Infernal

Twenty minutes later, his backside feeling as if he’d been riding a mechanical bull in some roadside bar, Richard cleared an enormous wash of driftwood and debris in the riverbed and let the HumVee slow to a stop. They’d traveled in silence since Sophia’s revelation that her Mirror was Elianna’s mother. Richard had questions, many of them. Sophia seemed to recognize his need to get his thoughts in order before they discussed the matter further. He was grateful for her empathy but now they had another problem.

“This is your idea of ‘centered in the channel’?” he asked.

He’d seen the glow of the Rip before navigating around the deadfall. It was mostly trees and stone but he’d seen shapes intertwined in the wreckage that may have once been vehicles or boats. Closer inspection might reveal other things, things that had once been alive and walking.

“Where’s the Rip?” Sophia asked.

Richard remembered that Sophia could not see the Rips and there was no heat haze on this version of Earth to refract the energy to a visual range she could see.

“There.” Richard pointed up and left through the windshield. “About forty feet up.

Sophia whistled softly.

The spot Richard pointed at looked like the open maw of some long dead beast; a rictus grin of uprooted trees, stones, and mangled manmade objects. At some point in the planet’s history, perhaps due to a nearby meteor strike, this area had flooded and then drained rapidly. The riverbank had been washed away as the receding waters carried what looked like miles of dense jungle vegetation and everything else in its path to this low spot. Looking downriver revealed that the deadfall went on as far as the HumVee’s lights illuminated.

“We won’t make it up that in one piece,” Sophia warned.

“Unless you have a way to bring the Rip to us,” Richard said, “we don’t have a choice.”

“Can we get to it from above?” Sophia asked. “Drive around this and find a way back up to the top?”

“We could drive for miles and not find a way out of here,” Richard said. “Do we have time for that?”

Sophia glanced at the RLP and shook her head. “This Rip is closing in less than ten minutes.”

“And we don’t have the fuel or oxygen to wait for another to open,” Richard said, ending the discussion by retrieving the POGS from the back floorboard. He handed one to Sophia and strapped the other in place on his head.

“We climb,” he said, his voice muffled by the vinyl and rubber headgear.

The deadfall looked even more treacherous up close. A jumble of long dead palm trees resembling matchsticks swept from a table by an uncaring hand. Rocks were mixed in—some the size of delivery trucks—and unrecognizable masses of twisted metal. Richard spied one semi-intact structure that might have been the remains of a radio or electrical transmission tower.

He placed his foot on the root ball of a smaller palm at the base of the pile intending to step onto a man-sized rock from there. The cluster of roots disintegrated under his weight and his foot plunged through. He lost his balance and fell forwards, the weight of the pack on his back driving him headlong into the deadfall. More wood turned to dust as he crashed into it. There was a groaning, shifting sound from above.

Richard glanced up and saw several rocks, one the size of a small dog, tumbling toward him. His pack saved him from the worst of them but he realized his misstep was about to bring the entire deadfall crashing down upon him. He’d be buried alive.

There was pressure at his ankles and then he was heaved backwards, his shirt rucked up and stones scratched his belly. The faceplate of the POGS snagged on something and was jerked from his head, only the hose between it and the canister clipped to his waist preventing its loss.

Stale air rushed into Richard’s lungs. It tasted of ash and pumice.

The deadfall continued to cascade down around him with a tortured, rending sound. There were snaps and crashes, thuds and long, tortured moans. An old Jeep previously entwined in a huge snarl of trees like a toy car in a child’s fist shot out of a tangle of debris. It left most of its rusting front end on a large boulder it glanced off of and flipped end over end twice before crashing into the roof of the HumVee.

Sophia let go of Richard’s ankles and grabbed the carrying strap at the top of his pack. She heaved him to his feet and yelled, “Run!”

They ran. The HumVee, its roof dented in and rust from the old Jeep still pattering down its sides didn’t seem to offer much shelter so they made for the opposite bank of the riverbed. Once there Richard grasped for the dangling POGS mask, desperate to replace the dead smell of this world with that of stale, canned air.

