A Shrouded World 4 Read online

  “Come on, we need to get out of here,” I said. I could barely turn my neck, and my body was stiff like I’d been tossed around like a rag doll by whatever had happened. I exited the building and was looking out over a small parking lot. A gas station was across the street and little else. I could see some single-family homes off in the distance, but otherwise, I was looking at scrub land and wire fencing in all directions. In the near distance, a line of hills crossed the plains from left to right, foothills that led to mountainous ridgelines beyond. At least the air was markedly better than that I had been breathing inside.

  “Trip, come out, man.” I walked to a parking curb and gingerly let myself down, groaning as I went. When I didn’t hear a response, I slowly spun my ass so I was looking back the way I had come. “Did I imagine all of that?” I asked as I looked at the charred remnants of the door holding on by half a hinge. “I manifested him as a way to help me get out of a collapsing building, that’s all. Where is my team, though? I have a team, right? Why else would I be wearing this getup? Oh shit, now I know I’m dreaming.” I was looking at the lieutenant bars on my uniform. “No respectable organization would ever let me wear these, especially my beloved Marine Corps.” I pulled off my helmet, noticing the large crack it had suffered. “Surprised my brains aren’t leaking out,” I said as I touched the split, then reached into one of my cargo pockets, pulled out a traditional Marine Corps cloth cover, and placed it on my head. “Got knocked on my grape so hard I was knocked out and imagined a dead stoner helping me. Can’t be long until the aneurysm hits.”

  I could hear noises within the building, so I stood to move away, figuring it was about to come down and I didn’t want to inhale in the resultant dust storm.

  “MEAT!” Trip said triumphantly as he stood in the doorway, holding up what looked like beef jerky strips.

  “Holy fuck, it is him. Get away from there!” I warned.

  He did as I asked, though he didn’t come closer to me, probably because he was fearful I would want some of his snacks. The building yawed to the left and then anticlimactically settled in on itself. I’d seen a Jenga tower collapse with more verve.

  “I’d share a Slender Joe with you but there’s only fifteen of them,” he said as he tucked them away—well, except for the three he was eating all at once.

  “I didn’t think I’d ever say this, but it’s good to see you, Trip. Is this real?”

  “Define real?”

  “Don’t start that shit; I just got blown up. My skull feels like it got hit with a sledgehammer.”

  “You were in an explosion, but the skull thing has more to do with where you are—or more accurately, how you got here.”

  Alarms began to canvas my brain plate. “Where exactly am I?” I asked, dreading the answer.

  “Vawlawwa,” he said around a mouthful of meat-like mush.

  “Try it again without the food. And I want you to make it sound as much like Arizona as you can, because, last I checked, that’s where I was, I think.” Once my head stopped feeling like its bell had been rung, I remembered—mostly—what was going on. I was now an officer in the Marines, doing missions for Etna Station. I had been with my team and we had one more room to check out before whatever happened, happened—that part was still wrapped up in a densely packed fog.

  “Why would we be in Arizona? The last Dead show there was in ‘92. It’s not ‘92, is it?”

  “Trip!” I yelled loud enough to hurt my own head. Got a fair amount of dust to issue forth from my lungs as well.

  “Neat trick! We’re in Valhalla.”

  “What? Like the Valhalla of Norse mythology?”

  “Does this look like someplace the Vikings would like to call their eternal home? Asgard is way cooler than this place.”

  “This is just fucking great. We’re both deceased.” I used the word “deceased” because if I said “dead” again, we’re all aware of the direction this conversation would head. “And I somehow end up with you as my guardian angel.”

  “You could do worse.” He was unwrapping another Slender Joe.

  “Two minutes ago I was relieved to see you were alive, but now…My regrets don’t usually manifest themselves quite so quickly.”

  “Jack needs our help.” He was looking at me pretty intently, though for what I’m not sure.

  “Trip, Mad Jack is gone. Saw it myself.”

