Chasing the Moon

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Every apartment came with a price. West lived in Number One and was the keeper of the building’s many secrets. He was responsible not just for keeping the building happy but for safeguarding reality from all manner of bizarre, unknowable threats. Very few of these threats were in the destroy-the-world category. That would’ve been far too simple.

Reality was a flexible thing, easily bent, but not easily broken. It had its own ways of protecting itself from such ordinary threats as apocalypse. But that every day the human race woke up to discover the dinosaurs were still extinct, the speed of light hadn’t slowed to fifteen miles per hour, and the continents were indeed where they had left them when they went to sleep was due, in some small way, to an obscure, hairy landlord who never actually set foot in the universe he kept running properly.

If Vom was destruction incarnate, and Smorgaz was creation personified, then West was order in its ultimate obsessivecompulsive form. It wasn’t an easy job. He wasn’t perfect. He still hadn’t found the time to nail down the confusing jumble that humans foolishly labeled quantum physics. And once, when he’d eaten a bad hot dog and been sick in bed for a week, the result had been the ludicrousness of superstring theory. A few extra dimensions leaked through here and there at the wrong times, and the human race just couldn’t let it go.

He’d never found the time to fix the error. And it’d probably work out fine in the end. Like when he’d accidentally let spacetime become curved. At first it’d bugged him, but now he hardly noticed. And the humans seemed to get a kick out of it.

Someone knocked on West’s door. He was surprised. There was no rent, beyond the obligations the apartments gatheir occupants, and nothing ever broke. The tenants rarely had anything to do with one another. Except for the pair from Number Three. They baked pies and distributed them on a schedule. He was due for a boysenberry sometime in the next week, if he remembered properly.

It was Number Five.

“Hi.” Diana held up a bag. “I got this for you. It’s a hamburger.” She hesitated. “You do eat hamburgers, right?”

Vom piped up from behind her. “If he doesn’t want it, I’ll take it.”

“I eat hamburgers,” said West. “Don’t suppose you brought a shake too, Number Five?”

“Had one, but someone got to it.”

“If it’s any consolation,” said Vom, “it was a bit watery.”

West took the burger. “Thanks, Number Five.”

He started to close the door, but Diana asked, “Can I talk to you for a second?”

“I can’t get you out of the apartment,” he said.

“I wasn’t going to ask that. I kind of assumed it. No, I wanted to know about Chuck.”

“Who?”

“The guy in Apartment Two. The one with the… dog.”

“Number Two? What about him?”

“What’s his deal?”

“He lives in Apartment Two.”

He unwrapped the burger, took a bite. She waited for him to finish chewing, but he was a painfully slow chewer. And an even slower swallower. He scratched his beard. His furry eyebrows arched.

“S’good.”

“You don’t find there’s too much mayo?” asked Vom. “I thought they overdid the mayo.”

“Is that why you only ate five on the ride here?” asked Smorgaz.

“Guys, could you do me a favor and go back to the apartment?”

Grumbling, the monsters walked away.

“Chuck… Number Two, how dangerous is that dog?” she asked.

West took another bite, chewed, and swallowed in the time it would take a normal person to eat the whole burger.

She sighed.

“I’m just worried about Chuck.”

His eyes narrowed.

“Chuck. Number Two.”

“Uh-hum,” said West neutrally.

“Is there some way to make friends with it?” she asked. “The dog outside of Apartment Two? If I gave it a burger, would it let Chuck out more often?”

“Hmm?”

“Number Two, would the dog let him out more often if he fed it something?”

West’s already sallow flesh paled. “Don’t feed it. Whatever you do, Number Five, don’t do that.”

“Because…?”

“Because it would be a bad, bad thing to do.”

“Bad how?”

West’s brow wrinkled. “You ask a lot of questions, Number Five.”

“How am I supposed to understand any of this if I don’t?”

“There are things the human mind was never meant to comprehend. And things the inhuman mind can never comprehend. Incomprehensible things.”

She nodded. “Uh-huh. Yes, that’s very clear. Thank you.”

