Forever Twilight, Patrick Sean Lee [christmas read aloud txt] 📗

Across The Great Divide

 

Bullet train. Saturn V rocket. Fiery orange blur. Deep indigo...sky? Oh God, where am I?

 

The moment my body cleared the liquid light, I seemed to stretch, like I’d slid over an Event Horizon, and then the sensation of instantaneous light speed velocity. I could hear Peter’s bleating voice beside me for an instant. So Near, but I couldn’t turn my head to look for him. Oh dear God, let him be at my fingertips!

The feel of my hair ripping over my shoulders, waving and snapping in the perfect storm. My face; Mach 10,000. Body prone, arms aiming backward, locked beyond my control at my side. I was a bullet.

Ahead of me, erupting from a single point, a maelstrom of red and green and yellow and purple ribbons shot, spinning in undulating currents. Corkscrewing wildly, like water spinning down the cosmic drain I was caught in.

The point, ebony at its center, drew no closer, but neither did it recede. Had my body elongated to the length of a galaxy—or a hundred galaxies—I knew I could never arrive and knife into it.

How long did I streak forward? Only seconds. Or perhaps time didn’t exist in this incredibly frightening other-existence. No, no, it all happened in the blink of an eye!

Suddenly the ribbons of light began to melt in a dazzling rain. I was slowing, descending, it seemed, my thoughts banging haphazardly as the incomprehensible rush of the colorful storm slowly dissipated. There! There, far ahead of me, something my mind could grab hold of. Twin stars locked in some sort of fatal dance, sudden bursts of angry yellow leaping across the void between them. Onward I flew, straight toward them and my fiery end. Images of planets of ice and gas and barren rock. Yes, it all made sense suddenly. By whatever means, through whatever physics I would never in a million years understand, some force inside the walls of the Aurora had gathered me up and flung me across the galaxy!

Had yanked Peter away, right behind me. Turn head. Yes, able at last to do that. No Peter. NO PETER!

Freezing cold. Numb. I should be dead, a brittle, rock-hard corpse, but I’m not. I’m thinking, so I can’t be dead. Too dead, anyway. I continue to see planets rip by, tiny moons caught in their gravity, orbiting helplessly. Slowing more and more until a reddish blob appears, and I am taken down, down, down.

I land softly, gain equilibrium onto my feet, knees shaking, weak, and then I hold my breath as the landscape unfolds all around me in a heartbeat.

Oh-My-God.

I stand in a desert on soft orange sand, dotted with stones for as far as I can see. The terrain is flat, until far on the horizon a range of mountains rise like scales on the back of a sleeping dragon. The once-black sky over my head stretches, now, in an arc of lighter orange-red, lighter still on either side of me, softened by the pure white of the two suns vying to defeat one another—to draw it into the victor’s belly.

 

“Peter! Where are you?” I screamed.

“Right here! I can’t see you, though!” His voice was muffled, panicked, distant. “I’m spooked, Amelia! What happened?”

I thought I knew, and it was all my fault. Obstinate, demanding, out of my mind stupid! But whatever the consequences, I had to know what lay beyond the deadly wall.

Not what I expected.

“Oh Peter, I’m so sorry I did this. It’s…Peter, describe where you are!”

A second, maybe two, passed. “It’s, uh…Earth somewhere, I guess. Could be Asia or Europe. Maybe North America. Not sure.”

“Describe it! The sky, the landscape, everything! Are there people?”

“Clouds in the sky…”

“What color?”

“White! What other color would clouds be?”

“No, the sky itself.”

“Blue.”

“Are there any trees or buildings?”

“No buildings, but yeah, tons of trees. Trees…crap, I’ve never seen any trees like these. Maybe South America.”

“Peter, you aren’t on earth. Neither am I.”

“What?”

“The sky here is orange. I’m standing in a desert. There are two suns!”

He stammered a few unintelligible words.

“Peter, did you like, feel yourself flying? I think that’s the best word. Like your body was being stretched for miles and miles behind you a few seconds ago. Before you landed, wherever you are?”

“Yes. Guess I did. Why?”

“That Aurora we entered is some kind of...what do they call them? A portal. A highway to another planetary system. Peter, don’t move.”

“Oh great. We’re screwed. If you’re right…”

“I am.”

“Okay. If that’s true, how do we get out of here? Why didn’t we land in the same place, too? I was right behind you!”

I squinted across the barren landscape; up at the sky and the twin suns. Rethink. The Sahara? Impossible. Don’t think. I wasn’t on earth, because no way could I imagine two suns.

“Peter, what’s behind you?” Hail Mary…I turned and looked myself.

A second ticked by.

“Weird. It’s like this whitish-looking curtain. Sort of like the one we jumped through. Smaller. I can see the top of it, and the sides.”

