One Minute to Midnight (32 page)

A tense moment of silence passed, and
then they could hear shuffling and other movements coming from
within the structure. One figure began to come through the door.
The man stood ten feet tall, and when he came closer Doug realized
he had at least three visible faces. The giant’s front face was
bearded, and it wore a tired expression, but they could only see
the protruding noses of two others as the giant faced them. The
giant wore on an old brown robe that was patched in places to cover
large holes, and the stench of rotten milk drifted from the man, so
pungent that it caused Doug to take a step back.

"That man has more than one face."
Jimmy whispered.
"I heard that!" Said a face on the right side of the man's
head.

"We are the ancients you seek,
although we don't see many of you outlanders very often." Said the
front face.
"I say we eat them now!" An unseen face from behind
squawked.

"No, no, no, we ate the last one who
came by here and he gave us indigestion for three days. Don’t eat
those little creatures." The left face said.

"Wise ancients, we only seek a way
home. Please, help us." Doug pleaded.

The front face solemnly looked down as
the other faces continued to mumble to one another, and Doug began
to feel as if his mind were folding in on itself as they stood
before the giant man with four faces.
"Well, the other three won't have much to do with you, but I've
always had a soft spot for children." The front face
sighed.

"Tell us what we have to do, sir, and
we'll be on our way in no time." Doug said.

"The way you seek is
through
that
cave. There is a time portal, an anomalous rift, opened a
thousand years ago between your world and ours. It is a time
abnormality that will transport you to the last place you came
from, but it is guarded by an imp." Front face said.

"Yes! The imp. Kixle will take care of
them, and then maybe he’ll share the meat with us!" Rear face
said.
"Would you please calm down? We are not eating them. I can still
feel the heartburn from the last humans." Said Left
face.

"Go through the cave, pass the imp who
guards the portal, and go home. Do not come back here again." Front
face said. The giant turned to go, and as he did they could see the
twisted, gnarled faces that were hidden from them previously. The
other ancients had crooked noses, beady, hate-filled eyes, and rows
of sharp teeth, yellowed from age and neglect.
Jimmy reached in his pocket for the vial and thought about what
Ignacious had said about drinking it when the time was
right.

"Let's go, Jimmy. The sooner we get
this over with the better I'll feel." Doug said as they watched the
giant slip back into its dark hole.

The cave was only a short distance
away, and since they no longer required his services, their driver
turned his cart and went back the way they had come. When Doug and
Jimmy got there, they found a torch on the wall inside. Beside it
was a box of long wooden matches, and oil soaked rags to wrap
around the torch. Doug fashioned their light source best he could,
and then lit it, smiling down at Jimmy once their path was
illuminated.

"See, nothing to it." Doug
said.

They walked into the cave that
stretched far into the mountain. They wound around several times
before ending at a blue-green wall of light. It swirled like smoke,
and drew them to it as they heard whispers from the edge of time
speak to them with a gentle allure. It was a hypnotic drone that
took them off their guard, and that was when they heard the shuffle
of feet behind them, and Doug was suddenly raised from the ground
by his neck. Jimmy turned to see a gigantic devil with two
sharpened black horns jutting from both sides of his
head.

"Put me down!" Doug
shouted.

"Gladly!" The imp hissed, and threw
Doug against a wall.

Jimmy stood with his hand on the vial,
frozen, terrified of the monster before him, but knew he had to
move. This place, this time, or world, allowed Jimmy to think
faster and more like a much older child, and he suspected that if
he did nothing his grandfather would be dead soon. He took the
vial, and pulled out the small cork, upending it in his mouth as
the bitter crimson liquid rolled down his throat. He winced at the
taste, but before the last drop was in his mouth, he began to feel
a superhuman strength surge through him. Jimmy was suddenly
changing, growing. Hair sprouted on his arms and face, and his
lower jaw extended by three inches. His hands hooked into sharp
claws and he grew long fur-covered ears and a long tail. The imp
missed all of this because his attention was focused on Doug and
where he would kick him next. The transformation complete, Jimmy
let out a long, low growl. He snarled as white drool pooled around
his powerful clawed feet. The boy had become something more
powerful than he had ever dreamed, and as he felt the hot rage of
bloodlust run through him, he howled inside the cave and demanded
the attention of their adversary for the first time.
"So, you want to kick an old man?" Jimmy barked. His muscled arms
rippled with acid filled veins as he flexed. "Get some exercise,
imp. Come kick me!"
Kixle turned around with an evil grin on his face, and as he did,
five little balls popped off of his skin and rolled along the floor
like marbles. They each unrolled and became duplicates of Kixle.
Jimmy leaped at Kixle with his claws bared. The imp had not been
prepared for such an attack, now he was on his back with a werewolf
on his chest, punching his head into the floor. Jimmy tore through
the imp's robust shoulder muscles with his two-inch razor sharp
canine teeth, and disabled one of his arms before the imp tossed
him aside, rolling to his feet.

"You have some strength my young
friend, I think I'll pay Ignacious and his family a visit tonight
and thank him for giving you that potion. That’ll be after I kill
you and the old man, of course. Boy's, let's get him." Kixle told
his clones, which were now full-sized.
One of the clones ran forward, but Jimmy was ready and jumped into
the air with his feet forward to kick the demon in his chest while
grabbing hold of its horns and ripping them from his head. The
horns were their source of power, a fact that Jimmy learned purely
by accident. He attacked two of the others, running at him by
stabbing down with a horn in each hand into the space between their
necks and shoulder. Then he ripped their horns off with lightning
fast movements. He was supernatural, a supreme being, doling out
harsh punishment. He saw three moves ahead of his opponents. He
wanted to stay like this forever. Immaculate, horrifying, the
embodiment of raw power. And as he tore through the final clone,
Jimmy felt the anger, hatred, and fire of the universe surging
through his boiling blood. He saw planets explode in his mind, he
witnessed stars supernova in deep space as he lost himself in the
action of killing. The pained screams of a million soldiers dying
in a thousand wars echoed within him as he stood before the wounded
imp.

