Infernal

Color.

Not color, but color. A chiaroscuro of color so rich and vibrant Richard could feel it. Taste it. It traveled around him, through him, wrapped him in a warm embrace. He’d never seen anything like it, though he knew this sensation was far beyond anything as simple as sight. His senses were inadequate to convey the raw power of what he was experiencing. This sensation, this immersion in energy, was being communicated by senses he was unaware he possessed. It felt like bliss. It felt like touching the divine.

And then it was gone.

Replaced by a wave of pain through his head that staggered him. He dropped to one knee on cold, wet earth.

“Are you alright?” Sophia asked, grasping his arm to support him.

“Dear God,” Richard said, shaking his head. The pain cleared as quickly as it had come upon him and he regained his feet. “What was that?”

“I told you the pain would diminish with each subsequent trip through the Rips,” Sophia said.

“Not that,” Richard said. “There was something else. Something in the Rip. As we traveled through it.”

“You experienced the lights?” Sophia looked startled. “On only your second trip through? Impressive.”

“It was much more than light,” Richard said. “It was…” He had no words for what he had experienced. Only a sense of longing and loss. He wanted to return. Go back through the Rip and be wrapped in that ecstasy for eternity. “Well, you know.”

“No,” Sophia said, her voice tinged with something like bitterness. “I don’t. Us non-Primes don’t experience the lights. We can only imagine them based on what’s been reported by those of you who do. Rip travel is instantaneous for us. We have no sense of anything between worlds.”

“I’m sorry,” Richard said, meaning it. “It was…amazing.”

He gathered the duffel, dropped when he emerged through the Rip, as Sophia checked their location on the RLP.

“I think we’re in the clear for now,” she said, dismissing whatever irritation she had felt towards his experience of something she would never know. “The Rip closed behind us and there’s no sign of bogeys.”

“There was no sign of them back in Missouri either,” Richard reminded her as he looked around to get his own fix on their location, “but someone shot that deputy and I doubt it was—Oh my God!”

His gaze had been drawn by what he had at first taken for stars in the night sky. What he saw instead was a brilliant band of glittering diamonds arcing bridge-like across the heavens. A bluish mist filled the space between the gems casting an unearthly glow against the landscape.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” Sophia said.

“What is it?” Richard said with awe.

“It’s an accretion disc. We’re on E-372, the three-hundred and seventy-second Earth catalogued by BanaTech.”

Sophia started walking in an easterly direction. Richard tore his eyes from the beauty in the sky and followed. Everywhere he looked he saw barren landscape and devastation. The air was still. Stale. It was harder to breathe here; as if they were ascending a mountain where the atmosphere was thinner than it was at sea level. Nothing moved. No insects flitted about them. No small, unseen animals scurried at their passing. No reptiles slithered amongst the rocks or the damp reddish soil.

“On December 21, 2012,” Sophia said, her words coming on labored breath. “Several decades ago on this Earth’s timeline, a rogue meteor struck the moon shattering it like a Faberge egg dropped by a clumsy child. The resulting meteor storm wiped out most of the cities and almost all of the human population. Widespread wildfires, residual radiation, and the loss of tidal pull on the planet—critical in maintaining climatic balance—took the rest. What you see there,” she said, gesturing towards the gem laden sky, “are lunar remnants that were either too small or too far away from the Earth’s magnetic field to succumb to gravity. Instead of falling to Earth they formed a planetary ring.”

“Radiation from the moon?” Richard asked, “I thought the moon was an Earth remnant, formed by a massive meteor impact during Earth’s formation.”

“So far as we know it is,” Sophia said, “The radiation didn’t come from the moon fragments, but rather the meteor that struck it. The press at the time dubbed it, aptly, the Hammer. It was expected to strike the moon but have little effect otherwise. Unfortunately, it was made up of materials far denser than expected and had absorbed high levels of radiation somewhere along its journey through space. This radiation caused cancer and widespread mutations in wildlife and the few who survived what was termed Hammerfall. Forty years ago this would have been an interesting place to visit. New species and mutations of old ones were popping up all the time. There are reports from teams that investigated this world for years after the event telling of housecats the size of lions with six or more legs and a dozen eyes. Of sea creatures that would dwarf the Blue Whale, the largest animal ever known to live on this planet.

