Velocity

5

I envisioned it all. I hadn’t gotten A’s in history for nothing.

They might just kill us out of hand when we ran out of bullets. Or maybe we would get hungry and weak and fall asleep one night. An arrow out of the night might do the trick, or maybe even something more mundane and natural, like the purplish infection that had puffed up Jason’s slashed arm.

But whatever it was, we were going to die here. Unless Mom and Dad found the workshop and the dead goblins. Maybe they could get my crazy Uncle out of the nuthouse long enough to help. Maybe he would twiddle the dials for them, returning the window to this precise spot.

Or maybe my parents would find another world, ignorantly dip the window into the bottom of some ocean, and flood our planet with a billion gallons from an alien sea.

Still, the window’s return was our best hope, so we dug in on the beach snugly up against the fern-tree. I had forty-seven rounds of ammo, a sick friend and a beautiful sunset to ponder. Wherever this world was, it was certainly wild and full of lovely vistas. Tiny blue crabs, each with ten rippling legs, ran around in the surf. When night fell, two moons rose, both bigger and more colorful than our own. One looked green and blue and had clouds of its own. A second waterworld, I felt sure.

By morning, Jason’s breathing was raspy. I thought about waking him up, but what was the point? Whatever dreams he had were probably better than this.

I’m thinking now about the blue ten-legged crabs. They might be good to eat. Then again, they might poison me. Pretty soon, I will have to try one, but not now. For now, I’m watching the sea. It’s strange, beautiful and entrancing.

Larson, B. V.

Velocity

The One-Way Gang

Beth held a limp hanky in her freckled hands and cried over the dead salesman. “You’ve got to do something, Paula,” she blubbered, rocking herself with her arms wrapped around her own shoulders. Her face was hidden by a long stringy mop of brown hair.

“Things will get better,” I lied to her. I bent over and gave her a squeeze, while she continued crying and rocking. I watched her tears make dark streaks as they rolled down through the dust that coated her cheeks. She used to be pretty. I thought. Really pretty.

“Paula, stop them this time,” she whispered to me.

Suddenly, I was disgusted with everything, including myself. I stood up and walked away from Beth. What could I do? Fight all three of them over some salesman from Fresno who should have kept his BMW on the Blowdirt instead of stopping here? The only thing I could do was ambush them, and they all slept with their guns in their hands. Killing Kyle wouldn’t be enough, the others wouldn’t let me get away with it. Besides, I considered Raymond my friend, and didn’t think I could kill him.

I glanced at Beth and frowned. If I had been planning to make a move, the last person I would have told was Beth. She would have blabbed my plans and then I would have been bleeding in the dust, with Kyle ripping chunks out of my face with those damned pliers of his. She wasn’t entirely with it these days, since Deb and Kevin had stepped out. She was too chicken to follow them alone, so she cried a lot.

I shook my head. No, I couldn’t tell her, she would have blabbed for sure. I walked over to the others, who had just found the salesman huddled up with his chin on his chest and his arms wrapped around his head. He was sound asleep, leaning against our One-Way sign, just as if he owned the place. He wore a navy blue pin-striped suit, now a patchy dust-brown, with a red tie that flapped a bit in the west winds.

Kyle gave him a long, low whistle of appreciation which woke the man up.

“Mister,” Kyle said, “you have a lot of balls to be sleeping up against our sign that way, but you didn’t have quite enough balls. You should have just stepped out, right through that ripper.” He gestured toward the flaming, shimmering fields of color that danced over the parking lot.

The man blinked at us.

Kyle shook his head to himself with his lips compressed. “You should of stepped out. ”

The salesman looked up at the four of us, blinking in the pink morning light and the dust that forever blew in our faces. He looked at Kyle, a guy so pale white that his skin was pink and his eyes were yellow. The saleman’s eyes moved over the double-twisted snake tattoos on both arms, the bandana over his mouth and the goggles over his eyes, then finally to the pliers which he held raised high in his left hand. Rather than fear, puzzlement was his first reaction.

