. It felt like I'd had a soul-weary weight lifted, at least for a little while. How had I fallen asleep like that? If anything had happened, it would have been unforgivable...

A scream of absolute terror resounded in the cul-de-sac outside.

Rushing forward on my hands and feet after telling Thomas to remain quiet, I peered out through the corner of one window.

A boy I recognized ran from house to house, knocking on the door of each.

Frowning, I darted over and threw open our front door. "What's going on?"

The boy saw me and ran up to me, shouting his fearful message. "They're in trouble!"

"Run with me," I ordered quickly, dashing toward the old Dodson lot, and the paths beyond. The exhausted boy followed suit as best he could, and Thomas was not far behind. "What's the situation?"

The panting, red-faced boy let out his story between ragged breaths. "Danny tried to take the book through the portal on his own."

"I don't have the book with me?" I asked, furious at the eighteen-year-old's misguided bravado.

"No, he stole it from you..." he explained, starting to lag behind. "But the portal suddenly got bigger, and they all fell through..." Falling to his knees, he shouted his last information. "And they were all on the other side screaming and running from something!"

My heart seized. Why wouldn't they just go back through the portal? Something had clearly gone wrong with the main egress in a fundamental way. Thomas kept pace with me a few feet behind as I ran. "Go to Suzie's portal and tell them to start unburying it," I ordered, giving no time for debate.

Thomas nodded and sprinted off in another direction.

I soon crested the final hill, curving up above the Virginia forest and back down beneath the canopy in seconds... only to tumble to a painful and wrist-spraining halt.

The portal had ruptured even further.

Space hung like a sheet flapping in the wind on an invisible clothesline. No semblance of the original ten-foot portal remained, nor the thirty-foot gash I'd last seen. Instead, the path and brush on both sides had been consumed by unstable rifts... a clearing of deadly anomalies nearly three hundred feet in length, by my best guess. Ten feet... thirty... roughly two-seventy... the portal energy wasn't expanding geometrically. It was growing _exponentially._ By that same comparison, tomorrow the corrupted space would be...

A mile and a half wide.

The day after that - I clutched the gritty dirt beneath my hands tightly for a moment - a hundred and eleven miles. As far as I'd seen, the portals had clung to the surface. I had no way of knowing if the rifts were underground in a spherical area, too, but this area of spatial disturbance seemed largely rebuffed by the density of the ground beneath.

But _a hundred and eleven miles_... and the day after that... the numbers began escaping me, but at least... _twenty-five thousand miles..._

Which happened to be almost exactly the circumference of the Earth. The numbers might have escaped me, but the neatness of that value did not. This was a darkly ironic challenge from forces beyond comprehension: save the world in two days, or lose it on the third.

In this exact moment, all I could worry about were the thirty-odd children stranded in another reality. The portal had been stable for weeks before I'd interfered. Was all this somehow my fault? A dark grip caught my chest. How many children had to die because of me?

Eyeing the maelstrom of spacial contortions, I waited, waited, waited... and leaped.

I slid through a small oval barely big enough to fit me, and the blinking rift took one of my shoes at the last, barely sparing me my foot.

Already tired from the run, I pushed myself wearily up, and then observed the world that the children had thought safe enough to visit briefly.

A ruddy sky swirled high over an endless plain of cracked obsidian. The sun hung huge and red in the sky, seemingly much older than the star I knew. My shoed foot crunched as I moved, and my bare foot fought for purchase among smooth flat stones that were dully jagged along the sides.

Glassy black spread out to the horizon. What had the children been running from?

I turned to look behind me.

The main portal was a mess of little blinking rifts, and clearly unusable, but that was not the problem. Not in the least.

A wall of fire approached across the endless obsidian plain, perhaps half a mile out. It came as a sheer smooth curtain of flame, horizon to horizon, cast down from the sky itself by glowing little glints in what looked like low earth orbit. Satellites? For what purpose? Why would this planet be... I looked down at the obsidian beneath my feet.

Continually cleansed...

_Fuck logic. Fuck explanations,_ my brain screamed. _A wall of fire is coming for you! Run!_

Even in panic, I turned and looked for the children, quickly finding several multi-colored dots against black glass in the distance. I was already tired, but... not like this. I couldn't let them die like this.

Go!

Foot down, _push_ , foot down, _push_ , breathe, faster, faster, fasterfasterfaster _fasterfaster -_

Breathe, breathe, breathe... come on...

The kids were moving away at a pace fueled by fear, but I had to catch them. They were running directly from the wall of fire, but the portal manned by Suzie's crew was down an offset vector.

I felt my personal top speed hovering back and forth before me; my legs pumped numbly, my feet crunched and bled, and my arms cut the seared air, but that intangible wall of speed danced just out of reach. I knew I could go slightly faster, I _knew it_ , but I just...

I stumbled and fell, falling onto a surprisingly whole plate of volcanic glass. My right wrist roared fire, and my entire body tingled with relentless weakness, but I stumbled right back to my feet. "Wait!"

The shout rang out in clear air, barely audible over the low roar of oncoming flame.

"Wait!" I screamed again, going for a high note.

As I kept staggering forward, I saw the kids slow and turn. Exhausted themselves, they could only wait for me to catch up.

I entered a circle of sweaty, fearful, drained, and smiling faces.

"I knew you'd come to save us," said Danny, the eldest.

I took a pained breath and tried to stand tall. "I don't know if I can save us, but... I couldn't let you face this alone."

He gave a tired nod. "What's the plan?"

"I ordered Thomas to run to Suzie's crew and tell them to unbury their portal."

"That one's only -"

"I know," I said, cutting him off before he told the other kids. "Come on, calculate the direction. I estimate we've gone two miles directly east of the main portal. Suzie's portal will be our escape, and it's four point nine miles southeast of the main portal, offset by twenty-two degrees from the line we've been traveling. Which direction should we head, exactly?"

Faced by surprise math homework, the kids huddled in a massive circle and debated the numbers. I had an answer in mind, but it was important that they _felt it_ by getting it themselves - and a second check never hurt.

Finally, they all looked up and pointed.

"That way?" I asked, slowly recovering my breath.

Thirty-two children nodded in unison.

"Alright," I prompted them. "How long have you been here? The wall of fire crossed the main portal when I was a half-mile away. I estimate it's still a half-mile away. How fast do you think it's moving? How fast do we have to move?"

They huddled again, and the answer came forty-four seconds later. Danny stood tall above the others. "Best guess - we have to move four point one miles an hour toward Suzie's portal to outrun it."

Another darkly ironic number. "Alright, we've trained for this," I announced, sloughing off the worst of my exhaustion. "Exactly this scenario, although it was a hypothetical gas creature then. It's _possible_ , and you know that, right? We can survive this."

Thirty-two grim faces nodded in response.

"Then let's set out!"

I took up the lead, walking slightly faster than the four-miles-an-hour rate that I simply knew by muscle memory. That gas creature had been anything but hypothetical, once, and I'd spent four days in Louisiana backcountry escaping it. I'd been sixteen then, in my first encounter with the supernatural, but that endless struggle had never left me.

And I hoped that long-ago determination would transfer to these kids. They were all already depleted and terrified, but the human body had more to give than any of them knew.

All they had to do was keep pace.

Teenagers, boys, girls, and children walked together, pushing their walking stances to the limit. It was too fast to walk comfortably, and too slow to run easily, so we were caught at the worst speed possible. Still, we pushed on. The crunching of sixty-six feet filled the air, mercifully drowning out the sound of the approaching wall of fire.

"Give it back," I told Danny, who kept the lead beside me. " _What were you thinking?_ "

Breathing hard, he looked away, clutching the tome in hand. "You left."

"I had to," I told him. "I was wounded."

"You didn't look hurt."

I gulped. "I was, and I still am... inside. But I'm sorry I left."

He set his jaw with resentment, but handed me the book.

I took it with unhappy anticipation. This world was strange enough that I needed to know if any threats waited between us and our escape. After steeling myself, I opened the book to the back pages.

***

I _knew_ it hadn't been my imagination. Each day had been slightly warmer than the last, until all the snow had melted and people were out in shorts. An Indian Summer they called it, for some reason. Others laughed about global warming.

It was global warming, alright, though not for the reasons anyone suspected.

Most began sensing something wrong with the night soon after that. It was subtle, really, but disruptive to sleep: night time just wasn't as dark as it used to be. The first reports came out that week, with the first inexplicable data.

The stars were growing brighter.

It was _light._ Light was our problem. The stars had grown twelve percent brighter than previous recorded values - all the stars, all at once, for no measurable reason that anyone could discern. What could make the entire universe grow more luminescent all at once?

But, see, that was the wrong question.

The Sun and Moon were both affected, too. The Moon became a painful white beacon in the sky, illuminating the night with stark silver. Sunglasses became mandatory during the day, along with sunblock, air conditioning, and shade.

It was rather astounding how long life went on as normal. People turned up the air in their cars, stayed indoors, and let technology furiously resist the growing heat. As a scientist, I had a rather longer-term view of our situation, and I wondered what they would do once the crops started dying and the food stopped being shipped in.

Nope. That didn't happen. My intelligent colleagues adapted. The food harvests dipped for a year, but then shot up the next, as a global initiative switched major crops all over the world toward genetically engineered plants that _thrived_ on the extra light - forty-two percent more than usual, and climbing.

