Pandora's Gun (7 page)

The problem with hiding the duffel bag in Christy’s yard was that at night it seemed much more secure and hidden than it did with the sun up. From the alley behind Christy’s house, three other houses had a clear view of him and what he was doing, and, of course, the back windows of Christy’s house also oversaw the carport where he’d put the gun. So, after trying to act casual, he strolled to her back gate, slipped into the backyard and behind the plywood sheets that hid the barbecue. He felt terribly exposed, his nerves on end, and when he held the heavy bag dangling from his hand while trying to silently close the barbecue’s` lid, Christy’s “Hey, whatcha doing,” nearly scared him into a scream.

She stood on the sidewalk beside the carport, holding a garbage can. Dang, thought Peter, I forgot it was trash day.

*

By the time they reached the old softball field, which was no longer a shallow pond, but still muddy, Christy seemed to have accepted at least a part of Peter’s explanation of how a duffle bag ended up in her barbecue.

“This gun, or whatever, among other things, can actually set a tree on fire?”

“Tree, house, whatever. I only tried it on a tree.”

“And it might be able to do a bunch of other stuff, but you don’t know yet.”

“That’s why we’re meeting at the field. We figure if we’re away from people and buildings, there’s less chance of hurting anything.”

Dante sat in the dugout, scowling, as they walked toward him. Peter couldn’t imagine that Dante would be happy about involving a third party.

“What did you tell her?” Dante said as they sat on the dugout bench. His notebook was out, pen ready.

“Nice to see you too, Dante,” said Christy. She turned to Peter, “How much
have
you told me?”

“She knows all the functions we’ve discovered so far.” But not everything we’ve done with them, he thought.

“But you don’t know where the gun came from? Let me see it. You might have missed something.”

Dante said, “Don’t pull the trigger. It’s possible that we could cause an explosion. After last night, an explosion is going to attract unwanted attention.”

“Peter said you were going to see what else the gun can do today. Did you have a plan for that that
didn’t
involve pulling the trigger?”

Peter handed her the gun. She smiled as she turned it over in her hands. “Looks homemade.” She gripped the handle and pointed it toward the pitcher’s mound. “Did you notice that it’s built for a hand with six fingers?”

“What?” said both Peter and Dante. Peter was genuinely startled.

“Yeah, look.” She held the gun up so that they both could see. Her fingers dropped neatly into the shallow depressions at the front of the grip, but below her little finger, the handle didn’t end. There was one more indentation.

“It could be decorative,” said Dante.

“I doubt it. A tool is functional. This looks functional, practical. There’s no practical reason to make the handle too long. How did you not notice this before? Can I try it?”

“Sure,” said Dante glumly. “Why not? At this rate, everyone Peter knows is going to know about the gun, and we’ll have to take a number to have a turn.”

“I’m not just anyone,” she said. The screen popped into view. “Which icon?”

“Do that one,” said Peter. It was the symbol beside the tractor beam function. She touched it. Peter heard the click in the handle, then she pointed toward the pitcher’s mound, through the chain-link fence, and pulled the trigger a second time.

Peter held his breath. In the distance, he heard a helicopter, and closer, behind him, beyond the empty parking lot, a car door slammed, but nothing else happened. He half expected a plague of locust to materialize, or the mud to turn to lava. Instead, a September fly buzzed by Peter’s head before landing on the rusty fence.

Christy partly lowered the gun and turned toward Peter.

Don’t point the . . .” Peter started to say.

“. . . gun at me,” he finished. Christy and Dante leaned over him, concern on their faces.

“You dropped like a sack of wheat, buddy. Lucky you didn’t smack your head.”

“Are you okay?” said Christy. “I didn’t let go of the trigger. I thought I’d killed you.”

“What happened?” Peter shook his head. His ears were ringing a little bit, and when he tried to sit up, his head swam. He lay back down to let his balance settle. “Did I pass out?”

Dante sat on the bench above Peter’s head. “Passed out or went to sleep. You were snoring.”

“How long?”

Christy checked her phone. “Two minutes. I got pictures. Want to see?” Peter nodded without thinking of repercussions.