He opened his mouth, but before he could speak, Raymond had shoved the roughcut barrel of his shotgun in his open teeth, corking his words. Raymond was part black, with one of those wild razor-cut hair-dos to prove it, but you could hardly tell with all the dust covering his skin. When the salesman tried to close his mouth, Raymond stuck his thumb in the man’s lips and pried his jaw open, working the barrel in there.

Everyone but me chuckled at this. I knew what that barrel tasted like. I knew how it depressed your tongue and scraped the roof of your mouth with the flanges of steel the hacksaw had left on the crudely sawed-off tip.

They always loved the look of surprise on someone’s face when they first tasted Raymond’s shotgun. Steve, the third man of our gang, pulled out his regulation police handcuffs and snapped them on the salesman’s upraised wrist.

“You’re under arrest, bud,” Steve said. The man’s eyes got even bigger when he looked at the helmet that sat on top of Steve’s pockmarked cheeks and crooked teeth. Steve always wore a gold CHP motorcycle helmet that he had picked up along with the handcuffs from some dead cop. He was only sixteen and a geek. He enjoyed playing Highway Patrolman. He chuckled at the man’s comic surprise.

I stood to one side and gripped my revolver nervously, rubbing the handle with my thumb. Inside I hoped, no I prayed that we were just going to rob this guy, that when we had whatever we could use from him, whatever we felt like taking, we would toss him past the sign and let him run for the ripper.

But Kyle had that yellowy gleam in his eyes, the light that meant trouble.

We did rob him. We took the keys to the Beamer, driving it around the deserted parking lots and up and down Geer road for fun with the sunroof open and the stereo cranked up all the way. He had all the usual shit that people try to take with them to the other side, money, booze, camping gear, even a coffee can full of old coins and jewelry. He had a little. 22 caliber target pistol in the trunk too, which Kyle later used to shoot out the beamer’s tires for a laugh. I looked through his wallet, although money was useless these days and credit cards were nothing but curiosities. I learned that his name was Kevin Simpson, and he had a wife and a little girl somewhere.

I think he knew that Kyle was going to kill him even before I did. I think he knew because he kept muttering prayers to himself, under his breath. Hail-Mary type stuff. Riding around the parking lot in the cushy leather backseat of his car, I looked at him, but he just kept his eyes shut and muttered his prayers. Raymond kept his shotgun pressed against the man’s cheek and had his fist wrapped double in the man’s red tie.

It was when we were done having fun, when we had everything that the Kevin Simpson could give us, that things went bad. The old way, the way we used to do things, we would take the guy and put him just past the One-Way sign, just at the edge where the fields started, and give him a quick kick in the ass to give him a proper send off. Then he would fall forward, tumbling into the new world wearing his butt for a hat. It was a great laugh.

But then Kyle had gotten into his pliers and things had changed. The last two people had gone through bleeding, and Kevin Simpson was never going to make it at all.

“You’ve got to do something,” Beth sobbed to me again. “Let’s step out, Paula. Let’s just do it. There has to be something better than this.”

She followed me into the wreckage of the furniture store that had become our home for the last several months. It was convenient, as there was plenty of furniture to go around and there was no way for travelers to get to the fields out in the parking lot without walking in plain sight of the big front windows.

“Just do it yourself,” I told her. “You don’t need me.”

“I can’t do it alone,” she told me, her hand gripping my wrist, her eyes bright. “I’m afraid to go alone. What if it’s something bad. What if something really bad is on the other side? I don’t want to die alone, Paula.”

“Then don’t go. I’m just not ready yet,” I told her in a gentle voice. I reached up to push the hair out of my face. She jerked her hand away from my wrist.

“You owe me, Paula!” she yelled, suddenly furious.

“Go tell your cats about it,” I hissed at her. My eyes flashed with anger and slapped her, slamming my hand over her big mouth. Kyle, Steve and Ray could be anywhere, and all I needed was for her to blab about me stepping out or maybe even turning on them. Kyle was not likely to take to either idea. Once you were in his gang, you were his property.

