HAVEN
When the world had finished reorganizing itself around her, Tabitha fell backwards, from a seated position, onto the hard packed dirt of a driveway. There were no walls or ceiling around her, or hellish chair to hold her; no feeling of being surrounded on all sides by miles of earth. There was only the sun-warmed ground beneath her, and a cool, blue sky above.
She laid there for a moment, soaking in the morning sun, as her good eye traced the outline of leaves cutting into the sky. The aching of her left side had reduced to a dull thrum, with the hum in her ear becoming nearly imperceptible. Imperfect, or incomplete, as it was, relief was relief. It was more than enough for her to be able to push the lesser discomforts aside, and, momentarily, leave behind the events that led her there.
As the modicum of comfort washed over her, Tabitha drifted off into a shallow sleep.
The dream that followed her was fragmented and distant. It was only sound and smell and the feeling of movement. Each sensation was familiar to her, individually, though, they had never come together to form this specific memory. A song in her ear, Fortunate Son by CCR, the smell of musk cologne spritzed over strong body odor, and the feeling of speeding down a hilly road in a car. The anticipation of approach was strong, as a two lane road became one, and went from asphalt to dirt, with a hard bump in the road.
When she began to hear someone else’s heartbeat in her ear, Tabitha’s own heart began to flutter.
“You don’t have time for this,” Agent Harris said through the darkness.
Tabitha’s dreaming eyes opened slowly to look for him. Instead of the Crown Vic, she found herself in an unfamiliar Blackwell issued vehicle. It was a newer model SUV, with all the buttons, bells and whistles available to higher level agents. Turning her head as she would have any other time, to find Agent Harris driving, she could not help but flinch, when she found a complete stranger next to her.
“W-what?” she said in a man’s voice.
The man driving looked back at her, pockmarked face mirroring all of the confusion she felt.
Tabitha let out a gasp, and the man’s face shifted to Agent Harris. His left eye was ablaze with iridescence.
“I said, you don’t have time for this!”
Suddenly, her partner’s hand was flying up into Tabitha’s face, to flick her in the eye.
She jolted awake from her pained vision, blue sky still overhead, and her back still in the dirt.
Behind the din of birds and wind, somewhere, off in the distance, Tabitha heard what could only be a car crash. Her heart dropped at the horrible sound of metal and glass crumpling, then leaves rustling and wood cracking. It must have rolled over five times, until it hit the trees lining the road, and came to a stop, she imagined.
As she laid there, frozen, listening for anything else, the faint hint of the vehicle’s horn reached her ears. It was the final death rattle of a totaled car.
When urgency took hold, again, Tabitha tried to sit up, but was stopped by her stiff left arm. She twisted her neck around, to get her right eye on it. Unvarite? she wondered. The strange looking metal, somehow rough to the eye, but smooth to the touch, covered her arm from fingertips to shoulder. Gentle lines of light rippled hypnotically on its surface. It was actively absorbing variant radiation. What the fuck?
Propping herself up with her right arm, she rolled her shoulder around, to look for any sign of a switch to release the apparatus, or a lock to pick or smash. The longer she studied it, the more she thought it looked as if it had been poured, molten, over her arm, and left to solidify. Nothing else explained the seamless surface, or its almost cast-like shape. When she tried to slip her fingers beneath it, just past her shoulder, where it ended, something razor-sharp bit her prying fingers.
Pulling back with a hiss, Tabitha inspected the bloody pinholes in her fingertips, before her attention slipped away to her surroundings.
Despite having only seen it at night, it was immediately obvious to Tabitha where she was. If the old split-rail fence on either side of the driveway was not already a dead giveaway, the rundown sign, facing out toward the road, that read Gander Ranch, more than confirmed it.
She struggled to her feet, legs loose and unsure, beneath the weight of her heavy arm. Her entire body ached, but it felt like fire beneath the unvarite shell. Anytime she moved the wrong way, there was red hot glass shifting, and clawing at her skin, and scraping at the bones of her forearm. She tried her best to stretch off the worst of it. At the limits of her movement, where needles were reaching across her shoulder to pluck at her spine, she gritted her teeth, and logged it in her mind.
You are fucked up, right now, Tabitha told herself, letting out an exasperated sigh. But you’ve gotta move. There was no doubt in her mind that Blackwell was already on their way. Variant? Looking at her arm, covered in the shimmering black unvarite, she ran her hand along the rough looking metal, as she tried to understand what could have happened. What did he mean by paradox?
