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>> Fiction - Quad World 1Welcome I wondered what had gotten me. Thirty-four-year olds who didn't smoke or drink weren't supposed to drop dead. My heart was good, and my blood pressure a respectable 78/115. I shouldn't have died, and especially not on a Tuesday. I didn't even have a will. But of course, it wasn't as if I had actually needed one. There hadn't been anyone to leave anything to. My folks had died almost fifteen years earlier when a drunk in a Cadillac, who couldn't tell right from left, had made it almost a mile on the wrong side of the Santa Monica Freeway before he caught my parents' little Toyota head-on. There were no relatives. I was single, and didn't really have what one could call friends. I had acquaintances, people to say hello to while racing down the hallway, or someone to share a cafeteria bench with while trying to down a greaseburger and a Coke. There wasn't anyone crying at my tombstone. Hell, I doubted that there even was a tombstone. I was probably planted in the far corner of a ten-acre patch of green in some place like Van Nuys or Mission Hills. I'd be right out there at the intersection of row 876 and column 239. Beneath smoggy skies, and within earshot of a freeway, a little brass marker in the overgrown grass would mark my eternal resting spot: JOHN SMITH
My estate, including the life insurance that the company insisted I carry was probably worth a couple of hundred grand. Every last dime of that would go to the State. My legacy to mankind would probably be the funding of twenty yards of sewer line on the outskirts of Barstow. Thousands would be indebted to me whenever they flushed. I coughed. My lungs were congested, full of liquid. Very strange. Dead men shouldn't be coughing, and they certainly shouldn't be worrying about congested lungs. My head pounded as if I'd just caught a speeding two-by-four above the eyes. I felt feverish and my joints throbbed. It felt an awful lot like the flu. Flu? Being dead was certainly bad enough, but
to also be subjected to the flue was adding insult to injury. My throat
was dry, and I couldn't swallow past what felt like some large glob of
mucus. What I really needed was a drink of water. A beer would have gone
down just great.
I was seated in a soft chair, with my elbows propped up on the table in front of me. I was in a room in which the walls were covered with walnut paneling. A mental clutch, buried somewhere deep beneath my frontal lobes, popped into first gear. I was in the Walnut Conference Room. I was not dead. My joints were on fire. Bending forward, I let my head rest against the tabletop. The lacquered wood felt cool. Sweat dripped down my face, gathering at the tip of my nose in large fat drops, until they fell, splattering into the carpet. I wasn't dead, but I was as sick as the proverbial dog. Hell, any dog that felt this bad would simply have curled up and died. That didn't sound like such a bad idea. I must have been hit with one of those new-and-improved mutated flue strains that had floated in from some Third World germ factory. Right now I was probably eyeball-deep in viral nucleic acids courtesy of Katmandu, or some damn swamp in southwest Cameroon. Coughing something up from deep in my lungs, I sloshed it around my mouth for a few seconds and then spit it out beneath the table. The janitors would just have to earn their money this week. If I had been sick enough to have passed out, it made absolutely no sense that I was still in the Walnut Conference Room. My comatose butt should have been hauled down to Malibu Emergency. Right now, some beefy nurse named Gretchen should have been sternly telling me that if I didn't quiet down and keep the thermometer tucked under my tongue, she'd happily find another place to stick it. Sitting up quickly, I watched the room tilt from side to side. I stood, and the joints in the small of my back popped. It sounded like corks exploding from champagne bottles. The conference room was dark - much darker than when I had first awakened. I glanced up, trying to ignore the stabbing pains in my neck. The fluorescents were dead, with one entire bank dangling down, having crashed through the overhead grillwork. Ceiling tiles littered the far end of the conference room table. Someone's ass in plant facilities would fry for this. Walking slowly, and taking shuffling steps
so I wouldn't find myself facedown in the dusty shag carpet, I moved toward
the window.
I blinked, squeezing my eyelids tight,
trying to force my pupils to dilate. It was dark, far too dark. Staring
down the black coastline, I couldn't see a single light. Those multi-million-dollar
beach homes, filled with movie stars and Vid preachers, usually blazed
as if lit with searchlights.
The voice echoed in the back of my head. The Pacific Coast Highway should be a sea of cars. Cars have headlights and taillights. I smiled. Of course. The answer was obvious. The road must be closed. There had probably been another damn rock slide that had shut down all four lanes. Suddenly all the pieces came together. There must have been an earthquake. Just as the flu had nailed me and I had passed out, an earthquake had hit. It had knocked the power out and rock slides had closed the highway. It even explained the state of the conference room. What timing. I never got sick. But the day some killer flue snuck up on me and kicked me square in the ass had to be the same day that "the big one" hit. Carefully walking back to the table, I dropped into a chair. I would wait until someone returned for me. Wrapping my arms around my chest, and trying not to cough, I closed my eyes. Pzzzzt! Reflexes tossed me out of the chair and threw me onto the floor. Rolling on my shoulder, and feeling no pain, I came to my feet. My body was crouched low, my hands reaching forward, and my fingers flexing. I felt the wall at my back. Lights were on. Sparks shot out from the siring of the
dangling bank of fluorescents. The arcing and hissing wiring had been what
had startled me.