Beth gave me a hurt look and ran away, deciding I guess that I was just as bad as the others. Maybe I was. I watched her flabby rear as she ran away, thinking that she was crazy to want me to go through the fields, to step out with her, just because she had helped pull a few guys off me one time. Who wanted to cross over? Earth was bad, but who wanted to take a chance on whatever was happening on the far side? Some said that the fields didn’t really work anymore, that if you stepped into them you didn’t get through the wormhole to Tau Ceti Minor. Some said that you were just stepping out into empty interstellar space, into a void where you froze solid in seconds. Some said that when you went through, aliens grabbed you and turned you into a slave, or shot you out of hand. Others said that if you went into the fields, it was random where you might end up, that the physics were unpredictable.

The only thing that everybody knew for sure was that you didn’t come back. You bought a one-way ticket when you stepped into the shimmering colors at any of the ripper points that dotted the planet.

I turned and walked through all the trash we had thrown around since we had taken over the store and sat on a coffee table next to the front windows. Absently pulling a candy wrapper from the sole of my shoe, I watched the shimmering fields outside, where they hung and twisted in the air a few feet above the parking lot. They leaped and danced like a rainbow-hued bonfire.

The sun was setting behind the building, and the colors in the ripper were shifting down from the yellows and oranges into the reds and violets, as they usually did in the early evening. Did that mean you would come out someplace else if you went through now? No one knew.

Silhouetted by the ripper’s strange, moving light, the salesman’s body was a dark lump on the asphalt. Next to him, the One-Way sign pointed into the colors, looking like a mailbox.

“He’s a deader, alright,” said Steve, coming up next to me and putting a hand around my waist down low, just an inch from grabbing my rear.

I shoved his hand away automatically. He smelled like spoiled meat.

“You should know,” I replied coldly.

He ignored me, his deep-set eyes fixed on the salesman’s lifeless form. His gold helmet glinted, reflecting the light from the rip outside.

“When I get close to the rip, I freak out a bit,” he told me. “The fields have an unnaturalness about them that fires up your instincts, you know? It makes your movements stiff and makes your skin crawl as if static tugs at every hair on your body. You know, when you are that close, that if you just take a few steps, or stumble, or somebody pushes you, you are on your way into nothingness.”

Steve was our resident ripper-baiter. He liked to go past the sign, every once and a while, and run back at the last second, but for the fields could suck him in for good. He had been closer that anyone I knew of.

Outside, the fields sparkled and shimmered, playing like cold fire on the asphalt. My family had gone through when the rips had worked both ways, but I had been in college then and had decided to wait. I pondered the dancing colors with the same old wonder they invoked in everyone.

“I remember climbing up to Nevada falls in Yosemite when I was a kid with my dad and my brother Tom,” Steve told me. “I stood out on the brink, looking down thousands of feet into the valley, with my sneakers placed side by side at the edge. I closed my eyes and it felt as if I were going to get sucked off, to fall into an endlessly deep pit. The fields are like that you know, only more scary, more alien.”

“Did you have to kill the guy?” I blurted out.

Steve shrugged, as if it were no big deal. He gave a nervous, adolescent laugh. “It was kinda fun. We always scare them, give them the old treatment with the shotgun in the mouth and the handcuffs. We just do it to soften them up some, get them in a talkative mood. But this time Kyle decided to snuff the guy,” again he shrugged. “It’s the same to us either way. If he’d gone into the rip, he’d be just as absent from our world.”

“No, it’s not the same.”

Steve was quiet for a while. Then he changed the subject. “You think the Berkley boys at the Livermore Labs were really the ones who started all these rips?”

“I guess. That’s what they say,” I said, taking a half-step away from him. Sometimes it was creepy just to stand next to Steve, and this was one of those times.

