The Broken Universe (30 page)

He found Glidden Road where he expected it. The farmhouse may have been a difference between universes, but the roads appeared laid out the same. Glidden Road was barren, but that was to be expected. The only things this way in the county were farms, spaced kilometers apart. He started hiking.

By the time he reached the first intersection, a kilometer down the road, he had yet to see or hear a car. Glidden crossed Van Wert Road. A farmhouse stood on the northeast corner. It too seemed abandoned. Screens hung from windows. The door stood open.

He turned northeast on Van Wert Road, taking up a jog. He hadn’t meant to expend so much energy, but he had a sudden sinking feeling and he wanted to know what had happened here.

He stopped suddenly and searched the sky. No contrails. On any given day there should be at least three jet contrails in the sky over any place in North America. Nothing.

He spotted another farmhouse in the distance. He ran now. As he neared it, he saw that it was slanted off its foundation, tilted due to old age and lack of maintenance.

A recession of some sort perhaps had driven these people from their homes? A war?

There was a car in the driveway of the farmhouse. He tried the door and found it unlocked. The key was in the ignition. The car smelled of mold, and the windshield was caked in dirt and leaves. This car had been here at least a season.

He tried to start it. It cranked but refused to start up.

Prime didn’t want to enter the house, worried that it would collapse. He continued instead toward Findlay.

He reached the outskirts, a subdivision to his left. He marveled to see the houses empty, quiet. No one was living here. No one at all.

Cutting across a fallow field, he reached the subdivision. Cars sat in driveways. Bikes lay in overgrown front lawns. Doors and windows were broken or ajar. People had left their houses at least a year or more before, left them vacant with all their possessions strewn about and gone.

Why?

He decided to enter one of these homes. They seemed less likely to collapse on him than the farmhouses he’d seen.

He picked one, tried the door, and found it unlocked.

“Hello?” he called.

This house had no open windows, no open doors. It smelled of dust. Clearly it was unoccupied. He called again.

“Anyone home?”

The first level was empty. He left the basement for last and climbed the stairs. Dust was caked on the banister. Something fetid reached his nose. He paused at the first door, pushed it open. Beyond was a child’s bedroom, a girl’s based on the pink, but it was empty. The next door was a sewing room. The last door was to the master bedroom. Something lay on the bed within.

“Hello?”

He squinted in the weak light.

Stepping closer, he saw a corpse on the bed. Long dead and nearly mummified.

Left dead or left for dead? he wondered.

He paused. Death? Everything left as it was. No humans.

Plague?

His stomach flipped, and he backed away.

At the door he turned and ran. Prime flung the front door open in front of him, and he was outside in the cool fall air.

Disease!

What had he done? Stumbled on some plague world?

And was he now infected?

What had he done?

*   *   *

He headed into town. As he walked, he paid attention to his heart rate, his temperature, his state of mind. Had he infected himself? Had he killed himself? Should he run as fast as he could to the gate and get his doctor to administer penicillin, streptomycin, and erythromycin, and any other antibiotic he could think of? Or would that risk Universe Prime by unleashing a plague there?

Stay or go? Carrier or not?

In the end he decided to wait and see if he developed any symptoms and, if he did, he’d deal with it then. Until then, he’d look around and stay in the open.

He passed the Burger Chef, its plate-glass windows shattered. He passed St. Paul’s, and realized its roof was burnt through. The grocery store had been looted. He came across no more corpses.

He stopped before the News Shop, a tobacco and magazine store he had frequented as a teenager for its comic books. Prime entered, propping the door open to allow light in. Magazines lined one long wall, and he remembered how as a child he’d thought there couldn’t have been one more magazine title in the world. At the start of the shelf, there were the racks of newspapers. He grabbed
The New York Times.

MARTIAL LAW IN EFFECT!
he read.

