Tales from the Bat - Dive through Hell

March 2067. After months of work, H.H. Boost's team has reverse engineered the Screamers and used them to create a bridge to their world. However, a sample retrieved during one exploration, a diary, forces him to deal with his family matters again... and with all that awaits his men on the other side.

(Proofread and edited by Kaleb O'Halloran)

“Status report, Ondra.”

“Everything’s fine so far, sir. Parameters within acceptable levels.”

“Good. Keep the audio channel open.”

The video feed on the monitors crackled with digital noise, images oscillating between crystal-clear frames and Pollock paintings in the span of a few instants. Some delays in the audio department too, but not too pronounced. It felt a little bit odd to have to wait a second or two between answers and questions, but it was overall bearable. All words recognized, transcribed automatically. Despite all the odds, the wired repeater they brought through the portal had borne fruit. Communications had never been better.

“Any signs of CHT6?”

“No, sir.”

“Proceed.”

The man who gave the order was tall and imposing. Unruly red hair, a tribal tattoo around his right eye, a freshly shaved beard, and an unmistakable bat insignia on his leather coat. He looked at the screen, at the direct camera stream from his soldiers. Red. Red everywhere. Black too. A dichromatic nightmare. He groaned, sitting behind the microphone. That was where his scientists should have been, but recent events had shaken his confidence in his techies. The people in the reconnaissance team were soldiers. They were used to following orders. His orders. Hearing his voice through the commlink was a surefire way for them to remember who they were working for.

“With all due respect, Major Boost, this is idiotic.”

Boost turned around to meet the owner of that unpleasant voice. A short guy with long, greasy black hair, glasses and a standard-issue lab coat was staring at him, with what could have been described as an accusatory gaze. He rolled his eyes.

“With absolutely no due respect, Dr. Zojimbo, you need to shut up.”

That egghead wouldn’t stop referring to him as Major, even after he had reached the position of general more than two years ago. He rolled his eyes. Scientists. Living in their own fantasy world, no contact with reality. Of course, not all of them were like that, but unfortunately his lead scientific advisor fell straight into that bucket. Yes, Zvonimir Zojimbo was a rather pathological case, the kind of antisocial self-appointed genius one could have found in an early 20s sitcom. He was thankfully the exception among his talented colleagues of the ROP research team, but being an authority on the topic meant that nobody sane would have taken disciplinary action against him. At least, not officially. Boost quickly went through his mental list of acquaintances in the British underworld, trying to figure out whom he could contact to rough Zojimbo up a little bit – just enough to remind him that there is indeed a physical world and that spheres are not divine objects worthy of worship. He could think of none, sadly, which prompted him to focus back on the task at hand. Or, at least, that’s what he would have liked to do.

“Well, I’m not shutting up, Major! I want it written and saved on record that I was against this stupid idea of yours!”

Zojimbo was not backing down – he was doubling down. Boost stood up, gestured in the direction of another soldier, letting him take his place at the communication center. Then, he stared at the scientist, with utter contempt.

“It’s on the record now. Your objection has been heard, doctor. Now, please, how about you go back to playing with your machines? We can’t jeopardize the safety of the expedition corps, whatever your personal opinion is.”

“But...”

“That is an order, Zojimbo.”

Zojimbo fell silent for a second, staring into the abyss of General Boost’s eyes, a dark landscape devoid of emotions and humanity. He gulped. That abyss only stared back at him, an abyss of violence, death and decay, all in the name of some twisted concept of the greater good. He could feel it, the overwhelming sensation of having to deal with someone with no moral qualms in disposing of him. Thus, he respectfully decided to just nod and step back. Instead, he focused his attention on his machines, the machines his department had spent months putting together, all for the sake of reproducing a Reality Oscillation Phenomenon. At its heart was a macabre mess of cables, valves and sensors, plugged into what could have easily been classified as a “corpse” – save for the fact that it never had any biological chance at living in the first place, due to its faulty internal organs. He checked the web of metal meshes and indicators plastered all over the capsule, where the remains of a creature once known as “Donner” were placed. None of those contraptions had actually been greenlit for military use – heck, most of their setup wasn’t even OSHA-compliant, which could have caused damages in the millions if a technician got hurt. However, that was the last of their problems. Zojimbo would have never believed a dead ROP could be exploited to trigger another ROP. The fact that a virtually impossible corpse was the key to trigger a resonance and open a portal to its original dimension was still a source of shock and awe for him – especially because it wasn’t spherical. If it had been spherical, his belief in the superiority and perfection of spheres over every other shape known to man would have made it easier for him to digest. Yet, that wasn’t the case. It was all wrong.