I thought about the way the rips had started. The Government Service boys had been playing with the theoretical physics of wormholes. No one knew just what they had done, because the biggest field had appeared in the middle of the labs and many of the Ph. D. s and their pale, spectacled grad assistants had vanished. At the same time, over six hundred other known spots had flared up all over the globe. Some were no larger than campfires, others had swallowed a city block. There were more of them in California and under the ocean on the shelf just off the Pacific coast than elsewhere, but there were enough around to let everybody get to one who wanted to. The first brave adventurers that had stepped through these rips to Tau Ceti Minor and returned to tell of the wonders they had seen.

They had pictures, too. Digitals movies that played on every house on the net. Tau Ceti Minor was a dream world. Green and lush, its surface was three-fourths land and only one-fourth sea. Once the population learned that a fresh new planet with virgin forests and oceans and without pollution was on the other side, people had flooded into the rips in droves. The fleeing population brought on a worldwide depression, which only served to accelerate the flow of humanity out of their old worn-out world and through the rips in space to the new one.

“I remember when they all switched around on everybody,” said Steve with a wheezy snort of laughter. “It was right after Christmas in December when the solar flares started in both systems and I remember that’s when all the weird shit started, like the people seeing the northern lights all the way down to New Mexico. Remember that?”

“Sure I remember. Messed everyone up, because they were all with their families on one side or the other, then the door slammed shut. I’ve never seen my parents since.”

“My folks were gone too. I was a kid then,” he said, ignoring my look which said: And you aren’t now?

“The people stopped coming out of the fields. People still went in, and disappeared, but they never came back out. I remember thinking that Santa Claus had taken back his gift.”

After that, with the earth population cut nearly in half, the world rapidly declined and many areas fell into anarchy. Few nations still stood as organized powers. Dictatorships and petty civil wars flourished. For years the steady, silent exodus continued. Like lemmings leaping from a cliff into the unknown, like forest creatures running from flames, the people continued to step into the shimmering fields and vanish. The bleeding never stopped, and soon the Earth had slipped into a new age. I suppose they would someday call this a dark age.

“This last year has been a weird time,” Steve said, tracing the outline of a face on the dusty store window. “Evil things have happened that nobody’s ever going to know about later. I think it’s kind of fun, it feels dangerous. ”

He left and I let go a breath of disgust. I felt an involuntary shudder go down my spine, and tried to control it. I grabbed an ugly green ottoman out of the nearest family room display and pulled it up to the window. There was a bullet hole through the cushion and as I watched an ant crawled out of it, feelers waving. I flicked the ant away and sat on it. A few minutes later the trash rattled and crunched as Raymond walked up to join me at the window. He leaned up against the glass.

“You thinking about steppin’ out?” he asked me. I glanced at him but he wasn’t looking at me, he was staring out at the fields and the dead salesman. “Sure is weird shit, ain’t it?” he added.

I noticed his 12-gauge was slung over his back, so I casually holstered my gun before speaking. “I think it’s going to go all purple tonight.”

He nodded, but didn’t repeat his first question. We watched as twilight set in and the flaming colors darkened and deepened into their cooler, more ominous night hues. In the violet glow the saleman looked less like a lump and more like a corpse, perhaps one that would animate somehow.

“Looks like he’s going to stand up and come for us, huh?” Ray asked me. The unwelcome image of Kevin Simpson’s corpse standing up and staggering toward the furniture store to exact his revenge on us sprang into my mind. His eyes would be two bloodshot orbs staring from the gray-brown dust that caked his face. I could see him dismembering each of the One-Way gang, including myself, while Beth cried for us all.

“Why did you do it?” I asked, suddenly wanting to know. Raymond had been the one to finally squeeze the trigger on his shotgun and ventilate the back of Kevin Simpson’s head. “Why did you kill him?”

“I shoved the gun in his mouth and all, but that was just part of the bit. Just to scare him, you know? After that though, it started gettin’ bad. Kyle… those pliers, man,” he looked down, shaking his head. His hand was a fist against the cool glass. “You don’t know, ‘cause you checked out early. It was all a waste.”

