Pandora's Gun (8 page)
Authors: James van Pelt
Peter felt an urge to laugh, but he bit it back. It wouldn’t be a healthy laugh, and he might not be able to stop himself if he did. “You watch too much science fiction.” But Peter watched science fiction too. Who didn’t?
“Why not?” said Dante. “We’re in a science fiction story now. Ray guns? Tractor beams? X-ray vision? Parallel universes? Science fiction has come to us.”
“Why would you open a door to that universe? What use could it possibly have? Surely you wouldn’t go there.” Peter pictured the Cyclops dogs. Instead of being on the boundary’s other side, they surrounded him. They weren’t big, but there were so many. They’d take his legs out, and when he was on the ground . . . the image sickened him.
Dante stood, stretched his back. “That was intense. I’ll grant you that. My turn.” He reached for the gun.
Peter pulled it back. “Didn’t you see what I saw?” His voice raised, and he could feel how close he was to losing it. “You can’t ever pull the trigger again. We’ve got to get rid of it. What if I hadn’t been able to turn it off? Can you imagine whatever that was coming through that hole, or what if the hole just kept growing? We can’t risk it.” He clutched the gun to his chest, even as everything within him screamed to throw it away.
Dante backed up, but Christy moved close to Peter and helped him to sit on the bench. “It’s going to be all right,” she said, but her voice shook too.
Peter rocked back and forth, looking through the chain-link at the baseball field. No evidence of the portal remained. Once again, it was a quiet, cold afternoon. Christy kept her arm around him while he settled down. He felt the warmth of her arm through his jacket. It was the only part of him that felt real.
Christy said, “We’ve got to know what else the gun can do, or we won’t know what we should be afraid of.”
Peter closed his eyes for a second. He could see the creature on the hill in his imagination. “We’re in danger.”
“Probably,” she said, “but we need to know more.” She pulled on the gun, but he didn’t let go. His breathing had begun to settle down. He couldn’t hear his heartbeat in his ears anymore. Suddenly he thought he must look foolish.
He gave the gun up. “If there’s a red hand on the screen, don’t activate it.”
“Really,” said Christy. Her breathing seemed to be under better control than Peter’s, who inhaled shakily. “What kind of safety feature is a red hand anyway? What if you didn’t close the portal? That was a world eater on the other side. A red hand hardly seems like enough. Whoever made this ought to rethink the safety standards.”
She handed the gun to Dante, who studied the screen, picking his icon. “You guys are freaking out about nothing. Maybe aliens have fights about their second amendment too. ‘The right of the people to keep and bear universe shattering portal machines, shall not be infringed,’ or something like that.”
“You know what I don’t get,” said Peter, trying to sound normal, “is if whoever made the gun wants it back, and that it’s valuable, why it doesn’t have a GPS feature in it. If I lose my phone or it’s stolen, I have a ‘Find my Phone’ app that will track it down. The gun has to be more important than a phone. Why can’t they just come and get it?”
Christy said, “It could be illegal technology. It
ought
to be illegal. Whoever made it couldn’t put a homing signal in it because someone else could find it, like the police.”
“Who cares?” said Peter. “They don’t have it now, and I’d like to see them try to get it. Having the gun makes you the toughest hombre on the block.” He pressed an icon. Pointed at the field. Pulled the trigger.
Christy recoiled, while Peter fought an urge to hit the ground and cover his head. Mud already soaked his back, and he didn’t want to coat the front. Nothing happened, though.
Dante put the gun down, disappointed. “I should get to try another. This was a dud.” He bent to his notebook to copy the icon and write a note about its properties.
“Not a dud,” said Christy. “Look.”
The color of the mud and grass on the softball field lightened. The ground crackled softly and hissed. As they watched, frost coated the area in front of them in a rough fan shape, starting from where Dante stood, and broadening as it headed to the trees beyond the outfield. Crystals an inch or two long pushed from the mud, catching the sun in a thousand glisters. A wave of cold rolled toward them.
