Nightwalk 2 Read online

  “No,” I replied, remembering the shoggoth and the slaughter at the duck pond. I still suspected the man in white had set those people up to die, just to see what would happen. “I don’t think so. In some ways, I don’t think we’re much more than bugs to him. Yet in other ways he has taken a bit of an interest. His actions have been a contradiction in those regards, at least what I understand of them. But he did save mine and Casey’s lives last time, and he did send me back to stop this guy before he causes some kind of apocalypse. So what choice do I have but to trust him?”

  “Not much,” she conceded, “but it’s one of those ‘contradictions’ that has had me wondering either about your story, or the motives of the guy who sent you here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean this guy told you to ditch Mickey and Justin because they were going to die, right? If I understand what you said, it was because her death was going to affect too many people or events for history to just let it slide, right?”

  “That’s right,” I was slightly surprised by this change in direction, and wondered where she could be going with it. “So?”

  “So?” she echoed in a tone suggesting disbelief at some obtuseness on my part. “So how is it you can’t do anything for Mickey, but you’re supposed to stop a guy who is going to destroy the world?! Doesn’t that sound like ‘affecting a lot of people or events’ to you?”

  Oh.

  Oh shit.

  Darla had a point. I spent so much time being annoyed with her that I kept forgetting how clever she was. Even with second-hand information, she had homed right in on the flaw in the scenario presented to me. I’m sure I would have thought of it eventually, but like I’ve said before my smarts aren’t the ‘quick on your feet’ kind. Besides, I had been sort of busy lately. Yet still, where did this leave me?

  I had a real problem here.

  Had I been sent on an impossible task? Had the man in white set me up to fail? Was this whole mission doomed from the start?

  Aghast, I stared at the ground under the bug-infested carport, trying to find some reasonable explanation for Darla’s observation.

  It didn’t make any sense.

  Why go to all the trouble to send a man to change a past he couldn’t change? This WAS the past. I had personally seen and lived nearly two years of life since this had happened. So it HAD happened. Yet the man in white had said the past wasn’t quite as rigid as we believed, and so far events had borne him out. It apparently had a sluggish fluidity to it, with some parts more easily changed than others. And if it was consequence responsible for setting things in time, then the past got stiffer as time passed… it just stiffened at different rates for different events due to the consequences.

  Yet he also said the future wasn’t as fluid as we might like, meaning some outcomes were inevitable. And as I remembered that, I had a truly awful thought.

  This was the past, but what about my home two years in the future? That was the present, wasn’t it?

  Wasn’t it?

  But what if it wasn’t? What if it was the past, too? Sure, it seemed like the present to me, but so what? To Darla, this insanity in Coventry Woods was the present. Yet to me, she had been dead for two years up until tonight. Was something similarly true of me?

  Had the man in white gone back in the past to send a man even farther into the past on a mission that had already failed? Why would he do that? Just to see if he could get a different outcome the next time? My head started to hurt just thinking about it. Where the hell did the past end and the future begin? How could I know from when I really was? How many times had I done this?

  No. It didn’t make any sense.

  That way lay madness.

  If I continued onward, it would have to be with certain assumptions being taken for granted. This was the past, I came from the ‘present’, and the man in white wouldn’t have bothered sending me here if I had no way to change the future. Simple as that. I would leave the finer points for smarter men than me to puzzle over.

  “I don’t know, Darla,” I finally turned to her and shrugged. “This kind of stuff is way over my head. I’m just some cosmic stage magician’s crazy idea of hired muscle.”

  “Oh yeah?” She folded her arms and gave me a sarcastic look. “And why does a godlike entity need a ‘bug’ for hired muscle? He can’t simply snap his fingers and make Jason Hallett drop dead? If he cares enough to do something about this, it seems like it would be a lot simpler for him to kill Hallett himself. Instead he waits two years and then goes to all the trouble to send a ‘bug’ back into the past just to possibly fail? Why wait? Better yet, why wait until that particular night and then say there was barely any time left to change it? How the hell does that make sense?”