The building trembled violently, nearly knocking both of them off their feet.

“What was that?”

“Bugs,” said West. “One tremor is nothing to worry about.”

A second quake rattled the building.

“Two is acceptable. Only pressing if it’s—”

A third shudder, less powerful but three times as long, shook the walls.

“Ah, damn. It’s always something.”

He walked past Diana and opened the front door. The city was gone. A glowing green wasteland stood in its place. A mosquito the size of a fighter jet soared overhead, kicking up radioactive dust.

West shut the door and trundled into his apartment. He found his old green toolbox. Diana stood in the doorway, blocking his progress.

“What happened?” she asked.

“World changed,” he replied. “It happens. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to fix the boiler.”

She stepped aside, but she followed him down the hall.

“That’s how it ends?”

“It didn’t end,” he said. “It changed. End implies it’s over, but it’s just different than it was. But it’s always different than it was. Just usually not so obvious about it. Or you’re not in a position to notice. The only reason you noticed this time was because you were in here when it happened. Otherwise, you’d have changed along with it.

“But just like that?” said Diana. “One second it’s there, the next it’s all changed?”

He took note of her voice, tinged with concern, but not overwhelmed with confusion. He smiled to himself. As a general rule, he didn’t get to know many of the tenants. The apartments consumed most souls within a few days. Some lasted longer. But only a rare few had the right combination of curiosity, common sense, and temperament to last a year.

He jammed a key in the lock and wrestled with it for several seconds. He gave the door a few kicks and rammed his shoulder into it.

“Are you sure you unlocked it?” she asked.

“Oh, it’s unlocked.” He took a moment to catch his breath. “The Hive must’ve blocked it.”

“What’s the Hive?”

He gestured toward the door, letting her know she should help him. Together they put all their weight against the door and pushed.

“Tomorrow a mutagenic radiation will cause all insects on the planet to grow to enormous size. Within a year they’ll devour all noninsect life on Earth. Within ninety years they’ll establish an interplanetary colony that will cover half the Milky Way galaxy. I call it the Hive. Although it probably calls itself something different. Or maybe they don’t even bother with words. They might not even have language. Never tried to have a conversation with the damned things.”

The door opened a few inches. A sticky substance oozed through the cracks.

“Don’t let the mucus get in your eyes unless you want to see how you die,” he warned.

With a bit more work they managed to open the door halfway, which was enough for West to squeeze through. He descended a few steps, stopped, and spoke without looking back.

“Are you coming, Number Five?”

She poked her head into the dim stairway. “Is it dangerous?”

“Worst that can happen to you is you die.”

“Oh, is that all?”

From most people this would’ve been sarcastic, but Diana understood, just as West did, that there were far worse things than death in this universe.

Diana followed him into the dark. He dug a claw hammer out of his toolbox and handed it to her. “You’ll want this. Your powers won’t work down here.”

“If you know it’s going to happen, can’t you stop it before it happens?”

“Doesn’t work that way.”

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“Because the radiation always hits tomorrow. If we succeed in fixing the problem, then it will just hit the day after tomorrow. And if we stop that—”

“Got it.”

“Near as I can figure it, the Hive functions on a reversed temporal axis. Not quite a hundred and eighty degrees from what all other life on Earth uses. Maybe about one hundred and seventy-three degrees. Maybe one hundred and seventy-four.”

They plumbed deeper into the depths. At the bottom of the stairs a faint yellow glow emanated from the goo-coated walls.

“The Hive’s future pushes against our past. If the Hive succeeds in pushing itself forward, or backward if that’s easier to comprehend, it’ll eventually rewrite all of history, erasing all of human civilization in the process.”

“That sucks.”

“Not really. Already happened three times before. Four, if you count the fall of the Neanderthals. And really, you should, because they were a fine primate civilization in many ways superior to humanity. The Neanderthals invented the telegraph a full week before Homo sapiens. And they made a hell of a chicken sandwich.”

“So if it’s the future and we can’t stop it, then what are we doing down here?”

