Bridgetown, Issue #1: Arrival Page 5

  He saw Susanna, her face illuminated by the lightning. He was surprised, briefly, to find that she had been the one driving.

  Then he saw the look on their faces, both of them. They looked like Godzilla was behind him.

  So he turned around.

  And he saw Devil's Peak, glowing red.

  He squinted, trying to make sense of what he was looking at.

  Then the mountain went white in a flash,

  And a bolt of crackling electricity shot through the earth. It made a beeline for their position.

  Silence, for a moment.

  Then the scene resumes.

  Jesse looked back at Susanna and Wayne. There was an immense, towering fountain of light behind them, spewing liquid energy into the sky. The ground beneath Susanna and Wayne appeared molten, though it did not seem to burn. They were struggling to get out, but he could see they were being pulled in closer to the light.

  Jesse, at the edge of the pool, crouched and dipped his hands into the shimmering gold soup that had been dry desert just moments before.

  He found its temperature to be as warmly pleasant and sunshine. Touching it comforted him. For a moment he thought he heard his mother's distant voice.

  "Hey! It's safe! Swim across! Try to swim across!"

  But it was plainly clear they couldn't hear him now.

  Susanna tried to swim, but to no avail. Wayne was clinging to the Jeep, which was tipping into the vortex and would soon disappear into it entirely. Wayne never had learned to swim.

  "Susanna!" Jesse cried out.

  But he didn't jump in after her. He knew it would be futile.

  He caught a last flicker of her, as she stopped struggling and flipped over onto her back. The ball of light was glowing brighter, and he couldn't make out either of them any longer.

  Susanna, Wayne, and the Jeep—all were gone, pulled into the light.

  Jesse's head was spinning.

  He fell to his knees. What is this? What's happening?

  The ground around him began to liquify, too, as the the phenomenon perimeter grew. He did not move from it. As his body seeped into the gold light, he again felt a calm. The sunshine-warmth was a welcome alternative to the frigid night air.

  He remembered things he'd never seen.

  He saw the ruins of Old Bridgetown, decaying in reverse. Re-assembling themselves into centers of society. A cantina, a livery, a homestead.

  He saw the city in the shadow of Devil's Peak. Not as it was, but as it once had been.

  And he knew his brother and Susanna to be in this place.

  Safe.

  Waiting for his return.

  It was a vision.

  This was the greatest drug Jesse had ever encountered.

  It was no street-grade hallucinogen.

  It was a rip in the very fabric of reality.

  Sobriety and the midnight chill returned to Jesse, hitting him like a wall.

  He stood, knee-deep in the dripping molten gold. The ground was re-solidifying, the sea of energy dissipating and the light shrinking to a finite point. His window was closing.

  He made a decision.

  Jesse ran toward the rapidly cooling core of light. The vortex knocked him off his feet and sucked him under what little remained of the energy pool.

  With mere moments to spare, it consumed him, and he was happy to allow it.

  All went light, and white-hot;

  Then all went black, and cold.

  Jesse braced for that falling, pit-of-the-stomach feeling that, as a child, had always signaled the beginning of the end of a nightmare. But instead of waking, he felt an altogether more alien sensation.

  His consciousness rose up through the heavens, up beyond the atmospheric limits of reality and into another place entirely.

  He was unable to see anything. He searched for any sense of the familiar, any extra-sensory connection to Susanna. He had followed her down this rabbit hole, and he was going to find her.

  Floating in this ether of Nothingness, he searched for the warmth in the chill that he knew to be Susanna. He raised his hands—if they still existed, he wasn't entirely sure—towards the warmth. But there was a barrier before him, a Plexiglas hallucination.

  Then came the fall.

  It was as if someone had pulled a trap door lever and sent him down a garbage chute into Hell.

  He could feel himself accelerating. He was dropping straight through the outer membrane that connected this Darkness to Reality.

