Bridgetown, Issue #1: Arrival (6 page)

Wayne said nothing.

Jesse felt a little bad for always bringing
up the fact Wayne had never learned to swim. But not that bad.

He gave a big, dramatic sigh. "I'm supposed
to be the kid brother you beat up on, you know. Not the other way
around."

Some moments later, they were on the raft,
floating across the body of still, soupy water to the tiny
outcropping in the middle of the swamp.

When their dubious raft reached the little
island, they disembarked. Jesse, excited, began to explore the
stomping grounds.

Broken bottles of booze. Empty cigarette
boxes. "Kilroy was here" graffiti on one of the rocks.

Yes'sir, this place had all the marks of a
great, good-for-nothing hangout.

"Look at all this neat stuff!" Jesse said
with a hushed, reverent excitement. "I bet it's been here for a
real long time."

Wayne rolled his eyes this time. "Paper
wouldn't last that long in these humid conditions. It would
deteriorate too quickly. And this vandalism is fairly recent,
judging by the tools used."

"Gah," Jesse said. "You're such a
know-it-all. Have to take the fun out of everything."

"You know, Jesse," Wayne began. "If this
stuff does belong to someone, what happens if they come back?
They're probably not going to be too happy—"

But Jesse was already in the raft and pushing
off into the swamp waters, cupping the scummy water to wash his
hands of silt.

Wayne saw him, and started to exclaim. "Hey!
Hey! Don't leave me here! What are you doing?"

Jesse started to laugh. This was too
rich.

As the raft pulled away from the island, he
spotted, in chicken-scratched thick black paint, a rockside scrawl.
It read:

"Crupp's Rock."

He didn't yet know that name, but in time
he'd come to know it well. Crupp was the biggest, most vile,
spiteful paragon of racist Confederate hillbilly trash the Cole
brothers would have the misfortune of going to school with. The
only people Crupp hated more than black people or eggheads were
"Yankees," which apparently Californians like Jesse and Wayne
qualified as. Likewise, it seemed like Crupp had been going to high
school since the Civil War, and wasn't about to graduate any time
soon.

Jesse heard a deranged, wolfish howl emanate
from the waters behind his raft. He turned and saw the troglodyte
he'd later come to know as Crupp, along with his lackeys, Verne and
Mud. The home-fried trio was floating towards the little island
with Wayne on it, aboard a skiff of their own.

Wayne ran to the shore, alternately cursing
Jesse and pleading with him to circle back around and pick him
up.

Crupp held in his hand a
Louisville slugger, which he ominously patted in his meaty paws
like a medieval club. Crupp pointed it at Wayne. "Just
what-in-the-hell-dya-think yeeeeeeer doin' on
my
island?" he shouted across the
way.

Wayne shrieked and jumped into the waters,
paddling like mad just to stay above the surface.

Jesse was still watching the commotion with
amused horror at this point. It served his know-it-all brother to
get knocked down a peg or two every now and then.

Crupp pulled Wayne out of the water like a
wet cat, by the scruff of his shirt. Then he dragged him back up
onto the little island.

Then the three brutes commenced roughing him
up.

A sucker punch to the gut.

A kick to the shins.

Wayne cried out for Jesse to help him. It was
a pathetic, mewling sound.

The scene no longer amused Jesse.

Crupp smacked Wayne and threw him against the
ground. Then he muttered something in Wayne's ear—Jesse, paddling
furiously to close the gap, couldn't make out any of it.

The bully handed his bat to Mud, the shortest
of the three. The stocky lackey twirled it about in a menacing
wind-up.

Jesse paddled faster towards the atoll.
"Hey!"

All three brutes turned their attention to
him.

As the raft listed onto the sandy bank, Jesse
leapt from it and hit the ground running, oar in hand, his forward
momentum unbroken. He was smaller, skinnier than either of the
three older boys, but he would not be intimidated.

He swung his wooden oar just as Mud had swung
the bat a moment earlier.

Mud was the first to go down. He dropped the
bat.