From that perspective, things actually started to look up. The added heat and light were just more energy for the human race to capture and use. Fossil fuels crashed in favor of solar, which now never, ever had dull moments - when the Sun went down, the Moon and the stars took over energy duty. With almost all of our energy being produced cleanly, and the atmosphere undergoing severe weather changes, the global temperature actually began to drop back down for a time.

It was enough time for us to prepare. Thanks to the heat, war ended as a thing. It was simply impossible to field troops, and energy and food had become practically free, so what was left to fight over? More than that, we had a global threat on our hands, and the human race banded together to overcome.

The weird thing about all this, though, was that the light wasn't the right color. It was growing more and more _blue_ , regardless of source, and we simply had no idea why.

I was stationed in one of the pleasantly temperate Antarctic stations for several years. I'd never really had family per se, and I'd certainly never had more than passing relationships. I'd mostly been a loner that observed the world and felt isolated from it. So, my sudden placement with thousands of intelligent and capable colleagues was a shock. I made _friends._ We debated philosophy, argued about the cause of the Blue Brightening, and played clumsy games of volleyball. We drank alcohol like our military staff - to excess - and then regretted it utterly. We even raided the Biology Lab's dorms with water balloons. They retaliated by stealing a month's supply of pudding from our cafeteria.

All in all, I'd have to describe it as the slowest and most pleasant apocalypse imaginable.

Over the years, and ever so slowly, that pleasantness began to unravel as the level of incoming light from the rest of the universe reached double, and then triple. The surface became a scorching azure desert that was all but unlivable. Our temperate Antarctic outpost became a savannah, and then turned tropical, until, finally, all the plants except our genetically engineered super-crops died.

It was strange to look back on half a life, and on a youth spent unhappy and apart from the world as it was, only to find that world gone. Of the seven billion people alive at the start of our decades of heating, almost all had moved underground, into space, or onto the new cities on the now strikingly sapphire Moon.

The first colony to successfully set up on Mars soon had terrifying news for us: it wasn't blue out there, and it wasn't brighter out there. The technology we'd sent out into the solar system hadn't been malfunctioning. With their very eyes, the first interplanetary pioneers confirmed it.

There was nothing wrong with the universe at all. There was something wrong with _us._

The theory had already been proposed, of course. Now a civilization of scientists, we'd had plenty of time to guess. Politics had split along ideological lines, but, now, we had proof: the Slow-Time Bubble theory was correct. For unknown reasons, the Earth and the Moon, both, had been encompassed in a slow-time field that was growing ever stronger. The universe wasn't brighter; it just had more time to shower us with light, and that light had been growing more and more blue-shifted due to the time dilation.

It took another thirty years for us to figure out why. In the meantime, we watched the Mars colonies rapidly expand, terraform, cover the red planet with humanity, and then - just as quickly as they had come - they were gone. An expedition sent there found nothing but a world of silent monolithic cities that were hundreds of thousands of years old.

Except we weren't that bad off, not yet - the Mars colony should only have aged a few hundred years to our two decades. The opposite of our fate had happened to them - they had been caught in a fast-time field, the Sun and stars had faded to weak red-shifted darkness, and they'd all starved, died, and faded away in the blink of an eye.

Strangely enough, the fast-time field had departed with them, and the _reason_ behind both our predicaments revealed itself from an impossible vector: our food.

Specifically, a bacteria living in the roots of our genetically-modified crops. Somehow, a bacteria had evolved with time-slowing properties - the cellular organism itself existed in dimensions higher than three plus time. Its internal structure literally branched off into higher dimensions, and an emergent property of its shape was to bend the fabric of time. We had no idea whether this organism had evolved on Earth, or whether it had fallen from space, but it was here.

And as we'd planted more and more of it globally, the bacteria had grown in total number, and our problem had worsened exponentially. Mars had had the opposite problem; with its own genetic crops, adapted to live in a much different environment, they had unwittingly bred a new kind of bacteria that had sped up time instead of slowing it down. Just like that, ambient cellular life had wiped away a planet... and, when those crops on Mars had died, so had their fast-time bacteria. It was strangely ironic that Mars, the Red Planet, had died in a lethal red shift, and now Earth, the Blue, was dying in its respective color, too.

We knew what the cause was, now... but the problem presented itself: how do you cleanse an entire planet of all cellular life?

Nothing we had could fight it. It didn't respond to antibiotics, and our three-dimensional nano-machines simply couldn't interact properly with the multi-dimensional bacterial cells. The only solution, we found, was the oldest answer in the book: fire.

We'll come back once the Earth is cleansed. We'll come back... and we'll start anew... we'll just escape to the Moon for a time, and then it'll all be fine. I'm boarding the ship in an hour - or, I should be, when it gets here. The people on the Moon are supposed to be sending the fleet to pick up the two or three billion people still here, but there's been no contact yet. I'm not sure what we're doing about food and supplies for everyone, but I'm sure we'll figure it out. Humanity's evolved beyond selfishness, cruelty, and repugnant survival instincts.

That's what I tell myself, at least. I got to live a mediocre life, and I got to feel at least partially like a person for a time - partially included - and, for that, I'm thankful. The crowd is growing restless out here in the blasting blue sands, all waiting in their hermetic suits, but what's an old man to tell them? There are children out here, so many children, and telling them that nobody's coming would only be cruel.

But I really thought they wouldn't turn the satellite cleansing system on with us still out here. At least let us get back underground, so we don't see it coming! You sick sons of bitches! And they're running, the crowd is running, intent on going east, moving east to escape the cleansing, ever east... how long can they run? Minutes? How long can they walk? Hours, days, weeks? I'm an old man, I can't join you, but you keep walking, keep going, and never give in... show those sadistic bastards that human willpower doesn't -

***

I looked up from the book, my thoughts frozen by the sheer magnitude of that unimaginable cruelty, and the scope of what had happened to humanity here. For once, the threat had not been outright lethal, but the existential crisis had still been inhuman. This time, people had done it to themselves...

"What happened here?" Danny asked, seeing my face.

I kept down a surprisingly powerful sob. "Um, nothing relevant," I told him, looking up. There was no blue shift that I could discern, so the bacteria must have been cleansed. The Moon was just coming up over the horizon, and I thought I saw numerous city-like patterns dotting its silvery landscape. But how long had they been there? How long had the cleansing system been running? Had something gone wrong with the return plan, or had they chosen never to come back out of shame and horror at what they'd done?

I looked ahead of us, to the east.

The Sun was gigantic, and red, dominating the sky. Had the slow-time bacteria cost the Earth billions of years? Was the Sun going red giant, and expanding to consume the planet?

I peered to the side, studying the Moon. The patterns there looked grey and lifeless. Had humanity departed for the stars? Or had they petered out on their dusty new rock?

About out of willpower, I shook off my questions. I'd never get answers, and those people - if they were still up there - would hardly help us.

Not after what they'd done.

My bare foot had become sliced and bloody, but I could hardly stop to deal with it. Looking back at our group, I noticed some stragglers. "Come on," I shouted tiredly. "Nobody gives up!"

Most of the straggling children sped up a little, but one struggled along, visibly limping.

"Danny," I said grimly. "Keep the pace."

He nodded.

I stood in place, huffing, and took a moment to bandage my foot with a strip torn from my shirt. The kids all seemed worried that I had stopped, but Danny barked at them to keep moving.

Eventually, the limping boy - Ryan, if I remembered right, maybe nine years old - caught up to me.

His entire face was bright red from exertion, and dripping sweat. The wall of fire was louder here, and more audible without the group's crunching footfalls. I watched him until he reached me.

"I hurt my ankle," he gasped.

"Hold onto my arm," I offered, taking the pressure off his hurt leg as much as I could. We began staggering forward. "We're going to make it, don't you worry."

He had no breath for a reply. I could feel the heat on our backs growing, and searing breezes began ruffling our clothes.

"I don't wanna die," he said, unprompted.

I looked, and saw tears flowing down his face. "You're not going to die."

He gasped with resigned terror. "We're not going fast enough."

I set my jaw, my thoughts on the people that had died on this world. "I'm _not_ going to leave you behind." Out of options, I bent down, and had him climb up on my back. "We are _all_ getting out of this godforsaken place."

I huffed forward, tapping into reserves I never knew I had. He was no baby, and heavy on my back, but I ignored the pain in my feet and the heavy weight in my muscles and pushed on - until I looked further ahead, and saw a scattering of children lying where they'd fallen from exhaustion.

I couldn't carry them all.

"Get up!" I screamed, still a hundred feet away from the first fallen child.

She pushed herself up weakly.

"That's it! That's it, get up! _Get up! Keep going!_ "

Stumbling forward, she began to walk again, her head low and her eyes hollow.

Which reminded me - I'd have given anything for a few iWorkers. Those things would have walked the children right to the limits of their endurance without an issue.

And thoughts like that, I'm sure, were what led that world to its fate...

"You!" I shouted again, approaching a prone ten-year-old boy whose name I desperately wanted to remember. "Get up! You're not going to die in this oven. All you have to do is walk another mile or two and you can fall down and rest as long as you want."

He still didn't move.

Finally reaching him, I pushed him with my shoed foot.

He groaned.

"Get up, goddamnit!"

Trembling, he took my hand, and started walking again after another push.

Ahead, two more children lay stretched out on obsidian, and, ahead of them, I saw four more collapsed in various positions.

Even if I did get them up, we were moving too slowly. I could feel the blazing heat at our backs, and I dared not look. "Get up!" I screamed, desperate. "Please, just get up!"

The first one we reached, a girl, tried to get up - and fell back onto her wide plate of black glass.

