 
THE EVENT

and Other Stories

by Jon Sauve

TABLE OF CONTENTS

STORIES

1. Disco Lights

2. The Stretch

3. The Awakener

4. Happy Birthday Land!

5. The Event

6. Portable Hyperspace

POEMS

1. Interstellar Jump

2. When the Light Turns On

3. In Moonlight

4. I Don't Exist

5. An Hour Before the End

DISCO LIGHTS

The helicopters are swarming everywhere. The people from the news are all around, waiting, recounting the same information again and again to new viewers as they come; the door will be opened in ten minutes. Nine minutes. Eight, seven, six, five...

The door had been found a week before by a demolition crew working on an old parking garage. It had been set _inside_ the wall, under three or four inches of concrete. The original builders were contacted, the blueprints procured, but as far as anyone knew the door should not be there.

Everyone was prepared to ignore it. Break it down, they said, let's get on with our jobs. But there were the sounds, and the lights through the crack. Anyone who got within ten feet of the door keeled over in pain. There were headaches, stomach aches. Dental fillings cracked, eyes began to burn, hands trembled.

The door was marked as a health and safety hazard, and a hazmat crew was brought in to deal with it. One of them made it all the way up to the door and actually touched the handle. He woke up in the hospital later, having suffered a mild heart attack, and claimed to have heard voices telling him not to open it.

Open it? How could anyone open it? There was just concrete behind it, wasn't there?

Someone had the idea of sticking a camera in through the crack below the door, where the lights came from. The camera failed almost immediately. All it managed to capture was a single dark frame, smeared across the middle by a vaguely human form.

After that everyone took a big step back. Word had started to spread about "the door" and people came to see it. Civilians at first, then news agencies. Finally, two days before the door was opened, the government showed up on the scene and barred everyone from entering. For their own good, they said. But they recognized the need of the masses to see what lay beyond the door, and set up live cameras for the "grand opening," as one reporter put it with a smirk on his face.

What might be behind the door? Nothing, some said. Just some Christmas lights and a set of speakers blasting out weird noises. Maybe some sort of microwave device that messed you up when you got too close. Just a weird prank by the builders, maybe by some disgruntled person who had quit right afterward and disappeared.

The cameras were set up. Four people stood there, ten feet from the door. Medical personnel were on standby, ready for anything.

"If one of us suddenly explodes," said one of the openers, "cut the cameras, alright?"

They approached the door. At eight feet the woman on the right started to feel it, even through her lead suit. Just a weird sort of feeling, like you get when going through a loop on a roller coaster.

As they got closer they all felt it. Waves of something hitting them. There were the sounds, and the lights, stabbing out from under the door.

"Opening in ten... nine..."

Thus went the countdown, and the openers kept going. Four of them, fighting a sudden and extreme sensation of illness and foreboding. They did their best, and reached the door at the count of two. They lingered for five or six more seconds. Someone reached out tentatively for the handle, then let their hand fall back down.

"I can't," he said. "You do it."

The woman on the right seemed to think he was talking about her. With a spasmodic flick of her hand she grasped the handle, turned it, and pulled.

It was all darkness beyond. The city followed into darkness an hour later. But for several days afterward, there were screams as the last of them died.

They should not have opened the door.

Four days later, a man named Lonnie Howell was crouched at the foot of an escalator in a department store. He was ranging far right now, way _too_ far; his shelter was six blocks away, six long and shadowy blocks. He had to wait here, staring out through the huge windows at the front of the store, and pick his time to run.

The wraiths kept going by. Invisible flying men, who cast a shadow of dancing rainbow lights. That was the only way to see them. Their shadow.

The wraiths went past, flying along the street, lights curving up and over cars and bus stops. They were stalking the dark city, seeking out the final survivors. For all Lonnie knew, _he_ might be the last.

Maybe it would be good to get out of the city. Maybe not. Lonnie had climbed up some of the taller buildings around, getting onto the roofs and looking out. All dark beyond the city, too. Even now, at about eleven in the morning, just darkness. Except for the wraiths.

Lonnie hadn't seen one for a little while. He'd been timing them. It seemed like one passed by every ten minutes on average. So he would wait for the next one, let it go by, wait a little bit longer, then make a dash for it. It could work; it had worked before.

Here came the lights now, flashing and blinking down the street. Lonnie froze, pulling back a little behind the potted plant he was crouched at. He twitched a little, and the cans in his pack rattled against each other. The wraith kept going. Lonnie counted ten Mississippi, got up, and booked it.

The cans rattled and rattled. They sounded ridiculously loud, especially when he got out onto the street. Lonnie weaved around cars, hopped over downed bicycles, skirted the messy remains of his fellow men. Back to sanctuary. Eventually, they would find him even there, but maybe he could live a bit longer. Maybe he could even think of a plan.

They all screamed when the wraiths got to them. Every last one screamed their heads off, as if that would save them. Lonnie bet the wraiths liked to see fear in their victims, and so he had decided that, whenever they got him, he would clamp his mouth shut and just act all bored. That would teach them.

Actually, no it wouldn't, but Lonnie wasn't going to die that other way.

There was a peculiar twilight in the city. Objects were only visible at a distance of ten feet. It helped that Lonnie had sharp reflexes, or else he'd be tripping and falling four times a minute. Plus he had traveled this way a few times, and sort of had a feel for it. Had it really only been four days?

Lonnie let himself go into his thoughts. It was either that or lose his mind with fear, alone like he was on the dark street. He started to imagine what he might eat tonight. He'd found a can of pasta sauce, and he already had a few packages of instant noodles. They were Asian flavor, but he could dispense with the seasoning packets and do a sort of spaghetti instead. There was that little bottle of grape juice, too. He could pretend it was wine. There were liquor stores, but those were farther away than he really dared to go.

Here was the laundromat, and the little restaurant across the street advertising four mini burgers for two dollars, plus a beer or a soft drink for an extra fifty cents. Good deal, Lonnie thought. The landmarks meant he was close to his hideout.

He slowed down a little. The road right up here was almost impassible; a bus had tipped over and a bunch of cars had crashed trying to get around it. Lonnie gripped his pack tight with one hand and, with the other, began to scale the cars. How fast could they have been going to end up all piled on each other like this?

At the top he paused and looked around the street ahead of him. Empty and dark, no screams to indicate another survivor gone and a wraith nearby. Just below was the little staircase leading down to a basement video rental place. That was his spot. Home sweet home. He started to climb down.

Weird, he thought. Maybe his eyes were just adjusting, but the street seemed kind of bright now. And maybe a little colorful.

Lonnie froze again. A cold, creeping feeling went up his spine. He looked back slowly, and saw the disco lights coming behind him. The wraith was still a block away, and Lonnie was hidden behind a car. But that didn't matter. If he was on the street, the wraith would find him.

He had a couple of cars to go down yet, and that was a noisy affair. And also the cans in his pack. Lonnie made a quick decision. Caution and quiet be damned, he was running for it. Speed over stealth.

He stuck out a leg and leapt. The street rushed up out of blackness. He could only really see it a few inches before he hit, and had no way of timing his tuck and roll. And it turned out there was some object there, dark and hidden. His foot hit it and folded over. Pain burst in his ankle. Lonnie tried to stand up but his foot wasn't having it. The lights were getting brighter. They were halfway down the block, maybe more. Brighter and brighter still. The wraith was swooping lower now. It knew someone was around.

Lonnie dragged himself along, as fast as he possibly could. He reached the stairs and peered down them. Fifteen steps of cold, hard concrete. Screw it. He grabbed hold of the railing and threw himself down. Rolling, crashing, flipping. His knee slammed against one of the supports for the banister, and the back of his head slapped down hard on one of the steps. His hand twisted under his back. He felt a pop and a rush of hot pain in his shoulder, and a throbbing as his hurt ankle jostled around.

Act bored when they got him. That had been his idea. He forgot all about it now. He was seeing stars, unable to tell what way was up. He was already at the bottom of the stairs, but he still felt like he was spinning around. All he saw was disco lights, dancing around him.

He screamed. And that was the end of Lonnie Howell, last man in the city.

THE STRETCH

The _Apollonia_ cut out of its dock approximately 200 hours after the object had been spotted. In the time between then and now, planning and deliberation had ensued. The council aboard Plano Plato Prime would be outside of its jurisdiction in launching a mission to scout the object; they contacted the Growth and Expansion Project for instructions.

It was decided that a small mission would be launched at first, something that could move fast and quickly detect whether the object posed any sort of threat. The _Apollonia_ was the only docked ship in operating condition. Its crew were among the most experienced available.

Leaving the station at Triple P behind, the ship sped forth to meet the object.

Max Valleis, the captain, got on the coms to remind his crew of their job.

"Remember," he said. "Our first move will be to attempt communication, then we are to identify. Third and final, depending on the outcome of the first two objectives, we are to attempt interception and docking."

Max turned to his second-in-command, Carlene Fullam, and gave her a nod.

Down at communications, Russ Kallidy and Azaleena Trasidro worked back to back, getting things ready.

"Frequency?" Leena said. Her eyes, like those of a hawk, swept over to him.

Russ shrugged, swiping sandy brown hair back from his eyes. "Keep it. If anyone's there, they should pick it up."

They turned back to their work.

Augie, their mechanical engineer, was coming up the hall, wiping his hands on his pants. He went by without a word, shaking his head. He'd been doing that ever since they left Triple P. Russ shrugged at Leena again, and she bit her lip in that way that was supposed to show frustration; all it really did was make her exotic beauty grow by leaps and bounds.

"You know," Russ said when Augie had gone, "one day he's gonna have to say something."

"I wasn't thinking about that," Leena replied.

Russ nodded, double-checking his work.

"What do we know about it?" Carlene asked.

Max rubbed his eyes. "It's a little under five solar radii from us now."

Carlene looked out the windscreen, shivering and folding her arms over her chest. "Yeah, farther out from Triple P than we've ever been. On this ship, anyway."

It occurred to her that, since they were headed out in the general direction of Pluto, this was actually the farthest she'd ever gone in her career.

"Captain, what I meant was..." She rubbed her shoulders, feeling cold all of a sudden. "What I meant was, what is it?"

"That information is fully declassified to the crew of this ship," Max told her. "You know as much as I do, as much as anyone at Triple P or GEP headquarters. Hence the second objective of our mission; identify."

"Aye, sir." She said no more, but she was remembering the briefing they'd received from the president of the GEP himself:

"What we have is an object approximately two hundred yards by seventy-five in size. It is mostly flat, with five large protrusions roughly the size of houses, with a smaller bump at one end. It could be the rubble of one of our own ships, destroyed at some point in the past. It could also be something else."

That _something else_ was what bothered Carlene. Rarely did the GEP speak in anything but absolutes. If it wasn't a human vessel, or the leftovers of one, it seemed there was only one other thing it could be. She didn't say so to the captain or the rest of the crew, but she was sure they were thinking the same thing. What if they, a scouting crew from a small research station, happened to be the ones to make the most important discovery in history?

"Get some sleep," Max said suddenly, making Carlene jump. "When you are needed, you will be woken."

Carlene nodded. It had been over twenty-four hours without sleep, preparing for the mission. She struck out through the ship for her cot. The _Apollonia_ was small, only thirty yards long, and had been built for speed. There was little in the way of comfort; its crew usually didn't have to spend longer than five or six hours aboard her at a stretch.

She could hear Leena and Russ working further up. As usual, Augie was nowhere to be seen. She turned into a small room with five cots, each too short and narrow to provide true rest. She had the advantage of being small, her and Augie both. Leena and Russ must have had a problem getting anywhere close to comfortable.

She curled up and tried to get to sleep.

Augie was coming out of the airlock, rubbing his hands together. Times like this, he liked to keep busy. His heart rate was up a little, and it made his toothache hurt more.

There wasn't much to be done. The _Apollonia_ was in perfect shape; he never let it get in any shape less than that. But it was good to check everything, over and over, just to be sure his standards weren't slipping.

He went quietly into crew quarters. Carlene looked to be sleeping, though very lightly. She was sprawled out, one arm twisted awkwardly behind her head, her left foot and hand hanging down to the floor. She hadn't undressed or covered herself.

At communications, Leena and Russ were bouncing nervously on their feet, feeding themselves with rice and vegetables. Augie went by and neither party said anything.

At the rear of the ship, Augie spent at least forty-five minutes checking and rechecking their stores. Everything was as it should be. All levels were normal. He wiped his hands on his pants and went to rest for a while.

Russ felt something hit him in the back, and heard it splat on the floor. He turned and saw the snow pea pod on the steel, in a nest of thick sauce. Leena was grinning at him.

He looked over his shoulder and moved toward her. They set their bowls down and kissed.

Max didn't often check in with his crew. He didn't often need to. Carlene was fairly new, but he had been riding with the others on this very same ship for several thousand hours of flight time.

But he had seen Leena and Russ before. They made their exchanges brief, at least when they were on the job. He was sure back at Triple P they were much less discrete.

He switched the camera view to crew quarters. Carlene was shifting on her cot, and he was sure she wasn't actually asleep. Augie was there too, sitting on his cot like a bench, his head against the wall and his eyes closed.

Some time passed. Max looked out the screen for a while here and there. Other times he looked around the dash, checking levels and trajectories. Then he switched the camera to rear view, and saw the shape of Neptune growing smaller until it resembled a marble, rolling away into the unimaginable distance.

The _Apollonia_ , the fastest scout vessel in the neighborhood in the GEP's time of need. They would reach the unknown object within the next hour.

By the time he switched back to the view of communications, Russ and Leena were long done with their little rendezvous. They didn't appear to be busy, but he knew them well enough to see they were nervous.

Whatever this thing was they had been sent to encounter, Max had a feeling it would change things.

Thirty minutes later, he woke the sleepers over the intercom. Carlene sprang up like she'd overslept her alarm clock, and Augie got to his feet and walked fast into the hall like he'd been waiting on the edge of his seat the whole time.

Leena and Russ were already beaming their communications out.

The object was still not visible. They would cover a lot of distance over the next half hour, and the object was not considerably bigger than their ship.

"Switch frequency," Russ commanded.

Leena was already doing it.

"Hello," Russ said into the receiver. "This is the _Apollonia_ , a 9-class scouting vessel from the research facility Plano Plato Prime. If I am being heard, please respond."

Leena, the well-versed one of the two, sent out the same message in several other languages. Carlene and Augie started moving up the hall, headed to the airlock to prepare for the inevitable encounter.

Ten minutes went by with no response.

"Captain speaking," a voice said above them. "Communication has failed. Upping speed for identification and interception. Azaleena and Russ, move to the cockpit for the next mission phase."

They set down their receivers and glanced at each other. Identification. It was a harmless word, but what it really meant was to assess danger. The _Apollonia_ wasn't meant for fighting, but she still had some defenses.

Max finally got his first visual of the object. It was just as described, a long, flat rectangle with five large protrusions. Most of it was a dull gray color. It definitely could have been part of the outer hull of a large ship. Not something as huge as the Cathedral, but large nonetheless.

It grew in their vision, more features jumping out at them. No one seemed ready or able to identify. The protrusions were irregular and jagged. Max drew back their speed, inching them toward it.

"Is that..." Russ pointed, then dropped his hand and shook his head.

They were within five hundred yards of it now. Max scanned across it with eyes, taking it all in but not truly seeing.

" _What_?" Leena said.

"Is that..." Russ tried again to tell them what he saw, but failed.

At first the object had been too foreign to comprehend, and now it suddenly became too familiar. What Russ pointed at, and what the GEP had said was house-sized, was in fact a house. Windows, a roof, even a yard scoured down to flat stone. Beyond it was an ordinary street cracked in several places. And four more houses.

"Are those _houses_?" Russ said. " _What_ the _hell_ are we seeing?"

Leena forgot discretion and threw her arms around him.

Max nodded to himself. He picked up the receiver for the intercom and said, "Attention, Augie and Carlene. Identification success. The object appears to be a residential area. Five houses along a stretch of road. Cut cleanly at either end."

"Fire hydrant," Leena said, her teeth chattering.

"And a fire hydrant," Max said, and set down the receiver. The hydrant had exploded, and the water from inside had pooled in solid white ice around it. "I'm going for that end, the one that's clear of houses," he went on. "Any advice for me?"

Russ shook his head.

"Captain, you're going to land?" Leena asked. "Right there?"

"It's certainly wide enough."

Nothing more was said. They all knew the _Apollonia_ could pull off just about any maneuver, but this was something different.

Max turned the ship and swept it along in an arc, using the computer to line up perfectly. He dropped the speed further, and the ship self-adjusted to the object's own trajectory; the screen showed him it was moving in a strange pattern, evident of self-propulsion.

"What if," Russ said quietly, "it's a decoy? Some aliens who might not know a whole lot about us, and they used this to lure us in? Maybe those houses are like the cockpits, or the chambers..."

It was worth speculating on, but they were learning nothing. Max took the ship lower. The houses ahead, three on the left and two on the right, loomed over. Being on any ship out here made you feel small, but now this place was putting things into perspective; the _Apollonia_ was barely big enough for its five-person crew.

The touchdown was gentle, as always. For a moment the three in the cockpit were as still as the houses, staring out the screen. At the other end, the road cut off as cleanly and abruptly as it did down here. Past it, nothing but stars and infinity.

The houses were ghostly shells; even the asphalt road had gone from black to almost white.

"If this is an alien craft in disguise," Max said, "they have had their chance, assuming they are hostile. One of you two, volunteer to go to the airlock and relieve Carlene of her duty. I need her here. Looks like we'll have to start our report right away."

Leena held to Russ even tighter, and he nodded at the captain, his lips white. "Aye, sir," he said, and gave Leena's back a quick rub before breaking away.

Ever since the captain had said the words "residential area," Carlene's imagination had run wild away from her. Augie seemed as quiet as always, in mind and body. He had suited up ahead of her, and was now standing near the outer door, his hands by his sides.

While she was still getting her arms in, Russ came through the door and said, "Carlene, captain needs you with him."

It was a good thing she was hardly dressed.

"So, we're down?" she asked, pulling her gloves off.

"Uh-huh."

"Well then, have fun," she said, slapping her gloves down on the floor. She was out of the airlock before Russ even had a chance to look confused.

Russ watched Carlene vanish before turning to his suit. It was no secret she was using this job on the _Apollonia_ to propel herself to greater heights – she had an ambition to be a freighter pilot for the projects on Pluto and Charon.

"If she wants to be a pilot," Augie said, "she better get used to politics."

