Staring down at the choppy gray Atlantic waters, Charlie sighed. “What are we supposed to be looking for again?”
“Storms in the sky that shouldn’t be there.”
Glancing up at the oppressive cloud cover, he shook his head. “And how are we supposed to tell if a storm shouldn’t be there or not?”
The man beside him shook his head. “Hell if I know. You can’t believe half the things they say on television these days. They’re claiming Superman is real.”
“Why do you think they have us looking out for weird storms?”
“Who cares? They only have us looking for the next four hours, so just keep an eye out for anything strange.”
The crack of thunder in the distance was sudden but not unexpected. It had been looking like it would rain all day.
“So what would you call strange then?”
Staring out at the sea, the man beside him ignored his question. “When did the fog roll in?”
There was a sudden smell of ozone, and both men instinctively stepped back from the rail.
The shadowy shape rising from the water was a surprise, and both men took another step back as it loomed above them for a moment before retreating back into the water.
Charlie stared at the retreating figure.
“I guess I’d call that weird.”
Seeing the Loch Ness monster in the middle of the Atlantic had to qualify by anyone’s definition of the word.
*********
“We’re getting the first reports in from Navy ships in the Atlantic and from the coast guard,” one of the Analysts announced. “And we have a problem. They’re reporting rifts at sea level. There has been at least one sighting of a plesiosaur.”
Dr. Ledderman scowled. “The rifts haven’t just widened horizontally then…they are appearing at different elevations.”
Lois said, “You need to warn people…these things are invisible.”
The thought of thousands of people driving into rifts and never coming back was horrifying. Worse, it might be possible to walk into your kitchen from the living room and suddenly find yourself somewhere else.
“Isn’t there anything we can do?” one of the generals said? “Run the damn thing in reverse or something?”
“Even if we could, it’s damaged now and would take weeks to repair,” Doctor Ledderman said. “And it wouldn’t stop the generators in the other universes from running.”
Lois murmured into her microphone. “The rifts are going to be appearing lower. You need to watch out for things on the ground.”
Things had gone from bad to worse. As long as the rifts remained in the sky it was likely that most places would remain unaffected, unless a rift to somewhere like the Denver rift was opened.
Doctor Ledderman said, “The good news is that it looks like the dispersal isn’t going to be as wide as we thought horizontally. The new rifts are wider apart and more dispersed once they leave the original pattern.”
“So there won’t be a rift every five feet on the ground?” Lois asked. If there were, it would mean the end of civilization as half the world’s populace ended up somewhere else.
“Hopefully the main activity will still be at the same level,” Doctor Ledderman said.
“You think we’ll still see the same universes we saw before?” one of the Generals asked.
“The aftershock Ms. Lane experience led Mr. Kent back to his same universe. That may be just an effect of the same rift reopening. However, I’m hoping that the reason we saw this was that the points of intersection between universes are the same.”
“Shouldn’t they change when the earth moves through the galaxy?” The younger man looked up at Doctor Ledderman. “We’re already thousands of miles from where we were…”
“We’re moving more than eleven million miles a day on a galactic scale,” Doctor Ledderman said. “All I can think is that gravity is having an effect, dragging the rifts along behind the different alternate earths. Why the rifts seem to be stationary with respect to the earth’s core I don’t know.”
“We won’t know if we’re seeing the same universes until the storms hit Delaware,” Lois said. “Clark can look through and see if it’s still his universe, if there’s time.”
“If it is, then Denver’s in trouble.”
“We’d better hope the universes continue to match up from the last time,” Dr. Ledderman said. “If they don’t, there’s no way of telling which city is going to be hit with poison gas until it’s already too late.”
********
“It’s not something I want to discuss right now,” he said irritably into his cell phone. The other passengers were glancing at him covertly and he was uncomfortably aware that he was the only person in this section of the train on the telephone. “I deserve a chance to see my daughters before the end of the year.”
Divorce was an ugly thing when it was only between two consenting adults, but when you brought children to the mix it was abhorrent, especially when you had one parent trying to use custody as a weapon against the other.
“If I have to call my lawyer again about his, you’re going to regret it!” he said finally.
He closed his telephone with a snap. When it buzzed again he glanced at the screen and pushed a button. Arguing over this wasn’t going to do either of them any good until they could calm down.
The few other passengers on this section of the train looked away quickly. At least the train was sparsely populated at this time of the day. He preferred traveling during off peak hours to avoid the crush.
In this case it meant there were fewer witnesses to his argument with his wife, which was a further bonus.
He heard the pattering of little feet as the door to the section in front of them opened. A little girl, barely school age came skipping through and behind her he could see a harried looking mother trying to carry a toddler in one arm and pulling a stroller with a baby in the other.
“Slow down!” the woman said irritably.
He stood to help her when suddenly everything went white.
The front of the cabin was gone and the little girl was falling backwards. He lunged forward and grabbed her by the arm, pulling her forward into his arms.