Martial Law is in effect across the entire United States. No travel except by military order is permitted. President Palin signed an executive order passing control of the nation into the hands of the local military leaders. Without a clear command and control structure in place, any top-down leadership is impossible.…

The story was dated two years prior. Two years. He skimmed headlines.
ONE BILLION DEAD IN CHINA! VACCINE TRIALS IN BRITAIN FAIL! PLAGUE HITS NEW ZEALAND.

It had been worldwide, and here was the effect two years later. Utter destruction of the human population.

He left the store, leaving the door propped ajar. Across the street was the Ben Franklin. He found a tiny transistor radio and placed a nine-volt in its battery slot. The dial was stiff to his touch as he rotated it. There was nothing but static up and down the spectrum. He tried FM, and then AM. Nothing.

Prime stumbled out of the general store. There could still be pockets of humanity on this planet. In the large cities. Couldn’t there be?

He spotted the Dynaco store a block down and ran there. The door was locked, the sign saying the store was closed until further notice. Prime looked around and found a brick near the road. He threw it with all his might, shattering the glass of the front pane. There in the display case was what he wanted, a shortwave radio. He grabbed it.

He plugged the radio into a wall outlet right there in the display case, but there was no telltale flicker of lights. The outlet was dead.

He walked back to the News Shop. The lights would not turn on. No power.

Prime scanned the downtown area. There was the police station, the library, the clothing store. He turned back to the police station. Maybe they had a portable generator.

He ran across the street. The front door of the police station swung open. He tried the power outlet right there in the lobby. Nothing.

The front desk wasn’t walled off; he could walk right through a waist-high swinging door, and did so. A board hung on the wall with a list of patrol cars and their keys hanging from it. He looked back out the door and saw that car K-12 was in the lot. He grabbed the keys.

The car started, to his surprise, but maybe police cars were made to last years. He bent down and looked under the dash. There was a cigarette lighter adapter, and next to it a normal plug. He plugged in the shortwave radio.

The radio warbled and squeaked. He waited a moment. Nothing. There was a button that said
SEEK
. He pressed and the digital dial spun through the frequencies. And kept spinning. Nothing.

Prime’s heart fell. If there was anyone, anywhere within a thousand kilometers, they would be broadcasting on shortwave. Something. The military would. Perhaps they were just taking a break from broadcasting.

He let the radio continue to seek and put the prowler into gear.

Driving slowly up Tippecanoe Street, he looked left and right at the desolate town. Not my town, he said to himself. Some other town entirely.

All these dead people, and possibly him too. Possibly him too. What had he done? Exploring worlds and not thinking it through? It was damned fool luck Pinball Wizards hadn’t dragged a plague already between universes.

Prime saw the Bank of Findlay on his left. He stopped. The doors were open and off their hinges.

He climbed the steps and entered. The vault gaped open. He peered inside. Stacks of bills stood against the walls. He ignored them. Beyond the first vault door were the safe-deposit boxes. Several boxes had been pried loose from their slots. He played the flashlight around the vault. A drill and a crowbar lay on the central table. Someone had spent some time here looting. But to what point. The futility of it all must have become apparent as the plague ravaged the body of the thief.

Prime opened the bag, found jewelry, gold bars, watches encrusted with gems. A small box lay at the bottom of the bag. Within was a handful of diamonds.

He took the bag with him, stowed it on the passenger seat of the squad car. The shortwave radio still twirled.

He left the car there and walked across the street to the SupeRx. He grabbed a thermometer off the shelf. Prime drove slowly back to the transfer site. He’d have to make a decision soon before Casey realized he was gone and alerted the Wizards.

He parked the car next to the farmhouse, overlooking the transfer zone, and sat. He unwrapped the thermometer and slipped the tip under his tongue.

If he was infected already—if this world was swimming in plague virus—he and his rescuers were doomed. They would come looking and be infected immediately. Or he would return and doom his home world and ultimately any world that he visited. The plague would spread to all the settled worlds of Pinball Wizards, Transdimensional.

But perhaps the plague had passed away with the death of the last humans. Or perhaps it was a plague that humans in other universes were immune to. Perhaps he was utterly safe. He could pass back to Universe Prime and no one would know.

