Double Dose, page 36
“She’ll be okay. Where you need to go?”
“Forget it. I’m not—”
Just then the sky lit up. The sun hung high and bright in the west over the mountains but not as bright as the giant bolts of lightning shooting from the top of the Pendry tower.
“No!” she shouted as she stared that way. “Damn it, no!” She pulled the door open and climbed in. “Take me to the tower. Fast!”
“You got it.”
Big one-eighty change of mind on a dime. First it’s I ain’t getting’ in with you and then it’s Get me there fast. She might be a goddess but she was still a woman.
Tom
Lucy had been right about the “things” gurgling up from the fissure. Creatures of varying amorphous shapes and sizes writhed and wriggled in the spewing water, mostly football-sized bodies with tentacles sprouting everywhere.
Tom heard her mutter, “My-my-my…how Lovecraftian.”
“Octopi? Squid?”
She shook her head. “You wish.”
Whatever they were, they seemed hungry, because they immediately latched onto the beached fish—the normal fish—and started ripping them apart and devouring them.
Water spewed in massive fountains ten feet high, and as the surging outflow spread toward them, Lucy moved to the stern and watched over the edge.
“Start the engine but leave it in neutral. As soon as the propeller’s off the bottom, I’ll give the signal to start us moving.”
“Got it.”
Tom hit the starter button and the engine caught. He understood the need to wait: If the propeller was on the bottom, it might break off, and then they’d have to row.
The water swirled around them, and so did the polypoid creatures. Good thing they didn’t have a V-shaped hull or they’d be on their side and taking on water instead of starting to float again.
He watched the water continue to gush from below, and as it deepened, larger shapes began emerging from the depths. He could feel his heart hammering and his hand sweating as he gripped the gear lever. They had to move.
“Ready?”
Lucy shook her head. “Not yet.”
Tom really, really, really wanted to start moving. Shapes in the water were coming their way. The boat shifted…floating free of the sandbar that had caused them to run aground? Or pushed from below?
“N-now?”
“Almost…wait…wait…okay, put her in reverse—gently.”
He did just that, and they started to move—at last—but he noticed an unusual vibration from the engine.
“Are you sure we’re clear?”
“Clear of the bottom, yes, but what you feel is the propeller making chum of those ugly things.”
The water around them was starting to change, showing swirls of dark color.
“What color’s their blood?”
“Black. Maybe real dark blue. Hard to tell. Keep going. It’s not the little ones I’m worried about, it’s their big brothers. And here comes one now.”
She reached behind her head and unsheathed her katana. The blade gleamed in the sunlight.
“Wh-what are you doing?”
She’d moved to the middle of the boat and stood with her legs spread and the katana held vertically in a two-handed grip before her right shoulder.
“Preparing to defend our rotting meat.”
Aw, shit. She’d lost it.
“Please, sit down.”
“I warned you about marauders, didn’t I? Well, you’re about to meet some.”
“Really, Lucy—”
She gave him a look. “Marauders come in all shapes and sizes, Tommy. Put us in forward and keep us moving.”
“Where to?”
“Stay in the deeper water. We don’t want to run aground again. Not too fast, just keep us moving. I’ll—”
A long, smooth, slim, tentacle, glistening black, emerged from the water and darted toward her. Her katana flashed and severed it, the top piece flying one way, the spurting stump retreating below the surface.
Damn, that blade was sharp.
Tom shifted the engine to forward and steered them into a wide turn. He fought the urge to go full throttle because it would topple Lucy overboard. She might be the bane of his existence but she didn’t deserve that.
As they chugged along, more tentacles darted from the water, sometimes in twos and threes. He crouched behind the steering wheel, kneeling on the flooring and keeping his head just high enough to see over the prow. But Lucy stood her ground, ducking and bobbing and slashing left and right, chopping through those tentacles in silence. A grim smile lit her face. She was having fun, damn her!
Were it anyone else, Tom might have felt admiration, but she was his personal royal pain in the ass who’d got them into this mess. And he was going to go down with her.
All he could think of was how fucked they were. And yet…still that looming sense that things were going to get worse.
The tentacles were coming thick and fast now and he heard Lucy start to pant from the exertion. She wasn’t in the best of shape. He was worrying about how long she could keep this up before one of them got to her and then he realized he had something else to worry about: the smaller tentacled horrors were pulling themselves up onto the gunwales.
Remembering what they’d done to those beached fish, he was going to point them out to Lucy, but she was pretty near overwhelmed with the long tentacles. Tom left the steering wheel—they had only empty open water ahead of them—and grabbed one of the oars from its rack on the side and started smashing.
They squished easily. Reminded him of Whac-A-Mole. But these weren’t cute harmless rodents, and for every one he killed, two or three replaced it. The situation was growing desperate and he was silently cursing Lucy and her scatterbrained obsessions when the little horrors began jumping back into the water and the long tentacles abruptly withdrew, retreating below the surface and leaving the floating severed segments as the only evidence of their existence.
“What happened?” Tom said, eying the water for their sudden return. “Where’d they go?”