“It’s beautiful,” said Christy.
Reflected light illuminated her face. The trees caught speckles of bright sunlight, and the field itself was both unbearably bright shards of light, and vivid, multicolor refractions, like a rainbow carpet.
Peter walked around the chain-link protecting the dugout and onto the ice field, his eyes watering. Ice crystals crackled underfoot. A snapping and shattering behind him told him that Christy and Dante followed. Already, the sun began the process of melting the field. Water trickled back into the ground. Within a few minutes, only the ice in the trees’ shadows remained.
Christy and Peter walked home together, the duffle bag hanging from Peter’s shoulder. “I’m sorry I took the trash out this morning,” she said. “The thing on the hill . . . I don’t want that in my head.”
Peter didn’t speak, but thought about sudden naps, orange monstrosities, and a diamond field that made the sun more glorious than he could possibly imagine.
The noon news spent most of its twenty minutes covering the “Disaster at Melville Park.” The station’s helicopter footage led the broadcast, replaying the downed trees beneath obscuring smoke. An interview with a representative from the gas and electric company revealed no gas lines ran under the park. “Our lines do not explode,” the rep said, clearly miffed that anyone thought his company might be responsible. The weatherman showed the radar and satellite images of the town from last night. “Despite rumors that we suffered a ‘microburst,’ a violent localized storm, the atmospheric conditions make this highly unlikely.” The fire chief didn’t try to explain what happened, but reported that wet conditions limited the spread of fire to a handful of trees and bushes. In a disappointing development, an info scroll under a graphic about other strange phenomena, the Tunguska event, a meteor airburst in Russion in 1908 that knocked down trees for over 800 square miles, reported that the high school would resume a normal schedule tomorrow.
A loud throbbing rattled the windows in Peter’s house. He stepped onto the back porch, a piece of toast in hand. A dull green helicopter passed overhead, followed by three more. He recognized the angry wasp-shape of a military attack copter. The others were fat troop transports moving in synchronized precision toward Melville Park.
He grabbed a coat and his bike and pedaled after them.
At the edge of the practice fields, where the split rail fence separated the school grounds from the woods, a crew of soldiers stretched yellow tape that they anchored with long metal stakes that they pounded into the soft ground on the school side of the split rail fence. Soon, a tape barricade marked the border. A soldier in camouflage stepped back into the tree line and practically vanished. Only because Peter knew where to look, could he see him.
Above the deeper woods, where Peter’s secret dump was, the attack copter circled. The other copters weren’t visible. Peter guessed they’d landed in the clearing.
He wasn’t the only person who’d come to the school to see what the fuss was. He recognized some classmates in the crowd and a couple teachers.
“The radio said the military is taking over,” said Mitch Ling, a junior in Peter’s Health and Wellness class. “That’s not an army helicopter, though,” he added. “I’m ROTC. I’ll bet it’s the CIA or NSA.”
“Do you think it’s black ops?” someone else asked.
Peter didn’t wait for the answer. He ran back to his bike and pedaled to his house, where he retrieved the gun from Christy’s barbeque.
The problem was finding a spot where he could wield the gun during the day but not be seen. If someone was looking for the gun, they would watch the crowd. Surely the person who had taken the gun would show an unusual interest in the military’s takeover of the dump.
However, Peter knew the old Goodman’s Sporting Goods store that closed last spring was easy to get into (some college kids hosted an informal and highly illegal rave there a couple times a month). Its second story rear windows looked over the park. Peter pushed a window open. Busted cardboard boxes, covered with dust filled the room behind him. He tried not to think about rats as he cleared a space for himself.
The icon screen turned on. Peter chose the X-ray function and pointed the gun toward the dump. On the screen, the woods turned into a denuded set of low hills. Peter moved his finger toward the screen, upping the magnification until he found the soldiers. Not unexpectedly (but uncomfortably) they were naked in the screen.
