Free Pandora's Gun by James van Pelt Page B

trunks. And still, the rent continued to grow, taller than the dugout, burning at the edges. On the ground, on the other side of the boundary between the muddy softball field and the orange landscape, an animal turned its head and looked at him. He hadn’t noticed it at first because it too was a rotting orange color. Peter stared, fascinated. It was no larger than a small dog, but it had two strong-looking hind legs, like a frog’s, coiled beneath it, and a single leg in front, protruding from the middle of its chest. A single eye studied him from the center or its awful head, a bare, skull-like gleaming orange bone filled with teeth. Then Peter realized there were dozens of them, all focused in his direction.
    A wind pressed on his back, pushing him to the chain-link between him and the field. The hole inhaled. Paper scraps tumbled past the dugout, into the orange world.
    Christy yelled something, but her words were jumbled in the roar of the rising wind. She and Dante braced themselves against the chain-link, like they were doing vertical pushups. If it weren’t for the barrier, the hole would suck them in. The dugout’s aluminum roof rattled and moaned. Trees on all sides bent in the torrent.
    Peter stared. Beyond the Cyclops dogs and broken trees, beyond what looked like the remnants of a wall and a tumbled battlement, rose a hill. It might have been a half mile away in the orange world. On top of the hill sat a creature, huge, bloated, tentacled. Its appearance hurt Peter to look at. It twisted the orange world around it, like its intents were too irresistible to be contained in real space.
    He could feel it turning toward him. If it looked at him, he knew he would be lost. The parts of him that made him human would be consumed by its awfulness. As surely as Peter knew anything, he knew he had to turn the gun off to close the tear it had created in the world.
    Ultimately, though, it wasn’t an act of will that made him release the trigger. The Cyclops dogs rose off their haunches, immune to the wind, a malevolent pack, and they moved as one toward his world, toward the boundary. Their movement distracted him. For a second, he tore his attention away from the demon on the hill, and that was enough for him to let the trigger go.
    A Cyclops dog made it through before the wounded air healed itself. The tornado that had formed behind them gasped into nothing. With a snarl as grating as broken glass, the dog loped away, though the mud, across the field, until it hopped over the broken outfield fence and vanished in the underbrush.
    Papers that had been blown against the chain-link fell to the ground. Peter’s heart pulsed hard against his chest. He’d always thought the expression “His blood ran cold” was a hyperbole, but he shivered hard for a moment. When he closed his eyes, he saw the terrible creature on the hill, broadcasting illness and hate, and now he was afraid that the creature knew of him, of him personally. To be a thought in the mind of such a beast was horrible to contemplate.
    “I won’t be able to sleep,” said Christy, her voice tight, as if she struggled between speech and a scream.
    Dante said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. That was wicked cool. What do you think we did? Did we damage the space-time continuum? Did we make a breach into another existence?”
    Peter felt an urge to laugh, but he bit it back. It wouldn’t be a healthy laugh, and he might not be able to stop himself if he did. “You watch too much science fiction.” But Peter watched science fiction too. Who didn’t?
    “Why not?” said Dante. “We’re in a science fiction story now. Ray guns? Tractor beams? X-ray vision? Parallel universes? Science fiction has come to us.”
    “Why would you open a door to that universe? What use could it possibly have? Surely you wouldn’t go there.” Peter pictured the Cyclops dogs. Instead of being on the boundary’s other side, they surrounded him. They weren’t