Tag Archives: supernatural thriller

Mutant red-furred rabbits with glowing eyes in a futuristic lab. One rabbit breathes fire, while others leap. Scientists in lab coats stand shocked in the background as a mysterious light bathes the room.

Attack of the Atomic Bunny Rabbits, Chapter 1

Attack of the Atomic Bunny Rabbits
Flames in crimson fur,
rabbits leap through fire and ash,
chaos hops away.
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This is a draft version of a chapter from John Saye’s book, The Attack of the Atomic Bunny Rabbits!

“The rabbits look like they are doing well this evening,” said Dr. Barnes.

“I suppose they are,” said Dr. Roberts.

The laboratory was large, stark and white. A glowing orb of energy hung low from the ceiling. Reflectors surrounded it and concentrated beams of light on a fabricated patch of grass in the middle of the room. On the grass, a dozen healthy white rabbits hopped and played. They munched on celery, carrots, and lettuce from two larger bowls. They bounded around and chased each other.

Barnes watched them, clipboard in hand while Roberts checked a readout on his laptop. He was jotting down things, making little tick marks in different columns.

Roberts put his glasses up on his head while he read some of the data coming in. Transmitters behind their ears sent in data.

Some of the rabbits were playing a little rough, pouncing on each other. They smacked each other with their large hind feet and rolled around a lot.

“They are becoming more aggressive,” said Roberts.

“I agree,” said Barnes. “The light is doing its job well, though.”

“At least, we aren’t working on mind control anymore.”

“No doubts there. The Television industry has that pretty well bottled up.”

“Did you see the game last night?”

“No.”

Barnes searched through the pocket of his lab coat to retrieve a new pen. He had just gone dry.

“How did we get into this anyway?”

“You mean you never wanted to grow up to become a mad scientist?”

Barnes shrugged. “Are the lights too high?”

“They seem to check out okay. I think we’re still within the parameters of our test. Wouldn’t be much good if we lost that.”

“I’m not sure it should matter. We haven’t seen that much of a change already in their temperaments.”

“True. Tonight is an interesting example, though.”

“Not much more than a little roughhousing. I think they are bored.”

“Possible.”

“Maybe we could throw in some enrichment? A couple of toys to get their attention.”

“Sorry, that would invalidate the test for sure. No, we’ve got to ride it out.”

Barnes put his clipboard down and looked on at Roberts’s computer station.

“This reading is a little high,” said Barnes.

Roberts waved it off. “Not likely to cause much of an impact.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positively. I think that’s a result of them getting too riled up tonight.”

One of the rabbits leaped up, three feet in the air and landed on the other side of the enclosure.

“What was that?” said Roberts.

They both looked, but in just a moment could no longer tell which rabbit had made the jump.

“Interesting,” said Roberts.

“I’m getting my lunch,” said Barnes. “Can I get you anything?”

“I don’t think so.”

Barnes nodded and made his way down to the lab’s lunchroom. It was a cramped back room with a table, sink, refrigerator, microwave, and one chair, yet enough table for five or six. Barnes remembered many nights coming in here to eat while they were waiting for an experiment to finish. There used to be two chairs, but now there was just the one. He couldn’t remember where it had gone to.

He pushed his way past a filing cabinet, closing the middle drawer with his hip as he passed it. This had become second nature to him, and he no longer realized he did it anymore. It slammed with a rusty thud.

He pulled open the fridge and got out his lunch. It was a sandwich and some soup in a Thermos.  He opened the Thermos, and a waft of warm air greeted his nose. He set that down on the little table and opened the sandwich. He slid that into the microwave and turned it on. Beneath the sandwich, a long strip of torn foil still remained.

Barnes walked out on it, in search of the bathroom. The sandwich would be waiting for him when he got back.

The sandwich turned and burned. It began to spark, and then it caught fire. Flames burst out from the microwave, and the door flew open. Now fire was belching from the open door.

The fire alarm blared.

Roberts looked up from what he was doing.

“What was that?”

The alarm continued to ring. Small lights around the lab began to blink.

Then the microwave completely exploded.

The burned sandwich covered the walls. The refrigerator toppled over, and three months of leftover containers fell into the floor.

Part of the wall was on fire.

Somewhere beyond there was a larger explosion.

Barnes popped out of the bathroom.

“What was that?” he said.

He ran down the hall, past the burning break room, and down the hall to the laboratory.

Pushing open the doors, he found Roberts face down by one of the tables. Barnes checked his pulse. Roberts was still alive. “Come on there Roberts,” Barnes smacked the side of Roberts’s face. He didn’t come around.

He looked up.

The lights were pouring down on the rabbits.

“That’s not right,” he said. “That’s way too high.”

Rabbits were beginning to cook.

Their fur grew, and got bushier, becoming more of a candy apple red color. Their eyes began to glow.

Barnes thought it was just the lights coming down, making beady eyes beadier. Then one jumped.

It flew through the air and landed on Barnes’s face. Then it kicked, pushing off and sent Barnes toppling to the ground.

“What the…”

Barnes fell back and hit the ground, clattering into a table that was covered with papers. He flew over the top of it and sprawled on the floor behind it. When he sat up, holding his hand over a small cut on his forehead, the rabbit was actually opening the gate for the other rabbits. It kicked the gate open, with what now looked like a clawed foot with deep red fur, and they all began to stream out of it. They ran over Barnes, each softly kicking him in the face with their big furry feet as they crossed the room.

“Hey!”

Their leader, the others were still in the process of turning gradually darker and darker red, looked him in the eye, with fiery white-hot yellow pupils. It opened its mouth and breathed a jet stream of fire on him, singing his hair before turning and bounding down the hall.

The bunnies jumped through the fire from the break room, bounced off a turn towards the front door, past the bathroom and then jumped into the iron front doors, and could not move them. They launched themselves, into the doors, and bounced off, or landed with silly looks of confusion on their furry faces. Then they started to gasp and gather air into their lungs before spitting a stream of flame on the door to heat it up.

One of the bunnies passed out, but the rest kept concentrating on heating the door up. The unconscious one’s fur returned to its original white, but only for a moment, then it blinked, looked around, woke up and started turning fiery red again. A moment later it was jumping and belching at the doors with the rest of them.

The doors came loose, and landed in a twisted pile of metal, surrounded by the ash of other burned materials.

In the lab, Barnes shook Roberts, who came around.

“What happened?”

“The rabbits are loose.” It wasn’t Barnes.

They both looked up, and standing above them were two official-looking men dressed in dark suits.

“Doctor Barnes, Doctor Roberts,” said one of them. “We’re going to need to confiscate all this material you have around you.”

“Who are you?” said Barnes.

“I’m Mr. Green, this is Mr. Red,” said Green.

“No, I mean who are you?”

“There’s no time for that. This building is about to come down.”

There was smoke coming from down the hall. The fire had spread beyond the break room.

“Don’t worry,” said Red. “The Fire Department has already been notified. Do you have any knowledge of which direction the animals may be going.”

Barnes shook his head.

“We’ll be in touch,” said Red.

Agents Red and Green made their way out of the lab, and into the night. Barnes and Roberts watched as other agents, who only identified themselves as Mr. Yellow and Miss Purple, took files, and destroyed computer records with some form of a handheld light-up device while the Fire Department doused the flames.

A big rabbit footprint appeared on Barnes’s face, where it had kicked him. It stung, red like a sunburn.

Mr. Yellow snapped a photo of the footprint and sent it to Mr. Green with his phone.

“Thank you, sir,” he says as the flash goes off in Barnes’s face.

Outside, Mr. Green and Mr. Red survey the grounds outside and the remains of the front door. They look around, through their scanning devices, and then shake their heads. They don’t see any sign of the rabbits.

Next to the fire truck, parked on the curb is a large silver van. Mr. Green and Mr. Red knock on the backdoors, which open. Inside Mrs. Orange is ready to drive, and Prof. Blue was looking over the data coming in from everyone’s scanners.

“Can you make any sense of it Blue?” said Green. “Our scanners aren’t picking up much of anything.”

“I’m starting to see a pattern,” said Blue. He slipped his hand into his pocket for a bite of chocolate, offered it to Green and Red, who refused, then stuck it in his own mouth and chewed while he thought. “They seem headed down into the valley. At least, that’s what this shows. The trails you are sending back peter out thirty feet from the door.”

“How is that possible?”

“If I knew that, we’d have the little devils back already, wouldn’t we?”

Green and Red looked at each other.

“Don’t worry,” said Blue. “If I’m right, they won’t stay hidden for long.”

Away from the lab, the rabbits rocketed through the underbrush and set it on fire. They fired their way down alleys and between houses as they reached the valley. Their businesses stopped and the village began. They nestled into backyards, tree houses and garages, finding cool spots to curl up and nestle down for the evening. Their fires cooled, and their eyes darkened, no longer glowing with fiery light, to wait for the morning. 

"A futuristic flying car glides over the Everglades at twilight as a steaming figure emerges from the swamp. In the distance, a hidden facility glows with eerie green light."

The Man With Three First Names, Chapter 13

The Man With Three First Names
Rabbits leap through time,
Portals hum with shifting fate,
Night and day now split.
Buy Yours Here:
Amazon - Books2Read

This is a draft version of a chapter from John Saye’s book, The Man With Three First Names.

Two weeks later Michael found himself walking through the rose garden at the White House, with the President. The morning air was crisp, and the wind was kicking up a little bit. The President, wearing a long coat, though he could have cared less about the actual temperature, smiled and talked with the man with three first names.

They shook hands.

“It’s good to see you, Mike.”

“It’s good to see you, sir.”

“How has the business down south been treating you?”

“Can’t complain. Not many people remember. It’s getting harder and harder to say it wasn’t a line of tornadoes now.”

“Well, that’s good.”

President clapped Michael on the back. “What do you say to a stroll?”

“That’d be nice sir.” They began to walk out on the front lawn, members of the secret service in the wings behind them, fanning out like ducks.

“Ah, don’t worry about them. Half of them are robots too.”

“And what about the other half?”

The President laughed. It was a simple laugh, quiet and short, but Michael knew he wasn’t going to get anywhere with it today.

“I wish you’d reconsider. There’s plenty of space for you here on my staff. With the election coming up, who knows. I could use you. I need you.”

“And you’ll have me. I’ll be around, just not on your direct payroll.”

“That’s the way you like it anyway, isn’t it?”

“Yep.”

“What’s with the whole Man With Three First Names thing anyway? I’ve always wondered that.”

It was Michael’s turn to laugh. The President knew better.

“I know. None of my business, right?”

“Nope.”

“Can I offer you anything, a better office, maybe a small staff? What about another partner? I heard about Simon, I hope he’s doing well.”

“I think he’ll be back eventually, but no, I don’t need a partner. I don’t need anything.”

“I think you do. I think you need people. As many people as you usually end up tagging along with you on a mission. You know how to pick them.”

“That I do.”

“Aliens, travelers…”

“Robots.”

“Yes, robots. I’ve heard you have a talking zombie head in your office. That ought to be fun.”

“Two.”

“Oh, two is it?”

“Yeah, well it’s best to keep them in pairs so they have someone to talk to when I’m off galavanting about.”

“I know what you mean.”

“You do?”

“Yeah, have you heard the vice president and the speaker of the house? They’re like two zombie heads in my office sometimes.”

“I can imagine.”

“Look, why’d you come here today Michael? What can I help you with?”

“I was just checking in.”

“Checking in.”

“Well, after a case… I wanted to make sure there was nothing I could do for you.”

The President thought about this for a moment, which to a human must have been like reading the contents of the Library of Congress in a millisecond, and said, “I’d like to see him.”

“No, Look, No, that’s just not a good idea.”

“I play the part every day. Hell, I’ve assumed all his responsibilities plus, and only you and I and the secret service here know I’m a…”

“I know.”

“A robot. There, I said it. I’d like to see him. People look up to me. They ask me to solve their problems and help them work out their differences. I have a right.”

“A right?”

“Even as a robot, you bet. It’s all I want. Where is he? Can I see him? I have to know.”

“He’s very sick.”

“I know. It’s all I know. It’s all I know that he isn’t dead. I want to meet him.”

“He won’t even know you’re there.”

“Try me.”

“Okay.”

“Michael looked up at the secret servicemen. Gentlemen, I have to take the President for a ride. He touched a control on his belt, and the car arrived quickly to pick them up. I know you have to be with him, but I can only take two of you. We’ll be gone for a couple of hours, who wants to come?”

Two of the seniors stepped foreword. They held back the rest of them with a wave. Everyone got on board, and they drove off.

Michael was headed out of the city when they pulled out the blindfolds.

The three of them put them on without a protest. They knew where they were going.

The car slung out into the sky and dipped and weaved about until finally settling down into a regular, low pattern. It slid through a tunnel, with other cars in another nearby city sometime later, and then somewhere dark, dank and cool, they came to a stop.

“All right, you can all take them off.”

They got out of the car in an underground facility. Above one of the doors from the hangar/garage was a DNA strand logo covered in stars, and the moniker The Sublight Group. He walked them through the doors, which swung open, and all around them, people got out of the way. Many nodded and said hello to Michael, but most had been trained not to acknowledge him. He wasn’t in charge, he was just welcome and trusted.

They made their way down fluorescent-lit corridors that felt like they’d been designed by someone who did public school buildings and libraries in the seventies. There was a faint yet acrid ammonia smell to the place.

Michael led them down to the last door at the end of a long windy series of packages. The door was black and shiny. There was a card lock on the side. Michael just waved his hand over it, and the door opened.

“He’s actually awake,” said a guard.

He peaked in.

“Sir? You have a visitor.”

An ailing voice beckoned them in.

The door slid closed behind them, and they were in his presence.

Sitting, in a wheelchair, and hooked up to about a hundred cables was the President, the real President. He looked about ten years older than the one standing next to Michael, and there was a reason for that, it had been by design. He appeared asleep, but the head moved and the eyes listed to the right to look at them. He spoke low into a microphone that echoed his raspy voice all around the room.

“So, you wanted to meet me then?”

“I did.”

Michael stepped back with the secret service guys.

“What do you think?” he whispered to the robot.

“I don’t know. What happened?”

“It was in my second year in office. You aren’t even supposed to remember this. I went off on a mad chase with Michael here. Look at him, he’s slinking away from us, getting out of the picture a little, as much as he can.”

The real President coughed, but couldn’t get his arm up to his face, and the spittle just ran down his shirt.

The robot President winced and turned to watch Michael.

“Oh don’t blame him, He and I have been getting into trouble for years. I just caught a bad one this time, an alien virus. It left me like this. He and I brought in doctors and technicians from all across the galaxy but nothing in the realm of science could help me. Nothing seemed to work, so we built you.”

“Do I make my own decisions?”

“You’re programmed to do what I would do in any given situation, and you do a good job. Is that answer satisfactory?”

“As good as it gets I suppose.”

“I suppose so too.”

“What about you, is there hope?”

“If there weren’t, I wouldn’t be alive now. If it means anything to you, You’re doing pretty well, though you could treat Michael here a little better sometimes. He does take good care of us.”

“What is this place?”

“It’s the Sublight group. It’s my company.”

“Wasn’t the Sublight group responsible for the portal?”

“Yes, well we’re into a bunch of things these days, all in the interests of national defense.”

“Can I come back?”

“Michael?”

“Michael turned his head.”

“Can he come back?”

Michael looked at the Robotic president. “You know how I feel about that.”

“He says, of course. It’s Michael’s way. He thinks people who are curious should know, especially when the secret is about them in the first place.”

“Thank you.”

“No, thank you.”

“Michael?” said the real President.

“Yes?”

“I’ve got another assignment for you.”

“Give me the details, and I’m on it.”

“Just what I was hoping for, get in your car, I’ll tell you on the way.”

The President and his men were dropped off back at the white house, and after sliding by Jen and Walter’s new place for a bite to eat, he was back in the sky.

He touched the video unit on his dashboard and the face of the President, the real President appeared.

“Michael, I’ve got a job for you. It’s pretty strange, I need you to turn south and head for the Florida Everglades.”

“Oh, not another swamp creature again.”

“Hear me out pal, this isn’t an ordinary swamp creature.”

“What’s different about this one then? Does it grow psychedelic mushrooms on its back and kill people by convincing the bacteria in its enemy’s stomach to revolt against it?”

“No,” he said with a smile.

“So then it feeds on local wildlife, making a mockery of the dead remains by using them for demented puppet shows?”

“Now that’s just sick.”

“Or how about this, does it control the alligators with its luminous hive mind, and cause them to eat tourists near some swamp park?”

“Hardly.”

“What is it then? What are you sending me up against?”

“It’s just Harvis, he wants a word about the car. He called me earlier and was asking what you were up to later.”

“That rabbit? Is the car what he wants?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s been calling my cellphone all day.”

“Why didn’t you answer it?”

“Why would I want to talk to him? He can’t have my car.”

Michael flew into the swamps, and out of sight.

Later that night, Simon hit the ground hard, smoldering at the hair, a crazed look in his eye. He’d managed the jump all on his own. He lumbered through the swamps, his feet still hot and stinging from the journey, burning his footprints into the ground as he walked. When he dipped his feet into the water, they hissed and popped as the water vaporized.

His skin healed as he made his way through the swamp, following the trail of Michael’s flying car.

"A colossal explosion consumes a monstrous entity atop Stone Mountain. A futuristic diner-airship hovers nearby, while a flying car speeds away. Figures stand silhouetted against the fiery sky as the portal fades."

The Man With Three First Names, Chapter 12

The Man With Three First Names
Rabbits leap through time,
Portals hum with shifting fate,
Night and day now split.
Buy Yours Here:
Amazon - Books2Read

This is a draft version of a chapter from John Saye’s book, The Man With Three First Names.

The missile went true, and straight, and long. It armed, and clicked, and whistled and turned and honed in on its target.

The creature looked up and all it could see was the red point of the missile coming at it. All it could hear was the roar of the missile as it approached, closing the gap.

It impacted with the rubbery body of the creature, which exploded in a giant fireball, expelling thousands (millions?) of gelatinous chunks in all directions.