When he upped the magnification, the gun seemed to solidify its position in the air. Peter decided that it was a form of image stabilization. Since he wasn’t using a tripod, at this level of magnification the image should be incredibly shaky, but the gun’s reluctance to move kept the scene steady.
Some of men patrolled what must have been the outskirts of the clearing. Others pantomimed digging—he couldn’t see their shovels—while others appeared to be studying things on tables the screen made invisible. He grunted in annoyance. Seeing the soldiers didn’t really tell him what they were doing, although the fact that there were so many indicated the importance the military assigned to the investigation. He had no idea that three helicopters could hold that many men!
He started to release the trigger to turn the screen off, sorry that he’d been careless enough to use the gun where people might see him no matter how cautious he was, when a man at the edge of the screen caught his eye. Peter leveraged the gun so the figure was centered (the gun moved easily up or down and forward and back, but it resisted rotating, which is why he could see the subjects so clearly). The man didn’t look like he was with the soldiers. He looked more like he was watching them. He crouched, peering toward them from fifty yards away. Peter pictured the news video from the morning. Whoever the man was, he would be in the trees, difficult to see from the soldier’s point of view.
Peter wondered if he could see the clothes, if the watcher wore a light blue suit. Increased magnification didn’t reveal who he was. The man’s back was mostly to Peter, so all he could tell was the man had black hair. Peter saw more of his butt than he would have liked. Only the tiniest part of the side of his face was visible. Was that the gun’s owner? Was he searching for the duffle bag?
Slowly, the man leaned forward, then he turned and looked back at Peter. Not toward Peter: at him. It was if the man could see Peter through the screen as clearly as Peter could see him. Thin lips and a sallow complexion. Indeterminate age: perhaps forty. Narrow, dark eyebrows. Small eyes. Deep blue, piercing eyes, staring at Peter as he stared at him.
Peter released the trigger, closing the screen. From the window all he saw were the tree tops rising and falling to match the hills beneath them. A half-mile away, hidden behind the trees sat helicopters. Dozens of military men worked in the blasted clearing. And, crouching not too far from them, a man who shouldn’t have been able to see Peter. He didn’t see me, thought Peter.
He kept telling himself that as he rode his bike home. He hid the duffle bag behind a dust-covered toolbox under the workbench in the Ford Fairlane’s garage.
Christy texted him as he parked his bike. “Come over.” She met him at the door. Going to her house the second time in less than a day, after not being in it since her 9th birthday party, seemed strange. They sat at opposite ends of a huge couch in the living room, a respectable room filled with dark leather furniture and bookshelves.
“We need to get rid of that gun,” she said. Her eyes were red-rimmed. She’d changed clothes from this morning to sweats and a headband. She always dressed so well at school, as if modeling fashion for trendy teens. Peter found the contrast disorienting. There were two Christys, the one at school who was so popular and out of reach, and this one who reminded him of the girl he used to be friends with.
“That’s what I told Dante.” Peter started to put his feet up on the couch to face her, but he decided it would be rude. This didn’t look like the kind of couch that anyone would sit at that informally.
She did put her feet up. She wore fuzzy blue socks that looked warm and a little childish. “I thought I had a handle on what the world was like. This year I’d keep up my grades—it’s not too early to be thinking about college, you know—and I thought maybe I’d get a job on the weekends. Something fun at the mall, maybe, so I’d have spending money. Next year, as a junior, I’d pad my resume with things that look good—I don’t think Pom captain as a junior is impossible—and I’d sign up for one of those overseas trips that juniors and seniors can go on. There’d be football games and dances and parties. I’d learn to play the guitar better, maybe even get in a band. By my senior year, I’d have a college picked out, and I’d go out into the real world, ready to be an adult. I thought I knew what the world was like.”
Her leg trembled, just a little. She’d wrapped her arms around her knees to face him.
Peter wasn’t sure what to say. He didn’t know where she was going with this. “Of course you’ll be Pom captain.”
