Chapter Three
I crested the last hill and immediately noticed excited energy among the neighborhood kids crowded around the portal.
"We got a good one today?"
The children parted, and my unofficial second-in-command stepped forward - the eighteen-year-old boy who often corralled the others. "Looks like it."
Peering beyond him, I found a rather surprising sight.
Each day for the last week, the random destinations had been non-starters. One world had been completely on fire - from the closest flaming ground to the distant smoldering mountains - and there'd been no sign of abatement.
We'd spent another whole day staring in horror out across a vast ocean of what seemed to be thick blood. The smooth and endless crimson surface had been interrupted only by a few massive bone-like protrusions, and a sunless sky of carved ivory presided over the inexplicable sight. Weird ripples had moved in that blood ocean, as if hidden creatures lived beneath. The portal had never shown anywhere but alternate Earths as far as anyone had seen… I'd warned the kids not to think too much about how our Earth had become like that ungodly place. That way laid madness.
It had definitely been a relief to find the portal showing onto an open green pasture the next day, and we'd almost gone in - but my second noticed it at the last moment: an eerie lack of parallax. The green pasture was an illusion, almost like a perfect television screen displayed across the rift, and what truly lay beyond was impossible to know. Such a deception hinted at far worse intentions through that particular portal than in most worlds. Most worlds didn't seem to know or care about us.
Every Earth we'd glimpsed in the last week had been anathema to human life in some way or another. Every world had been dead or dying. I'd figured that this was all somehow related to the otherworldly book I was trying to get rid of, and its inexplicable penchant for detailing the final stories of the doomed, but I couldn't be sure. I didn't know if it controlled the portal, or whether it was merely connected to it somehow, but the children reported that the destinations were definitely getting worse. The first few weeks they'd observed it, there'd been nothing but pleasant forests, open plains, and innocuous oceans.
But today's sight changed our data set. Today, the portal opened on a busy street in a city that looked much like New York. We watched people drive past in recognizable cars and trucks. Many passersby were on foot, hurrying with very human impatience.
It didn't occur to me until I'd already stepped through - nobody on the other side had given the portal any heed.
Suddenly surrounded by the hustle, movement, and engine rhythms of a busy city street, I turned and looked back. Yep, there it sat: a ten-foot-wide jagged oval in space showing a forested path and a crowd of children watching from the other side. None of the suited busy-bodies on the sidewalk gave even the slightest glance at the portal.
Or at me, for that matter. They bumped against me and pushed past in an ongoing series of collisions. None so much as flinched. None apologized. They weren't completely unaware of me - they just didn't care.
Given that we'd not yet seen a world where any human being was still alive, I had the distinct concern that these people were nothing more than marionettes. If they were dead… if they were just emulating life… then that meant, in the middle of a busy big city street, I was actually completely alone. I'd seen many things in my life, and almost nothing truly got to me anymore, but I'd never been able to handle p-zombies. Something about that kind of soulless fate just struck me as existentially horrifying in a basic and gripping way.
Forget this.
Placing the book down on the sidewalk, I darted back through the portal.
"What happened?" the kids asked. "What's wrong?"
I looked down. The book was in my hand again. "Damnit." I watched their expressions. "Did I put this book down on the sidewalk?"
"No," they reported in unison.
"So, the book doesn't teleport back to my possession," I realized aloud. "It's a mental diversion. A trick of perception and memory."
Steeling myself, I went back into the portal a second time, and shoved the book into the large purse of a passing businesswoman.
I pressed myself up against the wall of a building, waited a few seconds, and then closed my eyes. I took a deep breath, analyzed my own thoughts, then looked down… yep, the book was still in my hand. "Son of a bitch."
The damn thing was intent on preventing any simple method of getting rid of it. I studied the passing oblivious people, and I soon began walking along with the flow. Could there be some device, creature, or power here that might help? Experience told me that, when facing a threat beyond human capability, the best bet was to find an even worse threat and pit them against one another; between the balance of two terrors sat a sliver of hope. It was the same principle as the nuclear standoff between superpowers during the Cold War - the future of the human race had been predicated on the careful opposition of conflicting armageddons far more often than most people would care to know.
A haggard female voice interrupted my growing panic. "Don't move!"
I'd long ago learned to instantly follow any desperately shouted warnings. Freezing in place, I waited as the shouter continued making noise and approaching me from behind. She might have been coming to attack me, sure, but true human desperation was hard to fake. Not like that.
"Oh God!" she said again, grabbing the end of my jacket and pulling me directly backward. "I thought there was nobody left…"
"Can I move now?" I asked her. "What's the danger?"
"Yeah, yeah, just don't go that way," she said quickly. "How've you made it this long?"
Looking ahead surreptitiously as I slowly turned to face her, I saw nothing ahead on the street except a few office entrances, a coffee shop, and a sandwich place with a bright red light out front that shone down on passersby. What unseen threat lay ahead that needed such warning? The stream of business men and women seemed to face no threat.
I froze. For a moment, a shadow passed over my soul.
The girl before me was as haggard as she'd sounded. Dressed in a tattered suit that had once been grey and clean, but which now bore dirt and rips in visible testament to homelessness, she seemed every bit the sole survivor I'd instantly envisioned upon hearing her desperate voice. Her wild shock of dirt-smeared hair hadn't been cleaned or combed in some time. "Christ, Christ almighty, I prayed, but I thought… I thought I'd never see another person again…"
Wary, I kept my eyes on her. "Are these not people?"
Underneath a furrowed brow, she narrowed her gaze. "Do they seem like people to you?"
I said nothing.
"They're all in there, still," she stated after a moment. "I stabbed one or two out of frustration a few years back. They come out of it just as they die. They're all thinking the same thing in there."
"In there?"
"In their heads." She looked around with compassion and fear. "They're screaming. All of them."
So, another apocalypse… this world wasn't safe and normal after all.
While I hesitated, she looked to her right. "The hell is that?"
Silently, but quickly, I ran a cold-hearted evaluation of this unknown girl and her situation. The consideration was thus: how likely was it that a species-ending threat would remain active and wary long after it'd dominated the planet? No matter how fantastical, extradimensional, or incomprehensible a threat, one rule of logic had to remain. Time was a resource, motivation was a resource, and the combination had to be right for a threat to remain dangerous. If almost all humans were dead or controlled, there was no longer any point in maintaining active surveillance or traps. I'd already recently blundered through two such worlds where living humans had not been expected. I'd even read a book for several minutes in a room filled with invisible animated corpses - and gotten away with it. They'd been completely caught off guard.
But this girl represented a Catch-22. She was alive, therefor
e traps and surveillance might remain. If she was a trap, though, that meant that there were probably no free humans, and no need for traps.
"It's a portal to another universe," I told her, gently holding her back as she eagerly moved toward it. I decided to only tell half of the truth. "It'll kill you if you try to cross without me."
She seemed on the verge of tears as she gauged my unreadable expression. "Please…"
"Quickly help me understand this world, and leave behind this book if I can," I told her, hefting the tome. "Then we'll go."
She pulled me into a nearby alley that I found to be disturbingly like the one I'd run through in the rain the week before. "It's -" she began, but she opened and closed her mouth in frustration without making any further sounds. "It won't let me talk about it."
I nodded slowly. It was never quite that easy, was it? I lifted the book. "This will tell me, then. I'm pretty sure it recounts, somehow, the final tales of those who've died nearby."
She watched with wide eyes as I began reading aloud. The tale of this unknown person might shed some light on the situation.