Bonfires Burning Bright (8 page)

12

Frost and Laurie rushed into the station. Kyle followed close behind with Cash, who had an arm slung around Kyle for support and looked like he might keel over. Dodge, who had followed the cruiser in Cash’s car, came in behind them. The whole group hurried to the conference room, where they laid Cash down on the table. Kyle quickly went to work cutting off Cash’s torn t-shirt.

Laurie stayed and helped Kyle, as Frost and Dodge withdrew from the room. Griffin waited for them just outside the door. Their abrupt appearance and race through the building had wakened several of the people trying to sleep around the room, despite the loud hum of several box fans. A sea of expectant faces greeted them.

Frost spoke to them, but in a hushed voice, so as not to wake those who had managed to sleep through the calamity. “We’ll make an announcement soon, but for right now, Cash Whittemore is hurt, but not dying. The Doctor is with him. Best thing you can all do is get some rest. I’m waiting to hear back from the scout teams on what kinds of dangers this new world contains. When I know, you’ll know.”

With that, she took Griffin’s hand and pulled him with her toward the office, and Dodge went with them. Winslow had moved to the small loveseat-like sofa in the room, and was sleeping, stretched out on it. Frost left him where he was and went around the desk to sit. Griffin and Dodge remained standing.

“We need to go back out to the farm,” she was talking to Griffin. “Julie Barnes went down that tunnel out there after shooting Cash. And, apparently, Charley went after her. I think that must be where Ellison is hiding.”

“Yeah,” Griffin said. “We found Turkette. She’s here in the building. Ellison bailed on her and locked himself in the bunker. But I’ve got bigger news.” Griffin turned to look at Dodge, then back at Frost behind the desk. “Ellison is trying to get to Heaven.”

“What?” Dodge said. “That’s not possible... How?”

“According to Winslow, the journal explains the project, moving the whole town through wormholes in space, from dimension to dimension. Ellison thinks one of them will be Heaven.”

“As in ‘Our Father who art in’?” Frost asked. “That Heaven?”

Griffin nodded.

“That’s ridiculous,” Dodge said. “Even if Winslow’s idea of different dimensions was true, Heaven isn’t a place you can just hop on an intergalactic bus to. It’s—”

Griffin held up his hand to cut the pastor off. “I get it. Christianity teaches that there is only one way to Heaven. But Ellison apparently believes—or at least the alternate world version of Ellison believed—that by cycling through dimensions, he can eventually hit the right one. Heaven with a capital H. And honestly, I’m not sure I see a flaw in his reasoning. If Winslow is right, and there are an infinite number of dimensions, then why can’t one of them be Heaven? Maybe someone, like the Biblical prophets, somehow got a glimpse of the place, the same way I somehow painted this world without ever seeing it.”

“What do you mean by ‘cycling through?’” Frost asked, a grim look on her face. “How many more dimensions do we have to stop at before we reach this Heaven?”

“I had trouble with that bit too,” Griffin confessed. “Winslow seems to have a handle on it. The way he described it is like a giant Ferris Wheel. Imagine that our town, when we were on our world, was like the gondola on the bottom, and the ground, where we’d be touching, was our world.”

The others nodded, the image easy enough to visualize.

“This is where it gets weird. Well, weird
er
. Each of the other gondolas on the wheel is a town like us—a Refuge, or maybe just undeveloped land, or an ocean, depending on how that world developed. The wheel moves, shifting us from our world to the first position up the wheel. The big difference in the analogy is that every gondola is also touching ground—but in a different dimension. So when we’re on the desert world where Becky died…some other Refuge is back on Earth, occupying our place on the wheel.”

“Strange,” Frost said, “but okay, I’m following you. How many gondolas are there?”

“That’s the problem. Winslow says the journal is hazy on that part. Might be only a few or there could be thousands…or millions. Maybe more. We’re not sure if Ellison is hopping us all between dimensions at random, or if he’s identified some sort of path through universes.”

Frost stood up slowly and ran her hands down the front of her wrinkled uniform. The motion was so automatic for her, she wasn’t aware she was doing it. “So, what? His big plan is to take a cosmic joyride and hope that we stumble upon Heaven? If we find that lunatic, he might get there sooner than he planned. No offense, Pastor.”

Dodge scowled and looked up at them. “If it were somehow...possible, it would be amazing. A gift, especially to those undeserving. But even if this is possible, I don’t think we would be greeted with open arms. Treated as hostile invaders is more likely. There are plenty of stories in the Bible of God getting ticked off at the hubris of man. The Tower of Babel comes to mind. If we’re lucky, we’ll be sent on our way, unable to understand each other. If we’re not lucky, well, we might find ourselves right back in this hellish place.”

“There’s one shred of good news here,” Griffin said, rubbing at his elbow. “Winslow is pretty sure that with Cash’s help, he can disable one of the pylons, the next time we get to a relatively tame world.”

“Don’t want to stay here and listen to the screaming philharmonic?” Frost quipped.

“Thanks, but no. If they disable a pylon, Winslow believes that one of three things will happen. It will stop the shifting and we’ll stay put on that world, or we might just get flung back to our world. Like a reset.”

“What was the third thing?” Dodge asked.

Griffin frowned. “The imbalance in the pylons might rip the town and everything in it into molecular shreds. Winslow’s not sure we could prevent that even if we disabled all five pylons. It’s all uncertain. Remember, we’re operating off an instruction manual that’s really just the rantings of a madman. The journal is damaged. And it’s from another world, so maybe not a lick of it pertains to our Ellison.”

“So where does that leave us?” Frost asked.