  Down, down he went. Down past the outer fringe clusters of galaxies on the edge of the universe, down further still.

  His mind's eye zoomed into the candle-glow center of the Milky Way, and further still towards a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

  This tiny speck grew ever-more enormous until it occupied his entire field of vision, and he knew it to be a familiar blue marble he called Earth.

  A moment. Now, atmosphere was compressing at his fore, heating up and sending fiery streaks of burn-off shooting around his body.

  His ears were pummeled with the sound of air whooping about his form, and only then did he realize outer space had been silent.

  He could no longer keep his eyes open. The violent kinetic display going on around him was too intense.

  That, and he also didn't particularly care to see the desert slam into his face. That was definitely going to happen. No stopping it now.

  Impact.

  Once again, he was embraced by darkness.

  Then, quiet. And sleep.

  When he next opened his eyes, all was still.

  First, he was aware of the dirt. He could taste it on his lips.

  Then a sky, cloudless and pale blue as it had been for billions of days already.

  Jesse sat up. He patted his body, making sure it was all still there. Apart from being horrendously dizzy, he was alert, and unharmed. There wasn't even any obvious sign that he'd just fallen from outside of all Existence and smashed face-first into the Earth. No impact crater, nothing.

  He looked around him. Where was he?

  There was Devil's Peak, right behind him. Just as it had been the night before.

  He began to put the pieces together in his mind:

  The great sphere of light in the desert.

  The brittle desert floor turning into honey-lava.

  Visions of Bridgetown as it had once been, bustling and alive.

  The amniotic Darkness, in which he could only sense Susanna and nothing else.

  He had followed her here. To this place, to this time.

  He'd come to this desert seeking to build a community atop the graven ashes of a ghost town.

  Instead, the desert had led him to the ghosts themselves.

  Jesse began to laugh, a deep, riotous laugh from the pit of his gut. This was the height of absurdity. It was every old rerun of The Twilight Zone he'd watched on UHF while stoned out of his mind. It was something from the dime store science fiction novels that Wayne would escape into during those miserably hot Southern summers all those years ago.

  It was cliche. Pastiche. Pablum.

  And it was now his reality.

  Would he ever get out of this time? Could he ever get back to his world?

  He felt numb. He suddenly realized he could no longer feel Susanna.

  A cold took over his body. His face went flush; his stomach did flips inside of him. He had to sit down. His dizziness was only getting worse. This must've been what shock felt like.

  He vomited.

  After hacking up the last bits of bile, he flopped back and lay on his side, content for the moment to bake in the hot sun. He felt a strong compulsion to just go to sleep.

  No—he couldn't. He had to get moving. He was weak, distressed, and bound to become dehydrated. Especially now.

  He got up on his feet. He looked past Devil's Peak, towards where he remembered the ruins of Bridgetown to be. Sure enough, he saw a thriving town there now. Buildings with roofs. A puff of smoke rose from a chimney. There
was movement on the horizon, probably people milling about the roads on their daily business. People that would, to Jesse seem strange and alien; just as he would seem inscrutably foreign to them. They would use money he'd never seen and speak with slang he'd never heard. After all, this was, what, seventy years before his time? Eighty?

  Deciding he had to get moving now or he never would, he took a step forward towards Old Bridgetown.

  Then another, and another.

  After a couple thousand paces, he could make out signage. The general store, the post office—well-worn staples of the Western outpost town as it had always been represented in movies and TV. The sights comforted him. Maybe he would be able to make sense of this place. Maybe all he had to do was convince these people he was from New York, or Australia. Someplace far away, where they would have never traveled before.

  He spotted a horse-drawn cab stationed just up ahead at the edge of the town. A man sat in the driver's seat, wearing a tall black hat and a dark flannel double-breasted jacket. It looked like a horrifically hot thing to be wearing.

  Jesse rubbed his stubble with the back of his hand. Now or never. He walked up towards the cab driver, giving him a friendly wave.