The lower half of its body sat there quivering, and Michael and Simon stood up from it, with several of their new friends around them, other meals of the rubber monster. It stood there, hunched on its tail, and didn’t fall for several seconds until it rolled forward and spilled them out all over the mountain.

Fred and Moxie flew over in Michael’s car and watched as the little blobs around them of warbling rubber monster began to reform into tiny dinosaurs, and do a little rampaging of their own.

“It’s not over yet,” said Moxie. Fred pulled the flying car around, trying to get a larger picture of what was going on.

Jen and Walter pulled the restaurant into the park and held position over the scene.

“Can you see them?” asked Walter.

“Yep.”

Three of the mini monsters jumped up on the front window of the restaurant and started scratching and clawing.

“Walter!”

He wrenched the controls, and one of them fell off, but the others were still coming.

“What the hell,” he said, and wrenched the controls the other way, and another one fell off.

The third butted its head through the glass and started to come in just to find itself face to face with the business end of Jen’s blaster.

She pulled the trigger, and a blast of hot green energy flew forth and melted the creature on the spot, and took out part of the front plate glass with it.

The wind blew through the restaurant sending plates and cups and glasses everywhere.

“Aaaaah!” yelled Jen, and she pulled a switch behind the counter, and the window began to auto repair itself.

Walter pulled the ship into a dive, and pushed it back to the city, between the buildings. They were clipping trees down the street. He pulled up, and they could see them again, a huge number of creatures, little acid yellow rubber T-Rexes running all over the place. One of them was trying to eat a police officer whole but had only gotten him halfway down when he ran out of room. The man stood there, his legs flailing, and inside he was stretching the creature to the breaking point where it exploded, leaving behind a rubbery residue over everything around it.

Another pack of them was chasing dogs in a nearby park. They were gobbling the dogs one by one, but only able to keep one dog in their bellies at any given time, they were starting to be eaten from the inside out.

One of the little rubber dinosaurs was running down the street with the legs of a Doberman pincher hanging out of its mouth while the dog was barking from the inside, and causing the creature to expand like a bubble. Another one had eaten a chihuahua but was now running without ahead, as the little dog had eaten it and was now sitting on top of the creature like a little prince.

Michael and Simon rubbed the slime from their clothes in huge handfuls and slung them to the ground in big wet slops.

They looked around them at the creatures and up into the sky, where Fred and Moxie were currently pulling down in his car. “Need a lift?”

“Move over.” Michael took over, pushing Fred to the side. Moxie piled into the back, and Simon jumped in with her.

He pulled up. “Where’s Walter and Jen?”

“They’re just up there.” Fred pointed to the restaurant hanging in the sky.

“All right then,” said Michael. He lifted the car up and headed for the restaurant.

He pulled alongside it and called Walter.

The phone rang in the restaurant. Walter Picked it up. “Burgers and such, I don’t think we’re open at the moment though.”

“Walter, it’s me.”

Walter looked outside the restaurant at the flying car beside them. “You made it!”

“Yeah, look, I’ve got an idea about how to make all this go away, but I’m going to need your help, and I’m really, really sorry.”

Walter looked for a moment at Michael, and they exchanged a nod.

Jen looked up at Walter. “Whatever he needs Walter, you know that.”

“Man,” Walter sighed. “Whatever you need pal. We’re on board.”

“Good, now I’m going to fly ahead of you, I need you to get into place, and then follow us from there.”

“We’re right behind you.”

They flew the ship into position over a large cluster of power lines. The engines had always given them trouble around here, too much interference.

“Put it into park.”

“What, here?”

“Do it.”

Walter put it into park. The ship stayed there. It didn’t want to, but it did. It sort of fluttered, holding its position.

“Okay,” said Michael, “now overload it.”

Walter didn’t want to pull the lever, but he knew that he must. He pushed the lever down and engaged the engines. The trees and the ground started to warp and bend around them in sickening ways.

“Michael, I don’t think this thing can hold it much longer.”

“I know, I’m counting on it. Get out of there. You still have an old escape pod?”

“You know I do, it’s in the handicap stall in the men’s room.”

“Good, go use it. I’ll track you and come pick you up in just a second if I don’t have to send Fred here.”

“Okay, We’re on our way.”

The line went dead.

Michael threw his phone aside.

“Simon, you still have your whip?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Good, stand up and get it out. I’m going to use Walter’s warp engine to pop open a new portal.”

“You can do that?”

“Of course. How do you think space travel is possible? Come on now. Fred, are you ready?”

“Yeah, what do you need me to do?”

“As soon as we open the portal, we’re going to get sucked through it, I need you to go and pick up Walter and Jen for me.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Moxie”

“Yes?”

“Give me your wrist band.”

“She handed it over, without a second thought.”

Michael put it on and then stood up in the car.

Moxie jumped over to take over.

Simon also stood up. They got out their transdimensional whips.

“Into the center warp point?”

“Yes, said Michael. You can see it, it’s like a circle of bent air, a bubble there, just below the ship.”

They pulled back their whips, which started to crackle in the air and popped them into the heart of the air warped by Jen and Walter’s warp engine above them.

The effect was instantaneous. The ship was gone, pulled through the void in a half a second.  The clouds were gone, blue skies above them. The whips were gone, and with them Michael and Simon, both pulled through the void just a second later, pulled and stretched and twirled around like they were going down some great celestial drain.

Then the creatures started to fly.

Moxie pulled the car through the air and down towards where Jen and Walter had dropped and were now watching the fireworks.

“Well there it goes,” said Walter.

She hugged the old man, he was all she had left now and all she ever wanted anyway.

Stragglers, strange creatures from the other dimensions, still hanging around were flying up to the hole in the sky. The memory of anyone not involved started to fly up as well, slicing through the sky, a purple haze of memory. They would remember only a vague sensation that the last week just hadn’t gone that well for them. People all around them started hitting the deck, falling asleep in their cereal bowls, and doing face plants in their spaghetti, only to snooze the next few days away and wake up vaguely bemused at what a day it turned out to be, and slightly annoyed with their new laundry needs.

Soon it was little splats of goo that started to slide up into the sky, and then it was larger creatures, more than the spent remains of exploded monsters, the little mini T-Rexes, then it was the giant lower torso of the big one, flying up into the sky, just about the moment that the portal closed, the tail got stuck, then sucked through like wet pasta, and the portal closed.

All the remaining goo, which was little more than street slag now fell to the earth, and it was over.

Fred pulled up next to Walter and Jen. “Hop in.”

They got in the back, Fred, and Moxie in the front.

“You think they made it?”

“I hope so,” said Moxie.

“He must have made it,” said Fred. “They must have.”

They drove off without a real direction. The city was renewing itself, waking from its nightmare.

They drove to Michael’s office and found that they couldn’t get inside. The locks seemed to be melted together by magic, so they drove off to where the burger joint had once been and parked there. They looked up into the darkening sky and laid out in the parking lot looking up at the sky. The stars were coming out, and they watched as airplanes started flying over again, and listened and watched as cars started to fill the road again.

Familiar sounds.

“What will we do now?” asked Walter.

“What do you want to do,” said Jen.

“I want another restaurant.”

“What, right here?”

“Why not?”

“It won’t be like before.”

“No, it’ll be better.”

“Can we do that?”

“Why not, we’ve got plenty in savings, it doesn’t cost that much to run the place.”

Moxie and Fred stood up and brushed themselves off. “We’ll help.”

Walter and Jen looked over at them. “You want to?”

“At least for a while. Without Moxie’s wrist band we can’t travel, and I’m not leaving her behind. At least until we can catch a lift off-world.”

“Okay then,” said Jen, “You’re hired.”

Walter watched the sky. “I wonder where they are.”

“No telling,” said Jen.

Moxie looked worried.

Fred looked grim.

They laid there all night, watching the sky, waiting, hoping, praying, and nothing happened. They brushed themselves off, wiped the dew from their eyes and ambled off to find a place they could score some breakfast, and find some news.

They looked around, and found a little breakfast place, and stumbled into it. They had no idea how they looked, like refugees from a freak tornado, which is how pretty much everyone else looked.

Upon the television screen, a reporter was covering a big story out in the field, standing with a microphone in hand and the van somewhere in the shot, right outside of the building they were in.

They doubled back to look out at the van and could see the buildings all around them were either decimated or torn apart. They looked up at the screen with one eye to the window to see if the reporter was packing up yet.

On the screen, the reporter looked up with grim eyes and a solemn expression.

“It seems that Atlanta has been the hardest hit by this series of tornadoes. Businesses are destroyed, and lives have been ruined, but one thing is sure, the people of Atlanta have prevailed. Of all the damage we’ve found, and the countless items of property that have been destroyed, there have been no fatalities, and as far as we can tell no one is missing. A  local scientific lab has been leveled by the recent tornadoes, but it’s mostly businesses that have suffered. This is Robin Parker, in Atlanta.”

The news switched over to a couple of pundits arguing over the next presidential election. People lost interest, and the television was switched to cartoons instead.

Simon and Michael sat up in the alien dimension, blue grasses, and hills all around them. Had they been screaming? Michael couldn’t tell.

“We’re here again, aren’t we?”

“I’m afraid so,” said Michael. He pushed himself up and looked around. The scarred, pock-marked sky was gone. It was starting to get a little lighter.

He jumped upon a rock and looked around. The beasts were off in the distance, working their way through the fields, eating the strange grasses and lumbering on their way. Even further off in the distance, several of the sky grazers were loping along, snaking their long schnozzes down to the surface to feed on various kinds of flowers.

The sun was rising.

Michael realized he was standing near the same portal projector he had been near the last time, but a long time seemed to have passed here, like years. It was possible that barring the ivy that had started to crawl through it that this was just like any other rock in the field. A moment or two longer and in the light it looked even more like a rock, in fact, with the sun shining on it, the ivy seemed to have disappeared and what was standing before them was nothing more than a rock. He looked off to the creatures, they still looked the same to him, but somehow distant or in another way broken from their rampages on Earth.

“Probably because they were projections into our universe, some kind of worst-case scenario machine that injected the strange and unusual into our world, they probably didn’t remember their escapades there. Probably not the same creatures entirely anyway,” said Michael.

“Probably.”

“Shut up.”

Upon the hill, standing there as if nothing had happened, was their leader. He stood tall, and in no way struck by his desire to cross over into our dimension. Simon noticed him too, and they walked up the hill to meet him. When they arrived, they stood no higher than the great warrior’s knees.

“You are welcome here, Michael David Christopher, the man with three first names.”

“Thank you, sir. All’s well then?”

“Indeed. I see you’ve been by the rock.”

“Yes, I have. It’s just a rock then now, is it?”

“Yes, just a rock. As long as it remains daytime.”

“What happens to it at night?”

“It brings terrible things into our world. It haunts us, it also enchants us, and bends us to its will from time to time.”

“I’m sorry.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry for. We stay here to defend it. Occasionally I think we cross the line, though we can sometimes barely remember it, and sometimes it takes a few of us with it. I suspect that has happened again tonight, yes?”

“It has.”

“Is all well?”

“It is. Except… He looked over at Simon. My friend here seems to have been affected by the last cross over.”

“Is this true?” He turned to face Simon.

“Yes, sir. The blast, the one that connected our worlds. It changed me.”

“I believe it has. It’s shown you a part of your inner self, has it not?”

“I think so. I can transform.” He did so, into the tall, green-gray skinned creature with the wild hair. “I feel like some kind of troll or something. I can heal fast, regenerate if you will, and I have amazing strength and senses.”

“Has it helped you?”

“I think it has, I’m just not sure what to do with myself.”

“We cannot take it away, you know that. You are changed for life.”

“I figured as much.”

“And you do not wish to change? To return to your normal state for good?”

“No. I’ve seen what’s inside of me, and I think I could benefit the world.”

“Then you should go and use your gifts in this way. And what about you, a man with three first names, what do you desire?”

“I think all I’m interested in now is a good drink, a cheeseburger in my favorite burger joint, and an evening relaxing with my friends.”

“I don’t think you can quite achieve all those goals.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“How do you intend to return home?”

Michael held up Moxie’s wrist band. “This.”

The tall warrior looked at the little device.

“Walter rigged these things years ago to only return to Earth. I suppose it was a cheap way to keep her coming back all the time.”

“You think it’s about time to reverse that?”

“I think so, just after using it one last time to return myself.”

“I see.”

“What about him?” The warrior gestured to Simon. “He may not return with that. It only carries one, correct?”

“That’s true. I was planning on giving it to him anyway.”

Michael pulled off the cuff and held it out to Simon.

“No, Michael, you use that.”

Michael held it out again, but Simon refused.

“There is another way, said the tall warrior. We walk between dimensions frequently, and he his now part of us after the blast. We could teach him.”

“You could? There’s more to this than speed and strength?”

“Far more. We can teach you to walk between the dimensions, and you may one day make it back to Earth if you search, but you’ll have to take the long way around. Are you interested?”

Simon didn’t even think to look back.

He assumed his troll-like form and stepped forward.

“Michael?”

“Mike.”

They shook hands. Michael nodded to both of them, adjusted his hat, and touched the button on the wristband, and faded away with a wave.

On Earth Walter, Jen, Fred, and Moxie were sitting in a booth in a small Mexican restaurant. They had ordered enchiladas and tacos and were dipping into a pool of salsa and another of queso dip with their chips. Above them, a television blared with local news.

“Can you believe this?” said Walter, “They’re calling it a load of tornadoes. Useless.”

“What else did you think they were going to say,” said Jen. “You think they’re going to go for the whole rubber monster theory?”

“I know, it’s just silly though.”

“What are you going to do,” asked Moxie?

“You know what we’re going to do, we’re going to build another restaurant. I captained ships all across the galaxy. There’s nothing I like better than flipping burgers and dipping french fries. Its stupid, and I don’t care.”

“No it’s not,” said Jen. “It’s what you love.”

“Gonna miss my old ship though. Always thought of expanding it someday, all it would take is a little programming to change the walls and add some more seats. Suppose I’d have to do that sometime during the night.”

“I suppose.”

“Gone, cleanly gone, sucked into the vortex. Oh, I know. I want my ship back, it was a great little ship.”

“I know, I loved it,” said Jen. She turned to Fred and Moxie. “Are you two going to help us?”

“Yeah, we’re staying on,” said Fred.

“As long as we can,” said Moxie.

They watched the news coverage knowing they were the only ones alive who could remember that it wasn’t just a line of tornadoes, and ate their chips, waiting for their tacos.

“Walter, have you ever thought about getting off-world again, maybe starting up a burger joint in space?” Moxie twirled the straw in her soda.

“You know Moxie, I’ve thought about that so many times, and yeah, I might eventually think about getting off-world again, but I think it would just be for a vacation. For all it’s dullness, all the action takes place on Earth. Everybody comes here. It’s got to be the blindest planet, and the most popular one to visit. It’s like living in the Aspen, Colorado of the universe. On Earth, you have it all. There are beaches, and snow, there’s entertainment and music of all kinds, undead walk and terrorize the planet while aliens visit for the weekend, and the movies are beyond comparison. Where would you rather live? Out in space, slogging it up and down the system? Romantic, yes, but no, this is where it is.”

“Now Walter.”

“What?”

“We were just like them once, you know.”

“Yeah, I remember. I won’t say it’s all bad,” said Walter. “There are ups and downs though, and after you’ve been traveling up and down the space-ways for a couple or ten years you start to like the idea of sticking somewhere for a while. Then again, you are still pretty young.”

Michael arrived in the bathroom of the little Mexican restaurant and pulled the wristband from his wrist. He stepped out and saw them, but they didn’t see him. He slipped into the booth next to them and listened for a while. Soon a waiter came by with a basket of chips for his table. He accepted them with a thank you, and hung out for a moment, listening.

“I just love the space travel though. Fred and I, we love getting out there and seeing the galaxy. I know you are ready to stay on Earth, but we’re not. We’ll stay but we are always going to want to get out there again.”

“Well, you can’t get out there without this then, can you?”

Michael stepped up and pulled a chair up to the end of the booth, and set Moxie’s wristband down in front of her.

She grabbed his neck and hugged him hard.

“Here give me that.”

He snatched up the wrist band again. “And yours too Fred. It’s about time I fixed these.”

He touched their screens and slid his fingers across them. They made little beeping sounds. “Here you go. I took the loop off for good.”

They put them back on.

“Loop?” asked Moxie.

“Hey, you kept my blood so you could track me, right?”

She agreed, “Yes…”

“Well, I looped your wristbands years ago to keep you coming back to Earth once in a while. I think Walter tried to show you how to turn it off, but I hid another one in there. Forgive me? ”

“I will.”

Fred shook his head.

“Now I’m buying dinner.”

The waiter was over a moment later, and Michael added a heaping plate of fajitas to the order and another round of drinks for everyone.

When they were done, they went out into the parking lot, and Fred and Moxie raised their wrist bands up and synchronized them together.

“We’re off.”

Michael gave them both hugs.

They hit the button and were sucked backward through a random wormhole in space.

“Where have they gone?” asked Walter.

“There’s no telling.”

“Will they be back?” asked Jen.

“Oh yeah. Maybe not right away like before, but they’ve got the bug. They’ll be around.”

Michael saw his car in the lot.

“Hey, I thought I’d lost this in the fight.”

“Yeah, we kept it for you, thought you’d want it back.”

“Yeah,” he opened the door and was about to slip in. “I saw the restaurant, on the other side.”

“What happened to it?”

“Destroyed. Torn to pieces like you would not believe. There was glass everywhere. I think the land on the other side must have liked it though because it started to pull it under the grass right away.”

Walter hung his head. Jen took him by the arm. “Come on, big guy, let’s get out of here.”

“I could help though,” said Michael.

“What?” Jen turned to face him.

“I think we might have another one, maybe not the same model or anything, but possible, another ship from your world might be at the facility in New Mexico. Would you like to take a look? I’m sure the President will sign the order for me to give you one if it’s out there in the impound.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure I’m sure.”

They got into the flying car, and Michael put the top down. He cranked the engine and soared into the sky, headed for the setting sun.

"A colossal, glowing creature climbs Stone Mountain as a futuristic diner-airship launches a missile. A flying car speeds toward the battle while trapped figures struggle inside the monster’s translucent form."

