Multiverse Mashup Omnibus, page 42
“Crap crap crap,” I said.
“Keep running!” Jane-Z yelled.
I looked back over my shoulder. The romance duo were doing a decent job of keeping up, but Paul-Z and Alex-Z had passed them. Alex was starting to drop behind, and Jane slowed to stay with him.
“Crap,” I said again.
I dropped back so that I’d be the last in the group. As I slowed, I spotted someone in the street ahead of us – a man, dressed in drab green clothing, with a black kerchief tied around his nose and mouth. He was coming from the far side of the park, where the siren had gone off, and was running diagonally across Twelfth Avenue to intercept us.
“This way!” he said.
I didn’t see where he was leading, I was too distracted by the pair of zombies that we were about to run past. One was a tall, rotund man, the other a short, skinny teenage girl. They made a grab for Alex, but Jane pulled him clear. As she did so she lost her balance and both fell to the ground.
I went for the bigger zombie first, stabbing it in the forehead as it reached for my throat. My knife went in at a bad angle and it slid sideways across its skull, gouging out a chunk of rotting flesh but doing nothing to stop its advance. Its long fingernails started cutting into my neck and its teeth snapped in my face.
I stuck the knife into its open mouth, into the roof. The creature stiffened and fell.
Alex-Z was there, finishing off the teenage zombie before it could get at Jane and Alex. “That was stupid!” he snapped at me. “Are you bit?”
I pulled the knife back out and examined my hand. I had felt the zombie’s teeth scrape my fingers but my skin was intact. I shook my head.
“Keep away from the mouth,” he said. “Scratches are fine, even getting a little blood in your mouth is fine, but the tiniest bite and you’re done.”
More zombies were quickly approaching. Paul-Z, Jane-Z and the man in the handkerchief were already across the avenue. They were standing at the side entrance to a car dealership. Large windows ran the length of the building, and through it I could see lines of expensive cars sitting idle. The mysterious man waved at us frantically.
Alex-Z grabbed Alex’s shoulder roughly. “Can you run faster or are we going to have to carry you?” he spat at him.
Alex looked down and nodded meekly. The four of us rushed across the multilane street to join the rest of the group. The siren was still sounding, but a significant number of zombies had gotten close enough to find us much more interesting, and slowly followed us across.
We reached the doorway and our benefactor ushered us all inside. “Quick,” he said. “There’s an office to the right with no windows.”
He pulled the door shut behind us. It was solid metal and opened out to the street, so the zombies wouldn’t be able to bust through, but a moment later we heard them banging.
We were in a nicely carpeted hallway. To our left open arches led to the main showroom, and light from the large windows shone through, illuminating our path. We moved halfway down the corridor and into a room on the right.
Although it had once been an office, it looked more like a campsite. A sleeping bag was laid out on the floor, as well as a cooler and two large, closed duffel bags. Some clothes were scattered around, and a battery-powered lantern and a book – Bridget Jones’s Diary – lay next to the sleeping bag, a bookmark halfway through.
The man who had helped us came into the room. “We’re clear,” he said. “They’re starting to assemble along the windows, but as long as they can’t see us, they won’t get riled up enough to break through.”
Jane-Z drew her sword. “Not that we’re not grateful,” she said, “but why did you help us?”
He raised his hands. “Whoa, whoa, whoa! I’m not armed!”
Jane put her hand on Jane-Z’s arms. “He just saved our lives!”
“Yes, he saved our lives,” Jane-Z replied. “Very conveniently. How did he know we were even there?”
“I didn’t know you’d be there.” He nodded towards Jane. “I was tracking her.”
Jane looked sharply at him. “Me?”
He looked back towards Jane-Z. “Jane.” His voice sounded choked. “I can’t believe you’re here. It’s like a miracle. I was afraid I’d never see you again.”
Jane-Z squinted. The sword wavered in her hands. “You…your voice…”
Moving his hands slowly, he pulled the kerchief down around his neck.