  The man signaled him with a tip of his hat. "Haaa-low!" the man said, letting out an impressed whistle. "Must've really drove someone mad, I take it."

  Jesse cocked his head. "How's that?"

  "Someone did get you liquored up and dropped you off in the middle of the desert in that sorry state? Don't tell me you went out there on your own?"

  Jesse flashed the man a loopy grin, then continued to stumble into town.

  He reached Main Street, and found himself surprised to be able to trace which building was which pile of rubble in his own time.

  He searched within himself for some sense of awe, some inkling of amazement or bewilderment or at least terror at his present predicament. But he felt none of those things.

  Mostly, he just felt lonely.

  Men and women, dressed in the dark and heavy fabrics of the time, moved along the wooden sidewalks that lined each side of the road. Carriages traveled down the street intermittently.

  Jesse became acutely aware that his v-neck tee and black canvas Converse made him a stranger in this place. Despite trying to break the ice with the cab driver a minute earlier, he was still afraid to talk to anyone. He felt like a child lost in the department store. He was unsure of where to go, with just the sense that he wasn't supposed to be here hanging over him. But he had to start talking to someone if he was going to find Susanna.

  He looked around him, at the signs on all the buildings.

  The general store. That had looked friendly and familiar when he was walking into town. It was as good a place to start as any.

  Forcing himself to walk with a spring in his step, he entered the shop and rang the bell for assistance. The bell was comforting. It wasn't so different from what he was used to.

  He waited, for what felt like an interminable stretch, resisting the urge to tap-tap-tap out a drumline on the countertop.

  A bald old man in a smock emerged from a back office and approached the counter. He wore one of those old-fashioned green eye-shade visors on his head, just as Jesse had seen in period piece TV shows. He wondered why they used to wear those things.

  "Can I help you, sir?" the man asked.

  "You mind if I ask you a question?"

  "Go right ahead."

  "Why are you wearing that—that thing on your head?"

  The man didn't answer right away; he seemed to be drinking in Jesse's appearance. His strange attire, the perspiration on his brow and his generally queasy state of being mixed with his odd question. The shopkeeper's posture stiffened. Jesse imagined he was formulating all kinds of bad scenarios involving this strange customer.

  "Well," the man said, with a cautious gaze, "Ever since I put an electrical lamp in there, it helps make the light a little less harsh on my eyes, you see."

  "Oh."

  The shopkeep coughed. "Is there anything else I can help you with, sir? Anything you'd like to purchase?"

  "You wouldn't happen to know the date?"

  Again, the shopkeep regarded him with skeptical eyes. "It's July the 14th."

  "July 14th," Jesse repeated, softly. "What…year would that be?"

  "Well, eighteen-ninety-seven, of course."

  "Thanks." Jesse gave a curt nod to the perplexed old man, turned, and walked out of the shop into the harsh daylight.

  He considered the interaction he'd just had. It hadn't gone terribly, even if there was now at least one person in Bridgetown who thought he was a complete head case.

  Jesse sat on the curb, nauseous again. But this time it wasn't the trip that made his stomach do flips. He felt like the shock was wearing off. Reality was settling in.

  He buried his head in his hands and tried to block out the light.

  Here he was—in 1897. He didn't exist in any book of record. No Social Security card. Cash in his wallet that would look like joke money. Everyone he'd ever known—besides Wayne and Susanna—were worse than dead. They didn't exist.

  For that matter, what if he'd been wrong about what he'd thought he'd felt in the Darkness?

  What if Susanna wasn't here?

  What if he truly was alone?

  He looked up, and took in his surroundings with intent for the first time.

  On the one hand, it really did remind him of one of those old photos of turn-of-the-century streets—the ones a certain sort of kitch restaurant liked to hang on their walls.

  But something was just a bit off. Something a bit unexpected, a bit too modern.