Russ hadn't noticed the man had taken his helmet off. Augie was dark all the way around, in hair and eye and skin. He looked like he was about to fall asleep most of the time, but he slept less than anyone else on the ship. And except during jobs like this he hardly ever talked, and even then it was almost always directly to the captain regarding various issues around the ship.

Russ turned back to start getting suited up. "Ah, we'll be here a long time, I can guarantee that. GEP won't let us leave until they have samples and pictures of every little particle here. She'll get her chance." He spoke fast; that was the best way to keep the shiver out of his voice.

Augie, however, made it seem like he landed on streets in the middle of space once a week. He got his helmet back on, and waited patiently for Russ.

When they were suited up and situated at either side of the outer door, Max spoke to them over their in-suit radios.

"Mission moving into third stage. Russ Kallidy, Augie De La Rose, you are to do a cursory search of the street and all five houses. I expect you back here in no more than one hour."

They both waved behind them, at the camera they knew was watching.

"Depressurization will proceed. Please double check suit integrity."

They checked and waved again.

"Airlock depressurization will commence in five, four, three, two, one."

Russ felt nothing, but he was still shifting on his feet. Augie was as still as a rock, even as the outer doors opened.

Not more than ten yards outside the airlock, the street cut off, ending about as totally and absolutely as something _could_ end. Augie headed out, and for once showed something of his own feelings, taking short steps and letting his hand scrape along the wall. When there was no more wall, he turned sharply and moved away from the edge.

Russ came out, untying a link from his belt and handing the other end to Augie. When he was secure, he stepped over to the edge. He had thought years of doing this sort of thing would have turned his nerves to diamond, but he felt that old chill come back as he approached the brink.

Looking over the edge, he quickly gauged that the street, at least at this point, was about twenty feet thick. There were several metal and plastic-like pipes visible, cut cleanly. The rest of the material was hard to tell. It was either dirt, compacted to steel hardness, or something that was designed to look like dirt.

"Record new log, start picture feed," he said, feeling his own hot breath against his face. There was a little click to tell him his command had been recognized. He described what he saw, then said, "Close recording. Halt pictures. Send to _Apollonia_."

Another click, and the message was probably already being listened to up in the cockpit. Augie pulled him back, then returned the link to him.

There were two clicks in the helmet. Max was now watching live through their in-suit cameras.

"Russ, Augie," said the captain. "Good. Now move on to the first house on my left."

The house seemed normal. There was a sidewalk leading up to it, a little porch. But other than the obvious, there was still something strange about it.

"It's old," Augie said suddenly. "Looks like something that would have been built centuries ago."

Through all the gray, and the degeneration the house had gone through during its time in space, it was hard to see. But Augie was right. The architecture and materials were something out of the very early 21st century.

"Noted," the captain said. "Proceed inside and search the rooms."

They went up the sidewalk. The doorway was empty; the door itself was long gone. The glass from the window frames had long since vanished as well.

"It's dark inside," Augie said, leading the way. "I see some small shapes all over the floor."

His utility light came on, and the shadows inside swirled and parted. The wood floor had been scoured away to its lighter bottom layers and looked incredibly weak. In Earth gravity, they probably would have gone right through.

Since Russ was a good foot taller than Augie, it was easy to see past him. They simultaneously realized the identity of the objects Augie had seen.

"Balloons," Russ said. "Latex balloons."

"Not burst?" the captain asked.

Augie laughed. "Only deflated. Seems impossible. They're anchored by ordinary strings to... a table it looks like."

On his way to the table, Augie kicked the balloons; the wrinkled little sacks drifted up as though they were full of helium again.

Russ ran his hand over the table. The wood was in bad shape, but not as bad as the floor. He tried lifting it; there was a slight resistance as it tore away from the floor. Two nails through each leg had been holding it down.

"Seeing this, captain?" he asked.

"Yeah. Whatever happened here, looks like it might have been planned for."

One of the balloons slapped against Russ's face shield as he went around the table and into the kitchen area. The tiles looked like they'd been shredded by a massive pair of claws. The sink was dented, and there were parts where the damage had gone straight through, tearing long gashes. The tap was gone, leaving a ragged metal stump behind.

"Sink, highly damaged," Augie noted. "Tiles, same. Moving to the next room."

This area, which Russ guessed had been the main entertaining space, was completely empty. The floor was bare cement. At the end, sitting in an open fireplace, Augie found a green glass bottle. It looked like it had held between one and two liters. There was some deformity to it.

There was a bathroom just off this area. The fixtures were gone, the bare pipes sticking out of the walls. Something had been smeared on the floor. Inside the medicine cabinet - the glass of the mirror was bubbled and warped, Russ noted – was a single plastic bottle.

"Looks like a bottle used for medication," the captain told them. "Is there still... A label! Is it legible?"

The paper label had been covered by a protective plastic, and the writing was mostly clear.

"This was prescribed to a person named Rodolfo De Acosta," Augie said. "The prescribed drug... hydrocodone acetaminophen." He struggled over the words. "From a Doctor Karl Ryan. Take one every five or six hours, as needed for pain." He lifted the bottle, shaking it to see if anything was inside. Russ noticed something in Augie's face; something had deeply surprised him, even beyond what Russ and the captain were feeling.

"Set those back where they were," the captain said. "Move on to the next room."

"Hello?"

"Yes, Augie, Russ, are you still with me?"

"Affirmative, captain," Russ said.

"What was the hello for?" Max asked. "Have you found something?"

Augie was just closing the cabinet again. "Russ?" he asked.

"One of you said hello," said Max.

"I heard it, captain," said Russ. "But it wasn't me."

"Me, neither," Augie replied. "And it didn't sound like Leena or Carlene."

"They're both right next to me." There was silence for a moment. "Never mind," the captain finally said. "Must have been interference from... another ship. Move on to the next room."

The next room was smaller than the one with the fireplace. There was one window. The floor was wooden here as well. A desk sat against one wall, and Russ could already see the long nails holding it down.

"The drawers are still here," Augie said, grabbing hold of a handle. "Stuck a little."

The drawer gave way, and a little roll of yellow paper floated out. Augie snatched it out of suspension and unfurled it.

"Writing is good," he said.

"Received, Augie," said the captain. "Please read the text as you see it."

"Aye, captain. I quote..." He paused for a moment, clearing his throat, as if the text were embarrassing in some way. "I quote, 'I always see them kissing and holding each other. They think I'm a freak. I think she wants him to kick my ass. I don't think I can fix this one, not this time. Maybe I should invite them over to a party and show them what's in my basement.' End quote. Well, that was odd."

"A bit," the captain agreed. "I think we all know where to look next."

The basement stairwell led straight down off the dining room, to the right of where they had come in. The only intact door in the house, as far as they knew, was at the bottom, and it was double locked.

"I can get this open," Russ said with a smile.

"Don't," Max said. "Next party will leave with proper tools for the job. As curious as that note made me, I don't want anything damaged."

"Aye, captain. Augie and I will head upstairs."

The stairs were in worse shape than anything else, with great holes and gaps in them. At the top, they found themselves at one end of a short hallway. The roof was torn open in places, and they saw the stars beyond.

There were two bedrooms and a bathroom. Not much of interest was found in any of the rooms, except for more drugs in the medicine cabinet.

"Not for mister De Acosta this time," Augie said as he read the label. "And from a different doctor, Abel Pollia. These are for a woman named Tertia Araneta, something called misoprostol. There's a date. November, 2001. Wow."

"Good," Max said. "If you believe you have thoroughly searched the house, you may move on to the second one. I'm going to have to leave you two for a little while, send everything in logs and keep up a picture feed for now."

"Aye," they both said, and then they were alone.

They moved out onto the street. The _Apollonia_ looked smaller than ever now. The interior of the cockpit was visible. Leena gave them a little wave, but Carlene and the captain were busy with something.

Russ blew a kiss to Leena and she caught it and held it to her chest. Augie seemed to ignore the exchange, but Russ knew he never missed anything.

"What do you think, Russ?" the man said. "Next house on left or right?"

Russ looked up the street. "Left," he said. "Seems natural."

The next house was structurally identical to the first, at least from the outside. Russ began his feed as they approached the doorway. It was darker inside than the first house, and they had to dial up their lights.

Something hit Russ's face shield. A warning beep sounded. He drew back a few steps, shining his light across the room.

"Why is it so much darker in here?" he said. "What is _that_?"

There were things floating all around, small whitish objects. Augie reached out to grab one, turning it around inside his own beam of light.

"Teeth," he announced. "They're all teeth."

Russ looked around, performing a rough estimate. "Has to be at least a hundred here, probably more. Record new log. The second house on the left, at least this dining or kitchen area, is full of teeth, at least a hundred of them." He reached out to wave the teeth aside. An incisor wheeled off through the front doorway and into the street. "Close recording. Send to _Apollonia_."

"This is getting strange," Augie said.

"Like it wasn't already." Russ shined his light at a cabinet that had detached itself from the wall and had now drifted into the corner. "Search through that. I'll see what's in the next room."

"I'd like it if we stayed together," said Augie. There was no fear in his voice.

"And I'd like it if we got out of this house sooner rather than later," Russ told him.

They were in agreement. Augie went to his work and Russ to his.

The living area was empty but for a box made of some soft fibrous material on the edge of disintegration. It was closed by four flaps overlapping each other. Russ gave the box a shake, and felt something hit the side. He opened it, carefully, and reached in.

"Found something," he said. "Looks like a tool of some kind. A drill? Ah, here are the bits. Augie, you get that?"

"Hello?"

"Read you, Augie. Something wrong with your radio? You're sounding a bit fuzzy." Russ set the drill back into its place. "Record new log. Still in house two. I found a small drill with a case of bits that look to be made of some sort of carbon based metal, though it's been degraded considerably. These were found in a small, torn box in the living area, beneath the big window. Close recording. Send to _Apollonia_."

He took one last look around the area to be sure he hadn't missed anything. "Alright. Augie, come in here so we can head deeper. I'm not going back into the tooth room, no matter what you say."

Augie didn't answer. Maybe he'd found something that had taken his breath away. Russ turned around. There was no light coming from the kitchen.

"I saw you. Hello?"

"Yeah!" Russ said, already heading for the door. "Augie, I read you. Is something wrong with your suit?"

"Russ!" said another voice. "This is your captain. I'm getting bad signals off Augie. O2 and pressure is down. Get to him. I'm sending Carlene and Leena to help."

Russ reached the door. His light found Augie, floating several inches off the floor and struggling to ground himself again. His light had indeed gone off, and his face looked panicked for the first time that Russ could remember.

Before Russ had taken a third step toward him, Augie's light suddenly came back on and beamed into his eyes. The face shield tinted automatically, protecting his vision.

"...god!" Augie said. "Oh my god!"

"Augie," Russ said. "Augie, what happened? Can't I leave you for two seconds?"

Augie just breathed heavy through his radio for a few moments. Russ came over to pull him back to the floor.

"Captain," Augie said, breathless. "Emergency signal to _Apollonia_. Captain."

"I'm already here," Max said. "I don't know what just happened, but your suit's looking normal again. Carlene and Leena are getting suited up."

Augie bent over, hands on his knees. "Radio went out completely. Air stopped flowing."

"Did anything happen directly before?" Max asked.

"Yeah. Russ left." Augie gave him a dirty look, but it was quickly gone. "Sorry. It was nothing to do with Russ. I was looking through the cupboard, and my light just blinked out. That's it."

"Russ," Max said. "Escort Augie back to the ship at once."

"You should call Leena and Carlene back," Augie replied.

"Already have. Come back. You can help me up here. Russ, I'll send Carlene out with you. That is, if you want to keep going."

"Of course, captain," said Russ. "But I'd like to get my suit checked out first."

"Affirmative. A one hour break. You two get back here and get something to eat."

"Aye, sir. One last thing. I thought I heard Augie talking a minute ago, but it couldn't have been him if his radio was out. Interference again?"

"It definitely wasn't me," Augie said.

"Interference," the captain agreed. "I'll look into it. It's not your duty to worry about that. Get moving."

"You're so brave," Leena said, burrowing against his chest.

Russ shrugged. They were in the bathrooms, sitting together on a bench by the shower. There was barely room for him to stretch his legs, but it was the only place without active cameras.

"This is my job," Russ said simply. "I always dreamed of doing this. I always wanted to discover something amazing, or at least weird. Looks like we've got both here."

"Yeah..." Leena looked up at him, her sharp, hawk-like eyes growing softer for a moment. "Do you think Max will send me out?"

"Next shift is me and Carlene. By the time that's done, I'll bet Carlene will still be raring to go and Augie will want to get back out and redeem himself. You don't have to worry for a while."

She shut her eyes. He held her tighter. There was a knock on the door.

"Russ?" said Augie's voice. "I know you're trying to unwind, but I really have to get in there."

Russ sighed and got up to open the door. Leena groaned disappointment, drawing her legs up under her on the bench.

Augie looked like he'd been holding it for a while, but as always nothing showed on his face but a bulging vein on his forehead that wasn't there unless he strained himself. Russ beckoned Leena out, and Augie rushed in with a quick thanks.

"Looks like a number two situation," Leena said as they headed down the hall. "But I never see that guy eating, or really doing anything but checking our equipment and stores over and over. And watching us."

"Huh?" Russ looked at her. "Watching us?"

Leena smiled. "You never notice anything, Russ. I always catch him staring. Maybe he thinks we're just another piece of equipment that's malfunctioning."

"Well, I don't think he cares." They had reached communications; Russ bent down to pick up the shriveled snow pea pod that Leena had thrown at him earlier. "He just likes to know everything that's going on."

Russ suddenly remembered something. He went back to the bathroom and knocked.

"Yeah?" Augie called.

"Hey, Augie," said Russ. "I just wanted to ask if you found anything in that cupboard."

"I did. Some papers. I didn't get a chance to read them before my light went out, though."

Russ nodded to himself. "Alright, thanks. I'll let you know what they say when Carlene and I go out again."

Someone touched his back. Leena had come up behind him. He looked over his shoulder, into her eyes. They told him everything, though she didn't say a word.

"Hey," Russ whispered. "You should try and get some sleep. By the time you get up, Carlene and I'll be back with some great stories. Alright?"

She nodded, drawing him into a quick hug before heading toward crew quarters. Russ stood alone for a moment, wondering if it had been an hour yet. Just then, the cockpit door opened up further down the hall. Max took a half-step out and crooked a finger at him.

Russ was too exhausted to be worried. He went up and let Max herd him in. It hadn't been long enough since he'd seen the stretch of street they had landed on. Now that he was looking out at it from such familiar surroundings, he couldn't believe the things he had found, or that he had even been out there at all.

Carlene was here, going through the images from their picture feed. She was lingering around the series Russ had taken showing the view off the edge of the street. Her finger was tangled in the ends of her hair, and she kept tapping her foot.

"Come," Max said. "Sit."

"It was just a hug," Russ said. The captain had never cared much about him and Leena, but he sometimes got more serious during actual missions.

Max stared at him. "What, you and Leena? I'd give you a hug right now too, Russ, if it were my style." He turned, sweeping his arm at the scene before them. "Look out there. And look at us."

Russ nodded. He kept remembering the teeth.

"This is gonna change some things," Max went on. "We've made a very large discovery. Now..." His expression changed. "We can't let anything we find out there dampen our spirit, but... well, there are troublesome things coming to light."

"Like what? You mean the teeth Augie and me found?"

"More than that. Come over here."

They went to the controls. Max sat Russ down in his own seat and pointed at a diagram on the screen, showing the pattern of a radio signal.

"That," the captain said. "The 'interference' you heard out there."

He played it.

"I saw you. Hello?"

"That," Max said again.

"Can I hear again?" Russ asked. The captain played it again, and Russ listened carefully. "Sounds just like Augie," he finally said.

"The signal is not very strong," Max said. "But I agree, it does sound something like Augie. Of course, it wasn't him. Even if he had pranked us the first time we heard it, which he wouldn't, the _second_ time his radio wasn't even functioning. I have the evidence of that here as well."

"It wasn't Augie," Russ agreed. "Then what?"

"GEP has been checking, and there are no other vessels anywhere in the neighborhood of us. Actually, they specifically requested that all ships keep their distance. So, interference... highly unlikely."

"Still could be."

"What's more, though," Max added, "our radios right now are set to hear only each other, or from GEP HQ on the moon. Private frequency. I didn't know until just a moment ago. GEP went and changed it on us. Apparently, we are temporarily no longer working for Triple P. We are working straight for the GEP."

Russ's mouth fell open. He stared out into the street.

"It wasn't Augie," said Max, "and it wasn't from another ship. You can come to your own conclusions, but I'd like to hear them."

"Someone at GEP messing with us," said Russ.

"They'd have been fired after the first incident and we wouldn't have had a second one."

"Someone from the ship."

"Not like Augie, and again, he couldn't have. Carlene and Leena were here with me for the duration of your and Augie's spacewalk, except for a few short moments between when I sent them to help Augie and when I drew them back. Besides, it didn't sound like a woman to me."

Carlene was still moving slowly through the pictures, but it was obvious her mind wasn't on them.

"From..." Russ shivered and sat lower in the seat. "From out there?"

"The street." Max nodded. "That's the question, Russ. I've been thinking about what you said before we landed, that the street and the houses were a façade created by some alien civilization, or maybe a band of creative and wealthy criminals. I still don't think either of those are it. What I think..."

Carlene had stopped going through the pictures now. Russ shut his eyes, then opened them; now he couldn't get the image of Augie, drifting off the floor and choking in his suit, out of his mind.

"What I think," Max said, "is that this was some independent, off-the-record experiment. Maybe to try and find out how various things degrade while in space. The voice... could be a distress signal on a loop."

"So, it's a ship of some kind?" Russ asked.

"That's my belief. I think there must be an entrance to a lower deck somewhere out there." Max had been pacing, but now he stopped before the windscreen, gazing out with his hands on his hips. "Something must have went wrong with it. Even disregarding the style of the architecture, all of this looks very old. It's been out here a while. If we can get below deck, we'll either find empty rooms or skeletons. But we have to find the way in first."

"This isn't sitting right with me," said Russ. "If it's a cycling distress signal, it would say the same thing each time."

"And it wouldn't be so sporadic. Unless the hardware were damaged in some way."

Russ nodded and got to his feet. "Aye, sir. So, what's the priority of the next walk?"

Max waved a hand. "I'm not the sort of man to get ahead of myself. First, you will finish your exploration of the second house, and then move through the others. I'll send Augie and Leena out in a little while to look into that locked basement. And I have one new objective; keep your eyes extra sharp this time, search for anything that could be an entrance into the lower deck. If you do find it, you are not to even touch it until I give the word. Got that, Carlene?"