The Man With Three First Names, Chapter 11

The Man With Three First Names
Rabbits leap through time,
Portals hum with shifting fate,
Night and day now split.
Buy Yours Here:
Amazon - Books2Read

This is a draft version of a chapter from John Saye’s book, The Man With Three First Names.

The monster stomped through the city. It used the buildings for support, holding onto them as it continued to grow. Never meant to be in this world, its body kept trying to adjust and change, to auto-evolve until it matched what it needed to live here. Its skin had almost become opaque. The shadows of Simon and Michael were dim, along with the other people who were still alive inside of it. It stomped along, destroying cars and other property on its way.

As it looked around, it could see less and less of its native world, not that it would fit in its present form on that side either. It plowed through a little business district and climbed the buildings so that it could see.

Police helicopters buzzed around it like angry moths, and it knocked them away just as such. They called out to it with loudspeakers but it didn’t understand the language. Most of that part of its brain had already been eaten away, and there was nothing much left but the scream of terror and delight in destruction. It was an abomination, that it also knew. All it had left was to find somewhere that it could relax. Rampaging around the city was making it frustrated and upset, and the cars stung its feet.

It looked around for the bluegrasses of its homeworld, for the grazers with their long tusks, for the swoopers with their long nostrils from the sky, but it could see none of them, only the gray of the city, and the mist of destroyed water mains, and the rubble that it was leaving behind. It began to run. This broke up the ground a little more than it liked. Its feet were strong, but fundamentally they were pretty soft, and they seemed to splat and spread out more than was comfortable as it gathered up speed. It jumped from a building where it could see a nearby lake and made for it.

It stomped down the highway, and out into the countryside, glad for the softer earth and the ability to push through the trees and to put its feet on dirt and mud, and made for the lake.

The mist was just clearing here, people were out on their boats, and when the creature came up through the fog there was a panic. Boats went every which way. People jumped out of them and attempted to swim away, people lost fish and threw their poles into the water, and others just stood there and watched as the creature came up.

It jumped into the lake, splashing water in all directions and causing a small wave to smack a nearby bait shop, destroying its facade. It ducked into the water, up to its neck, and trudged along. It snorted water through its nose and relaxed for the first time since it had arrived. Finally, it was somewhere that it made sense to be. It reached forward and swam, taking joy in scaring the locals who were getting the hell out of the water as fast as they could now.

It took to the water, submerging, and swam through the dark lake, generating its own glow as it went. It thrust through the water, and took in a bunch of fish, swallowing them down, and then came into a more shallow area of the lake, and popped its head up, right next to a boat full of people drinking beer and eating hot dogs. Those people went over the side in a hurry as the creature crushed the boat in its teeth, then released it to sink into the water on its own. It watched as the terrified people scrambled away from it, half swimming, half flailing, and splashing. He pushed passed them, letting the people go. He thought of eating one of them but decided he didn’t care enough.

He climbed out of the water. It poured off him. A beach full of bathers were screaming for their lives and jumped up to stand on top of a little shrimp and fries shack that rented floats, flippers and masks. The shack buckled beneath them, cracked and fell apart as the creature ran by, and onto a small playground, where it was surrounded by children who simultaneously pointed up into the sky and said “Monster!”

They were not afraid of it. They were, in fact, compelled to attack, and they jumped up on the beast and began to climb up it, stuffing their hands through its jelly-like body, and taking big chunks from its flesh and just eating it like it was so much lemon-lime Jell-o.

They climbed up, and the creature began to writhe and bellow. It could feel its legs being destroyed by the children. They were tearing him apart, but they were getting full, and sleepy, and sliding off the creature and back into the playground or climbing to his head and jumping out for the lake like he was a gigantic, living, rubber diving board.

It could feel one of its legs was almost chewed through, and it kind of limped from the playground in a rage. As they fell, the children grabbed huge chunks of the creature’s flesh and used them to bounce when they hit the ground. No one told them to do this or that it would work, but they did it anyway, and it worked for them.

The creature staggered off, and looked before it at the towering rock of Stone Mountain near Atlanta, and made for it. It rampaged down the road in search of the rock, drawn to it by its sheer size. It bounded through the parking lot, cars screeching and getting out of the way. It bounded over a large fancy palisade, and down through the grass toward the mountain, and jumped up the side, where it began to slither up, crawling up beyond the great civil war carving and pulled its way to the top.

On the other side of the country, in a bunker beneath the desert, someone said: “Okay, Janson, bring him on in, we’re on a time limit here.”

“Is it time Darren?”

“Yep, now, bring him in.”

Janson walked into the little room. It was darkish but was reminiscent of an operating theatre. Janson pulled down a box from the left-hand side of the room and began to rummage through it. He brought out a left leg, a vaguely presidential left leg at that, and put it on the table. Darren began at once to work on the limb, bringing out a small electrical tool with which he started to activate the leg.

From the box, Janson pulled out another leg, and then hauled out the torso. Everything was already covered in clothing, the President’s favorite suit, and shoes.

Darren continued to work the circuits and to hook everything together. The legs started to work, moving around just a little bit.

Janson brought out the arms, and Darren hooked them together while a robotic arm came down from the ceiling and started to sew his clothes together as they continued their work.

“Give me the head, come on now,” said Darren.

Janson looked through the box and pulled out the head. It was a perfect replica of the original President, who had been prone to the assassination, but who had otherwise served well over the years, and placed it on the table.

Janson activated the servos and hooked the neck to the head, and touched a switch behind its ear.

The eyes opened in a flash, and the President sat up in a single jerk of motion, his eyes glazed over, peering into nothing. It looked like his eyes were little monitors in the dark, glowing with a fierce green, and you could tell that he was rebooting.

The President said “Presidential six-point-oh point three speaking. Downloading the latest software patch.” A little progress bar in his eyes filled from one side to the other.

“I always hate this part,” said Darren.  “I always wonder if he’s going to have enough hard disk space the next time we activate one.”

“Darren, why don’t we go ahead and put the next one together so we can just turn him on next time?”

“Don’t ask so many questions.”

They watched as the robotic leader of the free world continued to twitch his head and download new upgrades one after the other. In a moment, his eyes cleared, and he looked up.

“Last thing I remember we were attacking a large monster. What happened?”

“We’re not prepared to debrief you, sir, we’ll get you to a conference room where you can plug in and get the last few memories. They should have bounced off the satellite by now.”

They took him into another room and handed him what looked like a small red audio player. He placed the earphones in his ears, turned it on and laid back on a small reclining chair to soak in the last few minutes of his ship going down.

He sat up.

Gentlemen, get me to the command center. “I may have to call a full air strike on Atlanta, not that it’ll do any good. I want to see where the creature is now.”

He walked down the hall with them, and into a small war room staffed with techs capable of keeping the equipment running, and looked down at the map, it was much like the table in his command ship.

“Where is it now?”

One of the screens tracked it down to Stone Mountain on the map and focused it down to show the creature, who looked pretty battered by now, sitting on top of the giant rock.

“Call my ship.”

“Sir, your ship went down in the fight.”

“My other ship.”

They all stood back from him. They didn’t like that one.

“But that one hasn’t been fully tested.”

“Do you have a better idea of how to get me back to the other side of the country?”

“Sir, it’s not that. It’s just that the radiation sir.”

“I can take the radiation, don’t you worry about that.”

“But what about the pilots?”

“Easy,” said the President with a grin, activate two more of me, and download the piloting program into them.

“What?”

“Do it, I need to get back out to Atlanta as quick as I can.”

“Yes, sir.”

Two more presidents were assembled while the current version went into the hangar to his craft. It was a large saucer-shaped ship, recently discovered in a crater somewhere in Brazil. The President looked out at it and smiled. He’d wanted a chance to pilot this thing for a while. With three of him, he just might manage it.

A door slid open and two more of him, dressed this time in flight jumpsuits, stepped forward.

They smiled at each other and said in unison. “You about ready to get this baby in the air? Yep. Let’s go.” It was like listening to himself in stereo.

Darren shook his head. They hadn’t had more than one of them active for a while and it always creeped him out to hear them talk in unison like that.

They climbed aboard the ship, and everyone cleared the flight deck.

The ship began to spin, and in just a moment it was through the roof and on out into the night sky, zooming for Atlanta.

It zoomed through Texas, skidded through Oklahoma, dived through Louisiana, and then went on through Mississippi and Alabama. They could see the creature on the sensors in the distance jumping up and down on the peak of Stone Mountain.

When they’d landed outside of Jen and Walter’s dinner, they were upside down, lying on their backs, with their arms pointing into the air at the building above them, surrounded in fog, with an alien moon behind it. They were in the parking lot, and they knew what that might mean.

Fred and Moxie jumped up, and they could see it, the restaurant was just a few hundred feet away from them, but the parking lot was full of great tusked creatures, swinging their heads around and bumping into them.

Fred climbed the tusks of one of the creatures, and then pulled his way onto its head by grasping big handfuls of dark fur and hoisting himself up.

Moxie yelled, but it wasn’t a damsel in distress sort of thing. Ruffled by one of the creatures, she yelled back at it. Her cry was more of an assertive tone with the beast in question. She could almost hear herself saying “Bad Dog!”

She called one of them out, shaking a finger at it, and then climbed up on its back without a further question. She had no idea how she was managing to do this but didn’t question it.

“How’d you do that?”

“Beats the hell out of me. Come on!”

They dug in with their fists, full of fur and kneed the beasts until they moved over near the door. With everything swimming flying and exploding around them, they hopped off and made for the door, rolling through it, and into the diner.

“Moxie, Fred, you guys are back,” said Walter.

“Where’s Michael and Simon?” asked Jen.

“They’re in trouble, we’ve got to help them.”

“Where are they?”

“We’re not sure anymore, but Moxie’s got a tracer on Michael.”

“Oh have you now,” said Jen.

“Will you drop it, Fred?”

Fred laughed at her and kissed her. “Well, you do.”

“Come on then,” said Walter. “Fred, I’m going to need your help up top to get this old bucket running. Moxie, can you help Jen there with the navigator?”

Both of them nodded.

“Come on Fred,” said Walter. They walked back through the swinging door from the kitchen area behind the bar and into the hold of a working freighter.

“I didn’t know you had all this back here.”

“Well, that’s why we don’t let a lot of people back here, right? This way.”

They went down a little corridor and stepped onto a circular plate that lifted them up through a sliding hatchway in the ceiling and out onto the roof.

“What are we up here for?”

Fred was looking around. It looked like a normal roof, there was an air conditioner and various vents and things. It looked like a normal roof.

“Two things,” said Walter. “One, we’re disconnecting the cable, and two, we’ve got to fire up the engines.” He pointed over to the air conditioning unit.

“What this old AC unit?”

“Look again.”

Walter went to the edge of the roof, where a single cable connected the building to the outside world, and cut it off with a huge pair of limb loppers he’d brought with him while Fred went over to look at the AC unit. When he got close to it, he heard a beep beep, and it opened up. Little panels slid backward and forwards and disappeared into the roof. Before him was a working hyperdrive, and hover lift unit, starting to spin to life for the first time in about five years.

He turned to see Walter with a little key fob. He’d just hit the switch to open it all up.

“Cool.”

They opened the side of the engine and began to work. It all looked like it was in working order, there was just a lot of prep work to do to get her flying again. They stopped thinking about it and dived right in. Fred took every direction from Walter and followed his instructions as best he could. When you work for a year and a half at a space station pumping gas and doing minor fixes in the star garage, you can do anything like this. He was only a little bit rusty.

Below them, Jen and Moxie were hard at work.

“You’ve got a tracer on Michael do you?”

“Yes.” She handed it over, it was a little transceiver with a small dot on it, blinking on a map.

“Looks like he’s on Stone Mountain. Interesting.”

Jen took the tracer and dropped it down into a crack between the waffle irons and the griddle, and the griddle turned over to reveal a tracing program and screen. The lights dimmed for a second and every surface in the whole place turned over to reveal some kind of instrument panel.

In the back, an old man, still sipping on a cup of coffee, cold bacon was forgotten before he opened his eyes and started to look around. The whole place seemed to be alive.

“Oh Shit, Cal,” said Jen.

She went to him.

“Cal honey, come on, we’re closing for the night.”

“But you never close,” he said. He’d been spiking his coffee long enough now he wasn’t sure if anyone else could see all the instrument panels and lights but him.

“Come on now, gotta go.”

He got up and allowed Jen to walk him to the door.

“Just trying to finish my coffee.”

“Here, I’ll get you a to-go cup dear.”

She handed him a full cup of coffee in a plastic cup, made just the way he liked it.

“Who are you?” he said.

“You know my dear, I’m Jen. You’ve been buying coffee from me for four years now. Come on, get out, we’re closing up for the night.”

He toddled out into the parking lot and saw the light stream up from the rooftop and Fred and Walter lowering back into the restaurant, and the spinning blaze of lights now on the top of the place where the air conditioner had been.

“Wait,” said Fred, “What about Michael’s car? Have you got a garage back here?”

“Oh yeah,” said Walter.

“I’ll go out and get it.”

Cal watched, dumbfounded as Fred came out of the building, and waved, “Hi,” and got into the flying car and revved it up, tucked the wheels into the car in the floating position, and drove it around the building to the back where he brought it inside the restaurant and parked it.

Cal sat down on the hood of another car and then watched as the whole building broke from the ground and flew into the sky, two slender wings now protruding from the sides.

Cal looked next to him, at the tusked creature chewing up the ground, and downed his entire cup of coffee in one, and then proceeded to walk off home, ignoring all the animals and interesting creatures he saw along the way. Above him, his favorite restaurant had just floated away. He would never drink again. He threw the cup away.

In the belly of the beast, sat Simon and Michael. “Any matches?” asked Michael.

Simon laughed. “No, don’t smoke.”

The people around them had tired of trying to hack their way out of the creature’s belly. It wasn’t suffocating in there, but to claw your way out, the gelatin belly of the beast would just grow back stronger as you struggled.

“What are you thinking about?” asked Simon.

Michael was sitting, as comfortably as he could. He still had his hat on, which kept getting covered in goo, but his coat was off now.

“I’m thinking about our rescue.”

“What?”

“I’m imagining it, our rescue. I’m imagining how we get rescued. Somehow we’ve got to rely on Fred and Moxie, they’re all we have left.”

“What about Jen and Walter?”

“I suppose that’s a possibility. They might be involved.”

“So what happens?”

“I’m not sure but it needs to be something bloody big. We’ve got to get out of this guy as fast as we can. Going to be major.”

“Like what?”

“I’m hoping that either they bring the restaurant, or Fred brings my car.”

“The Restaurant?”

“Oh yeah, it’s a total space ship, you know that right?”

“Hey, I’m still getting used to being able to change into a ravening troll creature, remember?”

“That’s right. I’ve forgotten how little time has passed. It’s only been a couple of days, right?”

“Something like that.”

They sat there in the goo, thinking about life while Jen and Walter sped their way to Stone Mountain with Moxie and Fred plastered to the front windows of the diner as they flew across the city.

They passed Midtown, and downtown, and off to the East, towards the giant granite rock.

“So, said Simon, do you think we’ll make it?”

Outside, the creature writhed and danced at the top of the mountain, destroying the entrance to the gondola, and the front of a small arcade and gift shop.

Someone who had been running up the mountain saw the creature and turned right back around again. Another group who saw it arrive didn’t know whether to run or just gape at the sight of it.

It climbed to the top of the gift shop and bellowed, screaming at the sky, and brought its fists down destroying the roof. The creature fell in and then began to wade through the debris of ceiling tiles and insulation.

Inside the monster’s belly, they held on for dear life. It was a lot like being in a child’s playground at a fast-food chain restaurant, lost in the big pool of colored plastic balls, even the others trapped in there with them were starting to find the humor in bouncing around and off the walls. They’d all thrown up at one point or another by now, and there was nothing left to do but laugh.

The creature jumped out of the remains of the gift shop, covered in t-shirts and coffee mugs hanging from its teeth, and those inside took a tumble as it bounded for the arcade and bashed it’s way into it, sending teens and forty-somethings on the Pac-Man machines through the doors and out onto the surface of the mountain.

Walter sat in a captain’s chair that had come up out of the restaurant floor. Jen sat in a similar one. They were more like the kind of easy chairs you see on a motor home than anything else.

“There he is,” said Walter.

Before them they could see it, jumping up and down on the surface of the Granite dome.

“Moxie, Fred, you know what to do, right?”

They nodded and headed for the back. Moxie got behind the wheel of Michael’s car, and as soon as they were buckled in, the floor dropped out below them and they flew out of the back of the little diner, flying through the sky and zoomed off, looking for a lower angle of approach.

“Jen,” said Walter, “you know what we need to do now?”

“Yep. We’ve got to get them out of there.”

“Good, then let’s drop it.”

She flicked the switch and a missile lowered from the bottom of the little flying diner.

She flipped another switch to arm it.

Red lights blinked on the missile.

She flicked another switch and it cut loose from the bottom and zoomed off ahead of them towards the big rubber monster.

“I hope they hold on tight,” said Jen.

The missile sped out, targeting the monster. They were still a good ways off, mere moments from impact.

Inside the monster, Michael opened his eyes. “They’re here.”

Simon looked around and transformed in anticipation.

“Almost…”

“Duck         !”

"A colossal monster with glowing, translucent skin rampages through a city as battleships fire down. Two adventurers with energy whips prepare to strike while an unstable portal crackles behind them."

The Man With Three First Names, Chapter 10

The Man With Three First Names
Rabbits leap through time,
Portals hum with shifting fate,
Night and day now split.
Buy Yours Here:
Amazon - Books2Read

This is a draft version of a chapter from John Saye’s book, The Man With Three First Names.

There was a bellow from below them, the creature was beginning to grow. Its skin was already a sickening shade of yellow, and Simon could swear it was glowing beneath them. They watched out of the side of the ship as they passed over while the creature took a chunk out of the building it was climbing on. Electricity shocked through its body, and it began to convulse.

“Will he ever be the same?” asked Simon.

“No,” said Michael.

Fred and Moxie pulled on their goggles and watched the battle screen. They gathered around the console. They looked at the video image of the creature on the ground.

