theoretical physics of wormholes. No one knew just what they had done, because the biggest field had appeared in the middle of the labs and many of the Ph. D. s and their pale, spectacled grad assistants had vanished. At the same time, over six hundred other known spots had flared up all over the globe. Some were no larger than campfires, others had swallowed a city block. There were more of them in California and under the ocean on the shelf just off the Pacific coast than elsewhere, but there were enough around to let everybody get to one who wanted to. The first brave adventurers that had stepped through these rips to Tau Ceti Minor and returned to tell of the wonders they had seen.
They had pictures, too. Digitals movies that played on every house on the net. Tau Ceti Minor was a dream world. Green and lush, its surface was three-fourths land and only one-fourth sea. Once the population learned that a fresh new planet with virgin forests and oceans and without pollution was on the other side, people had flooded into the rips in droves. The fleeing population brought on a worldwide depression, which only served to accelerate the flow of humanity out of their old worn-out world and through the rips in space to the new one.
“I remember when they all switched around on everybody,” said Steve with a wheezy snort of laughter. “It was right after Christmas in December when the solar flares started in both systems and I remember that’s when all the weird shit started, like the people seeing the northern lights all the way down to New Mexico. Remember that?”
“Sure I remember. Messed everyone up, because they were all with their families on one side or the other, then the door slammed shut. I’ve never seen my parents since.”
“My folks were gone too. I was a kid then,” he said, ignoring my look which said: And you aren’t now?
“The people stopped coming out of the fields. People still went in, and disappeared, but they never came back out. I remember thinking that Santa Claus had taken back his gift.”
After that, with the earth population cut nearly in half, the world rapidly declined and many areas fell into anarchy. Few nations still stood as organized powers. Dictatorships and petty civil wars flourished. For years the steady, silent exodus continued. Like lemmings leaping from a cliff into the unknown, like forest creatures running from flames, the people continued to step into the shimmering fields and vanish. The bleeding never stopped, and soon the Earth had slipped into a new age. I suppose they would someday call this a dark age.
“This last year has been a weird time,” Steve said, tracing the outline of a face on the dusty store window. “Evil things have happened that nobody’s ever going to know about later. I think it’s kind of fun, it feels dangerous. ”
He left and I let go a breath of disgust. I felt an involuntary shudder go down my spine, and tried to control it. I grabbed an ugly green ottoman out of the nearest family room display and pulled it up to the window. There was a bullet hole through the cushion and as I watched an ant crawled out of it, feelers waving. I flicked the ant away and sat on it. A few minutes later the trash rattled and crunched as Raymond walked up to join me at the window. He leaned up against the glass.
“You thinking about steppin’ out?” he asked me. I glanced at him but he wasn’t looking at me, he was staring out at the fields and the dead salesman. “Sure is weird shit, ain’t it?” he added.
I noticed his 12-gauge was slung over his back, so I casually holstered my gun before speaking. “I think it’s going to go all purple tonight.”
He nodded, but didn’t repeat his first question. We watched as twilight set in and the flaming colors darkened and deepened into their cooler, more ominous night hues. In the violet glow the saleman looked less like a lump and more like a corpse, perhaps one that would animate somehow.
“Looks like he’s going to stand up and come for us, huh?” Ray asked me. The unwelcome image of Kevin Simpson’s corpse standing up and staggering toward the furniture store to exact his revenge on us sprang into my mind. His eyes would be two bloodshot orbs staring from the gray-brown dust that caked his face. I could see him dismembering each of the One-Way gang, including myself, while Beth cried for us all.
“Why did you do it?” I asked, suddenly wanting to know. Raymond had been the one to finally squeeze the trigger on his shotgun and ventilate the back of Kevin Simpson’s head. “Why did you kill him?”
“I shoved the gun in his mouth and all, but that was just part of the bit. Just to scare him, you know? After that though, it started gettin’ bad. Kyle… those pliers, man,” he looked down, shaking his head. His hand was a fist against the cool glass. “You don’t know, ‘cause you checked out early. It was all a waste.”