  Dammit! I wished she would stop this. It was wasting time.

  “I don’t know, Darla!” I groaned in a raised voice. “What difference does it make? Can I have my clippers now?”

  Darla clenched her jaw and I sort of felt bad about it. I hadn’t meant to blow her off like that, but I had no answers and I chafed to get moving. And if I were to truly be honest about it, the topic had now made me very uneasy.

  She stared at me for the briefest of seconds. Then she grimaced and handed over the clippers.

  “I guess it doesn’t make a difference at all,” she growled.

  Unsure how to respond, I decided it best to simply turn to other matters. I approached the wall of hanging vines and prepared to push my way through to the other side. The few bugs clinging to the wall fled from the proximity of my flare.

  Back to business.

  “Okay, I’m going to go through and get to the fence. Once I’m through, Lupe will come next. I’ll lay the flare beside me, but he’ll hold his torch for me so I can see better while I work. Then you and David step through but stay close to the carport. Your jobs are to watch the skies and let me know when something is coming my way. Darla, shoot it if it’s already too close, but otherwise leave it to me. I’ve got the bullets to spare.”

  I doubt Lupe followed much of those instructions, but I would direct him as I went. Actually, I would have preferred he had the shotgun and let Darla hold the torch, simply because I suspected he might be a lot more competent with it. But I knew trying to take it from Darla would only result in a major fight.

  Which reminded me…

  “Oh, and don’t forget, while you’re behind me with that shotgun…” I began

  “I swear to God, if you say it I will shoot you in the ass right now!”

  Right.

  The weirdness had passed and things were back to normal. Now I could return to focusing on otherworldly predators and basically trying not to die.

  I pointed at Lupe and motioned for him to follow. Putting the clippers in my belt, I pulled my gun again and let it lead the way as I eased through the vines. Getting out of the vermin-plagued Rocketwash would be a blessing.

  “Now if memory serves me,” I muttered as I pushed through, “the fence should beeee…”

  At that point I stopped and stared in shock at the scene before me.

  Things had just gotten worse. Unbelievably worse.

  “Mierda!” Lupe whispered as he came to a halt beside me, his eyes also widening in surprise. A gasp from behind told me Darla had stepped out and seen it as well. For my own part, I was simply speechless.

  About eight feet ahead of me, the world ended.

  Chapter Ten: The Chasm

  “What… the… hell…”

  Ahead of me the ground simply stopped.

  Moving slowly, I approached the line where white went to black and confirmed the awful truth. We stood at the brink of a chasm that stretched out of sight in both directions. A deep one. The heavy fog poured over the edge like a smoky waterfall, disappearing into the darkness below.

  “Ten cuidado,” Lupe warned.

  “Oh believe me,” I breathed, and eased back a bit from the edge, “I’m being careful.”

  “How deep is it?
” David asked in a hushed voice. “How wide is it?”

  I straightened and raised the flare high above my head. The reflected light off the mist around us had slightly messed with my night vision and I had to squint to make out what had not been visible to me before.

  Well over thirty feet away, another fog waterfall faced us in the dim edge of my light.

  The earth must have collapsed here due to one of the distortions. I doubt it happened during either of the latest ones since we weren’t very far away and should have heard something. I had seen a couple of physical effects to the world from Chandra’s machine before, but nothing like this.

  Somewhere to our right a bit of the edge crumbled. The sound of clattering gravel faded as it disappeared into the depths, and I had the sudden suspicion this thing was deep. Really deep. The kind of deep that almost seems to pull at a person when they near the edge. Emptiness echoed like a physical thing from the void at our feet.

  Reaching back to the side pocket of my backpack I pulled out a glowstick. Doing this only left one more in the backpack, and the one hanging from my belt, but we were running out of time anyway. I cracked it and shook it alight. Then, with an underhanded toss, I sent it into the crevasse.

