~ * ~
They walked for
a
long time. The air was warm and humid. Above them, the silent storm raged with
green and purple flashes of alien lightning. Molly and Toffee walked in
silence, eyes lifting often to observe the amazing vision in the heavens.
“I don’t understand,” said Toffee
after a while. “Which bit isn’t real?”
“It’s all
real,”
said
Molly, frowning down at her little sister. “But some of it is just in our
heads, because our bodies are someplace else, in big glass tubes in a liquid.
Isn’t that right, Mom?”
“Yes.”
“And they put big needles into
our brains!” said Molly, poking her fingers into the top of her head and
pulling a Big Scary Face at Toffee. “Whoooeeeoooo!”
“Stop it! Tell her, Mummy, tell
her! That’s not true, is it? They haven’t put big scary needles in our brains.
I wouldn’t like that. I don’t like needles. I remember going to see Dr.
Dentist, and he was all mad with eyes and hair and stuff, and he put a big
needle in my gum and it hurt! It really hurt!”
Kat threw a dark look at Molly. “No,
dear, I don’t think they’ve put big needles in our brains. I don’t think they’d
do that for a minute!” She gave Toffee a quick cuddle and made a harsh gesture
to Molly whilst Toffee’s head was bowed.
Again, distantly, there came a
clicking sound.
“What is that?” said Toffee. “That
clicking noise?”
Molly opened her mouth, caught
her mother’s glare, and closed it again.
“It’s the insects,” said SARAH,
and Molly grinned. Molly wasn’t happy unless doom and gloom were on the
horizon, and even more so if the doom and gloom were there to frighten her
little sister.
“Insects?” wavered Toffee.
“SARAH!” warned Kat.
“It is a very real threat,” said
SARAH. “You need to be warned.”
~ * ~
They walked through
tunnels of fire. Kat was apprehensive as they
approached the roaring inferno, as any sane person would be. But children are
not sane people, and Kat saw Molly and Toffee’s eyes light up with rabid
excitement, with glistening joy, with a
buzz,
baby, a
buzz.
Not
for them the fear that Dexter might be dead, or on the run, or worrying his
little mind sick due to his family’s disappearance. Children’s brains didn’t
work like that.
Oh, it’s Dad, Dad’s always there, Dad’s big and strong and
eternal; nothing bad can happen to him because he’s our dad. And he’s our dad
because he’s eternal. A rock. A constant. Like the spin of the planet, the
burning of the sun, the expansion of the galaxy.
But Katrina knew that even
gravity failed, even fires burned out, and explosions ran out of energy. And
she remembered her own father, remembered his death and the knife, the fucking
white-hot knife through her own heart at the realisation that he wasn’t a god,
wasn’t immortal, and she was, in fact, alone in a big, wide, fucked-up, cruel
universe that cared nothing for twelve-year-old little girls, cared nothing for
tears, cared nothing for pity. Nature was a cunt, there were no two ways about
it. And humanity was a virus, a fucking amoeba scraping along the bottom of the
barrel, a bottom-feeder of the lowest order. Nature cared nothing for being
fair. Nature did what it did.
“Wait.” An instruction.
Molly ambled to a halt, followed
a moment later by Toffee. They both turned with questions in their eyes.
But
it’s only a twenty-story-high circle of fire that leads into a vast, roaring,
screaming inferno,
those eyes seemed to say.
What could possibly be the
problem?
“In there?”
“Yes,” nodded SARAH, smiling in
that odd way which wasn’t really a smile; just a copy of an imitation.
“Is it safe?”
“Is any of this place safe?” said
SARAH. “But... yes. In the manner that you mean. No, you will not be ignited by
nuclear fire. It is a Sun Tunnel. An amplification. Not exactly like the real
thing...”
“You go first,” said Kat, her
face hard, wishing she had a Techrim 11mm.
“As you wish,” said SARAH.
The tall silver avatar stepped
forward to the edge of the fiery tunnel. She looked up, hair streaming back a
little from the heat and energy. Twenty stories above, glowing like the
atmosphere of a star, the top of the circle, the tunnel, ended. SARAH stepped
forward into the fire and was... engulfed.
Kat gasped, and ran forward,
trailing Molly and Toffee. And as she neared the edge, she realised there was
no
heat.
She stumbled to a stop, and saw SARAH smiling at her, and felt like a
fool. An idiot. This creature, this being, was here to help them; they were
lost; not just ghosts in the machine, but devils in the cogwork. And she’d been
sent to bring them out alive - okay, for the reasons of preventing bad
publicity for Theme Planet and Monolith, but fuck it, if that was what it took
to stay alive then Katrina was willing to play bubby bunga ball with all four
bats.
“You’re sure, now?” said Katrina,
eyes narrowed.
And Toffee jumped forward,
squealing, giggling, and stood in the fiery tunnel alongside SARAH.
“Come on, Mum! Don’t be such a
pussy wuss!”
“A...” Her mouth dropped open,
and she frowned, and, trailing Molly, she strode over to Toffee. “I’ve a good
mind to smack your legs.”