The President reached out his hand and moved his fingers across the table, moving in troops and air battle groups. They could see themselves. The President selected all the air units and then selected the creature itself. They could feel the ship they were in turn as he did it.

“What’s happening?” asked Simon.

Michael already knew.

“We’re surrounding it. I’ve just given the order.”

On the screen, the battleships converged on the monster, and keeping a safe-ish distance, began to circle around it.

The creature writhed and pounded its claws into the building it was on, busting out the side where a firm of lawyers was going over their latest case. Still around them, the thickness of the brown mists and bluegrasses pushed into the world. Great spiraling trees worked their way into the buildings, lifting some of them from the ground.

“The portal is still active,” said Michael.

Simon looked up. We saw it destroyed. How can that be?

“I don’t know.”

The President was quiet.

“What?” said Michael.

The President nodded over folded hands. He covered his face with them.

“Talk.”

“The connection hasn’t finished settling.”

“What’s going to happen?”

“If I’m right we’re working our way into a downward spiral.”

“What like a low-pressure system?” asked Simon.

Michael slapped the President’s hands down. “Talk! This isn’t a weather report.”

There were immediately fifteen guns trained on him.

“We are not playing here Mr. Christopher. We’ve got to ride this out. If the experiments we’ve been doing so far are any sign, then this is going to blow over in a few hours, and we’ll just have a little cleanup to go through after the worlds settle themselves out.”

Michael took a step back.

“It’s okay gentlemen.”

The President straightened his tie, and the men laid off, lowering their guns.

“Now let’s look at this again.”

They gathered around the console again, but this time Michael kept his distance a little bit. He listened, but he was already working on his own agenda.

The great dinosaur-like creature bellowed below them and put its hand into a building, past a group of designers and web developers, then pulled out a large pile of disused hard drives and ate them. It burped and belched fire all over another building that was just standing there minding its own business, thank you very much.

The creature, now starting to turn more of a green shade than he was before jumped down and landed in the middle of a busy street half-covered in cars and half great wooly creatures looking for succulent bluegrasses. It found the only asphalt instead. It grabbed a bus and started emptying people out of it into it’s gaping maw like they were potato chips at the bottom of the bag. When all the tasty morsels were gone, it tried to bite the bus, didn’t like the taste of it, and threw it into a local movie theatre, after which patrons began to run screaming from it, partially because of the impact of the bus, but also because they were in the process of running out already from the throng of little blue warriors that had taken refuge in the theatre.

“We can’t waste any more time.”

“Then you’re back on board Michael?”

“Yes.”

“Everybody else?”

Simon nodded.

Fred and Moxie nodded. They did their best serious looks.

“Okay then.”

The President waved his hand over the screen and began moving in troops.

“You’re ordering them with this right?”

“Yep, they are on the move, here.” The President brushed his finger on the screen, then selected a commander.

Michael watched them move into position. It looked like a leader was getting the orders in his helmet and then getting his troops in line. Chain of command.

“We’ve got to stop him.”

“All I can do is slow him down, I’m afraid.”

“It’s all up to Simon here.”

“What?”

“I think you’re the only hope in this situation. You were the closest to the blast and survived it when the barrier exploded between our worlds. Somehow you’re the link that’s going to send this guy home.”

“He’s pretty intelligent on his side of the fence,” said Michael.

“It’s sad,” said Simon. “Their world is poisoned.”

“I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do about that. I’ve got a country to run and a city to save here. Somehow it all comes down to you. I’m not sure how it’s just a hunch.”

“You’re right,” said Michael. 

“Mike?”

“He’s an ass,” said Michael, “but it’s the only thing that makes sense at this point.”

Simon found his nerve and straightened up. “When can I get down there then?”

The President smiled.

“Moxie? Do you have them?”

“You bet.”

Fred and Moxie pulled them from their gadget-laden backpacks what looked like little metal tubes. They held them forward and pressed a button with each thumb.

“What are those things?” asked Michael.

“They’re our ticket.” The bars expanded, and compartments opened and slid out until an entire hoverbike floated beneath both of them.

“Hop on guys.”

Simon ran forward and sat behind Moxie.

Michael took a deep breath and sat down behind Fred.

“What’s the plan then?” asked Michael.

“Oh the usual,” said the President. “Wing it.”

“Great.”

“Wing it. That’s all he’s got.”

“Wing it.”

“Nice.”

Michael shook his head. “Get us out of here guys.”

Fred and Moxie revved them up and took off. When they got to the edge of the flight deck, they turned to wave at the President, who waved back, then they dived off the edge, heading for the ground. It rushed up at them rather quicker than Michael would have liked.

They hurled to the ground, this time with engines spurring them on, towards mad creatures that wanted to kill them, but somehow Michael was at ease with it all. He sat there, on the hover-cycle, holding his hat and screaming at the top of his lungs like he was on a great carnival ride. He let it all out of himself, closing his eyes and imagined all the strange things he’d seen in his lifetime. The Lochness monster, bigfoot, aliens, zombies, and who knew what else. What better fate for him than to be dashed to death on the ground before a giant rubber monster that was terrorizing the city? If it was the way he was going to go out, it at least suited him just fine.

They flattened out, and started zinging through the streets, and in and out between the buildings.

There was a roar above them. Michael looked up and watched as the head of the monster seemed to bob between the buildings.

Moxie fired up her lasers.

Fred did the same.

They started firing on the creature as they approached.

“No!” yelled Michael

They didn’t hear him and kept on firing.

The creature swung out a fist and missed Moxie as they went by.

Simon leaped off of Moxie’s bike and flew through the air towards the monster, who batted at him and sent him tumbling into nearby thick grass.

“Simon!”

Michael too jumped, leaping for the creature’s neck. He latched on and held there for dear life. He reached into his pockets, and pulled out a squirt gun, and aiming it into the creature’s eye, blasted it with a mixture of lemon juice and battery acid. “That was handy.”

The creature writhed in pain and shook Michael off. He plummeted to the ground while the creature rubbed its eyes, more out of an annoyance, but it gave Fred and Moxie a chance to come around from the other side and hit the creature again.

Simon jumped and caught Michael on the way down and set him down.

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it,” said Simon, as he launched himself up into the air again at the creature. He latched onto the creature’s nose and began to punch him, but it was like hitting a towering stack of gelatin molds. His hand stuck through the creature, and he had to pull it out with a sickening sucking noise each time.

Fred and Moxie came around for another pass, and Michael could tell from the corner of his eyes that the President was bringing his ships in, moving in for a kill, or a melt-down or whatever this creature’s fate would be.

Fred and Moxie let loose, and Michael watched as their laser blasts hit the creature, entered its dinosaur-gelatin body, seemed to build for a moment, and then passed through to the other side with a spurt of slime and marshmallow goo.

The creature burped a cloud of sweet-smelling steam and shook it off.

“Cut the lasers!” cried Michael, but he was wrong. It was a signal to Fred and Moxie to up the ante and let the creature have it.

They tore into it and filled him full of as much energy as they could muster. It filled the creature up and bloated the inside of him. As they passed the rubber monstrosity, the energy came out its other side and flew straight at them. They had just reached out for a high-five, and it turned into a handclasp as the energy from their own blasts came out and smacked them from behind. They were blown off their bikes, which crashed into the outside of a nearby building, and they were flying through the air.

Michael’s got a lot of luck. Simon’s nigh-invulnerable. Fred and Moxie are cute and have cool toys, but they are mortal, so they searched their bodies for anything they could find, and without their regular backpacks there was little they could do before they too hit the outside of a building to be cut to ribbons on the glass.

They clutched their hands together, and just before they hit the wall they hit the emergency teleport button on their wristbands.

No time to program it.

In a whiff of sparks, they were gone.

“Oh crap,” said Michael.

He looked back up to where Simon was punching the creature in the face and getting his hands stuck deeper and deeper in it.

Simon yelled and flung his fists at the creature, who seemed annoyed but not much else. It reared back its head and shaking its neck toppled Simon onto it’s bubbling green tongue, and swallowed him whole.

The creature walked up to Michael, who could see Simon struggling inside the beast through its translucent skin, and lowered its head to sniff Michael’s scent.

He blew Michael’s hat off. It rolled to a corner of the street that was already covered in shards of glass.

“That’s enough.”

The creature opened its eyes a little wider and regarded Michael a little differently. It cocked its head.

“I asked you not to come here.”

He stepped forward just a little bit.

“I told you you wouldn’t make it through the portal without causing more damage than good.”

He stepped forward again, and this time the creature stepped back a little.

“I’ve had enough, and now it’s time to send you back home.”

Michael plucked up his hat and put it back on, straightening it.

“I don’t know how I’m going to do it yet, but you are finished, my friend.”

He held up a small phone to his ear.

“Mr. President, nuke the portal please.”

On his command ship, the President pressed a red button on his console, and then selected the remains of the Sublight group.

It wasn’t an actual nuke, but the three missiles that fell from his ship and headed out toward the facility were plenty good enough to do the job.

They landed one after the other, one, two, three, into the crater. Fire and dust exploded from the site, including a fearsome blast of light.

The portal was no more.

Cut off from his world, the creature began to scream and hold its head in pain for a moment, and then it righted itself, and almost seemed to regain and redouble its strength. Its skin became a more solid shade of green. Simon was still visible, but just barely, and he was moving less and less.

“Hmm. That’s not what I expected.”

The creature bellowed and stomped one of its great clawed feet down, pinning Michael to the ground. It was like being pinned to the ground by a candy bar.

“Okay,” said Michael from between the claws of the beast, now you’ve really ticked me off. He wrenched his body this way and that. His hat came off again, and he put it back on, giving the creature a glare when it happened.

The creature bellowed above him and reached out to knock an electric street sign down, which exploded and landed next to Michael in a shower of sparks.

Michael used the time to look through his pockets.

He pulled out a small voodoo doll, not much help there. He tossed it aside.

Policemen ran up, brandishing rifles, took aim and started shooting the creature. The rubbery nature of its skin wasn’t much help as the bullets just bounced around, or lodged in the skin and stuck there.

Michael searched another pocket and came up with his pistol, alien in origin, he wasn’t even sure what it was called. He fired it, and a beam of green energy flew to the creature’s torso, but it didn’t make much difference. For just a second, the creature forgot about Michael and started to walk off, carrying Michael with him still stuck at the foot, but the laser blast was enough to get its attention again, and it crouched down, pinning Michael flat He squeezed Michael’s arm against the side of the curb. Michael let go of the pistol.

“Crap.” It clattered to the ground.

What else did he have left?

He reached around and found a dagger there in the side of the street. It was one of those the little guys were always carrying. He took it and stabbed the creature, slicing off a rubbery toe.

It stepped off of him, and Michael popped up. He dodged a swing by the creature, and he could see in there, inside its body where Simon was now curled into a ball.

The creature kicked out and lashed its tail at Michael, but instead of hitting him with it, Michael jumped and landed on top of the tail, grasping it in his hands. He climbed up the creature’s back, using the spikes on the creature’s back for support. They were a little harder than the rest of its body.

The creature turned around, trying to sling him off, but Michael didn’t budge. Instead, he held on tight and didn’t move, and continued to scale the beast. There was occasional fire from the President’s men, but they were afraid to hit Michael, so they held off.

Michael grasped onto the creature’s neck and gathered his strength. The creature was starting to make it’s way through town, scraping buildings and breaking glass in its wake, stepping on a car here and there. Things were starting to stick to it, a light pole here, a small dog there.

Michael got up on the creature’s head, and he stomped on it.

The creature stopped.

Michael put his hands on his hips and looked down on the creature. “This is the end of the line for you. I asked you not to come here. To shut off your portal and leave it alone, but did you listen to me? You did not.”

Below him, deep in the creature’s belly, Simon’s eyes opened, and he transformed.

“Now it’s a little too late for you isn’t it?”

The creature looked up at Michael, not comprehending.

“That’s the worst part, isn’t it. You don’t even know you’re causing all this trouble, do you?”

The creature groaned a reply, but there was little feeling or coherence in it.

It rolled its eyes, trying to get a better look at him, then it shook its head, and just like Simon before him, the creature opened its maw and sucked down Michael and swallowed him whole. Then it burped and began climbing a nearby building.

It lurched up the side of the building, tearing out power cords and making a general mess of the place. It just wanted to see a little bit better. Being down in the buildings was as good as being in a cave to it. When it popped it’s head out above them, the President aboard his ship said “Fire.”

All the floating ships started at once, firing red pulses of light towards the creature, and it started to burn, and sizzle and pop.

It roared, and whipped around, smacking down on one of the President’s ships, which roared to the earth and exploded in a giant fireball.

They continued to fire. The President’s ship was standing back a bit now, and the creature whipped out its tale and took another one down, it spinning off into another building, and exploding. Only three left, the creature tracked them like they were gnats hovering just out of view of its left eye.

It jumped from the building and knocked the third one of the President’s crafts out of the sky like it was knocking the football from an opposing player’s arms. The craft lurched and hit the ground, plowing through a street lined with abandoned cars. There it carved a groove in the ground and sent dirt and debris up into the air, splattering all the buildings, and knocked the cars that were in the way into the storefronts of nearby businesses.

The President dropped his arms, and stood there, looking at the destruction all around him. He peered out at the orange sky and waited for it to all be over.

“Sir, what are your orders?”

He looked around lazily.

“What?”

“Sir, your next order sir?”

He let out a great breath and looked around him at the men who were in his service. He didn’t even know their names.

He turned back to the battle map in front of him.

“Ram it.”

“Sir?”

“You heard me, arm the nukes, and ram it.”

The officer relayed the message into his headset with a solemn face.

There was general nodding around. They had to hope to get smacked and nuke the creature. After the others went down there was little hope for victory that way, and they couldn’t just leave. The country would be in total ruins forever.

They armed nuclear weapons.

They fired up the engines and sped toward the monster at top speed.

Right before the weapons finished arming and booting up, the creature whipped out its tail and knocked the President’s ship down. It sailed in a spiral towards the Earth and exploded in a ball of flame half a mile high.

The creature roared and bellowed with rage, and with satisfaction as it continued to tear through the city.

In the belly of the beast sat Simon and Michael. They lay there unconscious and somehow preserved inside the jelly stomach. It stomped along and took them with it. Other people were around them in various states of consciousness. Some of them were curled into balls, some were whimpering, but others, some of which found themselves turned into snack food for the beast via being on the wrong bus at the wrong time were cutting and slicing their way through the beast’s flesh with plastic knives and sporks, and several were using just their hands, or paper coffee cups to do the digging with.

“Should we wake them up?”

“It’s no use. They’ll wake up in time.”

“I hope it’s on time.”

“I do too.”

“They kept digging, almost swimming through the creature.”

Outside the creature knew no different. To it, there wasn’t a rebellion going on under its skin. It just knew it was free, and that this world was there for the taking, not that it knew what that meant either. It was free, and wild in a strange land, and it was alone.

In the wreckage of the President’s ship lay the torn and scattered remains of the President. His body lay broken and torn apart, there were wires everywhere, and part of his plastic face had melted off. His suit smoked, charbroiled and burned and the screws holding his limbs on had all given away and were strewn across the field of battle.

One of his commanders, next to dead himself, pushed up from the wreckage, noticed the disaster and watched as the creature continued to lurch away. He held his earpiece to what remained of his ear and said, “Delta Bravo One, do you read?”

He heard a response.

“The man’s down, repeat, he’s down. Start operation starfish. Repeat operation starfish.”

“Copy that, Delta Bravo One out, Operation Starfish is in motion.”

There was a click, and he knew he’d signed his own death warrant. The remains of the ship exploded and took him with it. There was no evidence now, no pieces of the dead President’s robotic body strewn around.

The commander welcomed it. He closed his eyes and succumbed to the magnetic fireball, and knew no more.

Millions of miles away, Fred and Moxie came hurtling out of a purple wormhole and onto the deck of a popular space station. They got up and brushed themselves off. They didn’t have their backpacks, and they didn’t have anything but each other and their wristbands, which were blinking. “Recharge light…” By then it might be too late. They picked themselves up. There was a throng of people who were now avoiding them and walking away from them. They had arrived in a busy walking area.

They staggered to a coffee shop on the side of the walkway and looked up at the starry sky above the mega station. They ordered two cups of synth coffee, and sat back, unaware of how the battle was going without them, feeling guilty that they couldn’t return immediately.

“What do we do?”

“We wait it out, what else is there to do?”

They watched through the glass and force fields in the ceiling and looked out as the station came back around to the dayside of the planet.

It was Earth.

“Fred.” She said it as she grasped his wrist.

There it was, definitely Earth.

“Oh shit.”

Below them, the Earth turned. They had traveled in time as well as space. It’s always odd when you have to hit the emergency escape.

They took another sip of their coffees and watched their wristbands, to see how long it would take them to recharge.

By the time they had finished their fifth cups of coffee, now wired up and ready for anything, their wrist bands beeped and they were ready to go.

They stood up, the bill for coffee unpaid, and zapped out of there. It wouldn’t matter where they programmed it for, their wristbands were still stuck on Earth. They flung around through time and space, on their way back. They held hands as they traversed the psychedelic passages of space and time to come out the other side screaming, hot and flustered, and landing just several feet from Jen and Walter’s restaurant again.

“Hungry?”

"A battlefield where Earth and an alien world merge. Two warriors wield glowing whips against a monstrous warlord, while a spaceship hovers above and a collapsing portal pulses with energy."

The Man With Three First Names, Chapter 9

The Man With Three First Names
Rabbits leap through time,
Portals hum with shifting fate,
Night and day now split.
Buy Yours Here:
Amazon - Books2Read

This is a draft version of a chapter from John Saye’s book, The Man With Three First Names.

“That’s it!” said the President. “Now, go suit up!”

Simon and Michael looked at each other. They nodded and followed a pair of soldiers into an enclosed room.

“Your clothes sir.”

“Forget it,” said Michael, “just do it, we’ll fit in the jumpsuits just fine.”

Metallic jumpsuits lowered from the ceiling. There were large clear openings like a HAZMAT suit. They were silvery-green in color.

“Oh come on!” said Michael.

“Sir, we don’t know what’s on the other side, we want you to be able to breathe sir.”