  It fell.

  And it fell.

  And we finally lost sight of it without it ever hitting bottom.

  Needless to say, I was not the only one dismayed by this impossibility.

  “Oh, I did not need to see that,” Darla groaned. “How is that even possible?”

  “Cayo al infierno,” Lupe breathed in wonder. “It… fe… fell… to hell.”

  “Oh man,” David whispered. “Oh man, oh man, oh man… Now what?”

  Good question. We now stood on a fog-covered ledge overlooking a bottomless pit, with an alien jungle at our back, and some immense, antediluvian entity hovering in the sky ahead.

  I hadn’t prepared for anything like this. I’m not sure how I could prepare for something like this. My experience from two years ago had mainly featured other-dimensional predators and repressed psychopaths. Now I was flying blind.

  “I guess we go around,” I finally answered. “But we’re going to have to pick the right way the first time. We don’t have time to go up and down this thing. What do you think, Darla? Left or right?”

  She looked like she had been preparing to say something gloomy and sarcastic, but then bit it off in surprise when I actually asked for her opinion on the matter. Now she frowned in thought as she considered the problem.

  “You said the edge of this thing we’re in is somewhere around the trainyard, right?”

  “Right. I’m not precisely sure where, but I remember electronics still work somewhere on the other side of the tracks.”

  “So we can probably be pretty sure this hole doesn’t extend any farther in that direction.”

  “True.” I nodded. “But the problem is the second we set foot in the trainyard we get shot.”

  “Right. We either have to gamble it ends even sooner, which isn’t very far, or we follow the edge the other way back into Coventry Woods.”

  “Where it might go on for miles.”

  “Yeah. But it also has more room where it could end naturally and still give us time to make it around if we hurry.”

  Damn. She had a point there, too. Either way offered a different set of advantageous odds balanced against certain death. And to make matters worse, I felt pretty certain the man in white wouldn’t have sent me on this if one of those two choices didn’t offer a path to my goal. But which one?

  It was as I desperately pondered this, I got surprised again.

  “Hey!” a tremulous voice called from the darkness ahead of us. “Hey! Over here!”

  All of our heads snapped up and we peered into the blackness. Nothing showed, but the call had definitely come from the other side of the pit. It had sounded like a woman’s voice.

  “Hello?” I called back. “Where are you? We can’t see you!”

  “We’re in the storage yard. We’re in an RV, but our candle burned out.”

  Okay, that made sense. While the boats were stored under a long covered area in the back of the storage yard, I remembered a short line of RVs and trailers in front of it. If somebody had to take shelter in a storage yard, breaking into an RV wasn’t a bad option. She must have been yelling out a window at us.

  “You said ‘we,’” I continued. “How many are you?”

  “Just me and Herman,” the voice floated back out of the blackness. “Oh, and my name is Cassie. Cassie Loomis.

  And why hadn’t I heard from this Herman yet? I had an ugly hunch.

  “Hello Cassie. I’m Mark Garrett. Are you two okay?”

  “Yes… no… well, I am… but Herman is sick. He got bit by something. It looked sort of like a dog, but it wasn’t a dog!”

  “Easy, Cassie,” I called back. “I get it. We’ve seen some stuff, too. Now what I want you to do is real quick tell me what happened and how you got here. Okay?

  Time was an issue, but I was willing to spend a minute or two on the chance it might get me important information.

  “Umm… we were driving in from Dallas… Herman and I… when all of a sudden a dog ran out in front of us. Herman hit the brakes, and just barely missed it. But then we saw another dog run across the road in the next second and Herman hit the brakes again, and this time we stopped. And then it was like something out of a terrible dream. There were all these animals running across the road in our headlights! Thousands of them! Dogs! Cats! Squirrels! And rats and other stuff too!”