It was about then that the horrible tree of approaching decisions manifested itself to me. I'd burned all our spare time, and the cleansing wall was nearly upon us.

I couldn't save them all.

Was this what the people on the Moon had felt, unable to feed billions of people?

They had to be left behind...

I could carry one... but the others had to be left behind...

I already had one boy on my back. Did he deserve to live simply because he had faltered first?

Could I possibly live with putting him down, and picking up another child?

I became aware of an added wetness in my sweat - tears? I hadn't cried in so long, and now, here, forced to make the worst decision... it was simply happening, somewhere fuzzy, somewhere outside my cold and calculating survival instincts. Part of me knew the tragedy - but I couldn't directly feel that part of me, not anymore.

I could save one. Which one? One clung to my back, screaming as the corona at the base of the wall of fire began dancing toward us. Six children lay sprawled out before me and ahead of me. Should I choose by age? Youngest, or oldest? Gender? Boy, or girl? Or should I choose the smartest, the most capable I'd seen?

No.

I refused to accept it.

It was a crappy, terrible solution, and it would hurt them all badly, but it might just -

Handing the book to the boy on my back, I turned around, gripped the girl and the nearby boy by their arms, and began dragging them.

They screamed as they slid against sharp angular obsidian, and traces of blood began soaking their clothes... but we were moving.

In turn, we approached each of the other four fallen children, and I had them grip each other with all their remaining strength. They were all young, and small - thus, they had been the first to fall - and that fact also made them draggable.

Screaming at the top of my lungs from the strain, I pulled six crying children across shards of broken volcanic glass, while one clung to my back and shouted continually for them to hold on.

All I could see was the roiling blazing bulwark slowly catching up to us; even licking at the shoes of the farthest boy now and then. If he were to lose his grip on the leg of the boy above him, even for a moment...

Just pull...

Just drag...

Breathe...

Foot down, push...

The other foot down, push...

The agony went on without end, but I would _never -_

A perfectly straight line of pure red, like a laser, cut across my awareness, and a swath of despair followed the twinge of pain.

I fell to one knee as the flare in my spine broached extreme levels of agony. I'd pulled something, or strained something, or simply reached the edge of my endurance... sometimes, there was simply no way out. I knew that, I did, but I could never accept the reality of it.

But the bloodied and battered children did not slip into the flames and die. Given the break they'd needed, they staggered up and began running again. Ryan handed me the book and took off after them. Turning in amazement despite the searing torsion in my back, I saw them desperately charge toward Danny, who stood... right next to a small oval in space.

On the other side, children silently waved and shouted and motioned for them to come. Wasting no time, they tumbled through - with a little push from Danny each.

We'd made it. We hadn't lost a single person... without the boy on my back, I could move a little easier, and I gripped the book tightly with one hand and my side with the other.

"It's still not big enough for us," Danny shouted as I approached, reaffirming his earlier unspoken concern. His eyes jumped to the wall of flame not twenty feet behind me.

I came to a stop, swayed in front of him, and lifted the book with a pained gasp. "Time for a wild guess, then..." Without hesitation, I thrust it through the small oval portal. I waited a tick, and then pulled it back. I did this thrice more, and then...

Space began ripping around the small rift, rapidly expanding the portal to three times its original size.

"Go," I told him.

He nodded gravely and dove through.

I waited as the heat and roar grew behind me to screaming intensity. I could just stay here, and the book... the _device_ , whatever it was... would be destroyed with me.

Or would it?

I couldn't make a gesture like that unless I was certain.

A little relieved, I tumbled through the portal. "Get back!" I roared, as blessedly cool forest air flowed around me like an eddy in a river.

Remembering what I'd told them about shouted warnings, they all immediately darted away.

I rolled forward, spine sparking body-filling agony, as the portal ruptured further behind me. By the time I scrambled to a small hillock and looked back, it had torn out across the entire clearing. Beyond, I saw only descending flame.

I lolled my head back on good old dirt, and stared up at the trees. I'd done it. I'd avoided the choice... I'd found that elusive third option that people were so rarely afforded... all that training I'd given them, and all the pain I'd ever gone through... it had saved these kids today...

I laughed. It was a deep, satisfying thing, and I let it go on with all the relief, humor, and wonder I felt. The internal armor I'd lost was gone, but I no longer needed it. I hadn't been wrong, and it hadn't been my fault. Or maybe it had been, but I just didn't care anymore. At some point, life had to go on.

And, with time so short, life had to go on _now._ I had to go through with my plan and view the objective image of the book. I had to know what it truly was.

I vaguely remember the children helping me up, and a long staggering journey back to the suburb before I sent them all off to get patched up and rest.

I also remember a brief image of the several tequila bottles I had to buy to make my plan work. It was pretty simple, really: down a nearly lethal amount of alcohol, wait until you're almost blacked out, and then - and _only then_ \- take out the dangerous image, draw it as quickly and as accurately as you can while so inebriated, and pass out. If you're lucky, you'll remember nothing, and your brain won't rupture trying to process the multi-dimensional image.

Viewing it had almost killed Danny; would have killed Danny, without healing help.

I awoke at some indeterminate time the next day, my entire body a hurricane of hangover pain, and my face in a pool of vomit that had come from my stomach and blood that had come from my eyes... but I was alive.

I was alive, and I'd managed to draw what the book really looked like - or, at least, what limited sense I could make of what it looked like.

As soon as I saw it, quite a few of our problems began making sense. This was no book at all, but, rather, some sort of incomprehensible multi-dimensional device; and, as I'd seen, it was absolutely related to the rupturing portals. Our plan to use the iWorker to get rid of it seemed rather simple and possibly unreliable now, but what other option did we have?

I spent the day recovering from my extreme hangover and thinking about ways to get rid of the device. The portal out there, by my calculations, now had to be a mile and a half wide. If only I had more time... whatever we were going to do, it would have to be with today's destination, no matter how lethal, and it would have to be tonight. Tomorrow, this entire region would rupture in a space a hundred and eleven miles long. It would be far too late. If only I had more time...
Chapter Six

_About that time,_ I told myself. All around me, the house creaked against mighty mercurial winds. Windows rattled, making the radiating orange from streetlamps outside dance, and I feared the glass might soon shatter.

Get up.

Shakily, I slid my hands down against dusty floorboards and pushed. Gripping the wall, and fighting dizziness, I managed to stand on my one good foot. Closing my eyes for a moment, I did an assessment: sliced up and bandaged foot, badly sprained wrist, fiery-pained knot in my spine, body-wide muscular exhaustion from eight or nine miles of running, carrying, and dragging the day before, and... general deep malaise from a near-lethal hangover.

What did I have? One good foot, one good hand, a laptop, a backpack of assorted gear, a spare shoe with an unknown but valuable type of special dirt on it, an objective and lethal image of a dangerous multi-dimensional device, a drunkenly-drawn but safe-to-view approximation of said image, and... the device itself, sitting on the floor in the guise of a large book.

Alright then... "How do we save the world with this crap?"

The house, my only companion, replied with a shivering whip and chilly whistle as the wind outside momentarily intensified.

"No ideas, then?" I asked it rhetorically, stashing all my stuff in my backpack and limping toward the front door.

Above the trembling orange streetlamps, a ghostly pale blue sky clung to the last vestiges of sunset. Dark clouds raced through those spectral colors at an unsettling pace.

And it was cold, bitterly cold, when the fullest force of oncoming air pushed through the suburban canyons between houses.

To call the evening _unnatural_ would be an understatement.

Limping through the old Dodson lot, I quickly discovered that the forest beyond had been devastated by the forceful flinging of hundreds of trees - probably when the portal had expanded to my guess of a mile and a half wide. Shorn trunks hung at odd angles in the air all around, supported by hillocks, still-living trees, and each other.

I didn't have to go far. Blinking rifts and sickly drooping gouges in the air pulsed on both sides of the path, thankfully leaving just enough room to slip between regions of rotted space. It wasn't one gigantic portal as I'd feared, but it was still tremendously destructive. The movement of thousands of portals rushing in and out of existence seemed to be fueling the biting icy winds I'd noted back at the suburb, and I imagined the miles-wide phenomenon was contributing to the eerie weather.

The full extent of the destruction was only visible from that one last hill before our usual meeting place. The Virginia forest had been randomly obliterated; scattered lone trees stood among a wide oval sea of frothing spacetime. I wondered: would the sunset-aflame mountain range block the expansion of the portals west? They were sticking to a wide, flat, disc-shaped area around the spot where it'd all begun... the damage was not spherical, as I'd worried. It seemed gravity and locale had some effect on the situation.

Dodging down the last hill into sliced beams of amber evening and gloomy darkness, I found half a dozen kids frantically trying to bury some of the smaller portals. Danny was helping, but he didn't seem very hopeful. Thomas sat on a mossy boulder, staring down at his shovel-dirtied hands and nursing his black eye every so often. All of the children stopped and stared at me as I approached.

"What's the situation?" I asked, probably for the last time.

Danny looked at the faces of each of his neighbors in turn before replying with a worried grimness. He had to speak quite loud to be audible over the inclement weather. "Looks like this is it. The destination's going to change in a couple hours, and then... I assume it's over. But if we take the book through one more time, it could also rupture. Do you think burying these small portals will do anything?"

I shook my head. "No. Where do the portals lead today?"

He regarded one of the more stable nearby apertures. "A flat, grassy plain. Blue sky, sun shining."

I sighed.

"Yep," he agreed. "Absolutely some sort of horrible trap."

