The Pawn in the Portal: A Wyrd Short Story Read online

  The old stranger looked chastised. Suddenly contrite as though he’d only just realized his constant bombastic enthusiasm might be working at cross-purposes to the whole “avoiding the undead hordes attracted to the sound of noise” aspect of this particular end of the world.

  “Oh,” he whispered too loudly. “We don’t need the street. We can fly, fly away, my warrior friend. We can fly away.” He cast his eyes toward the mildew-stained ceiling above their heads.

  “Got a plane up there on the roof?” asked Ward doubtfully.

  “No. No plane. I’m sorry. You must think I’m crazy.”

  I do, thought Ward. I’m beginning to think you are.

  “I don’t mean actually fly. We can get across the rooftops and then down at the end of the street. Then it’s just a few miles to the government evacuation site. A hop and a skip and then we jump into a whole new world.” He warbled the last bit as though it were a song. It seemed familiar to Ward.

  The Tarragon briefings had indicated the government was still trying to evacuate people to a carrier offshore. But that was up in Santa Monica. Forty miles north.

  “Where’s the evac point?” mumbled Ward, moving aside a pink, gauzy, nicotine-stained curtain to check the street below. It looked like a riot full of looters. Except no one was looting. The breaking and entering was enough for them. And truth be told, as he watched the crowd below… truth be told, it was shrinking as they flooded into the building, climbing the stairs, coming for them in the “safe room”.

  How many buildings are like this now? Filled to the brim with living corpses waiting to spill out onto the street the moment you pass by, wondered Ward. Rooftops might actually be the way to go for what remains of the world as we knew it.

  “Disneyland!” the old man shouted, almost with joy. Then, “Sorry,” he whispered. “Disneyland was the last thing I heard on the radio. Marines out of Pendleton had secured the gates and they were airlifting people out of Fantasyland. At least that’s what the AM radio station was reporting before it went dead.”

  “Y’know how far away that is from here?”

  “Not far, my boy. Once we get down off the roofs, we can be there by dark.”

  Ward checked the window again. More of the zekes were lumbering toward the building from farther down the street. The crowd below was getting smaller as even more and more of the creatures joined the throng down there. That’s when he spotted another one of the New Kids. Except it wasn’t a kid at all. It was a tall woman with a curvy figure and a tight waist. She was wearing a tracksuit that was shredded and torn. She would have been hot if she didn’t look all haggard and gaunt. And now, seeing them side by side, the zekes and the New Kids, Ward could tell that they were the same and different all at once. As though the New Kids weren’t exactly dead, but zombies just the same. More like animals, thought Ward, as he watched the thing-woman weave through her lumbering counterparts unmolested. Sensing he was up there somewhere waiting for her.

  “They’re evolving alright,” whispered Ward.

  “What’s that?” said the old man as he made ready to leave the apartment.

  “Nothing.”

  ***

  On the roof, they could see the skyline of Downtown Santa Ana. The old stranger pointed off toward the Northwest.

  “We go that way and we’ll get there eventually.”

  The hot sky was a faded blue, the afternoon a sweaty fever wrapped in a wool blanket.

  They began to make their way across the rooftops. The going was slow, but in time they heard the moaning, groaning crowd less and less. In time, silence hung over everything and all they could hear was the scrape of their passing over the tarpaper and gravel-topped roofs. The old stranger breathed in and out like a gasping bellows, and at times Ward could hear him muttering and even chuckling to himself.

  Taking a break on the last rooftop before they’d find a way down onto the street, the old stranger, sitting splay-legged in the shadow of a roof-access stairwell asked, “You think they’re evolving.”

  Ward was silent. He’d cleaned his weapon and now he was just staring at it. He made a note of how much ammo was left.

  Not much, he thought. Not enough, really.

  Finally, in the silence that followed the stranger’s question, Ward replied. “Yeah. I do.”

  “How so?”

  More silence.

