Bridgetown, Issue #1: Arrival (7 page)

He began to put the pieces together in his
mind:

The great sphere of light in the desert.

The brittle desert floor turning into
honey-lava.

Visions of Bridgetown as it had once been,
bustling and alive.

The amniotic Darkness, in which he could only
sense Susanna and nothing else.

He had followed her here. To this place, to
this time.

He'd come to this desert seeking to build a
community atop the graven ashes of a ghost town.

Instead, the desert had led him to the ghosts
themselves.

Jesse began to laugh, a
deep, riotous laugh from the pit of his gut. This was the height of
absurdity. It was every old rerun of
The
Twilight Zone
he'd watched on UHF while
stoned out of his mind. It was something from the dime store
science fiction novels that Wayne would escape into during those
miserably hot Southern summers all those years ago.

It was cliche. Pastiche. Pablum.

And it was now his reality.

Would he ever get out of this time? Could he
ever get back to his world?

He felt numb. He suddenly realized he could
no longer feel Susanna.

A cold took over his body. His face went
flush; his stomach did flips inside of him. He had to sit down. His
dizziness was only getting worse. This must've been what shock felt
like.

He vomited.

After hacking up the last bits of bile, he
flopped back and lay on his side, content for the moment to bake in
the hot sun. He felt a strong compulsion to just go to sleep.

No—he couldn't. He had to get moving. He was
weak, distressed, and bound to become dehydrated. Especially
now.

He got up on his feet. He looked past Devil's
Peak, towards where he remembered the ruins of Bridgetown to be.
Sure enough, he saw a thriving town there now. Buildings with
roofs. A puff of smoke rose from a chimney. There was movement on
the horizon, probably people milling about the roads on their daily
business. People that would, to Jesse seem strange and alien; just
as he would seem inscrutably foreign to them. They would use money
he'd never seen and speak with slang he'd never heard. After all,
this was, what, seventy years before his time? Eighty?

Deciding he had to get moving now or he never
would, he took a step forward towards Old Bridgetown.

Then another, and another.

After a couple thousand
paces, he could make out signage. The general store, the post
office—well-worn staples of the Western outpost town as it had
always been represented in movies and TV. The sights comforted him.
Maybe he
would
be
able to make sense of this place. Maybe all he had to do was
convince these people he was from New York, or Australia. Someplace
far away, where they would have never traveled before.

He spotted a horse-drawn cab stationed just
up ahead at the edge of the town. A man sat in the driver's seat,
wearing a tall black hat and a dark flannel double-breasted jacket.
It looked like a horrifically hot thing to be wearing.

Jesse rubbed his stubble
with the back of his hand.
Now or
never.
He walked up towards the cab
driver, giving him a friendly wave.

The man signaled him with a tip of his hat.
"Haaa-low!" the man said, letting out an impressed whistle.
"Must've really drove someone mad, I take it."

Jesse cocked his head. "How's that?"

"Someone did get you liquored up and dropped
you off in the middle of the desert in that sorry state? Don't tell
me you went out there on your own?"

Jesse flashed the man a loopy grin, then
continued to stumble into town.

He reached Main Street, and found himself
surprised to be able to trace which building was which pile of
rubble in his own time.

He searched within himself for some sense of
awe, some inkling of amazement or bewilderment or at least terror
at his present predicament. But he felt none of those things.

Mostly, he just felt lonely.

Men and women, dressed in the dark and heavy
fabrics of the time, moved along the wooden sidewalks that lined
each side of the road. Carriages traveled down the street
intermittently.

Jesse became acutely aware that his v-neck
tee and black canvas Converse made him a stranger in this place.
Despite trying to break the ice with the cab driver a minute
earlier, he was still afraid to talk to anyone. He felt like a
child lost in the department store. He was unsure of where to go,
with just the sense that he wasn't supposed to be here hanging over
him. But he had to start talking to someone if he was going to find
Susanna.