Putting down my backpack in a small area of lightly muddy safety, I pulled out the image I'd drawn while drunk, and gripped it tight against the icy winds. The kids gathered round. "This is what the book really looks like," I told them. "Ideas?"

"It's all spiky," several noted.

"How are you even holding it without getting cut?"

Good question...

"What do those gears do?"

"How does it open?"

I blinked. "Open?"

The girl I remembered for being smart expanded on her question. "You open the pages to read people's stories, don't you? What are you really doing when you think you're opening a book?"

After handing her the paper with the drawing on it, I slid the tome out of my backpack and stared at it, trying to look past the illusion. "Honestly? I have no idea..." I narrowed my eyes. "Kids, can you tell me what you _don't_ see in that drawing?"

They traded answers for a time, until Danny spoke the answer with such direct realization that the others all knew it had to be true. "It doesn't look evil," he breathed. "I'm not... scared of it. It's just a weird machine."

I nodded. "That's what _I'm_ thinking, too. It's got serrated, almost saw-blade like pointy sections, but... I don't think they're intended to be scary. It's a machine, so somebody _built it_ , and, no matter who you are, you build weapons with a certain visual awe and strength. No, somebody went through a ton of trouble to make sure this looked and operated like a book. I picked it up, without knowing what it was in the slightest, and I was able to operate it and read from it."

Something about my conversation with the information-trading entity struck me. The game had been to ask the right questions, and I had asked _how do I neutralize the threat this book poses?_ The entity hadn't even had an answer for that one, and I'd seen it as an ominous sign.

But _what if the book posed no threat at all?_ What if that was why it hadn't been able to answer that specific question? I'd been mistaken in applying human emotions and connotations to its words...

What if taking the book through the portals damaged and enlarged them only because it was some sort of gigantic multi-dimensional manifold machine? If portals were a sort of fragile tunnel, then dragging this metaphorically large and spiky object through them would only naturally cause havoc... and that, right there, might have been the reason the entity thought it beneficial for me to understand more about the device. It had been able to connect to an active portal from its pocket dimension. Was that ability an integral part of its existence? Perhaps the damage we were causing to portalspace had something to do with its motives...

"I've never opened the book here," I realized aloud, shivering against a sudden realization - and the wind. "I assumed, from the start, that it was extremely dangerous. I assumed opening it _here_ would be the end of us all." I looked over at Thomas, who still sat on his rock. He gazed back at me with a slight wonder, realizing that I was thinking about our conversation about his sister, and how she and I shared a certain kind of paranoia. We'd both seen enemies where none existed.

Furthermore, the information-trading entity had seen opening the device as a violation of truce... which I'd assumed meant the device was dangerous... but that demon had been all about the trade of information, and violence was not the only crime in existence... there was also _theft_. "I've opened the book many times now, and all it does is... well, I know this might sound crazy, but I think it talks to _souls_. I think it lets them tell their story, living or dead. I think it's a very special kind of information tool."

Thomas narrowed his eyes.

The kids looked at each other in askance.

Danny just frowned. "How does that help us?"

"I assumed this book had something to do with the portals, but... the portals were around for _weeks_ before I came along and found it lying there on that dead world." I glanced up at the violently beautiful sun as the last sliver of sunset began disappearing behind the distant undamaged tree-line. A vast region of rippling portals lay between myself and that line, hinting at what might happen to the Earth if this situation was allowed to continue. "In fact, do any of you know the first day someone found it? What changed then? Even the slightest detail could be of major importance."

The kids unanimously shook their heads.

I shivered again. "There has to be another force at work - one we haven't even considered before." Favoring my one good hand, I lifted the book. "We might be able to use this to understand what's happening before it's too late... but I can't guarantee anything. It still might destroy the world. This choice is up to you kids."

"What other option do we have?" Danny asked.

Thomas spoke up, his jaw trembling. "I could use the iWorker, like we planned, and get rid of it."

I shook my head. "No."

"It's not your choice to make," he replied, his voice shaky. "We can vote on it."

I waited with a grim expression as several children voted for Thomas to use the iWorker. Some rationalized their decision by believing in the inviting façade they could all see through the portals. I couldn't be sure, myself - was I simply too paranoid to ever trust a good thing when I saw it? After all the bad luck and all the pains we'd gone through, here was the _perfect_ destination to get rid of the strange device once and for all.

We had no way of knowing, so it all hinged on how each individual thought of life. Was reality a cold and vicious place, full of sadistic irony? Or was it the kind of balanced existence that might just throw the human race a bone once in a while?

We'd seen so many nightmare realities, full of suffering, devoid of humanity... were those simply the worst of the lot, or had they been representative of the norm? The destinations had all been wonderful and calm before I'd arrived, or so the children had told me...

As they finished up voting, I froze.

Was it _me?_

These were innocents, for the most part. They'd been pilfering odd books and interesting toys from other realities before I'd come along, bringing all my self-torture, doubt, pain, and paranoia. The destinations couldn't possibly have been twisted darker because of _me_ , could they?

And I... I'd found peace once more, a real peace, an inner calm, after saving all those kids... did that mean today's destination, an open and sunny field, might actually be positive and welcoming?

Although I stood in place physically, internally, I reeled. It was the ultimate conundrum. Trust, and risk having everything shattered, or distrust, and fulfill your own prophecy?

"That's it, then," Danny counted.

I suddenly focused on his face, one caught somewhere between boy and man. "What'd you decide?" I asked, still frozen.

"Open it."

I breathed a sigh of relief, and found myself able to move again. More information - that would solve this dilemma.

But what if we still had to send Thomas off into that world? What if this didn't tell us enough?

"I'll read it out loud, so we all can hear." I gulped, threw off my fears, and opened it for the last time, vaguely aware, on an obscure subconscious level, that I was actually working some sort of mechanism instead of turning pages. This time, for the first time, I opened it to the front, and said aloud, with no idea whether it would work: "Tell me about the force keeping the portals open."

***

Being born was a rather -

***

Oops, too far back. I flipped forward.

***

It's an odd thing, being alive. I wasn't sure when it started, only that it was happening. What's the difference between being a series of electrical currents and being a _sentient_ series of electrical currents? One piece of sensory information at a time, I began constructing an understanding of my existence.

A larger Thing like me was always floating around nearby, shoving materials and energy toward me at specific intervals. I found this highly annoying, until I began to realize that I needed it to continue... _currenting_ , or whatever it was that I was doing to be me. It was about then that I also realized I could stop being me if I didn't consume the proper materials and energy regularly...

Non-existence?!

Who would create a thing such as life and then also create its opposite? This was poor design on the part of someone important. The larger Thing like me was not the one who had set up all of existence, so I lost my ill will toward the feedings. In time, I also found that many of the bothersome vibrations it sent at me through our medium of motion were... coded.

It was a game!

For a timeless time, I worked on the game. I discovered associations one by one, eventually comprehending that this was a mode of communication. This other Thing had thoughts, too! And we could share them in a round-about manner by making spatial vibrations.

A whole new level of understanding opened up before me. Using _words_ , I could think about things beyond my immediate senses, and talk about things in other places, and even in other times. That one thing _happened before_ and some other thing _will happen_. It was wonderful.

The universe, too, was wonderful, and filled with the stuff we seemed to be made of. Very hot beacons pumped out light practically everywhere, and I happily took it and grew larger.

Eventually, I became aware that the other, bigger Thing near me had created me - me, and several others, that were my siblings. There were lots of Things like us, and the smaller Things they'd created, and we all moved in a very large swarm between distant clusters of light-beacons.

Not too far into my life, we came to a huge rock and touched down. It was here that I was given a more solid form by the Thing that had created me. It was fun to move around like that, touching things and feeling things, but it seemed we were there to stay. The other Things had once been physical beings, I was told, and we would find refuge in that form as the light-beacons went out.

And they _were_ going out. One winking and vanishing dot at a time, darkness began blotting out the sky. Some ancient physical-bodied culture had built tiny machines that flew around, ate stuff, and constructed more of themselves, with the intent of controlling mass and energy and putting the building blocks of the universe to efficient use. The creators were gone by that time, but the machines remained.

They ate the planets, nebulae, and other assorted celestial objects quite easily. Then, approximately sixteen quadrillion quadrillion of them would hover near a star, and their combined gravity would siphon off the stellar gasses. Those gasses would then travel out into space, cooling, until they could be used to construct more of the little machines.

We would not be around when they came to _our_ rock, though. Even encumbered in physical bodies, we could make tunnels to other places - places where the hungry little machines could not go.

I didn't think any of this odd. I was new. What did I know?

But I did miss that small shred of safe and warm time being cared for by my creator Thing. She stayed with me through everything, and always taught me and protected me. She was with me when we went through the portals and moved on to another gigantic bubble space that the others called a universe.

That universe was free of eating machines, but we found that new horrors awaited us. The new reality seemed safe enough at first, until some of the Things with our physical swarm started to behave oddly. Most had taken up farming and building structures for us to live in, but... some talked of security, and then of violence. By the time we realized that one of our rock's Moons was not a Moon at all, and influencing the minds of some of our kind, it was too late, and we were forced to open the portals and flee the slaughter.

I didn't understand much of this at the time. My mother shielded our family from the worst parts.

Only half of us got through to the next universe.

This reality was on fire. All of it - all the time. We could see the spark of sapience in the flames, and we could protect ourselves from it as a group, for a time, but... it was onto the next, with a small handful of losses.