She had started looking through the pictures again. "Aye, captain. Whenever you're ready, Russ."

"My suit?" he asked.

"Carlene triple-checked it," said Max. "Nothing wrong with it. But there didn't seem to be anything wrong with Augie's either, so be careful."

Russ nodded and left the cockpit.

Carlene already had her suit half-on when Russ finally came into the airlock. He must have been with Leena. There was a sickly paleness to his face.

"Alright?" Carlene asked, pausing to do up her hair.

He wiped his mouth. "Alright. Let's, uh... let's get suited up."

They did so. Apart from Augie, Russ was the most experienced of the crew in suiting up, and he was finished quickly. Max began the opening sequence as soon as Carlene was ready.

She had thought the pictures and video feed from Russ and Augie would have given her a good idea of the street \- or the stretch, as GEP had codenamed it – but they did not. As soon as she stepped out she felt as if something was pulling her toward the edge, trying to shove her over. She pressed her back into the wall of the ship and slid along it until she was at a safe distance.

Russ was already powering on toward the second house. She followed, trying to suppress the urge to look behind her. But it got the better of her a few times, and she had to give in.

"If you're not fond of a hundred teeth hitting you in the face," Russ said, "you should wait out here."

Carlene looked ahead. They had reached the second house, and Russ was waiting for her near the doorway. "You shouldn't get ahead of me like that," she said.

"You shouldn't fall behind," he replied. "I was moving at an ordinary pace."

Carlene licked her lips, suppressing a rebuttal. She had never liked Russ much, but he was still another human being, and she wanted to rush over next to him. But her scientific mind won over; she paused for a time, looking further up the street. The three houses no one had entered yet stood as desolate and abandoned as they had for centuries, as far as she knew. At the very end there was a small, open metal structure with what looked like a bench inside.

"Captain," she said. "Do you see that? Captain?"

"I'm here, just distracted. Yeah, I see it. Looks like... a waiting area for public transport. Very good. Continue on."

She went to Russ. He stood aside to let her enter first.

"I guess you're setting the pace?" he said.

She ignored him and the teeth drifting past her, instead heading toward the cupboard that Augie had been searching through. She opened it; the door came off completely, and she shoved it aside.

"Here we go," she said.

"Envelopes," said the captain. "Mail. See who it's addressed to."

Russ came to look over her shoulder. "To Karl Ryan. The doctor."

The captain laughed. "Remember that drill you found? 'He' was supposed to be a dentist, I think."

"I guess we know who lived here," Carlene said.

"Did you get anything about the drugs we found?" Russ asked.

"Uh-huh, both of them," the captain replied. "Hydrocodone acetaminophen was a pain reliever. Misoprostol was used for a number of things, most of them disturbing and probably unimportant. Carlene, are the envelopes sealed?"

"No, sir."

"Open? Good. Then it won't matter if you take the mail out and read it. Just be _careful_."

"Aye, sir." She pressed at each end of the envelope to flare the opening, then pinched the paper inside between two fingers. "The letters have faded," she announced as she unfolded the sheet, "but seem legible."

She began to read, and Russ followed along with his eyes.

" _To Mr. Karl Connor Ryan,_

We regret to inform you that your paper was not accepted by our publication. None of the messages you tried to get across reached us fully, we are sorry to say. Perhaps we are just not the intended recipient.

Best of luck,

The S.A. Society of Science and Medicine"

"Got it," Max said. "I'm sending it to GEP to see what they think. The other envelope, now."

"Aye, sir," said Carlene, and she read it aloud.

" _Dear Karl,_

I've tried reaching you over the phone. I even came to your door, and perhaps it was better you didn't answer, because I realize now this isn't a message to give you face to face.

Things are fine here. But I keep thinking of you, and the duty we share, and I can't even enjoy my time off.

But I came to a final decision last night. Final, and forever. By the time you get this in your mailbox, I'll be long gone and you will never see me again. This is the best way. I couldn't stand to hear your voice again.

When we lost the baby, I think it destroyed something in my soul. None of this is right. I told you I could never be happy without you. That is still true, but the thing is, I'll never be happy with you either. I am so sorry about what happened."

"Doesn't say who it's from," Russ remarked.

Carlene looked back at the envelope. "Here. From... what? Tertia Araneta!"

The name was instantly familiar. Max groaned over the radio, then said, "I get it now. Misoprostol. It was sometimes used to induce birth, either in the case of unwanted pregnancy or miscarriage."

Carlene shut her eyes. "Oh, Jesus, don't say that, please."

"It's fine, Carlene. As I said earlier, I doubt any of this is real. If it was an experiment, I'll bet the creators made up this story to give themselves some entertainment. Could have picked something less depressing, though."

Carlene put the letters back, sniffing back her tears. Russ moved away, swatting teeth around with his hand.

"Huh," he said. "What was the bottle doing in De Acosta's house?"

"Who knows?" said Max. "Was that the last envelope? Good. Move on to the next room."

Max leaned back in his seat after giving the instruction, watching on two screens as Carlene and Russ headed past the stairs.

He nearly fell out of it when a loud sound blared through the radio. It was a crunching, grating, static-filled sound. Flinging all the curses he usually kept in when Carlene was around, he reached out to turn the volume down.

"-was that!" Carlene was saying.

"Quiet," Max ordered, slowly dialing the volume back up. " _Apollonia_ , begin analysis on incoming radio signal."

Even without the output of the analyzer to guide him, he could begin to pick out words. They showed up on the screen, known phrases listed one after the other. First, what the analyzer had picked up of their own words. Then, things none of them had said.

" _Apollonia RSA output on designated signal:_

Detected words –

" _What was that"_

" _Quiet"_

" _Watching us"_

" _Everything"_

" _Don't go"_

" _Where is it"_

" _Not a thing"_

" _Give me"_

The analyzer stopped outputting, and there was nothing but white noise. Finally, the signal cut off entirely.

"What did it get?" Russ asked. "Captain, what did it hear?"

" _Apollonia_ ," Max said, "run voice analysis on last RSA file."

The words vanished, whisked away into the ship's records. Others replaced them.

" _Voice analysis complete._

Number of unique voices: 1 male, 1 female

Signal strength: weak

_Broadcast address:_ "

It ended there. The ship couldn't tell where the signal came from.

"Russ, Carlene," Max said. "Focus on the task at hand. I'll work on this and tell you what I have found upon your return. I'm going to leave the feed going, but I won't be responding unless an emergency arises."

"Aye, sir, understood," Russ said.

The room was empty. Carlene looked ready to run back to the ship, if she could. Maybe she was even thinking of hijacking it and getting back to Triple P as soon as possible. When she caught Russ looking, though, she snapped back into her dutiful self.

"Alright," she said. "Upstairs, first?"

Russ nodded. He let her go first, in case she fell; the stairs here had even more holes than they had in De Acosta's house. There was a little more light, however. The roof was almost completely gone.

"Don't look up unless you wanna be sick," Russ advised.

"Yeah, thanks." Carlene used her hands on the walls to guide her. "Listen, captain, if there's something up here worse than teeth and Russ faints, is that an emergency situation?"

There was no reply. Russ just smiled at her back. She was as human as the rest of them, but her motivation would have driven her through a lake of rotting guts, let alone a few human teeth.

"If I do faint," he said, "you'd catch me, right?"

He though he heard a laugh. "Watch your step here," she said, climbing over a hole that had taken out three whole stairs.

Russ paused at the edge of the gap and trained his light down. He was looking directly onto the stairs that led to the basement. They were located differently than in De Acosta's house.

"Shortcut," he said.

Carlene kept on going. In fact, it looked like she started moving faster. Paying him back for earlier. Russ detached from the floor and pulled himself along on the banister, drifting across the gap and up the stairs with barely any effort. He wouldn't give her the satisfaction.

She was at the top of the stairs. He expected her to turn and give him a victorious smile, but she stood completely still, staring forward.

"See something?" he asked.

Carlene took a short step backward, putting out her hand to touch the banister.

Russ reached the summit. The starlight flooded through an empty bassinet, standing crooked on its three intact legs. The covers were torn, drifting above like a tattered flag.

"Bassinet," he said. "Just an empty bassinet. You alright, Carlene?"

"Yeah... Yeah, I'll be fine. Just..."

Russ nodded and went to the bassinet. It was nailed to the floor at its three points.

"Like pulling a toothpick out of a sandwich," he said, wrenching the nails free. "Hey, Carlene, what's your favorite kind of sandwich?"

She didn't say anything.

"There was never any baby, alright?" Russ tried. "Just made up stories, like captain said. Here we go."

He shoved the bassinet violently into the next room. It slammed against the window sill, then went twirling out into space.

"Okay, Carlene, that thing's gone."

"It's not a thing," came the reply, amidst crackling static.

Russ looked behind him. Carlene was gone.

Max was at crew quarters, about to wake Augie the gentle way, when the alarm sounded. He ran back, coming into the cockpit just as Russ sounded off over the radio.

"Emergency conditions reached," he was saying. "Where'd she go? Captain, can you see Carlene?"

Max sat down. Carlene's camera was out, as Augie's had done when his suit failed. The radio signal to her suit was dead, but he was still getting an emergency beacon off her.

"I don't know, Russ," he said. "I can't tell a thing. Her suit's going the way Augie's did. Find her, find her now!"

Russ turned down the hall. At the last room on the left, on the floor just outside, a shadow was cast across the floor. He moved toward it, as fast as his boots would allow.

Inside, a mannequin stood with its arms stretched toward him. A bright light surrounded it, blurring out its edges. Russ's face shield tinted, and he could now see Carlene behind the mannequin. She was sitting on the sill of a window, grasping for its edges. Her shield had gone full-tint, and he couldn't see her face.

Russ made to move around the mannequin.

"You found her," Max said. "Get her out of that window."

The stars glinted over Carlene's head, and the nothingness past the edge of the stretch yawned below.

The interference came again, the crackling and the static, the ghostly words.

"She did it," they said. "It was her. I know it was, Karl."

One of Carlene's hands gave way. Russ knocked the mannequin over, and it hovered away vertically across the floor, like a dancer. He grabbed her just as her other hand slipped. Her boots weren't touching, and there should be no resistance to his pulling, but she seemed to weigh two or three hundred pounds as he hauled her back in.

Finally, her boots touched and she was back to ground. Her face shield abruptly cleared and the terror on her face showed through. Her light dimmed.

"Carlene, come in," Max said.

Russ could see her breathing hard inside her helmet. Finally she licked her lips, reactivated her radio, and said, "I hear you. I hear you, captain."

"Carlene." Max hesitated. "Russ, Carlene."

"We're here," Russ said. "Carlene, what happened?"

She licked her lips again. "I... I don't know. I was standing at the top of... at the top of the stairs behind you and it was like... a current wafting up behind me. It took me right off the floor. I tried yelling for you, but my radio went out. It just kept carrying me... all the way in here, and it tried to take me out the window..."

Russ looked at the mannequin. It had reoriented itself to face him again, its arms reaching. There was damage to the mouth area that he hadn't noticed before. It made the thing look like it was screaming.

"Carlene, Russ," said the captain. "This is far more serious than I thought. I no longer believe we are fit for this mission. I'm going to talk to HQ and request a replacement mission with a larger crew."

"What?" Carlene said.

"Something just tried to kill you, Carlene. There's something more to this place than old houses. Leena and Augie heard the alarm, and they're on their way out to retrieve you."

"No, captain, no. I'm fine. It was just... Damned if I know what it was, but we're not here to be safe. We're here to discover something. I don't care what happens, this is _ours_. I know you're not a coward, Max."

She said it all with a bit of sweat on her face, but otherwise nothing of her experience made itself evident.

"Captain," Russ said. "I'm with Carlene. We're a 9-class scouting vessel for a science research facility. Zero liability. We do what we do for the sake of knowledge. I say we keep on."

Carlene nodded at him.

There were several moments of pure silence.

"Broadcast. Suited and ready, captain," said Augie's voice.

"I hear you," said Max. "Do you still have your tools?"

"Aye, sir."

"Good. Rescue aborted. Proceed to your original objective. Russ, if you allow your shipmate outside your field of vision again, you're off my crew. Carlene, that goes for you too."

They both confirmed, and went back into the hall.

Augie knew the way. Leena stuck close behind him out of her fear, but he knew she wished he was Russ. He could feel some sort of contempt coming off her.

The balloons were still floating the way he'd left them. While passing into the next room, Augie's eye caught something shoved between the sink and the wall. He pointed it out to Leena, and he knew the captain was watching.

After an unsuccessful attempt to get his arm into the crevice, he looked at Leena and said, "Can you fit your arm in there?"

She didn't say anything, but he got out of her way. After a moment of straining, the shoulder of her suit bulging against the counter, she drew out the object. It was fitted with a strap. Four lenses, two large and two small, connected by flared tubes.

"Scoping object," Max said.

"They're binoculars, sir," Augie replied. On a whim, he looked back into the crevice. "Still something back there."

Leena let the binoculars go and reached back in. She barely managed to pinch the corner of the note between her fingers. Like everything else they'd found, the writing was still legible.

"If you would be so kind, Leena," Max said.

She cleared her throat, and her speech was rushed.

"It says, 'I want to get this down right now, in case something happens to me. There's no fixing this. No matter how many times I go through it, I just can't find a way to put things back. Everything's out of its natural order, now.

'I like to watch them. I watch them from my bedroom. I can get a good view of the street. I saw Fortuna when she didn't think anyone could see her. I saw Karl and Tertia at their most intimate. Something's about to happen, and it won't end good for me.

I've already taken the week off work. I turn 33 today. Maybe I'll have that party, but no one gets to come over. Afterward, I'm going to lock myself in the basement and wait for everything to blow over.'"

Leena's voice slowed noticeably toward the end. Augie shivered.

"In the basement," he said. "Captain, are you thinking what I am?"

"I wouldn't know how you think, Augie," was the reply. "But we all know something is in that basement. No more tarrying; if you see something else, leave it for later."

Leena stood up with a smile, dusting her gloves off. "Let's go, short stuff."

She led the way, at least until she started going the wrong way, then he moved in front of her. The basement stairs seemed darker than before, but maybe he'd just bumped the brightness dial for his light.

The tool on his belt was something used on Triple P by maintenance personnel to open jammed or powerless doors. He stuck it up to the knob, and hit a switch. There was a powerful vibration, one that caused splinters of wood to break away from the door. Augie felt a click, and the door opened by an inch.

"Leena," Augie said, recalling something. A memory, or a dream. "Grab my shoulder. Don't let go."

She did so, and again he could feel the reluctance.

When Augie stepped into the basement, the lights went out and Leena's hand left his shoulder. As he felt the air go out of his lungs, he was unsure whether she had gone or he himself had ceased to exist.

Max leaned forward, staring at the screens.

"Leena," Augie's voice said. "Touch my shoulder. Don't let go."

The door opened. The basement was very dark; the cone of Augie's suit light made little imprint in it. There was a loud static burst over the radio, and Max sat back. The screens went out, and the alarm blared.

"Russ," the captain said. In the background of the transmission, the alarm could be heard; in Max's voice, cold fear. "It's happening again."

Russ and Carlene were in the first room on the right of the upstairs, searching through a pile of ragged clothing and bed covers. When he heard the captain, Russ turned around to see if Carlene was still there. She was, her hands frozen in the middle of turning a shirt inside-out.

"Augie and Leena," Russ said. "Move, Carlene, move!"

The boots allowed them to move at a top speed of around four miles per hour. At the stairs, Russ again purposefully detached himself and pulled himself down. He gained some speed that way. Carlene hooked herself to him and tucked into a ball so she didn't get bumped around.

At the bottom they reattached and quickly made their way into the street. Inside the _Apollonia_ , the top of Max's head was just barely visible as he bent low to watch the screens.

"In the basement," Max said. "They were just entering the basement when they-"

There was a pop, and the captain's voice went away.

"Come in, captain," Russ said. "Testing, testing."

"I hear you, sorry," said Max. "Leena's back, but she's not moving. I'm just looking at the floor. Vitals good. I'll start a beacon."

In a moment, a beeping sounded in Russ's helmet, the frequency of the beeps increasing slightly as they approached the house.

Several things were different, Russ saw, when they entered. The table was overturned, floating several inches off the floor. The balloons were trapped underneath it. The bottle he had found in the fireplace had shattered, and chunks of it were all around. His light caught small specks of glass.

"Watch it," he said. "Try not to get any of that stuff in your suit."

"I think I still have some teeth stuck in a few places," Carlene said.

Russ led the way, finding a path as best he could and swatting the glass away with the thick back-side of his gloves. Carlene followed, her light casting faint shadows through the field of dust.

She hadn't been in this house, but she knew the way from watching at the ship. She took up the front, and paused at the top of the stairs. Her light revealed neither Leena nor Augie. The door was half open, moving a millimeter at a time toward closure. Carlene took a step down.

"Movement on Leena," Max said. "I can hear her breathing."

Russ's beacon was going off steadily enough that it almost seemed a solid scream of sound. If Carlene hadn't already set the pace as fast as either of them dared to go, he would have pulled her out of the way and went past.

"She's down there, I can see the door... I can see you coming."

Carlene held the door aside. The beacon stopped.

Leena was splayed flat, barely holding her head up to look at them.

"Broadcast me, captain," Russ said. "Leena, can you hear me?"

"I can," Leena said. "I can. I'm... still here. Am I still here, can you see me?"

Russ crouched down to touch her arm. "Of course I can. You're still here, in the basement. Captain, how's she looking?"

"Leena herself is fine. Her suit is not. Boots are out. You'll have to link to her and haul her in."

"Augie," Carlene said.

"Augie," Max repeated. "I know I said not to split up, but one of you will have to bring in Leena."

Russ looked to Carlene. "Do it. Leena can keep an eye on you, you on Leena. And captain can watch you from the cockpit. I'll get Augie."

Carlene nodded. "Understood. Leena, did you see where Augie went?"

"No, I... No. Please, get me out of here, please."

"Let's go," said Russ. He went past them, detaching from the floor and pulling his way up the steps. He didn't bother reattaching at the top; he wound his way toward the room with the desk, but Augie wasn't there. He came down briefly to help Leena through the front doorway, then returned.

Upstairs. Russ went up, hand over hand, drifting and pulling. His feet snapped onto the landing, and he straightened up.

Three rooms. Russ made a quick guess and opted for the bedroom on the right. He stepped in, then stopped.

