One Minute to Midnight (29 page)

"That won't hold them for long. Come
on." She said.

The dirty girl led him through a back
room and into an alley outside. It was dark now, as starlight
gleamed down from the heavens while they paused and breathed in the
fresh evening air. She stopped in the middle of a cobblestone alley
and pulled back a sewer grate, revealing a dark hole and a ladder
leading down. The sounds of their approaching pursuers were getting
louder by the moment.

"I'm Jason." He said.

"Great! I'm Shannon, now go down the
ladder." She looked annoyed with him.

Without another word, Jason dropped
down the hole and descended into the darkness, wishing he had a
flashlight. A million movie monsters appeared inside his mind, and
he imagined them grabbing his feet to pull him down into their
lair.

"Go, I need to get down, soon!" She
whispered. Shannon's voice was strained and Jason could feel the
increasing urgency.
Jason landed at the bottom of a dry tunnel and looked up as the
girl's body came through the opening, blocking what little
starlight he could see from above, enveloping him into
pitch-blackness. He began to panic when he felt her hand in
his.

"Follow me. Don't talk, and don't let
go of my hand. I know the route." She said.

They were off as she led him down one
tunnel after another, twisting and turning their way through an
underworld of darkness. Jason tripped over something and hit the
ground hard, slamming his head into a wall. The stars above offered
little to brighten the tunnel, as there were only small slits and
cracks in the ceiling that were able to let light in, but Shannon
found him again after a moment. He got to his feet and followed her
without a word until she stopped at a ladder. She began to
climb.

"Wait here." she whispered.

Jason’s imagination ran wild. He
suddenly felt spiders crawling all over him. Again, his hand
grabbed the device and he considered jumping out to some other
place in time for a moment, but then he considered the girl. Who
was she, and how had she gotten here? He had to know. She climbed
through another grate, and a few moments later he saw the outline
of her head over the hole.

"Come on up. We're safe, for
now."

He did as she asked, and
when he reached the surface Jason saw that they were now in a
basement laboratory. Jason was amazed at the number of beakers,
test tubes, and glass pipes that wound their way through the lab.
Each glass tube had the dried, caked-on residue of whatever
experiment had been going on before it was all shut down. Spider
webs crisscrossed the deserted lab, their eight legged inhabitants
spinning traps for passing insects. Jason could not help but think
of the Charles Addams quote—
Normal is an
illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the
fly
.

"Who are you, and how did you get
here?" The girl asked.

"Jason Tweed. I came here with a time
travel device I stole from a government lab. I'm a time traveler
now. But, I guess I could ask you the same question."

"My name is Shannon Dolby, and I flew
through a time rift, or portal, or whatever you want to call it.
I've been here for three months hiding from these monsters."
Shannon said.

"How?"
"I'm a pilot and I was flying my family to the Bahamas for
Thanksgiving in my single engine Cessna, when I saw a band of light
appear in the sky. This streak of light must have been five miles
high and I saw no way to avoid it. I tried to mayday the nearest
tower but my instruments failed, so I went into the light and ended
up in this dimension. Once I came through, my engine quit and I had
to land the plane."

"Is your family alright?" Jason
asked.

"Mom and Dad died on impact." She
averted her eyes to the floor. "I struck a tree and the branches
came through their window. Anyway, my sister Lyric was all I had
left, and the monsters took her a few days ago when we were out
hunting for food. I was going to look for her again when I spotted
you trying to chat it up with them."

"Do you know whether she's still
alive?"
"We've always had a strong bond with each other, but it's even
stronger here for some reason. I can sometimes hear her thoughts,
and she can hear mine. I think they are keeping her in a castle
across the city, but I'm not sure how much longer she'll be alive.
She spoke to me in a dream last night and told me she's over at the
Frankenstein place, and I'd know it when I saw a light burning in
the fireplace. Can you help me, please?" Shannon asked.

Jason wanted to warp out and get as
far from this madness as possible. Who knows, he thought, maybe the
next dimension or planet will be a tropical paradise with half
naked girls? His thumb played with the buttons. He put the selfish
voice away sighed.
"Alright, I believe we can get to her without alerting the horde,
but I think you'll have to hold on to me when we get above ground
for this to work."

"How? I don't mean to
sound ungrateful, but there are thousands of those things up there
and it took me
days
to get as far as I did without getting killed."

Jason removed the time device from his
pocket and showed it to Shannon.

"This is it." Jason said.
Shannon crinkled up her nose and cocked her head from side to
side.
"It looks like a soda can. You got here with that?"
"Yeah," he laughed. "Press the
Time
Slip
button and you stay in your same
relative time, but you essentially stay in between the fabric of
space-time. It’s the craziest thing. No one can see you, but
there's a catch. It seems like only a minute has gone by while
you're in the time slip, but actually ten minutes or an hour have
gone by in normal time. I tested it out in the lab while I was
getting away, and seven hours had passed while my watch hands had
only moved two minutes. Anyway, while I was in this time slip, the
goons chasing me ran right past me."

"That's amazing! Show me."

"What?"
"I want you to show me how it works. Look, you seem genuine, but
I'm not placing my life in your hands if that thing doesn't work.
I'd rather continue sneaking around if it means I get to live, and
maybe I’ll find my sister by myself." Shannon said. Her hands went
to her hips and she was unconsciously tapping her toe.

"Okay, do you have a watch?" Jason
asked.
"Yes."
"Take it off and put it on the table right there." Jason said.
Jason adjusted the time on his watch so it would match her time
zone.

"See mine? What's the time read on our
watches?"
"Ten, on the hour." She said.