“Ondra here. We have reached the camp set by CHT5. Still no sign of CHT6.”

The voice from the speakers caused him to direct his attention to the delayed livestream. A red and black world, covered in sand, ooze and tentacles. Pretty near to what his idea of Hell was, except a little more dead. When Zojimbo had heard of the “Shadow Gallery”, he imagined it as a dark place haunted by the ghosts of the living. He wasn’t expecting it to be a lifeless desert under a demonic sky, covered in ruins of buildings and the remains of a civilization that didn’t exist anymore. A civilization he was eerily familiar with. When the video logs from the third expedition, codenamed CHT3, showed footage of what looked like the Big Ben and the London Eye, he didn’t know what to think of it. First, because he had seen them only in historical recordings, taken before the city known as London was partly razed and later rebuilt as Shard in the 2030s. Second, because they looked extremely faithful to the originals, to the point of being composed of the exact same material. That reality looked like a time capsule of a lost century, struck by a cataclysm that never touched the shores of their world. And, according to Major Boost (he just couldn’t get himself to reallocate him as General, despite the repeated death threats), that cataclysm had to have happened around 2014.

Zojimbo felt conflicted about that revelation. In 2014, when his father died in Helsinki, he was just two years old. Was there a Zvonimir Zojimbo, in that mirror graveyard? If so, where was he now? That thought made him feel like Schrödinger’s cat given human form. In the Shadow Gallery, Zvonimir Zojimbo probably died at the age of two. In the real world, he became a somewhat successful fifty-five-year-old ROP scientist. While he was going through all the phases of existential and philosophical questions in his mind, Boost tapped on the microphone, replying to the soldier on the other side.

“Roger, Ondra. What is the status? Do you have a clear sight of any new signposts?”

“I’m preparing a drone with Stozzen and Grumsley to survey the area where CHT6 was heading. So far, nothing out of the ordinary.”

Boost nodded.

“Ondra, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you this, but I’ll do it anyway: stick together and don’t get separated for any reason at all.

“Copy that. We’ll run the drone from our base camp. Valker and Zammer will stand guard while Stozzen operates the drone. We’ll resume operations after the aerial inspection, around twenty minutes from now.”

“Roger.”

Boost stood up, walked slowly away from the console, gesturing towards another of his soldiers – a peculiar young fellow with electric blue hair – to take his place. He stretched a bit, shook his head left to right, while heading for a small coffee machine. Zojimbo’s gaze followed him, mostly out of curiosity. As Boost selected a beverage, he pulled out a small, crumpled notebook from his pocket. Its cover was mangled and torn, with traces of a reddish dust all around the cuts, a rusty red that reminded him of the sand in the Gallery. Zojimbo had noticed him regularly browsing through that booklet ever since he came back from the Gallery with the CHT2 team. He could say many negative things about Boost, but not that he didn’t put his life on the line where it counted. He had been adamant in leading the second manned expedition to the Gallery, despite objections from his collaborators. Seeing him back then made Zojimbo feel like Boost somehow belonged out in the field, commanding a squadron. Work like that was something he couldn’t have hoped to be assigned to anymore, due to his... controversial actions while on active duty.

He should have seen it coming, though. Beating up mutants and pseudohumans that were asking for basic human rights, in such a blatant and violent way, was never going to win him any favor with the general public. Zojimbo himself found him revolting. A violent, racist brute who enjoyed spilling blood, a remorseless butcher with a tremendous disdain for what didn’t conform to his worldview. That was H.H. Boost. And, like most intellectuals when challenged by his presence, Zojimbo had always wanted to see him as an uncultured swine with no redeeming qualities.