Augie was by the window, staring out into the street. His feet were off the floor. A pair of binoculars was suspended by his right hand. Russ went to him and grabbed hold of his shoulder. The suit crumpled under his grip as he turned it around.

The helmet was empty. Russ let go and felt himself being strangled. A light shined in from outside, casting Augie's derelict suit in a silhouette. Carlene was out in the street, seeing if she could get a glimpse of them through the window. For a moment the new brightness hid the fact that Russ's own light had gone out.

Propelled backwards by his fear, he also failed to notice, until it was too late, that a strange current had gathered around him and was pulling him away.

"Help, help!" he cried, scrambling against the pull to reach purchase of some kind. He went out through the door, his fingers sliding past the frame. "Not me, not me, not me... Captain! CAPTAIN!"

Someone answered, but it wasn't Leena, or Carlene, or Max.

"You," it said. It sounded like Augie, his voice nearly lost in static. "It wasn't... It wasn't you..."

Russ grabbed the banister as the force shoved him down the steps. It tore from the wall, sending up bits of dry plaster and wood like a slow-motion explosion with no sound.

Down into the hall, into the living area, through the kitchen. He went into the street then, and no amount of grabbing could snatch him from this fate.

The women were gone by then. Carlene must have double-timed it back to the airlock.

Russ was pulled away from the ship, further down the street. Max appeared in the cockpit, but for all he could do, he might as well have been on the moon.

Looking backward as the stars and the emptiness came closer, Russ had a momentary fear that he was about to be thrown over. But he suddenly veered off to his right, so hard his head hit the side of the helmet. His heels bounced off the steps of the third house on the left, and he vanished into its darkness.

For a time he was lost. Had his face shield tinted, the way Carlene's had? Was the house even darker than the last?

Time passed. He didn't feel as though he were moving any longer, but there was no real way to tell.

His back struck something, a wall, and he realized he was drifting free. He had been released. He tried his light, but it was still out. His air was still flowing, and the environmental systems were fully operational.

" _Apollonia_ ," he said. "Come in, _Apollonia_. Come in!"

No answer. He reached out. His hand found the frame of a doorway, and he pulled himself through it, aiming downwards. Putting his hands out, he waited until he felt them skim the floor, then crawled along it.

With some traction now, he was able to turn in a circle. There was no light whatsoever, not even the glint of a star. It must be his face shield, then.

For all he knew, he could be out on the street again, crawling his way toward the edge. He turned a random ninety degrees and moved slowly, feeling along, until he touched a wall. Then he moved along it to the left until he found a corner. It bent inward, which meant he was still inside.

Max must have seen where he went. So he just had to wait until they got him.

There was a crackling sound, and for a moment he thought he was about to hear the captain's voice, or Leena's.

There were no words, no talking. The static broke occasionally in strange guttural moans, like a man screaming as some horrible machine transformed him into one of its own.

"Radio off!" he said. "Radio off, radio off!"

The command finally went through. The sound vanished, and with it the tint on his face shield. The light on his suit came back on as well, or it had been on for some time. He was balanced on his fingertips, his head a few inches away from a wall that seemed covered in black mold.

His suit showed normal function. He planted his feet and stood up.

"Radio on," he said with some reluctance. There were no sounds. "Captain, come in."

"Russ!" came the welcome response. "Are you alright, is your suit good?"

"Yes and yes," Russ said, reaching out to touch the wall. "Whatever Carlene tells you about what happened in that upstairs hallway, she isn't lying. The same thing just grabbed me."

"You're in the third house on the left," Max said. "Which room are you in? Can you find your way out?"

Russ turned around. "I'm in the..."

The shadow of someone was cast before him on the wall. He looked down. The light was on his chest. He passed his hand over it. The shadow flickered in the play of light, but otherwise stayed still.

"...basement," Russ finally said.

"She did it." The voice was clearer now. Clear enough that its identity was no longer in doubt. "He put her down here, until-"

"Augie?" Max said. "Russ, you heard that? Augie, where are you?"

The video feed must have cut off before Max could see what Russ had. The empty suit, the binoculars.

The shadow moved, dashing along the wall, growing and shrinking before it finally vanished. In fear, Russ moved not an inch. When the shadow was gone, he moved toward the door.

"Gotta get out of here," he said. "Captain, I gotta get the hell out of here."

Max said nothing. Either the radio had gone out again, or Max was busy with some sudden revelation. Either way, Russ needed to be back at the ship and on his way home.

He didn't detach at the stairs. He held firmly to the banister and climbed, refusing to look behind him. Towards the top, he increased his pace.

There was something under his boot. He looked down. On the floor, a single piece of paper enclosed in a plastic bag. It looked like a news headline. Russ put his back to the wall and read it aloud, in case the captain was still listening.

"'Alleged child killer released. The date... March 20th, 2002. Local woman, Fortuna Cadigan, has been having a rough month.

"I've never considered myself a lover of children," the 62-year-old told us. "But this is plain ridiculous."

On March the 2nd, she was brought into the Private Pass Police Department as a suspect in the killing of four-year-old...' The name is illegible. 'New evidence has come to light to at least vindicate Mrs. Cadigan, and she was allowed to return home earlier today.'"

Russ looked down the hall both ways. The living area on his left, and the study area on his right, were both empty.

"It was..." This time the voice was different, female, highly distorted. "It was her... Karl, you never... there were six left in the..."

Russ went into the living room. To his right, shoved into a corner, there was a toy box for a very young child. The plastic was eaten away, and it was empty.

"...in if you hear me, Russ."

"Captain," he said. "I hear you."

"Finally. I'm using my suit radio. Something must be wrong with the one in the cockpit. Are you alright?"

"Alright," Russ said. "I'm making my way out. We should have listened to you earlier. We need to get out of here."

The response was not what Russ expected. The captain laughed, and said, "Should have caught me when I was still in a chicken-out mood, Russ. I'm coming out with Leena and Carlene now. We're searching those last houses, and we're getting _everything_."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean we're bringing everything we find back to the ship, and back to Triple P. This is our mission, our glory. We're not handing it to some big crew that's used to getting all the good work and accolades. So, get your behind into the street. Leena will be with you. I expect every inch of that house to be scoured."

Russ moved toward the kitchen. "Augie..."

"I didn't see it at first," Max said, his voice expressionless. "I went to see to Leena, but I came back and went back through the feed. Right before your suit went out. I saw."

Russ tried not to remember.

"Shouldn't we stay in one big group?" he said.

"Leena and Augie were together when... whatever," Max replied. "I don't think we're safe, no matter what. Now, when we were on our way out here a few hours ago, if I would have said this mission would be dangerous then, you would have spat on the floor."

"Understood, sir."

"Let's get done fast, and get home fast. We'll meet you in the street."

In five minutes they had joined together. Their radios were set to hear all transmissions from one another. Leena was hooked on to Russ, Carlene to Max; now they could never get more than five feet away from one another without feeling it.

"Alright, we're good," Max said, giving the OK sign with his hand. "Russ, Leena?"

"Aye, sir," said Leena. Her voice was shaking.

"Aye," Russ said. He put a bold arm around Leena's waist and tugged her to him. That made her smile a bit. "On your mark, sir."

Max nodded, his pale blue eyes catching the light from the suits. "Let's get to it," he said. "I'll give us ninety minutes, no more."

They split off. 1st Expedition, which Russ was a part of, headed back into the home where Russ thought he had seen a shadow move. 2nd went into the first house on the other side of the street. Russ paused, looking at those two houses. They seemed taller, skinnier... different, like they'd been slapped together by entirely different hands, working under entirely different minds.

"This is it," Russ said, to no one in particular.

"Just another ninety minutes," Leena said, sounding like she'd just gotten out of a cold shower.

"I've spent worse ninety-minutes before," Russ said, heading into the house and trying to keep his voice cheery.

"Not with me, though," Leena said.

Russ smiled. "No, I guess not."

"Are you alright?" she asked. "After what happened?"

"Yeah. Fine. With you here, I'm just fine. Come a little closer, will you?"

She did so, and they scoped the kitchen a little more carefully. They almost didn't see the loose tile, until Russ's toe kicked it up. There was a little compartment underneath. Leena reached in and grabbed out a little plastic bag. Inside were six tiny hexagons with some gibberish printed on them.

"Pills?" he said.

Leena released the bag and stepped back. She made a little frightened chirping sound.

Russ grabbed the bag and looked at it again. "What's wrong?"

"I... don't know," she said. "Just felt a bit wrong for a second, like I was picking up a stranger's baby, or something."

"You would drop a baby like that?" Russ chuckled, sliding the bag into the large compartment hanging at his belt that Max had brought out to him. "There, I tucked them away. Let's go."

In the living room, the toy box had drifted a bit higher up the wall. They would get it on the way out. Russ went to check underneath it.

"...took them, Tertia, I..."

Russ looked around. Leena had frozen solid, her eyes rolling around the room.

"What was that?" she said.

"What was what?" Max said. "You two flirting? I heard that much. Keep moving."

"More interference," Russ said.

"...hid them before you..."

The new voice was terrible. There was something familiar about it, but it was like no one he could remember. Russ tried to block it out.

"Ignore it," he told Leena. "Just echoes."

That seemed to satisfy her to some degree. They went into the study.

"Russ, where are you two now?" Max asked.

"Last room on ground floor, captain."

"This house is pretty bare," Max added. "We're going upstairs to search the bedrooms."

"Aye, sir. See you in... eighty-five minutes."

The study was empty, but there was one curious thing. In the other houses, there had been one window in this room. But here, two smaller windows were separated by three feet of bare wall.

"Upstairs," Russ said.

They went. Leena had to stop to breathe and calm herself halfway up.

"I can't take this," she said. "I don't like this place, it feels really bad."

Russ touched her arm. "Hey, I don't like it either, Leena. But I need you here to keep me strong, alright? Just having you behind me makes me feel like I could rip this whole house out of the ground and throw it all the way to Pluto."

She sniffed, nodding slowly to herself, her eyes closed.

"Maybe you should go in front?" Russ suggested. "That way, maybe you'd feel strong too."

He reached out and guided her along. She took a deep breath and went up, leading Russ by the link they shared.

"...she... she... she..."

Leena slowed down, her shoulders hunching up. Russ gently prodded her along.

"... she did it... you... you... not your.... not your fault..."

"Oh, shut up," Carlene said. "Just shut the hell up."

"Ms. Fullam," Max said, "keep your head in it."

Leena steadied herself and kept on.

Before she and Russ had reached the top of the stairs, a great shudder ran through the floor. They grabbed the banister, and the shaking nearly wrenched it from their grip.

"Captain," Russ said. "Something's happening."

"I feel it, a little vibration under my boots."

"Full on tooth-rattling over here," Russ replied.

"Where are you?"

"Three steps from the top."

"Get to a window and take a look around. Maybe she's coming to life finally."

Leena drove herself on, even faster. She yanked herself into the bedroom on her right, and Russ stepped up behind her.

An instant feeling of vertigo hit him. The houses on the other side of the street – he could see Max and Carlene's suit lights coming out a second floor window – were tilting away from him. Or rather, the house he and Leena stood in was tilting away. He looked down at the crusted, death-dry earth that was crumbling under them.

He grabbed the link, turned, and started back to the stairs at top speed. Leena had seen too. Static had exploded over Russ's radio, but he could make out her sobs as she chased him.

"Russ," came another voice. Max. "Russ, get the hell out of-"

Russ detached and swam downstairs. Had he made a mistake? Could they have jumped from that window? No, no, he didn't think so. The break was forming around five or six feet from the front door. Too far.

Halfway down, he felt the last thing he wanted to feel; a tug on the link. He looked back. Leena was struggling, her face twisted in horror as she came after him.

"Tuck in, Leena!" he screamed, trying to be heard over the static. But it had gotten louder. "TUCK IN!"

He reattached at the bottom and rounded the corner into the living area. Through the windows, he saw that the house was now hanging at a forty-five degree angle to rest of the street. He started cursing, but he couldn't even hear himself anymore.

Leena started tugging at him again. She was falling behind, and he had to slow down for her. The house kept falling... falling...

He could carry her. But they were nearly at the door now. Just a few more feet.

By some miracle, he thought he heard Leena somewhere inside the static.

"I'm so sorry," she was saying. "I'm so sorry."

Russ reached the door, took a step out, and turned back. His link was at full stretch. Leena was at the end, her boots off the floor, her face shield tinted. Her hand reached slowly and detached the link from her suit.

"No," Russ said. No one heard it.

The house kept falling. Russ looked toward the stretch. There seemed to be no hope. The edge of the street hung eight feet above his head.

Leena was gone.

Russ moved at top speed, bent his knees, detached his boots, shoved with all his might. He went up, and his hands found the edge. He vaulted, sailing head over heels, flipping. For a moment he thought he had jumped too hard, and he was just going to fly all the way over the houses across the street.

He eventually struck a wall. He looked to his right, his vision spinning. Empty space that way. To his left, he saw a house. The house Max and Carlene had gone into.

When he looked up, he saw how close he had come. The shallow slant of the roof began inches from the top of his head.

He bent his ankles downward, then pushed carefully off the wall. The boots attached, and his body whipped around perpendicular to the wall. He took it all the way to the street, then stretched one foot out in front to contact the ground and reorient himself.

In the chaos, he hadn't realized that the static had cleared from his radio. It seemed like Max or Carlene would have said something by now.

"Come in," he said, but either his radio was out again or they were having their own problems. Nothing met him but silence.

He started heading toward the house, but stopped. He looked over to where the ground had fallen away into space. He went over and looked down. The house had gone fast, almost as if it had its own propulsion, and was barely visible now. Even if he went back to the ship, even if he knew how to fly it, by then the house would be gone – like trying to find a grain of sand in a shopping mall.

Thoughts began to torment him, whether he could have done more.

He fought his doubts and went to the house where Max and Carlene were. They should be coming out any second, hollering in their helmets even if Russ couldn't hear. By the time he reached the door, they still hadn't shown.

He went in and searched the ground floor. No one was there, so he went upstairs.

In the bedroom, the one from which he had seen lights shining, an empty suit lay on the floor, face-up. He read the name; Captain Max Valleis.

Slowly, in despair, Russ returned to the street. He stared up at the last house, the second on the right. As he watched, a light flashed past a ground floor window.

Top speed, into the entrance. The house was built differently, a long hall leading into larger, open rooms.

"Whatever you say, Karl."

For an instant, relief flooded into Russ. It was the captain, no doubt about it.

But it wasn't. Just an echo.

"She didn't do it." This time, it sounded like Augie. "None of it was your fault. Maybe it was me..."

"A million years old," said the voice that sounded like Max. "All this is a million years old... And none of them ever figured it out..."

Russ passed by a picture that had managed to stay on the wall, then turned back in shock to look at it. The colors had faded; an old woman, holding a baby. Smiling. Russ touched the picture, and a tattered note fell out from behind it.

He unfolded it gently and read.

"If I rigged this right, this painting will still be here after an earthquake, and way after I'm dead and gone. And this note will be found hopefully by someone who has no idea who I am or what's happening to me as I write it. But maybe that's too optimistic.

So, here I will confess. It will be hard to write, but I promised myself to tell it all. I'm too much a coward to speak it in life, so the next best thing is for someone to read it when I'm gone. It must be told, and maybe some redemption might finally reach my soul.

First, I didn't mean to do any of it. Second, even the foundation of the story is embarrassing and awful beyond belief.

I love that Dr. Ryan. So much that I hate him. I loved him from the first time, when I saw him moving furniture into his house. Indirectly because of him, I found myself jailed. Because of him, I ignored my faithful, loyal husband, even when he was dying in pain and calling for me. I always came to give him his medicine, but I was never truly there for him, in his last days when he needed my love most.

Karl Ryan was health, he was strength, he was immortality. I was insane, and I thought he could give those things to me.

My life fell apart. Finally, I realized I'm sick of waiting around being old. I'll die on my own time, and I hope to cause myself incredible pain before I go.

Mr. Ryan invited me over to miss Araneta's house. He is treating me on the anniversary of my husband's death. Trying to make me feel better. There are some leftover drugs that I can take. The plan is to swallow them before I go in, and hopefully I will die there at the dinner table.

I cannot hope to explain the reasoning to anyone, but I don't feel as if I should have to. It is my death, and I choose when and where and how.

Just so no one forgets me completely, my name is Fortuna Cadigan. I live in Private Pass, Arkansas, but you probably already know that."

Karl shoved the note in his bag and moved on.

"Carlene?" he said, in case his radio was working again.

A light flashed into the hall further down, and was gone again. Russ went to where he had seen it. Here was a door, the only solid door except the one on De Acosta's basement. He opened it.

Carlene was inside, floating in the middle of the room, spinning slowly, her face shield at full tint. Her two air tanks were detached and drifting some distance away.

Russ went to her, all the pain of his loss clearing his mind, and took one of his own tanks off.

"...put her in the basement, and waited," said the voice that sounded like Augie. "Waited for them to arrive. But it was too late..."

Russ attached the tank to her, reached under a flap on her back to the emergency controls. There were air stores built into the suit, small ones. She might have had air to breathe up until moments ago. He dialed the oxygen up a little, increased the pressure. The emergency controls had warning lights, and none of them went off. It meant, at least, that the suit itself was in working order.

Unsure whether or not she was breathing or already dead, Russ pulled her into the street and toward the _Apollonia_.

The airlock was open. He brought her in, shut it, and manually pressurized. He flattened out her oxygen level, then took off both of their helmets.

He bent low over her, putting his ear to her mouth. The air in the helmet always made his ears sensitive. He felt a breath. He stood and got their suits off as fast as he could.

At crew quarters, he drew four cots together, draped four blankets over them for cushion, then put her on with the last blanket over top. He ran to the cockpit and increased the warmth and oxygen level of the room she was in. Then he sat down in Max's chair and fumbled about for a while.

He finally found the landing controls and, after consulting the pilot's guide built into the ship computer, he detached from the stretch and watched it fall away beneath him.

"Come in," he said into the radio. "This is the _Apollonia_ , communications and defense officer Russ Kallidy speaking and I don't care who's listening, just answer."

"Heard, _Apollonia_ , this is GEP headquarters," a blessed voice replied. Clear and crisp. "We've had cause for alarm and have already dispatched rescue ships from Triple P. Please respond."

"Keep them coming," Russ said. "Three of my crew are gone and one is critical. The faster they can get here, the better."

"Acknowledged. They are already flying at urgent speed. How are you, Mr. Kallidy?"

"In one piece. Got all my fingers and all my teeth." Russ sat back with a sigh. "Should I... should I turn on a beacon, or anything?"