  “Yeah, that was pretty sad, but I’m talking about Jack Walker.”

  I shrugged as I asked “Who?”

  “Air Force guy, about this tall.” I’ll have you note that he first bent over and had his splayed hand not much more than a foot from the ground and then he stood and jumped, his outstretched arm over his head.

  “Great, so this guy I don’t know is somewhere between one foot and eight feet tall and was in the Air Force—well if that doesn’t narrow it down, I don’t know what will.”

  “Don’t be a dick.”

  He actually caught me off-guard with such an uncharacteristic response. I had to choke back the next words I was going to say. Revolved somewhere around “fuck off” and “go fuck yourself.” So not that much differentiation, but a lot of hostility. You’ve got to remember I was still in a very great deal of pain, either from the explosion or the journey, as Trip would lead me to believe.

  “I’m sorry, Trip, I don’t know this Jack Walker.”

  “I’ve got something that could help you remember.” He was fishing around in his pockets. From his right front pants pocket, he pulled out a condom wrapper (no condom), a lint ball roughly the size of an eggplant, a dozen or so pills of varying shapes, sizes, and colors, and a pen cap. He grabbed an orange pill that looked a lot like a children’s aspirin.

  “Trip, I’ve been around this block once or twice with you; I know better than to take a pill out of your hand.”

  He pulled off the backpack he had been wearing and rummaged around in it until he found a bottle of water. He turned his back to me—the motions he performed would lead me to believe he was opening the bottle, inserting the pill, shaking it up into oblivion, and then recapping before turning back to me.

  “Your throat must be dry, want some water?” he asked, holding the bottle out.

  “You’re kidding, right? I’d rather drink llama spit.”

  “Why? Why would you want to do that?”

  “Trip, you just put a pill in that bottle and are now trying to hand it off to me. Odds are you aren’t even sure what it is.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “What? I just saw you.”

  “You didn’t see anything. I had my back to you.”

  I put my hand up to my face. Rubbed my eyes and pinched the top of my nose. “Trip, just tell me what the hell is going on.”

  “Ponch, you’re really going to need to drink this. Moving through time and dimensions begins to section off parts of the brain. People aren’t built to be able to deal with the stresses it causes, the sheer amount of information it opens up. Our brains segment it, close it off. This pill will allow you to see where we were before—who Jack is.”

  He could talk until the cows came home, slept for the night, and then went back out to work. Taking anything from Trip that wasn’t in a hermetically sealed package was risking the aforementioned brain function.

  “There’s a car across the street at the gas station. Go take a look at the license plate. Take the water with you.”

  I turned to go, without taking the bottle. I stopped at the roadway, looked both ways, but there wasn’t anything coming for miles. The license plate was indeed stamped with the name Valhalla, though that wasn’t what convinced me. I mean, how did I know there wasn’t a Valhalla, Arizona? Though the plate would have just said Arizona I suppose. No, it was the name of the car that was much more interesting. It was a Geep, with a G instead of a J. And this thing was a far cry from the sport utility vehicle I had favored most of my life. This looked like something not even the now-defunct Yugo company could bear to put its name on. Prett
y sure it was at the gas station because it was a disposable car and once the fuel was gone, you just left it to be recycled. But just because it looked like a piece of shit didn’t mean I wouldn’t prefer riding in it as opposed to hoofing it. The key was in the ignition, I gave it a turn; absolutely nothing. It was so far dead that it likely had never known what it was to run.

  I came to the roadway and again for some reason felt the need to look both ways before crossing, though this time I could see the far off plume of something coming. I didn’t have any reason for the dread I felt, but yeah, that was what it was as I watched what was coming.

  I got back to Trip; he handed over the bottle and this time I took it.

  “Something’s coming,” I told him as I unscrewed the top.

  “Already?” He looked down at his wrist, though he was not wearing a watch. “Better drink that quick.”