“Now,” she said with a sweep of her arm, “it’s just a dead world. There may be some microbes still present in the soil, some phytoplankton still surviving somewhere in the thick muck that used to be lakes and oceans, but nothing more complex can survive here for long.”

“What about us?”

“We should be okay at the lower elevations,” Sophia said. “For a day or so anyway. There’s sufficient oxygen here to prevent asphyxiation by hypoxia—a build-up of carbon dioxide in the blood. But if we stay here too long we’re susceptible to pulmonary or cerebral edema; fluid in the lungs or brain, similar to what someone experiencing acute altitude sickness suffers.”

“And the radiation?” Richard prompted.

“The radiation from the Hammer had an extremely short half-life in a nitrogen/oxygen rich environment. Say twenty years or so. As long as we don’t go digging around in any impact craters and unearth an intact fragment, our exposure should be minimal.”

“Where are we going?” Richard said.

Sophia stopped, placing her hands on her thighs and breathing deep of the thin, stale air.

“There’s an old research station about a day’s walk from here. BanaTech hasn’t sent any teams here for years but if we’re in luck there may still be some supplies lying around. BanaTech outfits its teams well in case of unforeseen emergencies. When they pull out, they tend to leave whatever they don’t need behind.”

Retrieving an elastic band from one of the voluminous pockets of her BDU vest, she pulled her long, dark hair back and banded it into a ponytail before continuing on in the direction they had been traveling.

“We’ll be needing water soon,” she said. “We’re losing water vapor from our lungs at a higher rate than normal. If we don’t drink regularly dehydration will set in.”

“I think I’m already about halfway there,” Richard said. “The ground is damp; there must be water under here somewhere. Maybe we could dig…?”

“We’d risk radiation poisoning or worse,” Sophia said. “The water on this planet was contaminated by the Hammer. Then the fires burned everything. And there are all the manmade pollutants to think of. Chemicals released into the atmosphere that came down as acid rain; toxic and radioactive waste that flowed freely with no one to clean up when the containment vessels failed. I’m not that thirsty yet.”

They continued on. Richard eyed the landscape, his brain telling him that something must still be alive on this rock. He couldn’t comprehend an Earth in any part of the Multi-verse without life. His eyes told a different story, however. As unbelievable as it seemed, this Earth was a barren rock. He may as well have been on Mars.

“Where are we, anyway?” he asked. “Geographically. Relative to my Earth.”

“The RLP indicated a location corresponding to Central America,” Sophia said. “This would be a lush jungle on your world.”

“Jesus,” Richard muttered.

After a time the sun rose. The gems in the sky dimmed, but didn’t lose their uncanny glow. Sunlight filtered through the accretion disc, changing the sky to a sickly green that made Richard think of Kansas skies just before a tornado.

They plodded along under the disconcerting sky. Speaking required too much effort, so they kept it to a minimum. Richard noted that the air became somewhat warmer but there was little in the way of wind. The stillness, save the scritch and scratch of their footsteps upon the earth, was maddening.

Sophia periodically checked their position on the RLP.

The color of the soil deepened to brown, then to black. Whatever had caused the moisture in the soil throughout most of the day—an old riverbed, maybe, Richard thought—was now gone. The earth here was dry. Blistered and cracked. Richard wondered if this was what St. Patrick had experienced on his journey across the blighted and burned Ireland.

He been staring at a formation on the horizon for several miles before he realized that unlike the terrain they’d been passing through, with distant outcroppings of rocks and natural pediments, this shape was far too regular. Boxy at the bottom and narrowing at the top. This…structure—for that’s what it had to be—was manmade.

