The Portal in the Forest (9 page)

Handing the book to the boy on my back, I
turned around, gripped the girl and the nearby boy by their arms,
and began dragging them.

They screamed as they slid against sharp
angular obsidian, and traces of blood began soaking their clothes…
but we were moving.

In turn, we approached each of the other four
fallen children, and I had them grip each other with all their
remaining strength. They were all young, and small - thus, they had
been the first to fall - and that fact also made them
draggable.

Screaming at the top of my lungs from the
strain, I pulled six crying children across shards of broken
volcanic glass, while one clung to my back and shouted continually
for them to hold on.

All I could see was the roiling blazing
bulwark slowly catching up to us; even licking at the shoes of the
farthest boy now and then. If he were to lose his grip on the leg
of the boy above him, even for a moment…

Just pull...

Just drag...

Breathe...

Foot down, push...

The other foot down, push...

The agony went on without end, but I would
never -

A perfectly straight line of pure red, like a
laser, cut across my awareness, and a swath of despair followed the
twinge of pain.

I fell to one knee as the flare in my spine
broached extreme levels of agony. I'd pulled something, or strained
something, or simply reached the edge of my endurance… sometimes,
there was simply no way out. I knew that, I did, but I could never
accept the reality of it.

But the bloodied and battered children did
not slip into the flames and die. Given the break they'd needed,
they staggered up and began running again. Ryan handed me the book
and took off after them. Turning in amazement despite the searing
torsion in my back, I saw them desperately charge toward Danny, who
stood… right next to a small oval in space.

On the other side, children silently waved
and shouted and motioned for them to come. Wasting no time, they
tumbled through - with a little push from Danny each.

We'd made it. We hadn't lost a single person…
without the boy on my back, I could move a little easier, and I
gripped the book tightly with one hand and my side with the
other.

"It's still not big enough for us," Danny
shouted as I approached, reaffirming his earlier unspoken concern.
His eyes jumped to the wall of flame not twenty feet behind me.

I came to a stop, swayed in front of him, and
lifted the book with a pained gasp. "Time for a wild guess, then…"
Without hesitation, I thrust it through the small oval portal. I
waited a tick, and then pulled it back. I did this thrice more, and
then…

Space began ripping around the small rift,
rapidly expanding the portal to three times its original size.

"Go," I told him.

He nodded gravely and dove through.

I waited as the heat and roar grew behind me
to screaming intensity. I could just stay here, and the book… the
device
, whatever it was… would be destroyed with me.

Or would it?

I couldn't make a gesture like that unless I
was certain.

A little relieved, I tumbled through the
portal. "Get back!" I roared, as blessedly cool forest air flowed
around me like an eddy in a river.

Remembering what I'd told them about shouted
warnings, they all immediately darted away.

I rolled forward, spine sparking body-filling
agony, as the portal ruptured further behind me. By the time I
scrambled to a small hillock and looked back, it had torn out
across the entire clearing. Beyond, I saw only descending
flame.

I lolled my head back on good old dirt, and
stared up at the trees. I'd done it. I'd avoided the choice… I'd
found that elusive third option that people were so rarely
afforded… all that training I'd given them, and all the pain I'd
ever gone through… it had saved these kids today…

I laughed. It was a deep, satisfying thing,
and I let it go on with all the relief, humor, and wonder I felt.
The internal armor I'd lost was gone, but I no longer needed it. I
hadn't been wrong, and it hadn't been my fault. Or maybe it had
been, but I just didn't care anymore. At some point, life had to go
on.

And, with time so short, life had to go on
now.
I had to go through with my plan and view the objective
image of the book. I had to know what it truly was.

I vaguely remember the children helping me
up, and a long staggering journey back to the suburb before I sent
them all off to get patched up and rest.

I also remember a brief image of the several
tequila bottles I had to buy to make my plan work. It was pretty
simple, really: down a nearly lethal amount of alcohol, wait until
you're almost blacked out, and then - and
only then
- take
out the dangerous image, draw it as quickly and as accurately as
you can while so inebriated, and pass out. If you're lucky, you'll
remember nothing, and your brain won't rupture trying to process
the multi-dimensional image.

Viewing it had almost killed Danny; would
have killed Danny, without healing help.

I awoke at some indeterminate time the next
day, my entire body a hurricane of hangover pain, and my face in a
pool of vomit that had come from my stomach and blood that had come
from my eyes… but I was alive.

I was alive, and I'd managed to draw what the
book really looked like - or, at least, what limited sense I could
make of what it looked like.

As soon as I saw it, quite a few of our
problems began making sense. This was no book at all, but, rather,
some sort of incomprehensible multi-dimensional device; and, as I'd
seen, it was absolutely related to the rupturing portals. Our plan
to use the iWorker to get rid of it seemed rather simple and
possibly unreliable now, but what other option did we have?

I spent the day recovering from my extreme
hangover and thinking about ways to get rid of the device. The
portal out there, by my calculations, now had to be a mile and a
half wide. If only I had more time… whatever we were going to do,
it would have to be with today's destination, no matter how lethal,
and it would have to be tonight. Tomorrow, this entire region would
rupture in a space a hundred and eleven miles long. It would be far
too late. If only I had more time...

Chapter Six

About that time,
I told myself. All
around me, the house creaked against mighty mercurial winds.
Windows rattled, making the radiating orange from streetlamps
outside dance, and I feared the glass might soon shatter.

Get up.