It was Noah Lindstrom. Head judge for Cake Magazine’s Cake-tastic Tournament of Cakes, North Ameri-cake Edition. Or his alternate-universe double, at least.
Jane gasped. “Noah!”
“You son of a bitch!” Jane-Z screamed. She lifted the sword up above her head, preparing to swing it at his skull. “You’re dead, you bastard! You’re dead!”
Thirteen
“Hey, now!” I said. “I don’t know about you, but I have a lot of questions. So maybe don’t kill your handsome friend until we get some answers?”
“He’s not my friend,” Jane-Z replied.
“Even so…”
“He’s my husband.”
“Oh. Well, now I have even more questions.”
Jane-Z’s arm shook as she held the sword. After a long moment, she finally lowered her weapon, then let it drop to the floor. She pushed her hands through her short hair and bent over double. “You’re alive. Oh my god, you’re really alive.”
Noah stepped towards her, making as if to embrace her, but she stood up straight and held a hand out to stop him.
“No,” she said. “No. You were alive all this time? Do you know what I…how I…no.” She dug her fingers into her palms. “No.”
“I’m sorry, Jane.”
This Noah was almost identical to the counterpart I had seen die. His light brown hair was longer and messier, his short beard was scraggly, his skin was a lot paler, and his cheeks were a little more gaunt, but the piercing blue eyes were the same. Those eyes looked pleadingly at Jane-Z.
Paul-Z broke the tension. He threw his arms around Noah and pounded his back. “I can’t believe it,” he said. “It’s a miracle.”
“Hey, Paul,” Noah said. “I’ve missed you guys. So much.”
Alex-Z took his husband’s arm and gently pulled him away. “How are you still alive, Noah?” he asked. “We saw you die.”
Alex raised his hand. “Can you back up a little, for the sake of the uninformed? I never met our world’s version of Mr. Bedroom Eyes. But all of you know this one?”
“And you’re married to him?” Jane asked. “Married married?”
“Noah and I were married about a year before the plague began,” Jane-Z said, making a point of not looking at her husband. “A few months after the outbreak, a group of us realized staying in the city was a death sentence. The government blockade was breaking up so we decided to try and get out. It was me and Noah, Alex and Paul…” She took a breath and cut herself off.
“And Darla,” Alex-Z continued. “Annette. A few others, all of whom are long gone.”
“Everyone else?” Noah asked. “All…?”
Jane-Z nodded.
“I’m sorry. Damn it. Here, sit. You must be hungry. There’s water and food in the cooler. I caught some squirrels, and there’s even some rabbit. It’s cold, but cooked.”
Everyone took a spot on the floor while Alex-Z handed out the food. Jane and Alex declined the rodent cold cuts, but the natives and I dug in. I’d eaten far worse, and I had no way of knowing when the chance for another meal would come.
“We got separated outside that bodega, you remember,” Noah said.
Alex-Z nodded. “You were overrun. They swarmed all over you. There was no way out.”
“We had to drag Jane away,” Paul-Z said. “She wanted to dive in after you.”
“You did the right thing,” Noah replied. “You would never have gotten to me. I thought I was finished but I was standing on top of the store’s cellar doors. I got one open and fell down the steps. Got a few scratch marks, and two of the dead fell down with me before the door dropped shut, but I managed to take care of them without getting bitten. But then I was stuck. The door up to the shop was locked, and the dead were standing on top of the doors I had come through. By the time I busted the lock and got up to the street, you were all long gone.”
“Why didn’t you come after us?” Alex-Z asked. “You knew where we were headed.”
“I tried, but I was injured. I couldn’t move fast enough to catch up to you. Before I could make it out of the city, another group found me.”
“Who?” I asked.
“A group of scientists, engineers, some military personnel. I stumbled into a pack of the dead and they saved my life. They questioned me, and decided my skills would be useful to them. They were good people, but they didn’t exactly give me a choice as to whether I wanted to join up with them or not.”
