The Portal in the Forest (7 page)

"Right, yes," I corrected myself, my head
fuzzy with regret. "I saw her. She gave me the iWorker device
you're training. But it wasn't her… just a version of her from that
reality."

"That must have been very hard for you."

Wiser than his years? This kid was more of a
respectable adult than I!

"Are you still going to help us?" he asked,
after two or three quiet minutes spent thinking.

"I don't know if I can," I replied honestly.
"The last time I tried to-" I shook my head, choking up. "No matter
how much you anticipate, no matter how smart you are, or how fast
you are… sometimes it just doesn't matter. Sometimes, there just
isn't a way out.
"

He sniffled. "I don't want to believe
that."

"What's the alternative? Believing that, if
my daughter had just made different choices, she'd still be alive?
That it's
her
fault she-"

"Is it
your
fault, though?" he
interrupted. "Or should you blame the thing that… got her?"

To that, I had nothing to say. This boy -
this young man - had somehow hit right to the heart of the
issue.

He slumped down. "I'm starving."

But, apparently, he was still a young man,
and moments of wisdom were fleeting in young men. "Don't you have
any food at home?" I asked.

He didn't reply.

Reaching over to rummage around in my
oversized travel backpack, I reached past my laptop, various
sundries, one saved shoe with special dirt on it, and spare
clothing to fish out a ten dollar bill. I placed it in his
surprised hand. "Take it. Get something to eat."

"Really?"

"Really."

"Thanks," he said, sincere. "I'll go in the
morning." He curled up against the wall, preparing to sleep.

I frowned, but… I couldn't stop him sleeping
where he wanted. Did he not feel safe at home? By the ambient light
drifting in from the windows, I could see an ugly bruise around his
right eye. "Make sure you eat 'til you're practically sick. Really
glut on some heavy fast food."

He laughed. "I sure will."

Sometime late at night, I'd intended on
initiating my plan to safely view the objective image of the
problematic book, but it didn't seem fair to leave the boy
unprotected. I kept the paper with the deadly schematic rolled up
safely in my backpack, and waited up while he slept. It was a
simple matter to stay awake and alert for hours on end -

... I coughed and started, suddenly awake…
and oddly rested. It felt like I'd had a soul-weary weight lifted,
at least for a little while. How had I fallen asleep like that? If
anything had happened, it would have been unforgivable…

A scream of absolute terror resounded in the
cul-de-sac outside.

Rushing forward on my hands and feet after
telling Thomas to remain quiet, I peered out through the corner of
one window.

A boy I recognized ran from house to house,
knocking on the door of each.

Frowning, I darted over and threw open our
front door. "What's going on?"

The boy saw me and ran up to me, shouting his
fearful message. "They're in trouble!"

"Run with me," I ordered quickly, dashing
toward the old Dodson lot, and the paths beyond. The exhausted boy
followed suit as best he could, and Thomas was not far behind.
"What's the situation?"

The panting, red-faced boy let out his story
between ragged breaths. "Danny tried to take the book through the
portal on his own."

"I don't have the book with me?" I asked,
furious at the eighteen-year-old's misguided bravado.

"No, he stole it from you…" he explained,
starting to lag behind. "But the portal suddenly got bigger, and
they all fell through…" Falling to his knees, he shouted his last
information. "And they were all on the other side screaming and
running from something!"

My heart seized. Why wouldn't they just go
back through the portal? Something had clearly gone wrong with the
main egress in a fundamental way. Thomas kept pace with me a few
feet behind as I ran. "Go to Suzie's portal and tell them to start
unburying it," I ordered, giving no time for debate.

Thomas nodded and sprinted off in another
direction.

I soon crested the final hill, curving up
above the Virginia forest and back down beneath the canopy in
seconds… only to tumble to a painful and wrist-spraining halt.

The portal had ruptured even further.

