This is a draft version of a chapter from John Saye’s book, The Man With Three First Names.
“The pulses have been getting worse haven’t they?” asked Michael.
Jen nodded. “Yeah, they have been getting worse.” She stuck a pencil behind her ear.
Walter turned and leaned against the stove. “It’s like that time a few years ago when we had the bunnies coming through.”
Michael couldn’t remember. “Bunnies?”
“Yeah, you remember, it was like there was something to do with a hole in a tree, and bunnies kept coming out of it.”
“I remember that now.” It was vague in his mind, but he could remember something.
“I sure as hell remember that. I didn’t know how we were gonna get rid of them all.”
“True, I’m not sure how close to this that is.”
“What happened with the bunnies?” said Simon.
It was getting dark somewhere behind them. They brushed it off, but Walter spoke up. “We’re about to get a pulse.”
They turned around, but Jen kept talking. “There was this rabbit hole, it was in my neighbor’s back yard, at the base of a tree, where the roots all tangled up. My friend had been taking pictures of the rabbits, blogging about it, and when they had a bunch of little bunnies that spring, they blogged about that too.”
“And then there was the big power outage.”
“It wasn’t just the house either,” said Walter, “it was the whole dang neighborhood, out for like two weeks. Drove Nancy crazy, she had to go to the library to do her blogging.”
“Yeah, I remember that, said, Jen. She was sitting there, watching as the power trucks came through, and all that. There was a spark, I guess it was so many electrical things turning back on at once, it was kind of shocking, but she had her video camera trained on the tree at the time, but this time she had a timer on it, to try and catch them as they came and went, and a bunny popped its head out and ran across the yard, right at her. She watched it all happen. She jumped, upsetting her iced tea, the glass smashed on the patio, and she jumped and looked around. There was nowhere for the rabbit to go so it must be cornered behind her where the fence met the house. She looked, but there was no sign of the rabbit.”
“She was shaking it off and thinking about where she was going to find the broom and dustpan. Her tea was sitting there calm as anything where it had been and the rabbit, we’re pretty sure it was the same rabbit… just sitting there.”
“It was definitely the same rabbit,” said Walter.
“Yes, the same one, came out at her again, and we think it was grabbing the tea the second time that did it.”
“What happened?”
“Well, the rabbit came out and flew across the lawn to her. It got to the table that it bumped, knocking over the tea, and it just disappeared. Right there. Before she knew it, here came another rabbit. She knocked away her chair and pulled the table out of there. Her husband wasn’t due for another four hours, and the kids were staying at a friend’s house, so she just sat there and watched it as it all happened over and over again. She counted them for fifteen minutes and up to one hundred and fifty before she couldn’t take it anymore.”
Walter pushed forward, dropping burgers in front of everyone, just for the hell of it. “Then it really got weird when her husband got home.”
Simon turned to watch Walter. The old man seemed to have a gleam in his eye, and he looked ready to talk.
“There he was, Jerry, he had just come home from work. He’d stopped by here on the way home to bring home dinner, that’s how I heard about this later.”
“Oh I’d have told you, Walter,” said Michael.
“I know, anyway, it was just funny.”
“What happened?” asked Moxie.
“Well, it was like this. He gets home, and it’s already dark right, and she’s out on the patio, she’s upgraded to wine by this time, but he didn’t notice that at first. The first thing he saw was that she was sitting out there in the dark.”
“What’s with the dark?”
“I don’t know if I can take it anymore.”
“What? We’re doing all right aren’t we?”
“I don’t know about that.”
“Why are you sitting in the dark?”
She waved out to the tree, with a pained look, and said: “Do you see them?” She could no longer look on her own.
“See what?”
“Oh God, I am crazy then.”
She stood to go and said “I don’t know, pack our stuff or something,” and he said, “That’s odd.”
She closed her eyes and hoped. “What?”
“I just saw a rabbit go across the yard, and then another one must be your little troop. Wonder what they are doing out tonight?”
“Keep watching.”
“Okay.”
He continued to watch until the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth rabbit had come out and skittered across the yard.
“What the hell,” he said.
“Can you see where they go?”
“No, it’s too dark.”
“Try.”
He walked out into the yard, to watch from a different perspective and saw that they whipped across the yard to a certain point, and then just stopped. It was like they were just running into nothing.
“What the hell?” It seemed to be all he had left at this point.
“Yeah.”
“Can you touch them?”
“Yeah.”
He seemed surprised. “Really?”
“Yep. I’ve hit them with golf clubs, I shot a couple of them just before dark. I kicked three as they came out.”
“What happens?”