“Worse off than you thought,” came a voice from the door.

Everyone turned to find Kyle, his shirt spattered in Cash’s blood.

“I can’t stop the bleeding.”

“What—” Griffin started.

“I can’t stop
any
bleeding. I nicked my own finger earlier, when we arrived in this world.” Kyle held up his thumb, which had a Dora the Explorer Band-Aid on it. “Nothing is healing.”

13

Avalon Butler felt like crap. She thought she was over the worst of the cramps and sweats. In fact, she’d felt fine for days now. But suddenly, she felt terrible. The screaming outside was creepy, but the feeling of being cooped up inside the station with everybody else, all huddled in fear, overwhelmed her.

She got up and headed out of the room where Radar and Lisa lay snuggled up on a sofa, whispering things to each other.
Ahh, to be a teenager again
, she thought. She headed downstairs first, to a refreshment area, where the woman from the market—Avalon couldn’t remember her name, but, like everyone else in town, she called Avalon ‘Lony’—had brought in several cases of bottled water.

Avalon took a bottle, then thought better of it and took a second, before heading back to the stairs. Carol Herman was there, heading her way. The woman was amazing and nice, but Avalon really didn’t want to stop and talk.

“Are you alright, dear?” Carol’s permanent smile was present, if a little lackluster. The woman looked tired.

“I’m good. Just need some fresh air. Heading up to the roof.”

“Be careful up there.”

Avalon smiled her own fake smile. “There’s a .50 caliber machine gun up there. It’s everyone else who needs to be careful.”

Carol laughed and then was on her way.
Ugh. I hate the chit-chat. That’s why I got out of this place
.

Taking her bottles with her, Avalon climbed the stairs to the roof. The wailing shrieks in the distance were still there, and the air was full of thick charred smoke, like from a pot roast gone wrong. But the night air was also cool, and the chill helped her clear her head a little. She walked past the rooftop solar panels, and then slid the two 22 ounce bottles in the rear pockets of her jeans. Then she grabbed the ladder and started the climb to the little lookout tower.

She got to the top and looked south to the numerous bonfires lighting the dark night sky. Despite the solar-powered streetlights in Refuge, there were pockets of shadow all around the town, but the weird labyrinth in the distance was lit up like a Halloween version of a Christmas tree, with dancing orange light from the fires flickering over its walls. Huge curving rib-like towers could be vaguely seen further in the distance. Then there were lumps and bumps all over the ground that rose and fell like the waves of an incoming tide. They were probably the size of boulders. Winslow had said they looked like molars. Creepy.

She took her water bottles out and set them on the low parapet wall around the platform. Then she tried to angle and focus the big telescope toward the labyrinth. She wanted to know where all the screaming was coming from. It sounded like it could be different people in agony at times, but at other times, it sounded nearly mechanical.

The telescope was a bit more complex than she would have liked. She found part of a wall. It looked like it was made from round white stones, affixed together with pinkish mortar. But then she bumped the scope and the focus was off. She fiddled with the electronic controls, attempting to bring it into more focus, but the result was the opposite. In the end, she gave up and just leaned against the low wall. Her head buzzed, almost like she was high. It was a weird sensation, and her mouth felt dry, her tongue like a bloated piece of bread in her mouth.

She cracked one of the water bottles and chugged the liquid in one go. Then she screwed the plastic cap back on and set the bottle down on the edge of the wall. Except she missed the wall entirely, and the empty plastic bottle sailed away. It bounced off a solar panel, and skittered across the roof of the station.

“Oooh,” she said in a sing-song voice, as if she was both thrilled and sarcastically mocking her miss.

What’s wrong with me? I’m acting like I’m high…

But then a strong gust of wind came her way, blowing a fresh burst of smoke in her face from the distant fires. She started choking on the noxious fumes, and then she started laughing and coughing, and laughing some more.

Eventually the coughing subsided, but she had a fresh burst of giggles, tears streaming down her face. Any last semblance of rational thought disappeared. She shoved the expensive telescope and stood back, watching it slowly swivel like a tubular mobile sculpture. The idea made her laugh harder, and suddenly she was vomiting over the wall of the lookout tower. A steady wretch emptied the meager contents of her stomach, but then the next wave of dry heaves came and kept coming, like she was in full withdrawal again.

She started to panic, feeling like she’d never get a chance to catch a breath in between the convulsions. Her body involuntarily lunged forward, and she felt herself tipping over the edge of the wall, unable to arrest her fall, as her muscles locked up for another burst of snot and drool.

But then her mind did a strange cartwheel, like the world had started spinning. It felt like a tremendous hangover. She could close her eyes but that only made things worse. So she kept them open.

Someone had grabbed her arm from behind, the hand gnarled and muscular, the grip tight. She wasn’t falling to the roof of black panels below her. Instead she felt like she was floating. There was a hand on her other forearm too, but it was a black man’s arm. She didn’t think there were any black guys in Refuge.

She wanted to giggle at the thought, but her stomach lurched again, and her throat made that hideous
Hawwww
noise she always made when she vomited. Nothing came up, but she couldn’t talk past the reflex. As she looked up at the body attached to the arms holding her, her desire to talk and giggle turned to a sour desire to yell for help.

The...thing holding her wasn’t remotely human. And it wasn’t holding her back from falling. Wasn’t saving her. It was flying away with her. Her mouth was locked open in a helpless silent scream, as her stomach muscles desperately tried to empty her already empty body.

Below her, the town sailed past. Another creature descended from the dark sky and clasped onto her legs. But the creatures didn’t fight over her. They worked together, carrying her out toward the bonfires, past the edge of Refuge.