"Your ship already has for you, Mr. Kallidy. Your rescuers know where you are, and they should be there soon."

"Thank you," said Russ.

He sank down further in the chair, and stared at the stars beyond the windscreen. There was nothing left to do but wait until they arrived.

THE AWAKENER

Mick stumbled out of the ferns and sat down.

It had been eight days now. He'd walked some, drove some, and had ended up here, four hundred miles from the start. He'd just come from his parents house. They had been the same as everyone else - asleep for all time, waiting for someone to wake them up.

As for Mick, he couldn't sleep if he wanted to, and apparently didn't need it anyway. He had thought of taking sleeping pills, anything to catch a break, but what if he _did_ fall asleep?

He stood up and followed the driveway, back out to the road. He stopped and looked both ways. Things were already starting to change. It had been a wet spring, and it was now a hot summer. The growth was incredible; thimbleberry vines crowded onto the shoulder of the road, strawberries were sending out their runners. Maple seeds covered the asphalt in a thin layer. A huge branch had fallen and gotten tangled in the power line. No one had come to remove it.

The world was quiet. Mick wasn't sure how long everything had kept going, only that the power had just stopped at some point. The first night, with him camped in the middle of nowhere, had been quiet anyway, and he'd put off the distant sounds as thunder. But in the morning he had seen clouds of smoke rising in every direction. Crashed airplanes, trains, cars and trucks.

After he realized what had happened, Mick went to a library to try and find information on nuclear plants. He had planned his route around them, and tried to stay upwind.

Suddenly, as he stood there staring blankly at the road in front of his parents' house, he thought of the girl.

It had been the third day. He'd been searching a suburban neighborhood for possibilities, and he'd picked a house at random. A generally well kept place. There had been chalk drawings along the driveway and sidewalk. He might wake up a whole family. Wouldn't that be something?

He'd gone in and looked around. The younger kids, they looked about five and seven respectively, were both breathing soft in their beds. The parents too. A guy with prematurely gray hair, and a typical suburban wife beside him. Athletic, plastic looking. There had been pictures hung on the walls, all over. So far this looked like a pretty standard family. Perfectly normal, friendly people, Mick guessed. They might be fine to have along.

There had been one more room. As soon as he entered he knew; this was the room of a teenage girl. An acoustic guitar in the corner, a shelf of young-adult novels and school books, a computer monitor and cell phone decked out in strange sparkly things, posters of flash-in-the-pan pop singers. Not an abnormal girl in any way. Then again, nothing special either.

He went over to the bed. She was lying there, a lock of chestnut hair pasted to her brow with dry sweat. She must have moved in her sleep, sometime before the timeout; the covers had been shoved down to mid-thigh.

Mick felt a rush. Something moved in him. He took a step back, then forward again. He reached out his hand to grab the blanket, to pull it up, to stop himself. But his hand jerked a little, the way it did whenever he was nervous, and scraped along the flesh of her leg. She didn't move. She didn't make a single sound. She would never feel that touch.

Mick shut his eyes, his hand hovering a few inches above her.

"Don't do it," he said to himself.

He opened his eyes. How old could she possibly be? But maybe...

Mick found himself reasoning it out. She would never know, it wouldn't even matter, she might be older than that anyway. Arguing, pleading. Just let him touch her here and there, it's no big deal. All the while, some tiny part inside of him was screaming; _don't_.

Mick left the house ten minutes later without waking anyone and feeling filthy. But he hadn't gone too far with her, not so far that time wouldn't allow him to forgive himself. The days had passed. He'd gone into other houses. Each time he saw a woman he felt a stab of fear and fled the room. No women, he promised himself, not until he got over it.

Eight days now. And just the other day, the day before yesterday in fact, he'd gone weak. There had been another girl, and this time she had been so beautiful. He thought he might just look around her room, see if she was any good. Then his thought had become "look her over a bit, see what she looks like." Ridiculous fantasies of repopulating the Earth with his own band of beautiful women flashed in his mind. Mick had always felt he was pretty well grounded in reality, and he felt pathetic. But even so, he couldn't stop the thoughts once they got started.

This girl _had_ to be eighteen. Absolutely had to be. The type of books she had, the fact that her room was actually tastefully decorated. And she lived with only two other people, an old couple who slept downstairs. Probably just her grandparents who were staying with her for a while.

But she looked young. Mick had trouble getting past that, but not too much. And again he left the house without waking anyone, this time a whole half hour later. He'd gone way too far, and since then he'd felt terribly sick with himself. It wasn't about to go away. Mick decided not to try waking anyone for a while. Just let him spend some time alone. He had to get himself straight, and he deserved the isolation anyway.

The sickness was still there. A sort of muck, churning around in his chest.

Here he was, staring at the road. Why him, of all people?

"Wake up." That was all he had to say. Bend over them, put his face up close, and say it. Then they would wake up. He had heard the words himself, in some far-away dream.

Mick went back to the house. He sat in the living room, on the same couch he used to watch his cartoons on. He had his backpack tucked between his knees. There was a bottle of something at the bottom. He could barely see it way down there in the shadow, among the folds of cloth.

The clock on the wall was still going strong with its battery. Tick-tock, tick-tock. Mick watched the hands. As soon as the hour turned he took a quick breath and quickly grabbed the bottle out of his pack. He looked it over, turned it, watched the syrup within sloshing around. Do not exceed four doses per twenty-four hours. Adults, and children twelve or older, should take two tablespoons every six hours. For younger children, consult your doctor. Do not operate heavy machinery or drive a car...

He ripped off the plastic seal and twisted the cap. He gave it a little smell. It wasn't his favorite flavor, but whatever. Bottoms up.

It went down easy enough. He sat there for a while, burped a few times, and waited. He got up to find something to eat, but realized that food might slow the process down, so he went back to the couch.

He started to feel bored. He reached for the TV remote and hit the power button. It didn't come on, and it took a few seconds for Mick to realize why. No more cartoons, then. He chuckled a bit. The stuff was working.

It had been a long eight days. He felt wrecked. He fluffed up a pillow and laid out on the couch. The leather was cool against his skin. It felt a little greasy, and stuck to him a bit. He shut his eyes and tried not to think about anything. It wasn't very hard.

Some time later, no one would ever know how long, he fell asleep.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY LAND!

In a future that everyone hopes is distant but really isn't, in a time when all mankind's evil had long since come back around, a little boy named Cary Pickle was trying his hardest to fall asleep, but he was too excited about his birthday.

In the century before it all began, war had destroyed the face of the Earth. Where forests had been, the soil had been obliterated down to dust and desert by endless nuclear blasts.

Where oceans had been there were still oceans; oceans full of black radioactive slime that claimed anything that touched it, trapping its soul in eternal screaming torment.

Where the land had been rich and fertile, green and verdant, lovely and lush, there was nothing but desolation.

What was desert was still desert, a wasteland, in this new age populated by roving freaks born out of deformed wombs.

For decades, hope was a dead word. Life had once been the antonym of death; now the two were one and the same, synonymous, symbiotic, linked forever. Death before life, life before death, death following death.

Then came the dream, and the hope. The return of life as the opposite of death. At least for a few.

It started with an apple. A sweet apple, juicy and refreshing. Maybe the first that had grown in a long time. A man ate it, and its seeds fell to the ground. Where he stood, filled with new dreams, he decided he would build a city.

Men had long lived solitarily, or in tiny communities. A city could change things, a city could bring people back together.

There, in the middle of the Fetus Wasteland, he laid the first stone, the first log. Others came, and stone and wood were joined by brick and steel as civilization regained its footing.

Together they built Apple City.

Cary woke up and ran downstairs, yelling, "Happy birthday to me!"

His dad had fallen asleep at the table in the middle of wrapping presents, and jerked up with a trail of crusty drool going down his face.

"Huh! Yeah, happy birthday..." Mr. Pickle snapped off a piece of tape and kept going, like there had been no pause.

"We're going to Happy Birthday Land!" Cary danced in the middle of the room. He scooted over toward his dad, trying to get a sneaky look at the presents. "Aren't we, dad? We are, right? When are we going? Dad, when are we going?"

"Uh... Um..."

"When are we going dad?"

"Uh... soon."

The Pickle family lived in Little Europe, on a nice little street with nice families that never got in fights. Cary and his dad stepped out into the street, the latter with a load of presents under his arm, and looked toward the rising sun.

Sunrise came later now. It came whenever it managed to get over the city wall, five hundred feet high. It was coming now, half the red disc bulging and bleeding over the edge. Mr. Pickle looked at his watch.

"Early start, huh champ?" He reached over and ruffled Cary's hair.

"Yeah, dad, sure is," said Cary. "Hello there, Miss Harkadoodle!"

Miss Harkadoodle was walking her dog by. Such a nice old woman. She always gave the kids cookies and told them fun stories. She waved at Cary and a few other kids who were outside.

Mr. Pickle smiled and waved back. "Have a good day, Miss Harkadoodle!"

They got into the car, a Shimmy 300, and drove down the street.

"Hey, look there, champ!" Mr. Pickle announced, pointing at the McDoogles on the corner. "They've got buy-one-get-one-free sausage boys, today only! Whaddya say?"

"I say heck yeah, dad!" Cary said. "I love sausage boys! Oh, can I get that dipping stuff too?"

"Sure you can, champ." Mr. Pickle ruffled Cary's hair again. "I think I'll have one or two, myself."

This McDoogles was nice and clean inside, Cary realized, not like the one they went to that one time when dad visited his friend in East Town.

They got four sausage boys and some of that good dipping sauce. It came in little cups that said "Yummie Goodboy Sauce" on the lid. It tasted like onions.

"Chow down, champ. I want my boy to be well-fed on his birthday."

Cary ate up, dunking his sausage boys and slathering them in sauce. They finished and got back in the Shimmy.

"How far is it, dad?" Cary asked from the back seat.

"Oh, not far at all, champ. Just a little ways."

They went a few miles, the eastern wall growing smaller behind them and the western wall growing bigger in front. They went by a few more McDoogles restaurants. Soon they had to go through Aryan Land, and neither of them liked that very much.

Mr. Pickle stepped on the accelerator. Three bald men in weird pants ran into the road and started swinging their heads around. One drank a whole bottle of beer and smashed it over his own head, going "Awooo!" and showing his broken teeth. Mr. Pickle rolled up the windows.

Soon they reached the barrier that would take them into the Hubroads, a maze of streets flanked by tight walls that led all over the city. Mr. Pickle showed his license to the officer at the gate, and answered a few questions about Cary.

They were allowed through. Mr. Pickle said a few bad words as he tried to merge onto the road. It was slow going, but as they got closer, Cary started seeing marquee signs for Happy Birthday Land and other Johnson Bros Co. parks.

The roads were lined with tall posts that had machine guns on top. Every once in a while, Cary saw a few scary looking men watching the cars through weird looking binoculars. All of them had mustaches and were fat. Everything was metal, gray, and ugly.

"Hi there, friends!" a jolly voice said through their radio. "We at Happy Birthday Land have been sent word that a little boy by the name of Cary Pickle is on his way here right now to have the time of his young little life!"

Cary clapped his hands, and Mr. Pickle smiled at him in the rearview mirror.

"Well!" the voice went on. "We at Happy Birthday Land love to show little boys and girls a great time on their special day! I'm pleased to tell you that this month is Jumpy, Bumpy, Rolly Clown Month! All one hundred of our park entertainers are dressing as clowns for the theme! Watch out for them once you get into Happy Birthday Land! And remember this special little tip, friends; if you find the one with the purple nose, knock him off his unicycle to win a special prize!"

The voice laughed and tooted a horn, and then went away.

"Remember that, champ. Purple nose. I'll bet they give you a credit pass to use in their gift store!"

Cary remembered last year. He got a few things from the gift store, but there was so much stuff there! He was definitely going to find that purple-nosed clown!

A few minutes later, Mr. Pickle put on the turn signal and said, "Here we are, champ!"

They entered a wide tunnel. Lights blinked on and off, all different colors, spinning around in flashing chaos. A sound grew louder over the radio. The Happy Birthday Land theme song! Cary bounced around in tune with it, and Mr. Pickle tapped on the steering wheel.

There were lights at the end of the tunnel. They came out into a huge parking lot. Over the barrier, Cary could see the big buildings and the colors. The entrance was before them, a huge wide tent with loud music coming from it. They parked and ran in.

The tent was dark, and some fast crazy clown song played somewhere deeper inside. The girl at the podium was dressed like a clown and tooted a horn when they came in.

"Welcome to Happy Birthday Land!" she said, throwing her hands up. "You must be little Cary Pickle, huh? Why, you're the cutest boy I've seen all day! Why don't you come over and get your special Happy Birthday bracelet!"

She put a plastic band around his arm, striped in all different colors. One part had writing on it. It said:

"Cary Pickle

Age: 9

Lives: 1542 Pirate Treasure Rd. Little Europe

Guardian: Gilbert Pickle Age: 34"

"So if you get lost, they know how to help you!" Mr. Pickle said. "Come on, champ, we've got a long day of fun ahead of us!"

Mr. Pickle dumped the presents in the present receptacle. They moved further into the tent.

They came into a big room with huge balls rotating on the ceiling and reflecting light everywhere. Tons of kids were here, kids from East Town and North Town and Little Europe and the Southern Sphere, dancing with people dressed like clowns. The music was faster now, and it made Cary want to spin around until he got dizzy and fell down. But he was too excited to see the rest of the place; they revamped it every year, and this year it was supposed to be _really_ awesome.

It was a short walk to get outside the tent, and when they did, little Cary and his dad stood and stared.

Cary had seen the buildings past the big walls by the entrance, but that was nothing compared to this. He'd heard somewhere that the park covered two hundred acres. He wasn't sure what that meant, but it sure was _big_.

And it had all been transformed into a city. Twenty story buildings, with cardboard windows showing cartoon women hanging their clothes and cartoon men leaning out to get a look at the street. Some of the doorways were open, leading into accessible rooms. Others were painted to look like they were open, with kids running around and playing inside. In every building it seemed a birthday party was going on. Fake balloons and cake and piñatas were everywhere.

There was a little city square here, with a big fountain that shot purple and green water high into the air. One of the clowns stood on the center platform, dancing and laughing and strumming on a little toy guitar. Ten kids and their parents were here too, dancing and freaking out with excitement.

"Wow, would you just look at this!" Mr. Pickle said. "Your very own city to explore, champ! D'you like it?"

"I sure do, dad!" Cary said.

There were four streets leading off from here. They were each flooded with a shallow wash of a different colored confetti. A plethora of toys was scattered everywhere, from plastic baseball bats to life-size dolls, from roller-skates to huge train sets. Cary could hardly contain himself, but he had to wait for dad's permission.

"Let's go see where we are, champ."

They went to read the street signs.

One of them was blue. It said, "LONELY KID BACKROADS."

The next was green. It said, "SLIME PIT WAY."

The next was red. It said, "TERROR STREET."

The last was pink. It said, "JOYFUL BOYGIRL DRIVE!"

"Hm," Cary said. He pointed at the pink one. "That way."

Mr. Pickle held up his hands. "Hey, Champ, it's your birthday, not mine. Go run and have some fun! I'm gonna stay here and get the rest of your party set up."

"Alright dad! Thanks!"

Cary ran and ran, kicking up big storms of pink confetti. He saw a big pile of pink foam beads, and jumped into it with a laugh. There was a loud grunt underneath him, and a clown came crawling out. He ran over to a tiny little bike, his big shoes flapping, and rode off giving Cary a wave and a big smile.

Cary kept going. Joyful Boygirl Drive led off little by little from the other streets and he had no idea how far he was going. But he didn't care. There were hardly any other kids here, and he had all the toys to himself!

Up ahead, he saw a clown running into one of the open buildings.

_That must be the purple-nose clown!_ Cary thought, and ran after him.

The inside of the building was all rough wood and cardboard. A little staircase led up to a platform where someone had left a few cans of paint. The rest of the building was hollow, all the way up to the ceiling. Cary could see the sky. It was bright and orange, like every day.

He heard a laugh, and saw the clown through a window. He must have jumped out when Cary came in! But he didn't have a purple nose. He grinned at Cary, then ran off, shaking his whole body. His shoes were squeaky.

Cary went into the street and grabbed a hoola-hoop. He wheeled it along with him, until he saw a big squirt gun. There was pink water in the tank, with little purple sparkly things floating around in it. He threw the hoop down, grabbed the gun, and ran after the clown.

He found the clown doing cartwheels for two little girls. Cary started unloading the gun, and the clown fell on his head. He got up, laughed a little, and ran away fast. The girls called Cary a jerk, and ran back the other way. Cary didn't care; he dropped the gun and went skipping up the street.

Three miles away, behind the façade of the Police Station, on the eastern side of a long district that has many names and many doubts surrounding its very existence, in a top secret laboratory seventy feet underground, a man sat and looked through his computer and slowly came to a very troubling realization.

"Doctor," he said. "Doctor, get over here!"

Standing twenty feet away and sharing a beaker of champagne with his colleagues, Dr. Crappy Gilgamet excused himself and came over.

"Yes, mister Pook. What is it?"

"I don't know how to say this..." Mr. Pook actually did, but he didn't want to. But he had to, so he said, "You know Virus Z?"

"The thing we've been surveying in the Bogs for the past month nonstop?" Crappy said. "Of course I know it, idiot. If you have something to say, say it."

Pook licked his lips and said, "Well..."

General Stooge got the message around noon and ran out his door, screaming and pulling his underwear up.

"Up and at 'em, you bastards!" he cried. "Up and at 'em! Code L, CODE L! Breach of the perimeter!"

All his men gathered, shuffling along and dressing and grabbing their guns as they'd been trained to do.

General Stooge led his men into the courtyard, where Dr. Gilgamet was ready to brief them. There was a big projector screen and a map of Apple City was on it, all twenty-odd districts including two that no one else but the highest of government employees knew about.

Crappy Gilgamet extended a telescopic pointer and indicated their location. The Zone. A two-and-a-half mile long, one mile wide area that stretched down from the center of Apple City, all the way to Prison Land.

"We are here, gentleman," Crappy announced through a microphone. "As you all know, we have been monitoring a highly experimental and insidious new virus that recently evolved over here." He pointed at the Bogs. Nearly three-thousand acres of experimental ground, half of it moist swampy area. It jutted out from the bottom half of the Zone, stretching eastward to the Apple City Public Pool and touching on East Town to the north.