“They land, head for the same point, and vanish anyway.”
“What happens if you put something in the way?”
“Nothing much, they just go around it and get close.”
“What if we plug it up?”
“What?”
“The hole. Let’s plug it up.”
The idea hadn’t occurred to her yet. “What can we use?” She looked around for something. She went into the house and came out with a 2-liter bottle of soda, and together they jammed it into the hole and waited.
“That was their mistake, you see,” said Walter.
“Plugging the hole was just enough,” said Jen.
“Enough for what?” asked Fred.
“It was enough to put the portal just a little off-kilter.”
“What happened?”
“They starting busting out of there like gangbusters,” said Michael. “They popped that Coke bottle out of there, and started coming out in droves, not one at a time, but like five, six, eight at a time, and this time they weren’t going away, they were just piling up in the yard, and they didn’t want to leave.”
“It’s true. They were just sitting there.”
“So, I get there,” said Michael, “I’d already been called and I’d been watching them for a half an hour trying not to laugh, and it was time to go in, so I open the back gate and act all official-like I’m a regular cop or something.”
“Is there a problem here folks?” I say. “I’m completely ignoring the bunnies, even though they are hopping all around me. I’m not acknowledging them at all. They get in my way, I act like I mean for it to look like that.”
“So they’re freaking out right?” said Fred.
“Yeah, no doubt,” said Michael.
“So the lady says, Um, no officer, I don’t think there’s a problem. Did you hear something nearby?”
“The rabbits were all around us, one was up on the table now, and a bunch of them were in her lawn chair. No, I say, I was just trying to be neighborly,” said Michael. “I heard the two of you arguing, and thought I’d come over and make sure everyone was all right.”
“One of the rabbits jumped up on my hat. I totally ignored it as if nothing were in any way different, and pulled out a pad and a pencil. I licked the tip of my pencil and started to jot down notes, just to make them nervous. She tried to see what I was writing, which happened to be a list of books I’d like to order later. I kept the list away from her so she could not read it, which was the point, right?”
“Soon rabbits were in both of my coat pockets, and I was holding two or three of them in my arms, I was even petting one, and the two of them wouldn’t admit they were there for fear of being ridiculed. So I looked at them, covered in fur and rabbits, and said now come on, just admit, this is a bit funny.”
“Sir?” they said.
“The rabbits.”
“What?”
“All these rabbits, they’re everywhere!” She looked so relieved that she almost fell over, and, he did fall over and was then engulfed in the fuzzy little bunny brigade.
“Where is it? I asked, dropping the bunnies that were on me.”
“Down there, in the base of the tree.”
“Right, it’s the old rabbit hole eh? I’m on it.”
“After pulling the husband up from the sea of rabbits swarming all around us, I jumped into the oncoming stream and started to fight and sort of swim through them until I got right up to the tree. I stuck my hand into the hole, and though it was tearing the flesh from my arm to do so, I reached in and pulled a switch, on the other side, turning off the portal. There was some kind of box on the other side that was causing the rip, and it was jarred in just such a way to deluge us with thousands of copies of the same bunny from another dimension.”
“What happened to the rabbits?”
“We let them go.”
“They didn’t go home?”
“Not really. Thousand-plus clones of the same rabbit? We just let it go. Didn’t hurt anybody. I took some of them to my friend Harvis’s house, and some of them followed me home to the warehouse, but most of them just hopped off into the woods and became fox bait or something. It was odd though. Later there was no scarring or even a scratch from reaching through the bunnies like that. Every once in a while I still see one of them around.”
Thunder clapped, and the sky filled with misty clouds again. Outside, the cars were turning into great plains-walking beasts, and the buildings were transforming and taking flight into the sky to reach down and pick off the weak creatures with their colossal snouts and tongues.
“Walter, I’ve never asked you this before.”
“Yes, Mike?”
“Why doesn’t your diner ever sustain any damage?”
Walter’s smile broadened.
“Well, there’s a reasonable answer to that question my friend.”
“What’s the answer?”
“It’s simple. This is my space ship.”
Moxie and Fred stood up.
Walter hit a switch on the stove, and it turned over, revealing a large panel of instruments and computer screens. He checked one of them out. “Yep, the force field is still holding.”
He flipped it back again.
“You dog.”
“What?” said Walter.
“This is your ship then?” Michael looked around, noticing the grease spots, and the worn seats.
“Has it always been a diner?”
“It used to be a trailer, back in the days when we were marketing to construction workers of the clone fleets, and the people in the robot industry.”
“You sold, what, burgers in space?” asked Simon.