He looked around him, at the signs on all the
buildings.

The general
store
. That had looked friendly and
familiar when he was walking into town. It was as good a place to
start as any.

Forcing himself to walk with a spring in his
step, he entered the shop and rang the bell for assistance. The
bell was comforting. It wasn't so different from what he was used
to.

He waited, for what felt like an interminable
stretch, resisting the urge to tap-tap-tap out a drumline on the
countertop.

A bald old man in a smock emerged from a back
office and approached the counter. He wore one of those
old-fashioned green eye-shade visors on his head, just as Jesse had
seen in period piece TV shows. He wondered why they used to wear
those things.

"Can I help you, sir?" the man asked.

"You mind if I ask you a question?"

"Go right ahead."

"Why are you wearing that—that thing on your
head?"

The man didn't answer right away; he seemed
to be drinking in Jesse's appearance. His strange attire, the
perspiration on his brow and his generally queasy state of being
mixed with his odd question. The shopkeeper's posture stiffened.
Jesse imagined he was formulating all kinds of bad scenarios
involving this strange customer.

"Well," the man said, with a cautious gaze,
"Ever since I put an electrical lamp in there, it helps make the
light a little less harsh on my eyes, you see."

"Oh."

The shopkeep coughed. "Is there anything else
I can help you with, sir? Anything you'd like to purchase?"

"You wouldn't happen to know the date?"

Again, the shopkeep regarded him with
skeptical eyes. "It's July the 14th."

"July 14th," Jesse repeated, softly.
"What…year would that be?"

"Well, eighteen-ninety-seven, of course."

"Thanks." Jesse gave a curt nod to the
perplexed old man, turned, and walked out of the shop into the
harsh daylight.

He considered the interaction he'd just had.
It hadn't gone terribly, even if there was now at least one person
in Bridgetown who thought he was a complete head case.

Jesse sat on the curb, nauseous again. But
this time it wasn't the trip that made his stomach do flips. He
felt like the shock was wearing off. Reality was settling in.

He buried his head in his hands and tried to
block out the light.

Here he was—in 1897. He didn't exist in any
book of record. No Social Security card. Cash in his wallet that
would look like joke money. Everyone he'd ever known—besides Wayne
and Susanna—were worse than dead. They didn't exist.

For that matter, what if he'd been wrong
about what he'd thought he'd felt in the Darkness?

What if Susanna wasn't here?

What if he truly was alone?

He looked up, and took in his surroundings
with intent for the first time.

On the one hand, it really did remind him of
one of those old photos of turn-of-the-century streets—the ones a
certain sort of kitch restaurant liked to hang on their walls.

But something was just a bit off. Something a
bit unexpected, a bit too modern.

He thought back to the general store, and the
shopkeeper's comments about the lights. Was it common for a rural
mining town to be electrified in 1897? He wondered. He honestly
wasn't sure.

His eyes flitted about the scene, and settled
on something in the hills beyond the town: A large industrial
building, white smoke billowing into the sky. Power lines on what
looked like telephone poles connected the power plant to the rest
of the city.

And in the hilly backdrop, a radio tower
stood tall, visible from all points in Bridgetown.

On deeper inspection, this didn't look so
much like any old west movie Jesse had ever seen. And it didn't
look like the small-town ruins he'd wanted to build his commune on
in his own time.

A sinking feeling hit his gut.

Wayne.

Wayne had done something in this time, Jesse
was certain of it. Changed something.

He had to find Wayne, if he was going to find
Susanna.

2.

Wayne blew off excess metal shavings from the
component he was machining, huddled inside his little workstation.
This was his private inner sanctum, a place to get away from the
hustle and bustle of a daily life of industry. Here, he could be
like the boy he once was, immersed in making crystal radios and
reading his grandfather's Asimov collection.

All morning he'd been dealing with phone
calls. An incident down at the factory grounds. One more headache
he didn't need. So he came here, to free his mind in a trivial
project.