Despite how it looked, the strange material was smooth to the touch, and warm against her fingers. Her pricked fingertips light smudges of blood, which she then watched evaporate away. Touching the patch of it covering her eye, secured over a bandage, by little more than a leather strip, she hesitated at the thought of lifting it. When she tried to focus on the darkness behind it, a bolt of iridescent light flashed through her vision. With each flash, came a jab of pain that made her think twice about bothering it. It’s gone, she ruminated, gritting her teeth. Just like your hair. Her hand avoided the top of her head. She did not need to confirm that, she could feel it. Then her mother’s voice echoed coldly in her mind. You can mourn what you have lost, when there is time for it.
Tabitha’s eye ran down the road leading to the driveway, until it reached a sharp turn. Her eye bounced around her surroundings, while she considered her options.
The crash did not sound far, but it was an unknown. Most likely Blackwell, she thought. And the ranch house down the driveway looked no less intimidating in the day, its roof visible above the treeline, in all its sundered glory. That way was less of an unknown, but no less dubious, in her mind. As her eye followed the driveway, her memory traced its way back to the person-shaped void in the night.
Before she could be pulled back into it, Tabitha turned around, and set off toward the crash.
The walk to the curve in the road was slow going. She was barefoot, and the road was a minefield of rocks. The first time her heel found one, jutting out of the dirt, in wait, the pain shot up her leg, and through her entire side. After that, her eye carefully danced ahead of her, picking out the safest path for her to take.
When she rounded the sharp curve the road had disappeared behind, Tabitha could see debris and upturned dirt ahead. There was no sign of the vehicle responsible. Whatever happened had caused it to go completely off the road, and vanish somewhere within the dense treeline. Approaching the disturbed section of road, it became clear to her just how many times it had flipped.
Beginning as a skid, the tire tracks quickly turned sideways, then disappeared, as it began flipping. From there, it became a series of alternating divots in the ground. They were long and wide where the roof struck, then short and wide where the tires dug in. Over and over, the pattern repeated, at least six times, before it finally struck the woods.
Where the road’s shoulder ended, a dense wall of trees began. Each had grown in thin, but so closely to the plant next to it, that they covered the soft incline with a wall that would be impassable on foot. In a tumbling SUV, however, someone could punch clean through, and continue rolling, until they came to a stop in the clearing below. That was what the path of folded trees in front of her told her, as she stood over the scene.
At the end of the trail of damage, her eye found the SUV responsible, flipped upside down on its crumpled roof. The doors on both sides were open, answering the question of if anyone survived. Tabitha immediately began scanning the area, as best as she could, for any sign of them.
From where she was standing, she saw no one near the SUV. She spun around, and eyed the road. Seeing no one, again, she continued to turn away from the crash. On the other side of the road, see could see through the thinner line of trees to a piece of Gander Ranch. There was no one to be found in its fields.
As she stood there, back to the hole cut by the rolling SUV, Tabitha felt a familiar hum begin to build in her left eardrum. The ring? She looked down at the unvarite cast, and finally it dawned on her. The memory of her arm shattering against the iridescent light, as she tried to absorb it, returned. It wasn’t my arm that shattered, she thought. It was the ring.
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Distracted by her revelation, and the stinging, annoying pain trickling up her arm, Tabitha could not feel the ground begin to shake. The sound thrumming through her head kept her from noticing the uncracking of the trees, as the SUV rolled back up the hill. Faster and faster, it reversed through its fall, undoing all the damage it had done. It was only when it reached the shoulder, and the windshield unshattered, that her head snapped around to see it coming.
“Wha—”
It was only by sheer, unadulterated luck, that Tabitha’s first instinct was to throw herself to the left. She had just enough time to clear the front end of the SUV, as its tires slammed back into the dirt road, and the vehicle continued through its rewound crash. Landing hard on her ruined side, a lightning bolt of agony knocked the breath out of her.
“Fuuuu—,” she groaned, gasping for air, and writhing through it.
The SUV came to a sudden stop, right where it began its flip, Fortunate Son still playing.
“Damn it, Rich,” a man said from behind her. His voice was oozing frustration, as he approached. “I told you that wouldn’t work.”
“Pfff! Come on!” The other voice, a thick Boston accent, erring on the edge of petulant, came from ahead of her. “I gotta do something sometime, man!”
A man dressed in agent’s attire, except for a contrasting white sweater replacing his dress shirt, stood a few yards from Tabitha. His face was covered in recognizable pockmarks.