She shook her head. “No, no, no. You’re missing the point, Peter. Pom captain? What would that matter? Didn’t you see what was on the hill, on that runny, rotten, molding orange hill? Didn’t you see it? Pom captain can’t be important after that. The world isn’t what I thought it was. Whatever that was wanted to swallow us. It wants to swallow the entire Earth.”
Peter had been trying not to think about the monster on the hill. He’d kept himself busy riding his bike and spying on the military so he wouldn’t have to think about what he’d seen. Sleep tonight would come hard, and when it did, what dreams might rise?
He looked around the room, at a loss for words. On the wall across the room, a large wardrobe made of dark oak dominated the wall. The bookcases had been built around it.
“Is that an entertainment center?” he asked. “We could watch something to take our minds off it.”
Under the big screen TV behind the doors, were two shelves with DVDs on them. His dad liked DVDs too, although Peter hardly played them. He streamed almost anything he wanted to watch, and he was more likely to use a tablet in bed to see a movie than to put it on the television, but his dad was old-fashioned that way, and he liked videos that weren’t always available online. “How about something light?” he said.
“I don’t care.” Christy pressed her forehead against her arms. Her voice was flat, and that scared him more than what she’d talked about. Thinking about the monster on the hill was like standing on a cliff’s edge. There was a sickening in the stomach, a lurching in the inner ear, and the vivid image of leaning forward just a tad. What scared him about heights wasn’t that he might fall, but that a tiny bit of him wanted to fall. The abyss contains an urge. The image of the orange world and the orange demon was surely a cliff’s edge in his head. The key was to stay away from it, to not dwell on the thought.
Just as when he stood on a high place and felt the edge’s pull, he could picture himself stepping over. He saw him pressing the two stylized birds icon again, letting the orange world open before him, but this time he would walk forward. The skull-faced Cyclops dogs would move aside. Peter would walk across the orange landscape, past the broken trees and crumbling battlements, until the tentacle being on the hill noticed him (but, of course, it always noticed him—it noticed him even now), and turned its face toward him. Peter could not imagine that face, but he knew that seeing it would melt his brain. He would gibber, he knew. He would go slack-jawed, and drool, and then finally fall, his eyes melting in his skin. He knew exactly what Christy feared.
“How about
Toy Story 2
?” He held up the DVD case.
They sat together in the darkened room. Peter took a blanket from her room and covered their legs. At first she didn’t appear to be watching. He couldn’t see her trembling, but he could feel it. She sat rigidly, as if her muscles were clenched in a full-body fist. She didn’t relax until near the film’s end, when she leaned against Peter, and put her head back on the couch. As Woody and Jesse escaped from the plane, just as it took off for Japan, Christy’s deep breathing told him that she’d gone to sleep. He watched the ending credits roll without moving. When the screen went black, he still didn’t get up. A part of him didn’t want to wake her. The other part didn’t look forward to going home to an empty house.
His phone buzzed. Trying not to disturb Christy, he slipped the phone from his pocket. Dante’s message said, “Check the news. Fake soldiers.”
Peter flicked his news app and put in an ear bud. The evening news guy talked in front of an image of military trucks rolling down Devin Avenue. “A mix-up in jurisdiction over last night’s mysterious events in Melville Park has caused quite a commotion in the police department. The government investigative unit that arrived this morning in four helicopters, took off about thirty minutes before a second unit arrived in trucks from Fort Franklin. Captain Johnathan Montgomery has taken over operations and is briefing the Chief of Police and fire department at this time. An interview with Captain Montgomery when he arrived revealed the lack of communication.”
The trucks rolling into town graphic was replaced by Captain Montgomery standing in front of the City Council offices. A reporter off screen asked, “The government must be taking our little problem quite seriously to send two investigative teams.”
The Captain looked toward the reporter, puzzled. “Two?”
“Yes, the first investigators arrived ahead of you this morning.”
“This morning?” The Captain bent to say something in his aide’s ear. The aide rushed off screen.
“When asked about the makeup of the teams later in the interview,” said the newscaster, “the Captain said, ‘No comment.’”
