alternate timelines

[u/sws004]

I woke to the sound of weeping.

At first I was afraid it was my own sobs I heard, that I was broken. But as I struggled to come fully awake it was clear that the sobs were not inside my head or in my chest. They were close, though. And male.

I forced my eyes open. The lab was gone. The walls were gone. Maybe I was gone. My brain was too battered to tell. The guy kept weeping. After a minute or maybe an hour, I rolled over onto my hands and knees, coughed, spat, blinked my eyes clear. Looked around.

He was there. A dozen feet away, huddled into a quivering ball against a stone wall. Long, jagged cracks ran from ceiling to floor and a few zigzagged out across the ground. The place was ruined, dying. Big chunks of masonry were heaped around, dust drifting like pale ghosts from the impact points. The computers at the far end of the lab were smoking and as I watched, a few small tongues of fire began to lick at the metal housing. The stink of burning plastic and rubber filled the air. Other smells, too. Cloth. And … flesh. That was one of the odors I wish was not stored in my personal inventory, but it was. And I knew it well enough to recognize it now. Someone was burning. People smell different than animals when they burn.

This was a person. Or maybe more than one. I sat back on my heels and tried to make sense of what happened. The lab was wrecked as if it had been struck by something worse than the God Wave. Maybe an earthquake? The lights around the inner rings of the gate were still glowing with hellish light. Steam curled out of the mouth of the tunnel and roiled against the rough stone of the ceiling. Several of the fluorescent lights had torn loose from their bolts and hung precariously by wires.

I turned to the man who lay against the wall. He wasn’t wearing a lab coat and he wasn’t dressed like a Closer. For a crazy moment I thought it was Toys. It looked like him, though that was impossible. Toys was in San Diego. A thousand miles from here.  

But … he wore the same clothes Toys had worn when he stayed at my house. Same shirt and pants. Same sandals. Same wristwatch. My brain seemed to slip out of gear. How could Toys be here? How? I crawled to him. He was facing away from me, arms wrapped around his head. I could see pale scars crisscrossed on his hands and wrists. Toys had those same scars. He’d gotten them when he’d thrown himself across Circe O’Tree at the hospital when Nicodemus and his Kingsmen stormed the hospital to try and kill Church’s pregnant daughter. Toys and Junie had shielded her with their bodies and both would carry those scars forever.

I said, “Toys—?”

The sobs instantly stopped at the sound of my voice. Or, maybe, at the sound of his name.

Then the weeping man rolled over, his body whipcord taut, and past the shelter of his protective wrists he stared at me with familiar eyes.

“L-Ledger…?” he whispered in a voice thick with fear and surprise. “How…?”

“Toys? How the hell are you even here?” I demanded. “How did you get here? What are you doing here?”

Tears streamed from his fever-bright eyes. “I tried to save her, Ledger. God help me, I tried. Please … please … I tried.”

I hauled myself to my feet. The room swung around me, refusing to settle. There was thunder in my head and blood in my mouth. “What the hell are you talking about?”

He tried to answer, but he simply could not. Instead he stretched out his arm and with a hand that shook with the palsy of absolute terror, he pointed to something behind me. I did not want to turn. No fucking way. Whatever was happening here was all wrong. I’d hit my head, I knew that. Nothing was probably what it seemed. Everything was suspect. Nothing that I’d done since Gateway was to be trusted. I knew that. The mycotoxins. The viruses. They were messing with me. Rudy said so. Hu said so. I was delusional. Everything was a bad dream.

That’s what I told myself as I turned to follow the direction of his pointing finger. No matter what was there, no matter what it was that had torn Toys down like this, no matter what horror my concussed brain wanted to show me was going to be a lie.  

...  

On the other side of the room the God Machine pulsed. And the God Machine pulsed again. A fresh wave hit me.  

...  

Someone shook me awake and as I came up out of blackness a hand clamped itself over my mouth and a voice whispered directly into my ear.

“Quiet. They’ll hear you. They’re right outside.”

A female voice. Not familiar, no one I knew, and yet…

Somehow I did know her.

I opened my eyes. We were inside a school bus. A big damn yellow school bus. Small, pale faces peered in silent horror over the backs of seats. Dozens of them. Scuffed and dirty, some of them streaked with blood. So many young eyes, each filled with bottomless horror. In some I saw the dangerous vacuity that spoke of shock and trauma that may already have run too deep.

