Wildside

  “What are your conditions?” Thayer asked.

  “You guys leave with him.”

  Thayer winced. “That’s not possible.”

  “Why?”

  “I have orders.”

  “Illegal orders. Who is Bestworst, anyway? CIA?”

  Thayer’s mouth tightened.

  “If so, he’s operating illegally, too. Their charter doesn’t cover domestic operations, does it? Does his boss know what he’s doing?”

  Thayer closed his eyes suddenly and exhaled. When he opened them again, he said, “Let’s take a walk.”

  I touched my knee. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  He looked annoyed. “Just into the tunnel.” He held out his hand to help me up.

  I got up without taking his hand, wary. He pulled his hand back and put his arms behind him in parade rest. I limped along the wall to the tunnel door and he preceded me, holding the door as I limped through, then closing it behind us.

  The generator was still disconnected, but they’d hung chemical light sticks along the wall, lighting the space with a weird, greenish glow. I took a step to the right and sank to the ground, my back against the tunnel wall. I wondered if I should be reaching for the pepper Mace.

  Thayer took a step back and sat opposite me.

  “I’m going to tell you something, but if you repeat it, I’ll call you a liar to your face. Understand?”

  I nodded.

  “The printed unit orders detached us for a training mission at Fort Hood. I saw them by accident, when Captain Moreno left his briefcase open. This unit does anti-insurgency work in Panama, where our intelligence is supplied by the CIA. And I’ve seen, uh, Bestworst in that context.

  “This whole mission sucks.”

  He reached into his fatigues at the neck and pulled out his dog tags. A gold ring hung next to them, looped on the chain. “This is my wedding ring. I’ve got a beautiful wife and two wonderful daughters. I understand dying for my country—for them, but I don’t want to do anything that will make them ashamed of me.”

  “Uh, I see, I guess.” I shook my head, confused. “Well, maybe I don’t see.”

  He pushed the dog tags back into his shirt and rubbed his eyes. “You were right. This is an illegal mission. It stinks to high heaven. And if anybody dies—one of you kids or Carlson—and this becomes public…” He shook his head. “We’ll do it your way, I’ll take all my men over to the other side. You call the shots. The captain won’t like it, but screw ‘em. He has no business in this mess anyway.”

  He stood and held his hand out to help me up. This time I took it. Before he opened the door he said, “Keep away from Bestworst. Whatever you do.”

  They carried Carlson, three to a side, on the mattress.

  When Thayer said he was going to do it our way, he meant it. “Do you want our weapons?”

  “Hell, no. It’s dangerous enough over here.”

  They stopped ten feet back from the gate, next to where the plywood and mattress platform leaned against one side of the tunnel. Sergeant Costner was glaring at me, over his shoulder. I spoke into the radio in my left hand. “Ready, guys?”

  “Ready,” Marie’s voice said. They were orbiting the field overhead.

  “Remember, the gate will be open for one second only. If you stop in the middle, Carlson won’t need any medical aid. Start moving, gentlemen!”

  They trotted toward the terminus. Just before they reached it, I said, “Now!” into the radio. The gate opened and my right hand squeezed down on the air horn.

  The backup squad was there, standing at ease. They fell back in confusion. The end of the mattress cleared the terminus and the gate flicked back off, counted by Marie.

  I slumped to the floor, my knee aching.

  The radio crackled. “You okay, Charlie?”

  The radio seemed to weigh a ton. “Stand down, guys. Stand down.”

  We took the wooden portion of their platform and mounted it on the front of the tractor, widening it with the plywood from our video table so it stretched all the way across the tunnel and bracing the new section with four-by-fours left over from our old cargo sledge. When it was in position just short of the terminus, it stretched from wall to wall with a fourteen-inch gap between the top of the barrier and the ceiling.

  Marie, Joey, and Rick were standing at the back of the tunnel and Clara was sitting in the driver’s seat of the tractor.

  Dad stood on one folding chair on one side of the tractor and I stood on another on the other side. Dad’s whole face cleared the barrier. I had to go back and get two flight manuals to stand on before mine did. I’ve long known I got my height from Mom’s side of the family.