  Then, “I don’t know,” began Ward. “I’m not an evolutionary biologist. But for all intents and purposes, it seems that what’s happening out there is some sort of fundamental change in humanity. Except it’s not taking thousands of years to lose a tail or crawl up out of the ocean. This one’s fast. Real fast. So that tells me it’s a virus affecting the DNA or something. Whatever it is, if we cromags had lasted long enough to figure it all out, we’d have found it was there all along deep down inside our DNA, just waiting for the right conditions to come out and play.”

  The old stranger chuckled.

  “And you don’t believe this is the wrath of God? Stuff like that, do ya, boy?”

  “No sir, I do not. There’d have to be a God for there to be a wrath.”

  “Is that so? The dead getting up and walking around doesn’t fit that profile? Doesn’t even seem like magic? Dark magic… like supernatural voodoo even. Evidence of something else unseen at work? Something beyond all this.”

  Ward thought about that. He laid his rifle across his knees and drank a little bit of the chlorinated water from his canteen. Water he’d topped off back at the base in the depths of Death Valley a few mornings ago.

  “I don’t see any actual skeletons walking around. Like, just bones from some B movie made back in the sixties. If this was about the dead, then shouldn’t those things be crawling around too? Coming up in all the graveyards? Add those numbers and this... this would be a hell of a lot worse, if that’s even possible. Nah, what I see here is a bunch of biological meat bags that picked up a virus that’s decided to move us on to the next stage in the evolutionary process, regardless of how we feel about it.”

  The old stranger got to his feet and went to look over the side of the building.

  “I see,” he began, staring out over the rooftops and the silence of the dead city below. “I see judgement. I see what religions have been talking about all these years. People living for themselves… not payin’ attention to the other side, and now here it comes with a vengeance. Something has happened and whatever it is, it ain’t natural. Weird things have been going on, my boy. Weird…”

  “Religion is merely an opinion in which the facts need not apply,” interrupted Ward.

  The stranger turned, bewilderment etched in his face.

  “That sounds like something you memorized. Something you heard somewhere from some smarty pants that didn’t want to believe in something bigger because it messed with his sense of self, or if I know my humans, got in the way of something personal, private and most likely perverse that they really wanted to get up to. Sounds something like that. Something memorized.”

  “It is,” said Ward. “And so’s this one. What Science cannot teach us, man cannot know. Bertram Russell.”

  The old stranger ambled back across the rooftop, back into the shade, standing over Ward.

  “Problem with that, kiddo, is that statement isn’t science. And since it ain’t, it can’t teach us anything, according to itself. It’s in violation of what it’s proclaiming. That’s called the Law of Non-Contradiction.” Then he suddenly added, “Whoop, there it is!” His eyes wide, affecting some sort of stunned comic shock at his own wit.

  Ward rose to his feet. He checked his gear with one hand while holding his rifle with the other. “If there were time…” he paused and fixed the old stranger with a blunt glare. “Science would determine the cause of all this. Science would find out the truth. Even if it didn’t turn out so well for us. Even if it meant our demis
e, we, using science could find out the truth, and in the end, that’s all that really matters. There wouldn’t be any hocus pocus. Just chemicals and time, plus chance. That’s all. Science has exposed religion. We don’t have to be afraid of the boogey man because there ain’t one. Now c’mon, let’s get down off this roof and make tracks. Daylight’s burnin’.”

  The stranger followed, mumbling, “Well then, since you’ve got it all worked out… I feel much better.”

  “I do,” muttered Ward, as they started down the inside stairwell. “Religion’s just a fairy tale for children ‘fraid of the dark.”

  Later, in the deep black of an unknown stairwell, the old stranger whispered, after some sound within the building had caused them to stop and wait, listening. “Maybe science is just a fairy tale for people afraid of that boogey man.”

  ***

  Down on the street, the day was fading to what the sky promised would be a bloody close.

  “Need to find some place to hole up ‘till tomorrow,” muttered Ward, as they followed the sidewalk leading northwest along smashed blocks of broken glass and decomposing half-eaten bodies rotting in the heat.

  “No need to. We can make it there before dark, or just after. Let’s keep going,” urged the stranger.

  Ward stopped. Listening.

  “Do you hear anything? We’re close enough that if there were some kind of major evacuation still going on, we woulda heard choppers or something. It’s way too quiet for all that.”