“Your skills?” Alex asked. “Sorry, what skills does the editor of Cake Magazine bring to the apocalypse, exactly?”
Noah frowned. “Is that what the other me did, in your world? Funny. My family owns a publishing company, and I got a lot of pressure to join the business, but no. I’m a mechanical engineer. I worked on large-scale transportation projects before the plague.” He laughed. “What my new friends were working on certainly qualified, although it wasn’t quite the Second Avenue subway line.”
“The portals,” I said.
“You did this to me?” Jane asked. “You made the flashing lights? The portals?”
“That’s not what it’s meant to do,” Noah explained. “Not exactly. It’s a teleportation machine. It’s supposed to latch onto someone, wherever they are, and teleport them somewhere else. No portal required.”
“It beams them?” Paul-Z asked. “Like Star Trek?”
Noah laughed. “Sure, Paul. Like Star Trek. The machine was a military project, but after the plague, the group working on it thought it might be a way to save people from the dead. Teleport them en masse out of danger. But the guy who invented it got eaten over a year ago, before he perfected it. We’ve been trying to get it functioning ever since, but we couldn’t get it to latch on to anything. Anything solid, anyway.” He sighed. “The machine can teleport light to show us images from anywhere in the world. We’ve been following what’s been going on out there, but couldn’t do anything to help. Every time we tried to latch onto someone and bring them to us, it would fail.”
“So you weren’t trying to go to another universe?” I asked.
He shook his head. “We didn’t even know there were other universes to go to. But one day, a few months back…I was missing Jane.” He looked down at the rug. “I mean, I always missed Jane.” He looked up at Jane-Z. “I tried to use the machine to find you, so many times. But I was casting about randomly. The odds were astronomical that I’d find you by chance. By this point the group trusted me not to run off, so I went to your apartment. The machine can lock on to genetic material, so I found some of your hair and fed it in. There was something…I don’t know. Like a power surge. When the image resolved itself, there you were.” He rubbed his eyes. “I couldn’t believe it. You looked healthy. Happy. I was so relieved to have found you, it took someone else to point out what was wrong. Or, what was right. You went out onto the street, and the world was…whole. We didn’t understand. We thought somehow we were seeing the past, but gradually we came to understand that we were looking into an entirely different world.”
“A few months back,” Jane said. “But the lights only started a few days ago.”
“We were only watching, at first.” At Jane’s sudden suspicious look, he put his hands up. “Nothing sketchy, I promise! We didn’t watch you very often after that first day. From that point, the machine would only show us your world, not ours. We looked around, got a sense of it. It’s so much cheerier than ours. Even apart from the lack of dead. You’re so lucky. You don’t even know.”
The group fell silent for a moment, and the only noise was the sound of the dead pounding on the large windows just across the hall. Alex jumped at a particularly loud knock, then hugged his knees to his chest.
“We kept working on the machine,” Noah continued. “No practical tests. We were too scared to lose the link to the other world. But in theory, our scientists were sure they could make it work.”
“And do what?” Alex-Z asked. “You said you wanted to teleport people out of danger. How can you do that if you could only see the other world, not ours?”
Noah shook his head. “The plan changed. They wanted to use the machine to escape. To go to that other world, and abandon this one to its fate.”
Everyone fell quiet again.
“Bastards,” Alex said.
Alex-Z shrugged. “It’s hard to blame them.”
“But you disagreed?” I asked Noah.
He snorted. “Vehemently. The machine is humanity’s only chance. We could save so many people. We could save everyone.” He scowled. “I kept my mouth shut. I was afraid they’d kill me, or kick me out. I was going to try to convince them, one person at a time. But they worked fast. A few days ago, they tried to lock onto Jane.” He pointed at the Jane I had first met. “You, I mean. They wanted to use you as an anchor point, teleport themselves to your vicinity. It didn’t work, but the machine kept trying.”
“So…” Jane squinted at him. “The portals…that’s…?”
“That’s a side effect of the machine trying and failing to get a lock on you.”