It was then that he saw that there was no sign of the track. Instead of the rolling hills of the Philadelphia line, there was only death, a dry riverbed with a jungle rising on both sides.
He grabbed the little girl and wrapped his body around hers. When the train car finally slid to a stop, it was immediately slammed into from behind and the two of them went flying through the air.
Behind them, without a track to stand on, the train cars began to slam together and back further still, in another world the train began to derail.
All of this happened as a mother stared in horror at the suddenly missing train car that had cut the train in two.
*************
“There is a train derailment in Philadelphia,” Lois said grimly. “Witnesses say it cut the train in half.”
“Which line?” Clark’s voice was coming through clearly. Maybe it was going to be worth the fourteen dollars a minute.
“It parallels I-95,” Lois said. “About three miles from the southern Philadelphia border.”
“That’ll do,” he said grimly.
Lois glanced around her at the men and women who finally seemed united in something other than political cynicism. Most of them had joined the military because they believed that there was something precious about America, something that could only be protected by blood and sweat and tears.
Politics and grim reality had worn that idealism off most of them, but it was still there at their core. There was an energy to them now, a clarity of purpose that wasn’t there before.
This wasn’t some politically confused war in a distant country. This wasn’t a situation where there were a thousand confusing shades of gray. This at last was clear cut.
The country was in eminent danger and they were out to fight it. In the end, the entire world was at risk.
Lois only hoped they made it through.
**************
Consciousness returned unexpectedly.
He was surprised to wake up. He should have been killed by being thrown off the train or crushed by the train car being shoved from behind by the weight of thousands of tons of metal coming from behind. Instead he’d been thrown to the side and the oncoming train had twisted off in another direction.
Moving cautiously, he started to stretch out. He grimaced in pain. His back protested his move sharply, and he hoped that he hadn’t done anything permanently damaging.
The little girl in his arms groaned, and he was grateful that she was still alive.
He forced himself to stretch out, and he wondered how long it would take the ambulances to arrive. The smartest thing to do would be to lie here and wait for help.
The little girl in his arms began to cry and he sighed.
“It’s going to be all right,” he said. “My name is Ben, and I’m a teacher.”
At her expression he said, “I teach people about bugs.”
Best to keep things simple. As she smiled shyly up at him, he knew he’d made the right choice. Children trusted teachers, and at this age they still liked bugs. She was a little young to understand about college tenure and marital problems and financial stress.
If it hadn’t been for the divorce, he’d have been driving to work instead of stuck out in the middle of nowhere.
He stared up at the canyon walls. He wasn’t sure how they’d veered off the track and onto a dry riverbed, but he knew that this was a major disaster. There were going to be plenty of lawsuits over this, even if no one had actually been killed. If anyone actually had been killed it would be worse.
When he didn’t hear anyone coming for him, he carefully rolled onto his back, ignoring the bite of the gravel, scrabbling to get a foothold in the loose earth underneath.
Three cars were piled on top of each other, with several more stretched out behind. They’d been in the rear third of the train, and the front two thirds were nowhere in sights.
Grabbing the little girl’s hand, he muttered, “Let’s go find your mommy.”
“The trees look funny,” the little girl said, staring wide eyed at the scene around them.
“I don’t know what happened to them,” he said. “But the sooner we get out of here the better I’ll feel.”
As they walked hand in hand through the gravel, he noticed that there didn’t seem to be any power lines or telephone poles. He couldn’t hear any sounds of traffic and there didn’t seem to be any sounds of human existence at all, except for the sounds of people shouting from further back along the line.
The first three cars were piled on top of each other, and several cars behind that were turned on their sides. As they came to the first car that was upright, he saw a small group of people standing outside the train.
“What happened?” A heavyset man was the first to speak as he saw them.
As they came around the corner, he could see that three other passengers were helping people crawl through the door of the car ahead of them.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Some kind of explosion or something. Ripped the car I was in in half.”
“You look ok,” the man said skeptically.
He shrugged. “I don’t know what happened. One moment the front of the train was there, the next it was gone.”
“We’ve got injured!” someone shouted.
The group in front of him didn’t look particularly athletic. He sighed and turned to the girl. “There are people hurt inside there. I have to help them.”
Glancing up at a matronly looking woman, he said, “Could you keep an eye on her?”
“This your kid?” the heavyset man asked; apparently the woman was his wife.
“No. We’re looking for her mother.” He stared at the man for a moment. “Are you going to help?”
The man nodded after a moment and gestured toward his wife.
The little girl’s hand tightened in his and he said, “It’ll be all right. I’ll check on you in a little while.”
“I can’t get any reception,” he heard the teenager complain behind him.
He reached for his own telephone, only to discover that he’d lost it in the crash. At the expressions on the faces of several of the others he grimaced.
Great. They’d apparently crashed in a dead zone.
He could only hope that wasn’t prophetic.
***********
It took Clark longer to find the train than he would have thought, because only two cars were in view. One of them was bisected in two, and by squinting he could see that it was stuck partially inside the portal with the majority of the car being on the other side and invisible to him.