Jesse pivoted and jabbed his oar, using it as
a splintery, jagged spear. Verne high-tailed it out of the scene
and into the water, limbs flailing akimbo.

Crupp picked up the Louisville slugger, while
Mud, dazed, followed Verne to the far side of the landing.

Crupp took a swing at Jesse, but the younger
boy whirred around evasively, spinning his rotten oar. It connected
with the bully's thick skull with enough force that its compromised
form gave way, and it snapped in two. Wood chips burst in all
direction. Crupp lifted up his bat to deliver a counter-blow.

But Jesse kneed him in the groin, yanked the
bat out of his hands, and began a savage beat-down of his own,
hitting Crupp against the backside.

Mud and Verne could only watch, mouths agape,
unsure of what to do. And certainly too embarrassed to look at each
other.

To all present, it was as if the sound of
Crupp's great spanking was loud enough to ripple throughout all of
Mississippi.

The would-be assailant stumbled into the
water, crying for help, and paddled away.

Jesse helped his thoroughly soaked and
bloodied brother up onto his feet. Wayne was winded, but
relieved.

They climbed into their little borrowed raft
and paddled back to safety, using the baseball bat and their hands
in lieu of an oar.

The ride back to shore was silent. Wayne
watched the three bullies on the island as they sat in silent
defeat, looking back at Jesse and Wayne as they disappeared into
the thick of swamp trees.

Wayne waited until the bullies were no longer
visible to speak.

"Thanks," was all he could manage.

It was a half-hearted show of grace, for
every time that Jesse had to rescue him—and there had been plenty
already—it only cemented Wayne's status as the Littlest Big Brother
in the World.

And so the resentment grew. And deepened. And
metastasized, until Jesse could virtually do nothing right in the
eyes of his brother. And, in turn, Wayne could do nothing right in
Jesse's eyes.

At least that was his theory, right now, as
he chased after his own Jeep that Wayne had so thoughtlessly stolen
from him, along with Susanna.

More thunder, and
lightning.
Real wrath-of-God weather we're
having tonight
.

Jesse was driving the Volkswagen as hard as
its little, wheezing, blue-exhaust-spewing engine would let him. It
sounded like the bolts holding the damn thing together were
unscrewing themselves from their bearings. He bounced and jolted
around in the cabin that smelled of stale pot.

He was no longer quite sure why he was
pursuing them, or what he'd say to Susanna once he caught up to
them.

Maybe he should give up the chase. Maybe this
was a stupid idea.

No, it definitely was a stupid idea.

The taillights on the Jeep lit up in red.
They were stopping, after all.

He hit his own brakes in turn, and the
Volkswagen bus began to lurch downwards, skidding against the dirt
floor.

He shut off the bus and stepped out.

He saw Susanna, her face illuminated by the
lightning. He was surprised, briefly, to find that she had been the
one driving.

Then he saw the look on their faces, both of
them. They looked like Godzilla was behind him.

So he turned around.

And he saw Devil's Peak, glowing red.

He squinted, trying to make sense of what he
was looking at.

Then the mountain went white in a flash,

And a bolt of crackling electricity shot
through the earth. It made a beeline for their position.

Silence, for a moment.

Then the scene resumes.

Jesse looked back at Susanna and Wayne. There
was an immense, towering fountain of light behind them, spewing
liquid energy into the sky. The ground beneath Susanna and Wayne
appeared molten, though it did not seem to burn. They were
struggling to get out, but he could see they were being pulled in
closer to the light.

Jesse, at the edge of the pool, crouched and
dipped his hands into the shimmering gold soup that had been dry
desert just moments before.

He found its temperature to be as warmly
pleasant and sunshine. Touching it comforted him. For a moment he
thought he heard his mother's distant voice.

"Hey! It's safe! Swim across! Try to swim
across!"

But it was plainly clear they couldn't hear
him now.

Susanna tried to swim, but
to no avail. Wayne was clinging to the Jeep, which was tipping into
the vortex and would soon disappear into it entirely. Wayne
never
had
learned
to swim.

