The Portal in the Forest (12 page)

Finally, he looked up. "Is that true? Did all
that really happen to you?"

I closed my eyes for a good three seconds,
knowing what he was asking about, and then nodded.

"And you're still here? Doing all this? For a
bunch of kids you don't even know?"

I nodded again.

He fell forward, into me, the book pressed
between us, and I hugged him instinctively. He shook, sobbed, and
cried for a good minute, overwhelmed by the fact that he might
actually have found a home.

Danny edged toward me, his flashlight
circling. "We're surrounded."

"We'll be fine," I told him. "It's time,
Thomas."

He nodded against my arm, and then closed his
eyes.

Watching the quick flashes of illuminated,
leering corpses as they closed in around us, I held him tighter. If
this didn't work… they'd have to tear me apart to get to him.

Invisible hands grasped at my clothes, and -
fell limp.

The wind all around us stopped.

The sound of hundreds of falling bodies
echoed through the forest as the corpses fell in scattered
unison.

The forest still burned, but the portals had
damaged so many trees, it was impossible for the leftover flames to
spread now that the source was gone.

Danny laughed first, and Thomas and I both
joined him in a series of deep, freedom-charged belly laughs.

It was over.

I smiled. Just for once… everyone had lived.
And more - dozens more black-suited refugees moved by us in the
forest, overjoyed to finally escape their endless walk. The cold
and calculating part of me assessed them for threat… after all,
they might have had the slow-time bacteria with them… but I guessed
that, without the light-hungry super-crop plants the bacteria
needed, it would be no threat here. That runaway symbiotic cycle
had been broken.

Today is a good day: today, just for once,
everyone lived.

And now I sit in a corner, wondering at my
own survival. I didn't really expect to live through this, and I
have no plans. Thomas sleeps in one corner of the room, and I sit
in the other, analyzing the events of the past few weeks. It should
feel odd to become the surrogate mother of a
light-being-turned-human from another reality, but… I've seen
stranger.

And now I've got a book that talks to souls,
and a shoe with a maddening mystery. I wonder what next week will
bring… for the first time in far too long, I'm actually looking
forward to finding out.

###

About the
Author

I'm an author of science fiction and horror.
I write a wide range; everything from short story anthologies to
full-length novels. As an avid fan of both genres myself, I try to
create engaging works that, above all else, make the reader
think.

You can follow more releases, or give
comments at:

Website: MattDymerski.com

Twitter: @MattDymerski

Email:
[email protected]

I'm always interested in hearing from my
readers!

Other Works

Psychosis

Explore the true anatomy of horror through
these thirteen tales of despair and terror, each written by the
author of the original short story "Psychosis."

Psychosis

The Bonewalker

The Fire of the Soul

"Come Closer"

Scribblings

The Lodge

Correspondence

Strangers in a Graveyard

The Lonely Grave

The Basement

Erosion

Strange Things

The Seven Horsemen of the Apocalypse

The Asylum

What is the nature of insanity? Follow one
doctor's hunt for dark Truth through a series of patient accounts,
each further from the light than the last...

Contains all six of the popular Asylum series
of horror stories, brought together for the first time to create a
single nightmarish journey into the realms of fear.

Creepy Tales

Five longer tales designed to creep and
disturb.

It Watched Us Play

A Series of Strange Occurrences

The Hole

The Heat

The Misdial

Aberrations

Thirteen creepy short stories designed to
disturb even the most jaded horror fan.

A Strange Kind of Journal

Still Life

Staring Contest

Final Exam

The Everest Corpses

Something’s Wrong

An Overheard Conversation

Smoke and Mirrors

An Unhappy Awakening

The Unseen Hands

The Hungry Lights

The Television

An Impossible Window

World of Glass

In a total surveillance society where every
moment of every life is publicly recorded, three newly graduated
Scientists make a youthful pact to change things for the better.
Their naïve promise will shape the future in ways subtle and vast,
perhaps offering a sliver of hope against the coming darkness, for
this world of glass has reached a breaking point. Under the most
powerful tool of oppression ever built, work is life, and speaking
out means unemployment and starvation - but someone has found a way
to communicate in secret, and the implications will be explosive
beyond measure.

Read this tale of survival and awakening in
an industrial dystopian surveillance society disturbingly not too
far from our own - World of Glass, Book One of the Final Cycle:

Humanity has blazed a legacy of destruction
and rebirth across an endless history of violence, but Time and
Earth have finally run out. There is nowhere left to begin again. A
hopeful promise between three friends; the meeting of two very
different civilizations; one last struggle to master the human
spirit - whether harmony or extinction triumphs, there will be no
more chances. This is the Final Cycle.

Preview:

The Desolate Guardians

Chapter One

Statistically, somewhere in the early hours
of Christmas morning, more people are asleep than at any other
moment during the year. Me? I'm working.

And I love that the world is quiet. That's
less people to bother me, and more thickness for the walls of
darkness and solitude that surround this place. As the off-hours
network manager, I'm typically alone in my duties, and I don't have
to
manage
much of anything. I don't have to train people, or
deal with customer issues. All I have to do is make sure our
extremely expensive network doesn't go down or lock up or implode
when nobody else is around.

With today's technology, that means I spend
the vast majority of my time sitting around and browsing things
online. I'm pretty sure I've seen the entire Internet. I used to
cover my tracks by deleting my connection history from the network
log, but, one week I forgot… and nobody cared. I quickly got the
sense that nobody was even looking, and, if they did, they wouldn't
give a crap about the browsing history of the off-hours network
manager.