“Scared,” Lucy said as she swished her katana blade in the water to rinse off its coating of dark blood. She was spattered head to toe with more of the same.
“Hey, you’re good,” he said. “I’ll even be the first to say you’re great with that blade. But I don’t think those things are scared of anything.”
“Yeah, they are.” She pointed the tip of her katana at something behind him. “That.”
Tom whirled…and there it was…the doom he’d sensed.
A mind-numbing sight. A hole in the air, a perfectly round six-foot wide pit of black emptiness hovering maybe a dozen feet above the surface of the water. The boat was gliding straight for it.
He grabbed the wheel and quick pulled them to the left. But as they coasted around its side, it still appeared as a circular hole in the air. It looked like a sphere from every angle but remained an opening. A two-dimensional spherical hole seemed self-contradicting…all wrong…but here it was.
The hopelessness and despair flowing from it engulfed him, claimed him. He idled the engine and they both stared in silence.
Daley
As Kendrick raced his pickup through the solar array, Daley worked to catch her breath as she watched the wildly flashing tower—damn, she was out of shape. The huge bolts of energy arcing into the air made the test run of a few weeks ago look like a July Fourth sparkler.
(“What are we doing here?”) Pard said.
I’m not sure anymore.
The electrical display could mean that Elis had stopped doing whatever he did to cause the quakes and put all his voltage into the dome. If so, she could turn around now. All she cared about were the quakes. She hadn’t brought all those people back from the horrors just to have them crushed in collapsed buildings.
(“Do we care whether or not he opens a passage into the Void—assuming he can?”)
Not really. Because even if he can, Jason’s going to take care of that.
(“And soon…if that dashboard clock is accurate.”)
She tapped the clock and asked Kendrick, “Is that the right time?”
He shrugged. “Close, I guess. I ain’t been too worried about the right time lately.”
It read 4:18.
What had Jason said? We wait until the exact moment of the equinox—four twenty-one Pacific Time—and then we wait just a little longer until the passage stabilizes. Then we send the surge.
(“We’ve got maybe five minutes before the tower blows. I’d prefer to watch that from a distance.”)
I’m with you.
“Slow down,” she told Kendrick.
“You said you wanted to get here fast, but okay. Sure.”
The pickup slowed as the base of the tower came into view at the end of the road.
(“We should be going in the other direction.”)
Yeah, you’re right.
She was turning to tell Kendrick to head back the way they’d come when she caught sight of a familiar-looking car parked by the tower.
“Hey, isn’t that…?”
Kendrick nodded. “Yeah, the Pendry kid’s Highlander. Saw him drive by earlier.”
He’s here to stop his father.
(“And doing a bang-up job of it, I see.”)
Rhys might have hurt and offended her, but still…
We’ve got to get him out of there.
(“Then you’d better move fast.”)
“Pull up by the Highlander,” she told Kendrick.
When the pickup stopped next to it, Daley reached for the door handle and froze. A crowd of…what…creatures? Whatever they were, a dozen or so of them stood in a tight circle with Rhys at the center.
“What are they?”
(“They look like hominid Ken dolls.”)
“Don’t know,” Kendrick said. “Want me to have a look?”
“I’ll go with you,” she said.
“You should stay here, goddess.”
She hopped to the ground. “Stop calling me that.”
Kendrick pulled his aluminum baseball bat from behind his seat and they approached together.
“Rhys!” she called.
He spun and saw her. “Daley! Get out of here! He’s totally out of his head.”
She stopped about a dozen feet away. “What are those things and can you get away? Because you need to get away—like now.”
“They won’t let me pass. And they’re immovable.”
“What are they?”
“They’re called porthors. Remember the night somebody wrecked that empty shop next to Healerina? They did it. My dad sent them.”
(“I recognize them now. They’re the ‘lizards’ we saw in the desert that night.”)
“But—?”
“Well, well, look who’s here,” said a voice from under the tower. Elis Pendry stepped out into the sunlight. “The Duad arrives. And look who’s with her. The traitor.”
“What are you talking about, Dad?”
Kendrick said, “I tried, but she can’t be killed. She’s a goddess.”
Rhys stood there with his mouth hanging open.
Elis laughed. “A goddess! Is that so? Well, the goddess arrived too late.” He waggled a phone in the air. “Just talking to the Elders out on the Salton Sea.”
Daley said, “Who’re you kidding? Phones are useless. You’ve seen to that.”
He waggled it again. “Satellite phone. They just told me that the passage is opening. They’re approaching it now. All the dominoes are tipping just as planned. We’ve reached the point of no return.”
What he doesn’t know can hurt him, but I’m not telling him.
(“But it can hurt Rhys too if he stays here. Maybe your dragon can free him.”)
Worth a try.
“Karma,” she said. “Get Rhys out of there.”
“It’s Jeff now,” he said, shaking his head. “And I stay by you, goddess. My duty is to protect you.”
She didn’t need Jeff right now, she needed Karma.
“We have to get Rhys out of there.”
Another stubborn head shake. “I’m not here to protect him, I’m protecting you.”
“That’s the way you’re playing it? Okay…then protect me.”