“I’m tired of this support shit,” he whined. “I don’t ever get to do anything with this thing.” His hand was wrapped around a small camcorder, it’s lens pointed at the scene. “We had to get it out of there, anyway, didn’t we?”
“Gettin’ shit done right comes first, though,” the other agent said, from behind her. He sounded more eager than irritated. “And you just wanna play games!”
“Fine,” the pockmarked agent said, deflating, “do it yourself.” Stuffing his free hand in his jacket, he nodded at his partner in sour acceptance of it. From his other hand, there was a beep as the camcorder started recording. “Batter’s up, I guess.”
Painful confusion raked across Tabitha’s brain, pulling her head around to roll over and see the second agent. He was closing in too quickly for her to scramble away.
His swing came fast, practiced, making the baseball bat whistle as it cut through the cologne choked air.
Tabitha just barely managed to pull her shoulder up toward her head, in an awkward attempt to roll away from the strike. As he had swung too fast to adjust, the bat struck where her head once was, connecting with the rigid unvarite encasing her upper arm.
With a reverberating TIIIING, the bat ricocheted off the rigid, anomalous metal, with enough force to send the agent’s arms flying up into the air, in order to maintain his grip on it. “Gah-god—Fuckin’ hell!” He stepped back, hands barely able to contain the baseball bat, as the hit continued to echo through the wood. “Fuckin’ what?!”
While the unvarite absorbed the blow, something else reached into her arm, to chitter and chatter up into her mind, like glass wind chimes.
Behind it, the sound of a cheering baseball stadium rose, then quickly slid into booing.
The stadium died away, as reality returned harshly to Tabitha, with what felt like hot pokers being plunged into her forearm. Inside the unvarite shell, the ring sang to her. It was a chorus of pain rising up into her eye.
The agony pushed her to action.
Rolling her encased shoulder with a heavy shrug, Tabitha swung her left arm over, to drag her right arm up from under her. She propped herself up, on three of all fours, to get her legs under her. Pushing off the ground, she carried her momentum through a spin, and then stood up. She followed through the clumsy maneuver with a swing of her laden arm, stumbling toward the agent, and bringing the unvarite cast across the man’s jaw, like a bat, before he could get his own between them.
The agent’s face made a sickening crunch, as it gave way, the hit knocking him out cold, where he stood. Following inertia, he slumped over onto the ground, with a thud and clank of his weapon.
“Sh-shit!” The agent behind her began to panic. “Whatinthesh—what the fuck?!”
Tabitha spun on her heel to face him. He was scrambling for the camera.
Rewind? It crossed her mind just in time to hear it beep that poked her in the eye.
The agent pulled the variant object out, holding it between them, with wide-eyed panic in his eyes.
As she watched him slide his finger over the REWIND button, Tabitha got the feeling the look on his face could only speak to his uncertainty of what was about to happen.
The beep came too fast, and its consequences faster.
Up from the ground, like a puppet, the KO’d agent rewound back to where he was standing, before he was hit. In relatively the same spot her attack left her in, the batter pushed Tabitha forward on his return to position. She just barely stopped herself from falling face first into the road, when the bat-wielding agent continued to the spot he was in.
This time, he bowled her over completely.
To avoid eating dirt, Tabitha rolled into a somersault, while he kept rewinding, entangling himself with her, until he finally came to a stop.
From her back, Tabitha looked up at the agent now facing away from her. Their legs half-entwined, the realization of what was happening, as he tripped over her, had not yet caught up to him.
Pulling her legs up toward her chest, Tabitha drove her feet into the back of the batter’s knees, assisting his hard fall backwards, into her guard. Once he landed, she ensnared him with her legs, wrapping one across his belly, and then locking it, like a bar, into the crux of the other. The air escaped him as a sharp groan when she squeezed.
“What in the fuck?” he screamed in confusion. Thrashing around, he called out to his partner. “H-heeey! What the fuck, Greg?! What happened?!”
Tabitha’s free arm slid under his chin, wrapping around his neck, as she tucked her head behind his, to stop his flailing from reaching her face. He clawed at her snake of an arm, trying to choke out a plea.
There was another beep from the camcorder. The sound struck her eye, like a bullet.
Now, the other agent was covering the distance fast, his footsteps getting closer by the millisecond.
Just before he could reach them, Tabitha closed her eyes, and squeezed as tightly as she could.
“Haven,” she whispered into the back of the agent’s neck.
Suddenly, the approaching footsteps vanished, and the overgrown canopy of the road shifted to the open sky at the entrance of Gander Ranch.