“He didn’t know anything?”

“Kyle kept sayin’ he did, kept sayin’ that he was holding out, but no, he didn’t know shit. Everything he owned was in that Beamer we trashed.”

“So you killed him.” Raymond gave a slow nod, his lower lip jutting out a bit and his eyes locked on Simpson’s body outside. The winds had picked up a bit and the dust was blowing heavy, coming in off highway 99. The highway had once been known as the Blowdirt, back in the 1920’s before irrigation had really gotten going. Back then, this section of California’s Central Valley had been a big windy dust bowl, and 99 had high mounds of dirt on both sides of it. Every car had left a billowing cloud of dust behind it, and the locals had called the highway the Blowdirt. Now the people were mostly gone, but the dust was back and the old name had come back with it.

“Kyle was pissed, wasn’t he?” I asked, breaking the silence.

“Tough,” snorted Raymond. “That really breaks me up, you know. I feel for him.”

I thought about my family on the other side. I wondered what they were doing on the new planet, how they were making out. I had always been afraid that if I stepped through one of the rips I would end up in some other place, some dead end that I couldn’t get back out of. I had always hoped that the fields would start working both ways again, that somehow I might have a chance to rejoin my family, without having to face the terrible unknown.

“Ain’t never killed a man before,” muttered Raymond. He gnawed on his fist now, rubbing his knuckles against his teeth. “Not like that. I guess it was a mercy-killing. You know, like if you found a run-over beagle in the road and it was all twisted up. You’d kill it maybe, to stop it from suffering.”

I nodded and got up off the ottoman.

“I’m going to bed.” Raymond didn’t say anything. He just kept staring out at the shimmering lights-they had gone purple now in the darkness, as I had predicted-staring at the man he had killed. I left him there and went back to my “room” an area formed out of fake walls and office dividers and filled with new luxurious furniture. Beth was there, folding down the sheets on her bed. She had stopped crying, but she looked at me reproachfully when I walked in. I didn’t feel like talking to her, so I went back out front, pushed a pile of dusty clothes off a loveseat and stretched out on the flowery patterned fabric. Eventually I fell asleep.

When I woke up it was still dark. I must have heard something and awakened automatically. Groping for my revolver, I wiped my mouth and got up, blinking. I walked to the front of the store and saw someone was out there standing over the body, doing something. I moved quickly to the window, ready to sound the alarm if it was another gang, or maybe some friend of Mr. Simpson’s who’d come calling.

I squinted and recognized the outline of a shotgun slung over the figure’s back. It was Ray. I rushed out of the store and into the cool night air, doing the hundred yard dash across the parking lot. I was afraid that Ray would step out on me. So many people had, and for some reason I didn’t want him to go without saying something to him.

“What’s wrong, Ray?” I asked, panting a bit from my run across the parking lot. He didn’t answer. I noticed that the salesman was much farther into the field than he had been before. He had been rolled or pushed up almost to the point that he was sure to vanish into the ripper. I realized that Ray had done it, that he was trying to get the body into the fields for some reason, but he hadn’t pushed him quite far enough and couldn’t go in any further himself without risking getting snatched up by a flare.

Our One-Way sign was there to stop people from getting too close as well as to mark the rip as ours. Even though the fields generally stayed back a few feet from where the sign was, there was an occasional flare or ripple that could reach out and suck up someone standing too close. Without getting too close, Ray was trying to drag the man back by his heels, and first got nothing but his shoes. Then he was tugging on the dead man’s feet, his hands slipping on the socks. He looked like a man trying to retrieve something from the edge of a bonfire without getting burned. He became more daring and grabbed his ankles, giving a mighty heave that brought the body a foot or so closer.

“What are you doing, man?” I asked quietly.

“He’s gonna make it,” Ray grunted at me.

“What?”

“He’s gonna step out, just like he would’ve done if he hadn’t of been so stupid as to wait for us to catch him,” he jerked and heaved, pulling the man back presumably for another try. “Come on, you dumb bastard,” he muttered.