“Christ, Richard,” Sophia gasped into her own POGS, her hands on her thighs as her heart rate slowed, “that was stupid.”

The mournful, almost human wailing sound of the deadfall settling gradually tapered off. With no breeze to clear it the fine debris of its collapse hung in the air, casting a haze like that left by a recent forest fire over everything.

“Agreed,” Richard said. “Stupid, but not without merit.”

He pointed to the opposite side of the riverbed.

Sophia looked and saw a huge concavity where moments before there had been a twisted pile of wreckage. The avalanche had cleared the rotted wood and twisted metal leaving only the rocks, boulders, and large sections of concrete shot through with rebar behind. Richard’s hasty attempt to climb the deadfall had created a virtual staircase of stone and dense rubble.

“It would seem God not only watches over drunks and small children,” Richard said, “but Primes as well.”

“Is it close enough to the Rip for us to get through?” Sophia asked.

“I think so,” Richard said, squinting through the haze at the Rip above them.

“Then we better get going.” She’d pulled the RLP from a pocket and examined it. “The aperture of the Rip has already started to close.”

Despite fine layers of dust and fragments of wood chips and metal clinging to the stones the climb was easier than Richard expected. There was one uneasy moment when a section of concrete shifted beneath his feet threatening to topple him. His hold on a rock above saved him a nasty trip down the deadfall to the riverbed thirty feet below. Sophia, lighter and more agile, had elected to go first and was a good twelve feet above him when he shouted through his POGS:

“Stop there! On that ledge.”

She waited patiently as he moved into position beside her.

“It’s about four feet over,” he said, pointing into what appeared to her to be empty space.

She looked down. There was nothing beneath the area he indicated but a forty-foot drop into mangled wreckage.

“We’ll have to jump for it,” he said. “It’s closing fast.” He didn’t tell her that the pulsating red and blue disc had shrunk to a mere two feet in diameter.

“If I miss…” Sophia began.

“You told me that a Rip of any size will carry an object through to the other side, right?”

“So long as enough of its mass crosses the event horizon, yes,” Sophia said.

“Then I suggest you go now.”

“Richard,” she warned, “mass exits the Rips at the same velocity it enters.”

He hadn’t considered this.

“Tuck and roll, then,” he said. “And hope this one exits over a California King with lots of pillows.”

Without another word Sophia turned and leapt into space. Richard breathed a sigh of relief when she vanished, consumed by the multi-colored brilliance of the Rip.

“Here goes nothing,” Richard said, inwardly praying that he wasn’t leaping into a volcano on another version of Earth. Or worse. He took a deep breath, steeled himself, and jumped.

Peace.

Not the peace between two men who’ve long been at odds and recently settled their differences, but Peace. Eternal contentment and satisfaction. This was beyond love and compassion, beyond human gratification. This was a warm, all encompassing sensation Richard had never felt before or even knew existed.

Once again he saw/felt/tasted the colors of the Rip, was wrapped in them, as if he were part of them and they a part of him. They flowed into him and through him, guiding him. For the first time he felt a glimmer of something else; a stray and tangent thought that perhaps, in time, he could guide the Rips as well.

Then all too quickly he was out of the Rip, plunging downward. He curled as well as he could but the ground rose up and met his back with tremendous force, expelling the breath from his lungs with a whoosh.

He dragged the POGS from his face as if the oxygen it provided was what prevented his lungs from expanding. Tried to breathe but couldn’t get anything in.

Diaphragm spasm, he thought. Known as getting the wind knocked out of you. The paralysis is temporary so just relax.

Within a minute the spasm subsided and he drew in a great gulping lungful of acrid but breathable air. When his breathing returned to normal he got to his knees and looked around.