They were all putting on face masks.

“What, you think you’re all going with me?”

“Of course sir, we’re under your orders.”

“Then my first order is getting out of my way!”

Michael and Simon pushed out of the little room.

“What’s the problem?” asked the President.

“The problem is, we’re going on our own on this one Dave.”

“Mike, come on, you don’t know what’s in there.”

“I have a pretty good idea, and those creatures aren’t dying right away over here, so we’re on our way.”

The President grabbed Michael by the elbow, it was a vice-like grip.

“Lay off, robot.”

Mike swatted him off, then found himself looking at the bewildered troops around him.

“It’s nothing, said the President, just an old college nickname.” He gave Michael a stare to kill.

“That’s right,” said Michael.

“I just want to make sure you’re taken care of.”

“I’ll be fine. Simon, you ready?”

“You bet. He transformed into the crazed looking creature, and together they ran for the edge and jumped out of the ship together.”

“I hope you have a plan,” said Simon on the way down.

“I always have a plan, just let me think of one real quick.”

“We’ll be better off on our own.”

“Well, it’s not like we need parachutes or anything.”

“Why would we need that, right?”

Michael was looking at the ground, just a sea of sushi-like raw tentacles.

Simon was picking his landing point.

Michael touched a button on his jacket, and a parachute, small, but efficient popped forth from behind his neck. He shot up into the air, as Simon kept plummeting downwards.

Simon hit the ground like a ton of bricks, and sprayed fresh tentacle everywhere in a column above him, but still landed, kneeling, and stood up again, brushing the slime off of him like it was nothing.

Michael touched down and folded the parachute away.

“Interesting suit.”

“I got it from a—“

“Leave it.”

“Right.”

Around them, boiling pools of slime were eating away at the hardware of the old laboratory.

Simon put a clawed hand on the table, and it fell apart, from where the slime had already been working on the legs.

Before them stood the gate. It was the only thing shining in the place.

Somewhere a cell phone was ringing. It was playing a ringtone by the Beatles.

Michael answered it. “I’m sorry I called you a robot.”

“You’re forgiven.”

Simon could hear everything going on at the President’s end of the call. His senses were on overdrive.

President coughed.

“He and I went to college together,” Michael said to Simon.

“If he hadn’t been out on a mission with you I would never have been necessary.”

“I know.”

“I just wanted to make sure you got down all right. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“Yeah, watch our backs and stay local in case I need you to round them up again after the next pulse.”

“Roger that.”

“Roger my ass.”

“Roger your ass, roger.”

“Dave?”

“We did download the personality, Mike.”

“Are you in there?”

“Some of me. Get on with it, get through that portal.”

The President hung up and Michael tossed the stray phone aside.

“You ready?”

Simon pulled out his whip.

Michael pulled out his as well.

The portal, itself, seemed to know what was going on because it started to crackle with extra energy as Simon and Michael brought the whips out.

“Let’s crack ’em.”

They cracked their bullwhips into the portal, and they went right through and sucked Michael and Simon right on behind them.

Everything became a blur of light. Things stretched, pulled into pretzels, and then ironed out like old laundry hung up to dry before Michael finally opened his eyes again.

It was dark.

Michael felt around.

His face was there, that was good.

He thought about that for a moment. So, his face was there. What about his hat? He felt around for that, found it close by and put it on. At least he felt the sensations of putting it on his head. He could feel the satin lining caress his forehead and temples, and he could feel the weight of it on his ears, but it fell off again. He felt around and could feel the ground beneath him. He pushed up, and put his hat back on again, but still had trouble opening his eyes. Everything was blurry.

He searched around and rubbed at his eyes. His hands were there, and he could see them. He looked around. Simon was on the floor, but pushing up, and shaking his head. He kept transforming, back and forth and back and forth. Sometimes he got it right, and sometimes, he got it wrong and had to transform back so he could breathe or so his eyes weren’t on the inside of his nostrils or something. He wasn’t awake enough to control it. Soon he got it back, straightened himself up, and started looking around.

They were standing on a hill, covered in bluegrass with an open, cloudy coppery sky above them.

Before them was the portal, just as it was on the other side, just a mirror image.

“Where are the whips?” asked Simon.

“Doing their job.”

Michael reached around, felt at the base of his neck, and could feel the prickle where the extra-dimensional whip must have attached itself to him, and as he thought about it, he could see the light of it trailing like a faint ghost back to the portal.

“They are linking us back to our world.”

Simon felt for his as well.

“If we destroy the machine, we’ll have just a few seconds to make it back through before the portal loses its connection.”

“Here’s to keeping it light, right?”

There were great grinding and scraping.

Michael and Simon looked out and could see a great machine rolling forward and clamping down over the projector.

“We’ve got to get in that thing.”

“That’s it, right there?”

“I think so, we’re going to have to find out.”

Captain Harland stepped forward. Here he was about their size and started working on the machine. He waved off the help of his slaves, who scattered away as he flung his arms at them.

He threw what looked like a screwdriver at the ground and sat on the machine, looking through the portal.

“Why are they out in this field?”

“I don’t know,” said Simon.

They ventured another peek, and saw behind the portal generator, the huge army lying in wait. It looked like they’d been camped out there for a while.

Harland looked over at them, did a double-take.

“They spotted us,” said Michael.

“Get them!”

Michael and Simon turned tail and ran. They dived down into the bluegrasses and tried to hide in the thick underbrush, but the army was close upon them. Here, instead of being short and stubby six-armed assassins, they were lean and strong. It was their natural world, and they were proud warriors, skilled at what they did. They found Michael and Simon and brought them forward to Harland.

“How is it that you’ve come here?”

“Oh, you know, just looking around,” said Michael.

“Just looking around? You are not from this world.”

“Never met travelers?”

Simon turned into himself.

“And what of this little man? A skin-changer of some kind? Interesting.”

“How is it that you can understand us, and we you? Are languages that similar in the galaxy?”

“You’d be surprised,” said Michael. “One of my best friends in High School was an alien, and the most foreign thing he ever said sounded something like a combination of French and Spanish at best.”

“I don’t know of French and Spanish, whatever these things are. I should kill you now. You came through the portal, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Then how come you could make it through in one piece? We are having such difficulty with it.”

“What happened here?”

“It was a war. We burned our planet to death. Some things still survive. The grasses seem to have thrived on our warfare. We’ve been looking for a new home for some time now, and yours was the first we found that we could get through the portal with. We just couldn’t make it stick.”

“Part of it’s because you destroyed the portal generator on the other side.”

“Did we?”

“Afraid so, and when you come through the portal, you seem to change. I’m assuming you didn’t try and push a big tentacled monster through at us last time.”

“No, it was a horse.”

The word didn’t translate well in Michael’s mind. They didn’t have horses here. It was closer to the word steed, but that wasn’t even close. It was more like a beloved animal when it finished in his mind.

“What happened?”

“He got stuck. The portal generator isn’t stable, we can’t make it work.”

“I have to ask you to abandon it.”

“What?”

“What you’re doing is destroying our world. Each time you power this system up, you deepen the crack or rift between our worlds.”

“That is our hope.”

“You must not. What you are doing is twisting our worlds and breaking them apart. You’ve already laid waste to this world, please don’t do the same to ours. We have a hard enough time taking care of it ourselves. Here you seem reasonable. On the other side, you don’t come through quite the same. Your minds and bodies get warped and altered by the portal. You need to shut it off, for our own good, and yours.”

“You do not understand. We are dying.”

“It’s never simple is it?”

“No, it’s not.”

Harland straightened up. The army behind him was taking notice of what was going on. “We can’t turn it off, it’s our only hope. We don’t travel the stars, we only travel between dimensions. For most of the war, we used these machines to travel in and around and behind each other, for attack and surprise.”

“And now you’re using it to find a way out.”

“You understand.”

“Yes I do, and I promise to help, I’ve got friends, and we can make another arrangement. We’ll get you off-world.”

“I cannot accept your offer.”

Michael nodded.

“You’re sure you won’t reconsider?”

“I cannot make allowances. This portal is our last hope. Before a ship from your world could arrive, we’d all be gone.”

“You won’t accept then?”

“No. It’s kind of you, but it’s no use.”

There was a rumble across the ground.

“Sire!” called one of the technicians who had been working on the machine. “We’re ready for another pulse!”

“Good, then start!”

They rumbled away from the casing, and a blast of energy coursed up the projection that was generating the portal, and it brightened.

“Everyone move out!”

They began to move forward, and transform. In just a moment the grasses shrank into the ground and became hard asphalt, light posts, and traffic lights.

Simon looked around them. “We’re home.”

“No, we’re not.”

Harland was still standing there. “It’s just the beginning. It’s still not strong enough for anything to stick yet. If I go straight through the portal, I won’t make it through, or I’ll end up caught between two worlds, like the creature you saw.”

“What’s the point then? If you come through like some kind of monster, what’s the point?”

The Captain just shook his head.

“Come on, I can have a fleet here before you know it.”

“Sorry, Michael,” said Harland. “This is likely our last chance, this or the next pulse. The projector is dying.” He moved forward and began to push his head through the portal.

“Don’t.”

“I have to try.”

Harland pushed himself into the portal, climbing through, Michael and Simon could see him transforming into the ravenous toothy body of a major slobbering monster on the other side. On this side, his feet kicked and swayed and pushed, and his arms flailed to keep hold of the edge of the portal, which of course there wasn’t one.

“Good, he’s getting even uglier now…”

Michael leaped at Harland, and grabbed him by the foot, but could only hold on, finding himself hoisted up into the air. His feet couldn’t touch the ground, so instead of pulling, he just wiggled there, hoping to latch onto something by accident.

Simon transformed and then soared into the air and landed next to Michael, who while holding onto one of Harland’s feet, and losing the battle and began to slide through the portal. He screamed, and Simon watched as Michael’s right arm turned into a wild explosion of spaghetti as it went through to the other side.

Simon jumped up and tore at Harland, and got pulled up like a rag doll, too close to the portal for comfort, and let go, falling to the ground.

Harland stepped through with a sort of sticky squeaking spurt, and Michael fell through with him, getting turned into what looked like a wet slop of raw hamburger. Simon jumped, and grabbed at Michael, pulling him back through. They fell to the ground with a whump and looked back and watched as Harland, now through to the other side looked closer to a gelatin-based dinosaur with fangs than his usual self. Harland roared, and cocked his neck, yelling into the night sky on the other side.

Simon stood up.

“Now what?”

“We go back through.”

“What?”

“I saw it, you were mutating just like that guy was, worse!”

“It’s okay, We’ve got these.”

Michael reached behind him and touched the line that connected him to the interdimensional bullwhip. When he touched it, it fell back into his hands, and he reached back to whip it forward. Are you coming?

Simon pulled his and feeling that connection to the other side through it, that safe path, they both pulled their whips back in time to hear a great thud, a crack, and the portal snapped shut before them.

“Crap!”

Michael looked around. Simon was already on top of the portal generator, tearing into it.

He pulled off the side and looked in.

No circuits.

He scrambled around, looking for anything that he was familiar with.

Michael jumped up on the generator and just sat there.

“Alien technology,” he said.

Simon looked up from it all.

“You never know what you’re going to get.”

Simon yelled and threw a part of the machine fifteen yards away. Around them, the people and animals once perched on the hill, ready for battle, began to fade in and out like a great jackpot light exploding for the winners.

“What’s happening?”

“I’ll bet it’s similar on the other side, but now it’s a much larger problem.”

Michael kicked the machine and jumped off of it. He peered in. “Looks like Aztec stuff.”

Simon wasn’t bothered to be surprised at this.

“All physical, no circuit boards, nothing like that. It’s all put together with stone and magic.”

“So?”

Simon let out a deep breath like he’d been holding it for several minutes or more.

“It means there’s no way back.”

Simon transformed into himself from the creature version of himself.

“Never?”

“Never.”

What troops remained came down the mountain at them in a giant volley. Michael watched them winking in and out of existence like he imagined that his world was beginning to do. He ought to be seeing a McDonald’s or a Buick anytime now, flying through the air to squash them.

They came down the mountain, and Simon was ready for a fight. He transformed into the monster and jumped at the attacking soldiers, tearing one of them apart in the air before he came back down to the ground.

Michael thought about it for a moment, ignoring the onslaught of warriors and wondered if it was worth telling Simon that it wasn’t worth it, that they were stuck for good, and that’s all there was to it. He pushed up onto the projector and closed his eyes sitting on top of it. He imagined the warriors diverting their attention to Simon, and leaving him alone like he wasn’t there. He could see them in his mind, throwing their spears and daggers, and them slicing just by his head without hitting him at all. He opened his eyes and watched as one slipped by his nose, on it’s way to a nearby patch of bluish grassy land. He watched around him, in a peaceful state, almost in slow motion, and thought about how this was all going right now. They weren’t trapped, they weren’t besieged, they weren’t about to die, five minutes on this alien world. He opened his eyes. It was all still true. He closed his eyes again, and imagined them back in his office, pouring cups of coffee and getting straws for the zombie brothers. That was a good thought. He concentrated on the smells and the tastes and the textures, of the feeling of slipping back into his chair again, with all of this behind him.

Simon punched his way through the body after body, but they began to pummel him, coming at him from far too many directions. He lurched with one punch and then got caught off balance by another, and down he went, and then they piled on top of him. They couldn’t hurt him beyond a scratch. He was healing faster than they could hurt him, but they were keeping him pretty well pinned to the ground now.

Michael watched, but in his mind, it wasn’t happening to him. He was safe. He closed his eyes again. One way or another this would soon be over.

He could feel the whip and snick of weapons sliding by him, thudding into the generator beneath him, and knocking chunks of stone out of the design of it. One of the chips of a rock hit Michael in the face. He told himself it was the portal reopening again and concentrated on that thought.

“What happened?” It was the President.

“I don’t know,” said Fred. Moxie was at his side.

They were standing on the little bridge of the President’s attack shuttle.

Below them, they could hear the scream of Harland’s new lease on life as what looked like a giant rubber monster, half dinosaur, and half moldy bread. It was an awesome sight.

He came up out of the crater of the Sublight group’s building and bellowed with rage and a lot of misunderstanding. There was a crash behind him, and the entire building crumbled after a giant explosion that rocked the land for miles around. It wasn’t a full nuclear explosion, but the cloud of dust and gas rising from the epicenter was a magnificent mushroom. As it cleared, Harland pushed his way up through the rubble, grabbed a nearby army airborne in one clawed hand and gutted him down whole, then bellowed again as he pushed his way out of the crater.

“What the hell is that thing?”

“Sir?” it was an officer.

The President ignored him.

“Sir?” there was a more thoughtful, and respectful tone in his voice.

“What is it?”

“They’re gone.”

Everyone looked up.

“The portal, it’s closed.”

“Lost on the other side of who knows where the hell.”

Moxie was smiling.

“What?”

“He’ll make it. He always does.”

“Moxie I…,” said Fred. “You know I love you.”

“I know, and I love you Fred, but I can just tell, he’s okay.”

An explosion rocked the ship. Everyone fell over. Moxie and Fred slid to the edge, and almost out. The President held onto the console, and soldiers slipped in every direction.

“How do you know?” He was yelling at her over the sound of the explosions outside as the ship righted itself.

“I just know, you know that.”

“What are we going to do?”

“We gotta go look for him!”

They stood up on the edge, looking down into the pockmarked land below them, and the big dinosaur-creature that seemed to be eating a tank for breakfast, one that was currently firing at him from its uprighted position.

“Moxie, do you still love him?”

“Of course I do.”

Fred’s face fell.

“Just not the way that I love you.”

“Is face lightened.” He felt stupid for doubting her.

“How do we do it? We’ll have to trace him.”

“Do you have a sample?”

“Of course I do.”

She pulled from a small slot on her wristband’s watch, a tiny vial with a drop of blood in it.

“How did you get that?”

“You don’t want to know, Yes I got one of yours too.”

Fred just gave up and waited on it. They hadn’t tracked anyone like this in a while. Tracing his DNA across the galaxy would burn out her battery at best. She’ll have to be right the first time.

She dropped it in a little slot and pressed a button that broke the glass of the tiny vial and soaked in the drop of blood.

Her wrist band was still chewing on it when another explosion in the air rocked them again and they both went tumbling out into the air towards the ground.

“Guys!” The President was all alone on his little bridge. He thumped the counter, and his hand fell off. He looked around to see if anyone noticed, and then reattached it, and programmed himself to forget that it ever happened.

Fred and Moxie fell.

The air whistled around them.

They looked into each other’s eyes as the air rushed past them.

He clasped her hand, pulled her to himself, and kissed her.

While they were doing that, heading for the ground at terminal velocity, her wristband beeped, they had a match. She reached out, not opening her eyes, and not stopping the kiss, and pressed the button. They both disappeared in a flash of purple light right before hitting the ground.

There was a flash to their left, Simon didn’t notice it, but Michael did.

He opened his eyes.

“Moxie.”

Michael turned around, and Fred and Moxie were standing there.

Simon was still killing little blue guys with more arms than they required.

Michael jumped for Moxie, who was about to get hit with a flying dagger, and they tumbled to the ground.

Fred stood over them and then gave them both thumbs up.

“Simon!”

Simon turned around and without question jumped for them. Daggers plunged into his back. First one, then ten, then twenty. His eyes rolled into the back of his head. He fell in on them, his body protecting them from even more damage.

“Fred, get us back!” said Moxie.

Fred reached out and making sure everyone had a hand on him or the other way around, he hit his wristband and brought them all back with the feature that always kept their last location, or at least the one that kept dragging them back towards the burger joint.

They rolled into the dust near the crater and looked up. The President’s ship was right on top of them.

“Get on board!”

They all jumped on, dragging Simon’s body with them.

The ship sailed back into the sky.

“Oh Simon!” said Moxie. A tear was in her eye.

“Quick, let’s get these daggers out of him,” said Michael

They turned him over, which wasn’t all that easy.

Fred and Michael did the heavy pulling, tossing the daggers aside, but Moxie helped get some of the larger pieces out of him. His eyes looked dead, pale and silvery, then he opened them.

Moxie screamed, and Fred stood up with a sort of a yelp.

