Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 7: March 2014 (21 page)

I kept looking down at my legs as I gradually made my way up the sidewalk toward the first block of condos in the complex, all of them brand-new 1975 construction. The wood-strip siding still smelled heavily of stain. Marijuana was also in the air. I thought I saw a couple out on their second-floor deck, passing a roach. They quickly went inside when they noticed me looking up at them.

I smiled. Nobody wanted anyone from the older generation around, especially back then.

As I rolled into the hallway that led to units 14 and 15, a shadowy shape stepped out of the laundry room into the light cast by the single lamp over 14’s doorway.

I stopped cold.

“Do you think dying made me stupid, Matthew?”

The Nechronomator wasn’t smiling. He looked murderous.

I kept my hands fastened to the wheels, taking reassurance in the solid steel.

“I don’t know what dying has done to you, Chris. I really don’t.”

“Your apartment is twenty blocks from here. Why aren’t you over there?”

“I think you know,” I said.

“You can’t speak to me. I won’t allow it.”

“Why not?”

“
Nothing
must occur which might interfere with my ordinary progression. I lived a full life, and had a natural death. You have no right to be here.”

Now it was my turn to laugh. I let it boom out, as best as my 70-year-old lungs were able.

My dead friend flinched and waved his hands as if to shush me.

“Chris,” I said, “I think we’ve both passed the point of caring how we’re affecting the flow of events. What harm could possibly come from me having a chat with the younger you?”

“If there were no harm in it, you’d not be here. You plan to stop me.”

I looked up at the Nechronomator, his ugly gray flesh especially horrid in the dull bulb’s light.

“Not stop you,” I admitted, “but maybe talk you into thinking about a few things. I checked the papers on the way here and it’s only Friday. The accident isn’t until Sunday.
Time enough to avert that, if I can.
But before I rolled over to Nancy’s place—I was shacked up with her at the time, if you remember—I thought I’d stop in and see how you and Carol were doing. You should never have divorced her, you know. She was good for you.”

Christopher advanced on me, his hands looking like claws.

“You leave Carol out of this,” he hissed. “Look, Matt. You’ve got one choice. Turn yourself around and never come back this way again. If you do, I will know, and I will stop you. I sent you back
once,
I can send you forward too.”

“Against my will?”

“Damn right, against your will.”

“I wonder what He would have to say about that,” I said.

Just then the light for 15 popped on, and the door came open.

The Nechronomator turned and watched himself saunter out of his condo, boxers disheveled and a long-necked beer in his hand.

“What the fuck?”

Young Chris’s eyes focused on his older, dead self, and it was like a silent lightning bolt passed in the air between them.

“Chris,” I yelled from my chair, “I’ve got to talk to you! You’ve got to call off the climbing trip! You’ve got to—”

The Nechronomator spun and lunged for me. I reflexively rolled my chair in reverse. Just as Chris’s dead hands reached for me, the chair caught on the curb at the end of the sidewalk and flipped over. I slammed hard on my back and toppled out, the Nechronomator hitting the chair’s legs and pitching over me. Dead, brittle bones crunched as he came down in a heap. With my arms—made strong over forty years of wheeled effort—I righted myself and ignored the pain where my head had impacted the asphalt.

Young Chris had jogged out and knelt by me.

“Are you okay, man? I should call the cops.”

“Chris,” I wheezed, “
listen
to me. Sunday, you and I are going on a trip up the canyon. You’ve got to call it off. I’m going to break my back when I fall. Don’t let me convince you otherwise.”

“Jesus … Matt? What’s going on? You look—”

Dead Chris rose up from where he’d fallen, left leg and arm twisted grotesquely. He shouldn’t have been able to stand at all. Whatever he was tapping from the
After
, it was potent stuff.

“
Desist!
”

Young Chris looked like he was going to throw up, and took a few steps backward.

“Oh my God, what is this?” he said.

“It’s me,” I said to young Chris. “Remember the talk we had about you and Carol? She wanted you both to be back in church.
For the baby.
She’s right.”

“
Chris?
”

Carol stood in the doorway of the condo, her nightgown wrapped tightly around her very-pregnant a
b
domen. Casey was about six months, give or take. I remembered that his birthday always came around Thanksgiving. Shit, he would be a handful by the time he was ten.

Young and dead Chris both looked at his current/former wife.

When Carol saw the Nechronomator, she screamed and backed into the wall behind her, hand up to her mouth.

I turned and looked up at my dead friend. His mouth had drawn open, gaping inhumanly wide. Dead eyes were rolled back into their sockets and a rising groan had begun in his throat. Not air being pushed out, but air being drawn in. His chest was expanding like a balloon, and the groan quickly rose to a howl. A satanic, hair-raising howl that made the windows
rattle
. I felt an electric charge flow over my skin and though the asphalt.

Something was changing.
Had changed.

I waited, turning back once to see Carol clutched to Chris’s chest.

“Stay together, dammit!” I yelled as loudly as I could.

Then everything vanished at once.

***

It was almost midnight when Chris pounded on my door. Nancy and I had been relaxing after a good, long, end-of-the-week screw, and she was dozing on the bed. I threw on my terrycloth bathrobe and went to the door to find Chris and Carol fully-dressed and looking worried.

I invited them in, woke Nancy, and we talked over cans of soda.

I wanted to say Chris was crazy. I wanted to tell him I didn’t think the joke was very funny. Only, I couldn’t make myself believe that he was joking. And with Carol there as an eye witness—serious Carol, who had never pulled a prank in her serious life—the air was stone-cold sober.