He pulled the thermometer from his mouth. Thirty-seven degrees Celsius. Perfectly normal. He checked his watch. He could wait another six hours. He would check again then. If he was normal, he’d risk it and go back through to 7533.

*   *   *

Prime dozed in the squad car. Every once in a while, he would start awake, look to the dial of the shortwave radio, check his temperature, and close his eyes once more. The temperature did not change in that time, but he found he had no knowledge of how long a virus would incubate in a human host before manifesting symptoms. Depended on the virus, he supposed.

He awoke with a start, shivering. He was certain he had contracted the disease, but then realized he was merely cold. The sun had slid behind the trees. He was late, he needed to get back to Universe Prime.

Checking his temperature one last time, he found it still to be thirty-seven. He had to assume he was uninfected. He had to.

Ten minutes to the next transfer, he saw after checking his watch. He shoved his platform into the transfer zone. Five minutes before the transfer time, he squatted on the platform and waited. He didn’t want to be too late into the zone, getting cut into pieces by being halfway in and out. Nor did he want to squat in the cold for too long.

He knelt there, his bag of loot next to him, praying that he was not infected. That Abby would not die because of him. That Casey would survive. For a second, he was half convinced to just send a note through.
Good as dead. Don’t come after me. Love, John.

No, nothing would stop Casey from coming after him. Not even a plea for her safety.

His watch beeped. He crouched on the platform. One minute.

He hated this part. He hated this part. He hated—

The universe shifted.

He was back in the new lab. Stepping quickly away from the gate, he turned it off and deactivated the timer.

Prime had done it. He’d built a system to allow him to explore worlds on his own. But in the process, he’d possibly infected himself and all of Universe Prime.

He picked up the phone and dialed Casey.

“Hey, baby, I’m gonna be a little late,” he said.

“Sure, Abby and I are having pizza,” Casey said.

“Cool, save some for me.”

“See you when you get here,” she said.

Prime hung up the phone, feeling sick to his stomach. Not a symptom, just stress and anxiety.

He retched into the wastebasket, emptying his stomach of bile and fluid.

“Uh,” he groaned. And then he was sick again.

CHAPTER
25

They walked silently a few hundred meters to a memorial park. Kylie ran off to play on the swings. Melissa sat on a bench to watch. John stood.

“You can sit,” she said. “Tell me.”

He sat next to her on the bench. “You got the last of the food, remember?”

“I remember. Tell me what I don’t know.”

“I was just passing through. I’d never seen a universe like that one. Never where the world was winter like that.”

“Just passing through?”

“I was lost myself, trying to get back home.”

“So there isn’t just the two worlds? I always thought it was two.”

“Thousands, if not millions, if not infinite,” John said. “But that’s the only one I’ve found that was like that. I don’t think it’s common.”

“Thank god.”

“I was trying to understand. I had been in a normal universe and suddenly I was in yours. I talked to the soldier there, asking what happened when the food ran out. They pounced on you … Rudy, Stan … shot you as you walked away.”

“I knew them. From our old neighborhood.”

“Kylie rolled down the embankment, broke her leg. I carried her back up to where you lay. The blood had turned the snow red. I didn’t … know what to do. I was just a stupid high school kid. I took you to the next universe.”

“The same but different.”

“Yes, no war. It was a beautiful fall day. Snow was clumped around us, but it started to melt right away. I called an ambulance, and then I walked off.” John paused. “I’m sorry I did that to you. I’m really sorry.”

“Sorry for saving my life?” Melissa said. “Sorry for saving Kylie? She would have died right there with me.”

“I know, but I ripped you right out of your world. Took everything away from you. Your life, your family.”

“It’s okay. It was a sucky world.” She paused. “What’s your name anyway?”

“I’m John Rayburn.”

“My life wasn’t so great back there. Kylie’s father was dead. We were barely getting enough to eat. It was only a matter of time before it all fell apart. I just wish…”

“What?”