"You can't hide behind your minions
anymore, imp." Jimmy growled.

"I'll help you get home, if you spare
my life." Kixle said.
"You are in no position to bargain demon."
A portal opened in the cave wall, filled with illuminated green
swirling clouds. Through the other side they could hear birds
singing in the trees.
"Oh, but I am. You see, you must use this talisman to pass through
the gate or you'll be ripped apart by the gravity of space-time."
Kixle held up a small silver orb with a ring around it, resembling
Saturn. It dangled it in his hand.

"We need that to get through, or we
get ripped apart? I don't believe you." Jimmy said. Doug was balled
up on the floor with two broken ribs and a busted nose.

"There are many pathways. Good luck
finding the right one without me." Kixle grinned. His damaged arm
hung limp.

Jimmy considered his offer for a
moment, rubbing his furry chin with his right hand. He looked over
at his grandfather lying on the ground, and turned back to the imp.
He nodded his head, and stepped forward as if to shake the imp’s
hand, but instead grabbed his right horn with his right hand and
used his left to hook the demon under his chin with his iron
claw.
"I don't need your permission to leave this land!"
"No!" Kixle screamed.

Jimmy severed the imp’s windpipe, and
with another swipe he removed his adversary’s head, tossing it into
the greenish void. It dematerialized in front of Jimmy as Kixle's
body fell to the floor, the talisman in his hand. Jimmy picked it
up.
"Come on, grandpa. Let's go home." Jimmy was beginning to transform
back into a little boy again, but he still had enough strength to
pick his grandfather up and walk through the portal.
Once on the other side, the memory of their adventure was lost
instantaneously, like shadows in the fog as soon as they crossed
over. While Jimmy and Doug felt as if they had been gone only a
day, a search party had been looking for them for over two weeks.
They could never explain what had happened to them, or the strange
outfit Jimmy was wearing when they returned. The clothing Jimmy had
been given by Ignacious would stay hidden in a drawer, forgotten
for another fifteen years. One day, after Jimmy completed his
college degree and was moving out of his old room, he rediscovered
the relics, but he could not remember where they came from, or from
whom he had received the small shirt and pants. The fabric was
something he had never seen before, and when he showed the clothes
to a Dave Schellenbacher, a friend who worked in textile fiber
forensics, he would discover that the fibers of his childhood
loaner clothes were derived from a plant that had not existed on
earth for over thirty-five thousand years. Their brief
disappearance was ruled just another unsolved mystery of the
Watertown Vortex.

stranger in a strange
land

Jared Talbert and his crew of Space Marines
are
on a mission to recover precious minerals, when something goes
terribly wrong.

Jared stared at the blinking blue dot on his monitor with interest,
and from the signature on his screen, he knew they were close to
their goal. Captain Dwight Rogers, of the freight ship
Celestine
, had ceased
communication with home in one final abrupt transmission, which
stated that he had found a new planet. Sipping on his tenth cup of
coffee for the day, Jared wondered about the various causes that
would have stopped the vessel from reaching home, when it had been
due to return over a year ago. Was there hostile alien life on the
planet? Had space debris or a chunk of meteor hit the
Celestine
and knocked it
out of commission?
Jared’s crew fought against tedium with a game of poker at the
dinner table, with little conversation. Five months in space stuck
together in a tin can had killed most of the small talk. Space was
vast and miraculous, and once outside their home solar system,
boring. If one stared out into the void long enough, they would
experience space madness and unravel the mission, so cards and
video games were somewhat comforting as they traveled through the
cosmos. The
USS Rapier
had passed Neptune weeks before, and as the blue planet
whizzed by, the crew had shared a unified sense of loneliness. It
was the first time any of them had been so far from home. The
missing cargo ship was reported to be loaded with precious minerals
bound for the Deep Space Exploration Corporation.
DSEC was rumored to have needed these precious metals for a
top-secret space weaponization program in development by a joint
task force of technology and weapons manufacturers on Mars and
Earth. Jared had seen the space-time gate NASA had developed,
before DSEC took over the operation, and knew private contracting
firms were transporting ancient high technology from the red planet
back to Texas through the gate. It made him nervous, this
clandestine collusion, and he often wondered if any of it was for
the betterment of mankind.

"Captain, you’ve been staring at that
monitor for an hour. What are you looking at?" Sgt. Will Perry
asked. He was laying a card down, and all heads turned in Jared’s
direction.

"The blip is back. I think we found
the cargo ship, but it’s near an unknown planet, and it’s not
moving." Jared replied.

"How far out?" Staff Sergeant Ty
Williams asked. He was the ship’s navigational engineer, and walked
over to look at the screen.

The little blue blip was just outside
the orbit of a large planet.

"Captain, it looks like we can be
there in less than a day without the use of our warp drive." Ty
said.
"Good, let’s get in, get the shipment or rescue the derelict craft,
and get out. I want to be home by next Christmas." Jared said. He
turned to the crewmembers, who were all nodding with emphatic
agreement.
"Longest I’ve been out here before is nine months, and I thought
that was long. We've been out eleven this trip." Gunnery Sergeant
Blythe Delgado said.
Her hair was tied back in a ponytail, and although she was a
Marine, and they were all on a military assignment, it was still
difficult to ignore that she was a beautiful woman, and married.
The men did their best to pretend Sergeant Delgado was just one of
the guys, but many cold showers ensued during their journey.
"I hear that Gunny! Let’s get this done. We'll slip into
hyper-sleep on the return and won't feel a thing." Jared
replied.