Free Pandora's Gun by James van Pelt

function. She touched it. Peter heard the click in the handle, then she pointed toward the pitcher’s mound, through the chain-link fence, and pulled the trigger a second time.
    Peter held his breath. In the distance, he heard a helicopter, and closer, behind him, beyond the empty parking lot, a car door slammed, but nothing else happened. He half expected a plague of locust to materialize, or the mud to turn to lava. Instead, a September fly buzzed by Peter’s head before landing on the rusty fence.
    Christy partly lowered the gun and turned toward Peter.
    Don’t point the . . .” Peter started to say.
    “. . . gun at me,” he finished. Christy and Dante leaned over him, concern on their faces.
    “You dropped like a sack of wheat, buddy. Lucky you didn’t smack your head.”
    “Are you okay?” said Christy. “I didn’t let go of the trigger. I thought I’d killed you.”
    “What happened?” Peter shook his head. His ears were ringing a little bit, and when he tried to sit up, his head swam. He lay back down to let his balance settle. “Did I pass out?”
    Dante sat on the bench above Peter’s head. “Passed out or went to sleep. You were snoring.”
    “How long?”
    Christy checked her phone. “Two minutes. I got pictures. Want to see?” Peter nodded without thinking of repercussions.
    He looked peaceful in the picture, but stupid. Mud covered the dugout’s floor, and he’d been laying in it. He tried to sit up again, this time without problem. “I’d write ‘sleep ray’ for that icon. I wonder about its range.”
    Dante said, “If we smuggled the gun into class, we could put the teacher to sleep. Anytime you were bored, you zonked the teacher, and then did whatever you wanted. The teacher wakes up, you zap her again.”
    Peter pulled himself up onto the bench. The wooziness was almost gone. He took the gun from Christy, who was saying, “You know what this reminds me of? The flashy thingy from Men in Black , except it does a lot more. Do you think there’s a flashy thingy app? I always thought that would be a good capability.”
    “My turn,” Peter said. The next icon looked like two stick-figure birds, one above the other beside a left-facing letter “C.” With an exaggerated motion, he aimed the gun away from Dante and Christy. “Remember,” he said, “alien guns don’t kill people; people kill people. Safety first.” The gun clicked. A message in the same script as the icons appeared. “I can’t read gibberish. Here goes.”
    For a second, the gun pulled at his hands. He started to speak, then the air in front of the pitching mound swirled, not like a whirlwind, though. Peter stepped back, still pointing the gun. In a ten-foot high circle, a disk on edge, reality smeared as if what he could see in that circle wasn’t the baseball field, but a picture of the field in wet paint. The pitcher’s mound, the weeds, the trees at the field’s edge, ran together as if the painter dragged his fingers through the image around and around.
    “What is that?” said Christy. She stepped closer to Dante. Put her hand on his back.
    The motion accelerated until it moved too fast to see, turning the image into a solid gray disk.
    Then the gray coalesced, resolved itself into a landscape, a surreal hole that started on the weedy infield and ended in another world, a darker one. Mesmerized, Peter walked toward it, aware that Christy and Dante followed.
    Dante said, “It’s a doorway.”
    Standing at the edge, Peter tried to process what he saw. A slope rose where the baseball field was flat, and on the slope, apartment buildings or offices leaned crazily against each other, like they’d been shaken in an earthquake. Telephone poles tilted left and right. For an instant, Peter thought dark clouds shadowed the world. Then he saw they weren’t clouds at all; they were hills that came from the sky. Hills that impossibly had buildings on them too. There wasn’t a sky. Just jumbled structures