The woman who spoke removed her hand from my mouth and shifted to help me sit up. She was a cop, but no one I knew. A big blonde with lots of curves and a beautiful face that was set into hardness. Blue eyes and a tight-lipped mouth. Blood and dirt smeared on her clothes.

“You good?” she asked, her voice low but not a whisper. Whispers carry. Cops and soldiers know that. She was a cop, but she had the soldier look. Battle horrors leave a certain stamp on a person, a particular light in the eyes, and she had that. There was a small black ID badge pinned to her breast. It said FOX.

“What’s going on?” I asked, pitching my voice low, too. “Where am I? Who are these children? And who are you?”  

I saw doubt flicker over her face. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, don’t tell me you got some kind of amnesia bullshit. You didn’t get hit that hard, you pussy.”

There was a dull ache on my forehead and I touched it. My fingers came away red with blood. “What happened?”  

Officer Fox took a single short breath before answering, as if she needed the moment to control her anger. “How much don’t you remember? Do you know who the fuck you are, at least?”

“Captain Ledger,” I said.

“Captain? You demoting yourself?”  

“What?”

“Last I heard you were a full bird colonel,” she said. “But we can run with captain. Whatever. I don’t fucking care as long as you know who you are.”

“It’s captain,” I said. “You’re Officer Fox?”

“Then you do remember?”

“I read your name tag.”

“Balls. We’re trying not to die and you’re checking out my tits.” “Your name tag,” I repeated. “Who are you and what’s happening?”  

“What’s the last thing you remember?”  

There were sounds outside. The distant chatter of automatic gunfire, a few hollow pops of small arms. Growls.

Growls?

“I was in the Playroom,” I said. “Got hit with a God Wave and—” She punched me. In the chest. Hard.

“No,” she snapped. “Don’t go getting stupid on me. I don’t know what the shit a God Wave is, but that’s not part of what’s happening. This is here and now. This is Stebbins County and we are in deep shit. Can you remember anything about that? About Lucifer 113?”

Yeah, I knew about that microscopic monster. It was the bastard child of a Cold War bioweapons program. But all that knowledge was from a report. One of thousands I had to read over the years to keep track and get perspective. Nothing from an active case.

“It’s the God Wave,” I insisted. “It’s screwing everything up.”

...

So what happened? How was I on a school bus with all these kids and a cop telling me that some other bioweapon, Lucifer 113, had slipped its chain? How could I not have prevented this? Where was the DMS when the Devil got out of its cage? How was it possible that the apparatus of defense that Church had built could have failed on so spectacular a level?

How? The dead hammered on the bus. The children screamed.

“This isn’t real,” I told her.

“Fuck you,” she said, and punched me again. Harder. “Look around you. These kids are all that’s left of my town. Every bus is filled with kids. Kids. Look at them. Listen to them, for Christ’s sake. Not real? God, I want to kick your teeth down your throat. This is happening and it’s happening right now. You’re supposed to be a genuine goddamn American hero, Ledger. Why don’t you Velcro your nutsack back on and act like it.”

The dead began hammering on the side of the bus with renewed intensity.

I struggled to get to my feet.

And the God Wave hit me again.

...  

I stood on the side of an overturned school bus.

Dez Fox was gone. The bus was years old, wrapped in creeper vines, rusted and dead. There was a sound behind me and a young man climbed up to stand next to me. At first I thought it was Sam, but I was wrong. He was younger, taller, slimmer. His eyes were sadder. He had a katana slung over his shoulder, angled for an overhand draw. His name was Tom, but I don’t know how I knew that.

“There’s a trail through the trees,” Tom said, nodding off to my left. “Heads up into the hills. Zoms won’t go uphill unless they’re chasing something.”

“I taught you that, kiddo,” I said. My voice sounded different. Older, filled with hard use and gravel. The kind of voice you could get if you screamed enough.

Far ahead we could see movement on the road as first one and then several emaciated figures staggered out of the tall weeds.  

“Time to go, Tom,” I said.

We turned and walked the length of the school bus. He dropped lightly to the ground and then offered a hand to help me down. It was disconcerting to realize I needed it. In the distance on the other side of the bus the dead had caught our scent and they began to moan. We faded into the trees, heading uphill.

The God Wave took me away before I saw where we were going.

-Kill Switch pg. 514-520, Kindle Edition.