Simon groaned, and turned over again, and pushed himself up into a crawl. Moxie watched as his skin curled and peeled and began to stitch itself back together. Soon he was standing, and the color came back into his eyes.

He looked around, blinking. “What happened?”

“We’re back.”

“We made it?”

Michael looked around. “Yeah, we made it, thanks to these guys.”

"A massive, glowing portal divides two worlds—one alien, one Earthly—as a colossal creature remains trapped between dimensions, with military ships circling overhead in preparation for battle."

The Man With Three First Names, Chapter 8

The Man With Three First Names
Rabbits leap through time,
Portals hum with shifting fate,
Night and day now split.
Buy Yours Here:
Amazon - Books2Read

This is a draft version of a chapter from John Saye’s book, The Man With Three First Names.

The giant smacked his side of the massive gate. “More power!”

Behind him, men who all looked like they were normal, and not any way too tall for the Earth, began working harder on the machine.

“We have to get through.”

Captain Harland stood there and paced. He could see the remains of the lab on the other side of his portal, though it was only in crossing that you could tell a difference in height between these men and the men of Earth. He threw his fists into the portal, was electrified, and flew fifteen feet backward, landing in a heap and smoldering on the ground.

It wasn’t the first time he’d ever done this. The men around him, all working on the machine, which is what the Captain called it, buried their heads in their jobs and kept at it, letting the big guy pick himself up. Trying to pick him up led to disaster.

The Captain stood up and brushed himself off. He checked himself and straightened his suit. Nothing out of the ordinary.

He pushed forward and continued to pace in front of the gate.

“I don’t understand, he said. There’s nothing to it, dimensional travel is all. We should be able to break through the barrier by now.”

A small robot came whizzing up to him through the air. It was spherical and seemed to float on its own repulser field. It bleeped at him.

“Report, oh-one.”

The robot twittered.

The captain smacked it away. “Speak damn you! We programmed you to speak!”

The robot righted itself and floated back up, and switched speakers so it could translate its words into a robotic whine. The voice seemed to tremble and warble over the little tinny speakers the robot had. “Yes sir, sorry sir.”

The Captain looked back at the little ball. He wanted to crush the little sphere between his fingers, and he knew that he could, but you had to talk to someone while you were waiting sometimes.

“Please continue,” said the Captain. He held his hands behind his back while they talked to remove his temptation to knock the little balloon for another spin.

“Yes sir, sorry sir.”

The Captain waved off the apology.

“It seems sir that we are splitting the barrier further and further with each attempt and reaching into the other dimension a little bit more each time. As long as we keep up with our pulses like we are, and reinforcing the link to the other dimension, we should break through before long.”

“Just a matter of time then.”

The Captain looked around at their strange, declining world, no longer habitable by his kind. Wars had ravaged here, and after hundreds of years of nuclear bombardment, subsequent mutations, and attempted gene therapy, this was all they had left. The world was dark, and silent, and filled with purple grasses and brown mists. Around him, near where the men were working on the machine, grazers worked on the soft grasses and a massive creature worked its way through the skies lowering its long snout into a local lake to drink its fill as it cruised along on a gas-filled bladder that kept it in the sky. Around them in the distance, the ruins of a futuristic city stood behind them, covered in purple and orange moss, with grass poking up through the streets and trees growing into the lower floors of the busted outbuildings. It The tops of the buildings, what remained of them, were covered in birds of various kinds and styles and their nests.

The Captain seemed on his own, desperate and lonely. The robot twittered next to him, but he found it intolerable and knocked it to the ground again. It was the only thing he had to talk to. The other men talked among themselves, but they were useless. They had no vision, and he suspected, they were too close to the new animals of his world. This portal was all he had left.

He pulled a photograph of his wife from his pocket. She was beautiful, with long blue hair and silver skin tone. On the Earth, the pocket photo would have been larger than a standard poster. He put it back in his pocket.

She’d been killed just at the end of the last wars when the bombs were still dropping. She was lost. The blue fireball had consumed his entire street. He whispered to her, his hand on the photo in his pocket. The other world, I know it’s my only hope. I have to reach there, even if I destroy it or most of it in the process.

He listened to nothing. What he imagined was her voice, soft tones in his ears.

“I know it’s harming them. I know I should just turn off the portal, but I can’t.”

He watched as the men worked on the generator, getting ready for another pulse. There was a video projection coming from a light housing on the top of the machine, the bulb within it was the only thing keeping the tenuous connection he had with the other dimension. He dared not get too close to it. He was starting to wonder if it would ever work at all.

“We just kept getting so close.”

If he’d had it his way, he’d have stepped through, and left them all behind, but it seemed to keep bleeding this world into the next. When he tried to push himself through before it hadn’t worked the way it should. He couldn’t remember. Trying to think about the last time he tried to push through wouldn’t come to him.

He pondered it all and sat watching the projection from the portal like it was a huge television screen. Beyond it, he could see the remains of the science lab on the other side. He could see there were casualties there, and that their equipment seemed to be continuing to function a little bit. They must have tried to open dimensional portals to each other at exactly the same time. “How did that even work?  What could the odds have even been?”

He watched the science lab, now devoid of life, on the other side, and regretted that those men had to die. He’d had little to do with it, just an accident, but he still felt responsible. He’d been watching the little scavenger assassins that ran over the countryside in this part of the world bursting through to terrorize them on the other side. He still hadn’t been able to get through for more than a few minutes each time.

He thought about it, no one was choosing to cross on their own. It just seemed to be everything in the general vicinity was just working its way through. So the intention to use the portal was a factor. Either way, everything would return to normal as soon as the connection was lost, and they were forced to boost the pulse again.

“If I let it go on, then there’s no going back for any of them. If there were only a way to get through without having anything else hitchhike along with me. That’s the key. I should do it. Just crush the lamp, destroy the machine, and take that last walk into the wilderness. It would be easy. Close the portal, walk away. It would be over.”

Quick, and painless, again with his own kind. He’d been born with a drive to survive, but when all you’ve got to look forward to are monsters in the forest and radiation sickness… He kicked at the ground.

Behind him, the men were starting to get excited.

Oh-one floated up and chirped. “Sir, there’s some movement on the other side.”

Earlier they’d set out sensors, and for some reason, maybe it was the dimensional static, they seemed to continue working while they were still stuck on this side.

The Captain rushed over to the sensor equipment, red dots on a field of yellow.

“Is that all the detail we have? Turn it up, let’s bring these guys into proper focus.”

He adjusted a dial on the side of the screen and smiled with personal satisfaction when he had everything in clear view.

“It’s four of them. It looks like two men, a woman, and some form of creature, perhaps a bodyguard of some kind, lean and tall. I wonder how he deals with that hair. It’s all over the place.”

They were climbing forward, and down into the caverns that had opened up after the blast, down towards the epicenter where the portal now fizzled, almost about to go out.

They lowered themselves into the science lab of the Sublight group and he watched as they looked around, surveying the perimeter.

“They’re looking for any of the creatures. If there are any stragglers. Let me tell you there aren’t. Not until I can push back through. It could be any minute. It’s the only way.”

“Sir, we’re almost there!” called one of the men who was working on the portal generator.

“Yes? Is it there?”

“We’re about to pull the trigger on it now. We’ll be there in just a moment. All the fuel reserves are full, we’re just waiting on the charge to kick in.”

The Captain watched through the portal at the four of them standing there. What was he about to unleash on them? He didn’t know. What would he look like on the other side? It was all a blur.

“Sir, we’re there. Shall I pull the trigger?”

He took one last look at them, just in case it was his last.

“Do it.”

The men worked around the generator at a frantic pace. They flipped switch after switch, generating ever-increasing surges of power.

On the other side, Fred and Moxie walked up to the portal. Behind them, Michael and Simon made their way down. Michael removed the clip from a harness he had lowered himself in with and tossed it aside. Simon just landed with a single leap from the top. They looked through the hazy screen of the portal, and just for a moment, Michael was face to face with the Captain.

The pulse went out.

There was an explosion of light on the Captain’s side of the portal, and a blast of light from the projector flew out and exploded where the portal was. All around them the countryside was replaced with a broken parking lot, a piece of the street and a field of junked cars. On the other side, on Earth, the cars were vanishing and replaced by the form of furry creatures of the night, and the four of them were knocked to their feet by the shockwave.

Before them the images in the portal crystalized, and they could see the Captain on the other side. He seemed pleased with himself, a job almost complete was the look in his eyes.

All around them they heard the ching of metal as a half dozen of the little bastards, six arms each flew at them in the dark.

Moxie ducked as one went over her.

Michael blasted one with a small silver blaster pulled from his inner coat pocket.

Fred hit one with a baseball bat, sending it flying back into the darkness in a silent crumple.

Simon roared as five of them hit him at once and were stabbing him with everything they had. He felt magnetized. They seemed to fly at him without meaning to. He punched one, sending it careening off into the darkness. Another one bit as his ankles and tore his foot off. It exploded with sprays of green blood. He hit the floor on one knee and reached out to slam two of the creatures together into a pulp before him. In another moment, he grabbed two more out of the air above, who were about to land on him, and brought them to the ground hard and fast, killing them.

“Simon—” Michael came over to him.

“It’s all right.”

Simon stood up, and Michael watched as Simon’s wounds healed together, and his foot reattached to his leg. He popped his ankle into place and shook it off.

“All right then.”

 He punched his open palm and cracked his knuckles.

The area was clear for the moment, but there was some warbling in the air, and time and space seemed to be shifting in on itself just a little bit.

“Climb back out!” said Michael. He could feel the next one coming.

“What?” asked Moxie.

“Out, everyone out! Simon, can you help them?”

Simon took Fred and Moxie in his arms and leaped out of the cavernous remains of his old office, landing on the ground above. When he got there, Michael was already up.

“How did you—“

Michael ignored him, and pulled out his telephone, a sleek black job, no good for games, but deadly secure, even for a cell phone. He was already opening up the space roadster.

He got a signal.

“Yes, Mr. President. I think we’re going to need a little help here. I’m about to put you on the car’s cam system.”

He stepped into the car, and everyone else followed. Once in there was a rumble, like a small earthquake, and then another.

“Thunder?” asked Simon.

“No. We should be so lucky.”

He dropped the phone into a slot on the dash, and an image of the President came up.

“What is it you need Michael, is everything in hand?”

“Hey that’s the President!” said Fred.

There was another rumble.

“No sir, I think we’re going to need a little help here.”

The ground rumbled and the car was thrown a hundred feet into the air, where it settled in and began to hover there.

“What was that?” asked the President.

“We’re going to need a little help getting to the portal to get through it sir, I’d like to suggest you send in a task force, can you oblige?”

“We can arrange help in that fashion Michael, what’s the objective of the mission?”

“I’m going to turn on my exterior cameras for you now, and I’ll give you a look. Getting close enough to the portal is going to prove dangerous, and I don’t think we can risk waiting for another down pulse.”

He turned on the cameras.

Below him there were seas of the little assassins, cartwheeling about, shredding everything they could find. Around them were the Grazers, transformed from local cars and trucks, but now in massive form, as if they had been moving towards the portal since the pulses began. There were large floating behemoths, sucking up everything they could find through their furry snouts, and right on top of the portal, sticking through it, and fighting its way into the world was a creature, large and insane, a multi-tentacled beast as large as an aircraft carrier. It looked like a giant mass of wriggling spaghetti, undulating in all directions. There was a large gaping maw at its base, and each clawed tentacle ended with a large rolling eyeball, the size of a truck tire.

“Jesus Michael, that’s what you’ve got there?”

“Yes sir, and I’d appreciate a little help. I just want to keep them at bay. It’d be nice if this big one didn’t get through the gate between now and then.”

“I’ll order it now.”

The President smacked a button on his desk, and Michael could see him stand up and start giving orders before the connection went dead.

“So, what do we do now?” asked Fred.

“We wait.”

“Wait?” said Moxie.

“There’s nothing else to do. If we go down there we’ll be toast, and Simon and I have to get through that portal and knock it out on the other side. Can’t get through that on my own.”

There was a crackle in the air.

Another brief pulse and a shockwave rang out, multiplying the creatures below.

“What the hell,” said Fred.

The assassins were throwing themselves into the air and climbing on top of each other. One of them landed on the hood of the floating Cadillac.

Michael flipped the car over, doing a stationary barrel roll. The little guy flipped off, but more were on the way.

“We’ve got to get higher.”

Michael pulled the car and opened the jets, pointing the car up into the sky. The sunset played on the hood.

He dropped the speed and looked down again.

“Michael, this is the P.R.E.Z one, do you copy?” It was coming over the radio.

Michael hit the switch.

“Copy that. It’s me.”

We have you on our scanners. Hold your position, and we’ll be making our entry now.

“What’s he mean entry?”

“Watch this. You think our military hasn’t done anything interesting lately?”

“War in Iraq?” asked Simon?

“Child’s play. Here come the real guys now. Let’s just hope they can hold them off long enough.”

In they came.

Three ships appeared, from dots of light in the sky, they became brighter and brighter over the course of a second, and through a rip in space and time they arrived. They were definitely US military. Two were painted in modern camouflage, which changed almost like a chameleon to match the general tones around them. The ship in the middle was pure white, which could mean only one thing. The President was aboard, commanding the fight.

The ships had no wings, but just little sharp, pointy juttings, like fins on each side. They had command bridges up top, were smooth, and silent. On their sides, massive doors opened up, and metal spheres, each the size of a car began to spill out.

“Are they bombs?”

Michael shook his head. “Your tax dollars at work.”

The silver spheres landed on the ground below, destroying everything in their way, rolling in and ripping up mounds of dirt and turf that Michael knew would be just fine in the morning when this pulse was over if it ever was.

There was no explosion, but the tremendous crash of them impacting.

Then the spheres began to wiggle, crack and stand up on long tripod legs.

Michael took a closer look at his camera.

He focussed in, and they could see the clear, yet metallic dome over the human driver of each machine. The tripod walkers marched forward on the dome. Forcefields around them kept the little assassins at bay, and they used robotic arms to toss the grazers aside. There was some laser fire, but together the soldiers, with the help of the President and his small fleet, began to herd the creatures closer and closer together.

“They aren’t killing them,” said Moxie.

“That is interesting,” said Michael. “It’s what I expected them to do.”

There was a beep from the console.

“Looks like the President wants to talk,” said Simon.

Michael hit the switch, and the President was on the line.

“Michael, doing all right there?”

“Fine as fiddlesticks sir, he said.” He tipped his hat at the President.

“We’ve got them corralled for now. Come on board, and let’s take a look at this big guy together right?”

“On my way.”

Michael cut off the channel, and dived for the President’s ship, he landed the car in an open bay. As the four of them were walking towards the President and some of his advisors, Michael beeped the car behind him, to lock it with his key fob. The convertible roof came up, and everything locked down.

They shook hands.

“Mister President sir.”

“Michael David Christopher, the Man with three first names, its good to finally meet you in person.”

“It’s an honor, sir. Shall we?”

“Of course.”

They reconvened in a separate room, with a large table on which was an interactive screen.

The President swept his hands across the table and pointed the camera at the Sublight group facility. The large tentacled creature filled the gaping hole.

“What’s it doing there?”

“I think it’s stuck.”

Michael looked up.

“I think it is. It hasn’t made a move since the last pulse. We’ve monitored one more major pulse, a strengthener, and another few minor pulses around to even the load, and stabilize it. We think they are waiting. Someone is testing something by putting this creature through.”

“Hmm…”

“The other creatures are just bleeding through. They are part of one world, and part in another. This creature is struggling. It looks like it’s stuck halfway between this world and the other, but pinned at the portal.”

“Again, hmm,” said Michael.

“There’s a bit more there. We think it might be an experiment, the attempt to push something through on purpose, perhaps before someone or something else makes the attempt again.”

One of the advisors moved the screen with a touch and dropped some print-outs on the table.

“We think it’s almost through. One more pulse maybe.”

“Then what happens?”

“We don’t know. Two theories. Either it vanishes as everything else does after a pulse is over, or since it came through the portal, it might be left behind. We don’t want to change that.”

“What about blasting it?”

“Blasting it could cause it to complete its journey. We don’t want that to happen either. The soldiers on the ground have done a good job of herding everything up and engaging the little assassin guys, but this one we’ve been watching by satellite peek through in the last couple of pulses.”

“So now it’s a waiting game?”

“Yes, it’s a waiting game. Our plan is to get the two of you down through the gate as soon as the next pulse comes through. Until that, we’re staying airborne.”

“That makes sense.”

“That is unless one of the big guys knocks through us.”

Foom!

They looked down at the table.

“There it goes, another pulse.”

“Sir! The sun!” It was one of the soldiers, hanging by the open floating hanger.

“Good good, let’s see.”

They focused down on the hole again.

“That’s what I was afraid of.”

“What?”

There was a huge cloud of smoke around the Sublight group.

“Are the creatures fading?”

“Yes, they are fading, but this one, half-in and half out.”

There was a pulse.

“It’s made it through for good.”

They looked down, expecting to see a giant writhing creature, but there was just a splatter of green.

“At least that half of it made it through.”

The dust settled. As it did so, it revealed the half-body lying there.

“Now we may have a hell of a time getting to that portal.”

“Why?” said Moxie.

“Sushi, My dear, said the President. The crater down there is now full of it.”

"A retro diner glows under neon lights as a towering alien leader in robes addresses an army of creatures. A group of adventurers stand ready for battle as dawn breaks through the swirling mist."

The Man With Three First Names, Chapter 7

The Man With Three First Names
Rabbits leap through time,
Portals hum with shifting fate,
Night and day now split.
Buy Yours Here:
Amazon - Books2Read

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.

"A neon-lit diner on the edge of a warped landscape, where reality shifts between city streets and alien terrain. Inside, a monstrous humanoid and a detective talk, while strange creatures prowl outside in swirling purple mist."

The Man With Three First Names, Chapter 6

The Man With Three First Names
Rabbits leap through time,
Portals hum with shifting fate,
Night and day now split.
Buy Yours Here:
Amazon - Books2Read

This is a draft version of a chapter from John Saye’s book, The Man With Three First Names.

“What have you got there this time Michael? You know I always liked your second name better,” said Gregor as he shuffled around the room.