“Just because it’s the future that doesn’t mean it happens tomorrow. The Hive pushes against our past. And our past pushes against the future that is the Hive’s past. It’s entirely possible for the future of the Hive to always be tomorrow, to always be out there.” He waved his pipe wrench in a vague manner, as if pointing toward a distant horizon. “Somewhere else, but never quite here.”

“Ah,” she said. “Makes sense.”

“Does it?”

“It’s like the future, but not necessarily the future that ever comes.”

“No, it’s nothing like that, but never mind. If it’s an explanation that works for you, we’ll leave it at that. Mostly I make this shit up as I go along, so it’s not like I understand any of it either. Theories and explanations are just tools to be used and discarded as needed in this job, Number Five.”

A sac of eggs burst open, and puppy-sized maggots squirmed down the wall.

“Don’t mind those,” said West. “They’re grown for food, harmless.”

A trio of four-foot-tall ants appeared and started collecting the maggots, placing them in baskets.

“Drones,” said West. “Harmless too.”

“So how do we keep the insect apocalypse at bay for another day?” she asked.

“We fix the boiler.”

As they went deeper the basement became hardened slime catacombs and worker drones. After a few minutes every trace of the man-made world vanished.

He stopped at an intersection of eight tunnels.

“Been a while since I’ve seen it this bad.” He opened his toolbox and pulled out a map. “Mmm-hmm. According to this, the boiler is either that way or that way.”

“It doesn’t know?”

“At the point where two histories meet, certainty is replaced by probability.” He folded the map. “I’ll go this way. You go that way. One of us is bound to find it.”

Before she could argue he was already halfway down his chosen corridor, vanishing in the sickly glow of the nest.

“Wait! If I find the boiler, how do I fix it?” she called out.

“Use your hammer!” he shouted back. His voice echoed, ringing against the walls for several long seconds. Then there was only silence, and she was alone in the murky luminescence.

She wondered why she wasn’t terrified, but all of this was becoming too ordinary. She couldn’t remember which tunnel West had told her to take. Rather than think too much about it, she just picked one at random.

She walked leisurely through the nest. She ignored the larvae and drones, and they paid her the same courtesy. Once flies the size of small birds buzzed her. One landed on her shoulder and stayed there like a hairy, clicking parrot. She tried shooing it away. It kept returning, and after a while she gave up and let it perch. Whenever she came to a junction she’d turn in a random direction.

She was lost. She imagined herself forever wandering through a future that never happened. It more irritated than frightened her. She had far too many dooms, many worse than this, hanging over her head to be bothered by it.

Diana entered an alcove. Aside from the bioluminescent walls, a single lightbulb dangled from a cord in the ceiling. Several crates sat stacked to one side. A rusty boiler stood in the center of the room.

It couldn’t be this easy, she thought.

A fat red beetle the size of a compact car lumbered into the chamber. Diana pressed against the wall into one of the gray pools of twilight. The beetle wheezed with each breath. It scanned the room, its hundred of glowing green eyes sweeping from side to side. She thought for sure it would see her, but she resisted the urge to run for it. Even if she escaped, she doubted she’d find the boiler again. And if she was going to get eaten by something lurking in this nest, then she figured the beetle would finish her off quickly. Only a bite or two at most.

The creature retched, spitting up an arm, a pipe wrench, and a toolbox.

“Damn,” she muttered.

The beetle snorted. It tilted its head to one side. She held her breath, remained very still, and mulled over her choices.

West was dead. Thleft her as the only one capable of fixing this problem, and she had to fix it. Otherwise the bugs from the future would destroy the past, and even if that didn’t end up erasing her because she lived in an apartment building that didn’t play fair with the space-time continuum, she didn’t think she wanted to live in a world of giant mutant bugs. Her world was strange enough already.

Fixing the boiler would fix the future. She didn’t know how to fix a boiler, but she might be able to figure it out if she didn’t have to contend with the beetle in the room too. Her only weapon was an old claw hammer. Unless it was magical, it wasn’t going to do much against the creature.