“What is that?” he said when he’d worked enough saliva into his dry throat to speak.

“Oxwitik,” Sophia said, checking the RLP. “On your Earth it’s known as Copán. That’s where the research station is. If there’s anything left of it.”

“Why there?” Richard asked. The knowledge that their destination was in sight re-invigorated his tired and aching lungs. The hope that there was untainted water there made him salivate.

“A decade after Hammerfall,” Sophia said, her voice clearer as she, too, felt somewhat refreshed after miles of trudging along, head down, seeing little more than her mud caked Oakley S.I. assault boots leaving tracks in the soil, “BanaTech started sending teams here. They knew this planet was doomed, but were interested in the mechanism of it. The major cities were already gone, smashed or burned. Some of the smaller ones and their outlying areas were still intact, though, and there were pockets of survivors living in these. Some banded together. Despite sickness and mutation they made a go of it. Eventually though, they’d meet another pocket of survivors—another tribe, if you will—and there would be conflict. War. What the Hammer started, man finished.”

“And BanaTech just sat back and watched?” Richard said. “They did nothing to help any of those people?”

“Revealing themselves would have put the entire program at risk,” Sophia said. “Besides, benevolence isn’t exactly one of BanaTech’s priorities.”

“And what is?”

“The complete and total domination of the Multi-verse.”

Richard laughed. His amusement trailed away when he saw that Sophia had stopped and was staring at him with a stone-cold expression on her face.

“It’s no joke, Richard,” she said. “These people are to the Multi-verse what Adolph Hitler was to your world in the nineteen-thirties. Only worse. They have thrived for over two-hundred years, raping and pillaging worlds for resources, building an empire that spans almost a thousand worlds while destroying anyone and anything that stands in their way. Do you think the lives of a few thousand people on a dying planet mean anything to them at all?”

Richard swallowed, the saliva in his mouth turning the consistency of mud. The enormity of what she was suggesting, the brutal indifference it implied, was overwhelming.

“I suppose not,” he said.

Sophia began walking towards the edifice in the distance again. Richard readjusted the duffel’s weight on his shoulder and followed.

“This location was remote enough,” Sophia said, “that BanaTech could remain hidden while still performing their research. They used satellites and drones for remote surveillance and would have had vehicles at their disposal for work that required them to be on-site.”

“How would they have gotten all that equipment here?” Richard asked. “They certainly didn’t scrounge it up once they got here.”

“No,” Sophia said. “There would’ve been no need for that. The Rips are dimensionless. For reasons unknown the event horizon normally appears at right around sixty-two feet, or a ten foot diameter. However, you can push a city bus through a Rip only a few inches across with the same result.”

“That would explain a lot of disappearances,” Richard said, “from aircraft to ships at sea.”

“Exactly,” Sophia said. “And as I’ve already pointed out, Rips tend to form along ley lines and natural magnetic vortices, the same ley lines and vortices the Mayans, Egyptians and other ancient cultures built their monuments in conjunction with.”

“Which means travel to and from this area would be relatively easy,” Richard said.

“Relatively, yes,” Sophia said. “Team members would still have to wait for a Rip the QC’s predicted would terminate in the right location. But a lot can be moved through a Rip of sufficient duration.”

And the area would be easily defensible given the terrain, Richard thought.

As they walked, Richard mulled over BanaTech’s motives. While an audacious endeavor, Richard thought he could see how it could be done. Baby steps at first. A takeover of the Home world. The Rips could be used to acquire the resources needed; money primarily, then weapons on a massive scale. Rip onto a neighboring world; take what you need, then Rip out before anyone there could put a stop to it. Back at home, subvert the local political structure with the money and then, when enough politicians were in your corner, take the rest by force. Which made BanaTech a political and military complex, as well as industrial.