Unfortunately for him, the real H.H. Boost was a much more complex figure. Sure, he was a brutal man with a past of semi-professional boxing and a very rigid definition of what a human being was. On the other hand, though, he was also an insatiable reader with a vast knowledge of philosophy, and some more delicate hobbies that didn’t fit his public image at all, like sewing and gardening. So, while it wasn’t rare to see him reading in the corridors of the base, it always felt like a weird dissonance. Especially when he wasted his time on that dilapidated booklet, which looked no more important than a child’s first diary.

“What are you staring at, Dr. Zojimbo? Your machines are on the other side of the lab. Keep an eye on them, we don’t want another CHT5 incident.”

“We tested them thoroughly. There is less than a one in ten thousand chance that they’ll shut down without forewarning.”

During their previous expedition, they had almost lost an entire squad when the Donner they used as the bridge started to deteriorate all of a sudden, effectively closing the threshold while the members of CHT5 were still on the other side. Three frantic hours later, the portal had been restored, just in time to allow all members of CHT5 to get back before their oxygen supplies expired. Unfortunately, the Donner showed no signs of stabilizing since that incident. Its broken body was decaying at a breakneck pace, which meant they didn’t have half as much time as they believed. What was left of it was kept under active monitoring, with wide arrays of gauges and displays showing the projected amount of hours left before it decayed into an amorphous mass of dust and ashes.

Despite that, Boost seemed relatively comfortable. Too comfortable, especially after what happened to CHT6. Zojimbo didn’t want to take any chances.

“Even if the tech works... with all due respect, Major, I think we should get them out of there. The last pictures sent by CHT6 were... ominous. What if... those things crossed the threshold?”

“Seeds don’t walk, Zojimbo.”

“In our world.”

“In any world. And I suspect a twenty-foot-tall monolith would have trouble sneaking through a fracture no larger than an average man.”

“...If you say so.”

Boost turned the page, kept on reading as his coffee mug was filled to the brim. He pulled it away from the machine, almost without averting his gaze from the book. Zojimbo couldn’t resist anymore. Curiosity was eating him from the inside out. What in the name of heaven, hell or purgatory was written in that book? Okay, Boost had found it during the CHT2 expedition, had it analyzed and sterilized until it was deemed safe, then just seized it for himself after reading it around a dozen times. Zojimbo had read it once himself, it wasn’t anything special – just what amounted to a teen noting down unimportant daily events. That was what irked him so much. Why was Boost so adamant in going through it over and over?

As if his superior could read his mind (or simply extrapolate his thoughts from behind his glass-shielded stare), Boost finally looked up from the pages to acknowledge Zojimbo’s perplexed gaze.

“Yes?”

“I... uh, Major...”

Zojimbo gulped down a lump of saliva. He was a scientist. His body, his mind, everything about him was curious by design. He couldn’t shelve the feeling that there had to be more to it, more to that ruined, ripped, rotten mass of pressed cellulose that he somehow wasn’t seeing.

“...What exactly is so special about that book? You almost didn’t care for any of the other samples. Just for that one. What... makes it interesting? I’ve skimmed through it, but it just seems to contain some fancy descriptions of historical events we studied at school.”

“You’ve only read half of it, haven’t you?”

“I... might have, yes.”

“You are partly correct, Zojimbo. This is indeed a hand-written diary, three hundred or so pages, one entry per week or less, with large hiatuses in its latter half. Some pages are missing and some are in a horrible state of preservation, but most of it is nevertheless perfectly readable.”

He closed the booklet, sipped his coffee.

“To most, it would be fairly unremarkable. But here’s the kicker: I know the person who wrote it.”

“W... what?”

“My mother.”