"The exact nature of the virus has been top-secret..." Crappy said. "Until now. It is called Virus Z. It attacks the brain, turning the host into... Well! We've tested it on numerous prison inmates. The infection rate of those who come in contact with the virus has been estimated at ninety per cent, give or take.

"In our test subjects, all exhibited certain troubling symptoms within ten minutes of exposure. Chief among them..." He flipped a page on his clipboard. "Murderous rage and cannibalism."

General Stooge spit a big stream of dirty brown chewing tobacco liquid and rubbed his gray-stubbled chin with the back of one huge, callused hand.

"Sounds like my kind of party," he said.

"Lemme guess!" someone up ahead shouted. Private Shatsberg. "One of 'em got out!"

"I find it unfortunate that you would jump to that conclusion so quickly," said Crappy. "But even more unfortunately, you are right. We had a breach thirty minutes ago."

General Stooge hefted his gun and nodded at his men. "Alright, looks like we're getting some action!"

"We have been feeding prisoners to the virus constantly, at a rate of five every day," said Crappy. "It has evolved at a very fast speed. Though we do have our insect repellant field, our sensors picked up an infected mosquito that managed to escape. So, we have probably less than ten minutes now before infection begins."

"Yadda yadda!" Shatsberg called. "Where do we go?"

"The mosquito was headed northwest," said Crappy. "Toward Happy Birthday Land."

"Aw, shit, man," said Cpl. Donahue, to Stooge's left. "Zombie kids? Screw this, man."

He turned to leave, but Gen. Stooge grabbed him by the sleeve and pulled him back.

"You keep your ass here, in _my_ squad," Stooge said. "You leave, and we have a hole. We have a hole, a zombie can get in it. You wouldn't want our deaths on your conscience, would you Donahue?"

Donahue nodded. "Alright, man. But I ain't shooting any kids man, screw that, they don't pay me enough for that, man."

"You ain't a soldier Donahue." Stooge pulled out a cigar and stuffed it in his mouth. " _I'm_ a soldier, baby, and I'd do this stuff for free. You slack out there in the field, and I'll be out one combat boot 'cause I'll be leaving it in your ass, got that?"

Donahue nodded. They moved on to join their battalion.

Harris B. Harrisben, an entertainer at Happy Birthday Land, had ducked into a little alleyway, behind the cardboard cutout of a dumpster with an evilly grinning homeless man peeking out of it. After four hours of entertaining snot-nosed kids, he was ready to have a sip off the old flask. And a cigarette.

"Damn kids," he said, as the whiskey filled him with philosophy. "Well, I should blame the parents, and the administration. They just let the kids beat us up and throw burritos at us." He was having bad flashbacks to a south-of-the-border themed Happy Birthday Land that had gone badly. And just today, some little punk had doused him from a squirt gun.

The cigarette was lit, and his lungs burned. He felt an itch on his arm, and went to brush off a mosquito.

Harris wasn't an angry drinker, so he didn't know why he started feeling so mad a few minutes later. His sense and logic started to leave him, and he realized he just wanted to find the kid and throw him off a building, stuff a burrito down his throat, or smother him with a big meringue pie. Harris stood and stomped back out into the street.

"I'm gonna go eat a kid," he said to himself with a grin.

Cary had found a cool little playground off a side street. There was a maze here too, made up of wooden boxes painted to look like bushes. Some of them had glowing red eyes peeking out of the darkness on them. Others had big spiders, or lurking cats.

He was hanging upside-down by the jungle gym, trying to keep his shirt from falling down, when he heard a huge, screaming crowd coming up the street. He dropped down and watched.

A clown appeared ahead of them. He was riding a unicycle with a wheel that must be ten feet tall, and he kept looking over his shoulder with a scared look on his face. He had one hand up trying to hide something, but Cary saw anyway; a purple nose!

"Holy crap!" he said, and jumped through the bars to join the chase. He got to the street and looked down it. He was still ahead of all the kids! He had a chance!

He ran, but the clown was so fast. His big, floppy feet were pedaling like his life depended on it. But Cary knew he was a good runner, because dad said so.

"I'm gonna get you, clown!" he screamed.

He was starting to catch up a little. But a bigger boy suddenly came out of a side street up ahead and threw a toy fire truck. It hit the unicycle, and the clown let out a high-pitched shriek as he toppled ten feet to the ground and smashed into a pile of marbles.

"No fair!" Cary screamed. He wanted to run up and punch the bigger boy that threw the truck, but dad had said not to do that, so he sat down and started to cry instead.

The clown stood up slowly, grabbing his nose. There was blood dripping down off his face. One of the windows on the building next to him was busted out by a strong blast of air, and a screen inside said, "CONGRATS TO LITTLE JOHNSON MCTERNER! YOU WIN THE PRIZE: 10,000 CREDITS AT OUR GIFT STORE!"

Ten thousand credits! Oh man, you could get everything for that! Cary threw himself to the ground and started banging his fists.

All the others kids ran up and started beating up the clown. He shielded his head. Johnson McTerner kicked him over and jumped on top of him, waving his arms in the air.

Suddenly, the clown screamed really loud and threw Johnson off of him. The other kids tried to get away, but he grabbed two of them and threw them through the wall of the building. Johnson was too scared to move. The clown picked him up and started biting his neck.

Cary was too scared to move, too, until he saw the blood, then he ran back to the playground, and past it, all the way to an open building. He ran inside and hid.

For a while he sat under the stairs in the shadows, hearing other kids run by and clowns chasing after them, laughing and screaming like psychos. An older girl tried to get in the building, but she fell down and a clown dragged her out and Cary could hear awful sounds.

General Stooge and his squad were third on the scene, and they ran right in like badasses. The general himself was smoking a cigar, Pvt. Shatsberg had that mean look on his face like he was about to rip a zombie-clown's throat out, and even Donahue managed to mask the fact that he was about to wet himself. Further back, Sgt. Dickson was brandishing his knife and PFC Giggle was singing a good song about killing.

There was a group of parents being held back by first and second squads. They'd already been given their orders; squads three, four, five and six were to take the four different districts of the park. They'd been shown maps on the way in, and they'd dropped two minutes after first possible infection.

"Looks like we're in the pink, ladies!" General Stooge announced, stomping past the street sign and cocking his gun. "Look lively and kill some clowns!"

They had their chance a few seconds later. Two of the bastards were hunched over the body of a kid, smacking their lips.

"Sat down for a little picnic!" Stooge said.

"Aw, man, what the hell, man?" Donahue whined. "They're eating kids, man? No way!"

"Die!" Shatsberg screamed, pounding the cannibals with twenty or thirty bullets from his rifle. They didn't die right away, but their meal sure had been interrupted.

"Aw, man, they're not going down!"

"Back off, men." Sgt. Dickson came forward, licking his knife blade. It cut his tongue, and he sucked the blood off it. "It's gutting time."

He set upon the clowns, dancing around them and howling like a madman as he stuck them over and over. They were already bleeding out of ten bullet holes each, so it wasn't long before they were dead on the ground.

Dickson came forward, and raised his knife to lick the clown blood off.

"Woah!" Stooge raised a hand. "You want that virus shit swimming in your body, Dickson? Wipe it on that bastard's red afro, there ya go! Alright, men, let's-"

There was a loud cackle, echoing out of an alleyway. Suddenly, twelve clowns were in the street, walking toward them in comical fashion, their shoes slapping away at the ground.

"Hyuk, hyuk," one of them said.

"Booya! Booya!" another one kept saying every time he honked a little horn in his hand.

"Look at all the big kids!" another of them said, doing a cartwheel and laughing. "I need a _big_ kid to fill my belly! Hyuk!"

"This ain't good," Stooge said, flexing his bicep. "Alright men, triangulate. Let's show these clowns a good time!"

They went into formation. The clowns converged on them. Stooge blasted away, the vein in his bicep bulging and a stream of smoke rising from his cigar. Dickson's knife flashed ten times a second, and each second a clown had ten new holes in his body he hadn't had a second ago. Shatsberg fired and waved his gun around, sweat pouring down his face. PFC Giggle shrieked with laughter, imitating the clowns as he slaughtered them.

"Get some!" Donahue yelled, pumping his shotgun and widening the holes that Dickson left behind.

Stooge thought they had it in the bag. These clowns were used to making little kids laugh. They weren't used to fighting tough-as-nails army men, zombie or no zombie.

He got his first inkling of the trouble they were in when Giggle stopped laughing and started screaming and bleeding. One of them had bitten a chunk out of his neck.

"Watch it!" Stooge said, turning his gun on his squad member. It was Giggle right now, but in a minute he'd either be dead or a kid-eater, and either way Stooge might as well send him packing. He let Giggle catch a few bullets, then dropped back toward a building with the others. Dickson stayed, covering their path. He almost got bit, but he managed to duck away at the last second.

They put their backs to the wall and entertained the clowns.

"You like that!" cried Donahue, reloading his shotgun.

"I like the feel of clown flesh," said Dickson, "and so does my knife. Who's next?"

"Kill 'em all!" Shatsberg screamed. It seemed like he hadn't even reloaded yet, but he must have sent out at least two hundred bullets.

Finally, all twelve clowns were down for good. The last clown gave one final toot of his horn, then his face hit the ground. Stooge went over to survey the carnage. He bent down and tugged Giggle's tags off.

"I'll make sure Suzie gets these," he said. Then he saluted. "It was an honor to fight by your side!"

"An honor, man," Donahue echoed, giving Giggle's scrambled remains a quick nod. "Now let's get the hell out of dodge, man, there's more of those freaks around here, I can feel 'em!"

Stooge heard the report of several guns, echoing from some other street.

"There's plenty more noses to be honked, men," he said. "Fall in!"

Cary heard the gunshots, and when they finally ended he looked out into the street. There were bodies everywhere, but at least they were hidden by the confetti. He went out and tiptoed back to the playground. Maybe if he got on the jungle gym, no one would be able to grab him.

He jumped up and pulled himself to the top. He sat there. He was scared, and dad wasn't here to make him feel better. He hoped dad was alright. The police must be here, and Cary thought they would keep dad safe back at the tent.

There were squeaking sounds behind him, and he turned and saw a clown there, running up the street past the building where Cary had been hiding. Cary was about to scream, but the clown saw him and put up his hands.

"Don't yell, kid!" he said. His voice was all old and gravelly. "Don't yell, you'll bring every one of 'em down on us. Shut up and get down here, fast."

Cary jumped down and ran over. The clown grabbed his arm and pulled him into an alleyway. Cary would have screamed this time, but the clown put a rough, scratchy hand over his mouth.

"Quiet," he said. "I ain't gonna hurtcha, kid. I just gotta make sure you don't make any noises, that's all."

They went behind a plastic trash can. At least it looked like a trash can, but it was full of toys.

"You promise you won't make any noises?" the clown asked.

Cary nodded, and the clown took his hand away.

"Good," he said. "Name's Dillis, kid, and I got a bruise the size of a pumpkin on my ass from you kids kicking me around all day. Now, whaddya say we get the hell outta here? I was on my way to a super-secret passageway that I know about. Eh, Clarice told me about it."

"Super-secret?" Cary asked. "Who's Clarice?"

"Prettiest little clown this side of the Death Crack, kid. And yeah, it's super top secret, so, uh, don't tell any of your little friends about it, alright?"

"Alright!" Cary said.

They went up the street. There, a small cardboard structure hid a maintenance section. Dillis swiped a card and went into a door. They were in a long, skinny hallway. The clown yanked Cary along.

A door slammed somewhere. Dillis froze and Cary squeaked.

"Daddy!" he said.

"Sh," said the clown.

"Dillis?" said another voice.

A woman came out into the hallway, and she looked just as scared as Cary. He felt bad for her. Maybe she wanted to find her dad, too.

"Hey, Clarice," Dillis said.

Clarice! She really _was_ pretty, even with white makeup caked on like a baseball pitcher had thrown it in her face.

"Oh, Dillis!" She came toward them. "You found a little boy! Come here, little guy. Me and Dillis will get you out of here."

She was so pretty that Cary decided to play the part of scared little kid to get her attention. It wasn't that hard to put the act on.

"Poor thing," said Clarice. "Where'd you find him?"

"Playground," Dillis said. "Now, if ya don't mind, I'd like to get my clown ass outta here."

Clarice scoffed. "Language, you stiff old meanie! Let's go, kid."

They went. The tunnel was a lot longer than Cary had thought it was. It took them forever to get to the end, and his feet were tired. They stopped at a drinking fountain, but there was no food.

"I want a sausage boy," he complained.

"Well," Dillis said, "unless you wanna _be_ a sausage boy, you should stop whining. Wanna get dipped and dunked and chomped on by a big mean clown, kid?"

"No," Cary said.

"Leave him alone, jerkface!" Clarice grabbed Cary's hand tighter. "He's just a little boy who came here to have a fun day. Just because you're so jaded and foul, you don't have to scare him!"

"Just getting the kid ready for what's probably comin' to him," said Dillis.

They got to a door at the end of the tunnel. It was red.

Dillis shook his head. "Ah, shit. Terror street. The bane of my existence. Let's get this over with."

He opened the door. It was all red outside. There was a ceiling over this part, and it was all red with swirling clouds and huge skeleton monsters flying through the air. The buildings were crooked and warped, and the people in the windows were screaming.

"I hate this goddamn place," said Dillis.

In front of them, two clowns were laughing as they dug around in a pile of guts.

Dillis waved Clarice back. "It's alright, they think I'm one of them." He ran forward, flapping his arms and yelling, "Booga booga!"

"Let's go, cutie." Clarice grabbed Cary's arm, and they ran down the street until they got to a little house where a family of cardboard people were jumping up from the dinner table as a zombie hand came out of their potatoes.

"Yummy," said Clarice.

Dillis came in a minute later. He looked like he was about to fall asleep, but he just sat on the floor and started smoking a cigarette.

"Well, we're outta the meat grinder," he said. "And right into the sausage maker."

Clarice was looking out the window. "I don't really see anyone. Looks like we might have a straight shot to the exit!"

"We'd get chewed up and spit out by the bastards before we made it ten feet," Dillis told her. "Well, maybe we'd make it, but the kid wouldn't. Whaddya say to that, Clarice?"

"Leave the boy here?" Clarice made a sad face and clapped her hand over her mouth. "Not even you would be such a monster!"

Dillis puffed his cigarette. "Relax, sweetcheeks. In case ya didn't know, I'm the one who rescued him in the first place. As much as I hate kids, I still wouldn't let one get eaten by a freaky clown if I had any choice."

"Pig!" Clarice turned to the window, folding her arms. She finally turned back around and said, "Alright then, what do we do?"

Dillis laughed. His laugh sounded like a snake moving across broken glass and sandpaper. "If I ain't the smartest damn person in this whole park... It doesn't take a genius to see that our former colleagues are still acting under the edict of their specific training in regards to each area of the park. For example, honeybuns, the freaks on Joyful Boygirl were acting just like they would under normal circumstances, except for a few minor details."

Clarice nodded. "I see. And on Terror Street, we're all supposed to hide and jump out at people as they walk by..."

"...so, if we stay here, we're golden," Dillis said. "Unless there's some clown hiding right outside the door. We all heard the gunshots, unless I'm also the only son of a bitch in this place with working ears. So we sit tight until the guns arrive and carry our sorry asses outta here. Got it?"

"Got it!" Cary said. It was a whole lot better hiding with two grownups than by himself.

Clarice came over and put a hand on his shoulder. "If cutie pie is in, so am I."

"Alright then," Dillis said. "Anyone want a smoke?"

"Swallow lead, scum!" General Stooge roared, peeking over a cardboard dumpster and railing down two clowns.

"They're behind us, man!" Donahue said. "Ah, no way, man."

Stooge made sure the alley was clear, then turned back. Four of the scumsuckers were closing in on their rear. Dickson was holding them off, using the alley as a chokepoint, and Shatsberg was ready to leap into the fray once shit got real.

"Move it, men!" Stooge yelled, and they backed slowly into the alley. If the maps had been right, there was an access tunnel to the next street back here.

"It's Giggle," said Donahue. "It's Giggle, man! He's one of 'em!"

Stooge looked back in time to see PFC Giggle, newly back from the dead, be sped back to his grave by a devastating knife blow to the throat. Dickson stopped and bowed his head, saying a prayer the way he did when he bested a worthy opponent.

"Dickson!" Shatsberg screamed. "Watch your head!"

A clown had just pitched himself from a third floor window. He fell laughing onto Dickson's head, and the two went down in a tangle. Shatsberg charged the freak with his bayonet, but it was too late; Dickson was gone.

"It was an honor, Dickson!" Stooge cried. "And we'll make sure every one of these goddamned freaks from hell suffer more than you did!"

He stopped and saluted. In front of him, Shatsberg was firing on his last clip and Donahue had moved onto his last few shells.

The clowns, weak from Dickson's knife, went down fast. Stooge pulled his last two men into the access tunnel and slammed the door. He shoved a broom into the brackets and wedged it as far down as he could.

"Regroup, men," he said. "We'll grab supplies from the next squad and come back to finish our work."

Donahue started crying. "Ah, Dickson, man. This can't be real, man. And Giggle, too."

Stooge went over and slapped him across the face. "Pull yourself together, woman!" He pointed at his foot. "I've got a combat boot here with 'Donahue's ass' written on it, and I don't deliver my mail gently!"

Donahue wiped his tears away and nodded. Shatsberg was taking stock of his ammo. Two bullets left in his rifle, two clips on his sidearm. They had their knives, but all except Dickson were too chickenshit to use them. Stooge saluted again.

They went out onto Terror Street, and were immediately assailed by ten clowns with human flesh stuck in their teeth. They came out of an alley, hooping and hollering, somersaulting and back-flipping, cartwheeling and blowing horns shaped like dragon snouts that made a blood-curdling screaming sound. They were all in dark blues and purples, with blood-red wigs and black painted faces.

"Terror!" one of them yelled. "We strike terror in your heart, then we rip it out and eat it!"

"Eat this," Stooge replied, and delivered his last rifle bullet directly into the eyeball of the bastard who'd opened his cursed pie-hole.

That left nine. Donahue had two shells left. He waited until one of them got close, and made sure the shot was fatal.

Eight moved forward. Shatsberg fired one shot and made one kill.

Seven clowns came flipping and wheeling and spinning on. Shatsberg missed with his final rifle bullet, but lifted his sidearm in time to punch a golf ball sized hole in a clown's forehead.

Six. Stooge let rip with his pistol. They must have killed thirty already since they got here, and here were ten more. That left sixty clowns left in the park, not counting the ones that the other squads had no doubt dispatched.