He was simplifying things, he knew. It would have taken decades to acquire the resources needed to fund the research and development of the QC’s and the RLP’s. Then more time to place the satellite network, both at home and on other worlds, that linked the entire operation together. All while moving quietly behind the scenes to gather allies and build an indomitable power base that would stand against any and all adversaries.

Once that structure was in place, however, once an entire world had been turned to BanaTech’s purposes, other worlds could be taken. Rip in, repeat the subterfuge and political maneuvering, and another world would be under BanaTech control before the populace became the wiser. Another planet to draw resources, technology, and military might from.

Over two-hundred years and almost a thousand worlds, Sophia had said. The thought made a lump form in Richard’s throat. His stomach rolled over. He wanted to puke.

Sophia stumbled. Had Richard not reached out a supporting arm she would have fallen.

“Sorry,” she said. Her voice grated through dry vocal cords.

“It’s okay,” Richard said. He was having a hard time speaking as well. He’d been so lost in his deliberations he’d barely registered the passage of time. His thirst was now a clamoring need; his throat as rough as leather. As he looked around at the terrain his head spun. “We can rest a while if you need to.”

“No,” she said. “If we stop we may never get moving again.” Slowly at first, then picking up momentum, Sophia struck out towards the necropolis once again.

They’d covered a lot of ground. Approaching the ancient ruins from the east Richard could now make out individual features of the vast complex before them. Three massive pyramidal structures stood on the left, with smaller buildings and edifice beyond those. To the right was a wide opening into the city that led to the ceremonial plaza.

During his incarceration Richard had watched a National Geographic series on the Maya and their cities. The documentary had centered on the better-known finds at Chichén Itzá, Tikal, and Palenque, but Richard remembered scenes of Copán. There had been vigorous vegetation throughout the city. Trees and shrubs, bushes and greenery of every sort that thrived in South America, all meticulously maintained and trimmed to appeal to the tourists. He remembered thinking that he’d hate to have been the one responsible for all that maintenance.

There were no vast grassy fields now. No trees to trim. No shrubs to cut back. No need to protect the city from the encroaching jungle just outside its perimeter. All the vegetation was gone with nothing remaining to indicate that it had ever grown here at all. It struck him as odd. They’d spent the day walking through what had once been a tropical forest, but there was no evidence of it in sight. Long before his birth, Richard’s grandfather had cut down an oak tree that had been split open by lightning during a thunderstorm. The stump from that oak had remained throughout Richard’s life, slowly eroding away but not decaying entirely. That had been a span of fifty years, and to Richard’s knowledge, the stump was still there. Richard looked out across the vast, empty expanse. Why had none remained here?

He thought to ask Sophia about it, but his parched throat deterred him. He shelved the question for later.

His mind began to wander. The events of the past twenty-four hours—Dear God, has it only been a day?—played through his mind, mixed with the events in Kansas last winter. There was no particular order to his musings. His thoughts wandered from the jarring arrival in Kansas City, Missouri to a fist-fight he’d had his first week in prison. From the abduction of Katie Marsh to his first kiss outside the middle school he’d attended as an adolescent. The subconscious is a fitful and incongruent beast. Left to its own devices, without conscious guidance, it may wander back alleys opening doors onto long buried memories best left to rest. Suffering the effects of dehydration and oxygen deprivation, Richard’s conscious mind retreated into a dark corner to spare him the fatigue and pain his body was enduring. He dreamt on his feet.

Patrick McCormack had reacted with hostility when Richard knocked on his front door a week after being set free.

“Fuck you want?” he growled, reaching down and locking the wood framed storm door between them. This was not the chubby but well dressed man Richard had seen in the courtroom. Clean-shaven, hair neatly parted in the middle, tie knotted perfectly at the throat of an expensive Calvin Klein dress shirt. The picture of innocence. Wrongly accused and graciously—but timidly—enduring the gaffe.