He looked peaceful in the picture, but stupid. Mud covered the dugout’s floor, and he’d been laying in it. He tried to sit up again, this time without problem. “I’d write ‘sleep ray’ for that icon. I wonder about its range.”

Dante said, “If we smuggled the gun into class, we could put the teacher to sleep. Anytime you were bored, you zonked the teacher, and then did whatever you wanted. The teacher wakes up, you zap her again.”

Peter pulled himself up onto the bench. The wooziness was almost gone. He took the gun from Christy, who was saying, “You know what this reminds me of? The flashy thingy from
Men in Black
, except it does a lot more. Do you think there’s a flashy thingy app? I always thought that would be a good capability.”

“My turn,” Peter said. The next icon looked like two stick-figure birds, one above the other beside a left-facing letter “C.” With an exaggerated motion, he aimed the gun away from Dante and Christy. “Remember,” he said, “alien guns don’t kill people; people kill people. Safety first.” The gun clicked. A message in the same script as the icons appeared. “I can’t read gibberish. Here goes.”

For a second, the gun pulled at his hands. He started to speak, then the air in front of the pitching mound swirled, not like a whirlwind, though. Peter stepped back, still pointing the gun. In a ten-foot high circle, a disk on edge, reality smeared as if what he could see in that circle wasn’t the baseball field, but a picture of the field in wet paint. The pitcher’s mound, the weeds, the trees at the field’s edge, ran together as if the painter dragged his fingers through the image around and around.

“What is that?” said Christy. She stepped closer to Dante. Put her hand on his back.

The motion accelerated until it moved too fast to see, turning the image into a solid gray disk.

Then the gray coalesced, resolved itself into a landscape, a surreal hole that started on the weedy infield and ended in another world, a darker one. Mesmerized, Peter walked toward it, aware that Christy and Dante followed.

Dante said, “It’s a doorway.”

Standing at the edge, Peter tried to process what he saw. A slope rose where the baseball field was flat, and on the slope, apartment buildings or offices leaned crazily against each other, like they’d been shaken in an earthquake. Telephone poles tilted left and right. For an instant, Peter thought dark clouds shadowed the world. Then he saw they weren’t clouds at all; they were hills that came from the sky. Hills that impossibly had buildings on them too. There wasn’t a sky. Just jumbled structures clinging to slopes and rock to the front, to the left and right and above. The vast, broken cityscape existed in what must have been a giant cave that went for miles and must be miles high, although caves are dark, while here, in the distance behind and above, the light streamed around the hanging hills.

Peter reeled, closed his eyes, triggered the gun. When he looked, he saw that he’d walked through the mud almost to the pitcher’s mound.

“Oh, man, that was awesome. Do it again,” said Dante. “The icon next to it is almost the same. Choose that one.”

Christy shook her head. “Was that another world? Could we have walked into that? What if we did and couldn’t return?”

Peter’s heart raced. The icon screen showed four more symbols with the two stick-figure birds and an accompanying shape, different from the reversed “C” of the first one. “We won’t go in,” he said.

The gun clicked. This time no crosshair appeared on the screen. Instead a solid picture of a hand in red, palm toward him, fingers extended (there were six) filled the screen. He showed it to Dante and Christy. “That looks like a ‘stop’ symbol to me, or at least a strong caution.”

Dante disagreed. “Who knows what that might mean to a six-fingered person. The aliens who designed this probably have a whole other set of symbols than we do. Do you remember the ‘white flag’ scene from the old
War of the Worlds
? The meteor cracks open, and the three guys are trying to decide what to do, so one says, ‘Wave a white flag. Everyone knows when you wave a white flag you want to be friends,’ so they wave the white flag and the Martians turn them into ashy silhouettes on the ground. A hand, open like that, might mean ‘Welcome’ or ‘Come on in’ or ‘We’ll wash your cat.’”

“We’ll wash your cat?” said Christy, her eyebrows raised.

Peter counted the fingers on the hand again. “You think this is an alien’s gun now, not a secret government project?”

“It’s a theory,” Dante said. “Why don’t Christy and I get behind something solid, and then you can press the trigger.”