She broke into run toward the tower.
“Goddess, no!”
Tom
“The Void,” Lucy said, eyes wide, her voice a whisper.
He’d have to take her word for it. Whatever it was, it didn’t come from their world or their reality. And that realization brought everything crashing down around him. He’d been writing off all this Visitors crap as just that: crap. But if this clan could open a gateway into the Void or whatever that blackness was, then everything else surrounding their mythology might be true. And that meant reality wasn’t what he’d always assumed it to be.
“Get closer,” Lucy said.
Every cell in his body screamed NO!
“I can’t, Lucy. Absolutely not. If those monsters that came out of the fault are afraid to come near it, we should be too.”
“I think those ‘monsters’ are here as snacks for the Visitors. Someone’s stocking the pond, so to speak. Closer, Tommy. Please. I’ve waited all my life for this.”
Still, he held back. Couldn’t she see the opening was expanding?
“It’s getting bigger, Lucy. It could swallow us up!”
“Would that be so bad?”
“Damn right it’d be bad! If you’re right, that’s pure nothingness in there!”
It spanned eight feet, maybe nine now, and had lowered to within a few feet of the water. He could feel air flowing past him into its maw. In fact, their stern was drifting around as they started to float toward it.
“I’m moving us away,” he said, reaching for the gearshift.
“No!” she screamed in a singular display of emotion. “I need to see! Just a glimpse. You can throw it into gear and race away on an instant’s notice, but just let me see! Just once! Please, Tommy!”
The naked need in her voice reached deep inside him. She was feeling something. As much as he resented her for putting him in this spot, he left it in neutral…but kept a tight grip on the gearshift.
The katana clattered on the aluminum hull as she dropped it and pulled a folded piece of paper from within her harem pants.
“Take this.”
“What—?”
“Just hold onto it and read it when you have a chance. I would have texted it to you but I didn’t know if texting would work out here.”
He took it and promptly dropped it as she moved to the stern. There she leaned on the engine, stretching over it on tiptoe to peer into the blackness.
“Careful!”
Suddenly faint, frantic voices echoed across the water. Tom looked around and saw a white fiberglass, inboard runabout approaching. Four older men stood at the sides or leaning on the windshield, all waving frantically.
Their words became clear as they neared.
“Get away from there!”… “Stay back!”… “You don’t know what you’re doing!”
“I know exactly what I’m doing,” Lucy muttered as she leaned even farther.
“They act like they own it,” Tom said. “They must be from the clan.”
Lucy said, “Tell them to fuck off.”
“We’re fine!” Tom shouted back.
“No!” one of them called. “It’s dangerous. You’re in the way!”
Lucy cried, “I see something!”
“If it’s truly a window into the Void,” Tom said, “you shouldn’t see anything.”
“The Visitors, they’re coming this way, coming through.”
Was she really seeing anything? Was it possible?
What was he thinking? Of course it was possible. If this hole in reality was possible, so were the Visitors.
The clansters had idled their engine and were drifting about thirty feet away, still calling warnings.
“Maybe we’d better move away,” he said. “Maybe they know something.”
She shook her head. “No. Stay. The Visitors are still far off.”
“What do they look like?”
He envisioned lots of tentacles, like their “snacks.”
“They’re just blurs.”
They’d drifted too close for Tom’s comfort. “I’m going to move us away.”
“No! I’m not finished!”
“Finished what? I’m sorry, I—”
Lucy cried out as the stern suddenly lifted into the air. A chorus of wails and shouts from the runabout echoed her. The bow stayed in the water but the stern hovered three feet above the surface. Lucy clung to the engine but Tom noticed her ponytail had drifted off her back.
“I feel weightless!” she cried. “I am weightless. There’s no gravity by the passage!”
Nonplussed, he pushed the gearshift to “F” and the engine howled as the propeller spun in the air.
“Stop that, Tommy! You’ll burn out the engine and then you’ll be stuck out here!”
He couldn’t argue with that so he idled again…
…and watched in horror as his sister let go of the engine and floated free in the air.
The shouts from the clansters increased in volume.
Baffled, Tom cried, “What are you doing?”
She rotated toward him and her expression was beatific as she drifted toward the opening. “Heading home.”
“No-no-no! Stop!”
As he scrambled uphill toward the stern, he grabbed the oar he’d used against the little horrors. He almost dropped it as he entered the no-gravity zone or whatever it was. His insides lurched and he had to clutch the engine cowling to keep his feet on the deck as he extended the oar toward her.
“Grab this! I’ll pull you in!”
She folded her hands as if praying. “It’s okay, Tommy,” she said, her voice and expression maddeningly calm. “I’m right where I want to be. I’ve been aimed toward this all my life. I couldn’t be happier.”
“Lucy, please! You’re happy now, but you don’t really know anything about what’s in there! It’s just a guess! The Void is a myth! A hope! Wishful thinking! And if it is real, it’s a Void, Lucy—a fucking Void! It’s empty by definition! Nothingness! You’ll die in there! You won’t be free—you’ll be nothing!”
Her mouth twisted. “I already am nothing.”