Shakily, I slid my hands down against dusty
floorboards and pushed. Gripping the wall, and fighting dizziness,
I managed to stand on my one good foot. Closing my eyes for a
moment, I did an assessment: sliced up and bandaged foot, badly
sprained wrist, fiery-pained knot in my spine, body-wide muscular
exhaustion from eight or nine miles of running, carrying, and
dragging the day before, and… general deep malaise from a
near-lethal hangover.

What did I have? One good foot, one good
hand, a laptop, a backpack of assorted gear, a spare shoe with an
unknown but valuable type of special dirt on it, an objective and
lethal image of a dangerous multi-dimensional device, a
drunkenly-drawn but safe-to-view approximation of said image, and…
the device itself, sitting on the floor in the guise of a large
book.

Alright then… "How do we save the world with
this crap?"

The house, my only companion, replied with a
shivering whip and chilly whistle as the wind outside momentarily
intensified.

"No ideas, then?" I asked it rhetorically,
stashing all my stuff in my backpack and limping toward the front
door.

Above the trembling orange streetlamps, a
ghostly pale blue sky clung to the last vestiges of sunset. Dark
clouds raced through those spectral colors at an unsettling
pace.

And it was cold, bitterly cold, when the
fullest force of oncoming air pushed through the suburban canyons
between houses.

To call the evening
unnatural
would be
an understatement.

Limping through the old Dodson lot, I quickly
discovered that the forest beyond had been devastated by the
forceful flinging of hundreds of trees - probably when the portal
had expanded to my guess of a mile and a half wide. Shorn trunks
hung at odd angles in the air all around, supported by hillocks,
still-living trees, and each other.

I didn't have to go far. Blinking rifts and
sickly drooping gouges in the air pulsed on both sides of the path,
thankfully leaving just enough room to slip between regions of
rotted space. It wasn't one gigantic portal as I'd feared, but it
was still tremendously destructive. The movement of thousands of
portals rushing in and out of existence seemed to be fueling the
biting icy winds I'd noted back at the suburb, and I imagined the
miles-wide phenomenon was contributing to the eerie weather.

The full extent of the destruction was only
visible from that one last hill before our usual meeting place. The
Virginia forest had been randomly obliterated; scattered lone trees
stood among a wide oval sea of frothing spacetime. I wondered:
would the sunset-aflame mountain range block the expansion of the
portals west? They were sticking to a wide, flat, disc-shaped area
around the spot where it'd all begun… the damage was not spherical,
as I'd worried. It seemed gravity and locale had some effect on the
situation.

Dodging down the last hill into sliced beams
of amber evening and gloomy darkness, I found half a dozen kids
frantically trying to bury some of the smaller portals. Danny was
helping, but he didn't seem very hopeful. Thomas sat on a mossy
boulder, staring down at his shovel-dirtied hands and nursing his
black eye every so often. All of the children stopped and stared at
me as I approached.

"What's the situation?" I asked, probably for
the last time.

Danny looked at the faces of each of his
neighbors in turn before replying with a worried grimness. He had
to speak quite loud to be audible over the inclement weather.
"Looks like this is it. The destination's going to change in a
couple hours, and then… I assume it's over. But if we take the book
through one more time, it could also rupture. Do you think burying
these small portals will do anything?"

I shook my head. "No. Where do the portals
lead today?"

He regarded one of the more stable nearby
apertures. "A flat, grassy plain. Blue sky, sun shining."

I sighed.

"Yep," he agreed. "Absolutely some sort of
horrible trap."

Putting down my backpack in a small area of
lightly muddy safety, I pulled out the image I'd drawn while drunk,
and gripped it tight against the icy winds. The kids gathered
round. "This is what the book really looks like," I told them.
"Ideas?"

"It's all spiky," several noted.

"How are you even holding it without getting
cut?"

Good question…

"What do those gears do?"

"How does it open?"

I blinked. "Open?"

The girl I remembered for being smart
expanded on her question. "You open the pages to read people's
stories, don't you? What are you really doing when you think you're
opening a book?"

After handing her the paper with the drawing
on it, I slid the tome out of my backpack and stared at it, trying
to look past the illusion. "Honestly? I have no idea…" I narrowed
my eyes. "Kids, can you tell me what you
don't
see in that
drawing?"

They traded answers for a time, until Danny
spoke the answer with such direct realization that the others all
knew it had to be true. "It doesn't look evil," he breathed. "I'm
not… scared of it. It's just a weird machine."

I nodded. "That's what
I'm
thinking,
too. It's got serrated, almost saw-blade like pointy sections, but…
I don't think they're intended to be scary. It's a machine, so
somebody
built it
, and, no matter who you are, you build
weapons with a certain visual awe and strength. No, somebody went
through a ton of trouble to make sure this looked and operated like
a book. I picked it up, without knowing what it was in the
slightest, and I was able to operate it and read from it."

Something about my conversation with the
information-trading entity struck me. The game had been to ask the
right questions, and I had asked
how do I neutralize the threat
this book poses?
The entity hadn't even had an answer for that
one, and I'd seen it as an ominous sign.

But
what if the book posed no threat at
all?
What if that was why it hadn't been able to answer that
specific question? I'd been mistaken in applying human emotions and
connotations to its words…

What if taking the book through the portals
damaged and enlarged them only because it was some sort of gigantic
multi-dimensional manifold machine? If portals were a sort of
fragile tunnel, then dragging this metaphorically large and spiky
object through them would only naturally cause havoc… and that,
right there, might have been the reason the entity thought it
beneficial for me to understand more about the device. It had been
able to connect to an active portal from its pocket dimension. Was
that ability an integral part of its existence? Perhaps the damage
we were causing to portalspace had something to do with its
motives…