I mean, realistically, what else was I
supposed to do? Cooped up in this half-dark, half-rainbow server
room, alive with the breath of endless banks of computers and the
cooling system needed to keep it all from melting… I used to joke
to myself that my ultimate responsibility here was to literally
pull the plugs out of the walls if the air conditioning ever
stopped working, something no software could ever do, and something
a monkey could have managed - but my little joke ceased being funny
when I realized that was actually, probably, most likely the case.
I'm a glorified button pusher.

Once I'd seen the entire Internet, I grew
bolder. I began looking at files on our own network. I had excuses
lined up if anybody came to ask what I was doing… but nobody ever
did. We did quite a bit of work with military contractors, and it
was rather astounding to sift through bid documents, designs, and
plans that dealt in the billions of dollars. It was all protected
and encrypted, of course… except I was the acting network
administrator. Score one for the network being far too big for
anyone to lock down perfectly.

There were files, emails, and logged
communications from practically everywhere, and a few places I'd
never even heard of. We weren't military, or governmental, but we
did business with them all. VPs discussed third-world coups over
lunch, accountants logged tax tricks that were clearly illegal but
heavily obfuscated and ready to be pinned on patsies hired for the
task of taking the fall, and soldiers emailed their families back
home.

That was the thing about these memos and
emails. Unlike the swarm of crap on the Internet, they were
real.
One soldier's email chain ended two months ago, and
the subsequent data linked to his widow trying to get money out of
our insurance department despite their best efforts to renege on
the payout. These were
real people
being churned through the
system. Was that widow asleep somewhere right now, ready to fake
her way through Christmas morning with her daughter, or was she
still awake, with anger and despair gnawing at her?

I mean, I had access… and the system was the
system… and I knew it was inevitable. Alone in here ad infinitum,
I'd eventually do it. Why not now?

I closed the widow's insurance payout ticket,
taking it away from the current person assigned to it, then
reopened it without an assignee… a simple matter. With a few
manipulations, I created a fake employee in a department with a
redundant sounding title. Then, I sent it on over to pay
processing… doubled the amount… and marked it as Approved. It was
nothing to a gigantic corporation, but everything to a single
person. As a final act, I deleted all traces of my actions.

Huh.

That was it.

Maybe what I'd done was illegal, but it
seemed… the morally right thing to do. She'd be getting an email
confirmation before she woke up. That seemed like a Christmas
present and a half.

And I couldn't be caught, in any case. There
was simply no trace in the system that I'd had
anything
to
do with it, and hardly anybody knew I existed anyway. The system
was the system, and if, through some impossible feat, a mid-level
manager noticed an issue, he'd simply pass a ticket up… to me.

And that ticket would most certainly be lost
in the shuffle.

I felt oddly great for a little while, until
I realized… everyone's asleep. If ever I had an opportunity to do
more like this, and get away with it, it was now.

I delved deeper into the files, looking
specifically for military communications with signs of
distress.

Somehow, I think I knew it the moment I saw
it. The message log hung there in emptiness - alone, like me.
Nobody had read it, and nobody was even aware of its existence. It
was encrypted in a unique way, and hidden by rare system
priorities. No users had the rights to access it, and the file had
no traceable origin. This was a message intended to be read by no
one.

But the access process
did
exist
within the system, even if nobody actually had the rights to
it.

I couldn't resist.

***

01101111011101010111010001100111011011110

11010010110111001100111001000000110001101

10111101101101011011010111010101101110011

01001011000110110000101110100011010010110

11110110111000100000011011110110111001101

10001111001

You'd be surprised how easy it is to play
chess against yourself. The game is uniquely suited to cold
decision-making, and your next move doesn't depend on prior states.
You can spend a few hours reading a book, come back to the board,
and legitimately make a move in your own best interests before
doing it all again as the opposite player.

Of course, your opponent is perfectly matched
to your level of skill, and there's no bragging, so nothing really
gets decided. I did find, curiously, that black won more than fifty
percent of the time…

At some point, I'm pretty sure the human
brain forces you to stop doing things you realize are pointless.
Once chess became agony instead of welcome distraction, I had only
the books left.

And when I'd memorized all the books, I…

I went for a lot of walks. They don't take
very long, though.

I've got seven chambers here. One has the
shower and the toilet, and the marks I make in the wall for each
day that passes. One chamber has my bed, my books, and a picture on
a nightstand. The third chamber has a kitchen area, and a table
that serves adequately as a ping-pong arena against my only
opponent - the wall.

The fourth chamber has the computers and
communication equipment. Screw all this stuff. It's all held
together by rubber bands and scotch tape. You know, I think I've
finally managed to send a message out somewhere… but I always think
that, don't I? This time, with everything going unbounded, with
time slipping into time and thought slipping into thought… I really
think I've done it. This message is going
somewhere.
It has
to be.

The fourth chamber has a wall of televisions
and radios, incoming-only. Some goddamn genius got hired to make
televisions and radios that couldn't be repurposed to send a
message out. I
hate
that guy. I've been in and out of half
of these things, even burrowed into the wall myself, and the crap
back there just won't give me a break.

I used to watch the TVs, but they just remind
me how cooped up I am. And everyone out there seems to be getting
dumber and more outraged at everything all the time. I wish I could
shout loud enough for them to hear.