  The old stranger cocked his head and squinted one eye.

  “Maybe,” he whispered. “Can’t really say. But, there’ll probably be someone there who can tell us where to go next. Or...” he looked wildly about. “Maybe there’s a lull. More choppers coming in soon. Or maybe they’re even staying. Gonna take everything back. Whatever it is, we’ll be a lot safer inside the park.”

  After a moment Ward whispered, “That’s a lot of maybes.”

  They walked on, Ward leading the way and scanning ahead, thinking as he tracked shadows that seemed to appear and disappear all about them. More New Kids on the Block.

  Maybe it’s time to cut Tarragon loose, he thought. It was a statement and a question he’d been testing out. Things with the outfit had been strange, to say the least. Now, whatever had happened with that A-10 that jumped them, Tarragon Corporation wasn’t as in control as it had hoped to be by this point. Maybe it was time to cut and run and get back in with the government. Ward turned this over and over as they finally reached Harbor Boulevard, which the old stranger promised would take them straight into the gates of the Magic Kingdom.

  That was when they came. The sun was blood red and setting at the far end of a long street that led off into the west. The New Kids came like a cavalry charge, screaming and howling, snarling and baying as they leapt over cars and crawled along the ground and through debris like fast-moving bipedal sidewinders. Ward knew it was a trap.

  “C’mon,” he cried louder than he’d meant to, and knew the fear and stress of days-on-end in this end-of-the-world madhouse were starting to have their way with him, whether he liked it or not. “C’mon… in there!” He pointed toward a Denny’s at the corner of the intersection. Then he detached a grenade from his web harness, pulled the pin with his teeth, and flung it a few feet away toward the oncoming New Kid Cavalry. Already, he was bolting across the parking lot toward the door of the diner.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he could see other fast-moving shadows careening out toward them from all points of the compass. He raised his rifle and engaged, as the old stranger flew past him, his great black jacket flying in the dry, end-of-the-day heat.

  Rounds caught a New Kid and dropped the foaming at the mouth thing as it charged. It tumbled and rolled and got back up all at once with a missing arm and a sucking chest wound. Seconds and steps later, it was face down on the street and twitching as Ward backed into the darkness of the diner, firing short bursts at multiple closing targets.

  “Tangos?” he wondered somewhere in the back of his brain.

  Humans.

  New Kids.

  Meat.

  He fired until empty, stepping back within the darkness and slapping in a new magazine.

  The stranger was racing from window to window. Silent and panting expectantly.

  Ward followed and saw through the wide, tinted table windows, regular zekes now coming out from every building along the street, stumbling and lurching toward the diner. In minutes they’d be surrounded. Again.

  A once-dead waitress lunged up from behind the counter and grabbed at them with mangled and cut up hands. Half of her once-pretty face was missing. Ward drew his sidearm and put a bullet right through what remained of the rest of her face. She fell over in a slump.

  Keep the sidearm for up close and personal he reminded himself as they ran. Then, “That’s nine left in the magazine.” He holstered the gun and leapt the counter.

  “Back here. Let’s look for a back door.”

  The undead were flinging themselves into the diner’s windows like heedless birds as glass began to shatter. They spilled inward, their number suddenly beyond easy counting. Ward passed the kitchen and smelled rotten eggs. He’d been smelling it since they’d hit the diner thirty seconds prior. But now it registered full and sickly sweet back here in the darkness of the shadowy kitchen.

  “Move, kid!” wheezed the breathless old man.

  A moment later, they reached the back door and stumbled out into the heat of the dying day. Ward detached an incendiary grenade, pulled the pin with his teeth, feeling a tooth grate against the pin, and lobbed the bomb back into the darkness of the diner.

  “Run!”

  WHUP-Boooooooooooooooooooooom

  The first explosion blew out the far side of the diner. Probably, thought Ward as he ran and was pushed down onto his face against the hot grit of the crumbling parking lot, where the gas lines ran…

  The second explosion sent bodies in every direction as the roof of the diner, most likely where the gas had been collecting, went up in a fiery, apocalyptic bloom.