“What about my third?”

“It lacks something dear. It lacks… I don’t know… spunk!”

“What’s wrong with Christopher?”

Simon was gawking around the room. It looked like a combination of tech-boy Christmas and James Bond’s nightmare in here. Gadgets were piled to the ceiling in all kinds of little bins and various safes and other storage containers.

Simon looked up and noticed that Xip was using his tongue and little suckers on the ends of his fingers to climb the walls.

“Well, let’s see what we have here Mr. Christopher,” said Gregor. “You’ll be needing something to get through the barrier with then, or whatever it’s called.”

“I suppose so.”

“Yes, well Xip!”

Xip, stood on the wall, straight out like anyone who normally stood upon them, and looked down at Gregor not just with an attentive ear, but with little tendrils that were extending out of his slimy head.

“What do we have for dimensional travel then?”

Xip put up a finger, licked his eyeballs, then jumped down to a shelf covered in soft burlap bags. He wheedled his way in behind one of them, and pushed it back, using his entire body until it was on the way down to the ground with a whistle.

Gregor caught the bag without even looking at it and opened it up. “Yes, this might do.” He pulled out headphones, two sets of them, ones that totally cover your ears.

“You know, dimensional travel is largely a matter of vibration, these should get you through the portal nicely. You just put them on and turn them on, and the rock music they play is enough to keep you on the right frequency to get you through the gate.”

Simon put them on and phased out for just a moment. He pulled them from his head and fell over zapping back, clutching a workstation nearby.

“Oh man,” he said and dropped the headphones.

“I don’t think so Gregor,” said Michael. “What we need is something to tether to this world with. We might not make it out alive using those.”

“Dangerous you say?” Gregor said it with a lisp. “Well, maybe not. Xip!”

Xip saluted Gregor. He was standing sideways on the wall about ten feet up in the stacks.

“Let’s have the dimensional bullwhip then!”

Xip nodded and made a flying leap to the other side of the shelves from where he was, and caught it with his tongue, pulling himself up to a shelf filled with children’s metal lunch boxes of all kinds and styles. He opened an Indiana Jones lunch box, shook his head, and moved on to a Star Wars lunch box, and his eyes bugged out for just a second, then closed the box again.

Gregor chuckled.

“What was that?” Michael adjusted his hat. “What did he find?”

“It’s where I’ve been stashing the chocolate.”

Gregor laughed to himself again.

Xip rummaged through the lunch boxes, eventually coming up with an A-Team lunchbox, a big van on the side. He opened it up, and pulled out two bullwhips, and dropped them down to Gregor.

“Here they are,” said Gregor. Multidimensional bullwhips. He cracked them both at the same time like he was some kind of action hero, which he wasn’t.

“Here.” He held them out to Michael.

“How do they work?” Michael and Simon took the bullwhips.

“Careful not to crack yourself on the chin now. These are designed to attach to something, anchoring them in the real, or at least our world, while you tie them to your waist and go through the portal. They are designed to vibrate at both frequencies at the same time, keeping you anchored. Handy!”

Michael nodded in disbelief, but with interest.

“Aren’t they too short?” asked Simon.

“I was going to ask that,” said Michael.

“No actually,” said Gregor. “They are designed to stretch without much problem. They will always trail away from you, in a semi-transparent state, pointing right for the portal.”

“So we’ll have to work fast.”

“Yes, these will be your silver cord friends,” said Gregor. “If someone severs it, it’s all over, you’ll be stuck for good. At least that’s the way I think it works. There are always other ways to get through.”

“Like what?”

“Like the portal that’s already there!” Gregor smacked Simon on the head, but lightly. Was Gregor wearing blue plastic gloves earlier? Simon couldn’t remember.

“Michael cracked the whip.” There was a slight hum in the air. “I like these.” He set his down on the table.

“What about some standards for Simon here?” asked Michael.

“Is he to be your new partner then?”

“At least for a while.”

Simon stood there.

He looked at them.

“You think I’m good enough to be your partner?”

“Look, you’ve seen a lot of strange stuff. It’s pretty quick, but I need some help here and there. There’s always room for some help. Besides, I think my zombie head guys like you anyway. Is there a problem?”

“No, it’s just that… Well, yesterday I was a Janitor, and now all of this…” Simon looked around himself.

“I know. Think about it. I could use you.”

“Okay then.”

Simon held his breath for a moment and exhaled, he was on board.

Michael turned to Gregor. “Clothes.”

“Clothes?”

“Michael, now, what is this?” Gregor looked between them.

“He’s a shapeshifter.”

Gregor took another look at Simon.

“Okay, so what’s the other form then?” Held his finger and thumb up to his chin, thinking.

“Now?”

Michael said “Yeah, go ahead and show him. This is good.”

Simon said, “Okay then, here goes.”

He closed his eyes, and his clothes mostly ripped here and there anyway, tore completely off. He was standing there, in his troll form, gray-green skin, and slick black hair, screaming at the top of his lungs.

“He’s still getting used to being able to change.”

“Is this an effect of the portal?”

“I think so, but I think he may be stuck with it. I’ve seen him do this between pulses now.”

“I see.” Simon turned to Gregor. His voice was calm and deep. “What do you think?”

“Well, you definitely have trouble with clothes. I think I have what you need though. Xip!”

Xip jumped down on top of Simon’s head.

Simon looked up, and Xip walked forward to stand right on his face so that he wouldn’t fall off like he’d done this a million times before. He jumped off and stood on the table with the dimensional bullwhips.

Gregor sat down in a small task chair before Xip. “What do you think? Anything that might help him?”

Xip stood up, excited.

“You have an idea?”

Xip nodded quickly.

Gregor leaned in his ear, and the little gecko guy whispered.

“Yes, Xip, I think that might very well do. Go get it.”

Xip saluted and shot up into the air like a rocket, bouncing off the walls and ricocheting off the shelves like he was in a giant pinball machine. When he hit the top, he popped open a cereal box that had been filled with packing peanuts and took from it a small black amulet, smooth polished stone, with a green light buried deep within it that gave it not so much a glow, but a quality that was pleasing to the eye. They could hear him down below, squealing with delight as he found it in the bottom of the cereal box. Getting down was trickier. He tried two or three methods, before just giving up and jumping. He hit a button on his belt and a tiny plastic parachute opened up, and he sailed on down with the amulet in his hands.

Xip handed it over to Gregor and gave a brief smile and a wave to them all.

“Thank you,” said Gregor. “I can’t think of anyone better to give this to than you. We’ll have to calibrate it first, but then after that, I consider it yours. So, you’ll have to throw off everything.”

That wasn’t difficult, as most of the clothing was already torn beyond belief.

Simon took the amulet.

“Okay, put it on.”

Simon nodded and put it on. It was cold, at first.

“Did it warm up?”

“Yeah.” Simon touched it.

“Okay, now take it off for a moment, and change back.”

Simon took it off, put it on the table and changed back.

“Okay, now put it back on and let it get used to this form of you.”

Simon did as he was told.

“Did it warm up again?”

“Yes. It’s actually pretty comfortable.”

“Good, now let’s get you set up. I don’t have much more than sweats, lab coats and sneakers here, but you are welcome to them.  The amulet you have on now recognizes both of your states. If you are wearing or carrying anything with you when you change, it all gets stored in the amulet. You can dress now, then change to the Troll creature, and dress again. After that, it will always store the other set of clothes, so changing back and forth shouldn’t be a problem for you. If you are going to need something, like the bullwhip or something, then the easiest thing to do is just put it down before you change. The opposite is true for your other form. Change into the troll, then put on whatever you like, then when you change back to your normal form, whatever you had on in that form will now be in the amulet.”

“Thank you,” said Simon.

He dressed in a jumpsuit, sneakers and lab coat, and then transformed into the Troll, put on an oversized black sweatsuit, with a hoodie. He changed back and forth several times to watch in a nearby mirror. It worked perfectly.

“Thank you very much.” He turned and shook Gregor’s hand. “Where did this come from?”

“Like everything else in here, it’s what we call a gift from out-of-town, but this one used to belong to a Chinese Zen-Mookie master who could transform himself into the form of a great Tiger-man.”

“What happened to him?”

“Unfortunately he fell fighting with us during a particularly difficult invasion.”

“I never heard of an invasion like that before.”

“It’s only because he was very good at his job, he and Michael David Christopher here, the man with three first names.”

Michael nodded. “I can’t think of a better use for it. You should definitely have that. Old Mooke, he got good enough with that amulet that he could eventually pull the same stuff out of the pockets of the two different outfits with ease. I think he also figured out how to store multiple outfits in there for each of his forms. You ought to be able to figure out all that in time.”

“It’s an honor to wear it.”

Michael looked around.  “Where’s Xip?”

Gregor looked around. He was unaccustomed to being without Xip very often.

“Xip?” He called out.

There was scrambling on the other side of a large shelf system.

They turned the corner and looked up. Xip was pulling the tarp off of a large automobile, that was parked on a shelf about thirty feet in the air.

The tarp fell to the ground, and while Michael could see the wheels, he wasn’t exactly sure what it was.

“Xip, what’cha got up there?” Michael took off his hat so he could see better.

Damn if it wasn’t.

Way up high, the engine revved, with Xip at the wheel, and the car lifted off the floor, and the wheels tucked away, then the car, for lack of a better word right now, glided off the shelf, and floated gently to the ground. It was a real space roadster. The combined efforts of himself, a good friend of his in High School, a friend named Harvis, who turned out to be from a planet some ways away, his father’s convertible Cadillac, and a shop class where the teacher was the one absent for the day, was this shining machine. Black, and beautiful. Michael’s father had only let him drive it once.

“Where the hell did you get this?”

It hovered on its own, keys or no keys about two feet from the ground. Michael brushed his hand across its smooth surface.

“Xip, where? How?”

Xip just smiled back.

Gregor smiled. “We were going to wait for your birthday, but I think you should have it now, what do you think?”

“How, I mean, my Father…”

“Oh, I know. We’re not sure how it got into the collection, but we knew when we saw it that it had to be yours again.”

“Gregor, thank you.”

Michael shook the old man’s hand and took the keys.

“Just remember to put the wheels down if you’re parking it in public right?”

“Right.”

Michael couldn’t believe it.

“I think we have our ride out of here.”

“What about Lenny and Harry,” asked Simon.

“Don’t worry about them. I’ll have another assignment for them momentarily. Hop in.”

Michael and Simon hopped in the old caddy, and Michael fired her up. The engine still sounded just as sweet as before.

He pulled up and headed for the ceiling, where a portal began to slowly open, and they popped out the top, exiting from what looked like the side of a small mountain, about a mile away from the original house they came in through. When Simon looked back at where they had come from, it looked like they had exited through a giant sculpture of a porcupine eating leaves off a tree. It was a virtually unknown monument in the giant stone carving world. There was a single lemonade stand and a bathroom, three parking lots, and that was it, the only car in the lot belonged to Zorzman, and he runs the lemonade stand, and uses the bathroom all day. He was a former agent, himself, and waved them off on their way, and went back to his copy of Catcher in the Rye.

Michael and Simon rode across the sky with the top down. It was sunset, and the air was cool but not too cool. They both put on sunglasses, which were in the glove compartment, barely touched since the last time Michael had this car out.

They left the Mesas behind and back out toward the eastern shore. The going was slower, not exactly like riding in a spaceship, the speeds for the space roadster weren’t much better than a regular car, a hundred miles an hour or so. That’s all you needed.

“Check the map there Simon.”

Simon opened the glove box and pulled out a map, noting the year. “Nineteen seventy-three?”

They laughed and threw the map behind them.

Lucky I installed one of these before I lost her the last time. Michael pushed a toggle switch, like the thumb button of an old car radio, and a piece of the dashboard flipped over revealing a small black and white television on it.

In just a moment, the television faded from static to an image of the road below them. A voice from the radio spoke.

“Michael, it’s so good to see you.”

“Thank you, Gretchen,” he said to the car. “Take us home.”

“Very well, happy to assist,” said the car.

Michael put his feet up on the dashboard and leaned his seat back. Simon also leaned back, and they let the car fly them back across the country to Atlanta.

As they were getting closer, they could see the purple mist up ahead where the lines had been drawn, and the beasts were within.

“Let’s hear a little news.”

Michael pulled the car down and parked it in the lot of a breakfast diner.

“Gretchen, can you get us some news?”

“Sure thing. Satellite news is so much easier to tune in on, here you go.”

The navigator on the little black and white came back and soon there was the face of a television announcer.

“This ought to be national news. Wonder how they are going to cover this one up.”

“You never know,” said Gretchen.

The announcer pointed to a map of the United States.

“Right now, the clouds seem to be covering Georgia, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Florida, and Alabama, and there are trace reports that the darkness has started to drift into Louisiana, but there are no substantiated reports of that so far. All we know is that it seems to be coming from an area near Atlanta. We’ve had no contact from them in all this time, save for patches of time that seem to be miraculously clear of all disturbance. There seems to be an ebb and flow to the smoky mist, and the damage that it’s causing, though as soon as it clears there’s no evidence of any disturbance at all, and all of our reporters that we’ve sent into the field haven’t yet returned or reported.”

“Well, one did there, Charlie.”

“That’s true, we did have one reporter, well one of the production assistants from the mobile crew did return, but his mind is empty.”

“He can’t remember anything he saw in there?”

“No, he can’t remember anything at all. The only reason we know about him is that he was found on the side of the street with nothing but a badge, and a microphone boom, and a sack lunch at three fifteen this morning, and he can’t remember his parents, the school he went to, his name, any of his passwords or the name of his dog.”

“Nothing’s gotten through to this guy?”

“Nothing that we can come up with.”

Michael licked his finger and put it into the air.

“It’s almost time.”

“For what?” asked Simon.

“We’re due for another pulse.”

“It’s all going to clear off?”

“Yep.”

Foom!

There was a large deep noise, a sucking, and a blowing at the same time that washed over them.

“There it is.”

“On the screen, the announcer looked up from his desk again.”

“We have word that the clouds are blowing away again, or at least being drawn into the epicenter somewhere near Atlanta, and we’re hoping to get a bead on that location now. We’ve got Satellite looking down near that area. Gill, turn on that camera and see what you can see there.”

The camera flipped, and all Michael could see on the screen were rolling clouds. As they began to blow away, a solitary mouth whipped up out of the clouds and landed on the camera’s face. The last thing they saw before all went black was a snarling mouth, full of jagged teeth, then all was quiet.

“Gill?”

The camera winked back to The announcer, in his shirt and tie.

“Well folks, we still don’t know anything, and that’s the news.”

Michael flipped off the screen.

Michael cranked the car, pulled up the wheels and sped off for Atlanta.

Soon they began to get into the mist.

“Get down low, I’m going to go in on the ground.” Simon stood up in his chair.

“What are you doing?”

“A little reconnaissance.” I’ll meet you there. He jumped forward to land on the Car’s hood and rode it like a surfboard.

Michael pulled closer to the ground, and before he knew it, Simon gave him a salute and jumped off the car.

“Simon!”

Simon landed on the ground, in the middle of the mist. He watched as Michael rode on ahead of him.

Simon was in his element now. The part of him that was from this world of strange creatures opened its senses and threw himself into it. He ran through the neighborhoods and jumped houses like they were stepping stones. He closed his eyes and allowed his other senses to take over. He was surprised at how keen they all were. His sight was good, but his hearing could almost see all by itself, and his sense of smell was phenomenal. He smelled a wet cat, hanging out under a bridge and understood the feeling of contempt for its surroundings and its longing for its master’s warm bedroom. Simon saw a future where the cat made it home alive. He also saw one where the cat became a six-foot monster with three mouths and fourteen eyes and a strong hankering for bad sushi.

He jumped forward and rolled into a clearing, which later turned out to be a parking lot, and found himself surrounded by the large shaggy creatures, and calmly reached out for one of them.

He took great tufts of hair into his hands belonging to one of them and pulled himself up onto the back of the beast and looked around at them. They were grazers. He could tell they were rooting around in the dirt and eating small underground things. Some of them were munching grass, and others were eating mushrooms and earthworms. He stood on the creature’s back and looked around, the mist seemed to be clearing somewhat.

Soon what was under his feet was made of metal.

He looked down and realized that he was standing on top of a minivan with his hands on his hips with a lopsided smile.

He slid off it and looked around him. He was standing in the middle of a parking lot, surrounded by cars that were all parked where the beasts were standing before, none of them in their original spaces, but kind of all over the place.

He walked through them and wondered for a moment, then began to bound off once more, clearing the tree lines in a single bound, and moving on through them towards the remains of the Sublight Group’s headquarters.

It was a longer slog than he’d thought it would be, but he really didn’t have any indication of how long a distance it was on foot anyway.

When he found the burger joint again, where Michael’s other car was parked, he was in time to see Michael pull up in his space roadster, right next to the other one, and get out.

Fred and Moxie were in the front window of the place still, and they hit the glass when they recognized Michael.

Moxie was first out the door, slamming Michael with a huge hug, and Fred was second, much more laid back, but you could tell he was happy to see Michael. “Well, if it isn’t the man with three first names,” he said.

“Good to see you both.”

Moxie, Fred, this is Simon.

Simon flipped quickly back to himself from his troll-like form.

“Hi,” said Simon.

“Simon, this is Fred and Moxie. They are useful people to know in this world.”

Michael took both of them around the neck and walked them back into the place.

“Jen!”

“Michael you dog, where you been keeping yourself?” Jen threw her towel into the cleaning water and gave Michael a big hug around the neck.

Walter turned. “Ah Michael, what’ll ya have there?”

“Just a burger, a couple for my friend Simon here.”

“Fries or chips?” said Walter, “I can never remember.”

“Chips, I think.”

Simon and Michael sat down at the bar, and Fred and Moxie sat down with them, but not before Moxie had added five or six songs to the jukebox.

“You have time right?” asked Walter.

“Oh yeah, we ought to have another pulse soon. But yeah, time.”

“Yeah, what is all that then with the monsters coming out to boogie?”

“It’s a long story, I think we have a portal down there on the other side of town. We’ll have to close it up, but we have to see what we’re up against first.”