“Why did it keep happening?” I asked. “Why keep trying if it’s not working?”
“Ah.” Noah stood up. He moved to the door and looked out into the hall, then leaned against the wall. “I’m afraid that’s my fault. For the first few hours we let the machine run, so we could collect data. But then…we solved it. Well, I didn’t, I’m just an engineer. But they did. All the trial and error gave them the data they needed to flee to the other world, and leave this one to rot. I couldn’t let that happen.”
Jane-Z spoke for the first time since Noah began his story. “What did you do, Noah?”
He kept looking out into the hall. “I let the dead in.”
Alex gasped. Alex-Z shook his head. “Jesus, Noah,” he said. “You killed them? Like that? Brutal.”
Noah looked back into the room. “No! There was plenty of time for them to get clear. I just wanted to get them out of the building. Once everyone cleared out, the dead would wander around the room, like guard dogs. They’d keep everyone away from the machine until I could come up with a plan.”
“They couldn’t fight them off?” I asked.
“There were a large number of dead. An extremely large number. And our group is small. We lost most of us over the past two and a half years, including almost all the soldiers, and used up most of our ammunition. I didn’t think they’d be able to get control of the machine back any time soon.” He came back in and crouched down next to Jane. “And since the machine is still running, I suppose I was right.”
Jane pulled slightly away from him. “Are you sure it’s still running? I haven’t seen any lights since we came here.”
“True,” he agreed, standing back up. “The machine is still looking for you in the other world, most likely, which means we have no way of knowing from this point on if it shuts down. So we need to move quickly. I don’t know what became of my friends. My…former friends. I assume they’re holed up somewhere near the lab, plotting a way to take it back.”
“Then we need to take it first,” I said.
Noah grinned. “Fantastic! I was afraid I’d have to convince you.”
I swallowed my last bit of squirrel and stood up, brushing off my butt. “That first day, you saw me, didn’t you? You saw me save Jane.”
He nodded. “I saw how you fought, and I saw you were staying close to Jane. I thought you’d be my best chance of getting back to the machine, if I could just get you to go through one of the portals. After I left the lab I didn’t have access to the machine’s display anymore, but I needed to keep tracking you, which meant tracking Jane. So…”
Alex thrust his hand up into the air. “Me, me, me, I know! You set up the creepy cameras!”
“Anywhere we had seen Jane frequent, or anywhere my Jane used to go. Her apartment, her bakery, her gym…”
Alex snorted. “That was a waste of a camera.”
“I had to keep going around to check the memory cards,” Noah continued. “No internet to upload to, obviously. And no sound, but with motion detectors they picked up a lot whenever a large portal opened. I wanted to talk to you directly but I kept missing you. I saw a flier on your fridge, Jane, for the cake contest, and thought it would be a good time to try to make contact. I knew you’d be in one place for a long time. That’s why I set up camp here. I saw that you were still around…sorry, we’ve been talking all this time and I never got your name…?”
“Jed.”
He shook my hand. “Good to meet you, Jed. And I’m so glad you stuck by Jane. From what I’ve seen, I’m really going to need your help. I have no idea how to clear all those dead away from the machine.”
“What about that trick with the sirens?” Alex-Z asked. “Seemed to work pretty well.”
Noah looked doubtful. “I’m worried it just draws more to the area. The sirens got you out of Pier 94, but I wouldn’t want to try to get back in there now. But we can try it. I have one more.”
“What’s the layout of this place?” I asked. “Can you draw it for me? It’ll help us work out a plan.”
“I can sketch something out, but…are you from New York?”
“I am. Why?”
“Then you may already know it. Are you familiar with the Astor Place Kmart?”
I laughed, tilted my head, then laughed again. “You’re joking.”
“I’m not.”
“But it’s so big, so open. How could you keep it secure?”
He unzipped one of the duffel bags. It was filled with clothes and canned food, but he dug around and from the bottom he pulled out a notebook and a pencil. He got down on the floor and started sketching.