There was little light and a lot of noise here. Thunderous explosions followed by concussions that threatened to knock him back to the ground. He looked frantically about for Sophia but saw only a dark wasteland briefly lit up by stroboscopic bursts of light from above. The earth was soaked with rain and gunfire erupted from seemingly everywhere around him. He made out long strands of razor-wire before him and large steel obstacles reminiscent of enormous jacks from a knucklebones game. The air was thick with the smell of cordite and spent explosives.

My God, he thought, we’ve Ripped into the middle of a war!

He could hear voices shouting in the distance. The repeating pop of automatic weapons fire made it difficult to pin down direction, impossible to discern the language being spoken. A huge explosion went off to his left and the shouting turned to screams.

His confusion was mounting. As was his anxiety at not being able to locate Sophia.

Where the hell is this? He thought. And when?

He started to rise, thinking the razor wire in front of him might border a foxhole and that it would be a good idea to get to cover when something roared overhead. He looked up, tracking the sound through the smoke and haze of spent gunpowder. A P-51D Mustang shot through the sky, followed closely by three others. Each spat death at the earth from six .50 caliber M2 Browning machine guns.

“Oh my Christ!” he heard himself yell.

There was a splash of wet footfalls behind him. As he turned to run he heard a perfectly clear though oddly accented voice yell:

“I got this one!”

Then a rifle butt slammed into the back of his head and he heard no more.

Richard came to in a seated position, his arms and legs bound to a chair. He had time to think of Michael Manus, bound in eternal agony to a chair on another world before a hood was pulled from his head. Light stabbed into his eyes. He squinted and shook his head to clear his vision. His vision only doubled, then trebled.

“I’d take it easy there, boy,” a voice told him. His mind struggled to place the same sort of accent he’d heard before being butt-stroked. “You took a hell of a knock and may well be concussed.”

His vision returned; a single, blurry line of sight. Richard looked around. He was in a room with concrete walls, surrounded by men. One stood at his right shoulder. He had the look of a man who was awaiting an order to kill. Another was seated at a table before him. Sophia was bound to a chair beside him, watching. Blood welled from a cut above one eye but she looked otherwise unharmed. That eye would blacken beautifully. If they lived long enough.

“I see you didn’t give up without a fight,” Richard chuckled weakly.

She gave him a curt smile and nodded towards the man behind the table.

Richard’s vision cleared fully and he took in the items on the table. Their packs, weapons, supplies. His mother’s copper trinket box.

He took in the man seated at the table. He expected the black uniform but not the man himself. He was obviously in his sixties, thin of face and sporting a neatly trimmed beard that descended to his chest. Despite the soft, not unkind voice he’d addressed Richard with moments before his eyes had hardness in them. This man had both seen and dealt death. But the eyes were not cruel, as was often the case with seasoned killers. The man was no thug, or murderer. Whatever his cause, he felt it was just.

Whoever he was, he wasn’t, as Richard had feared, Jefferson. And he did not appear to be one of his goons. The uniform was black but looked to be cotton and not a synthetic material like rayon or polyester. It was cut simply, as if stitched by hand. Not at all like the fitted attire Jefferson and his men had worn when last they had met. The insignia on the man’s arm and chest bore a stylized devil’s head over crossed swords, which was not, to Richard’s limited knowledge, of BanaTech design.

Relieved that they were not at the mercy of BanaTech forces, though fully aware they were still in danger, Richard’s curiosity was piqued.

“And who might you be?” He asked the man.

“You shut your damn mouth, Westie,” a voice from the left said.

“No!” Sophia protested as the man delivered an open handed but powerful blow to Richard’s head.

There was a blast of pain and the room went blurry again. “We’ll ask the goldarn questions here!”

Though his ears were ringing Richard placed the accent. North American. The rural southeast. Tennessee or West Virginia, maybe.

“That will be enough, Johnse,” the man behind the table said mildly. “I can answer his question and then maybe he’ll answer one of mine.”

“I am Brigadier General William Anderson Hatfield, sir,” the man said to Richard, “serving under the President of these here Eastern United States. Now who might you be and what are you doing on the West Virginia side of the Tug?”