This was a new image. Wild, unkempt hair that hadn’t seen a comb in days. Spotty growths of whiskers on the throat and chin that had been plucked and picked to the point of irritating the skin and raising pimples. A yellow stained t-shirt with the debris of many meals embedded in the fabric above piss stained undershorts that had been worn so long they gapped about the legs. McCormack stank of alcohol, rotting food, and urine. This was a man who’d been exposed for what he was. A snake. A reptile. A walking, talking, child murdering predator so far out on the edge he’d soon be hunting another victim.

Any hesitation Richard might have felt at what he’d planned, what his mind had chewed upon since this piece of filth had been released into an unsuspecting world a mere week ago, fled him at that moment.

“Ain’t you caused me enough problems?” Patrick said.

“Not enough by far,” Richard said and promptly shot his arm through the thin fiberglass screen separating them. He caught hold of McCormack’s hair before he could reel back out of reach and pulled. The older man crashed headlong through the door, landing face first on the porch.

McCormack screamed. A shrill, old woman’s scream that pierced Richard’s ears like a hatpin. He lived at the far end of a rural route and there wasn’t another house for a quarter mile; no one would hear him at twice the volume. Such an innocent bray from this unrepentant monster enraged Richard further and he kicked the man in the stomach cutting the sound off like someone throwing a switch.

Richard pulled a Colt .45 M1911—a gift from his grandfather who’d carried it during World War II—from the small of his back and pointed it at the man’s head. He’d intended to simply shoot the man. Execute him where he lay and be done with it. No fuss, no fanfare, and very little evidence. He’d driven out to the property on two previous occasions. Watching, waiting. Simmering in the need for justice. His compulsion to avenge little Katie Marsh—and there had been others, hadn’t there? Six other girls of the same age and body type gone missing from this and surrounding counties in the last three years—and prevent this animal’s sick hunger from destroying any more lives.

He’d seen the new tornado shelter cellar McCormack claimed to have been digging several hundred yards from the house. Knew the police had keyed on it during their investigation, thinking the five-foot deep pit and pile of earth surrounding it, a shovel standing upright in the extracted dirt, might be a grave. A thorough examination of the property with a Self-Contained Sub-surface Penetrating Radar System had revealed the excavation was just what McCormack had said it was. Wherever McCormack disposed of his victims, it wasn’t anywhere on his property. The dig, however, gave Richard an idea.

“Get up,” Richard said. He gave the man a not so soft nudge in the ribs with his foot. “Now.” He didn’t move fast enough to suit Richard so he helped him along. He grabbed the man’s greasy hair at the nape of the neck and pulled him erect. McCormack screamed again. This time, Richard let him.

He hauled him around the side of the house to the pit, McCormack wailing and blubbering the entire way, asserting his innocence and pleading for mercy. Richard would have none of it. The protestations only served to fuel the fury that had kept Richard awake every night since a simple clerical error had loosed this fiend from custody. He let go of McCormack at the edge of the concavity and gave him a kick in the rump, adding a footprint to the stains already spreading there. McCormack sqwawked and tumbled into the depression.

“You gonna bury me alive?” he wailed, getting to his knees. Snot ran down his face, mixing with dirt from the fall and bits of food that had dried there. Tears coursed through similar residue on his cheeks. “Oh God, please, NO!”

Richard squatted beside the hole, lining the Colt up with McCormack’s nose.

“Not quite,” Richard said. “We’re gonna have a little chat and I want you immobile while we have it.” He gestured at the mounded earth surrounding the pit with the Colt. “Pull the dirt in around yourself.”

“Fuck you!” McCormack cried. “I ain’t burying myself! You can just go on and shoot me!”

“I can.” Richard nodded. “But I’ll start at your feet and work my way up, avoiding anything vital.” He turned the gun over in his hands as if inspecting its smooth finish. “I have seven rounds in this magazine,” he continued, “and one in the chamber. I also have two spare magazines in my pocket. That’s a total of twenty-two. You’ll probably pass out from the pain after the first few rounds but I have all day. I can wait for you to wake up before I start shooting again.”