“Yeah,” said Jen, “it turns all the cars in the lot into great wooly beasts, they wreak havoc in the asphalt.” She pinched Michael’s cheek and wiggled it.

“Who’s your friend here then?”

“This is Simon. He was caught in the blast when the portal exploded. He can shapeshift now.”

“Ah well, isn’t that nice,” she said. “Isn’t that the way it always is. If there’s a nuclear meltdown someplace there’s always a superhero that comes out of it, all powered up and ready to go. Are you Michael’s new partner yet?”

“Yeah actually. I think I am.”

Walter and Jen laughed with each other for a moment. “He’ll find out.”

“What do you mean?”

Michael stood up, “I’ll let them have their fun.” He smiled at them as he hit the restroom.

“All we’re saying is that Michael goes through his partners.”

“What, burn out? Is he just an asshole?”

“Nah, nothing like that, it’s just that his kind of life is a bit intense. Not everyone can keep up with the adventures he goes on. Sooner or later they take a back seat, and help him occasionally, like us. He is a riot though, and we love him to death, but he does keep the adventures wild.”

There was a.flush from the bathroom, soon Michael was back with them, and the burgers were served.

“Eat up, I think it’s about to get rough.”

Michael plowed through his, he was ready for the next challenge, even bouncing his foot a little, waiting to leave.

Simon worked through his burgers, sharing the occasional eye with Moxie.

Fred sat on the table and asked Michael how the old space roadster was doing. It had been a long time since he’d seen it.

"A towering humanoid creature stands in a rain-soaked street, facing a fearless young girl, while an enormous alien entity looms overhead, distorting reality around them."

The Man With Three First Names, Chapter 5

The Man With Three First Names
Rabbits leap through time,
Portals hum with shifting fate,
Night and day now split.
Buy Yours Here:
Amazon - Books2Read

This is a draft version of a chapter from John Saye’s book, The Man With Three First Names.

Simon hit the ground with full force, sending a shockwave out around him in all directions. It’s almost a good thing the pulse had already taken the land because he would have disrupted the electricity for several blocks, and toppled some of the closer buildings to the ground. He stood up. His clothes were in tatters, and his rucksack lay on the side of the street. He stood to his full height, which while transformed, was about eight and a half feet, and shook his long black hair out of his face. His gray-green skin showed through his tattered shirt. His mind was awake and alive, he could sense telepathically in all directions around him. He closed his eyes. In the buildings by him, he could hear the conversations of everyone in them.

“Did you do your homework young lady?”

“Mom! Can’t you see outside there are monsters everywhere!”

“There is no such thing. Do you know what time it is?”

“No, but mom!”

He shifted his attention and focused on another house.

“Billy, you need to take a bath.”

“Mom! Can you see them? They’re in the sky, everywhere.”

“You need to stop lying—“

He shifted away again.

There was a girl standing on the street corner not a hundred yards from him.

He drunk in her presence and listened to her mind.

“Can you hear my thoughts?” she thought.

It began to rain.

Simon turned to her. “Yes.”

“Where did you come from?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s your name?”

“Simon, but it’s hardly fitting is it? I’m more of a troll or something now.”

“You were human, not one of these creatures?”

“I don’t know what I am anymore.”

“It’s okay.”

She stepped closer to him. She couldn’t have been a day over seventeen.

“What’s your name?”

She didn’t speak but continued to just think her responses.

“Alice, that’s nice.” He heaved in a deep breath and felt the strength in his body.

She hugged her arms. “Are you real?”

“I don’t know anymore. I don’t think so. It doesn’t feel real.”

She stepped closer to him, and reached out to him, the janitor of secret projects, and put a hand on his chest. “You feel real,” she thought.

“Then I suppose I’m real.”

He shook the rain out of his hair, and one of the larger creatures flew over them, its long snout reaching down from the clouds and sniffing over the land. The snout, long and hairy, was all that could be seen beside the slow manta-like wings it used to glide through the air. He looked back at Alice. “Is this your world, or are you from mine?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know anymore.”

He looked down at her as the creature floated above them, and smelled the rain around him. The smell was alien, oily and strange, it stung the interior of his nose and clung to it.

“Does the rain sting your nose?”

She looked at him and considered that. Did it? She inhaled, as the rain-soaked her hair.

“I can’t tell. I can’t tell if it’s stinging or not.”

He knelt down and faced her eye to eye.

“Did you know one of your eyes is bigger than the other?”

He felt his face and his eyes. He didn’t know.

“I must be grotesque to you.”

“I think you’re beautiful.”

He stood.  “I must go.”

“Don’t.”

“I’ll return?”

He leaped up into the air, forcing himself to ignore the second glance in her direction. He must stay focused. He landed on the top of someone’s house and began to jump from rooftop to rooftop. He found it easy to do so, almost as if he was floating under his own power. He found it easy to soar like this, just a few hundred feet at a time, stepping stones across a pond.

He increased his speed and took a flying leap over one house. Then they swung up through a tree and found himself heading for the side of an office building. He twitched the muscles in his torso and turned to face the building, grasping onto the sides of it easily. Then he started climbing up like it was level ground. He stood atop the building and looked back at the neighborhood.

Behind him, some of the houses remained, and some others did not. Where they were there were now great rolling hills of purple flowing grass whipping in the wind. His larger eye seemed able to focus farther away, almost telescopically, and focused back, looking for Alice in all of this.

She was still standing on the corner where he’d left her.

She gave him a smile like she knew he was going to look back for her. Then she waved and turned to step into one of the houses.

He looked around, checking out the grasslands.

Grazing creatures stood in the tall grasses. Their long tusks and tall tails poked above the line of grass as they shifted and plundered through the weeds. Were there eyes on the ends of those tails? Were they warning devices or something like that?

He watched them chew the grasses around them to the ground until he could see them for what they were. They were short, maybe four-foot-tall mammoths, covered in long brownish-green fur. He took a closer look at the tail, It did have an eye on it, a single eye capable of looking in any direction that it needed to. There must have been thirty of them standing in the field just eating the long purple grasses. In his mind, Simon realized that on some level all the purple grass was the dimensional drift of houses that might not come back again once this pulse faded if it ever did.

He jumped to another building, and looked out at the remains of the Sublight group, and could barely see the scattered remains of the ship they had been in.

He decided to jump down to see if everyone was all right when the building shook. He grabbed hold of it and held on tight. It shook again, it was a slow rhythmic pummeling. He looked over the side and saw massive creatures, each the size of a house, crawling up the side of the building. Several were already in his view. They hit the side of the building with large padded feet that seemed to dig in, blasting out the windows and making the glass tinkle to the ground. All Simon could see was a gaseous mist down there. He watched them lumber up, and also noticed several of them down the street, starting in on one of the shorter buildings, which just went down without a fight.

They’re building smashers, some kind of stomper. They smashed into the side of his building again, each step with the force of a car hitting the building at a hundred miles an hour. Concrete spluttered out, and gashes in the side of the building sprayed out into the sky, flaking off the building like it was exploding with charges of dynamite. They smashed and smashed as the creatures ascended. He could feel the building starting to become rocky, leaning this way and that.

He jumped to another building.

Then he felt it again, they were already on this building. He jumped to the next one as that building came down like an old Vegas implosion. He realized at the bottom, at the street level, all the mist was the smoke and mess of the other falling buildings.

It didn’t seem to phase the grazers one bit though, who stepped aside and kept to their grasses that were growing quickly up through the asphalt.

Simon jumped to the ground and landed in a crouch. He stood up, and what remained of his shirt flowed around him like a cape.

He stepped forward and looked around. He could hear them. What the hell were they, goblins? Was there a better word for the little beasts? They began to run upon him in droves. Each running on two short stubby legs, and using their four arms held high with swinging daggers to rend and strike and slash. They were screaming, a garble of incoherent jabbering, and leaping at him from the darkness like they were on kung fu wires… They flew at him from all directions. They climbed over him, and stabbed him in the chest many times, then cutting his throat. They stabbed him in the eyes, which popped with a hideous spurt, and he hit the ground. They jumped on him like he was a giant beanbag chair and slashed at him some more. When he was a nothing more than a ragged heap, they slowed down and stood over him to watch him bleed. They stared and wondered at him, as he continued to breathe despite their torture of him.

One of them stabbed him again.

“Alice.”

It healed up.

They prodded him.

His blood was gone from the ground around him. His eyes opened, full, clear, bright and healthy — for the troll that he was — and he stood up in their midst and looked around at them.

He breathed, unhindered for a while, and thought about them all, looking at him like a piece of meat. They jumped on him again.

With renewed vigor, they thrashed and he thrashed back. He threw them from himself, and they careened off into the mist of destroyed homes that covered the land. He kicked them like footballs and punched through their skin as if they were grape jelly. It stained his hands and the remains of his shirt.

Simon strode to the nearby landing strip where he’d seen the saucer go down, then he started to run. Soon he was making great strides and bounding over buildings once more. He rode on the back of one of the crazed creatures for a moment, gave it a pat on the back and flew off again to land outside of the ship, which was standing back up on three repaired landing feet. He walked up and shaking off the troll shape for his normal form, he walked into the shop and looked around.

Lenny and Harry were just pulling Michael from the rejuvenating pod.

“Is he all right”

They turned to see him

“Simon! You’re back!”

“You’re not going to drop me again are you?”

“Of course not!”

They bounced up and hugged his legs, each looking at each other through them, half scared. Michael offered his hand and Simon shook it.

“Come on, we’ve got to take this bucket to Headquarters for debriefing and some equipment. You up for it?”

“Yeah, I’m with you.”

They piled into the ship, and once they were all in their seats in the sunken couch, they were off again.

They glided over the horizon and off across the country, leaving behind the sickened, and pock-smeared area of the country. They blasted from the mist and hugged the ground as they spun off out to the other side of the country. Before long they were gliding over the American southwest. Beneath them, they left behind, desert areas, large rock formations, and beautiful canyons.

They watched as cars, able to see them, skidded off the road and slid off the road behind them.

“What is the cloak thing not on there Harry?” said Michael.

“Oops!” Harry hit a switch and they disappeared from sight.

Out in the dark regions of the desert, beyond the streets and the shops and the tourist traps, there was a house.

It was just a little farmhouse. Not a good house, and next to it was a five-acre farm. Not a lot, but it looked like someone’s home. Of course, the corn was all made of rubber, and the house itself of solid steel, concrete, and rebar.

As they arrived above it, the house, miles from any observer outside of an armadillo that was standing within a hundred yards of the place, opened up. It split in half underneath them and spread apart until there was a large space open big enough to lower the ship into, which Lenny did without breaking a sweat, not that he could sweat. His race expressed excess fluids under stress through a series of misting jet sprays on their backs, which he did.

“Excuse me.”

When the ship had lowered beneath the house it closed up behind them.

The armadillo gave less than a damn. He was too busy with a candy wrapper and an extra bit of chocolate nougat to give the first whip.

Below the surface, the saucer descended until it was floating over a sea of enormous cubicle shaped cubbies, each with its own starship parked inside it.

Simon came forward and looked out at the expanse. Michael had seen it all before, but it never ceased to amaze him.

Below them, one of the ships was shaped like a giant ice cream cone, with the point of the cone up in the air. Was it Neapolitan? Another of the ships looked like two massive tin cans connected together with a cord of flexible wire that was ten feet thick and seemed electrified. Some of them looked like saucers, which was nice, but there were some of them that looked frankly stupid in nature. These couldn’t be space ships. One of them looked like a fucking Italian restaurant turned on its end.

“What the hell?” said Simon

“Yep it’s true,” said Michael.

“What, these are space ships”

“Some of them are captured or salvaged. Others are just visiting and needed a place to park for the weekend.”

“So this is what, both impound and parking lot?”

“Yeah.”

Michael didn’t tell Simon it was all a lot of garbage, and this was just the stuff they couldn’t have floating around in the sky, the stuff that didn’t cloak, or didn’t look like an average Nissan. He just let him boggle at what was before him.

“Michael, look that one looks like a Bonsai Tree.”

Michael nodded his head. He’d been in that one.

“A fifty-foot bonsai tree!”

“I know.”

“It’s even got an eighteen-foot Buddha sitting at the base of the trunk. Come on! What are these? Disguises gone wrong?”

They were starting to pass into what Michael called his own personal Hell’s Kitchen, and was grinning, waiting for it.

“Good Grief…” said Simon. He failed to notice that he’d changed into the troll-like creature and back again. “That one looks like a food processor!”

“It does?”

Michael acted as he’d never seen it before, mocking but with good nature. He hadn’t been able to show this to anyone for a while.

“Oh you know it does. I suppose you’re going to tell me it was a miscalculation on size before a brief trip to Earth for a weekend at the beach then?”

“Well they were on vacation, but it was to New York for a weekend of Broadway shows and dancing before returning home. Seems they lost the blade while gambling in Atlantic City earlier in the week, and it won’t work without it.”

“And where’s the blade?”

“It’s currently part of a large children’s playground that looks like oversized kitchen gear in a home show open to vendors only. It’s a masterpiece.”

“And you can’t retrieve it and send them on their way because?”

“Because they lost their pilot’s license, traveling on a ship that could chop their heads off, and anyone who was traveling with them. I think it’s safer this way.”

“Where are they now?”

“They are both Blackjack dealers in Las Vegas at the Playboy Casino.”

Simon opened his mouth to talk, and just gave up and looked out at the expanse of space ships there. Did one of them look like a skyscraper-sized lava lamp? He shook his head. He could turn into a massive troll, who was he to say that any of this was impossible, or even just plain stupid. He sat back.

“You’d be surprised how popular blackjack is off-world.”

Soon they were docking and bringing the ship around to land in one of the massive cubicles. In no time they landed, hooked up to supply lines, and several robots glided out on unicycles with round silver balls for heads, and little spindly arms for checking the ship over. They slid out and checked everything they could find as the four of them were coming down the ramp.

Lenny and Harry waved them off. They would tend to the ship. Michael stepped out onto a moving walkway with Simon and they rode off into the great underground building.

As they glided on through the underground, they seemed to be picking up speed. Simon wasn’t sure, but he could feel a slight breeze and Michael was holding onto his fedora.

“Where are we going?”

“This is the headquarters.”

“Of what?”

“Everything.”

“Of what? Washington?”

“No, everything. The whole Earth.”

“We don’t live in a world government though.”

“You need to understand a few things if you’re going to work with me.”

Michael took off his hat. His hair was a lot grayer than Simon thought it ought to be.

“Understand what?”

“You’ve got understand the score. We’re not living in a democracy anymore.”

“I know, it’s a constitutional republic, right?”

“No, and it never was. the whole history of the founding fathers…”

“Yes?”

“Baloney.”

“All of it?”

“All of it, yes.”

“We live in a global economy, and under a global government. We’ve been doing so for three hundred years at least.”

“Three hundred?”

“Yes, it could be five though, the records were destroyed a couple of times.”

“But what does all of that mean then? To the world?”

“Mostly, nothing. People go about their lives like they always do. The even elect people President and everything, newscasts the works. It’s all real. At that level. Then there’s this level, where we all get along, because we know there’s something else out there. Hell, there’s lots of everything else’s out there, and we’re here to protect the world from it.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“Why of course.”

“Is it worth it?”

“It’s the best job in the world.”

“What about the president?”

“He’s a puppet.”

“What, you mean he’s bribed or controlled in some way?”

“No, I mean that. He’s a puppet. Well, that’s not the whole truth, he’s like me, an agent in the field protecting the world from everything else, but we also have puppets of him that we operate. He’s a muppet, I think. Here we are.”

They glided past a room full of full-size and half-size replicas of the current president, and the past few also, stacked up against the walls.

“Oh hell.”

“Yep, there they are. Looks like they are getting ready for a press conference, no it’s an address from the Oval Office.” On the sets, people were starting to haul out the great puppet, wheel it over to the desk, and hook it up to the power feeds. Its eyes lit up, and they started to control it with joysticks.

“No wonder he’s always boring.”

“You got it. We like to keep it that way. The more boring a President is, the easier it is to keep everything under wraps.”

“I can imagine.”

“You see what I mean then.”

“What about those Presidents that just keep getting into trouble?”

“Let them, then it’s even easier. It’s when you get a good person in the office that you have trouble.”

“I’d think a change like that would be good once in a while.”

“It is. It’s just that sometimes they don’t agree with keeping all of this a secret.”

“It’ll come out.”

“Maybe, but not for a while. It’s just too weird.”

Michael held his hand up. They had arrived. The doors before them opened up, and they continued to glide into a dark room. It felt huge and cave-like. Simon couldn’t see, even with the advanced vision of his troll persona, which he switched to for a moment just to be sure. He was getting better at that.

The lights clicked on, and Simon ducked, finding himself hurtling down a corridor that was not much wider than the two of them could stand there in, and just tall enough that he wasn’t scraping his head on the ceiling.

They began to go faster. Could Simon even tell how fast he was going now? He felt that if he reached out to touch the wall he’d end up skipping and bouncing against the tiles, and with such great force that he’d be dead in a second. He closed his eyes and waited for it to all stop, which in just a matter of moments, it did. Willy Wonka anyone?

The air, now cool and calm around him, Simon opened his eyes and found himself in a regular corridor, already walking with Michael who was dusting off his fedora and placing it on his head again. Funny, he had thought for some reason that he’d be standing in a field somewhere looking out at alien flowers or something. He wasn’t certain he was still on the Earth after that ride.

He stepped forward, and Michael led them through a doorway of frosted glass that said Lab 1 on it in large friendly letters.

They stepped through the door, and an ailing human greeted them, with a full beard, a blue lab coat, and his assistant, who was an alien of some kind, sort of a pink frog creature with four hopping legs, and a fifth for writing and another for hand-eye tasks, also in a little blue lab coat. He was about a foot tall. The old man introduced himself as Gregor, and he motioned to the little one, and said: “This is Zip.” Xip licked his eyes with his prehensile tongue, then smiled and croaked.

Gregor motioned them over to the table, and looking at Simon said, “We’ve heard about you, can we take a look please?”

Michael waved them off. “What have you got?”

“Well, we’ve got to shut down that tunnel right?”

“Right.”

“It thinks I have what you need, right this way.”