The call had apparently come from the portion of the train which had passed through before the rift had formed.
He was going to have to go through and assess the injuries.
“I’m going to need emergency teams here,” he murmured into his headset. “I can’t even begin to assess the casualties yet, and the majority of it is on the other side. I’m going to be out of contact while I go across to assess the situation.”
“Don’t get stuck on the other side,” Lois said faintly.
He frowned. Reception was poor here. Some sort of interference from the rift?
“I’ll do my best,” he said.
***********
He was sweaty and exhausted, but they were making good time. As he helped more and more people get free from the compartments ahead, more and more people turned to help him. They’d formed a line, passing the injured carefully from person to person.
It was strange how easily they all slipped into it, a clarity of purpose that stripped them of differences, white or black, Democrat or Republican, Arab or Jew. They were united in their need to help each other.
For these few moments all they saw of each other was someone in need.
He’d found two nurses and a doctor on board, as well as a paramedic. The paramedic was in the front, assessing injuries and checking to see which passengers couldn’t be moved. Under ordinary circumstances, they’d have been left until help was to come, but it wasn’t at all clear that help was coming.
It had been almost an hour and no one had come yet, and out of two hundred people, not one had been able to get any sort of reception at all.
One teenager had walked to the back of the train and reported seeing the rear car bisected, just as the front car was.
As he emerged into the sunlight, he blinked as the heavyset man approached him. “There’s movement on the ridge,” he said, glancing nervously up the sides of the canyon.
He could see three of the younger teenagers crawling up the steep sides of the canyon heading for the crest of the ridge. Instinct made his stomach knot. Something wasn’t right about this situation.
“Have you heard any animal sounds at all?”
“No birds, no familiar insect noises…it’s been quiet except for the sound of the wind.”
“Then…”
He didn’t get a chance to continue as the boys started screaming and sliding down the slope.
What was following them was impossible, something out of a nightmare. A swarm of yellow and brown insects far larger than anything he’d ever seen in nature.
“Everybody needs to get in the car,” he screamed.
Working as an etymologist didn’t pay the kind of salary his wife had liked, but it did let him recognize the species that was coming.
Japanese giant hornets…three inches long and capable of injecting poisons so powerful they could melt human tissue. They were vicious and deadly and known to kill between twenty and forty people a year in Japan.
It didn’t make sense. They didn’t exist in this part of the world, and certainly not in such numbers.
The boys were running as quickly as they could, but it was apparent that it wasn’t going to be quick enough.
He grabbed the little girl and shoved her into the train car. There was a stampede on both entrances, and at least it looked like people were going to be able to fit.
The swarm descended on the boys like a biblical plague, but a moment before it hit them a sudden breeze arose. It struck with the power of a fist and the boys were visibly staggered, but the swarm was dispersed behind them.
The red and blue figure floating above them was a sudden shock, and he felt his world suddenly shifting on its axis. A lifetime of devotion to science and biology hadn’t prepared him for the existence of Superman.
*********
“We’re going to have to move quickly,” Superman said. “The rift is closing gradually, and there will come a point where it will be too small for anyone to pass through. At that point you’ll be stuck here for at least three days.”
Glancing at the ridge and knowing what was on the other side, he noticed several of the other passengers reaching the same conclusion.
“I need everyone to hold on and keep their hands and feet away from the sides of the car.” he said.
A moment later the door shut behind him.
Everyone looked at each other and then almost as a group decision huddled together in the center of the aisle. By this point the car was full, with some unhappy people forced to sit on the aisle seats while others huddled in the middle.
No one was prepared for the jolt as the train began to move backwards.
“He’s pushing the whole train,” someone muttered in awe.
Shaking his head, he said, “He’s pulling it.”
These cars hadn’t upended, and there were still passengers in several of the cars behind them. There hadn’t been time to transfer them all to just two or three cars.
Pulling them was the only thing that made sense, though the sheer power that it would have taken to pull thousands of tons of weight over gravel and sand was mind boggling.
It wasn’t until the first telephone began to ring that people realized that it was over. First one ring, and then another and then another again. It seemed as though the entire car was filled with the sound of ringing telephones and for the first time it wasn’t the sound of annoyance or just the noise pollution of daily life.
It was the ringing bells of victory.
*********
“He went back in with one of the nurses and a doctor,” the voice on the other end of the line said.
“May I ask who’s speaking?” Lois asked, struggling to keep her voice calm. They were already getting reports from other parts of the country and he was spending too long on this. If he spent too much time he was going to end up trapped in some sort of hellish other world and the people of Denver were going to be lost.
“Professor Benjamin Hanover,” the voice said. “I work with bugs.”
The man’s voice had a sense of gentle irony to it.
“There he is! It looks like that’s going to be the last batch. Oh….that was close.”
“What?” Lois asked.
“He just lost half his cape.”
Lois closed her eyes and tried to keep her teeth from grinding. Even he wouldn’t survive being cut in half, or having part of him in one world and another part on the other.
If he kept taking risks like that she was going to kill him.