Suffice to say, I grudgingly let us cancel the climbing trip. In fact, we never did go climbing again. Chris wouldn’t hear of it. Kept telling me how horrified he was to see me in the wheelchair.

Nancy and I were present for Casey’s baptism.

When Chris and Carol moved back east for the university job, Nancy and I followed.

By the time Casey was in high school Chris and I both had tenure.

We had good lives, the two of us.

Chris was a grandpa six times over when Carol finally went. It was Alzheimer’s. Ripped Chris in two to see her go out like that, but we were both glad when it was over. Chris had helped me through Nancy’s passing a few years before, and I wasn’t surprised to see Chris in my living room, day after day, in the weeks following Carol’s.

We talked about God a lot in those final days.
A couple of odd ducks in our department at the U.
I still have the photo from when Chris debated Dawkins on the quadrangle. I’d thought they were going to punch each other out, they were so angry. We wondered what it would be like, when we crossed over.
If
we crossed over.
Neither of us spoke much of that night anymore, when Chris and Carol showed up and told me the story. Sometimes I still wonder if it wasn’t just in Chris’s imagination. But Carol had remained firmly convinced, to her deathbed. She’d said she’d never forget watching the zombie swell up like a bloated deer,
then
pop into nothingness with a flash like that of a camera bulb. Disabled, older
me
had vanished too, though the wheelchair had remained behind. Chris still had it in his garage on the day he died, and weeks later when I went over with his kids to begin cleaning things out, I found the wheelchair.

It was covered in dust, and rusty.

Chris had died on April 22, 2016.

The peeling manufacturer’s label on the chair said 2018.

I peeled the sticker off, put it in my pocket, and told Chris’s kids to send the chair to Goodwill.

Original (First) publication

Copyright © 2014 by Brad R. Torgersen

*************************

Robert T. Jeschonek is a prolific author of short stories and articles, and has four novels to his credit, including the recent Forward Na
tional Literature Award winner
M
y Favorite Band Does Not Exist.

.

.

Heaving for breath, I spin in a circle, looking for a way out. But I see the same thing in every direction.

Nothing but clowns.
Dozens of clowns.

Every one of them laughs, giggles, or guffaws at the same time. They bobble their heads, slap huge clown shoes on the parking lot pavement, and toot horns. All face paint and bulbous red noses and baggy costumes in all the wild colors of the rainbow, they look like they’d be right at home at a circus or a carnival or a kid’s birthday party.

Except for the malevolent sneers etched into every one of their faces. Not to mention the jagged, shark-like teeth lining their red-lipped maws.

As the clowns close in, my heart hammers in my chest. I’m a big guy, I’ll fight them—but I’m exhausted after what I’ve been through. The past two days of nonstop madness have wrecked me, I admit it. And I wasn’t feeling up to snuff to begin with; the pain in my gut was bad at the start and has only been getting worse.

Plus which, I’m wearing a bright green knee-length dress and spiked heels.

Not exactly the ideal outfit for a five-eleven, two-hundred-twenty-five-pound guy to wear
while fighting
a mob of savage clowns.

“Back off!” Even as I shout it over the crazed laughter, I see it does no good. The clowns are still moving toward me.

Swallowing hard, I prepare to make my stand. I crouch and turn slowly, arms extended from my sides.

Suddenly, I hear a wild scream behind me. I whip around just in time to see a clown with a big plastic daisy on its pink derby hat charging toward me.

As I stumble back a step, the unexpected happens. The charging clown gets to within six feet of me and explodes, blowing apart in a burst of orange flame.

I throw up my arms to shield myself.
Lumps of dead clown splatter all over me, smelling like burnt bacon.

Then, I hear another shriek and spin to see a second clown charging. Trying to dodge him, I trip on my spiked heels and go down hard.

This time, the clown gets closer, within five feet, before exploding.

And then I hear another scream, and another, and another. I hear three pairs of floppy clown shoes paddling toward me. I wonder how close this new batch will get before blowing up. I wonder if they’ll get close enough to take me with them.

And I wish to God that I’d never gotten on the lifehacker radar in Crowdlife.

***

Three days ago, I could not have imagined how things would turn out for me. I was busy just doing my job as an agent of Crowdlife Outcomes Enforcement—the C.O.E.

My last case, the one that changed my life, led me to a rundown tenement apartment on Skid Row. A family of five was living in this three-room dump, dressed in rags, immersed in squalor.

Make that a family of five plus a screeching chimpanzee in a purple turban and glittering gold diaper.

“Look at this place!” said the man of the house, Mr. Byron Chellingham. “There’s been a mistake, I tell you!”

“Sorry, sir,” I said, looking around the dilapidated apartment. “Crowdlife has spoken.”

“Like hell!” Byron swatted at what was either a passing bug or a gnat-cam—one of the multitude of tiny airborne camera-bots zipping through modern humanity’s environment at all times. Gnat-cams constantly beamed video and audio signals to augmented reality devices like my contact lenses and aural implants, enabling them to enhance what I and others saw and heard. Gnat-cams also streamed data back to the social network providers; without them, Crowdlife, Yapstream, and the like wouldn’t have a window on the world.

“Calm down, Mr. Chellingham.” I raised my voice, trying to snap him out of it … doing my best to hide the fact that I felt sorry for him. “You need to get a grip, sir.”

“But someone
gamed
the system! Don’t you see?” Byron flapped his arms like he was trying to take flight. His bright green eyes were bugged out, his wife-beater tank top t-shirt soaked with sweat. “We don’t
deserve
this!”