**

It was with utter surprise that Marin O’Rilley found her son at the door. She would never have expected H.H. to come visit her with such little notice. Even at the age of seventy, she was still healthy enough to deal with daily chores and with her husband, so she didn’t really bother her kid (despite everything, he was still their kid in her eyes) to come and have lunch with them. This time, though, he was the one who asked if they could have a word, in person. She hoped that meant he was finally ready to introduce them to his future wife or husband, something she had secretly wished for the last twenty years, but the tone of his voice hadn’t been very reassuring. He indeed looked quite startled, as if he had seen a ghost, when he walked through the door of their small countryside house.

“Hi, sweetheart.”

“Hi, mom. Sorry for the bother, but I needed to ask you something. Unfortunately, it’s work-related, but... you are literally the only person in the world that could help me.”

“Nah, don’t mention it. Please, take a seat. Some tea?”

“That helps, thanks. How’s dad?”

“Working on his new greenhouse renovation pet project. He can’t stay quiet even for a day.”

H.H. chuckled. They were very similar. While he got his red hair from his mother, his obnoxiously stubborn attitude was all from his father’s side. Marin smiled too. Seeing him even slightly relieved made her heart lighter. She knew her son was a controversial figure, with political views as far from her own as they possibly could be, but he was still her son, her Heinz-Harald. It had been hard for her to stomach the pictures broadcast on TV, of him brutalizing nekos and mutants with extreme prejudice, given the image she had of him at the time. She almost felt like that human killing machine couldn’t possibly be her son. She thought about cutting ties altogether, pretending he was never born. But then, he was appointed to the Yard, and made a public apology towards the people he wronged. He sounded sincere and heartfelt, but maybe that was her motherly bias talking. Truth was, she hadn’t quite forgiven him yet for his hatred of those different from him, especially since he was brought up in a very open and multicultural environment. She had always wondered what went wrong with him on that front. Her best guess was that his first girlfriend or boyfriend cheated on him with a neko or a shoiga, prompting him to hate all pseudohumans equally, but that was just her hypothesis. H.H. never talked with her or her husband about his teen crushes.

“Mom, I know this sounds weird, but... do you still have your old diaries? The ones you used to write around the time of the Helsinki Disaster?”

She stared at him with a puzzled expression. She couldn’t understand how that could be a matter of national security. Those diaries were still there, in her personal library, just as always. She also read them relatively often, when she felt a bit of nostalgia for her past and what her life could have been like. She had actually stored them pretty high up, so that H.H. couldn’t find them by chance when he was a kid, due to some of the... spicier content she used to write about. Of course, a curious teen H.H. had found them anyway, but she had managed to snatch them out of his hands before it was too late.

“Yes, I still have some of them. What’s the deal?”

“It’s not really a standard procedure, mom, but... ah, screw that.”

He browsed the pocket of his jacket, taking out a small, deteriorated book full of torn, yellowed pages. Its hard cover still looked white enough, with several barely-visible splashes of color that had since faded away to almost nothing, and the words once written on it eaten by sand and time. Yet, Marin recognized it immediately. H.H. opened it with care to the first page.

Upon the mangled sheet stood a single line, written in black ink, starting with regular, beautiful letters that transitioned abruptly into chaotic shapes scrawled in a fit of insanity.

Diary of Marin O’Rilley, December 2013 TiLl thE EnD Of thE fuCkin’ WORLD.

Marin winced. It was her handwriting. Her diary. The diary to which she entrusted her deepest wishes and ideas for the future, the diary of an all-too-optimistic sixteen-year-old girl. And here it was, defaced. Completely, utterly defaced. Her cheeks turned red with anger.

“How did you get this?! How could you DARE...”

“I didn’t. Not from your library, anyway. This is your diary, but, at the same time… it isn’t. I’m confident the original is still here, mom, and I need to see it. I need to compare it with this... let’s call it ‘copy.’ That’s why I’m here.”

“Then… where did you find it?”

H.H. shrugged, shook his head.

“Afraid I can’t answer. Hell, I shouldn’t even have shown it, but whatever. This spares me the effort of coming up with an excuse to browse through your old diaries.”