  He thought back to the general store, and the shopkeeper's comments about the lights. Was it common for a rural mining town to be electrified in 1897? He wondered. He honestly wasn't sure.

  His eyes flitted about the scene, and settled on something in the hills beyond the town: A large industrial building, white smoke billowing into the sky. Power lines on what looked like telephone poles connected the power plant to the rest of the city.

  And in the hilly backdrop, a radio tower stood tall, visible from all points in Bridgetown.

  On deeper inspection, this didn't look so much like any old west movie Jesse had ever seen. And it didn't look like the small-town ruins he'd wanted to build his commune on in his own time.

  A sinking feeling hit his gut.

  Wayne.

  Wayne had done something in this time, Jesse was certain of it. Changed something.

  He had to find Wayne, if he was going to find Susanna.

  2.

  Wayne blew off excess metal shavings from the component he was machining, huddled inside his little workstation. This was his private inner sanctum, a place to get away from the hustle and bustle of a daily life of industry. Here, he could be like the boy he once was, immersed in making crystal radios and reading his grandfather's Asimov collection.

  All morning he'd been dealing with phone calls. An incident down at the factory grounds. One more headache he didn't need. So he came here, to free his mind in a trivial project.

  A knock at his door. He looked up, exasperated.

  "Yes, Martha?"

  "Mr. Cole, you have a visitor. The sheriff."

  "Thank you, Martha. Tell him I'll be out in just a moment."

  Wayne took one more look at the little bit of metal he'd just spent twenty minutes fashioning. Was it even on all sides? It looked about right.

  He held it by his thumb and forefinger, placed its point down on the work table, and gave it a good spin.

  The top spun, balancing itself, for several seconds. Then it fell and skidded out across the table.

  Wayne smiled.

  He switched off his work lamp, and left his private chambers to go meet the sheriff.

  Wayne's manor was different than the other vanity homes of Bridgetown's upper class, with their high ceilings. For one thing, at a time when other wealthy individuals chose to adorn their homes
with flourishes of gilded molding, Wayne's ranch house seemed positively spartan. Clean, bold lines illustrated every corner of the parlor room. Wayne had burnished aestheticism in favor of a design ethos for which none living in Bridgetown had a name.

  It was modernist, a design language that apart from Wayne's self-styled mansion, wouldn't be invented for a few more decades.

  The socialites in Bridgetown who worked with Wayne did find him odd, even if his brilliance was plainly on display. To their ears, he spoke with a strange accent, flat and efficient, and always at a brisk clip. He seemed perpetually in a hurry, and he rarely made it through a conversation without checking his watch.

  Everyone knew that Wayne had made his capital by selling watches that were to be worn on the wrist instead of in the pocket. His wasn't the only outfit in the world getting in on the wristwatch game, but he had foresight enough to target not only field officers in Africa who needed a convenient way to synchronize their slaughter of natives. Instead, he was bringing the concept to the well-heeled ladies and gentlemen of America. It seemed a queer idea to many at first, but Wayne managed to convince enough people that it caught on and, in fact, became quite fashionable. All the better to check the time at a moment's notice, in another instance of Wayne's characteristic yielding to efficiency.

  Maybe that's what it took to fit as much invention into a day as Wayne Cole was apparently capable of. After all, he had arrived in town with nothing, and in half a decade, had turned himself into a rich man. An important man.

  Wayne passed a mirror in the main hall of the ranch home, and stopped for a moment to inspect his appearance. He was dressed in a purposeful black smock, his wispy blonde hair slicked back. His eyes sat behind small, perfectly round wire-framed glasses in the current fashion. He wiped his hands on the smock, getting the last bits of machine lubricant and industrial grease off, then straightened his collar and continued walking towards the parlor.

  He spotted Sheriff White inside, inspecting the three-foot-tall scale model of the Bridgetown radio antenna cast in bronze. White was a leathery, honest-looking man. The kind who'd clearly spent most of his days on the back of a horse.