“Yeah, I guess, it was something like that. You don’t have cattle in space, well you do, it’s just that the meat is different than what you’re used to.”
“What’s different?”
“Well the cows, as close to an earth name as they come, are purple, but the meat is much the same. You cook it about a minute less on each side, but that’s about it. They still take ketchup pretty well.”
“Why land on Earth?”
“Well at first, I wanted to settle somewhere half-way normal, so I put down some roots here, only to find out this is the strangest planet of them all. Isolated, yet it draws every strange onlooker that has ever gone everywhere.”
“Do you mean anywhere?”
“I know what I mean.” He said it with a sort of a glint in his eye that said there was more to the story.
Thunder crackled outside. Great red forks of lightning flashed across the night sky illuminating the creatures in the fog.
“We’ve got to get out there, and get to that portal,” said Simon.
“You are right,” said Michael, “but have you noticed what’s happening yet?”
“I don’t know, sort of.”
“It’s like there’s s separation between day and night.”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
“Walter, will this place hold out?”
“Mike, with our force field on, we could withstand a nuclear explosion.”
“That’s what I wanted to hear. We wait until morning then. As soon as the day brings us some time, we’ll get as close as we can, in my caddy, and see if we can get through that portal.”
They looked at each other.
“All right then,” said Fred, and started pumping quarters into the jukebox. He and Moxie picked out as many songs as they could, and tried to make it last until the morning. When they ran out, Walter tossed them a couple of rolls from the till and they kept on plugging. Before long, they had every song in the box set to play twice.
“Why didn’t you ever tell us this was a spacecraft?” asked Fred.
“You didn’t ask,” said Walter, with a smile. “I know that’s not fair, but there you go.”
“I’m with Fred,” said Moxie, “we’ve been here like a hundred times, and we never figured it out?”
“Why do you think you keep zinging back here with your little wristbands then?”
“What? I figured it must have been the portal thingie.”
“That’s just the last theory you came up with.”
Michael sat on one of the tables in a booth to himself, laughing at them. “Walter, what did you do to their wrist bands?” he was chuckling at them.
“Nothing they didn’t deserve.”
Jen smacked Walter on the arm.
“What?” Walter was laughing now.
“Walter you old space cow.” She smacked him again.
“Jen, do you know who this is?” He was pointing at Moxie.
“Yeah, it’s Moxie. She and Fred have come in here a hundred times.”
“It’s Maxine’s daughter.”
She just looked at him.
“Maxine. You know, my sister.”
“What?” It was Moxie now.
“You’re my—”
“Uncle, right, and this is your Aunt Jen.
Jen smacked Walter again.
“Hey now…” He held up his hand to ward off the blows.
Simon decided to stay out of it and drink his coffee. He also decided to change into the troll for a moment, just to see if that made any difference. Besides making Fred jump again, it didn’t.
He shrugged and returned to normal, but before he finished with it he decided to transform just a couple more times. He was starting to get good at taking the clothes with him each time, and anything that was in the pockets, although he kept dropping his fork. That wouldn’t stay in the amulet.
Moxie turned to Michael. “Did you know?”
“Oh yeah, but I didn’t realize it was Maxine, that’s all. I thought it was another sister. It makes sense that it’s Maxine for some reason.”
Moxie jumped the counter to punch Walter on the nose but hugged him instead.
“You’re mother asked me to look out for you a little while back.”
“So you kept us from traveling far off-world?”
“She doesn’t like the bands. She just asked me to make sure you were doing well before I let you get too far away again.”
“Have you seen her?”
“Well of course I have!”
“She’s not here is she?”
“No. She’s on Alpha Proxima, but I didn’t tell you that either. Once this business is over, you ought to be able to go off-planet again, but She would like it if you checked in once in a while.”
“What did you do to our wrist bands then?” Fred and Moxie were taking them off. The bands were made of a strange synthetic leather and flexible plastic that was definitely alien in origin. On them were little screens, and red and blue light.
Walter pulled his from below the sink and put his on. “See? Right here,” he twitched the blue button, and it turned green. “It’s a safety feature. The colors are so similar that I bet you didn’t notice. It’s designed to keep you from getting too far off course on short hops. Call it a feature, rather than a bug.”
They both switched them to green and then back again to blue, just in case.
“Either way they won’t be able to get onto the network until we shut this portal down.”
“So, what’s the plan then?”
Michael jumped off the table. “So we’re serious now then?”
“You bet. We’ve got to get off this planet, eventually.”
“Why?”
“So we can go tell her mother to cut it the heck out.”