  Ward rolled over onto his back and watched as a flaming zeke soared over his head and out into the parking lot. A moment later, the old stranger was on his feet, his square-toed hobnail boots resounding against the pavement as he jumped up and down and whooped crazily in victory.

  He took a long pull from a dented flask and then extended it down toward Ward. Ward pointed toward the man’s coat. It was smoldering.

  ***

  “Where do ya s’pose they are now?” said the stranger as they walked up Harbor Boulevard, the diner still burning and occasionally exploding in the background.

  “Who?” asked Ward.

  “All those people you just killed?” exclaimed the older man in black, and took another long pull from his dented flask.

  “They ain’t.”

  “They ain’t! Ain’t what?’

  “They just ain’t.”

  “You mean, they’re not all in hell roasting for the sin of trying to eat you and me?”

  “No. That’s a lie told to children.”

  “It is?”

  “Yeah. Children who don’t want to ask a few tough questions, think for themselves, that’s all.”

  “Questions?”

  “Yeah, science. That’s what science is. Questions. Science is just a series of asked, and sometimes answered, questions. And one of the questions science answered was “Do we need religion?” and the answer was…”

  “No?”

  “Yeah. It was no.”

  “So we don’t need religion anymore?” asked the Stranger earnestly.

  “No. We don’t. Religion is bad, and you can’t do real science with it around. The crusades. Televangelists. Wars. Power. All that stuff’s not actually good for us. Good for science.”

  “So we’re t
alking about good and evil now?”

  “Yeah. Good and evil.”

  “And you think science and religion, or a belief system that expresses an idea that there is something more out there, you think they aren’t equals? That there’s no room for the supernatural in science?”

  Ward snorted. “No. They can’t coexist. They’re not compatible. They’re mutually exclusive. If you have science, you can’t have religion. You can’t have a lie, and the truth. You ever read Douglas Adams? He wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

  “No, can’t say as I have. Been real busy lately,” answered the stranger.

  “Well, in this one part, he sums it all up. You see a garden. It’s just grass and flowers and real nice. You enjoy it. But that doesn’t mean there’re magic faeries living somewhere down inside that garden. It’s just a garden, that’s all.”

  The old stranger seemed to consider this for a few steps.

  Then, “And what about the gardener?”

  Ward said nothing.

  “You said it was a garden. Implies there’d be a gardener. Someone who tends it. A landscape architect even. I haven’t seen too many gardens growing wild out in the forest. Y’see kid, that’s your problem. You think science and belief can’t exist side by side. That’s called scientism, and it’s just a religion also. The belief that science is the only way to truth. It’s a faith just like all the others. But here’s the deal, science can’t answer every question, even questions asked by little children. What’s the meaning of life? Why am I here? Science can’t answer that out. Hell, science hasn’t even figured out what gravity really is! What did you say science and religion were?”

  “Mutually exclusive.”

  “But you see, they aren’t. That’s just a lie foisted on you by carnies looking to make a buck off your anger.”

  Ward shot him a hard glance and continued to scan.

  “See, they can say that,” continued the old stranger. “They can say there’s nothing out there, but they don’t really know, do they? They can say it because they don’t have to really prove it. They don’t know that belief is like a door. A door to another room where there might be something you hadn’t seen until you opened the door. Doubt alone, here’s the thing, doubt alone disproves people who tell you nothing else exists. In other words, not knowing everything disproves them. Because you can’t know everything. Because then you’d be God. And they say, “there is no God”. But to say that, they’d have to be God, because they’d have to know everything to know that. So they stand up at big lectures for fat checks and sell you nice creamy books in the back of the hall on a folding table for you to put on a shelf and comfort yourself with when you’re afraid of the unknown, like death, at three a.m. Books that tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is absolutely nothing out there in the darkness to be afraid of, even though they don’t know what’s out there in the darkness. Behind every door is something. Every door requires someone to open it. And that someone’s got to believe that there’s something behind it worth investigating, otherwise, they’ll never turn the key. That’s what real science is. Real faith is. The belief that there’s something and not nothing.” The old stranger beamed beatifically down at Ward as though expecting to see some sort of sudden enlightened realization and subsequent appreciation.