He selected the chapter and erased it—and wow, there were some blood, sweat, and tears down the drain. So okay, that was done and it should be done. He’d rewrite it with a more bearable scenario.
The blank page confronted him, and he told himself that he actually preferred blank pages.
Bullshit, this was awful, killing his work like this. But he had to, he could not see his people suffer this much.
So he started a new chapter. Then he stopped. He didn’t feel like just plunging into it like this, and he was sick of using the laptop, which he closed. Writing on the computer was an addiction, and he already had too damn many of those, drinking the way he did and sneaking cigars, and wanting to do a lot more than that.
He put his beloved old Corona back in her place of honor. Now, this was a writer’s tool. She clattered like an old freight train, churning out the words, engraving every mistake in stone. Everything he had done—everything real—had been done on this fine old typewriter. Early days, he would lie in bed writing through the night on yellow pads, then transcribe them onto her in the morning. Civilized way to work.
As he rolled in a sheet of paper, he noticed that the laptop hadn’t gone off as he closed it. A defect due to the short, no doubt.
Intending to shut it down manually, he opened the clamshell.
There were words. He scrolled down. It was all there, right up to-here. He typed. These words appeared on the page. He erased them. As he did so, they reappeared. He did it faster, but the faster he worked, the faster they came back.
Okay, this appeared to be insanity at work here. This could not be. He erased the chapter again.
The process sort of made the words bounce, then they were back. He erased it again, then yet again and again, until erasure did nothing at all. Not even a flicker.
All right, this was crazy. This was not a possible thing.
He closed 2012. Time to go nuclear. On his computer, he had a program called Zztz, which would destroy any file completely. It used the same sophisticated techniques approved by the Defense Department for the destruction of classified files.
He opened Zztz and dragged the entire 2012 file into it.
“Neutron bomb,” he muttered, setting Zztz to Defcon 12, its ultimate destruction level.
So, he’d write another novel, big deal. Late or not, he’d come up with something.
Even as he watched Zztz work, the file came back. He destroyed it again. It came back again.
There was no level in the program higher than Defcon 12. But there was one other way to go about this. He went into the DOS prompt and typed “erase *.*”
By the time he was back in Windows, it had all returned.
He stared at the screen. This was proof of something, because if you can’t make the erase function on your computer work, things are crazy.
“Brooke,” he called.
From their kitchen, “Yeah!”
“Could you come up to my office for a second. It’s important.”
“Wiley, I’ve got a million balls in the air.”
“Brooke, please!”
“In a minute!”
He found himself shaking, feeling the clammy coldness of fever or fear. Because this was proof, right here staring at him, that all these nightmares and all this craziness had something real about it. It was exactly as real as he had feared.
He jumped up and got out of the office like the place was on fire. He ran downstairs and threw his arms around Brooke. He kissed her forehead, her lips, her neck.
“Hey! I’m cuttin’ up a stew, here, fella.”
“Never leave me, for the love of God, never leave me!”
He took her in his arms, and this time he kissed her hard, pushing her head back, pulling her body to his until she was collapsed against him, her breasts compressed against his chest, their genitals pressing through their clothes.
When he let her go, her eyes were soft with pleasure. “We’re gonna have a long night, I hope.”
“I’m gonna break you in half, you gorgeous thing.” Then all of his fear surfaced, and he held onto her as he might to a life preserver in the wild ocean. “I love you with all my soul,” he whispered, his voice hushed in his truth.
Probably she didn’t quite understand what had inspired this, but she didn’t need to, the intensity and the honesty were there. She stroked his head, and her hand against his advancing baldness felt as soft as the wings of a butterfly. He remembered the yellow porch lights of his boyhood, and the moths there, their fluttering the only sound in the quiet of a summer night.
Thunder rumbled, long and low. It was accompanied by a distant flicker of lightning—and he reacted with a surge of terror so great that he all but pissed himself. He raced into the living room, cutting off lights as he went. The sky was alive with flickering.
He went out onto the porch, looked up into roiling high canyons of madly flickering clouds. And then at his kids running around in the eerie light.
“Kids, come inside, please.”
“Aw, Dad.”
“It’s lightning, it’s dangerous.”
They continued to play.
“What’s going on?” Brooke asked.
“Look at the sky!”
“Yeah, so what?”
“You don’t understand!”
“Honey, it’s miles away, you can hardly even hear it. Let them play.”
“No, please, for me. Because I’m so scared for them, Brooke. I am scared for my kids and you need to help me.”
“I think Crutchfield needs to help you.”
“Okay, look, if you would deign to come upstairs for just a few minutes, I can prove to you that something is wrong around here. Very wrong.”
She followed him.
“Okay, now. I erased Chapter 7 of my book just now. And it reappeared. Then I erased the entire book. And it reappeared.”
“You erased your book?”
“Absolutely. From the DOS prompt. Absolute erasure.”
“Goddamn it, we need that money.”
“We need—I don’t know what we need, here, exactly, but I do know that these people on the other side, they’re having a hell of a bad time, and if I can erase this and rewrite it, maybe things will get better for them, and maybe for us, too, because there is a nightmare over there, and it is about to invade us, too.”
She sat down at his desk. “Oh, this is nonsense. Here’s your book right here.”
“Erase it.”
“I will not!”
“Okay, then, watch this—” He moved in front of her—and she grabbed his wrist. Her grip was strong, shockingly so.
“You will not, Wiley Dale. You will finish this and turn it in or you will lose me and your children.”
“Excuse me?”
“How much self-indulgent bull crap can one woman take? Answer me that? Because I am personally at the end of my tether with you. I can’t handle this anymore. How dare you bring me up here and terrorize me playing games like this. We could lose everything! End up on the street! I’m sick of being the wife of the rich writer who is actually a poor bastard.”
“Never tell anybody I’m broke.”
“Then write a book that sells and you won’t be. Put food on the table, God damn you!”