Space hung like a sheet flapping in the wind
on an invisible clothesline. No semblance of the original ten-foot
portal remained, nor the thirty-foot gash I'd last seen. Instead,
the path and brush on both sides had been consumed by unstable
rifts… a clearing of deadly anomalies nearly three hundred feet in
length, by my best guess. Ten feet… thirty… roughly two-seventy…
the portal energy wasn't expanding geometrically. It was growing
exponentially.
By that same comparison, tomorrow the
corrupted space would be…

A mile and a half wide.

The day after that - I clutched the gritty
dirt beneath my hands tightly for a moment - a hundred and eleven
miles. As far as I'd seen, the portals had clung to the surface. I
had no way of knowing if the rifts were underground in a spherical
area, too, but this area of spatial disturbance seemed largely
rebuffed by the density of the ground beneath.

But
a hundred and eleven miles
… and
the day after that… the numbers began escaping me, but at least…
twenty-five thousand miles…

Which happened to be almost exactly the
circumference of the Earth. The numbers might have escaped me, but
the neatness of that value did not. This was a darkly ironic
challenge from forces beyond comprehension: save the world in two
days, or lose it on the third.

In this exact moment, all I could worry about
were the thirty-odd children stranded in another reality. The
portal had been stable for weeks before I'd interfered. Was all
this somehow my fault? A dark grip caught my chest. How many
children had to die because of me?

Eyeing the maelstrom of spacial contortions,
I waited, waited, waited… and leaped.

I slid through a small oval barely big enough
to fit me, and the blinking rift took one of my shoes at the last,
barely sparing me my foot.

Already tired from the run, I pushed myself
wearily up, and then observed the world that the children had
thought safe enough to visit briefly.

A ruddy sky swirled high over an endless
plain of cracked obsidian. The sun hung huge and red in the sky,
seemingly much older than the star I knew. My shoed foot crunched
as I moved, and my bare foot fought for purchase among smooth flat
stones that were dully jagged along the sides.

Glassy black spread out to the horizon. What
had the children been running from?

I turned to look behind me.

The main portal was a mess of little blinking
rifts, and clearly unusable, but that was not the problem. Not in
the least.

A wall of fire approached across the endless
obsidian plain, perhaps half a mile out. It came as a sheer smooth
curtain of flame, horizon to horizon, cast down from the sky itself
by glowing little glints in what looked like low earth orbit.
Satellites? For what purpose? Why would this planet be… I looked
down at the obsidian beneath my feet.

Continually cleansed…

Fuck logic. Fuck explanations,
my
brain screamed.
A wall of fire is coming for you! Run!

Even in panic, I turned and looked for the
children, quickly finding several multi-colored dots against black
glass in the distance. I was already tired, but… not like this. I
couldn't let them die like this.

Go!

Foot down,
push
, foot down,
push
, breathe, faster, faster,
fasterfasterfaster
fasterfaster -

Breathe, breathe, breathe… come on…

The kids were moving away at a pace fueled by
fear, but I had to catch them. They were running directly from the
wall of fire, but the portal manned by Suzie's crew was down an
offset vector.

I felt my personal top speed hovering back
and forth before me; my legs pumped numbly, my feet crunched and
bled, and my arms cut the seared air, but that intangible wall of
speed danced just out of reach. I knew I could go slightly faster,
I
knew it
, but I just…

I stumbled and fell, falling onto a
surprisingly whole plate of volcanic glass. My right wrist roared
fire, and my entire body tingled with relentless weakness, but I
stumbled right back to my feet. "Wait!"

The shout rang out in clear air, barely
audible over the low roar of oncoming flame.

"Wait!" I screamed again, going for a high
note.

As I kept staggering forward, I saw the kids
slow and turn. Exhausted themselves, they could only wait for me to
catch up.

I entered a circle of sweaty, fearful,
drained, and smiling faces.

"I knew you'd come to save us," said Danny,
the eldest.

I took a pained breath and tried to stand
tall. "I don't know if I can save us, but… I couldn't let you face
this alone."