Tabitha fell back into the hard-packed dirt driveway, with the two hundred pound agent falling on top of her, again. Despite how much everything hurt, she adjusted, and maintained her hold on his neck. Try as he might, to pry her arm off, or hit her in the face, the fight quickly slipped away from him, with his consciousness in tow. When his arms slumped to the side, she held just a little longer. 1…2…3…4…5…, she counted to herself, before pushing him off her.
Tabitha got her legs under her, again, just in time to watch the agent rewind through the motions of being choked, sans choker. It was like watching a horrific marionette play out. Lifted by invisible strings, through their fall onto the driveway, he suddenly vanished.
Exhausted, and breathing heavily, Tabitha released her exasperation. “Fuck!”
There was no time, though, to stand there and dwell. The agents would regroup quickly. They would either come after her themselves, to even the score, or call in backup. Either way, Tabitha stood no chance in the open.
Pushed past her hesitation, she began limping up the driveway, toward the ruined house of Gander Ranch. Every so often, she would stop to look behind her, and listen for the approaching SUV. If not the same two agents, then, surely, she would soon feel a Chinook, filled to the brim with a containment team, breathing down her neck. The feeling of grim anticipation was made all the worse by the mounting signs that a remediation team had already been sent through to clean up. There were no longer bodies, human or bovine alike, strewn about. And the horrid smell was gone.
Only the department’s signature scent of ozone, with a hint of lemon, lingered in the air.
At the end of the driveway, Tabitha found the house remained in its same sorry state. In the daylight, it looked even worse. From top to bottom, it was mangled and worn. Bits and pieces of the roof were still scattered around the yard. The hole in it was still yawning at the sky. If it was a trap, it was not a welcoming one. Even as exposed as she was, she still hesitated to climb the stairs to the front door.
Up the stairs, she saw that the door was not just still open, it was ripped from the hinges, and thrown on the floor inside. The square middle segment, where the Cullers had scrawled their brand, was now missing, having been removed hastily by an axe. With nothing to impede the wind, leaves had blown in to join the thick splinters of wood scattered throughout the foyer.
Hesitating in the doorway, she eyed the shadows, where none of the outside light reached. Nothing about the deep spots of darkness, contrasting the slivers of light entering the house, seemed right. Tabitha held her breath, and gave the dark entity a chance to coalesce. The count felt necessary, but it was quick, so she could push through her fear. 1, 2, 3, 4, she counted to herself, and on the 5 she stepped into the house.
Tabitha carried herself across the threshold, aching every step of the way into the foyer. Despite how run down it was, the place was enormous. She sighed at the thought of how much ground she would have to cover, if she wanted to figure out a way to use the home to her advantage. If she could hold out until nightfall, and somehow avoid a full blown tactical team, she thought an escape into the woods seemed plausible.
Still eyeing every dim corner for living voids, or a leftover cultist, Tabitha made her way slowly through each room of the first floor. She found nothing but empty cans and containers of food, collecting dust with the clothes and bedding strewn about. It looked like fifty people, not five, once lived there.
Upstairs, past the painstaking climb, Tabitha felt like she could faint. The throbbing in her arm had not been so bad, but now, mixed with hunger, each pang carried into the next, until it began to make her nauseous. With the adrenaline and whatever cocktail Blackwell gave her wearing off, the full breadth of her injuries finally found her.
The warm glinting in her bandaged eye matched her heart rate, with a pinprick of pain accompanying each beat. Pulsing heat carried down into her arm, and up from it, meeting somewhere in the middle, only to double, and carry on tormenting her.
Hoping she would find somewhere to sit, or at the very least, stumble into a banquet and a bar, she pushed through the first door at the top of the stairs. Unlike the rest of the house, the office was nice and warm, the giant hole in its ceiling allowing the falling sun to pour in.
So many points of entry, she thought, grimacing at the image of Blackwell breaching the room from the door, three windows, and ceiling-hole. But the thought of rest had already crossed her mind, creating the crack in her armor for exhaustion to exploit. The floor was dirty, but so was she. At least the carpet was cushioned. A hole in the roof might mean cold air in the night, but it would be fresh air. At the moment, the warm beam of sunlight pressing up against the wall, as it made its daily arc through the room, looked too cozy to pass up. Even ruined, as it all most certainly was, these were five star amenities to her crumbling body.
Suddenly, all the places someone could enter the room were ways she could escape from, when they came for her. The justification expounded upon itself, as she crumpled into the circle of light, and drifted off to sleep. So many ways to exit.
