Anomaly Flats (17 page)

Mallory hefted the sticks. “That’s actually a surprisingly decent plan,” she admitted. Colleen cleared her throat impatiently from the back porch. “Okay, okay,” Mallory said irritably, “I’m going.” She gave Lewis a minor death stare. “This spear better be worth it.”

“It will be,” he assured her. “I promise.”

Mallory waved him off and turned to face the portal field. She tucked three of the scrawny twigs in her back pocket and held the fourth in front of her with both hands. “Here goes nothing,” she muttered. Then she took a step toward the Spear of Rad.

“I’ll give you a freebie,” Colleen called out from the porch, clearly enjoying herself. “Don’t go that way.”

“Why not?” Mallory asked without turning around. She was sick of that woman already, throwing Mallory into this little spatial minefield for her own sick enjoyment without even offering her a single second sip from the gin bucket.

“The portal just ahead of you leads to the lair of a mutant raccoon that lives down by Plasma Creek.” Colleen took a slow pull from her pail. “But do whatever you want.”

Mallory exhaled irritably. She thought about going straight ahead anyway, just for the sake of spite. But as a girl, she’d had a life-scarring experience with a presumably non-mutant raccoon at Girl Scout camp, and she wasn’t terribly eager to intrude upon a mutated version. So she begrudgingly turned to her right and crept slowly forward.

After a few feet, the tip of the stick disappeared. It just vanished. Mallory pushed the stick forward a bit farther, and it disappeared almost all the way up to her knuckles.

Six inches of gnarled tree finger, swallowed up by an invisible portal.

“Hooooly shit,” she whispered. “This is weird as hell.”

She pulled back on the stick, and it reappeared, bit by bit. She gingerly touched the end between her forefinger and thumb; it felt cold.
Really
cold.

Okay,
she thought.
Let’s not go in there.

She turned a little back toward the left and, using the stick as a diving rod, managed to keep the Spear of Rad more or less straight ahead as she threaded the gap between the portal to Coldtown and the portal to Mutantville. She pressed on slowly through the grass and tiptoed alongside the pile of solid gold Army men. Each one was probably worth a car payment at least, and she considered putting a few in her pockets…but then she thought about Colleen’s penchant for violent weapon usage and decided that being sans-gold was somewhat preferable to being dead. So she skirted the pile of Army men rather than stealing them.

The tip of the stick disappeared again. Mallory stopped abruptly. She prodded the stick deeper into the portal, and something caught her eye off to the left. She glanced over and saw the last six inches of her stick hovering four and a half feet above the ground, about twenty yards away. She pulled her end back toward her chest; the hovering stick drew back and shrank in size. She pushed her end back into the portal; the hovering stick grew longer.

“This is incredible,” she murmured.

She glanced back over her shoulder and looked to see if Lewis was as astounded as she was. The expression on his face was something much more like alarmed nervousness. He paced the ground in front of the back porch furiously, his arms crossed tightly at the chest, his mouth fidgeting. Colleen loomed over him from the porch, plunking a few fresh ice cubes into her gin bucket and grinning down at the entertainment that was Mallory’s confusion and endangerment.

Mallory turned back to her stick. Then she pushed her left hand into the portal.

She felt a tight, fizzling crackle along her skin as her fingers disappeared…and then reappeared in mid-air off to her left. So she pushed her whole hand into the portal, up to the wrist. Her arm appeared to end in a clean stump. Mallory waved at herself from across the yard.

Farm Portals was instantly her new favorite game.

“Lewis, look at this!” she shouted gleefully. She pushed her whole arm into the portal up to the shoulder and gave him a thumbs up from the other side of the yard.

“Mallory…” he warned, sounding tired.

“What?” She reached her second arm into the portal and gave an awkward, exaggerated shrug that was all hands and elbows.

“Can you please just—”

“Lewis!” she cried, interrupting him. “My arms are closer to the spear than the rest of me!” A devilish grin crossed her face.

Lewis held up both hands in protest and shook his head violently. “No, no, no,” he said. “Absolutely not!”

“Should I do it?” she asked playfully.

“Mallory…”

“I’m going to do it!”

“Mallory!”

“Okay, okay…geez,” she said, pulling her arms back with a pout. “I won’t go through the portal.” She took a step backward and considered the empty space before her. Then she lowered her head, gave the scientist a grin, and leapt directly through the portal.

She was through in an instant. But it was an instant she’d never forget. In the space of a nanosecond, her entire body seemed to squeeze itself into a hard lump, like coal squeezed into a diamond, and then expand again into a full Mallory shape. Every cell felt as if it had been run through a laundry wringer and then reinvigorated with a straight injection of coffee concentrate.

“I need a portal farm,” she decided aloud. “Do these things grow in Canada?”

“Mallory…”

“For that matter, do any of these
go
to Canada?”