"Full auto!" Stooge didn't lift his finger until the gun went click. Two more clowns went down, and another was badly wounded.

"For Giggle, you mother-" The end of Donahue's battle cry was drowned out by the sound of his shotgun as his final shell took the wounded clown straight to hades.

Three. Stooge's gun was empty, and Shatsberg's had jammed. Donahue tried to fire his own sidearm, but nothing happened.

He looked down at it in shock. "I forgot to load it! I forgot to load it, man!"

Stooge watched as the three clowns converged on his men. His last two men, whose wives and daughters had asked him personally to protect. He unsheathed his knife; the red light glinted off the metal, and shined on the sweat that glistened on his tanned muscles.

"Time to get messy," he said, and charged.

The gunshots woke Cary up, and he was scared for a second before Clarice hugged him. Dillis stood and said a few naughty words, then went to the window.

"Soldiers," he said. "Let's go."

Clarice piggy-backed Cary the whole way, and covered his eyes when they got there. Three big men stood there, covered in blood and breathing hard. One of them, with a cigar in his mouth, was the biggest, scariest man Cary had ever seen.

"Jesus Christ," Dillis said, looking at the mess under his feet. "Clown soup."

The big cigar smoking man sheathed his knife and narrowed his eyes at Dillis.

"Whaddya know," he said. "The ten percent. Lookin' like a mighty small ten percent to me. What do you think, men?"

"Ninety-eight percent infection rate, sir," said another man. He was young and had his head shaved. He looked like someone who enjoyed beating people up.

"This shit must have mutated, man," said the other guy. He looked like he was about to cry. "Ninety-eight percent! Aw, man, we better get our asses out of here, man, before we get turned into man-eating sonsabitches too."

The big man cracked his knuckles. "Name's Stooge. General Stooge. This is private Shatsberg and corporal Donahue. The latter of whom will surely be demoted following the conclusion of this mission. Also, he will be forced to take medical leave to recover from the damage incurred by one combat boot violently inserted into his rear."

Donahue winced and walked away, talking to himself.

"General, sir," Dillis said. "If you'd be so kind, would ya mind escorting my friends and I to safety? I've had about enough of this goddamn job by now. I thought I was done before but, hell, this is pushin' it."

"A disgruntled clown." Stooge leaned forward and sniffed the air. "Who smokes. We got a walking cliché here, boys."

Dillis laughed his crusty laugh. "The comebacks I could come up with," he said. "But I'll refrain. Let's get this show on the road, Stooge, I ain't got all day and the bars close at midnight."

Stooge's cigar had gone out at some point. He took out a book of matches and lit it, then blew some smoke in the clown's face. "Mission priority, creep. We are to neutralize the threat. Every infected individual in this park will be killed and burned and buried. Now, you would think anyone who's infected would show the telltale signs. Cannibalism, shit-eating lunacy, and just plain old pure evil. But there is such a thing as being infected without showing the signs..."

"It's called being a carrier," Shatsberg said.

"A carrier." Stooge grinned around his cigar. "There's also such a thing as delayed onset. Now, I ain't saying you'll soon be chewing on your lady friend there..." He turned his grin to Clarice. "Not saying she wouldn't like it, either. What I _am_ saying is, you're following us, and you're arming yourselves, and you're helping us clear the park. Do I make myself clear?"

"That's a bluff," Dillis said.

Stooge cracked his knuckles.

"But just in case it isn't," Dillis added, "I guess we'll follow you."

"Thought so." Stooge looked over his shoulder. "Donahue! Stop your bitchin' and get back in the kitchen! We're heading out."

"Where to?" Clarice asked.

Stooge grinned again. "Lemme think about that. There _was_ a squad of soldiers here, but judging by the lack of nearby gunfire, they're most likely dead. So we'll head for the next squad and pray they're still alive. On Slime Pit Way."

Slime Pit Way. The name strikes horror and existential dread in the hearts of every clown in Happy Birthday Land. Or at least it did, before all but two of them lost their minds and became cannibals.

The appearance of the street can only be described as "melted." Greens and yellows, neon and eye-splitting, turn the place into a kid's dream and an adult's nightmare. Along the street, the blinding light hides the fact that certain stretches are made of thin paper. And under this thin paper, vats six feet deep with green slime writhe and jiggle, waiting to swallow up unwitting passers.

Stooge and his men had been called many things. Bastards. Murderers. Dishonorable mercenaries who did what they did not out of love for their city, or for freedom, and not even for glory.

But on this day, the one thing they would and could not be called was "unwitting."

Until Donahue went through the paper and up to his eyeballs in goo.

His cries were muffled, but his hands were flailing above his head. Stooge grabbed one of them and, with one arm, lifted Donahue all the way out and set him back on solid ground.

"Holy hogshit, Donahue," the general remarked. "Just when I thought you couldn't be any more useless! Wipe that slime off, boy, and if you fall in another one of those I'll put my boot on your head and let you drown in it!"

"Yes, sir!" Donahue set to cleaning himself off.

With all the hubbub of nearly losing a man to a pit of slime that even a drunken, emphysema-ridden clown could have gotten out of, it took them a moment to see the mess in front of them. Blood and guts everywhere. Clarice covered Cary's eyes again.

Stooge went over and fished around in the gore with his toe. A pair of dog tags clung to his boot and he bent down to read them.

"It's Major Stonejack," he announced. "Well, I'll be damned. Looks like we've outlived two entire squadrons so far!"

Donahue wiped a glob of green ooze off his shoulder and said, "Stonejack, man? Aw, man, ain't _nothing_ can kill Stonejack, man. This is just goddamn great, man!"

"Corporal Donahue!" Stooge boomed.

Donahue froze and looked at his CO with a horrified expression.

"For once you're on to something!" the general said. "There was only one man in this army that could beat me in hand-to-hand combat, and that was Stonejack! Hell, he slept with my sister once and I did nothing about it! He could outdrink a fat skinhead, that man. For some shrimpdick clown to kill him? No, I don't believe it. What was that you said earlier, about the virus mutating? Not to mention all these men look like melted strawberry ice cream! There must be something-"

Stooge cut off, and everyone else started yelling all at once.

Throughout his monologue regarding the merit of Major Stonejack, a presence so terrifying it defied verbal cues of danger had been building behind General Stooge.

Dillis recognized it at once, but of course he was unable to speak.

Clarice did too.

Jibson. The meanest clown in the park. He had been on suspension for two weeks for punting a kid through a second floor window, and he'd finally returned this very day. Over seven feet tall, with a history in bodybuilding and strong man contests. Four hundred pounds of pissed off muscle, and an eternally angry personality gone fully insane with bloodlust.

Stooge turned, and yelled a throaty wordless yell. He pounded Jibson with the last bullets from his pistol, then dove, tucked and rolled when the freak came closer.

Shatsberg threw his knife; it stabbed right through Jibson's chest. The clown pulled the knife out and tossed it back. Shatsberg fumbled out of the way and nearly went into the slime.

Donahue was full-on crying now, tears streaming down his face as he desperately searched his person for more ammo.

Stooge flipped out of his roll, did some kind of spinning breakdance move, and delivered a powerful kick to the back of Jibson's legs. The giant stumbled forward and jumped into the slime.

He stood head and shoulders out of it, reaching his great arms to try and grab Dillis and Clarice. Shatsberg had found his knife again. He dashed forward and plunged it into the giant's arm.

Even with eight inches of steel through his tricep, Jibson found the power to grab Shatsberg and yank him butt-first into the slime. The two of them sank down into the murk. The surface of the slime jiggled and waved with the concussion of whatever battle was ensuing beneath the surface.

With a lion's roar, Stooge grabbed out his knife and dove headlong into the fight. He vanished as well, and for two long minutes Cary and the clowns waited.

Finally, the buzz-cut head of General Stooge emerged, bearing the humongous head of Jibson. Shatsberg's dog tags were strung over his knife blade.

Stooge climbed free and stood, straight-backed and dripping with goo, to salute Private Shatsberg.

"You died too soon, soldier!" he barked. "It should have been Donahue! An honor, Shatsberg!"

"That bastard tried grabbin' my feet," Dillis said. "But Shatsberg stopped him."

Stooge looked over at the clown with his chest puffed out. "He was a hero!" His voice dropped to a somber level. "A goddamn _hero_. Now what do I have? Donahue, and two clowns, and some little pipsqueak. I hate to admit defeat... Hell, I'll _never_ admit defeat. But maybe a little break is in order. To restock, and all."

Stooge turned away and started walking. Everyone followed him.

Cary looked over at Donahue. He wasn't crying anymore, but he looked like he was trying to hide under his helmet. He was walking right up against the buildings, carrying his rifle and avoiding looking at Stooge.

"Somethin' strange I noticed," Dillis said. "If this virus or whatever the hell it is has such a high infection rate, how come we ain't seen anything but clowns, huh?"

Just then, Donahue screamed and everyone heard a loud _plop_.

Donahue had gone into the slime again. He was still floating at the surface, thrashing his arms and fighting to get out. Stooge growled and ran over.

"You useless, whiny, sissy, girly sack of rotten-"

Stooge planted his foot on Donahue's head, just as he'd promised. Six hands, all gray and bloody, reached up out of the slime to grab his leg. Stooge went in, howling like a wolf. In midair, as he fell, he whipped out his knife and one could already see the desire to kill in his eyes. Then he was gone. Muffled screams drifted up out of the slime.

"Let's get the hell outta here," Dillis said.

"General Stooge! No!" Clarice had her hands over her mouth again.

"Hey, sunshine, don't ya know when to run?" Dillis asked.

She turned around, delivering a sharp punch to his red-painted nose. "Shut up, buttface!"

Dillis reeled back, grabbing his nose, and before he could recover Clarice was running toward the slime pit. Cary fell down, covering his head. He didn't want to see what came next. He felt someone grab him, and the next thing he knew he was flying down the street. He heard people screaming behind him, and he finally opened his eyes. Dillis was carrying him, and there were fifteen or twenty kids chasing them. Zombie kids.

Dillis started coughing and they almost fell down.

"Jesus Christ, kid," the clown said. "Lay off on the sausage boys, will ya? How many are back there?"

"Lots!" Cary yelled.

Dillis looked. The kids were running a lot faster than him.

"Ah, shit," he said. He slowed down enough to drop Cary on the ground. "Run, kid, I'll hold 'em back!"

"No!" Cary said, hugging Dillis. "No, don't do that!"

"I'm too old and crusty to make it, anyway," the clown told him. "Come on, you look like a fast runner. Get the hell outta here. Don't stop until you're outta the park, got it?"

Cary nodded. Dillis gave him a shove, and he started running. He didn't look back.

A week had gone by since the incident at Happy Birthday Land. Out of the six hundred and twenty-two children who had gone in that day, only fourteen had made it out alive.

One of them was little Cary Pickle, who was trying to fall asleep but couldn't because he kept wondering if he should have looked back to see if Dillis had made it.

Downstairs, his father sat hollow-eyed by the TV and watched hour after hour of news broadcasts. Most of it was about General Stooge, the hero who had been the lone survivor of the army squads sent into the park. He had emerged with his knife dull from killing zombies, covered head to toe in green goo and dried blood. It was estimated that he had single-handedly destroyed over two hundred of the infected clowns and children.

Mr. Pickle started to fall asleep, but snapped awake when he heard the loud booming sound the TV station used to signify breaking news.

"This just in!" a reporter said. A helicopter view showed a team of medical technicians carrying out a very exhausted looking man with smeared paint on his face and a red, curly wig. "Another survivor has been found! It was previously thought that all staff of Happy Birthday Land had deceased, and a count was made difficult by the state in which we found the bodies, but it turns out one man rode out the storm!"

Cary had a bad dream. He went downstairs to sleep on the couch next to his dad. When he saw the TV, he stopped.

Dillis was on the screen, wiping his face off with a wet cloth with one hand and holding a beer and a cigarette with the other. Under all the makeup, he looked like an old, scary guy who liked stealing kids.

"Sir, how did you survive so long on your own?" the reporter asked. "Apple City officials only just managed to kill the last of the infected!"

"Easy, peasy," Dillis said. "I hid my clown ass in an access tunnel. There was lotsa water there. No beer, though. Sheesh, ya'd think they would stock up for us clowns, huh? The kids are less annoying when they're zombies, for chrissakes."

"I'll let you get back to it," the reporter said, "but first, do you have any interesting stories for us?"

"Hell, no. But I have a question. There was this one kid, I think his name was Picklepuss or something. I tried to help him get outta the park, but I never knew if he made it..."

Cary smiled and ran back upstairs. He decided he could fall asleep, now.

THE EVENT

The disaster, later called the Event, occurred around two-thirty on an afternoon in August, 2015. An area roughly four miles in radius surrounding the Blue Fluid Horizons research center in Denver, Colorado was suddenly jumped forward in time and cut off totally from the rest of the world.

The barrier, known collectively as the Time Wall in literature published after the Event, was an impenetrable transparent membrane. Beyond it, the affected area could be seen as it would stand roughly fifty years in the future. People inside the area at the time of the Event were transported forward in time, cut off, except by sight, from everyone in the present.

Anything alive caught halfway between present and future vanished without a trace. Anything inanimate caught similarly was merely frozen and immovable, as though stuck partially in cement. Anything inanimate caught totally within was aged suitably to resemble its future self.

A woman named Marsha Gilpin was separated from her dog. The dog's leash was suspended in the air between them, trapping the poor creature who, after a full hour of struggling and trying to chew through its leash, was found and rescued by one of the human exiles.

Men and women on the inside of the Time Wall were able to walk around in this city of the future. It was immediately obvious that this vision of the times ahead was a negative one. Buildings were abandoned and overgrown with weeds. The animal population was unhealthy at best. Windows and doors were stuck and very difficult to open, or broken. Other than the exiles, there was not a single person around.

After the initial panicking was out of the way, the exiles came together and discussed the importance of what they were seeing. The fact that the city was abandoned seemed very dire indeed, but there were optimistic reasons why it might be so. One woman suggested that drought and natural disaster may have forced people at last to leave the place and settle somewhere else, that the world of fifty-years-from-now might be just as heavily populated. Someone else had the wild idea that we had discovered and developed interstellar travel and moved to a better world. But everyone knew, whether they said it or not, that the most likely possibility was also the darkest. That the bad day had finally come, whether by war or disease or something else.

One young man, later identified as twenty-four year old Sam Lima, had an idea to check the wreckage of old cars and stores to try and determine _when_ Armageddon had occurred.

This particular group of exiles, one of many, consisted of around twenty people. They rallied around Lima's idea, and went to gather their evidence. It quickly became clear that whatever it was that had caused the city's abandonment, it must not have been anything extremely violent, such as nuclear war; the cars were simply derelict, like they had been parked and left untouched for decades. Some had trunks open, windows broken and gas caps removed, but that was it.

The stores that were searched had all suffered different fates. Food stores were utterly ransacked; there was nothing left but piles of trash. Other stores were mostly untouched, with the exception of a sporting goods store, which had been cleared of almost everything.

Some of those sporting goods were later found scattered around the city; tents set up in the covered bus parking area of the Greyhound station, RTD buses modified and outfitted and made livable. An elaborate water-catching system was found set up on the roof of a building.

The group, having gathered their evidence, convened near the intersection of 19th and Arapahoe.

Everyone talked in turn about what they had discovered. It seemed that everything, from the packaging of the food to the make of the cars, pointed to one conclusion; whatever had happened to Denver, it had happened very soon after that day in August, 2015.

The group decided that they had to warn those outside the Wall. They ventured together to the Wall, caught the attention of some onlookers, and took turns pointing at various potato chip bags and soda cans. It didn't take long for someone outside to receive the message. The crowd of spectators grew even more anxious. Women were seen crying and banging at the unseen wall, screaming the names of their trapped loved ones, unheard.

"We need to find out what caused this," someone said.

Again, it was Sam Lima who had the idea; whatever the cause, it must have originated at the very center of the bubble they occupied. At least, it was worth supposing so, since they had nothing else to go on.

Inevitably, the majority of the exiles had worked their way outward, to the Wall. The farther the group led by Sam Lima went, the more lonely and quiet their surroundings became.

"It's been decades," someone said. "Whatever made this happen, it's probably not there anymore."

Everyone had their own ideas about it. Sam had his; the cause was surely something wholly unnatural, that did not necessarily heed the dictates of time.

A short while after the group had reached the approximate center of the area, they became aware of another group up ahead. These were mostly men and women dressed in white coats. The rest of the group was made up of menacing figures with guns at their hips.

The two groups met. Sam Lima, who had by accident became the leader of his own group, met the leader of the other and shook hands with him.

"I'm Edward Young," the other man said. He was middle-aged, and looked more like a lawyer than a scientist. "I'm head of the TRE project at the Blue Fluid Horizons research facility."

"Never heard of it," Lima replied.

"Then everyone did their jobs right. But I guess there's no longer a reason for discretion. You look like a civilized bunch, so I will tell it like it is."

"You caused this," Lima said.

Young nodded slowly. "We did. Well, we certainly must have, anyway, though no one has any idea how. Out of all the people you see behind me, only four others were on the TRE project with me. It was a tiny outfit, a spare-time project we took on for fun. You know how the CDC developed an actual zombie apocalypse plan? It was kind of like that."

"Time travel?"

Young at first shrugged and then nodded again, this time more readily and with a look of relief on his face. Possibly, it was relief at not having to utter that ridiculous phrase himself.

"Nothing like in the stories," he added. "We weren't trying to send people back to stop Hitler, or people forward to interface with aliens. We were trying to send particles. Light and energy. Forward, but not backward; there was nothing in any of our research to suggest that backward travel should be considered even a remote possibility. Our most recent test was attempting to send a stream of light photons forward by one hour. If successful, the result would be that we would see a spontaneous burst of light in our testing box, exactly one hour after the test was initiated. To give you a hint as to the actual result, the experiment was attempted roughly five hours ago."

"Okay. So, what the hell's going on here? How do we get out?"

"That's exactly what we've been trying to figure out," Young said. "But the problem is, the forward jump in time also affected our lab. All our instruments and materials... none of it is usable anymore."

Lima considered, and soon developed a sick feeling in his gut.

"There's no food here," he said. "Not much water either, probably. If we don't get out, we'll die."

Miles away, at the Wall, the majority of the exiles were acting on this very same fear. They were trying to break through, smashing chairs and bricks and other things against the barrier. Someone found a car parked at the top of a rise and set it rolling toward the Wall. People on the other side jumped out of the way, then watched as the car folded up like an accordion. The exiles were no closer to finding their way out.