  I wasn’t thrilled but I did it anyway, the cool liquid a welcome feeling in my raw throat. I was halfway through the bottle when I felt the aneurysm I knew had to be coming finally burst in my mind. There was a blinding white flash in my field of vision, I dropped to my kneepad-clad knees, the bottle fell from my hand, I cared about none of that as I was flooded with impossible imagery. Scenes from another life, from another person living my life. Atlantis, Indian Hill, night runners, Whistlers, zombies, people stuck at impossible angles within inanimate objects. Jack Walker, his wife Lynn. I vomited before falling over onto my side. The blinding white light still pulsed but was becoming less frenetic.

  I was unable to move. I guess that’s what happens when you burst major blood vessels in your head. I felt hands wrap underneath my armpits; I was being dragged. I figured it was Trip, but I couldn’t see anything past my eyelids.

  If I had to put a number on it, I’d say I was like that for five minutes or so. When I came back to my own, I was leaning up against the back of the building I woke up in.

  “Fuck,” I said, letting my head rest against the wall. “We just left him there?” It was phrased as a question but I already knew the answer.

  “There was no other option, Ponch. Jack’s home is closed off to him now.”

  “What…what does that mean?”

  “I think you know, but right now that isn’t the important part. He needs help here, right this very minute. Things are happening in this world—and to him—that will threaten to tear him apart from the inside out.”

  “What’s coming down the road?”

  “What?” He seemed nervous as he chewed his way through another Slender Joe.

  I could now hear the car coming, and it was hauling ass, though this wasn’t the throaty roar of a V-8 engine—more of knobby tires on pavement and the static hum of an electrical turbine working overtime. I was shifting to get a better look when Trip laid his whole body over my legs, making it difficult to move.

  “Is this your subtle way of telling me not to look?”

  “What’s subtle about this, Ponch?”

  “Your moments of lucidity freak me out. Your actions say you’re crazy, but you’re speaking like someone with terrifying knowledge. You could have just told me not to move.”

  “You wouldn’t have listened. You think that rifle will protect you from all the horrors of the worlds. It won’t.”

  A chill started at the top of the big toe on my left foot; by the time it reached the base of my spine, it had reached tsunami proportions, so once it broke over the back of my head, it threatened to overwhelm my senses. Remember the Ringwraiths from The Lord of the Rings? Creatures that just by their very presence instilled fear? That was exactly what I had going on. And the fact that they were still a mile or more off didn’t bode well for how intense this feeling was about to get. With Trip draped over my legs, it wasn’t all that difficult to watch as he downed three pills.

  He smiled up at me. “I’ll deal my way; you’re on your own.”

  “That’s a pretty fucked up thing to say.”

  “I’ve got extra Milly if you want it.”

  “Molly?”

  “What I said,” he responded.

  Oh, I thought about it for longer than I should have, but in a hostile world I knew very little about, it might not be such a good idea to take something that was going to make me love everything I encountered. There was a lump in my throat as the car approached. I leaned my head back against the wall, took in a breath, and did my best to control the breathing that threatened to run away from me in a fit of hyperventilation. I could not remember a time I had ever possessed this kind of unbridled fear, and I’d had enough fearful encounters to have a decent back catalog to peruse. This was different. Like the fear I felt before was within me, something I could control with some effort, but this was from the outside, tampering with my ability to cope. The car zipped our way and seemed as if it was going to keep heading on by at great speed, and then what I hoped wasn’t going to happen, did. The high whine of the hard-working turbine slowed considerably, the vaporization of rubber tires on pavement slowed, then stopped along with the car. Couldn’t have been more than a hundred yards up the road from our present location. Not sure what kind of braking system that vehicle had, but it was state of the art. With the speed it was going, it should have taken triple that distance to stop.

  “What are you doing?” Trip was looking up at the sky but he reacted when I shifted.