“He’s dead, Ray,” I said gently. I was standing next to him, and thinking that he was going over the edge. Ray was losing it, even while I watched.

“I’m tired of lookin’ at him, and I don’t feel like digging a hole,” Ray explained.

“I’ve got a lighter,” said a voice. The voice chuckled when I jumped and then Steve stepped out of the shadows from behind the Beamer we had joy-rided to death earlier. He was wearing his crazy gold helmet as always, and seemed amused by the two of us.

“We could burn him. I’ve got a lighter and we can use the gas from the Beamer.”

Ray suddenly stood and got right up in my face. His arms were cocked back and he was ready to go for me right there, I could tell.

“You gonna stand there and watch, or are you gonna help?” he asked me.

I looked at him for a moment, then without even a glance at Steve I reached down and helped Ray with the body. We lifted him up Ray working his legs and me working his arms. The head lolled and flopped as we swung him to and fro. With a mighty heave we sent Kevin Simpson through the rip. The fields rippled and loomed a bit like a fire that is fed a dry stick of tinder. I wondered what the people on the other side, if there were any such people, would think of their latest immigrant.

“Oh man, you guys are dog meat,” laughed Steve, holding his rifle to his belly and bending over it a bit. “When Kyle finds out you tossed him through, you’re both friggin’ Alpo, man.”

“Why’s that, Steve?” I asked.

“Because you tossed old Senor Simpson through the rip.”

“So what?”

“So you were about to take the stuff out of the Beamer and step out with all of the loot,” he explained, as if we were simpletons. “You were stealing from Kyle, stealing from the gang. At least, that’s what I’m telling Kyle. You guys have been acting weird lately anyway, he’ll believe me.”

“Yeah, well-” began Ray, casually turning a bit and laying his big black hand on his shotgun, which protruded over his shoulder.

“Hold it right there, man,” said Steve, instantly grim. He held his rifle confidently, aiming it from his hip. It was pointed at Ray’s chest, and all of us knew that he wasn’t likely to miss. He was good with that rifle, he was forever stalking around in the fields and vacant lots, shooting at everything that moved like a ten-year-old with a BB gun.

Ray let his hand ease away from the shotgun, while I took a nonchalant step forward. “You too chick,” barked Steve, swinging the barrel to cover me. I froze. “You are two of the sorriest nuts I’ve ever caught out farting around in this parking lot,” he laughed, shaking his head. “Now both of you will drop your guns and kick them over here, nice and easy,” he said it just like a gangster in an old video, which is where he got most of his ideas.

“Hey now,” I said after we had kicked away our guns, forcing a jovial smile. “We’re all buds, Steve. Let’s go have a sixer in the store and talk it over.”

“Not anymore,” said Steve, shaking his head with grim finality. He was obviously more relaxed now that we were unarmed. He glanced to the One-Way sign we had knocked over while tossing Simpson through the rip. He frowned, walking over to it while keeping an eye on us. “You guys even kicked over our mascot here, just to prove you’re traitors.”

He looked down at the sign for a moment, a good long moment, but not quite long enough for us to get to him. He got his rifle up in time to check us, and the look of shock in his eyes was good to see. Ray had stepped quickly and silently up to within five feet of him, and I was right behind him. He could see the deadly intent in our eyes, and we could see a moment of fear waver through his. He and Ray were practically face to face, with Steve’s back up against the fields. We were all very aware of how close Steve was to going into the rip. One step back, maybe two, and he was stepping out for sure.

“I’ll blow your guts out, Ray. You back off now.”

“And I’ll jump you Steve, you skinny little psycho. I’ll rush you and we’ll both go steppin’ out together, just like we was dancin’,” Ray told him in a low, gutteral voice.

“I know what you need right now Steve. You need a little chemical courage, a little crank or smack or maybe a good dose of blur,” I said, baiting him. “You’re a scared weasel without a little bit of blur, aren’t you Steve?”

