22
Helena Frost had heard all the theology she could stand. “Listen, Ellison. I really don’t care who has a bigger Bible. I want—”
“I know, Sheriff. I know what you want. You want to stop it. To turn it off, and send us back. I know.” He shook his head with a grin.
Frost didn’t understand. She had the upper hand. Barnes was down, and the old man wasn’t armed. “If you think I won’t shoot you—”
The man held up a hand. “I believe you. But I cannot stop the—what do you all call them?—
shifts
between dimensions. I do not know where we are going next. I do not know if it is even possible to get back. Nor do I know how many more shifts there will be before we reach our glorious destination. It is all uncertain, which is why the US government pulled their support. They could not control it.”
Now it was Dodge’s turn to be outraged. “Are you telling me you have no idea what you’re doing?”
Ellison’s grin was subtle, but unnerving. “Now you begin to understand. Even if we could return to the dimension from which we departed, would you recognize it? How would you know for sure? I have been watching. You have encountered things and even people beyond the borders of town. Some of these dimensions are very similar to our own. How would you know for sure that you were home?”
Turkette leaned against a wall, her rifle leveled toward Ellison, but her eyes minding Barnes, on the floor.
Frost began pacing around the room. “Can we disable the shifts? At least control when they happen, so we’re better prepared for them?”
“No,” Ellison shook his head and folded his hands on his lap on top of a blanket covering his legs. “The process is completely random. The shifts happen when the computer decides to make them happen. I hope you appreciate the magnetic leash on the church bell. You at least have that warning. I do not control the machine. I barely understand it. I am intelligent, yes, but dozens of scientists worked on different parts. It was all compartmentalized knowledge, you see. I do not run it from here. I just watch what happens.”
Dodge shook his head at the madness of it all.
“What if…” Frost began, “what if we dismantled it. Took apart one of the pylons? Would that snap us back home?”
Ellison looked at her. “Considering that where I want to go is
not
back, why would I tell you such a thing?” He paused, looking at Frost’s gun, considering her silent answer. “As it happens, I have no idea what that would do. If you took down one of the array’s towers the effect might be nothing more than a rocky landing at our next destination. Or it might rip the town to bits. Or it might do nothing. I do not even know if there are redundancies in place.”
Frost shook her head. She wasn’t buying it. Everything they knew about the project pointed not just to Ellison’s involvement, but to his masterminding the project.
“Remember,” Ellison said. “Compartmentalized governmental knowledge. All I did was steal the final plans and implement the construction. I knew how to turn it on. Not how to turn it off. And frankly,
off
was never a concern. When we reach our desired destination, we simply step off the ride, allowing the town to continue on its journey without us.”
“And how will you know when we get there?” Dodge asked.
“Now I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away.” Ellison paused, his smile growing wicked. “And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.”
“Revelation 21,” Dodge said. “But you shouldn’t ignore the last verse. ‘But there shall
by no means
enter it anything that defiles, or causes an abomination or a lie, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life.’ Call me crazy, but I’m starting to think that bit might have been written just for you.”
Behind him, her leg now bandaged but still soaking the bandages with blood, Julie Barnes struggled to her feet and leaned against a desk. “There’s always a way to break the rules.”
Everyone turned their attention to her.
Frost realized it for the distraction it was, but a moment too late. When she turned back to look at Ellison, he had a remote control, like a TV remote in his hand.
He pressed a button.
The room plunged into darkness. A rifle fired once. Something loud crashed across the room. There was grunting and shuffling. Before Frost could get her Maglite out of the holster on her belt, something plowed into her, knocking her sideways onto the conference table. Her body rolled along the surface until the table suddenly wasn’t there anymore. She tumbled over the edge and fell head first. She raised her arms up and slammed into the floor. The impact drove the air from her lungs.
Her head throbbed. She didn’t remember striking it, but she could have blacked out on impact. She reached for the Maglite but it was gone.
She tried to sit up, but nausea and pain brought her back down to the floor. The last thing she heard before passing out was a deep metallic clunk. She understood that Ellison and Barnes had gotten away, but worse than that, they’d been locked in the vault.
23
Charley had seen Griffin drive hellbent for vengeance into the mouth of the labyrinth. But shortly after that, he’d seen a flock of the winged abominations.
While Griffin was clearly heading for the center of the maze, the flapping monstrosities massed around a series of low buildings on the western wall of the twisting structure. Charley, still feeling like he’d tied one on, was massively suspicious—like he always was when he was drunk.
He stopped the truck half way down the embankment, and thought. It was hard. Whatever made him feel plastered also muddled his cognition. Even worse, the cuts and scrapes all over his body were slowly draining his energy, as the flow of blood had never stopped. He felt rattled. He felt scared. He hurt. He knew this feeling well. He’d lived in it for years.
Shame.
It simultaneously fueled and drowned him. And it had reared up anew, without the aid of a bottle, claiming Charley’s will.
Then a new emotion rose to greet and combat the discomfort and confusion.
Pride.
Not for himself. For his son, who had become, in just a few weeks time, more of a man than Charley had ever been. While he hid behind a bottle, Joshua had faced the unimaginable and become an important part of keeping this town alive. It wasn’t supposed to work this way. The son was supposed to aspire to the father. Charley figured the very least he could do now would be to make the boy proud.
Of him.
If only just once.
Charley stamped the gas pedal to the floor and cranked the wheel hard to the right. He raced for the cluster of buildings and the last place he’d seen the swarm of flying ‘flappers,’ as he’d started to think of them.