  “They stopped, Trip; I don’t exactly know why, but they’re suspicious of something. I don’t know who they are, but I feel like simultaneously pissing down the front of my pants and running off into the desert with my hands above my head screaming like a baby. Because I don’t think either of those things will help me in any way, I’m going to get into a position where I can shoot whatever is coming.” He moved, but only because I was pushing him off.

  “You can’t shoot an overseer.” He looked quite alarmed.

  “Are they bulletproof?” I asked.

  “No,” he said after thinking about it.

  “Immortal?”

  He thought again before shaking his head in negation.

  “Not bulletproof, not immortal—to me that implies I could put a round in them. I’m going to resist at first, just because that seems to be man’s first reaction to everything that causes him fear, to shoot I mean. But anything that is triggering this type of response has to be predatory, right? It’s like they want me to be flushed from my hiding spot so they can hunt me down.”

  “Capitulation,” was all Trip managed to say before he shut his eyes and a heavy glob of drool began to form at the corner of his mouth.

  “You are really going to pass out on me right now? Must be fucking nice.” I gently moved his backpack and rested his head on it before I rolled on to my stomach and low crawled to the side of the building so I could get a view of whatever an overseer was. A sleek silver sedan was sitting there. Though the dimensions of it were off, it was the basic shape of a car albeit double the size I would have expected to see and the windows were small, roughly half-size. Looked more like transoms—those small windows that used to be placed over doors. It was off enough to make the image unsettling, like this was an alien’s version of what they thought a car should look like after torturing a human to get the information and now these aliens were doing their best to blend in.

  The vehicle was strange enough, but what came out only added to that. Oh, and just to make the entire encounter weirder, it came out of the trunk, or where the trunk ought to have been. The back end of the car dropped down as a seam appeared in the middle of the roof, bisecting it; this was met by another seam that traveled from the taillights to the passenger side door before it began to yawn open. The tallest being I have ever had the misfortune of seeing stepped out the back.

  Whistlers shot through my memories, but that wasn’t right—from what I could remember, those beasts were as human as tuna fish. This thing was humanoid-ish, at least. Freakishly tall, eight feet if my eye was calibrated correctly. Its head was devoid of hair but it had recognizable faci
al features: eyes, mouth, nose, ears. Though as I looked, they appeared much too small for something so large. Obviously, the scale was way off, but picture an elephant with human-sized ears—that was how it struck me. Thinking about how those little patches of cartilage attempted to cool the enormous beast under the brutal sun of the savannah was comical; the overseer was not. It was clothed in black from head to toe, because, well, why not. Nothing truly evil is going to wear pastels.

  “Keep it together Talbot, one abnormally tall human with small ears does not make a trend.” Another human-ish creature stepped out, this one maybe a little taller than the first, and they were both thin, like rail thin. Like Jack from The Nightmare Before Christmas thin. Like, what kind of musculature could they have possessed to keep them standing, thin. Then another, and another. I was peering at them through the scope of my shaking rifle. I could not regulate my breathing enough to keep a clear sight on them. There was a part of me screaming to shoot the unholiness that had extracted itself from that car, though they had done nothing except look the way they did. Was that reason enough? My trigger finger sure thought it was. Five in all had come out of the car, though for some reason I don’t understand I’m certain there was a sixth still inside.

  They stood in a small semi-circle not doing anything, not talking to each other that I could tell, not looking around, not going to take a piss—absolutely nothing except standing there, like maybe they were getting a recharge of their internal batteries from the sun. The original one, whom I was calling Shorty because he was the runt of the group, turned in my direction. I wanted to recoil like an overextended tape measure. I knew that would be a bad idea; the jerky movement would be noticed and those things would come investigating. Still, though I had a full magazine, they were just standing there, and as far as I could tell I didn’t see anything that looked like a weapon. He kept looking, I kept applying a steady pressure to my trigger finger, and it wasn’t going to be extremely long before one of us flinched. Though my flinch would involve a supersonic speed 5.56 NATO round.