And so could I. Twenty or so paces behind me. It shimmered, just like the Aurora back on Earth, but whatever it was made of, the narrower surface looked as though streams of water coursed over the top, disappearing without a splash into the sand. A door. The question was, if we entered, he on his side, me on mine, where would it take us? Sideways into galaxies so far apart that we couldn’t possibly hear one another? Forever separated? Or could it be the portal in reverse, rocketing us back to our planet?

“What do we do?” I heard him ask.

He was asking me? Peter was my protector, my staff. He should be telling me, “Here’s what we should do…”

I couldn’t stay here, wherever here was. He couldn’t stay over there. Really, we had no choice. If only I could somehow find his hand, take hold, and run into the doorway out of here. That way, wherever we wound up, at least we’d be together. Our hands, anyway.

“Peter, I think we should try to get out of here right now! Something’s moving in my direction!”

“Huh?”

“Get back to the wall, quick! How far back is it?”

“Probably twenty feet or so.”

“Mine, too. Run to it. When you get there, stop. Move to the left of it, then wait. Tell me when you’re there.”

“Okay.”

I raced to the curtain on my side and stepped to the right of it.

“I’m here,” I heard Peter say.

“Me too. Now, do this. Reach into it. Push your left arm sideways. As far left as you can. Hurry, hurry!”

I glanced over my shoulder, back at the desert. Four distinct bodies, now. Humanoid, but definitely not human. Them! A hundred yards away and sliding along quickly. Ten seconds and they’d be on me. I reached out with my right hand.

Nothing.

“Now what?”

That didn’t accomplish anything.

“Okay, okay.” Panic. “Move your hand!”

I stepped to the shimmering surface on my side as closely as I could without actually penetrating it. I waited, counting the half-seconds. I could make out the creatures’ forms and faces. The same hideous beings as we’d seen too often back home. Thirty yards away, now.

SHOCK!

I saw the fingertips of his hand! I immediately threw my hand in and grabbed his fingers as tightly as I could.

“Don’t let go! Push your arm in all the way! Move it around!”

It moved my grasp along with it.

“Okay, okay. Now, when I count to three, jump in, but whatever you do, don’t let go of my hand!”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Ready?”

“Yes.”

“All right.” I paused. “One…two…three. JUMP!”

I didn’t wait for him to answer. I leapt in.

Jerrick Lied?

 

Would they be right behind us? Swarm over us the second we landed?

Off we flew at Mach zillion again. I couldn’t turn my head to see Peter, but I felt his lovely hand locked tightly in mine, my body plowed so closely to his that our substances merged. My hand was his hand. My leg, his leg. All of me was all of him!

Stretching. Stretching. Nothing ahead of us—US!—only black with lines of light; ribbons of endless shades of colors rippling by. I wanted to scream at Peter, ask him anything, but my mouth wouldn’t open. Wouldn’t obey the commands I gave.

However many minutes, or years, or eternities elapsed, I had no way of comprehending. It felt like mere seconds, though. If, IF we arrived back where we started, maybe everyone would be long gone. Dead years ago. I’d often heard it said that if, or when, mankind finally approached the speed of light and travelled for what to them seemed only a short time, when they returned to their starting point all their friends—everyone on Earth—would have aged by years and years, but they wouldn’t have aged at all.

What would have happened to the Aurora wall that Jerrick said was creeping outward, to eventually cleanse the entire planet? Our friends gone.

Home. We had to be going back to Earth, and not some distant galaxy; some bizarre planet of water, or desert, filled with hungry monsters. We had to be. Wherever we were being taken, I was with him. Great consolation.

We slowed. I was finally able to turn my head toward Peter.

Oh God! His face was silly putty! Long, so freaking long, like someone had grabbed hold of his hair and chin, and pulled his face apart like taffy!

“Peee-ter! I…looo-ve…you!”

“We’re…gooo…ing…HOME!”

We smashed through an ocean of broiling clouds at ten times the speed of sound, slowed quickly until I thought we’d surely be compressed to two dots, and then a second later we landed. Splat. Tumble. Rolling forward head over heels. I lost my hold on his hand in a not a very elegant landing this time. We came to a stop at last, my body half-atop his. Dust whirling everywhere. I heard him grunt and groan, clear as a bell.

The entirety of me tingled. I’m sure the entirety of him ached. I rolled onto the ground, clenched the dry soil with all ten fingers, looked up.

Blue. A wisp of fluffy white far above the top edge of a white wall. So much like good old planet Earth. Invaded planet Earth. The-soon-to-be-dead planet Earth. Or...the-long-dead planet Earth?

“Peter?”

The sound of him spitting dirt. “Yes.” Spit again. “Guess we made it?”

I jumped to my feet, twirled around, felt the air whistle through my fingers. Stopped. I laughed.

Trees. CHAPARRALS! The same forest we walked through an hour, or a thousand years ago.

I knew we didn’t have much time. Not a good time to admire the landscape.

“Get up! Run to the forest and dive in!” I yanked him to his feet by the arm. “They were right behind me!” He stumbled over the dirt,