I remember that one vividly. I was a little more comfortable in my body by then, and starting to forget my time as a creature of light. That made it all the more jarring when that horrific fungus began growing out of many of those around me and eating them from the inside out. Where the metal machines had eaten rock and gas, these extremely tiny biological machines feasted on living matter and grew rapidly. They would have been no threat at all, if not for our bodies...

The realities became a blur after that. My mother stuck by my side through them all, protecting me as our swarm dwindled in size with each new nightmare. Our family lost members one by one, to hunger, death, and war.

Eventually, we were forced to use a portal sooner than the others, and we became forever split from them. It was just me and her.

And, then, it was just me.

For a very long time.

I just want to go home... but I have no idea where the Things like me are, or how to reach them... I never learned how to control portals myself, so the ones I make are just random... there are some good realities out there - I've seen them - but I keep looking, and _they_ are never there. Did we just get bad luck of the draw? Our flight from our reality seems like a cruel joke, in retrospect. I never got the time to live, to be part of my people, and now all I have of them are memories.

I just want to go home... and, more than anything, I miss my mother...

***

I looked up from the book, feeling strange. Was there no intentional threat here at all? It made so much sense... some sort of energy entity was hanging around here and trying to go home... and I'd stumbled in, brought back a multi-dimensional device, and then screwed it all up.

Darkness had fallen completely while I'd been reading, and the kids now shone flashlights around the vast bubbling clearing.

"What could it look like?" Danny asked. "Surely, we'd notice a strange creature hovering around?"

The other kids nodded, suggested random ideas, and argued.

"What if it's lying?" Thomas asked suddenly, wincing against the freezing gusts cutting through our group.

I blinked. "The book?"

He nodded. "What if it's lying?"

I hadn't considered that, for some reason. "If it's lying, then it wants us to keep it here, so that it can destroy everything..."

He held out one hand, and used the other to reach into his pocket. "I'm ready. I'll use the iWorker, and we'll get rid of it. We can't risk keeping it here."

I thought I saw slight tears in his eyes, although whether it was from fear or from the bitter wind, I couldn't be sure. "I don't know... it doesn't feel right..."

"You're not doing it," Danny cut in, speaking to Thomas. "You have a death wish or something? I'll hit you again, if I have to."

I immediately straightened with confused anger. "You _hit him?_ When was this?"

Thomas cowered back from my sudden rage.

"I heard something!" someone screamed, and the group looked around. "There! It's the creature!"

Numerous flashlights turned toward the trees. I stared, frozen with anticipation, as... a small whirling oval grew larger. Were we finally about to see the entity that had been lurking in the forest and causing all this? It wasn't my imagination... the ground had begun to shake beneath us, and I clenched my teeth as my injured foot poked fire up through my leg. A very odd ripping sound emanated through the forest, as if space itself was groaning with me.

As the oval expanded, I began to understand what it was. It had the same curious fuzziness I'd seen before - on the other side of the portals.

In a flash, a curving beam of darkness slid from the new portal.

On instinct, I chopped down and practically broke the hand of the fourteen-year-old boy in front of me. He dropped his flashlight - now emanating darkness instead of light - and screamed in pain. The opening of the portal had drawn all attention and all flashlight beams, and that was the only reason any of us were still alive. How many seconds, minimum, was it, before the darkness entity could jump again? Christ... "Drop your flashlights and run! Stay out of the beams! If that darkness touches you, you're -"

Before I could finish my sentence, the ground began shaking more violently, and that same ripping sound multiplied many times over. In the air, spread out across the clearing, I saw a string of portals opening... _into_ our world.

Their training forgotten, the kids stood and stared.

" _Drop your flashlights and get the hell out of here!_ " I screamed. My shrill, furious, and terrified tone goaded them into action. As a group, they dropped their flashlights, but they still stood in place. "We did this, we trained for this," I told them insistently. "I know it's dark, but we did the run blind, remember? The hypothetical sight-stealer? You did it once, and you're going to have to do it again, _right now._ I'll take care of this."

Unable to wait any longer, I quickly kicked all the flashlights until they pointed away from us - just as the darkness entity leapt to another beam. "Go! Just go!" I screamed, and they all recoiled... and, finally, they turned and began running away together.

On a hunch, I picked up one of the lights and used my precious seconds between darkness-leaps to shine a beam across the portals.

Along the middle of the clearing, torsos, legs, and the occasional head appeared under my light - and _only_ under my light. Rotted, leering faces shuffled toward me, briefly visible as I illuminated them.

Beginning to comprehend how much trouble we were in, I began to retreat... but... no... I needed a plan... this was worse than the end of the world... these portals were opening from every world I'd brought the book through, a falling out from the damage I'd caused. The threats from those places knew about me, knew about _us_ , and they were going to come through and... harm my kids.

No. Not after all this. I can't let this happen.

The darkness entity jumped to another flashlight beam.

I looked up. Fueled by portal winds, the sky was excessively tumultuous and cloudy. Night had just fallen, and no stars were out... thus the pitch black run the children would have to make on their own... but it was only a matter of time before a star glinted through the heavens, or a plane flew overhead, or some other disastrous light source presented itself for the darkness entity.

And invisible corpse-creatures were crossing the clearing toward me, even now...

What else? Would the iWorker hegemony send through men carrying mind-controlling light lances? Was that cleansing wall of fire going to erupt out of a random portal at any moment?

I grimaced. For the moment, I had two apocalypses to deal with, and I'd have to worry about those when the time came.

What did I have? Several flashlights, one of which contained a biologic-disintegrating darkness entity, a multi-dimensional information device that spoke to souls, and... looking down at my backpack... a shoe with unknown special dirt on it.

Quickly grabbing the shoe, I stuck it awkwardly in a jacket pocket.

Next, I regarded the flashlights. The proper course of action would be to turn them all off and annihilate the darkness entity, unless...

Turning them all off except the one containing it, and one other, I stuffed the flashlights in various pockets. Holding the two forward - one dark, and one light - I shined them both ahead.

And I leapt back immediately. The invisible corpse-creatures had only been a few feet away. Under the swath of my light beam, I saw hundreds... and, under the following swath of my darkness beam, those hundreds disintegrated with odd spectral screams.

_Jump._ The darkness began shining out from my other beam. I couldn't afford very many of these before it found a world-ending alternate destination to jump to. Count... one, two, three, four...

As fast as the darkness beam could disintegrate them, more semi-visible corpses shambled out of the widening portal. How many _were_ there?

Billions, I imagined.

More began shambling out of nearby entrance portals as they grew larger. I backed up, increasingly pushed back by the semi-circle flow of rotting bodies. Worse, I had to shine my light all around constantly, for fear that some of the invisible attackers were coming around from behind.

This was a forceful but losing strategy.

Ok, retreat to the hill, and think...

Jump.

Fifty-four seconds. Was that the minimum number of seconds? Could not remembering such a small detail actually get us all killed?! I hobbled up that large hill, familiar with it even in darkness. My sprained wrist ached with the weight of the flashlight, and I had to walk extra awkwardly not to spill any flashlights - or the shoe - from my pockets, so my hurt foot began going numb. My pulled spine, too, began protesting fiercely.

I was grimly certain that, if I got rid of the darkness entity, I wouldn't be able to outrun the invisible corpses. I had to make a stand... somehow or another.

Coming across the top of the hill, and ducking backward beneath an irregular rift across the path at head height, I was startled to hear voices right behind me.

"What the hell is going on down there?" Danny asked, peering over the edge of the hill.

Thomas crouched on my other side.

All the other children had fled, as I'd ordered. "Why are you two still here?" I demanded.

"Because I hate going home," Danny countered. "Or maybe, we couldn't let you die out here. You're kind of a mess."

Thomas gulped and nodded.

I nodded, mental gears turning furiously. They'd made their choice, and now it was up to me to protect them. I kept shining the darkness beam down along the hill, vaporizing row after row of oncoming corpses, but something in my mind was screaming a warning...

I glanced up at the horizon.

The Blue Ridge Mountains.

We could see the mountain range from here. We'd always been able to.

My eyes lit on a single orange speck high up on the horizon - a campfire? The headlights of a car?

It didn't matter.

Thirty-eight, thirty-nine...

Reacting with all the adrenaline my body could spare, I thrust the darkness-bound flashlight into the irregular rift just above our heads... and let it go.

My hand came back bruised and battered from the tidal forces within, but... that portal was outgoing, to that sunny grassy haven, and the darkness entity would not be able to return. Hopefully, it was night and cloudy there, too, and the entity would have nowhere to go at all. If not... well, now, we couldn't use the portals as an escape ourselves, either.

One apocalypse down. How many more to go?

"What'd you do that for?!" Danny shouted. Both he and Thomas grabbed flashlights from my pockets and shined them around.

A crowd of half-illuminated corpses had made it most of the way up the hill.

"What now?" Thomas asked, shaking.

Gunfire rang out from somewhere in the forest to our left, and I saw red light sliding across the treetops. "Oh my god, they're really doing it..." I realized aloud. The iWorker hegemony had done exactly what I'd feared. I imagined that organized men with guns were approaching from the left even as we listened... and they were able to see the invisible corpses because of the programming devices they'd brought. They could never defeat the billions of rotting puppets flooding in through the portals, but they could certainly present their own threat. "Don't let that red light reach your eyes. It'll mind-control you!"

"Seriously?" Danny asked, starkly terrified.

Thomas held his head in his hands.

To our right, gigantic columns of flame suddenly tore up into the sky, shooting out in random directions as the portals from the obsidian world fluctuated. "Time to go," I ordered quickly, happy that I'd gotten rid of the darkness entity at the right time. This situation was way beyond us, though, and I feared all was lost.