  I took a deep breath and looked over at Dad.

  He was already looking at me—staring, practically.

  “What?” I blurted out, flinching.

  He held up a hand. “Nothing. Nothing. Just, um, trying to figure out who you are.”

  I flushed. “I’m your son.”

  He kept looking. “I know the relationship, Charlie,” he said steadily. “I just don’t know the person.” He coughed and looked down. “You ready?”

  I swallowed. “Yeah. I guess so.”

  Click.

  Two soldiers, standing before the barricade, unarmed, threw themselves forward and came up hard against the barrier. There was six inches between the plywood and the terminus and they stopped there, not trying to climb, but freezing with their bodies on the terminus. The one on the left stared up at me with wide eyes. The other one had his eyes squeezed shut and his lips were moving.

  “Are you going to kill them, Charlie? Are you going to slice them in two?”

  It was Bestworst, standing ten feet back with Captain Moreno. He lifted his hand and more soldiers, standing behind him moved forward, led by Sergeant Costner. I saw no sign of Lieutenant Thayer.

  I twisted on the chair and looked at Clara. She was staring back at me, eyes wide. I pointed at the tractor and then forward, emphatically. She didn’t waste time nodding but reached for the ignition key. Luckily, it was still warm and she shoved it into low gear as the first soldier appeared on the top of the barrier.

  Bestworst’s confident smile dropped from his face at the sound of the tractor engine. With a groan and shriek of flexing wood, the entire barrier moved forward. There was a crash as the fake machinery on the other side of the terminus toppled.

  The soldier in front of Dad was fast, the entire top half of his body was over the barrier and he had a knee on the edge. Dad jumped forward, off the chair, and shoved upward, against the soldier’s chest. He teetered but clung to the top desperately. Dad screamed, “Close it, Charlie,” and grabbed onto the barricade and pushed the soldier back.

  “Get back, Dad!” I shouted, but someone on the other side of the barricade was holding Dad’s arm. Dad flattened his body against the barrier and shouted again, “Close it!”

  The sergeant’s arm, shoulder, and head started over the barrier, and I hit the button. There was a blinding flash and Clara pitched forward against the steering wheel as the front end of the tractor dropped. A cloud of water vapor billowed up around me and I heard liquid pouring onto the tunnel floor—hot coolant by the smell. The undercarriage of the tractor plowed into the dirt and the engine quit with a “clunk.”

  The front sixteen inches of the tractor, including the steering suspension, radiator, and most of the front wheels were gone, along with all of the barrier.

  And Dad, too.

  I looked at the floor near where Dad had been standing, dreading that I’d see part of Dad, but there was nothing there. There was something on the floor in front of me, next to a semicircular section of tractor tire. I got painfully down off the chair and looked closer. There was a slice of nylon helmet cover and a thin piece of Kevlar helmet on the floor.

  And a tiny slice of bloody skin and hair.

  “Son of a BITCH!“ I shouted and hit the wall. “Those stupid assholes! They’re not going to stop unt
il they’ve succeeded in killing somebody.”

  Clara was staring at me. “They have your dad.”

  “Again,” I said, trying to diminish the importance of what just happened.

  “Do you think he’ll be all right?”

  “I don’t know.” I shook my head. “I think they’ll hold him, like Luis and Richard. If they let him go, he’ll raise too big a stink.”

  The guys joined us, staring at the front end of the tractor. Rick said, “What are we going to do now?”

  I looked at the floor. I felt trapped, frustrated, and angry. “I don’t know. Let them sit. We have supplies for six months, longer if we hunt. Maybe they’ll finally get somebody a little less ruthless over there. We’ve disappeared, after all. There should be some hue and cry.”

  Rick sighed. “I’m not sure I can wait six months, Charlie. Chris doesn’t know where I am. Neither does my mother. Think what she’ll be going through. What if she investigates and they take her into custody to shut her up? What about your mother?”