He gave a tired nod. "What's the plan?"

"I ordered Thomas to run to Suzie's crew and
tell them to unbury their portal."

"That one's only -"

"I know," I said, cutting him off before he
told the other kids. "Come on, calculate the direction. I estimate
we've gone two miles directly east of the main portal. Suzie's
portal will be our escape, and it's four point nine miles southeast
of the main portal, offset by twenty-two degrees from the line
we've been traveling. Which direction should we head, exactly?"

Faced by surprise math homework, the kids
huddled in a massive circle and debated the numbers. I had an
answer in mind, but it was important that they
felt it
by
getting it themselves - and a second check never hurt.

Finally, they all looked up and pointed.

"That way?" I asked, slowly recovering my
breath.

Thirty-two children nodded in unison.

"Alright," I prompted them. "How long have
you been here? The wall of fire crossed the main portal when I was
a half-mile away. I estimate it's still a half-mile away. How fast
do you think it's moving? How fast do we have to move?"

They huddled again, and the answer came
forty-four seconds later. Danny stood tall above the others. "Best
guess - we have to move four point one miles an hour toward Suzie's
portal to outrun it."

Another darkly ironic number. "Alright, we've
trained for this," I announced, sloughing off the worst of my
exhaustion. "Exactly this scenario, although it was a hypothetical
gas creature then. It's
possible
, and you know that, right?
We can survive this."

Thirty-two grim faces nodded in response.

"Then let's set out!"

I took up the lead, walking slightly faster
than the four-miles-an-hour rate that I simply knew by muscle
memory. That gas creature had been anything but hypothetical, once,
and I'd spent four days in Louisiana backcountry escaping it. I'd
been sixteen then, in my first encounter with the supernatural, but
that endless struggle had never left me.

And I hoped that long-ago determination would
transfer to these kids. They were all already depleted and
terrified, but the human body had more to give than any of them
knew.

All they had to do was keep pace.

Teenagers, boys, girls, and children walked
together, pushing their walking stances to the limit. It was too
fast to walk comfortably, and too slow to run easily, so we were
caught at the worst speed possible. Still, we pushed on. The
crunching of sixty-six feet filled the air, mercifully drowning out
the sound of the approaching wall of fire.

"Give it back," I told Danny, who kept the
lead beside me. "
What were you thinking?
"

Breathing hard, he looked away, clutching the
tome in hand. "You left."

"I had to," I told him. "I was wounded."

"You didn't look hurt."

I gulped. "I was, and I still am… inside. But
I'm sorry I left."

He set his jaw with resentment, but handed me
the book.

I took it with unhappy anticipation. This
world was strange enough that I needed to know if any threats
waited between us and our escape. After steeling myself, I opened
the book to the back pages.

***

I
knew
it hadn't been my imagination.
Each day had been slightly warmer than the last, until all the snow
had melted and people were out in shorts. An Indian Summer they
called it, for some reason. Others laughed about global
warming.

It was global warming, alright, though not
for the reasons anyone suspected.

Most began sensing something wrong with the
night soon after that. It was subtle, really, but disruptive to
sleep: night time just wasn't as dark as it used to be. The first
reports came out that week, with the first inexplicable data.

The stars were growing brighter.

It was
light.
Light was our problem.
The stars had grown twelve percent brighter than previous recorded
values - all the stars, all at once, for no measurable reason that
anyone could discern. What could make the entire universe grow more
luminescent all at once?

But, see, that was the wrong question.

The Sun and Moon were both affected, too. The
Moon became a painful white beacon in the sky, illuminating the
night with stark silver. Sunglasses became mandatory during the
day, along with sunblock, air conditioning, and shade.

It was rather astounding how long life went
on as normal. People turned up the air in their cars, stayed
indoors, and let technology furiously resist the growing heat. As a
scientist, I had a rather longer-term view of our situation, and I
wondered what they would do once the crops started dying and the
food stopped being shipped in.