He pulled the truck up just shy of the first building. The walls were made of human skulls, and there was a pasty pinkish-white mortar holding it all together. The structure stood two huge stories tall, with arched windows on the second floor, and a twenty-foot-tall oval doorway. There was no door, just a yawning open space. The flappers flew in and out of the windows on the second story.
Something was going on here. The creatures were agitated. Excited. Coming and going like demented flying tourists. Whatever it was, he thought it might be important. Something worth putting a monkey wrench—or shotgun—into. And if it wasn’t? Well, he would just kill as many of the bastards as he could.
He could live with that.
Charley got out of the truck and climbed into the rear bed, moving slowly to not draw attention. He reached down and picked up his shotgun, a Remington 870 with a 7 + 1 feed system, meaning he could unleash eight rounds of lead pellet-infused hell. He planted his legs wide in the bed, finding his balance.
“Come get me, you little flying peckers!” he shouted. Instantly, a swarm of thirty of the creatures raced out of the second story window. Charley thought they looked like angry hornets, but huge...and with gaping mouths, and human limbs and...
Shit, they look nothing like hornets
.
Charley waited a beat and then unleashed with the shotgun, pelting and blasting the flappers from the sky. Stray pellets shattered the skulls embedded in the structure’s wall.
The remaining flappers quickly dispersed, flying in erratic, wild twisting patterns like bats startled by a sudden noise. Charley adjusted his aim and kept shooting, until the last of them plummeted to the ground with a wet splat, spraying thick red blood onto the skull fragments littering the ground.
He lowered the muzzle of the gun and looked—not at the dead flappers, but at the destroyed walls. He’d not even been shooting at the building, and he’d taken down a corner of it. It gave his muddled mind an idea, inspired by a memory of the first time he’d lost his license for a DWI.
He dropped out of the bed, kicked aside the corpse of a flapper near the driver’s side door, and climbed into the truck with the shotgun. He loaded eight more shells and set the weapon aside, started the truck and shifted into drive. He nudged the truck up and then rammed his foot on the gas, and quickly switched to the brakes. The front corner of the truck hit the wall of skulls, just under the second story window through which the flappers had come for him. He’d shattered a good part of the second story window frame with the shotgun, but now, with the truck impacting the support wall, the whole façade crumbled.
He shifted to reverse and backed up a good thirty feet as the building slid down like a slithering, crumbling house of cards.
“Oh hell yes.”
Charley backed the pickup for another forty feet. Then shifted into drive. A hundred yards further along the tall outer wall of the labyrinth was another small building, like the one he’d just demolished. It too had a massive oval doorway.
He drove parallel to the maze until he was lined up with the doorway, seventy feet away. He aimed straight for the door, then stepped on the brake pedal with his left foot. With his right, he stamped the accelerator to the floor. The truck’s engine revved into a high-pitched whine.
“This is more like it,” he said, and released the brake pedal. The truck’s rear tires scrabbled at the grit under the inch of accumulated snowflakes, then caught. The truck raced forward, quickly reaching sixty. The truck’s headlights illuminated the inside of the doorway.
He shot right through the room, which was empty, and smashed head-first into the far wall. The skulls and their flimsy mortar shattered and spread like little more than tearing tissue paper. One of the less brittle skulls put a spider-web crack in his windshield, but he didn’t let off the gas until he’d gone through three more walls.
When the truck stopped moving, he saw he was in a wide lane of the labyrinth. The walls stretched up twenty feet high, and the lane went to his left and his right.
In the rearview, he could see the tunnel he’d created and the crumbling heaps of bone fragment lining the way. His truck bed was filled with skulls.
He started laughing.
Looking forward, he realized he didn’t have just two choices. Left or right. He had three.
Left, right or ‘break shit up.’
He laughed harder, his foot hanging over the gas pedal. But his foot remained locked in place. A high-pitched sound tickled his ears. Screaming. A woman.
“Lony,” he whispered and opened the truck door. Outside the vehicle’s cab, her voice came into focus. A tower rose up, just twenty feet away. He craned his head up. Flappers circled the tower.
A fresh scream spurred him into action.
Leaving the truck running, Charley charged to the tower’s open entrance. Inside was a staircase of skulls, carpeted with leathery skin twisting upwards. He tried the first few steps cautiously, but threw caution to the wind when Lony screamed again.
He nearly called out to her, but held his tongue. If she’d been carried here, they could move her again. When he reached the top, Charley was winded. His body screamed for a breather. But when he saw the room full of fluttering monsters harassing Lony, who was curled up in a corner, he charged forward with a battle cry.
Aiming high to avoid hitting her, he fired again and again, spreading an arc of lead through the tower. When the shotgun clicked empty, the floor was littered with twitching bodies. Some of the flappers were dead. Others, merely wounded. The rest were uninjured, but wary. As Charley strode across the skull floor, the still living monstrosities shrieked at him, but kept their distance.
Lony screamed when he took her by the arm.
“I got you, kid,” he said.
She flinched and looked up at him. “Ch—Charley?”
“To the rescue.” He looked in her fear-filled eyes. They were dilated. Her speech was slightly slurred. “Are you high?”
She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head. “Are you drunk?”
“No,” he said. “But yes. I think it’s this shitty world.”
He pulled her to her feet. She made it two steps with him, and then collapsed.
“Dang it, girl.” With a sigh, he hefted her over his shoulder, nearly toppled over. Then he hurried for the steps.