  I clenched my fists and stared at the wall, then shook my head. “Maybe we can figure out a way to get you back without killing somebody.” Marie, Joey, and Rick joined us. “Are you okay, Clara?”

  She was touching the end of her nose. “A little sunburn. Next time I’ll put on sun block.”

  “Nice driving.”

  She blinked. “Woman’s gotta do what woman’s gotta do. I’m glad nobody got hurt.” She looked at me. “Those people are crazy. I don’t think we should invite them to any more parties.”

  Rick said, “We’ve gotta try something.”

  I squeezed the bridge of my nose with my thumb and forefinger. My knee was killing me. I stared blindly at the end of the tractor, where antifreeze was soaking into the dirt floor. “Somebody get me some ibuprofen and an Ace bandage, please…and a shovel.”

  Clara brought a canteen of water with the ibuprofen. I took three and washed them down. Rick brought the shovel and Marie grabbed the five-gallon plastic bucket we use to drain engine oil from the Maule.

  I scooped the antifreeze-soaked dirt into the barrel, driving the blade of the shovel down into the dirt. I wasn’t really paying attention to what I was doing, just step, thrust, scoop until the wet dirt was gone.

  “That’s strange, Charlie,” said Marie. “Aren’t you on the term—”

  The shovel hit something in the dirt that didn’t give, reverberating up the handle with a shock. I blinked. The antifreeze had spilled across the terminus. I pushed more gently with the shovel and was rewarded with a “clank,” as if I’d hit a buried pipe.

  “It’s probably that glassy stuff,” I said. I lowered myself to the ground and scooped the dirt aside with my hands, pulling clods of dirt back into the hole excavated for the antifreeze.

  I didn’t run into the glassy stuff. Instead I ran into a gray metal frame that looked to be the same material as the gate switch. I shook my head, then pulled myself to my feet, the shovel clutched in my hands.

  “What’s that?” asked Joey.

  I took an abrupt step to my left and slammed the blade of the shovel into the wall, a foot above the hidden switch and near the terminus.

  “Charlie!” Marie shrieked and jumped back.

  The dirt we’d plastered into place showered down and I thrust again, scraping and twisting with the blade. Dirt showered down revealing the wire box we’d built around the switch. I moved closer and closer to the terminus, expecting to run into the glassy material we’d encountered before, but I never reached it.

  I ran into the same metal frame I’d uncovered in the floor of the tunnel.

  “The last time we did this, the gate was on. That glassy stuff we ran into was dirt—it was frozen in place by the gate. And now that the gate’s off, it isn’t there!”

  Rick frowned. “So—how does this help us? Aren’t we more likely to screw it up now that we can get to it?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe we’ll find out something that can help us.”

  The gateway was a metal rectangle whose inside dimensions were about four inches greater than those of the tunnel. It was thirteen and a half inches deep, front to back. On three sides it was fifteen inches thick from the inside dimension to the outside dimension. The fourth side, the one with the arm that tapered into the switch, was almost twice as thick—twenty-nine and a quarter inches from inside to outside. All corners were rounded.

  It was made of the same gray metal as the arm except that, on the center of the inside surface, there was a five-eighths-inch band of a milky white material that appeared to be ceramic. Whereas the metallic surface was slightly rough—uniformly pitted—the ceramic surface was smooth and fluid.

  When we’d excavated the majority of the hangar-facing surface, it moved.

  “Shit!” Rick and Clara, the two tallest of us, were standing on boxes to scrape the dirt from around the upper frame of the gate. It was Rick who’d cursed and leaned forward, both hands pushing against the gate.

  “It moved,” said Clara.

  I studied the excavation. “On its own? Or did it come loose and want to tilt forward?”

  Rick suddenly looked like he wanted to let go. “Who knows?”

  “Look,” I said, “if it tilts forward, it’s just going to run into the other side of your cut in the roof. There’s not enough clearance for it to fall all the way. Let go.”

  Rick eased off the gate. It didn’t move. I stepped through it, took the handle of my shovel, and pushed against the top. It tilted slightly and the top moved perhaps five inches before it stopped.