“You shut up, or I’ll blast off you-” I never heard what part of my anatomy Steve was going to blow off, because right then Ray hit him. He had swung his gun to the side to aim at me, and Ray took this opportunity to shove him into the fields. The rifle went off and missed me, although I suppose it was just luck that it did. We saw him fall back into the fields and try to catch himself on the edge of the transfer point, at the point where a man’s molecules are spread half-here and half-there. He fired his rifle again, and it made a distant popping sound, as if he had fired it into a king-sized foam mattress. The muzzle flashed, but we never felt or heard the bullet strike, I have no idea where it went.

We could see for a second that his vocal chords strained, his mouth gaped open and his hand stretched toward us, but it was all silent, his voice never reached us. Just before he disappeared, his helmet slipped back and I saw his pimply face one last time. In that moment he wasn’t a gang-member or a vicious bully, he was a sixteen-year old kid and he was scared out of his mind. Then the fields rippled and he was covered up, like a man drowning in a vat of swirling paints.

Then Kyle came out. He was very rational. He was almost always calm, even when he was tearing chunks out of your face with his visegrips. “So let me get this straight, team,” he told us in that fatherly voice I hated. “Mr. Simpson had wanted to get through our rip so badly that you felt sorry for his corpse and tossed it through. Then Steve came along and accidentally stumbled through after the body?”

“Nothing like that, Kyle,” I said, watching him slap his goddamn pliers into his palm like a school master’s paddle. Slap, slap.

“I pulled Steve out of his drug scene, you know,” Kyle said quietly. “I pulled Stevie up and out and then you guys tossed him into oblivion.”

Slap, slap.

“He might not be dead, Kyle,” I said, feeling a bit defensive. “He’s probably better off than we are. No one knows what’s on the other side.”

“I do!” shouted Kyle at me suddenly, glaring with those intense big yellow eyes of his. Then he looked down at his pliers again and I followed his gaze. The light from the fields shimmered and glinted on the shiny metal. Dark blood stained the jaws and ran down to smear the grips. I wondered briefly if Simpson’s blood still felt tacky in Kyle hands and cold fingers of nausea tickled my guts.

Kyle lowered his voice, all calm and reason again. “We all know why nobody comes back out of the rips. Because there’s nothing on the other side now, nothing but death.”

“He pulled his gun on us, Kyle,” I said.

“So you iced him, nice and neat. You guys are a pretty pair, alright. Couldn’t have just tripped him, could you Ray? Couldn’t just give him a nice judo throw, knocking the wind out of him and some sense in? No, you had to make an interstellar iceball out of him, you had to turn him into a sixteen year-old popsicle, zits and all.”

Ray stared glumly into the dancing colors, silently brooding. When he finally spoke he didn’t take his eyes away from the colors. “You know what I want to know, Kyle? I want to know what’s with you and those friggin’ pliers. Did your daddy beat your lil’ butt with his handtools, or somethin’?”

“No Ray,” said Kyle quietly, the snake tattoos jumping on his forearms the way they did when he was pissed. “No, but I bet your daddy beat your butt good, didn’t he? Too bad he never got a little carried away and tossed you over a cliff or out a window, like you did for poor old Stevie.”

Then Kyle stalked over to the Beamer, lifting the trunklid and dug out something that crackled like paper out of the darkness. He returned with a long paper sack in his hands, the type that liquor stores used to put booze bottles in so that drunks could pretend they weren’t booze bottles-back when there were liquor stores. He walked back to us and held it out a sack to Ray, grinning.

“Would you like a drink, Ray?” There was something funny about the way he held the bag. It was upside down, with the open end covering his hand. Ray’s eyes slid to Kyle’ side, to his holster. My eyes followed his, and widened. Kyle’s holster was empty.

“You gonna shoot or what, Kyle?” asked Ray in a dead voice.

Kyle waved the gun under his nose a bit, chuckling. The bag slipped half off, revealing black metal.

“Not a drinker? On the wagon, Ray?”