"Susanna!" Jesse cried out.

But he didn't jump in after her. He knew it
would be futile.

He caught a last flicker of her, as she
stopped struggling and flipped over onto her back. The ball of
light was glowing brighter, and he couldn't make out either of them
any longer.

Susanna, Wayne, and the Jeep—all were gone,
pulled into the light.

Jesse's head was spinning.

He fell to his
knees.
What is this? What's
happening?

The ground around him began to liquify, too,
as the the phenomenon perimeter grew. He did not move from it. As
his body seeped into the gold light, he again felt a calm. The
sunshine-warmth was a welcome alternative to the frigid night
air.

He remembered things he'd never seen.

He saw the ruins of Old Bridgetown, decaying
in reverse. Re-assembling themselves into centers of society. A
cantina, a livery, a homestead.

He saw the city in the shadow of Devil's
Peak. Not as it was, but as it once had been.

And he knew his brother and Susanna to be in
this place.

Safe.

Waiting for his return.

It was a vision.

This was the greatest drug Jesse had ever
encountered.

It was no street-grade hallucinogen.

It was a rip in the very fabric of
reality.

Sobriety and the midnight chill returned to
Jesse, hitting him like a wall.

He stood, knee-deep in the dripping molten
gold. The ground was re-solidifying, the sea of energy dissipating
and the light shrinking to a finite point. His window was
closing.

He made a decision.

Jesse ran toward the rapidly cooling core of
light. The vortex knocked him off his feet and sucked him under
what little remained of the energy pool.

With mere moments to spare, it consumed him,
and he was happy to allow it.

All went light, and white-hot;

Then all went black, and cold.

Jesse braced for that falling,
pit-of-the-stomach feeling that, as a child, had always signaled
the beginning of the end of a nightmare. But instead of waking, he
felt an altogether more alien sensation.

His consciousness rose up through the
heavens, up beyond the atmospheric limits of reality and into
another place entirely.

He was unable to see
anything. He searched for any sense of the familiar, any
extra-sensory connection to Susanna. He had followed
her
down this rabbit
hole, and he was going to find her.

Floating in this ether of Nothingness, he
searched for the warmth in the chill that he knew to be Susanna. He
raised his hands—if they still existed, he wasn't entirely
sure—towards the warmth. But there was a barrier before him, a
Plexiglas hallucination.

Then
came the fall.

It was as if someone had pulled a trap door
lever and sent him down a garbage chute into Hell.

He could feel himself accelerating. He was
dropping straight through the outer membrane that connected this
Darkness to Reality.

Down, down he went. Down past the outer
fringe clusters of galaxies on the edge of the universe, down
further still.

His mind's eye zoomed into the candle-glow
center of the Milky Way, and further still towards a mote of dust
suspended in a sunbeam.

This tiny speck grew ever-more enormous until
it occupied his entire field of vision, and he knew it to be a
familiar blue marble he called Earth.

A moment. Now, atmosphere was compressing at
his fore, heating up and sending fiery streaks of burn-off shooting
around his body.

His ears were pummeled with the sound of air
whooping about his form, and only then did he realize outer space
had been silent.

He could no longer keep his eyes open. The
violent kinetic display going on around him was too intense.

That, and he also didn't particularly care to
see the desert slam into his face. That was definitely going to
happen. No stopping it now.

Impact.

Once again, he was embraced by darkness.

Then, quiet. And sleep.

When he next opened his eyes, all was
still.

First, he was aware of the dirt. He could
taste it on his lips.

Then a sky, cloudless and pale blue as it had
been for billions of days already.

Jesse sat up. He patted his body, making sure
it was all still there. Apart from being horrendously dizzy, he was
alert, and unharmed. There wasn't even any obvious sign that he'd
just fallen from outside of all Existence and smashed face-first
into the Earth. No impact crater, nothing.

He looked around him. Where was he?

There was Devil's Peak, right behind him.
Just as it had been the night before.