  Clara said, “It’s catching on the sides.” She pointed up where the corners of the frame were digging into the side of the tunnel.

  It felt massive, the density of stone, if not metal.

  “But does it still work?” said Clara.

  The pit of my stomach hurt. “Are we sure there aren’t any other attachments? Why don’t we check again, now that it’s tilted?”

  We probed the perimeter again, with knife blades and stiff wires, looking for cables or rods or anchor bolts—anything connecting the gate to something else, but again, we didn’t find anything.

  I closed my eyes and exhaled. When I opened them I said, “I wonder what would happen if we moved it?”

  Clara played the pessimist. “It may not matter. We may have already broken it by digging around it. And suppose it is still working? Moving it may not cause it to open in a different place. We may drag it all over the place only to find those same people waiting when we turn it back on.”

  Marie didn’t help. “If there’s one parallel earth, there are probably many. Moving the gate may cause it to open on a different world than ours. Maybe one that didn’t develop life at all—or one where the K-T impact event broke the earth into pieces and there’s nothing but vacuum on the other side of the gate.”

  Rick and Joey looked grimmer with each sentence.

  I swallowed, wondering if I’d already doomed us to the wildside for the rest of our lives. “For better or worse, it’s already moved. What do we have to lose by trying?”

  The question became could we move it.

  It was massive—just how massive we couldn’t tell without knowing what it was made of or weighing it. Also, it was four feet wider and almost three feet taller than the interior dimensions of the tunnel. And our tractor, the mechanical device that might have the muscle necessary to move the device, was missing its front wheels and radiator.

  “I think I can make the tractor work,” I said. “If I can, how would we get the gate out of here?”

  “Pity we can’t disassemble it,” Joey said. “Give me the measuring tape.”

  I handed it to him.

  “You figure out the tractor, we’ll figure out the excavation—okay?”

  I remembered the day we built the hangar and smiled. “Okay.”

  The tractor would probably run, as is, for about five minutes before it seized up forever. The gate had cut cleanly through the coolant
hoses running from the radiator to the engine as well as chopped the fan blade off its pulley. I wondered what they made of the pieces of tractor radiator over on the tame side.

  I cut a hole in the side of a five-gallon plastic bucket, flush with the bottom, and ran a piece of garden hose from the hole to the radiator hose that ran to the water pump. The hoses didn’t match—the radiator hose was much bigger, but we wrapped rags around the brass end of the garden hose and clamped it down with a hose clamp from the Maule’s spare parts bin. We put screws right through the bottom of the bucket and into the sheet metal bonnet of the tractor.

  “It’ll leak,” said Marie.

  “Not as bad as the hose.”

  We filled four empty five-gallon fuel canisters with water from the stream. Clara used Impossible to transport them, two at a time, hanging them off the sides of the saddle. Back at the tunnel, we hung them off the sides of the tractor on improvised wire hooks.

  “What are we going to do about the front wheels?” Marie and I crouched beside the grounded front end of the tractor and stared at the place where its undercarriage ground into the dirt floor. The steering linkage and framing pieces ran under the engine and ended, flush with the rest of the missing metal.

  “Let’s put some plywood under it and just let it slide.”

  “How will we steer?”

  “Steering is for people who know where they’re going.”

  While Marie and I were fiddling with the tractor, the other three were digging out the lower sides of the tunnel, widening it by the gate and also digging a shallow ramp from the lower edge of the gate’s frame up to floor level.

  “What about the top?” Marie asked.

  We had one full-size spade and two folding survival shovels. Joey was scooping dirt with a coffee can and flinging it past the gate, into the dead end of the tunnel. He stopped and wiped sweat off his face with the back of his hand. “We’ll pull the bottom until it’s flat. That way we just have to widen the bottom part of the tunnel. Well—we have to make more room for that.“ He pointed at the arm of the gate with the switch. “It’ll stand up about two feet when it’s flat and we’ll need to make room for it. Wouldn’t want to accidentally turn it on.”