“He didn’t know anything?”
“Kyle kept sayin’ he did, kept sayin’ that he was holding out, but no, he didn’t know shit. Everything he owned was in that Beamer we trashed.”
“So you killed him.” Raymond gave a slow nod, his lower lip jutting out a bit and his eyes locked on Simpson’s body outside. The winds had picked up a bit and the dust was blowing heavy, coming in off highway 99. The highway had once been known as the Blowdirt, back in the 1920’s before irrigation had really gotten going. Back then, this section of California’s Central Valley had been a big windy dust bowl, and 99 had high mounds of dirt on both sides of it. Every car had left a billowing cloud of dust behind it, and the locals had called the highway the Blowdirt. Now the people were mostly gone, but the dust was back and the old name had come back with it.
“Kyle was pissed, wasn’t he?” I asked, breaking the silence.
“Tough,” snorted Raymond. “That really breaks me up, you know. I feel for him.”
I thought about my family on the other side. I wondered what they were doing on the new planet, how they were making out. I had always been afraid that if I stepped through one of the rips I would end up in some other place, some dead end that I couldn’t get back out of. I had always hoped that the fields would start working both ways again, that somehow I might have a chance to rejoin my family, without having to face the terrible unknown.
“Ain’t never killed a man before,” muttered Raymond. He gnawed on his fist now, rubbing his knuckles against his teeth. “Not like that. I guess it was a mercy-killing. You know, like if you found a run-over beagle in the road and it was all twisted up. You’d kill it maybe, to stop it from suffering.”
I nodded and got up off the ottoman.
“I’m going to bed.” Raymond didn’t say anything. He just kept staring out at the shimmering lights-they had gone purple now in the darkness, as I had predicted-staring at the man he had killed. I left him there and went back to my “room” an area formed out of fake walls and office dividers and filled with new luxurious furniture. Beth was there, folding down the sheets on her bed. She had stopped crying, but she looked at me reproachfully when I walked in. I didn’t feel like talking to her, so I went back out front, pushed a pile of dusty clothes off a loveseat and stretched out on the flowery patterned fabric. Eventually I fell asleep.
When I woke up it was still dark. I must have heard something and awakened automatically. Groping for my revolver, I wiped my mouth and got up, blinking. I walked to the front of the store and saw someone was out there standing over the body, doing something. I moved quickly to the window, ready to sound the alarm if it was another gang, or maybe some friend of Mr. Simpson’s who’d come calling.
I squinted and recognized the outline of a shotgun slung over the figure’s back. It was Ray. I rushed out of the store and into the cool night air, doing the hundred yard dash across the parking lot. I was afraid that Ray would step out on me. So many people had, and for some reason I didn’t want him to go without saying something to him.
“What’s wrong, Ray?” I asked, panting a bit from my run across the parking lot. He didn’t answer. I noticed that the salesman was much farther into the field than he had been before. He had been rolled or pushed up almost to the point that he was sure to vanish into the ripper. I realized that Ray had done it, that he was trying to get the body into the fields for some reason, but he hadn’t pushed him quite far enough and couldn’t go in any further himself without risking getting snatched up by a flare.
Our One-Way sign was there to stop people from getting too close as well as to mark the rip as ours. Even though the fields generally stayed back a few feet from where the sign was, there was an occasional flare or ripple that could reach out and suck up someone standing too close. Without getting too close, Ray was trying to drag the man back by his heels, and first got nothing but his shoes. Then he was tugging on the dead man’s feet, his hands slipping on the socks. He looked like a man trying to retrieve something from the edge of a bonfire without getting burned. He became more daring and grabbed his ankles, giving a mighty heave that brought the body a foot or so closer.
“What are you doing, man?” I asked quietly.
“He’s gonna make it,” Ray grunted at me.
“What?”