McCormack whimpered, then began pulling the dirt in around himself.

“I ain’t done nothin’,” he sniveled as he worked, “this ain’t right.” The hole began to fill up. Earth first surrounded, then covered McCormack’s ankles.

“Where are the bodies?” Richard asked.

“I don’t know nothin’ ’bout no bodies!” McCormack protested. “I didn’t kill that girl! I ain’t some sicko!”

“And all the evidence found in your basement was planted, right?”

“Tha’s right!” McCormack howled. “Them cops, tryin’ so hard to find someone to pin it on. And you! Runnin’ ‘round shootin’ your mouth off that you’d seen me take her! Seen my car! For all I know you killed her and planted all that stuff in my house! Just tryin’ to cover up your own…”

Richard belted him across the temple with the Colt. Had the earth in the hole not already been up to McCormack’s knees, he’d have fallen flat on his back. Instead, he swayed back like a drunkard. A thin line of blood ran down his temple and dripped off his chin.

Richard stood and started shoveling dirt in the hole around the semi-conscious man, packing it down to ensure he remained erect. He had filled the hole to the man’s shoulders before McCormack spoke again.

“You gonna kill me, ain’t ya?” His voice was softer now, resigned.

“Tell me where you hid the bodies and we’ll discuss it.”

McCormack laughed softly as Richard continued to shovel. He was almost level with the ground now, with a substantial pile of earth remaining. His father had told him that when shoveling there was always more dirt left than hole. Just like evil, there was always far more than the world they lived in could contain.

“They was sweet, you know,” McCormack said, almost whispering. He met Richard’s eyes and smiled at some memory Richard did not want to understand. There was something behind his eyes. Something muddy and dark, yet shining and capering madly with glee.

This, Richard thought, is the beast that must be vanquished. The evil light that must be banished from the All.

He shook his head as if to clear it. He didn’t know where the thought had come from. Had never had such a thought before.

“I did ’em up real good,” McCormack continued. His voice had changed, become thicker, slurred with more than alcohol or the addled tongue of someone impaired by a blow to the head. “Spread them sweet little legs and tore the innocence right out of ’em. Defiled them. And the All.”

He was talking nonsense now. Richard’s hopes of locating the bodies of McCormack’s victims and helping the families find some sort of closure, some sort of peace in their lives, was fading fast.

“You go on keep her,” McCormack said. “You do what you have to do. I’ll just move along somewhere’s else. I ain’t tellin’ you shit.”

After a time, Richard gave up asking for the remains of the girls McCormack had brutalized. McCormack remained unresponsive as Richard leveled the ground around his neck, tucked the Colt into the small of his back, and walked to the small shed several yards away. He uttered neither word nor sound as Richard wheeled out McCormack’s John Deere D140 22 horsepower riding mower and settled into the seat. He neither balked nor objected as Richard started the mower and swung it in his direction.

Just before front axle passed over McCormack, cutting him off from Richard’s view, he shot Richard a baleful glare of utter hatred so fierce it raised goosebumps on his forearms. Then the deck of the mower bumped up and over the exposed head mere moments before three spinning blades tore into it, spreading blood, brain and bone outward in a circular pattern.

Richard shut off the mower and walked away, avoiding the mess. He went home and slept peacefully for the first time in weeks.

A staying hand on his arm pulled Richard back to reality. His throat hurt and his head spun. He blinked his eyes several times, clearing the past from them, reasserting himself in the present.

“We’re here,” Sophia croaked.

They stood in the central plaza at Copán, surrounded by stelae adorned with the stylized faces of brooding kings and fantastical creatures. An ancient ball-court and stepped pyramid structures loomed to their left, other monuments and altars to their right. A smaller pyramid, perhaps forty feet in height and three times that at the base, dominated the plaza. It was towards this edifice that Sophia was pointing.

“That’s where we need to go,” she said, and promptly collapsed.