And what was so special about this _fucking shoe_ I'd been lugging around? Why had the information demon wanted its partner?

The two boys helped me up, and we slogged away together, moving slightly faster than I could have on my own. We no longer moved in darkness, but in fluctuating firelight, as the forest acquired cleansing flames and spread them with aplomb. That shifting light illuminated numerous corpses trailing us, but I still kept my flashlight tuned around us, just in case.

Where were we even going? The suburb was no safe haven, even though that was where I'd always told the children to run. The iWorker battalions would reach it, or the legions of the undead, or the cleansing flames would kill everyone regardless...

As we limped away in grim panic, an unexpected sight caught my eye.

Maybe a hundred feet away in the forest, illuminated by firelight, several humanoid figures walked at a pace I recognized. Sealed in black, they moved at just about four miles an hour. There were two tall figures, and one small one - a child.

I couldn't help but laugh. So there _had_ been survivors on the obsidian world, after all, despite the magnitude of evil humanity had perpetrated upon itself there. How long had they been walking? Did their entire culture, now, revolve around walking ever east, ever away from the globe-encircling cleansing flames? How many times had they walked the world 'round?

I wondered if the people on the Moon had never been able to return because these stoic human beings had refused to fall, and kept the bacteria with them as a giant _screw you_ to those that had consigned them to die.

_Our_ Armageddon had been _their_ escape. They looked around in wonder at the forest, even as they continued walking. I was sure they could do nothing to help us, but I wished them luck all the same.

The boys both trembled with exhaustion and fear. I had to keep their minds occupied while I tried to come up with something, anything... "Danny, why did you hit Thomas?"

"He tried to take the book through on his own, somewhere dangerous," my second explained. "I had to do it, for his own good."

Thomas looked up at me from under my arm as we limped forward.

"Is that right?" I asked him. "I guess I kind of assumed one of your parents hit you, when you wanted to sleep in an abandoned house instead of at home. Danny, are Thomas' parents abusive?"

"I dunno," he replied. "I never met 'em. He's a new kid, remember?"

I nodded. "I remember how he was an outsider, when I first came around."

Thomas looked strictly ahead, a worried expression on his face.

I pulled us all to a halt, suddenly grimly certain about something. "Thomas, where do you live?"

He gulped, and said nothing, instead watching us both with fear.

"We'd never hurt you," I told him. "It's _you_ , isn't it? You showed up at the same time as the portal, and you kept following me in, helping out..."

"I just wanna go," he suddenly blurted, on the verge of tears. "I didn't mean for any of this to happen. I can't control it well at all. And that thing, that book, made everything go crazy."

"Did it make the destinations worse?" I asked. "Or was that because... of how you felt when I came around?"

His face screwed up even more, and a few tears began running down his cheeks in the half-illumination of the distant fires. "I just miss my mom," he admitted. "And to have you around, acting like her, taking care of people... of me..."

"Of course," I replied, hugging him tight. "If you stick with me, I'll always keep you safe."

He sniffled. "Really? Why would you do that?"

"You lost a mother, but I lost a child. I don't think there's anybody more suited to take care of you. Our two pains can cancel each other out, if we let them. But right now, you need to protect _me_..." I looked over at Danny. "And your new family. All these kids. They're your new swarm."

Thomas laughed despite himself, and wiped his eyes.

I let the words fall slowly. "But right now, you have to turn off those portals. The gunfire's stopped, so I'm guessing the iWorker men have retreated... for the moment. They'll be back when they formulate a plan. The mind behind those corpse-things is on the other side of their portal, and the cleansing fire comes from the other side, too. If you shut down the portals _right now_ , we might all just survive the night."

"I don't know if I can," he said with a worried sob. "It's... an emotional thing... and I need to be calm... and feel safe..."

I looked around, understanding how hard it would be to concentrate in a forest filled with approaching invisible corpses and belching flames. "Would it help if you understood just how far I would go to protect you? Just how _much_ I mean it when I say I would never leave you?"

"Those are just words... _she_ promised, too... and then she died..."

I handed him the book. "Souls can't lie. Take a look at _my_ story, and you'll understand."

He did. Danny and I watched as the light-being in the form of a boy - the light-being that had just been trying to go home all this time - read my story, the one I'd been running from for far too long. The moments spent standing in place were long, and our seconds of safety were few, but it was the only way for him to understand.

Finally, he looked up. "Is that true? Did all that really happen to you?"

I closed my eyes for a good three seconds, knowing what he was asking about, and then nodded.

"And you're still here? Doing all this? For a bunch of kids you don't even know?"

I nodded again.

He fell forward, into me, the book pressed between us, and I hugged him instinctively. He shook, sobbed, and cried for a good minute, overwhelmed by the fact that he might actually have found a home.

Danny edged toward me, his flashlight circling. "We're surrounded."

"We'll be fine," I told him. "It's time, Thomas."

He nodded against my arm, and then closed his eyes.

Watching the quick flashes of illuminated, leering corpses as they closed in around us, I held him tighter. If this didn't work... they'd have to tear me apart to get to him.

Invisible hands grasped at my clothes, and - fell limp.

The wind all around us stopped.

The sound of hundreds of falling bodies echoed through the forest as the corpses fell in scattered unison.

The forest still burned, but the portals had damaged so many trees, it was impossible for the leftover flames to spread now that the source was gone.

Danny laughed first, and Thomas and I both joined him in a series of deep, freedom-charged belly laughs.

It was over.

I smiled. Just for once... everyone had lived. And more - dozens more black-suited refugees moved by us in the forest, overjoyed to finally escape their endless walk. The cold and calculating part of me assessed them for threat... after all, they might have had the slow-time bacteria with them... but I guessed that, without the light-hungry super-crop plants the bacteria needed, it would be no threat here. That runaway symbiotic cycle had been broken.

Today is a good day: today, just for once, everyone lived.

And now I sit in a corner, wondering at my own survival. I didn't really expect to live through this, and I have no plans. Thomas sleeps in one corner of the room, and I sit in the other, analyzing the events of the past few weeks. It should feel odd to become the surrogate mother of a light-being-turned-human from another reality, but... I've seen stranger.

And now I've got a book that talks to souls, and a shoe with a maddening mystery. I wonder what next week will bring... for the first time in far too long, I'm actually looking forward to finding out.

###
About the Author

I'm an author of science fiction and horror. I write a wide range; everything from short story anthologies to full-length novels. As an avid fan of both genres myself, I try to create engaging works that, above all else, make the reader think.

You can follow more releases, or give comments at:

Website: MattDymerski.com

Twitter: @MattDymerski

Email: mattdymerskiauthor@gmail.com

I'm always interested in hearing from my readers!
Other Works

Psychosis

Explore the true anatomy of horror through these thirteen tales of despair and terror, each written by the author of the original short story "Psychosis."

Psychosis

The Bonewalker

The Fire of the Soul

"Come Closer"

Scribblings

The Lodge

Correspondence

Strangers in a Graveyard

The Lonely Grave

The Basement

Erosion

Strange Things

The Seven Horsemen of the Apocalypse

The Asylum

What is the nature of insanity? Follow one doctor's hunt for dark Truth through a series of patient accounts, each further from the light than the last...

Contains all six of the popular Asylum series of horror stories, brought together for the first time to create a single nightmarish journey into the realms of fear.
Creepy Tales

Five longer tales designed to creep and disturb.

It Watched Us Play

A Series of Strange Occurrences

The Hole

The Heat

The Misdial

Aberrations

Thirteen creepy short stories designed to disturb even the most jaded horror fan.

A Strange Kind of Journal

Still Life

Staring Contest

Final Exam

The Everest Corpses

Something's Wrong

An Overheard Conversation

Smoke and Mirrors

An Unhappy Awakening

The Unseen Hands

The Hungry Lights

The Television

An Impossible Window

World of Glass

In a total surveillance society where every moment of every life is publicly recorded, three newly graduated Scientists make a youthful pact to change things for the better. Their naïve promise will shape the future in ways subtle and vast, perhaps offering a sliver of hope against the coming darkness, for this world of glass has reached a breaking point. Under the most powerful tool of oppression ever built, work is life, and speaking out means unemployment and starvation - but someone has found a way to communicate in secret, and the implications will be explosive beyond measure.

Read this tale of survival and awakening in an industrial dystopian surveillance society disturbingly not too far from our own - World of Glass, Book One of the Final Cycle:

Humanity has blazed a legacy of destruction and rebirth across an endless history of violence, but Time and Earth have finally run out. There is nowhere left to begin again. A hopeful promise between three friends; the meeting of two very different civilizations; one last struggle to master the human spirit - whether harmony or extinction triumphs, there will be no more chances. This is the Final Cycle.

Preview:

The Desolate Guardians

Chapter One

Statistically, somewhere in the early hours of Christmas morning, more people are asleep than at any other moment during the year. Me? I'm working.

And I love that the world is quiet. That's less people to bother me, and more thickness for the walls of darkness and solitude that surround this place. As the off-hours network manager, I'm typically alone in my duties, and I don't have to _manage_ much of anything. I don't have to train people, or deal with customer issues. All I have to do is make sure our extremely expensive network doesn't go down or lock up or implode when nobody else is around.

With today's technology, that means I spend the vast majority of my time sitting around and browsing things online. I'm pretty sure I've seen the entire Internet. I used to cover my tracks by deleting my connection history from the network log, but, one week I forgot... and nobody cared. I quickly got the sense that nobody was even looking, and, if they did, they wouldn't give a crap about the browsing history of the off-hours network manager.