A knock at his door. He looked up,
exasperated.

"Yes, Martha?"

"Mr. Cole, you have a visitor. The
sheriff."

"Thank you, Martha. Tell him I'll be out in
just a moment."

Wayne took one more look at the little bit of
metal he'd just spent twenty minutes fashioning. Was it even on all
sides? It looked about right.

He held it by his thumb and forefinger,
placed its point down on the work table, and gave it a good
spin.

The top spun, balancing itself, for several
seconds. Then it fell and skidded out across the table.

Wayne smiled.

He switched off his work lamp, and left his
private chambers to go meet the sheriff.

Wayne's manor was different than the other
vanity homes of Bridgetown's upper class, with their high ceilings.
For one thing, at a time when other wealthy individuals chose to
adorn their homes with flourishes of gilded molding, Wayne's ranch
house seemed positively spartan. Clean, bold lines illustrated
every corner of the parlor room. Wayne had burnished aestheticism
in favor of a design ethos for which none living in Bridgetown had
a name.

It was modernist, a design language that
apart from Wayne's self-styled mansion, wouldn't be invented for a
few more decades.

The socialites in Bridgetown who worked with
Wayne did find him odd, even if his brilliance was plainly on
display. To their ears, he spoke with a strange accent, flat and
efficient, and always at a brisk clip. He seemed perpetually in a
hurry, and he rarely made it through a conversation without
checking his watch.

Everyone knew that Wayne had made his capital
by selling watches that were to be worn on the wrist instead of in
the pocket. His wasn't the only outfit in the world getting in on
the wristwatch game, but he had foresight enough to target not only
field officers in Africa who needed a convenient way to synchronize
their slaughter of natives. Instead, he was bringing the concept to
the well-heeled ladies and gentlemen of America. It seemed a queer
idea to many at first, but Wayne managed to convince enough people
that it caught on and, in fact, became quite fashionable. All the
better to check the time at a moment's notice, in another instance
of Wayne's characteristic yielding to efficiency.

Maybe that's what it took to fit as much
invention into a day as Wayne Cole was apparently capable of. After
all, he had arrived in town with nothing, and in half a decade, had
turned himself into a rich man. An important man.

Wayne passed a mirror in the main hall of the
ranch home, and stopped for a moment to inspect his appearance. He
was dressed in a purposeful black smock, his wispy blonde hair
slicked back. His eyes sat behind small, perfectly round
wire-framed glasses in the current fashion. He wiped his hands on
the smock, getting the last bits of machine lubricant and
industrial grease off, then straightened his collar and continued
walking towards the parlor.

He spotted Sheriff White inside, inspecting
the three-foot-tall scale model of the Bridgetown radio antenna
cast in bronze. White was a leathery, honest-looking man. The kind
who'd clearly spent most of his days on the back of a horse.

"Sheriff," Wayne said, catching his
attention.

White looked up, and chuckled. "Oh, you
caught me playing with your wonderful little toy here. Don't mind
me."

White got up and walked over to shake Wayne's
hand, carrying a small black bag.

"Mr. Cole," the sheriff said, "How do you
do?"

"About as well as you can imagine, given the
circumstances." Wayne replied. "Telephone's been ringing all
morning long about the factory. I had to get away from it. I take
it you're here to discuss what happened this morning?"

"And you'd be right, Mr. Cole. I suspect I
might be able to shed some light onto the nature of the
incident."

"How's that?"

"Well, Mr. Cole—"

"Wayne, please."

"Wayne. Ah, I'm prepared to make a statement
that the explosion at your factory site was no industrial accident.
It was a bombing."

"Luddites. Goddamn Luddites, trying to blow
up my work to Kingdom Come."

"I managed to intercept a couple of banditos
not too long afterwards. Familiar faces, past associations with the
Lotus Boys." The sheriff placed his black bag on the table. "They
were taking photographs of the factory. I recovered the negatives
and developed them."