Dropping her cell phone was just another indignity in the wake of a terrible day. Kristin stared at the cracked screen and grimaced. She didn’t have the money to replace it now, not with casting calls being so slim and prices going up.
Worse, this wasn’t even her stop. She’d been so distracted trying to get in touch with her boss that she’d stepped off one stop too early.
It had been just one thing after another. Her alarm hadn’t woken her and she’d been late for her first casting call. Her second and third hadn’t been any better, and if she didn’t get to work she wasn’t going to be able to make her half of the rent this month.
To top it all off, she was having a bad hair day. It wasn’t all that humid, but for some reason their seemed to be a lot of static electricity in the air.
As she shoved the cell phone into her pocket, Kristin noticed that the subway station was deserted. It wasn’t the busy portion of the day, but she’d never seen a deserted station at this time of day.
It was an eerie feeling, and years of living as a city dweller made her instinctively take a step back.
Eerily, the lights flickered, and she grimaced. If she’d been watching a horror movie, she’d have been yelling for the heroine to get out. Standing alone in an abandoned subway station wasn’t the act of a smart woman.
Still…the train was due in less than five minutes, and once she got on there would surely be other people.
Click, clack.
The sound echoed from the darkened expanse of the subway tunnel and Kristen took another step back. She wasn’t alone, and if there was some crazy homeless guy waiting to jump out at her she wanted to be ready.
Click, clack.
The sound was coming from the other end of the tunnel, much closer to her and Kristen froze. She began to slowly back up toward the turnstiles. There should have been attendants there, but recent modernization efforts to automate the system had left the place deserted.
Click, clack, click, clack.
The footsteps behind her were moving faster and faster and coming closer and closer. Kristin glanced behind her and screamed as she saw something scaled with huge teeth. She shoved her way through the turnstile and ran up the stairs.
The sounds of footsteps behind her had stopped, but Kristin didn’t stop running. She screamed again and moved up the stairs three steps at a time.
As she came up onto the street, she was shocked to see that the street was almost deserted. It was like some sort of post apocalyptic nightmare, and the few people who were on the street looked as shocked and confused as she did.
She glanced back into the darkness of the subway platform and decided that discretion was the better part of valor. She began walking quickly down the street until she finally met up with a group of three women who were walking slowly.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
Normally accosting another New Yorker was considered rude, but these women looked concerned.
“I don’t know. The streets just started clearing out a half hour ago and nobody said anything.”
“Did anybody see anything on television?”
The first woman lifted her head slightly and said, “I don’t watch television.”
It sounded like a point of pride with her. Kristen glanced at the other two who shook their heads.
Kristen watched television but she’d been busy.
Staggering toward them, a bearded man dressed in multiple coats and staring fixedly said, “It’s the end of the world.”
All four women took an unconscious step back. Scaled things with teeth were scary, but aggressive homeless people were a danger they were all familiar with.
“It’s all coming apart,” he said. “What’s real…unreal…”
He took another step toward them and vanished.
Kristen stared at the spot where the man had been, and then she blinked. She glanced quickly at the other women, who looked just as confused as she did.
A moment later the man staggered backward, his face fearful.
“Run,” he said, before turning and doing exactly that.
Kristen’s stomach knotted, and she instinctively took a step around the place the man had vanished. It was lucky that she did, because a moment later a huge reptilian head emerged and snapped at her.
For the first time Kristen was glad that her heels had snapped off earlier in the day, because she’d brought her sneakers to work with her. She screamed as she ran, glancing back to see that the head was apparently too large to fit through whatever entrance to hell it was coming through.
She felt herself yanked to a stop. She screamed again and then stared in horror as she realized that her arm was missing. It felt wet, and at first she thought it was with blood. As she fell back her arm reappeared, and she realized that it had simply vanished like the hobo had.
She froze as she realized that there could be invisible portals anywhere, that with a single step she could be in the home of those scaly things.
When she heard the rumble of a vehicle approaching, she felt a sudden burst of hope. As the vehicle rounded the corner she saw that it was a SWAT van. She waved frantically and the van slowed.
The driver stared at her. “You need to get off the street, miss. It’s not safe.”
“There’s a thing right here,” she said, pointing at the place her arm had vanished. “And another thing back down the street.
The man nodded and spoke into a microphone on his shoulders.
Several men filed out of the back of the van cautiously and they approached the location she’d indicated. Several of them snapped out long retractable canes, like Kristin had seen used by the blind and they began to check the area methodically, using the canes to test the size and shape of the invisible thing.
They began spraying a careful circle around the thing, along with a cryptic set of numbers.
“I don’t think we’ll have much of a problem with this one,” one of the men said. “It’s only a two footer, elevation five feet. If it was on the street it would have been nasty, but…”
“You know where there’s another one?” the leader asked, ignoring the trooper.
Kristen nodded. “There was something trying to get through. I think it was too big.”