Which was also a relief, since last time he had done that, he’d accidentally found a hidden photo book of his mother having a great time with a space lizard. Not the kind of stuff he would have wanted to stumble upon at his parents’ place. Marin nodded, still in a mild state of shock, as she returned to her room. H.H. sat down, opened the diary for what seemed like the thousandth time to him, turning page after page until he landed on the day of the Helsinki Disaster, the day when Fennoscandia began to sink into the sea and – surprisingly, almost impossibly – the world didn’t end. Or did it? The more he analyzed the effects of that cataclysm, the more he convinced himself that he was living in a simulation. No way a destructive event of that magnitude could leave such a small mark on the planet. Well, small wasn’t the right way to frame it. Many countries had suffered tremendous consequences, just from being somewhat close to the blast radius. Denmark, the Baltic Republics, Poland and Germany were all hit by tidal waves of heights never before seen in that part of the world, washing away cities and destroying critical infrastructure. Copenhagen disappeared like a modern Atlantis, broken apart by the earthquakes and swallowed by the sea. If that hadn’t been enough, the sudden loss of the Scandinavian nations and the ensuing chaos caused trillions of euros in damages, millions of refugees and a widespread economic collapse, which had been the root cause of at least two neofascist coups around Europe. One of those newborn regimes still covertly existed in Greece, after having mutated into something “more socially acceptable”, at least in name, while the other had ended long ago in an abrupt and violent way – with the longstanding Italian tradition of hanging their fallen leaders upside down in Piazzale Loreto. H.H. had watched many documentaries about that period. The first two years after the disaster had been akin to recovering from a world war, with all able bodies sent on the field to restore at least part of what was destroyed, independent of their age. Then, thanks in vast part to the Phoenix Plan and a joint effort from the unaffected countries, Europe managed to rise back from its ashes, in a sort of modern renaissance. By the end of the 2030s, new, safe distortion plants were commissioned and switched on all around the old continent, finally ending its decade-long energy crisis. That was the story H.H. knew and studied since he was a kid. Yet...

“Here. It should be this one. It looks... the same”

Marin came back, a book in her hands. Same colors, same patterns. Only, much better preserved. She opened it to the first page. On the still-pristine sheet stood a single line, written in black ink, starting with regular, beautiful letters and ending with equally elegant marks.

Diary of Marin O’Rilley, December 2013 – August 2015.

H.H. took it from her hands, carefully,

“Please, skip all the entries in summer of 2014, if you still feel icky about...”

“Space lizards. I get it, mom. I get it.”

He sat down, opening both diaries on the small table in front of the couch, arranged so that he could check both of them at the same time. Seventh of December. First entry. Marin’s beautiful handwriting was filled with hope and wishes for a new year. She went through how she hated winter holidays because of family dinners, gushed a bit about some of the shoiga rhepp that were working as carpenters in her hometown, on how cool they looked. The ruined diary from the Gallery started the same way. Word for word. Letter for letter. Ink smudge for ink smudge. A staggering one-to-one match. H.H. turned the page with care, compared the second entry, the third, finding them all perfectly identical. It had been unsettling to immerse himself in the thoughts and experiences of his mother when she was a teen, especially given how she had changed during the years. Back then, she had dreams of becoming an astronaut to travel to EXODUS. Of opening a flower shop in Dublin, after the government dealt with the haemophage outbreak in St. Patrick and freed Ireland from those beasts. H.H. sneered nervously. More than fifty years later, haemos were still the dominant species in the Dead Zone. So much for that highly coveted government intervention.

He turned the page again. A photo of his mother, taken while she was young. Fiery red hair – the same he inherited – fashioned in a long braid, with a freckled complexion and deep green eyes. The picture was also in the diary from the Gallery, just more faded and with weird claw marks around the white frame. That photo reminded him of a cousin, who sported that same O’Rilley surname. She looked a bit like his mother in her prime. And, much like his mother, she had a thing for reptiles. Just... the more unsettling ones. Even more unsettling than the space lizards. He rolled his eyes with contempt, unable to stop the words from leaving his mouth.

“...Does monsterfucking run in the family, mom?”

“You shouldn’t judge your cousin Patricia too harshly for that.”

“She had sex with a haemophage. Multiple times.”