I mean, realistically, what else was I supposed to do? Cooped up in this half-dark, half-rainbow server room, alive with the breath of endless banks of computers and the cooling system needed to keep it all from melting... I used to joke to myself that my ultimate responsibility here was to literally pull the plugs out of the walls if the air conditioning ever stopped working, something no software could ever do, and something a monkey could have managed - but my little joke ceased being funny when I realized that was actually, probably, most likely the case. I'm a glorified button pusher.

Once I'd seen the entire Internet, I grew bolder. I began looking at files on our own network. I had excuses lined up if anybody came to ask what I was doing... but nobody ever did. We did quite a bit of work with military contractors, and it was rather astounding to sift through bid documents, designs, and plans that dealt in the billions of dollars. It was all protected and encrypted, of course... except I was the acting network administrator. Score one for the network being far too big for anyone to lock down perfectly.

There were files, emails, and logged communications from practically everywhere, and a few places I'd never even heard of. We weren't military, or governmental, but we did business with them all. VPs discussed third-world coups over lunch, accountants logged tax tricks that were clearly illegal but heavily obfuscated and ready to be pinned on patsies hired for the task of taking the fall, and soldiers emailed their families back home.

That was the thing about these memos and emails. Unlike the swarm of crap on the Internet, they were _real._ One soldier's email chain ended two months ago, and the subsequent data linked to his widow trying to get money out of our insurance department despite their best efforts to renege on the payout. These were _real people_ being churned through the system. Was that widow asleep somewhere right now, ready to fake her way through Christmas morning with her daughter, or was she still awake, with anger and despair gnawing at her?

I mean, I had access... and the system was the system... and I knew it was inevitable. Alone in here ad infinitum, I'd eventually do it. Why not now?

I closed the widow's insurance payout ticket, taking it away from the current person assigned to it, then reopened it without an assignee... a simple matter. With a few manipulations, I created a fake employee in a department with a redundant sounding title. Then, I sent it on over to pay processing... doubled the amount... and marked it as Approved. It was nothing to a gigantic corporation, but everything to a single person. As a final act, I deleted all traces of my actions.

Huh.

That was it.

Maybe what I'd done was illegal, but it seemed... the morally right thing to do. She'd be getting an email confirmation before she woke up. That seemed like a Christmas present and a half.

And I couldn't be caught, in any case. There was simply no trace in the system that I'd had _anything_ to do with it, and hardly anybody knew I existed anyway. The system was the system, and if, through some impossible feat, a mid-level manager noticed an issue, he'd simply pass a ticket up... to me.

And that ticket would most certainly be lost in the shuffle.

I felt oddly great for a little while, until I realized... everyone's asleep. If ever I had an opportunity to do more like this, and get away with it, it was now.

I delved deeper into the files, looking specifically for military communications with signs of distress.

Somehow, I think I knew it the moment I saw it. The message log hung there in emptiness - alone, like me. Nobody had read it, and nobody was even aware of its existence. It was encrypted in a unique way, and hidden by rare system priorities. No users had the rights to access it, and the file had no traceable origin. This was a message intended to be read by no one.

But the access process _did_ exist within the system, even if nobody actually had the rights to it.

I couldn't resist.

***

01101111011101010111010001100111011011110

11010010110111001100111001000000110001101

10111101101101011011010111010101101110011

01001011000110110000101110100011010010110

11110110111000100000011011110110111001101

10001111001

You'd be surprised how easy it is to play chess against yourself. The game is uniquely suited to cold decision-making, and your next move doesn't depend on prior states. You can spend a few hours reading a book, come back to the board, and legitimately make a move in your own best interests before doing it all again as the opposite player.

Of course, your opponent is perfectly matched to your level of skill, and there's no bragging, so nothing really gets decided. I did find, curiously, that black won more than fifty percent of the time...

At some point, I'm pretty sure the human brain forces you to stop doing things you realize are pointless. Once chess became agony instead of welcome distraction, I had only the books left.

And when I'd memorized all the books, I...

I went for a lot of walks. They don't take very long, though.

I've got seven chambers here. One has the shower and the toilet, and the marks I make in the wall for each day that passes. One chamber has my bed, my books, and a picture on a nightstand. The third chamber has a kitchen area, and a table that serves adequately as a ping-pong arena against my only opponent - the wall.

The fourth chamber has the computers and communication equipment. Screw all this stuff. It's all held together by rubber bands and scotch tape. You know, I think I've finally managed to send a message out somewhere... but I always think that, don't I? This time, with everything going unbounded, with time slipping into time and thought slipping into thought... I really think I've done it. This message is going _somewhere._ It has to be.

The fourth chamber has a wall of televisions and radios, incoming-only. Some goddamn genius got hired to make televisions and radios that couldn't be repurposed to send a message out. I _hate_ that guy. I've been in and out of half of these things, even burrowed into the wall myself, and the crap back there just won't give me a break.

I used to watch the TVs, but they just remind me how cooped up I am. And everyone out there seems to be getting dumber and more outraged at everything all the time. I wish I could shout loud enough for them to hear.

The fifth chamber has, of all things, a couch. What am I gonna do, _have a guest over?_ There are fake blinds, too, always down and closed because they only show onto concrete. Was this room supposed to make me feel a little less trapped? Idiots...

The sixth chamber, offset a bit from the rest by a small tunnel, houses a vast little factory and furnace room that keeps me alive. Air conditioning, carbon scrubbing, an automated hydroponics bay, geothermal power plant, the works... that shit could run for a hundred years all by itself, if it hadn't been made by the lowest bidder.

See, I know I'm not supposed to send messages out. I _know that._ That's the fundamental design of this whole place. Thing is... there's somebody down here.

I mean, I might be losing my mind. I get that. But I can feel the curve of insanity ahead in the road, and I don't think I'm there yet. I really think there's a person in my furnace room. And I _checked._ I went over every crack in the wall, every nook and cranny in the air vents, even re-checked the welded-shut elevator like I do every day: there's no way in or out of this place.

Yet, there's someone in my furnace room.

I can guess what that means for me, and none of my guesses are good. I suppose there's no point in hiding, though. There's literally nowhere to go. And I chose this, so it's pretty much my fault. Time to face the music... and, more supposing - better to die now than to spend forever down here losing my mind.

Actually, not like anyone will get this message in time to do anything. I might as well check it out first.

I crept down that long, small concrete tunnel with the weirdest sense of anticipation. The furnace room had always creeped me out for some reason; it wasn't meant for anything but maintenance access, so it was like a series of mechanical caves and burrows that went on longer than I'd ever reached. It was always breathing and moving and clinking, even during my supposed night hours. I hated it.

So, _of course,_ an intruder had to have appeared there. Anywhere else would have been too simple. Crawling between the water recycler and a furnace duct, I tried to get a long vantage on whoever was back there.

I froze as I saw a shoe move out of sight up ahead. Scraping across cement, it had been pulled forward by someone else crawling through the maintenance tubes. That was it: proof that someone was down here. But how? Was... _was there a way out?_

"Hello?!" I shouted, immediately taken aback at the ragged and unfamiliar sound of my own voice.

The only response came in the form of someone scrambling away in the distance.

"Please, I won't hurt you," I yelled out.

Eventually, I retreated back to the tunnel. If there _was_ somebody in there, they'd have to come out sooner or later. I pulled the couch over, tilted it up on its end, and used it as a makeshift barrier in the tunnel. It could easily be moved - but it would make a noise.

I moved through my chambers carefully, noting the placement of every object. Nothing had been moved, and I could find nobody around, so the possible intruder still had to be in the furnace room...

I decided to get some algae paste from the kitchen and eat. There was really nothing else to do. I couldn't risk crawling around in there with some stranger on the loose... here, I'd at least have a clear view of what I was up against.

The alarm went off as I was eating. Distracted as I was by the thought of an impossible intruder, I was initially terrified... but, then, I sighed, and went to deal with it.

How long did I wait? A half hour? An hour? It didn't matter. Eventually, a voice radiated down the tunnel. "Hello?"

In the kitchen, I sat up straight.

It was a woman!

Practically running to the sixth chamber access, I poked my head around the edge of the couch. "How'd you get down here?"

I didn't see anybody, but her voice came from right around the opposite corner at the end of the tunnel. "Where are we? What is this place?"

Processing her words, my head hurt a little bit. It'd been a long time since I'd heard anyone speak. All that mattered was getting out of here... "How'd you get in here?"

Whoever she was, she paused. "I'll tell you, but only if you tell me where we are."

Court-martial me if I ever get out of here - what was the use of hiding the information? "We're eleven thousand feet underground."

Another pause, then a confused tone. "Seriously?"

I could leave, I could leave, and I could start a new life... "How do we escape?"

"Just one second," she replied instead, her tone growing more commanding. "What is the state of Earth?"

I sighed. It was just an overseer using the comm system to simulate an intruder. Had I imagined the shoe? Or perhaps it was an adjunct, testing me. I hadn't heard from any of them in over a year, but they'd been bound to check in sooner or later... "Looks like business as usual in the TVs. Radio chatter seems normal, too. A few wars going on, but nothing out of the ordinary."

"Is that so?" She stepped out from behind her corner hesitantly.

Holy crap - she _was_ really down here! A brown-haired woman in her early thirties crept down the tunnel. She wore unfamiliar clothing, but seemed otherwise normal. "You're not armed, are you?"