“Mallory! The spear?” Lewis said, spoiling everything like he always did.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m working on it.” She shook her head irritably and walked toward the birdbath, moving more quickly now that she knew how fun it could be to traipse through an invisible portal. She still held the stick out ahead of her, but she bounced along with a bit more carefree abandon. After just a few steps, the tip of the stick disappeared again, and Mallory looked excitedly around the yard, trying to find where it had surfaced. But the branch was nowhere in sight. “Where do you think
that
one went?” she asked, waving her hand through the air just this side of the portal. “Should I go in and see?”

“Mallory, please!” Lewis begged. He had begun nibbling at his cuticles.

Even from her considerable distance, Mallory could see the little droplets of sweat beading down from his hairline.

Mallory laughed and rolled her eyes. “Oh, Lewis, it’s—” But before she could finish her sentence, something on the other side of the portal pulled hard on the stick and yanked it out of her hands. She cried out and fell to the ground, scrambling back from the portal until she felt the now-familiar tingle in her fingertips. She looked back and saw that her hand had disappeared into another portal behind her. She yelped and yanked her hands back, then leapt to her feet and stepped frantically in a tight little circle. She suddenly felt horribly claustrophobic in the middle of this open yard. “What the
fuck
was that?” she yelled up at the cabin.

Colleen grinned. “Probably don’t want to know.” She sat down on a long, low bench that ran along the cabin wall and began cleaning a series of pistols that she’d brought out onto the patio. “But here’s a hint: it has a shit-ton of teeth.”

Mallory glanced anxiously in the general direction of the invisible portal, doing her best to keep her distance from an intangible object she could not see. “It can’t…
come through
. Can it?”

Colleen pulled an oily rag through the empty barrel of a Glock. “Happens all the time,” she said. She nodded at the ground at Mallory’s feet.

Mallory looked down and recoiled in horror when she saw the mess of oversized hoof prints stamped into the hard dirt beneath her. “I don’t suppose this is also a horse farm,” she said nervously.

Colleen blew across the top of the gun’s barrel. “Nope.”

“Lewis!” Mallory cried, focusing all her attention at the general space where the portal stood and tensing every muscle in her body. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

Lewis ran his hands through his hair, leaving it sticking up in every direction. “I’m not sure the way back is any safer than the way forward,” he said.

“Of course not,” Mallory grumbled. The game of Farm Portals was suddenly not so fun anymore. “I’d better get to stab
something
with this fucking spear.” She pulled a second stick out of her back pocket and held it out like a magic wand. She skirted around the general area that contained the stick-eating hoof-monster portal and resumed her snail-slow, creeping pace toward the Spear of Rad. After eight feet of walking, the tip of the new stick disappeared, and Mallory instantly yanked it back. It had only been on the other side of the portal for two seconds at the most, but even so, that edge of the stick was glowing orange and dripped like lava onto the grass.

She was almost positive that sticks were supposed to burn and not melt.

Mallory screamed and dropped the stick. It smoldered in the grass for a few seconds before cooling without starting a raging backwoods forest fire. “
Will you just tell me where to go?
” she yelled over her shoulder at the gun-happy hermit on the porch.

Colleen only shook her head. “My spear, my rules. Take it or leave it.”

Mallory growled—actually
growled
—as she whipped the third stick from her back pocket. She held it straight out in front of her and moved more slowly than ever, winding her way through the portal field and inching toward the birdbath in a frustratingly roundabout way. Each time the tip of the stick disappeared, she yanked it back and leapt away in the opposite direction. This method proved reasonably reliable until she found herself leaping backward through a portal that stretched up directly behind her. For a split second, the ground didn’t appear beneath her like it should have, and she flailed her feet. She heard Lewis start to call out, but by the time his voice had a chance to take shape, she’d already passed through the portal and had slammed down onto her back in this new and terrible place.

The impact crushed her sternum against her lungs; she wheezed as the air crumpled out of her chest. It was dark in this new place, almost pitch black but for the torches that lined the earthen walls and cast their unreliable, flickering glow about the chamber. She grunted as she struggled up, turned, and sat. The fall had disoriented her; she had no idea which way she’d tumbled through, or where the portal was. She heaved herself up to her hands and knees and tried to ignore the stitch in her chest as she patted forward, searching for the invisible doorway back to Colleen’s yard. The dirt floor was cold and moist beneath her hands, and she grimaced as she felt the wetness soak into the knees of her jeans. She was grumbling something or other about the vengeance she vowed to take on the gun-crazy alcoholic on the other side of the portal when she heard a slow rattle of chains from the darkness behind her.

She spun around to face the noise, but the torchlight didn’t reach into the vast gulf between her and the far end of the chamber; there was nothing but complete, suffocating darkness and the increasingly loud jangle of chains that groaned and scuffed as they were dragged across the floor. She scooted as quickly as she could in the opposite direction, praying that she’d tumble through the portal…but instead, she bumped up against a wall, and the thing dragging the chains got closer, and closer.