The light switch by the door was gone. Every Tuesday morning for the past three years I had flicked on that light switch. I suddenly felt dizzy. "Where's the goddamned light switch?" I
leaned against the wall, feeling hot and flushed. The fever was on me again.
I turned, still leaning against the wall. The room was empty. That was a bad sign, a hell of a bad sign. I was hearing voices. "Light request?" asked the voice again. I then realized that the voice was coming from somewhere above me. I looked up, peering through the thickening smoke that was drifting down. A speaker grille. Someone from the Central Security Station must have been listening in on the conference room. She might have control over the power. "Kill the lights!" I shouted. The room was thrown into darkness. The door was practically at my back. Fumbling,
I searched for the doorknob, grabbed it, and pushed the door open.
Obviously, I had not been in the Walnut Conference Room. The missing light switch should have told me that, but this flu was scrambling my brain. After I had passed out they must have taken me to some other room. I stared down the long hallway. The labs were not all that large. I had
never seen this hallway, or come across anything that even resembled these
strange walls. I turned my head, looking down the opposite direction. It
was identical, and just as featureless as the other end of the hallway
had been.
Almost sunk into the wall, and colored in the same cream color, was what looked like a phone. Hugging the wall, and dragging my cheek along its warm surface, I worked my way toward it. Grabbing it, I popped it from the wall. A remote. No cord. I looked at it closely. No buttons, no dial, no nothing. Desperate, I put the receiver up to my ear. It was dead. There was no dial tone - not even a hiss. "Shit!" I said into the phone. "No one of that name is listed in the directory," said the same voice that I had heard in the conference room. "Are you trying to reach an outside party?" she asked. I took a deep breath, that is, as deeply as someone could breathe who felt like they had a quart of slime filling each lung. "What's happened around here?" I asked. I leaned my forehead against the wall and closed my eyes. "Can you be more specific?" she asked. In that instant, I realized that she had to be one of the many morons from the Plant Facilities Department. We had just had an earthquake that had probably flattened Los Angeles and she didn't seem to have noticed it. "The big quake," I said cynically. "Can
you remember back to a few hours ago, when your ass was being bounced around
your office?"
I reopened my eyes, pulled the phone away from my ear and stared at it, then pushed it back up against the side of my face. "Larger than 5.0 on the Richter scale," I said with a surprising degree of calmness. "The last quake of that magnitude or larger occurred 854 days ago, measuring 5.8, and was centered on the Paso Robles fault." I just shook my head. Then I realized that she must be in shock. A ceiling tile had probably smacked her on the head and she was still woozy. That had to be it. She was suffering from a concussion. "Let me speak to someone else," I said. "There is no one else," she answered. I was getting mad now. I needed a doctor, and didn't have time to play games with a delirious woman. "Am I supposed to believe that there is no one else in this entire building?" "The man responsible for the reactivation of system lighting has just entered the building." Now I was getting somewhere. The damn building must have been evacuated and somehow, in all the confusion, I had gotten left behind. I'd be tearing someone a new asshole when I found the idiot responsible for that slipup. "How can I get to him?" I asked. "Simply follow the red arrow," she said. Red arrow. She was a certifiable loon.
This hallway was one unbroken, cream-colored tunnel. "What red arrow?"
I snapped at her.
Like an idiot, I looked down at my feet. Like an even bigger idiot, I lifted up my left foot. I damn near dropped the phone. Where my foot had just been there was now a red arrow. It was somehow beneath the floor, or possibly even within it. It pulsed on and off in about one-second intervals. I felt sick. Things gurgled deep in my gut. Somehow the phone was back up to my ear. "I don't understand," I said in an almost inarticulate mumble. "When you hang up the phone the arrow will lead you to the man who has just entered the building. I suggest that you do this while the lights remain on. As a result of the large power drain from systems activation earlier this day, there has not been sufficient time to recharge. I estimate less than five minutes of lighting remain." I nodded stupidly at the phone for a second, then hung it up. The instant it hit its cradle the arrow flitted across the floor and pulsed its way down the hallway. It got about six feet in front of me and then halted. I shuffled a few steps in its direction, then stopped. It pulsed a few more feet down the hallway, then stopped. When I caught up with it, it made a turn
at the first corridor intersection it encountered. I followed. It traveled
down another long, featureless hallway, then turned a corner and led me
into a dead-ended hallway. The arrow pulsed momentarily at the blank wall,
then vanished.