Outside, those blocked out of the city were trying just as hard to break through. The police tried every weapon in their arsenal. After a while, the military arrived and were also unsuccessful.

Near the city center, well within the confines of the bubble, a bum was scraping around in the dusty ruins of a liquor store he frequented when he found a veritable gem; an unopened bottle of scotch, covered in a layer of dust. He scraped the grime away and stared at the glittering amber within, his eyes wide and full of wonder. In typical human fashion, he quickly set the bottle aside and went rifling around for more. His hand touched something unknown, and yet he understood very quickly what it was, even before he cleared the debris and saw it with his eyes. He had found a skeleton, holding an empty bottle, a skeleton dressed suspiciously like himself.

The Wall has never been breached. It never lifted. It stands there today. The people outside have watched as the exiles slowly wasted away and resorted to violence and other vile acts to survive, to _live_ until the time they hoped for; the lifting of the Wall.

Though the exact cause of the Event hasn't yet been determined, and likely never will be, certain things have come to light. Through observing the exiles, and interpreting the increasingly frantic and wild messages they sent through the barrier, we understand that the Event consisted of two timelines.

The one observed by the outsiders was that of the exiles, cast fifty years into the future to a dead city with no means of sustaining their existence.

The second, unseen timeline was that of the exiles in their own year, in the year of 2015, hidden by the overlapping bubble of the future. We will never know what _they_ saw when looking out through the Wall, but we know that they were trapped in the city as it should have existed in 2015, the living city whose food stores and water supplies were seemingly bountiful. But they found themselves trapped and overpopulated, and died off over time, to have their bodies and doomed attempts at survival discovered by their future counterparts.

But there was more evidence to support this than just the messages of the visible exiles. Not long after the Wall appeared, a police officer received radio communication from his partner, trapped in the city. He continued talking to the partner for some few days. At that time, his partner showed up at the Wall and was able to communicate visually with the police officer at the same time that his counterpart, in the other timeline, was talking to the officer through his radio.

From this, we can determine that electromagnetic radiation is the only thing capable of penetrating the wall. But after all these years, long after our police officer's radio rang out with gunfire and then went quiet, this is the only thing we have learned.

PORTABLE HYPERSPACE

Sov looked at the readout on his Portable Hyperspace Unit. One hour might seem like long enough to someone inexperienced in hyperspatial covergence, but it might not be enough time at all. Or it might be plenty. You could never tell for sure until it happened. Once the convergence began, multiple timelines from multiple universes would mix, spawning a temporal and spatial chaos that could stretch time like a noodle going through a black hole. Worst case scenario, Sov might be ripped into a thousand thin slices, each one cast out across the multiverse like flat stones skipping over calm water.

Sov looked up. The land ahead was flat and covered in snow that had melted slightly on top and then refroze. The surface of it was a shiny glaze that looked unreal, and it made a crunch like thin caramel when he stepped in it.

He looked back. His prints, clearly showing the direction he had gone. It was time to get smart. He had to throw them off.

He set down his PHU and set to clearing a spot in the snow. When he had one, he sat and took off his boots. Now the tricky part, the part he had trained himself for; actually using the PHU. It wasn't the first time he had done so, but this was arguably the most pressure he had felt beforehand.

The PHU was about two feet long and a foot and a half wide. Not quite a cube; more like a rectangle. But applying three dimensional shapes to it was ludicrous, considering what it contained, or rather what it gave access to.

The "Portable" and the "Unit" weren't troubling; the "Hyperspace" part _was_. If you weren't careful, if you let your eyes linger too long on the PHU's inner dimensions or stuck your hand too far in, bad things could happen.

The lid on top was help down by two clasps which required considerable strength to open. Sov was known for his speed and cunning, but not his strength; he grunted and strained at the clasps for several minutes before they sprang open.

When the first one went, the pressure of the Unit's interior caused the loosened side of the lid to lift up. A bit of condensed hyperspace leaked out, causing the air to shimmer and split into colors.

When the second clasp went, the lid exploded open and Sov felt his hand get sucked in. After the initial equalization, the pressure weakened to the point where Sov was able to fight it. He pulled his hand out and looked at it. A peculiar sensation prickled in his fingers. It was probably similar to what frostbite felt like, Sov thought.

He now had to do something scary. Had to perform a reorientation on himself.

His socks came off next. His feet were sweaty. He had been running for a long time. Looking back once more, Sov let out a sigh of relief followed by a long groan when he fully realized what he was about to do to himself.

It was best not to think about it much.

Scooting himself back over the mushy snow, Sov jammed both feet into the PHU's slot, up to the ankles. Immediately, they were covered by the pins and needles sensation he was familiar with. When he felt them lock into place, held there in the folds of hyperspace, he started twisting his body around.

The feet stayed where they were as he turned over onto his stomach. It didn't hurt as much as he thought it would, but the feeling he did get was just as bad; a weird humming in his ankles, as well as a feeling like someone was scouring the bones with steel wool.

Still on his stomach, he pulled his feet back out. His heels hit the snow, and he looked down. The feet had kept their orientation, and now faced backward.

Putting his socks and shoes back on was not easy. Nor was standing up. But Sov was also known to be very adaptable. After a few minutes, he decided that he could do this.

He put the PHU back over his shoulder, then turned it over. The antimatter jets on the bottom were damn near empty. Of course they were. If they weren't, he could have flown out of here lickety-split.

They did, however, have enough left in them for a short flight. He had been saving it for days, and now his willpower had paid off. If this reorientation ruse was going to work, he really needed that antimatter.

He looked toward the sun, dead ahead. It was hard to see the effects of the imminent convergence through the cloud cover, but they were there; the sun was shooting out spikes of plasma in all directions, dancing tendrils of fire that sparkled every color of every rainbow in every universe that was involved in the convergence.

Enough of that. It hurt his eyes. He looked back at his tracks instead. Here, the handiness of the PHU really made itself apparent. Every single track he had left on this world, in this universe in fact, had flipped itself around. And they would stay that way, as long as he waited until he left to fix his feet. And since his enemies had no idea he had a PHU, let alone what a PHU even was, they would be ridiculously confused. Add to that the fact that they were likely still on the steppe, where there was no snow, and where they would still be a little while in picking his trail back up, he had a very effective ruse.

Now, to add the icing on top. He moved to the edge of the cleared area and pulled his firebox out. He used it to carry embers between camp sites, but now it would serve a different purpose. He opened the thing and upended it into the center of the cleared spot. Then he pulled out his bundle of kindling and threw it on top. After a few minutes of careful stoking, he had the fire going. There wasn't much wood, so it would burn out before the pursuers found it. They would see the ash and the prints, and think that Sov had headed back to the steppe. They would follow, and track him across that snowless expanse. Perfect!

He centered the PHU on his back, cinched it down tight, and face toward the sun. The clouds seemed to be thinning now. Probably natural, but there was a chance that the first tendrils were reaching the atmosphere now and burning the moisture away. During really bad convergences, on similar planets, the atmosphere could be entirely consumed in the space of seconds.

Hopefully that wouldn't happen here.

Sov reached for the controller in his pocket, found the jet button by memory, and pressed it.

After a fitful start, he was soon sailing through the frigid wind, his hair blasted back, ice forming in the hairs of his nose. He went a good half mile before the PHU started chugging and gasping. He released the button, let himself fall ten feet or so, then pressed it again. In this way, he inched his way back to the ground. The antimatter went totally dry when he was still fifteen feet up, but he was ready for it, and fell with grace despite the fact that his feet were on backwards.

The sharp glaze of the snow cut his hands a little, and his newly reoriented ankles burned and ached when he landed, but otherwise he was OK.

He looked back. The combination of the flat landscape and the stark plainness of the snow made it so that he couldn't see his other tracks at all. Only the hint of smoke rising. Very good.

He turned and walked. Now that he didn't really need the backwards feet anymore, they started feeling more like an annoyance. His top speed was greatly reduced. He looked at the PHU's readout again:

T minus forty minutes, thirty six seconds

And he still had a couple of miles to go.

About ten minutes later, as Sov was walking, he realized the little hill just ahead of him wasn't getting any closer.

He looked around and puzzled over the problem for a moment before realizing what was happening. He had been walking steadily, but hadn't moved an inch. Each time he moved forward, space-time smeared and carried him back again. The phenomenon was made evident by the weird crystal-like artifacts floating in the air, surrounding him. After wracking his brain for a moment, he remembered that it was something known to occur during converges, and was called a Box-In. The only way to cancel out the effect, and enter back into the ordinary flow of time, was to cause a hyperspatial burst.

Luckily, he had the PHU. He set it between his knees, squeezed it there, and with a choreographed effort managed to get both clasps to come free simultaneously. Normal space was pulled in and distorted. As a result, the Box-In matrix was realigned with the temporal flow and things went back to normal. Seemingly.

He had wasted a couple more minutes there. And if Box-Ins were now happening, it meant that the convergence was getting very near. All bets were off now.

He got to the hill and had to blink a few times. The landscape ahead, still snowy but now gently sloped here and there, seemed for a moment to be a swimming ocean of negative colors. The effect left an after image on Sov's eyes. He wasn't sure what _that_ was called. Either it was too boring and common to have ever been mentioned to him, or it was some exotic, rare thing.

An exotic, rare event during a convergence wasn't always a bad thing. Just ninety-nine percent of the time.

Sov kept going, pressing the speed even more. There was some strain on his ligaments that soon caused a tight, twanging pain in the backs of both knees. He had the idea of walking backward, so that his now backward feet would suddenly be forward again, but that somehow felt even more awkward.

Oh, well. Better to have sore knees than a body dissected and mutilated by overlapping dimensions that were never supposed to exist in the same universe, let alone ever touch one another.

T minus twenty four minutes, eighteen seconds

Sov lowered the PHU and looked back. No sign of his pursuers, not even a wisp of smoke. He was long gone. Given enough time, they might find him. But time was something they didn't have. Or, quite possibly, they had absolute eternity, as convergence scientists like to call it; that state of total temporal void, in which nothing moves or ever changes; where everything freezes forever.

Either way, they would never get him. Even if Sov suddenly turned to a human statue, even if the dust of snow in the air suddenly hung fixed as if from strings, they would _never_ get him.

The land behind him, in the direction he had come leaving his backwards footprints, things looked normal. This planet wasn't prized for its beauty. It wasn't prized for its anything, really, which was why Sov had come here to begin with. But it did at least look natural back that way. Snow, the curve of land, a smear of gray further along where the steppe began. A terrestrial place, one where the human mind could exist assailed by nothing except loneliness.

Ahead of him, though, the effects of the convergence were twisting reality like a wet rag.

Sometimes when Sov looked at the horizon it appeared flipped; sky below, snow above. Under ordinary circumstances this wouldn't trouble the eye much. White sky, white ground and the lack of contrast between them. But now the sky was starting to clear, revealing itself as not a blue expanse but a deepening void in which the many colors of the hyperspatial seepage presented themselves in electrical starkness. The stars, light years away, appeared magnified and blurred. Thunder filled the sky, more melodic and more disturbing than any thunder that could be considered natural.

Sov realized how foolish it was that he was going _toward_ all that. But in convergence, one must learn to be counter intuitive. When one runs back in the direction of normality, one is condemning themselves to a worse fate. The longer the convergence has to effect reality, the more terrible the reality becomes. The only way out is forward.

Sov had survived three convergences in his life. The trick to getting out of them was to find a traveler. Back in his home universe, people had been using a system called NTS to travel great distances in less than a second; teleportation, in other words. NTS had been a common system of travel for a very long time. It worked by throwing people through hyperspace.

If you traveled just far enough into a convergence to see into hyperspace, but not so far that your body was smeared across ten light years in ten different universes, you sometimes saw the travelers floating by. All you had to do was grab on to one of them and ride them back home. If not your home, then someone else's.

By the looks of the mess of unreality ahead of him, Sov was getting close to that magical point.

T minus fourteen minutes, fifty two seconds

The convergence was all around him. Sov had already stopped three more times to get out of Box-Ins. He had also suffered a marrow quake, which is when a certain particle flying out of hyperspace and through your body reacts badly to the marrow in your bones, resulting in a very nasty sensation that your limbs are about to disintegrate. Which they absolutely will, if you don't get out of the way fast enough.

Sov stopped. Up ahead, a wobbling sphere of purple supermatter floated in the air. It looked familiar. He opened the PHU again and stuck his hand in. It came out of the sphere up ahead. He felt cold air on his fingertips.

He had heard of this happening a couple times. Each PHU is rooted to its own chunk of supermatter, which is suspended somewhere in hyperspace. The supermatter acts as a buffer so that you don't cause your own convergence on accident. Sometimes, during convergences, you will glimpse a supermatter orb or two. But it is extremely unlikely that you would come across the orb of your very own PHU.

Sov took his hand back and shut the Unit. The orb went drifting past him, headed for normalcy. It wouldn't survive much longer, not immersed in normal space as it was. It would soon burst, causing a cascading effect of splitting molecules that might, under the proper atmospheric conditions, entirely destroy the possibility of life on the planet. All the more reason to get out of here.

The worst part was that his PHU was now useless. He would have to find another one once he got out of here if he wanted to turn his feet back around.

He walked onward, racing the convergence now rather than his pursuers.

T minus fourteen minutes, thirty seconds

It should have read around ten minutes. Now that that the PHU was disconnected from hyperspace, it was now unable to get a gauge on the progress of the convergence. Sov was now playing it by ear. Thankfully, he had already seen his first traveler up ahead. The woman had been here and gone in about five seconds. Enough time to grab on. He just had to walk up to where he had seen her, and hope another one would come by.

He went. It was easy to tell where she had passed because the snow was melted slightly in a wide trench there.

Sov waited awhile. About two minutes passed. He was starting to feel anxious. The sheer amount of people who used NTS meant that, on average, he should see several more before the convergence was on him. But averages had a way of biting you in the ass.

A troubling thing had occurred. The sky and the air around him had taken on a thick blueness. And not the fresh, brave blue of the normal sky. No; this was the ominous doom shade that immediately preceded the heart of a Class C Convergence, which wasn't the worst but it wasn't the best either.

Sov blinked. And of course, that was when the traveler came. But he was quick, and he latched on to the flying shape with both arms first and then wrapped his legs around it.

The traveler flew on, in a perfectly prone position parallel to the ground. A bubble of heat surrounded them, which was a result of the interaction between hyperspace and that protective gel they put on you before you took an NTS trip. Sov singed himself a little as he grappled onto the traveler, but it felt nice and cool inside the bubble.

The traveler shot on, unaffected by gravity, and then punctured through the wall of reality which was weaker than ever here at the edge of the convergence. They were now in hyperspace.

It wasn't Sov's first time here, but he never got used to it, nor did he ever find the words to describe what it was like. Maybe it was like standing inside of a hollow sphere made of mirrors. Or maybe it was like dancing in the heart of a black hole. Or maybe it was like having angels sing your demise as you died in the most unimaginable, horrific way the multiverse could come up with.

Thankfully, the trip would be short. The traveler might be unconscious and thus safe, but Sov's fragile human psyche was at the full mercy of hyperspace.

To take his mind off it, he took a closer look at the traveler. It wasn't even human, he realized. He wasn't sure of the species. He hadn't been back home in a long time. But it was alive, and it was dressed in the typical gown given to travelers at official NTS stations, which meant it was civilized and hopefully friendly as well.

One good thing about his backwards feet was that they made it easier to get close to his alien companion.

The bubble dissolved as they passed back into normal space, as it was meant to do.

The NTS pod was far too cramped for two people, and the alien was rather large anyway. Sov was crammed against the pod's lid, his throat pinched between it and the alien's shoulder. The operators immediately saw that they had an unexpected tagalong, and opened the lid. Whilst the alien traveler slept on, the operators grabbed Sov and rushed him over to a special shower designed to clean any residual hyperspatial particles off of his person.

When the process was finished, Sov underwent a brief exam and interview. He almost expected to be thrown into prison, but it seemed enough time had passed in this universe that they didn't have him on record anymore. Also, his PHU was apparently so outdated that they thought it was some kind of travel case. When he told them what it was, they said that it made sense considering the state of his feet.

After all the formalities someone brought in a working PHU and Sov got to fix his feet. They hurt worse after being turned back, but it was such a relief that he didn't care.

As soon as he was able to walk he went out to explore the place where he had found himself. It turned out to be a pissant lunar research station, barely worthy of even having an NTS pod. Oh, well. It would have to do, at least until he found out if anyone else in the universe remembered him. And until he found out where to go next.

POEMS

INTERSTELLAR JUMP

It cuts, we bleed

It flows, we lead

In the dark

Where there is no light

In the dark

Where there is no fight

We jump, it bends

We fall, it wins

In the dark

Where there is no air

In the dark

Where there is nowhere

We jump, it withers

We die, it glitters

In the dark

Where there is no night

In the dark

Where there is no light

No life, no death

No hope, no less

We live, then die

In a single breath

In the dark

Where there is nowhere

WHEN THE LIGHT TURNS ON

A cold wind blows

And an old door groans

Enter what you thought was gone

Songs that never have been sung

In hallways of the forgotten

Where the new souls now arrange

Words of truth are torched

Thought and memory destroyed

All familiar things made strange

You begin to see that all is gone

And you don't look like yourself

When the light turns on

IN MOONLIGHT

We stood last night

In twisted moonlight

Felt our skin on cold stone

Tasting frost

Kiss the sky

Felt a fire in our bones

Can we stay

Here in the moonlight?

Can we lay

Together now?

Why won't you say

You love me now?

Why can't we wait

Forever here?

We stood last night

In twisted moonlight

Felt your touch, your frozen bones

Tasting frost

Crush the sky

Saw a fire way up high

I DON'T EXIST

I think it's fake

It's crystal clear

It's too clean, too mean

A universe in despair

Blacking out, giving up

I was never here

I was never there

And I can never leave

It might be real

Let's seal the deal

I'm too frail, too pale

A universe going stale

Backing out, falling up

I was never here

I was never there

And I can never leave

I don't exist

I'll be going now

I always loved you

Please, don't touch me

AN HOUR BEFORE THE END

When you leave us

When lands deceive us

All of this in your eyes

Goodbyes... let's say goodbyes

Can you see us

Can you feed us

Keep us in this dark

Leave... let's leave, let's leave

Now it leaves us

Don't believe us

Don't conceive us

Take us to this light

Lightness... we can be, we can be

Will you end us?

Dark, defend us

We will stand in light

Can we?

We can be, we can be, we can...