“God, after reading her book, I wish that was me.”

H.H. shook his head, resisting the urge to retch. That was not something he wanted to hear from his more than seventy-year-old mother, especially having seen how her brother’s side of the family was much more traditionalist and in tune with his own values. It was much better to simply drop that awkward topic and focus on the task he came here for.

He turned the page again and again. January, February. No differences. Some pages from the Gallery diary were torn or missing, but aside from that, the surviving ones were a near perfect match. March. The litmus test. He stopped for a long second, before turning the page once more. The next entry should have been within that all-important week. The week of March 12, 2014. The week of the Helsinki Meltdown. Marin sat in silence, staring at the diaries, at that transcription of her past. She sighed heavily.

“I still remember the emergency sirens. Even though my memory is hazy and I can’t recall every detail, those sirens have never left me. Sometimes, I still wake up in the night hearing them, even if they aren’t there anymore. I can still grasp pieces of what happened. The earthquakes, the reports on TV, the chaos. Electricity coming and going. It sounded like the end of the world – hell, maybe it was. I was just sixteen, though, and didn’t want to die. It was horrible. I started writing and writing and writing to exorcise the fear, hoping someone would wake me up. But it wouldn’t end.”

H.H. turned the page again, started following the lines down the paper on both notebooks at once. Every letter, every word matched, until...

He gasped.

They had diverged. They had finally diverged.

He looked down again, to the original diary, to the words written by that younger version of his mother, more than fifty years ago.

“We are told to remain at home, that the tidal waves that razed Denmark won’t reach Wales, that there is no reason to worry. For now, at least. I’m scared. Scandinavia is gone, Finland is gone. Copenhagen is gone. What will happen to us? Are we really safe?”

He moved his eyes to the Gallery diary, to that passage he had almost memorized.

“We are told to remain at home, until further directions. We are lucky Cardiff isn’t near any of the energy research facilities. If it were, we would be already dead. The experimental distortion reactor in London has exploded, taking out a huge chunk of the city, the one in Glasgow too. Germany, Italy, France... Australia, Canada, the USA. Reactors are bursting everywhere, in a sort of tragic, global resonance. The earth is shaking, the sky is turning red. I hear voices, my parents’ voices, my father is crying. Japan now, is gone too. Their four reactors were set off together, in a beautifully frightening choir. They’re saying that the whole country is sinking into the sea right now. Russia, China... everywhere. Madagascar, Egypt, South Africa, New Zealand, Brazil. Everywhere. EXODUS is gone too. It lit up the sky like a second sun. Is this the end? How long till Wales sinks too? I don’t want to die like this! I DON’T! I DON’T! I DON’T!”

Back and forth. Twice, three times. That was it. That was the exact point. Not a moment sooner, not a moment later. Marin’s blood had turned cold. Those words. Her words. But not how she remembered them. Still, that was her voice. Her handwriting. Whoever wrote those sentences was Marin O’Rilley as much as she was. How was that possible? Was it a prank? A theater prop? A bad joke planned by her ungrateful son? Yet, despite all her doubts, she could see it. She could feel it, as if she was there, as if strange, locked memories had suddenly awoken. She had to know. She had to understand.

“H.H. I... I know that it’s classified evidence, but... may I... read how it goes on?”

H.H. sat motionless on the sofa, incapable of raising his gaze, incapable of meeting her eyes. Were she anybody else, anyone from his Fledermaus cabal or from his military corps, he would have denied that request. But…

“Please, do. I have... already read it all. Several times, in fact.”

He stood up, leaving his seat open for her, as he began pacing around the room without a goal. The divergence point was March 12, 2014. In that version of Earth, the worldwide ROP known as the Helsinki Meltdown caused all the experimental distortion reactors around the world to enter resonance at the same time, triggering a chain reaction, a global series of disasters. EXODUS wasn’t spared either. The main reactor of the ark exploded in the aftermath, disintegrating all devsks and shoigas on board in one colossal ball of fire. Society collapsed soon after.