I looked up, saw something, and then looked right back down at the floor. My fever must have been a lot higher than I had imagined. There was no doubt about it, I was delirious. I looked back up. What I had thought I
had seen was still there. He stood at the end of this new hallway. I had
hoped that he would have vanished in a puff of smoke, or perhaps dribbled
into the floor. No such luck. It was amazing what my delirious brain was
capable of generating. The guy was completely decked out in a space suit.
However, it was not one of those form-fitting white NASA jobs, but an aluminum-foil
special that sprouted a wild array of coat-hanger antennas. His left arm
had been replaced with some sort of manipulator that looked a hell of a
lot like a lobster claw. He wore a leather belt with two holsters, one
of which held a pearl-handled pistol and the other what had to be his ray
gun. This guy looked like a refugee from a fifties sci-fi flick that had
been shot over a weekend in someone's basement. All that was missing to
make him the perfect alien invader was the bubble space helmet. Instead,
he wore a red beret.
His fingers seemed to have melted into the toaster's dull aluminum sides. "Good night!" he screamed in a screechy voice. I wanted to jump, to find cover, but there
was no place to hide. The corridor at my back didn't turn a corner for
at least fifty feet.
The tendons flexed in the exposed parts of his hands. I squinted, gritted my teeth, then closed
my eyes. I wondered if I'd feel anything when my brain was splattered against
the cream-colored walls. For just an instant, an image of someone from
Plant Facilities wiping down the red-stained walls filled my head.
I opened my eyes. His hands were flexing convulsively. "Crash hard!" he screamed. "The Supreme wills it!" Every time his hands flexed that same something tickled inside of my head. "Shielded," he said, while sneering at me. He re-slung the toaster across his back and pulled his ray gun from its holster. The gun's tip shimmered a deep purple. It was one ting to take it like a man, and accept your fate when faced with the prospect of being raisin-breaded to death by a toaster, but it's something totally different when you're threatened by a loon in a spacesuit who's waving a ray gun. Blind instinct finally took over. I turned and ran. "Stop!" he screamed. Once I started moving it was going to take a hell of a lot more than the screech of a NASA-induced nightmare to slow me down. I seemed to eat up the hallway. Never had I run so fast. My head cleared, my lungs sucked down air, and before I would have thought it possible I'd started my turn into the hallway corner, dropping down to all fours as I did in order to increase traction. Fzzzt! Hot air fanned the side of my face. With the added incentive of ray-gun blasts I was certain that I'd practically fly down the next hallway. Wrong. My hands grabbed the wall just as I rounded
the corner. And I mean grabbed. My fingers bit into the soft wall and sank
almost knuckle-deep. I shredded a five-foot length of the cream-colored
material before I came to a stop. It seemed to turn to goo in my hands,
and I threw the now slimy stuff onto the floor where it hit with a wet-sounding
smack. I crept slowly back toward the corner I had just rounded.
The spaceman's galvanized lobster claw jutted from around the corner. I wanted to crawl into the wall, but my body had other plans. My right hand grabbed the claw, and instead of trying to push it aside pulled it straight toward my chest. I wanted to close my eyes, but no such luck. I was staring directly into the spaceman's now startled face. Pulling him toward me had thrown him off-balance and he was now falling, with that claw hand leading the way. I'd be skewered for sure. Then, at a speed that I wound not have believed possible, I sidestepped like a matador skirting around a bull. This move sent him sailing down the hallway, but apparently my body did not consider that sufficient. My left hand shot up for his face - palm open. I caught him square in the nose. I could feel things break, almost shatter. With a final flick of my wrist, my hand pushed his splintered nose up into his brain. Suddenly looking extremely limp, he flew past me. I turned. I was back in charge. Whatever had been running my body by remote control was gone. I collapsed to the floor. Then I looked over at the spaceman. It appeared as if he had been kneeling, perhaps praying, and then had simply fallen over, landing flat on his face. His ass was still propped up, pointing straight at me. I had just killed a man. My only experience with fighting had been in the fourth grade. The result of that encounter had been two black eyes, six stitches, and a cracked rib. All mine. The spaceman wheezed. I scrambled down the hallway on all fours, moving like a scuffling crab. I only stopped when my head smashed into a wall and I fell back on my butt. He had to be dead. I'd felt him die. Sweat dripped down my face and my vision began to tunnel. I told myself that all I had heard was trapped air in his lungs gurgling up through his throat. That explanation didn't seem to reassure me. Then, without the slightest warning, my stomach exploded. I didn't even have time to get to my knees, but threw up in my lap. My already bruised throat burned, and my nose stung as stuff backed up through my nostrils. One explosive burst was all there was. Putrid green slime ran down the front of my shirt and dribbled over my pants. That stuff that now covered my clothes had absolutely no resemblance to the waffles and