My hand slipped down to my gun, and Kyle caught it.

“Hold it right there, Paula,” he said, darting a glance my way. “I’ll shoot you both before you’ve got it out.”

I froze, but tensed to go for the gun if he shot Ray.

“You two were going to leave me, you were gonna step out. No need to deny it. You were going to leave me here, alone. ” he hissed the words between clenched teeth.

He pulled out his pliers then and reached up to grab Ray’s cheek with them. “Well, I’ve got just the thing to keep you around.” The tattoos on his arms did a snake dance as his muscles tremored with tension.

Sweat popped out on my skin and I could see sweat on his face and arms too, glistening oily beads that reflected the shimmering colors of the fields. I heard Beth coming up from the store, her sandals slapping on asphalt and crackling in the dead ivy that had once grown on the cement islands in the parking lot.

“Don’t kill each other,” she said, her voice sounding desperate. Her fear for our safety had finally overwhelmed her fear of the confrontation. “I know what’s wrong with you Kyle. You’re afraid we’ll all leave you here.”

Kyle laughed, his eyes snapping over to Beth, then back to Ray, who flinched at the touch of the bloody pliers.

“He’s nuts Beth,” I said quietly. “Over the edge.”

“I think he never wanted to see anyone leave,” Beth continued. “Perhaps each time he saw our fiery rip eat another one, a strip of his sanity came loose and burned with them. We’re all incredibly lonely. We all grew up in towns, where people and cars filled the air with noise and smells. How long had it been since you saw a movie Kyle, or caught a whiff of diesel fumes?”

“Fuck off,” growled Kyle, his lips lifting away from his teeth in a snarl.

“You don’t want to kill us, Kyle,” Beth said gently. Her face came into the light now, dusty tear-streaks and all. “We’re the only friends you have left now.”

This last struck home and Kyle looked at her, his mouth gaping like a fish, his eyes wide and lit with insanity. It was all the chance that Ray had, and he took it. He knocked the gun aside and it went flying away, firing inside the brown paper sack. The blast blew out the back of the bag and the sack gave birth to the black pistol in midair, like an alien bird. Before the gun clattered onto the dusty asphalt, Ray pulled out his shotgun. He struck Kyle just below the ear and he went down.

We stood there for a moment, guns out, panting and sweating. A breeze came up and glued grit to our moist skins. Blood trickled down Ray’s cheek and ran into his mouth, staining his teeth red. It looked like a terrier had taken a bite out of his face. Staring down at Kyle’s motionless form, all of us felt a new freedom. With this feeling came decision. Moving quickly, hardly speaking, we gathered together the camping gear from the BMW and what other belongings we wanted. Like parents on Christmas night, we shuffled past Kyle with muffled steps, hoping he would not wake up until we were gone. It would be harder to leave with his crazy eyes boring into our backs.

Standing at the brink of the rip with our backpacks full, we took a last glance at old Earth. Just over the horizon the moon hung high, looking white and clean over the dirty world. The parking lot was barren and empty, the rusting hulks of cars everywhere like a slaughtered herd of metal beasts.

Kyle slept peacefully on the asphalt, unconscious and undreaming. A clear spot in the dust had appeared before his blowing nostrils. Ray’s cheek had stopped bleeding, and he had his shotgun in his hands. Beth had a struggling cat tucked under each arm. We were ready.

“Let’s make sure that wherever we end up, we’re together,” I said, and put my hand on each of their arms. Together, we took a step forward. Swirling liquid color closed over us, and we left old Earth behind.

Although as years passed and Beth, Ray and I lost track of one another under the yellow sun of the new world, none of us ever forgot the man who had tried to hold us back. In the frontier boomtowns that dotted the wild landscape of Tau Ceti, I often wondered what had become of Kyle. Had he gone completely mad? Had he eventually stepped out? Or was he still back on old Earth, possibly the last man there, a beetle rattling about inside the ribs of an ancient behemoth that had long since died and rotted away?

I tended to think the latter.