That was the last rational event for the rest of the afternoon. Later, when he went to bed, Peter lay on his back, eyes wide open, thinking about life-altering moments. Before today, the only one he’d had that didn’t sound stupid, like discovering that Santa Claus was his dad putting presents under the tree at three in the morning, was when his mom died. Eight days before Peter’s tenth birthday, Dad helped Mom to the car so they could go to the hospital. He had wrapped the quilt around her that she’d used for the last couple of weeks to keep warm while lying on the couch. They had told Peter that she was “under the weather,” but it turned out to be much worse, and she never came home. At the funeral, everyone hugged him and said, “It will be all right,” and it did get better. At least the emptiness filled and he quit thinking about her all the time. The world might even seem “all right” again, but it was never the same. That’s what a life-altering moment meant.

Peter shrugged, pointed the gun to the middle of the field again, and activated it.

The air vibrated. The gun’s handle grew warm while, inexplicably, the gun felt heavier. Peter struggled to keep it from sagging in his hand. He grabbed it with his other to keep it steady. On the field, an orange light appeared and grew larger. Peter’s jaw dropped. Just on the other side of the first base line, only fifteen feet away, the world seemed to be peeling away. What he could see of the field unfolded, like a fruit rind pulling from the fruit, like a portal opening before them, but not a round one. It was a ragged hole, growing larger and larger. The size of a tennis ball, then a basketball, then a hoola hoop. On the other side, a landscape bathed in a sickly orange revealed itself. There were tree things: busted, leafless branches hanging broken from moldy trunks. And still, the rent continued to grow, taller than the dugout, burning at the edges. On the ground, on the other side of the boundary between the muddy softball field and the orange landscape, an animal turned its head and looked at him. He hadn’t noticed it at first because it too was a rotting orange color. Peter stared, fascinated. It was no larger than a small dog, but it had two strong-looking hind legs, like a frog’s, coiled beneath it, and a single leg in front, protruding from the middle of its chest. A single eye studied him from the center or its awful head, a bare, skull-like gleaming orange bone filled with teeth. Then Peter realized there were dozens of them, all focused in his direction.

A wind pressed on his back, pushing him to the chain-link between him and the field. The hole inhaled. Paper scraps tumbled past the dugout, into the orange world.

Christy yelled something, but her words were jumbled in the roar of the rising wind. She and Dante braced themselves against the chain-link, like they were doing vertical pushups. If it weren’t for the barrier, the hole would suck them in. The dugout’s aluminum roof rattled and moaned. Trees on all sides bent in the torrent.

Peter stared. Beyond the Cyclops dogs and broken trees, beyond what looked like the remnants of a wall and a tumbled battlement, rose a hill. It might have been a half mile away in the orange world. On top of the hill sat a creature, huge, bloated, tentacled. Its appearance hurt Peter to look at. It twisted the orange world around it, like its intents were too irresistible to be contained in real space.

He could feel it turning toward him. If it looked at him, he knew he would be lost. The parts of him that made him human would be consumed by its awfulness. As surely as Peter knew anything, he knew he had to turn the gun off to close the tear it had created in the world.

Ultimately, though, it wasn’t an act of will that made him release the trigger. The Cyclops dogs rose off their haunches, immune to the wind, a malevolent pack, and they moved as one toward his world, toward the boundary. Their movement distracted him. For a second, he tore his attention away from the demon on the hill, and that was enough for him to let the trigger go.

A Cyclops dog made it through before the wounded air healed itself. The tornado that had formed behind them gasped into nothing. With a snarl as grating as broken glass, the dog loped away, though the mud, across the field, until it hopped over the broken outfield fence and vanished in the underbrush.

Papers that had been blown against the chain-link fell to the ground. Peter’s heart pulsed hard against his chest. He’d always thought the expression “His blood ran cold” was a hyperbole, but he shivered hard for a moment. When he closed his eyes, he saw the terrible creature on the hill, broadcasting illness and hate, and now he was afraid that the creature knew of him, of him personally. To be a thought in the mind of such a beast was horrible to contemplate.

“I won’t be able to sleep,” said Christy, her voice tight, as if she struggled between speech and a scream.

Dante said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. That was wicked cool. What do you think we did? Did we damage the space-time continuum? Did we make a breach into another existence?”