“What kind of something?”
“It was scaly and had a lot of teeth,” she said. “Like something out of Jurassic Park.”
“You saw a dinosaur?”
“There were two smaller ones in the subway tunnel.”
“Crap,” one of the men said. “Cleanup is going to be…”
The leader gestured and the men quieted down. “We’ll deal with one thing at a time. First we’ll deal with the things on the street, then we’ll worry about the subway.”
The men began to file into the back of the van.
“If you’ll ride in the front, you can show us where this other portal was,” the leader said.
Kristin hesitated.
“These things are appearing inside people’s houses,” the man said. “There’s not going to be any place safe for at least another half hour.”
“It goes away in half an hour?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. No less than that.”
Given that the choice was between getting caught by more of those scaly things or riding in an armored truck along with a group of men with guns, Kristin nodded.
Slipping into the passenger’s side, Kristin was startled as the man said, “We’re going to be going pretty slow. We’ve already lost two vans to microportals like the one you had your arm stuck in.”
At her expression he said, “From one direction they don’t even exist. From the other…it’s like hitting an immovable ring. It’ll ruin your transmission. They occur at head level too, to watch your head.”
As they turned down another side street, she saw what he means. Three cars were wrecked and burning. And two had large dents in their sides.
“It’s playing holy hell with ambulance services and police. If this lasts very long, a lot of people are going to start dying.”
“It’s not this way,” Kristin said.
“We have a detour to make,” he said. A moment later they stopped beside one of the burning cars and the men jumped out. They checked the location and quickly circled the area with red spray paint.
They jumped back inside and a few moments later they were back on the road. When they turned down a road which already had circles sprayed, he speeded up, carefully avoiding the boundaries of the circles of paint.
“We’d run out of barricades if we tried to use them,” the leader said. “Once an area is cleared we can move a little quicker.”
“How did you know there was anything back there?” she asked, gesturing in the direction of the last circle they’d left.
“We’ve got help,” he said, gesturing toward the roof of the vehicle.
“What?” she asked. “Who?”
As they turned the corner and headed for the street she’d been on, she gasped and stared.
Something huge was moving over them. It loomed, like a nightmare from the movies. She’d avoided dinosaur movies as a child because they’d scared her too badly, but this was one even she would recognize.
Apparently the smaller brother of the earlier monster had managed to squeeze through the gate.
Yet it was being pushed backward by an even more familiar figure floating in the air over the street. He was pushing it back, and for all its massive power it wasn’t making any headway.
“Him,” the man beside her said grinning.
Kristin couldn’t stop staring. For once her unflappability as a New Yorker deserted her and she found herself looking up with her mouth open, as openly as any gawking tourist.
Slowly, her mouth twitched into a grin. For the first time this morning, Kristin felt a sense of elation. Everything was going to be all right.
***********
The voice coming over the loudspeaker was speaking so fast Lois could barely understand it. One of the analysts was recording it and playing it back more slowly to relay to the authorities in New York.
Clark was flying over the city rattling off the locations of the rifts that only he could see. He’d managed to describe the location of rifts throughout a third of Manhattan already.
When the flow of words stopped abruptly, Lois leaned forward.
“What’s happening?”
“There’s a Tyrannosaurus. I’m pushing it back through the gate.”
Dr. Ledderman spoke. “There’s no chance you could just stun or incapacitate it? It would be of enormous value to science.”
“I don’t think the Brooklyn Zoo has a Tyrannosaurus cage ready,” Clark’s voice said dryly. “This thing is twenty foot tall and it weighs seven tons. It’d eat the elephants.”
A moment later Lois could hear a sound like firecrackers.
“Is somebody shooting?” she asked.
“The local SWAT team is helping out with some of the smaller ones,” Clark’s voice said. “It looks like you’ll have your specimens, Doctor.”
“Well, not me,” Dr. Ledderman said, sounding abashed. “I’m just a physicist. I just meant in general.”
A moment later Clark’s voice came again. “It’s through the rift and I’ve stacked three cars up in front of it. It won’t be coming through again.”
“How’s it looking up there?” one of the generals asked.
“Mostly quiet,” Clark said. “Not a lot of people on the streets.”
“You don’t hear people screaming in their homes?” Lois asked. She winced; she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
“Not much more than normal,” Clark’s voice said impatiently.
He began rattling off locations and addresses again.
They all glanced at Dr. Ledderman who shrugged. “Animals don’t pack themselves in like humans do. They roam over large areas and the chances of an animal wandering over a particular space is pretty slim.”
“We’re hearing a lot of reports…” one of the analysts said.
“Not nearly as many as you’d expect, given the number of rifts. I’ll bet that the reason we’re getting more traffic on the roads is because some of them were built on old animal trails or near watering holes. Those kinds of places probably have a much higher chance of seeing traffic crossing over.”