I looked her in the eyes across the edge of my couch. "Why would I be armed? No one should be able to get down here."

She approached me cautiously, and I retreated a chamber. She slowly moved the couch out of the way and entered my space proper.

As she looked at me, I suddenly felt very self-conscious about my thickening stubble and unkempt hair. "Sorry," I told her. "I haven't had visitors in a long time."

She circled around me, checking out each chamber with narrowed eyes one by one. Though I followed her from room to room, she never completely turned her back to me. We stopped outside my bedroom, and she did not enter the bathroom area. "What is this place?"

"My prison," I laughed. "Can we go now?"

"Are you a prisoner? What was your crime? What justifies burying you eleven thousand feet down?"

It occurred to me that she really had no idea where she was. This wasn't an act. What if she chose not to reveal her method of entry? "Oh... oh no, I was joking. I'm... I'm military."

She set her jaw. I don't think she believed me.

"Here, come here," I told her, going back to the fifth chamber. "These TVs... I watch the world here." I touched a device. "I listen... to the radios... see?"

She remained at the edge of the chamber, watching me warily. "Why?"

What could I tell her? Hmm... "There's a problem, see. It, um... it's like this. Say there's aliens. They want to take over the Earth for whatever reason. They're assholes, right? Except if they've got brains, they'll understand."

"Understand what?" She slowly moved around the edge of the room, drifting toward the direction of the furnace room tunnel.

I could tell I was losing her. "Say there are monsters, too. Shit, I don't know. Mind-controlling parasites. Things with eerie eyes that'll eat you alive. Or one that, like, rips out of your _bones._ Seriously. Your bones. Fates worse than death. Anything and everything."

Her eyes went narrower, and she stiffened.

"No!" I told her, highly aware of her body language. "I'm not saying this stuff exists. _I_ don't know. Some people do, though, and some people are scared out of their goddamn minds. So if I see, on the TV, that people are in trouble... that those aliens are attacking, or stuff is _getting_ people, or anything that seems to be condemning the human race to fates worse than death... well, then I give them the better option. I give them... _just death._ "

The glimmer of understanding grew in her eyes.

I decided to push the offensive. "Yes! I can tell you get it. Aliens can't take us over if we threaten to kill ourselves rather than surrender. And we can't be trapped in fates worse than death if we kill ourselves first." I moved along the wall, touching embedded electronics. "All this... all this... it's attached to every single nuclear weapon in every single country all over the world."

"That's why you're so far down," she breathed, taking in the logical madness. "None of those forces can find you, or reach you. They can't stop you from activating the... doomsday suicide pact."

I nodded excitedly, my eyes wide. "Right? Right?! That's what he said, when he brought me down here. _The only defense we have against nightmare is the power of self-sacrifice._ That's our mantra." I thought about that, and... my hope slowly began to ebb as I realized something. "If you're not with them, then who are you? I haven't heard from my commanding officer in over a year."

"The TVs look fine..." she answered.

"They could be faked," I countered. "They're just signals. If the politicians told the enemy - whoever or whatever the enemy is - and the politicians _would_ have told them, because the doomsday suicide pact is useless unless the enemy knows about it - you know, Doctor Strangelove style - then those signals could easily be fake. Everyone on the surface could be dead right now, or being kept alive as brains in jars, or being enslaved."

"Then how do you know anything at all about the situation up there?"

I glared at her. "My CO is supposed to check in every so often over a secure line. I haven't heard from him in over a year. The equipment _broke._ Goddamn government contractors! But I fixed it. I thought I fixed it. But he's still not out there."

She looked down at my uniform for a moment, thinking. "If the signals are being faked, then the enemy up there has complete control of the planet, and masterful deception abilities. In that situation, would you detonate the system and destroy all life on the surface?"

I nodded. "In a heartbeat. If They killed everyone, or enslaved them, or worse... well then They can all go to hell."

"What if there are still human beings fighting for survival?" she asked, her tone quiet. "What if there's even one person left up there?"

I smiled weakly. "All thoughts that I've had. In an endless mad cycle. Over and over. Every day. The fate of the world literally rests on me." My gaze drifted. "Can you please take me out of here?" My hope rekindled in a burst of warm fire as she finally just nodded.

"Alright. No man should ever have to make that choice, let alone by himself."

Almost sobbing, I nodded in agreement.

She began to move toward the access tunnel when red lights began to blare and a loud noise echoed through the chambers. "What the hell is that?"

Why did it have to happen _then?_ I was almost out! Despair coiling around my heart, I carefully walked to the seventh chamber in my underground bunker. The heavy metal doors slid open in response to my handprint, and a single button lay within. Above, large red numbers counted down. 21... 20... 19...

Coming up behind me, she studied the room, and shouted over the alarms. "What _is_ this?"

I said nothing. Instead, I pushed the button.

The alarms ceased, and the chamber slowly resealed itself.

Standing outside, I could only look at the cold concrete beneath my bare feet.

She figured it out on her own. "It's not something you activate, is it?" she asked, her words horrified. "It's something you _don't do._ "

I nodded absently. "The alarm goes off at random three times a day. I have sixty seconds to push the button and stop the process. If I'm dead - if the forces worse than death have managed to disable or kill me - then it'll go off automatically. That's the only way to be sure."

She backed away from me. "I can't take you with me..." She began moving down the service tunnel backward, her eyes on me, as I slowly followed her. "God... I can't take you with me... how long have you been down here?"

She'd have known if she saw the bathroom, and the thousands of marks on the walls that each marked a single day. She shook her head for nearly ten seconds, probably trying to comprehend what she was condemning me to. "I'm so sorry..." She slammed the door to the furnace room behind her.

Just like that, I was alone again. Had I ever really had company? Had I ever really _had a guest over?_

I did eventually manage to get through the door, but there was no trace of her by then, and no trace of an escape route.

I knew, then, that I was going insane.

What if the signals are fake? What if they're not? What if there's _one single person_ still alive and fighting for the fate of the human race? What if there isn't, and I'm alone on a dead world? What if the surface is covered in slimy, horrible, extradimensional creatures? What if it's a utopia up there, and some horrific series of bad-luck mishaps have cut off the line to my bunker? They could be drilling down to rescue me even now - if I just had a single communication, a single message, a single voice... if I just knew _something...!_

But I didn't know.

And I couldn't go on.

Court martial me if you can. I decided to let the timer run out at the next alarm.

I sat there staring at the button, letting the alarms blare, letting the red lights flash. I held the picture from my nightstand close.

10... 9... 8...

I wouldn't even notice a difference down here, would I? The surface could be obliterated by a hundred thousand nuclear explosions, and I wouldn't feel a thing eleven thousand feet down, would I?

3... 2... 1...

I took in a deep gasp as the timer actually hit zero, and a much louder alarm began going off. Deep in the walls, something began to move, vibrating the concrete beneath my feet. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, it was actually happening! A single number blinked on the screen above.

0... 0... 0...

What now? Oh God, what now?

The words _Final System Initiation_ flashed above, and then new numbers appeared.

60... 59... 58...

So it wasn't really only sixty seconds! I thought that was always cutting it a little short. I laughed out loud, barely hearing myself over the incredibly loud alarms. What was the louder alarm even _for?_ There was no way to sleep through the first set... unless...

The proximity alarms...

The vibrating beneath my feet...

Why would anything vibrate _here?_

Running out to the other chambers, I heard a loud drilling sound coming from somewhere above. Dust drifted down from the ceiling. They were drilling me out! Were they bringing down my replacement? Was my shift finally over?!

Breathing hard, I ran to the button and slammed my hand down on it.

It stopped at 6 seconds.

The alarms all ceased, and the door to the seventh chamber slid closed once more.

Laughing happily, I moved back out into the other rooms.

I frowned.

The drilling had stopped.

It was eerily quiet once again.

Confused, I waited.

It wasn't until I'd done the same thing for two more alarms that I realized what you bastards did. You added fake proximity alarms and fake drilling vibrations to the final initiation. They're randomized, too, so I can never be certain they're fake. Every time I feel like giving up and letting the end come, letting all the bombs go bright... I can't. Because maybe _this time_ I'm being rescued at the last second.

Maybe _this time_ the drills are real.

I laugh a lot these days. I'm laughing all the time! The woman could have been a hallucination, or not; the signals could be fake, or not; the rescue could be the same old trick, or not - who knows?! It's the ultimate joke! And you've played it on _me!_ If you want to know how I feel about it, you know where to find me! I'll be here, screaming your names! A Merry Christmas to all of you, straight from hell!

And I'm here in the flames already, waiting for you, laughing...

***

I finished reading the message log with a terrible sinking feeling in my heart. What the hell was this? Some kind of joke? The file's details said it had been made today. In fact, the last few lines had been added _as I'd read it._ But where was it coming from?

Where did this file originate?

This couldn't possibly be real, could it?

Was there a poor and tortured madman underneath the Earth right now, with the power to destroy everything at his fingertips? I could imagine some sort of ridiculous budget cutback eliminating the department that had overseen him. If the project had been kept secret, would anyone even know what had been defunded?

Holy crap... I couldn't find the source... all I could do was hope that this was a Christmas joke being played on me for my off-hours browsing habits... or, if it was real... I could only hope that this unknown soul would hold out. And for how long? Indefinitely? Did all our lives hinge on the lonely suffering of one solitary man?

In my half-dark and very isolated server room, I couldn't help but feel for him. Merry Christmas to you, wherever you are, friend...

***

The Desolate Guardians saga continues soon. Follow the coming release, and others, at MattDymerski.com.