  What she described had to be the animal migration as they fled the neighborhood. I had seen a bit of it myself two years ago. But I could only imagine the flood they must have witnessed as all of Coventry Woods’ pets and wildlife fled across the nighttime highway.

  “And then something awful happened,” she continued. “I don’t know how to describe it but it felt like the end of the world. And I saw all the store signs and street lights go out. The animals were still running across the road, so we were afraid to move because we might run them over. So we sat there hoping they would pass and that… awful thing… happened again. And when we tried to leave, the car wouldn’t start. Nothing worked! Not our car, our flashlight, our phones, or anything!”

  The first two distortions. I remembered them well. I had just never stopped to consider how people driving past on the highway must have been caught in them too.

  “The only light we had was a little scented candle I carried in my purse. Herman remembered seeing traffic lights ahead so we decided to walk and see if there was a corner gas station where we could find other people. I don’t know how far we made it before the… dog creature… attacked us. Herman fought it off, but I thought we heard others out in the darkness. His arm and leg were bitten really bad, so we started hunting for the first place we could find to stop and get inside. We saw where a pickup truck had smashed into a chain link fence and checked it out. There was no driver, so we thought maybe he had gone inside the fence to find a landline phone. We went in, too. But we never found him. Then we heard more… sounds… so we broke into this RV and hid here. Then Herman got sick and now he just fades in and out. And then the candle finally burned out. That was a few hours ago. I’m not very good with the dark, and you’re only the second people I’ve seen with any light since then.”

  Second?

  “You saw other people, Cassie?”

  “Yes, about an hour ago. Two young people with a lantern. They were going north on the highway. I called to them and they said they were going to a church up north of here. They said I could join them, but they couldn’t help with Herman and I wouldn’t leave him behind.”

  North? On the highway?

  Darla and I shared a sudden, meaningful look.

  “Cassie? Did they say anything about this pit? Did they mention going around it maybe?”

  It went quiet a second, and then the voice answered again.

  “I remember the
m talking about ‘climbing over’ something. They talked like it was a big deal, but they never got close so I didn’t hear everything they said clearly. But they definitely came from your direction.”

  They climbed over something? I didn’t know quite how to feel about that, but it didn’t matter. The important thing was our decision had just been made for us.

  Those other two had found a way past this chasm, somewhere in the vicinity of the highway.

  “Thank you, Cassie,” I called back. “You have been a very big help. Is there anything we can do for you?”

  I know, I know… I had already been warned about taking chances with the past. But how the hell was I supposed to turn off being a human being? Not only did we owe her for solving our dilemma over which way to go, but she sat out there alone with an injured and sick husband.

  “I-I’m going to stay with Herman,” she answered back. “But I meant it about not doing very well in the dark. Please, if you have any kind of light you could spare, I would really appreciate it.”

  I could certainly understand her distress. I had had my own problems with the darkness for the past two years, and it somewhat surprised me how well I handled it tonight. Nevertheless, I knew exactly where she was coming from and I could damn sure help her with that.

  “Just a minute, Cassie. I’ve got some spare candles. I’ll send them right over.”

  “Oh, thank God,” her distant voice came back. “Thank you so much!”

  The relief in her voice was a reward in itself.

  I had Darla pull out the pack of tea candles while I grabbed the duct tape from Tommy’s bag. Removing a couple of candles from the box, I gestured for Lupe to hand me his torch. Then I taped the two candles to the copper pipe handle before returning it to him.

  By this time Lupe had figured out for himself what I planned. He nodded at me, then backed up near the vine curtain before taking a couple of swift steps forward and hurling the torch out over the chasm.

  It was a beautiful throw.

  The torch arced high as it flew, tumbling end over end and making a curved tracery in the night sky. It landed in a distant puff of sparks well on the other side of the canyon. The torch’s glow marked its place in the low fog, and dimly illuminated an expensive looking RV. Lupe must have gauged the position of the woman’s voice well, because he put the torch about fifteen feet on our side of the vehicle’s rear tires.