She tightened her grip. It didn’t feel magical.

The fly on her shoulder made a loud buzz. The beetle swiveled in her direction.

Diana stepped out of the shadows. She didn’t know why. The best justification she could arrive at was that if she was going to die anyway, she might as well go down swinging. If there was a Valhalla, she’d be dining with the Vikings tonight with one hell of a story to tell.

She remained calm. Where once a giant bug would’ve shocked her, now it was just another oddity that wanted to eat her. Her heart beat faster. Her muscles tensed. She tapped into a part of herself that could view this from a distance, as if she were playing a survival horror video game in which she had only one shot at this level.

The creature didn’t advance. It just stood there, studying her. She wondered if it was impressed by her bravado or confused by her stupidity. She didn’t look it in the eyes. It had so many that that would’ve been impossible. She watched its legs, its body language, trying to be ready for when it tried something.

Diana took one step to her left. The beetle pivoted. Its raspy wheeze quickened.

Speaking softly, she held the hammer in both hands and leveled it at her opponent. “Make your move, big guy.”

But the monster just stood there.

“What are you waiting for?” she growled through clenched teeth. “Come on, you stupid bug. Come on!”

The beetle took a step back, and its wheezing ceased. She’d scared it.

It was ludicrous, but just for a moment she’d managed to intimidate the damn thing.

Maybe it was only surprised. When you were as big as a car you probably weren’t used to being yelled at by little women with littler hammers.

The beetle moved toward her. She shouted. It backed away with a startled shriek.

Diana drew in a deep breath, then unleashed the loudest roar she could muster. It echoed through the chamber, and even she was surprised by it. The beetle turned and dashed away, slamming into a wall with enough force to stagger itself. She stamped her feet, jumping up and down, shrieking. The creature regained its senses and bolted down a tunnel.

She smiled at the fly still perched on her shoulder. “What a wimp.”

She checked the boiler.

“Now how the hell do we fix this thing?”

The fly hopped off her shoulder and walked in small circles on the rusted boiler.

She raised her hammer. “When in doubt…”

She struck the boiler, sounding a peculiar gong that literally rattled the nest. The quake shook dust off the walls. She wasn’t sure if it was a good thing or a bad thing, but it was something.

She hit it again with the same results. This time the noisy buzzing warbles of alien crickets also sounded. Several drones entered the chamber. They didn’t do anything other than watch her and make clicking noises to each other. She took this as a positive sign.

“Sorry, fellas. It’s nothing personal.”

Diana struck the boiler several more times. Each blow sent shock waves through the nest and drew the attention of more and more of the Hive. Three of the giant beetles arrived too, but none made a move to stop her. She kept her guard up, expecting a rush any moment. It never came. And after a few minutes of smacking the boiler, everything went back to normal.

It was a bit anticlimactic, actually. She wasn’t even sure when the change happened. She just looked up and noticed that the nest and all the bugs were gone, that she was back in the ordinary basement.

The part of her that had seen too many horror movies knew that this was the fake-out, the false moment of triumph. When the monster jumped from the shadows, she’d deal with it. Diana climbed the stairs out of the basement. There was no bug behind the door. And when she checked the world beyond the front door, everything was normal. As normal as she could expect.

“Good job, Number Five.”

She turned. West stood in the doorway of his apartment, eating a hamburger. She was unsurprised to see him alive.

“Thought you’d gotten eaten,” she said. “I saw your arm, your toolbox.”

“Lot of arms out there. Lot of toolboxes,” he replied. “But if you didn’t see me get eaten, you didn’t really see anything, didja?”

“No, I guess I didn’t.”

West offered a crisp salute before retreating to his apartment, and Diana, accustomed to such things, didn’t give the incident another thought. Except to be glad that the world outside her building wasn’t a hellish landscape of mutant insects. Just the one she knew, with a healthy dose of cosmic monsters and indescribable horrors sprinkled here and there.

It wasn’t much, but she’d take what she could get.