“Good luck with that. You’ll be lucky if Maxine doesn’t put a complete tracer tag on you.”
“Have you met her?”
“She used to be my partner.”
“Who hasn’t been your partner?” said Jen.
Michael was glowing with old memories. He pulled out a small lens, connected to a power supply and dropped it on the table. A three-dimensional image of the Earth appeared before them in full color.
Fred waved his hand through it, but Michael slapped it out of the way. “You’ll screw it up — ah look, it’s heading for the coast of Libya, nice.”
Michael waved through it, and repointed it to the United States, and then down to the area in which they were.
“It’s here,” he said, pointing to a dot on the map. He closed in, using his hands to get in closer.
It was a real-time image of what was going on there.
There were creatures all around the remains of the Sublight group building. Some of them just stomped around, some were circling and eating the large grasses that came with them for lunch, and others, the little blue ninja attackers, stood guard and walked around like they had something to guard.
“What’s going on there?” asked Fred.
“I don’t know,” said Michael, “but I’ll bet it’s not that nice.”
There was a great fooming sound and after that a blast of light from the crater. A hand reached out and pressed against the ground, it was the size of a compact car, then there was another one, and it pushed it’s way out through the ground.
“What the hell is that?” asked Fred, not that he wanted to know or anything.
“I think it’s daddy,” said Michael.
The creature pushed its way out of the hole in the ground, it was easily fifty feet tall and stood over the other creatures like they were its scruffy little pets. It wore long sweeping robes, and a pair of long scimitars made of gold hung from its belt.
He reached out and petted one of the grazers with its left hand, and then stood, looking around at what must have looked like its own lands, and the little assassins started to line up around him, and bow.
“Yep, that’s what I thought,” said Michael.
When Michael thought that he was just going to walk around some more and observe his turf, the colossal man looked around and began to address his people. He was making an effective speech, but the language was lost on them all. Lots of hand gestures and fists in the sky. What they could tell about him was that the creatures were all laughing in all the right places, that they seemed to both love and fear him, and that they were totally obedient to him.
He opened his arms, and proclaimed their goodness, and his happiness in them, and seemed to be giving the speech of his life. Michael couldn’t understand each individual word, but he began to put it together as he was watching the arm movements and gestures the giant was using.
“You know what he’s doing Mike?” It was from Walter.
“Yep. He’s declaring victory.”
“That’s what I thought too. We’ve got to get that portal closed.”
“We’ve got to get it closed before they can make it stable. How much longer do you think we have Mike?”
“Not long, another pulse or two. I don’t think this is the final one though.”
“No?”
“Nah, I think that this is the premature victory speech.”
The towering figure turned and looked around him. In the distance, the sun was coming up, and the creatures around him were beginning to fade. He stepped down into the crater, and slipped back through the portal, and into his own world.
Around them in the diner, the mist was clearing. The cars were transforming back from creatures of another world into the hunks of junk they used to be.
“Walter, do you think you can get this hunk of junk flying again?”
“Mike, you know I haven’t actually flown this thing for fifteen years.”
“Can you do it?”
“It’ll take some work.”
“I need you to try.”
“If you need it, Mike, then I’ll do it. Jen?”
“I’m already on it,” she said from the other room.
No one had seen her leave, and Walter hadn’t thought to look around for her. She emerged from the door to the back in a yellow jumpsuit with black trim, form-fitting and zipped to the cleavage. Walter’s eyebrows went up. He hadn’t seen her in that outfit for some time. He turned to Mike. “I think we’ve got a chance.”
“Simon, What about you?”
“I’m on board.” He stood up and transformed. I think I’ll keep to this shape for a while. “Its kind of Troll-like, don’t you think? I keep thinking that for some reason.”
“It could be.” He turned. “Moxie, Fred, what do you think?”
“Count us in!”
They grabbed their packs and pulled their goggles on.
“Leave the packs. You can pick them up later.”
They dropped them but weren’t sure they wanted to.
Michael held his watch up to his mouth and tweaked a knob on the side. There was a crackle of static on the line.
“Gretchen?”
“Yes, Mr. Christopher?”
“Meet us by the door.”
“Yes, sir.”
The car outside, the space roadster, lifted its wheels, and they vanished under the car’s frame. It floated up in the air and sailed over to the door as the last of the mist and monsters faded away with the morning.
They stepped out into the cold morning air and jumped in the car, its convertible top already folded down.
“Hey, Walter?”
“Yeah?”
“Can you feed my other car?”
“Oh yeah, sure!”
They jumped in and Gretchen pulled into the sky and pointed herself towards the crater at the Sublight Group.