"Okay, now take my hand." Jason
said.

She looked at him with
suspicion. "Today, please?"
She grabbed his hand and Jason pressed the
Time Slip
button. The room became
fuzzy, almost like they were looking through a filter, and after he
waited about three minutes, he took his finger off the button and
they returned to normal time.

"Look at my watch, and then yours."
Jason said.
"Yours says three minutes past ten, and mine… oh my god. Three
hours went by while we were in there."

"Uh huh, pretty cool,
right?"

"Yes, and very useful. We can get in
there and get my sister."

"We should be able to, yes. But, there
is something that concerns me about the time slip. If you walk too
far in one direction or the other while holding this button down, I
think it causes you to either go back or forward in time. Which way
is the castle?"

"East of town, I'm pretty sure."
Shannon said.
"And, where does the sun rise on this planet?
"I think in the east, just like back home on Earth." Shannon
answered.

"We should be OK then. As long as we
are traveling along with the rotation of this planet, we should not
end up going back in time. That would be bad, especially if we end
up skipping too far into the past. Theoretically, you could up
seeing yourself crashing into that tree again. I'm not sure what a
paradox looks like, but I'd like to get out of here before we cause
one." Jason said.

He raised his eyebrow at Shannon,
noticing her. Although Shannon was covered in dirt and grime, her
black hair reminded him of ravens, and she had azure blue eyes,
with a natural, irresistible pout to her lips. He had known Shannon
for less than a day, and she had already convinced him to go into a
zombie-infested castle and rescue her sister. He suspected she was
going to be trouble, but that was what he thrived on. Jason shook
his head and followed her lead up a rickety staircase and out into
the darkness of Haven. They emerged into a very narrow alley where
only about two feet of separation existed between buildings. Once
out of the alley, she led him to a wooded area with a path that
vanished into more darkness. Jason viewed the path with suspicion,
and then he caught something out of the corner of his eye. When he
looked, up he saw a ringed purple planet outside the atmosphere,
and it was so big and close it felt like if he stood on a ladder he
could touch it. Purple and lavender clouds swirled like cream in
coffee inside the enormous orb.

"I want to go there." Jason whispered
to himself. His eyes were wide as saucers.

"I know, that thing had me and my
sister, Lyric, staring at it for a week. It's amazing." Shannon
said. "Come on, let's go. The castle is just ahead."

Jason followed her through the woods,
and in moments he could see the ancient, medieval castle, rising
like an omen of doom into the night. Jazz music played inside as
multicolored lights illuminated every window, giving the palatial
estate an electric atmosphere. The undead meandered around out
front, drinking and carrying on like a college party. A bonfire
blazed as a crowd gathered around, throwing the writhing bodies of
their fellow undead into the pyre, and as those engulfed in flames
screamed the crowd cheered.

"They're eating each other out there."
Jason said.

"Yeah, this is a real swell place. Can
you use your thingy to get us inside, please?" Shannon frowned.
Jason grabbed her hand and pushed the button.

In the space between time, the two
walked through a frozen world where the undead moved in such a slow
manner that they looked like static Halloween decorations. Jason
walked into the castle and saw the most macabre scene he had ever
witnessed. The bottom floor was teeming with the undead, writhing
around and chewing on each other like they were the meal of the
day, reminding him of some kind of dark and twisted wax
museum.
"No sign of her down here." Shannon said.
They ran up a stone stairwell to the second floor through the
blurry space between time, and as they picked up speed the frozen
mob of undead vanished. They searched one room, and then another,
and then at the end of a long hallway they were greeted by a locked
door. Jason threw caution to the wind and pressed the button again
just long enough to come back to real time and kick the door in.
The hallway was barren, and as they looked into the room Shannon
saw her sister laying on the stone floor, chained to a wall. She
was emaciated, and her wrists were caked with dried blood from the
manacles her captors had placed around her arms and feet.
"Lyric, is that you?" Shannon asked.

The little girl, no more than ten
years old, raised her head and Shannon could see that there was no
life left in her eyes. They had turned her into one of
them.

"Shannon, can you come closer? I'm so
hungry. Maybe I can have just a bite of your leg. Not much, just
enough so the pain goes away." Lyric moaned.

Shannon turned away from her sister,
unable to process the horror, and began to weep. Jason quickly
tried to reason with her, knowing that remaining silent might cause
her to do something irrational.

"She's not alive anymore. That thing
is not your sister." Jason said. He felt much empathy for Shannon,
and sorrow for the loss of her sister, but self-preservation was
screaming at him to flee for his life.

Jason heard booted footfalls in the
hallway outside the cell Lyric had been kept in, and he turned with
a start. The woman he had met in the street was with her little
girl and two undead henchmen.

"We have been looking all over for
you! Are you ready for dinner?" She asked. Felicia's mother grinned
with a mouth full of broken and missing teeth.

"Come with me, Shannon. There's
nothing but death for you here now." Jason said.

For a moment, Shannon looked at her
sister, and Jason could feel her conflict. Shannon reached out for
Jason and he took her hand while aiming the time device at Felicia
and her mother. When he pressed the button, a time bubble
manifested in the space where they stood, evaporating all of them
as it formed a perfect sphere. None of the ghouls had time to react
before the gravitational force of the bubble’s appearance turned
them to dust.

"We can't just leave her this way."
Shannon sobbed. Jason knew he had to do something, or he would
regret his inaction forever.

"I think I can help her, but we'll
have to do something I haven't tried with this device of mine."
Jason said.

They heard more footfalls outside in
the hallway, beyond the time bubble, and those who ran too close
were sucked in and gone, lost, no longer a problem for
anyone.