She willed her legs to work, but she was gelatin from the waist down. She screamed for help, from Lewis, from Colleen—from
anybody
…but the sound of her own shrieks only sank into the dirt walls of the chamber. She pulled her knees up to her chest, into the orange light of the flames where the darkness couldn’t touch them, though she didn’t know what this could possibly accomplish. The chains dragged even closer, and a shadow began to emerge from the unwavering blackness. The shadow slunk forward and became a man, a hulking monster clad all in black.

He wore an executioner’s hood over his head.

Mallory screamed and scrambled away against the wall, clawing her way between pools of torchlight. The man in the hood followed, lumbering across the stone floor in his heavy boots and dragging something with both hands. He stepped into the light, and Mallory’s scream caught in her throat…the thing he dragged was a massive axe, its sharp, gleaming head the size of an end table, its handle nothing less than a small tree. It must have been excruciatingly heavy, because as the executioner dragged it with his two ham-hock hands, it dug a deep trench in the ground below.

His wrists were bound by shackles; each cuff dragged several feet of heavy, grease-black chain links that had been hewn from whatever fixture had once held them, and he dragged them freely through the dungeon. He heaved the axe up with a loud grunt and hoisted it above his head, preparing to bring it slicing down on his prey.

Suddenly, Mallory found her feet.

She scrambled up and dove to the right just as the executioner brought the axe crashing down at the spot. The dull thud of metal on mud shook through her bones as she tumbled forward even further, into the darkness.

The monster followed. He crept forward, and the shadows swallowed them both. Mallory kicked herself to her feet and slipped backward on the wet earth. She tried to control her breathing, because surely the man in the hood could hear her. She clamped her hands over her mouth and stopped moving. She willed the darkness to cloak her and keep her safe. Suddenly, the air was still; the chains did not rattle, and the man’s clunky footsteps stopped. Mallory prayed that he would turn and lumber back into whatever cave he’d slunk out of. Just as she was about to make a beeline for where she thought the portal was, she felt a strong gust of wind blow past her chest. It took a few seconds for her brain to recognize what had happened.

The man had swung his axe at her throat and had only missed by inches.

Her scream found its voice once more, and she plunged deeper into the darkness. The beast behind her clomped after her, and she heard the axe head drag through the dirt again. Mallory threw her arms out and ran forward, screaming and crying and cursing at the darkness. She heard the gentle whoosh of the axe begin its wide arc, and she dove forward as the blade buried itself into her spine.

Except there was no pain. Mallory had never been sliced in half from the spine outward before, so she wasn’t exactly an expert, but she had assumed that a somewhat severe level of pain would have accompanied that particular experience. She opened her eyes, and her eyelashes brushed against blades of grass.

She was back in Colleen’s yard.

She gasped for breath and jolted to her knees. She clawed at the ground and scrabbled forward until her fingers disappeared into another portal. She pulled them back out, flipped onto her back, searching wild-eyed for the creature…but he hadn’t followed her through the portal. “
Lewis! Get me out of here!
” she screeched.

“Mallory!” Lewis cried, clenching and unclenching his fists, pacing helplessly on the edge of the field. “Where did you go?”

“Get me the fuck
out
of here!” she repeated. Up on the porch behind him, Colleen laughed uproariously.

“I don’t know the safe path! Tell me what you saw!”

“A huge fucking monster with a huge fucking axe!” she screamed. “Black hood, dark tunnel, and a
huge fucking axe
!”

“Oh!” Lewis exhaled in relief. His shoulders relaxed, and he actually laughed. “Thank goodness!”

“
Thank
goodness
?” Mallory screamed, not taking her eyes from the general area of the portal into hell. “
Thank goodness
that I fell face-first into a medieval torture chamber?!”

Lewis was still laughing. “No, no,” he said, waving his hands through the air. “That wasn’t a medieval torture chamber. It was the Check Into Cash, over on Dollop Street.”

Mallory froze. She twisted her neck slowly until she was staring directly at the scientist. “The Check Into Cash?”

“Yes! The man in the black hood…that was just Merle. He runs the place. I’ll grant you, he
does
dress strangely. The hood is…I don’t know, some weird personal thing. But he wasn’t trying to kill you; he was trying to sign you up for an unreasonably high-interest loan.”

“By chopping me to pieces with an axe?!” Mallory screamed.

“A blood signature is part of the contract. It’s pretty standard for those kinds of places, I think.”

“How do you even
have
a Check Into Cash? This town has never seen a computer!”

Lewis shrugged. “I never said it was a thriving enterprise.”

“I told you she’d be fine,” Colleen said, snapping her revolver back together and admiring its luster.

“I’ll show you fine,” Mallory grumbled. She’d never been more furious or terrified in her life. She searched the ground and laid her eyes on a baseball-sized rock. She picked it up and hurled it toward the woman on the porch as hard as she could. It sailed through the air, heading straight for its target…but then it disappeared, swallowed up by a portal. Colleen leered down on the scene from her perch. Mallory was about to throw a world-champion barrage of curse words her way when the very same stone came hurtling out of a portal behind her and smacked right into her own shoulder blade. “Ow!”