New And Bitter

This week's story, dear reader, concerns a phone call on your off day. You know the ones, right?

"There's something wrong. And you need to get here quick."

We've all been there. I know I have, all too often. The kind of call where you spend the drive in half wondering what they've managed to screw up now.

And the other half... that half of the drive you just hope that nobody got hurt.

Which is precisely where Lora finds herself on this Saturday morning, dear reader. Wondering, worrying, and tasting something...

New And Bitter by M. K. Dreysen

I should have been down at the beach. I could have been out on one of the nature trails, chasing birds and avoiding mosquitoes.

I wanted to be anywhere but staring down the maw of something from another world.

Let me back up, to a little before the hot drool burning its way through my pants leg, and the claws and the teeth that went with it.

"Lora, hey, it's Yuri, can you come in? As soon as possible?"

I'd answered the phone more by accident than anything. I couldn't see the phone well enough to know who it was, other than that it was someone in my contacts list. No glasses yet.

I dumped the complaining tomcat off my chest. "Yeah, Yuri, I guess I can get there. What's up?"

"Just hurry. I'm in the lab." And then the twinkle of the broken connection.

If he was in that kind of hurry, on my day off Yuri could put up with my unwashed stink. I did brush my teeth while the coffee pot did its thing, though. I have some standards, even at five on a Saturday morning.

No other to say goodbye to, not once I fed the squalling beast who sheds on my pillow all day while I'm gone. But that's a different story.

And at least the traffic headed into the center was nonexistent. Small favors, with only me and the boating types headed down Nasa 1. The gate guards shook their heads at me but at least they smiled doing it.

"Ok, Yuri, what's up?" The walk from the parking lot had had its charms, but the YMCA style hallways and the lab called stronger. Same as they always do.

Short and rounding toward retirement waved me in to his bench.

Or, more properly, toward the Ring. "It, well, look promise me you won't call the IG?"

"Yuri..."

"Promise, please?"

"Promise? Sonofabitch, you promised you wouldn't turn the damned thing on!"

He had. He'd sat there in front of me and the director and God and everybody and said that he would only test the circuitry. "And that I will follow the protocols and not power the Ring up."

I like "Ring" better than "Wormhole". But either way, the math said we shouldn't have been able to power it up. Not all the way, anyway.

Yuri's not a mathematical type. He is, however, the type who'd signed acceptance on a pony nuke one of the in-town university's had wanted to move along. Some barely less than usable old core they'd accepted back in the Cold War days and now didn't want to acknowledge existence of. Yay, us.

"Lora, you've gotta see it."

Well, since I was here and all. I mean, I could take a few hours, before pulling the switch I mean. Stability readings, power loads.

The color of the other side of the universe. That's what I'd aimed for, anyway. Not expecting in a million years to ever physically open it. Just, you know, cycle it enough to measure something.

Not that I knew where it went, mind. Still. I grabbed goggles and a couple of home-built meters and almost ran for the Ring's little room at the back of the lab.

Yuri giggled at me. He knew, the sonofabitch, but he'd been there just as long as I had, sketched and wrote out parts lists while I worked numbers.

The first couple hours went just as I'd have hoped. The Ring, all the other days of existence until this one a one meter ring of titanium and nickel alloys, shimmered with a sheet of purple... distance, I thought. But I didn't linger over the view.

Too many other readings to take. It wasn't until I'd wrapped that up, and made sure the computers had recorded everything in their connections properly, that I turned back to the Ring opening for one last look.

The colors had gotten a little more active. "Yuri, it's time to shut it down."

"I know I know," he muttered, one hand on the big switch.

Yeah, I'd made it big and naughty, like I expected the Doctor and Igor to have in their lab. It's not all that often you get to be twelve again.

That's when the claw appeared. I watched it. Well, it's more like I noticed it, just off center of the top of the Ring. "Yuri, turn it off. Now!"

More of whatever the claw was attached to started coming through. Dark, deep browns and blacks and a shimmering green, the claw tips themselves almost the same hard purple as the Ring had been.

I reached out, waving slapping at Yuri. Only he wasn't there.

I wanted to turn and start screaming at him. Except I needed to keep my eyes on the new addition making its way from wherever to here.

While I eased my way over to the switch.

Its head came through when I'd made my way about halfway there. Close enough for that demon in the back of my brain, the little idiot that always suggests the best worst ideas, to giggle in anticipation that I'd make it before the critter did.

Only its arm came for me. It blurred, the swirl of colors decorating it blurring with it, masking its movement somehow. The creature grabbed my ankle and yanked.

"Oh fuck." I didn't have time for anything other than the harsh wonderful poetry of the good words. And then I got busy kicking and punching and scratching.

And that's where the drool that burned through my pants came from. "Yuri, goddamnit, where the hell are you?"

Not expecting a response, I went back to whatever violence I could manage.

The creature was still only head and one arm and shoulder through. At least it was, so far, too big and too busy trying to drag me away for teatime to try and squeeze all the way past the Ring itself.

The Ring's colors mingled with it, somehow, the flashes of powered colors dragging along on its skin, or maybe birthing it. It was pure and muscled and hard. I scraped my fingers across something like familiar skin, maybe elephant or rhino hide thick.

It lived and it sweated and its sweat burned almost as painfully as the drool. I aimed my kicks, from the other leg, for the forehead I finally distinguished, above the drool and the teeth and framed between some kind of horns.

It hissed and grunted, a low rumble of noise, then tried to jerk its head away but the Ring and its greed for me kept it locked in. So I hammered away.

Neither of us relented. Whatever the creature's hunger, I wasn't going without a fight. Apparently it wasn't giving up without one. So there we were.

Until Yuri finally called up his courage and threw the switch back open.

The colored wall of lightning rose back up, a screen of space-time unwinding to the vacuum, leaving once again a clean look at the back wall through the Ring.

And the creature's arm. Well, hand at least, just above the elbow. It had, somehow faster than thought, let go of me and tried to make it back through.

It had almost made it. Almost.

"I don't think it's going to like you very much," Yuri muttered.

"Mutual."

****

I didn't report it. I did, however, move Yuri's baby nuke somewhere else, nice and distant and where he doesn't know of.

Just like he did with the switch. Gaudy and Universal Pictures as the switch looks, underneath is a circuit. A very carefully built and expensive circuit that I can't reproduce without a serious amount of work and money I don't currently have available.

So we've got ourselves protected from ourselves, Yuri and I.

And we've got a claw buried under salt in the back cabinet.