“You can’t do that, Mom. The
school will have you locked up. Remember what happened to Old Lady Jenkins?”
She had a look of wisdom on her face that far outweighed her very modest years.
“Hmmm. Don’t you dare do that
again,” said Kat, and pointed, using
that finger.
Toffee looked
sheepishly at
that finger. That finger
had a whole lot of power, as if
it were some ancient carved magick wand. Or something.
They started to walk.
All around them, the world burned
like... the sun. It was like being in a sun tube. The ultimate in dodgy tanning
experiences. And yet nothing but a gently warm breeze caressed their faces; no
horrific burns nor immediate incinerations came their way.
“This is brilliant,” said Toffee.
“It’s too bright,” complained
Molly.
“Yeah, but it’s pretty crazy, isn’t
it?”
“You think a five headed Funky
Monk is crazy.”
“Aww, don’t say that, Mols.”
“Well, you’re just a little girl!”
“I’ll tell Dad!”
They looked at each other. Their
mouths closed. They put hands in pockets and walked along beside Katrina, and
all three walked in a line behind SARAH, the personification of the Monolith
Mainframe.
They walked, and seemed to walk
for hours. Eventually, Kat called a stop and SARAH halted, turning with patient
eyes and a look of serenity on her simple pretty features. “Is everything well?”
“How long in this tunnel?”
“We are bypassing a hazard.”
“That’s fine. I just wondered how
long?”
“I cannot give you a time frame,
for we are side-stepping time in this environment. All I can tell you is that
it will be soon - as you
feel
it. But we will be emerging into a
Jackhammer Hall, and that’s a very dangerous place.”
“Mommy, what’s a Jackhammer Hall?”
“Huh!” snorted Molly. “You mean
you don’t know what a Jackhammer Hall is?”
“No,” said Toffee, meekly.
“Girls!” snapped Katrina. “Okay,
SARAH. Explain it to me.”
“Up on the surface of Theme
Planet there is a huge ride called
Jack
the Hammers.
The hammers start at ground level, and pound a carriage up
a pole for two kilometres, right up into the sky. Feels like a Slamjet Ejector
Cube. But for the purposes of equilibrium and safety, as the capsules are
punched skywards, counterweight pistons are pounded down below the ground. That’s
where we’ll be. In the chamber where the pistons come smashing through the
floor. A Jackhammer Hall.”
“Are there a lot of these
pistons?” asked Katrina, suspiciously.
“Thousands,” said SARAH.
“Why, if we’re not in a real
reality?”
“This fake reality models the
real one in many ways. But it has become deviated, as I explained. Twisted.
Even the pistons may not be what they seem - so you must be on your guard when
we enter the Jackhammer Hall.”
They continued to walk through
the fire tunnel, the sun tube, and as Katrina walked she thought about Dexter
and what he would do. What
would
he do when discovering their
disappearance? First, he’d look for them, of that she was sure. Then he’d go to
the police - after all,
he
was police. What then? The police would start
to do a sweep of the Theme Planet resorts, but obviously her and the girls had
been taken somewhere, hidden away somewhere from prying eyes. Katrina squeezed
her hands in frustration, as much at the consideration of Dexter’s pain as at
their own predicament.
Something touched her hand, and
it was Toffee. Toffee’s finger curled into her palm, and they walked for a
while holding hands and Katrina was thankful for this basic act of warmth and
kindness and humanity. It was such a simple thing, simple contact, and yet it
meant so much. To be touched. To be trusted. To be loved.
“Mommy?”
“Yes, honey?”
“Daddy’s okay, isn’t he?”
“Oh yes, Daddy’s just fine,
poppet.”
“It’s just I had a dream. Last
night. Or... whenever it was we were asleep.”
“A dream?”
“Yes. About dinosaurs. Well,
kind-of
dinosaurs. Only they were
alien
dinosaurs.”
“And what happened with the alien
dinosaurs?”
“They ate Daddy.”
Katrina stopped, and knelt on the
corridor of fire. Hydrogen ignited below her knees at millions of degrees, in a
bright white glow. She took Toffee by the shoulders and looked into her
daughter’s eyes. “Listen. Daddy’s just fine. Daddy’s not in trouble, it’s
us
who are in trouble. Do you understand?”
“Yeah, Mom. I understand.”
Toffee skipped ahead to Molly,
and wearily, suddenly filled with exhaustion, Katrina stood up and put her
hands in her pockets.
“Did you tell her?”
“Yeah!”
“What did she say?”
“She said Dad’s fine. He is a
policeman, after all.“
“Yeah, she would say that.“
“Well, I believe her.“
Molly considered this.
“Yeah.
So do I.”
Katrina smiled, and hurried
through the solar fire to catch up with her daughters.
~ * ~
Stepping out from
the raging inferno of nuclear holocaust was like
stepping into a cool gel bath. Suddenly, Katrina felt the cool breath of angels
on her neck and face and arms. Confusion scattered lullabies through her brain.
What was it? What was happening?
“We were a step out of time,”
said SARAH. “That’s why we weren’t incinerated.”
Katrina stared at her. “So it was
a trick?”