Doctor Ledderman was silent for a moment then said, “Really, I’d expect us to mostly get humans, rats and roaches. Statistically speaking, those would be your best bet, assuming humans are even on the other side. Otherwise, I’d expect more insects than anything.”
“So we need to worry about more visitors,” one of the generals said flatly.
From the expressions of the people in the room, it was clear that they considered the ones they already had as being more than enough trouble without adding potentially thousands of others.
“They may not even know they’re in the wrong world until it’s too late,” Dr. Ledderman said. “They aren’t what worry me.”
The men closest to them looked up and stared at him.
“The rifts are numerous and small on this end…but the pattern seems to be that they are getting less frequent but bigger as they head west. It doesn’t look good for Denver.”
Lois glanced at the screen in front of her. “It doesn’t look good for New Orleans either.”
She spoke into the microphone. “Clark, there are reports of flooding in New Orleans, and it hasn’t rained in a week.”
Dr. Ledderman paled. “Most of that area is below sea level, so a lot of the analogues…”
Animals might not pass over a certain spot for days, but below sea level there was nothing but water, water and more water.
**************
“Not this time you bastards!”
Junior shifted gears and pushed the accelerator as hard as he could. Fifty tons of metal moved underneath him pushing forward through the water. The metal tracks shoved against the ground and against all odds the bulldozer moved forward another three feet.
If he could get it close enough, he’d be able to bring the blade down, and the men behind him would be able to move the sandbags forward to block the spray of water.
The water was getting deeper; it was already three feet in places and it looked like the rift had formed in a natural depression. There was no telling how deep it was going to get. At least this water didn’t have the sewage smell so ubiquitous around parts of New Orleans these days.
“Get ready!” he shouted at the men behind him.
They were a motley crew. A few national guardsmen, more men from the local neighborhood, even a few people he’d once have classified as thugs.
There was a look of determination in their eyes that he hadn’t seen before. The things that had been happening to New Orleans had been beyond their control, acts of God that left them feeling helpless.
This was something they could fight. It wasn’t the only rift, but it was the one they could deal with.
He felt a sense of elation even as they pushed further into the water. This was going to work! For once the power of man would dominate over the power of nature. Fifty tons of metal and ten men were going to stop this part of their city from being violated again, no matter what it took.
The motor began sputtering.
“Son of a…” he cursed to himself, shifting gears again and giving it every last bit that he had.
Ten feet. Five feet. The bulldozer jerked several times and he hastily pushed the control to bring down the scoop on the front.
The bulldozer shuddered again as the scoop dropped into the water and the engine stalled and died.
For all intents and purposes they were trapped in the middle of an expanding pool of water. It was a situation he would have cursed at anyone else for getting into. Even a small amount of moving water could send cars careening down the street.
Luckily he’d planned ahead.
“We’ll have to do it by hand,” he said, turning to the others.
Attaching a trailer to the back of a bulldozer wasn’t the safest thing to do, but his grandmother’s house was in the path of the flood. At least the trailer was loaded with sandbags he’d dumped onto it using the bulldozer scoop.
It was still going to be risky. There was a chance that someone would fall as they passed the sandbags hand over hand toward the front.
At least he hadn’t been stupid enough to try to hit the rift head on. The water on the other side of the rift was a sold wall, and he doubted that even the bulldozer would have been able to force its way through that kind of pressure.
Loading the bags from behind was going to be easier until they reached the level of the rift, and then the wall of water was just going to push the bags out of his hands.
He didn’t see anything else he could do though other than hope to get enough sand in front of the wall to slow it down.
Crawling out onto the scoop, he felt a moment of uneasiness. He’d chosen the most dangerous job for himself.
Somehow it seemed important to make his grandmother proud.
When he was set, he said, “Get moving. We don’t have all day!”
Glancing back at them, he saw that none of them were moving. Instead they were staring up in the air.
He glanced upward, then felt himself gasp.
He’d dismissed the news reports as cruel pranks, and he’d dismissed his great uncle’s story as just another hallucination.
Yet floating above him with a thousand pound bag of sand under each arm was a figure in blue and white.
“You’re the angel,” he said, his eyes widening in realization.
“You know Cyrus?” the man said.
“He’s family,” Junior said.
The man smiled slightly and said, “While it looks like you guys are doing a good job, I was wondering if you could use some help?”
Junior scrambled out of the scoop quickly, aware that it would be too dangerous for the man to drop the sand with him in the scoop.
As he crawled back into the driver’s seat, he could hear something in the distance, even through the roar of the water.
It was coming from the left of him and also from the right.
As the bags began dropping rapidly, he realized what that sound meant. It was the sound of men cheering.
A moment later his voice and that of his crew were added to that sound as the last of twenty sandbags sealed off the portal.
“Say hi to Cyrus for me,” the man said from above him.
A moment later he was gone.