eggs I had eaten for breakfast. Standing, I felt the muscles in my legs start to twitch, and my left knee turn to jelly. Again I was on the floor and again I tried to stand, this time almost crawling up the wall. I locked my knees and took several deep breaths. Somehow, I did not faint. Mercifully, he had not moved. He was dead, there was no doubt about that. I hoped. "Shit!" I managed to scream, just as I launched myself from the wall I was leaning on, bounced off the opposite wall, and once again hit the floor. I had seen something - several somethings - move. Pushing my way up the wall, this time only sitting, I looked at the dead man. He was still dead, but things continued to move. The claw that had been his right hand had detached itself and was now crawling across the floor. As I watched, it jerked and spasmed, and a small cloud of smoke quickly engulfed it. Little puffs of blue smoke were also rising from his ray gun. Something else was moving. Where I had ripped off a large patch of wall covering and thrown the goo to the floor, the torn wall had almost repaired itself. It wasn't that the wall had simply closed the rip. No, by comparison that would have been far too easy. The goo that I had tossed onto the floor had almost vanished. Only a small pile of the stuff remained. The rest of it was now undulating in a narrow line, like a long column of ants marching single file, working its way up the wall to fill in the gouge. As I watched, the pile on the floor grew smaller and smaller and eventually vanished. There was not the slightest indication that the wall covering had ever been ripped out. I just closed my eyes and banged the back of my head against the wall. I shivered. Again I could feel my face flush and my lungs clog. A stabbing pain sliced through my chest with each breath. Before I even opened my eyes I'd stood,
in one quick jerk. Opening my eyes, I ignored the fact that the hallway
had taken on a green tint and was listing back and forth like a boat in
a hurricane. I went down to the end of the hallway and pulled a phone out
of the wall.
"Specify the destination," the female voice said sweetly. I could handle no more of this. "Get that damn red arrow back here, and take me outside of this building by way of the nearest exit!" At my feet the red arrow appeared again, then darted down the hallway in the direction of the spaceman. I dropped the phone and stumbled forward. Nothing was left of his smoking possessions but little piles of gray goo. Not a weapon left. Not quite. The pearl-handled pistol hadn't melted. Bending over, and risking fainting, I tugged at his belt buckle. My fingers felt almost boneless, as if made of rubber. After I'd tugged at leather and brass, from all possible angles, the buckle finally popped open. Standing, I leaned against the wall for support, planted the toe of my black boot in his side, and pushing, rolled him over. A small little piece of myself, detached and hiding somewhere deep in the back of my brain, wondered about the black boots that I now seemed to be wearing. I had never owned a black pair of boots. God, how I suddenly missed those familiar, ratty brown wingtips. Those old shoes seemed a world and a lifetime away. My hands, which seemed to be controlling themselves, strapped the gun belt around my waist, managing to rebuckle it on only the fifth or sixth attempt. The red arrow still pulsed, seeming to patiently be waiting for me. I shuffled forward, my feet not so much walking as scraping against the floor with each step I took. Down hallways, through door panels, past twists and turns, I wandered for what felt like hours. It was probably only minutes. I stared down at thick brown carpeting. I looked up. It was the lobby - the lobby at Dummar. That big polished obsidian block that made up the guard's desk filled the adjacent wall. In front of me, across the lobby, stood the front doors. Walking, even through my feet seemed to catch in the thick carpet, I worked by way into the center of the lobby. I tried to show my badge at the guard's desk but I no longer seemed to have a badge. No problem. Dummar Research Labs no longer seemed to have a guard. I didn't have to lean on a door to get it open. One was already propped open, probably courtesy of my dead friend from outer space. Outside. It was a warm Malibu summer night. In the distance, surf pounded. That was wrong. The beach was at least a mile down the hill. The background buzz of Los Angeles, twenty miles away, always drowned out the sounds of the ocean. But apparently, no longer. Starlight lit the night. I walked. First I shuffled over concrete, then packed dirt and weeds, and finally through chaparral and gravel. Loose rock crunched under my boots. One more step and I could rest. One more step and I'd be safe. I took that one more step. There was no ground beneath my boot. I fell, sliding down in a torrent or rock and dead brush. I came to a bone-crunching stop. On my back, I watched the stars flash across the sky. North, south, east, and west they raced. The stars produced only feeble light, but holding up my hand I could see every bloody scratch that covered it. More than just starlight lit the night. I twisted around, as rocks tore at the skin on my back. There it was, far to the north, almost over the rim of the canyon I had just slid into. A large, glowing number blazed in the sky: 27. I felt myself smile. How nice, I thought. The night sky is numbered. What a wonderful place this is. Rolling onto my belly, I crawled. Darkness came.  © robert a. metzger. All rights reserved. |