The Marin of that world, the alternate version of his mother, survived for a short while afterwards, living together with a shoiga. A shoiga who, in this world, she had apparently dated in the summer of 2014, and who died at the end of that same year, while on an underwater expedition around what was left of Helsinki. In that other world, though, they became an inseparable couple in the face of the apocalypse. He closed his eyes, recalled the entries in the diary, their short summaries.

But he didn’t need to.

His mother started reading them to him.

Each and every entry, read aloud.

Giving life to the words of that other Marin O’Rilley.

“15 March. Dad is dead, Mom too, and also Connor. Our house crumbled like a castle of cards. It’s a miracle I survived. Raida, this shoiga who used to work as a carpenter near us, saved me from the rubble. He too lost his friends and family. Cardiff is a ghost city. We decided to stick together, to comfort each other.”

“10 April. Raida managed to make me laugh again. He’s so sweet, yet so different. I like his scales. They are so shiny and smooth. We met some people around, most have lost hope. Some took their lives. There are some automated messages. They urge us to search for the bunkers. It’s becoming harder to breathe by the day, and the sun is constantly covered by those dark clouds, aside from sparse moments. We have found a new shelter, with some food. We’ll live to see another day.”

“18 June. The sky is always red now, at every hour of the day. We can’t see either the sun or the moon. The air is becoming unbreathable, there are fires everywhere. Raida managed to find two rebreathers, so we were lucky in that way. His beautiful scales are wounded, though. We need to get to a medical post.”

“27 July. There goes the shelter. Doctor Harris was the last to leave. There was a defect in the oxygen filters, our air supply was contaminated. Most of us died. Without rebreathers, it will be harder. We still have ours, our reserve tanks were well hidden. We need to move.”

“15 August – or is it the 20th? Or the 13th? I’ve lost track of the days. People are starving, we haven’t seen a cargo copter in months. Does the government still exist? I managed to repair a radio, but no dice, just picking up other survivors. Some of them were singing. Raida is still hoping someone survived the explosion of EXODUS. He doesn’t want to believe it’s over. I’ll be there for him. We can’t be separated.”

“October, probably. Situation is dire. Ink running out too. Hope new supplies come. Raida is well. I love him. He loves me. We MUST survive. Together.”

“November? I’ve snatched a batch of pens. Plenty of office supplies. I can finally write again. We found a pocket of air, near the sea, only the two of us. We can breathe better, we don’t need masks for now. The sky is darker and darker. There is almost no difference between night and day. I have forgotten what the moon looks like. I still hear people singing through the radio, but their voices are dimmer, weaker. Raida still hopes for a miracle. On my side, I’ve stopped praying. Yet, it’s good that shoiga and humans are genetically incompatible – I couldn’t afford to have a baby in this hellscape.”

“Still November? A carrier ship just washed up on the beach. Everyone on board was dead, but there was plenty of canned food there. Enough for one year or more, for the two of us. We disposed of the corpses, threw them into the sea. We don’t have the time or energy to bury them. The ship's derelict has become our new shelter. The waves are as red as the sky above. Plants all around us are slowly withering due to the lack of sunlight. Sometimes it rains, but the rain is also red. Sand is falling from the sky together with the droplets. It’s cold too. We hug each other to keep our body warmth from waning.”

“1 January. Happy 2015! We saw a firework in the distance. Then, a couple more. Voices from the radio singing, many more than usual. We won’t go away in silence. What’s left of us is celebrating. Raida has found a little bit of alcohol in the captain’s quarters. We drank it down and had a little celebration of our own. We are still alive. We are still together. I know that it seems impossible, but we are happy. I hope this happiness lasts.”

“February. All the plants around our small paradise seem to have died. We need to use rebreathers every minute now. It’s becoming hard to find oxygen. We have located a nearby shelter thanks to a radio transmission. We must sadly leave our small, seaside pocket of peace. We have to keep our tears in check, as we finally abandon the last place we could call home.”

“March? The shelter was a trap. They wanted to kill us and steal our stuff. We ran away, but lost two tanks of oxygen in the process. I hope those bastards die a horrible death.”

“Still March? No more singing from the radio. We have plenty of food, but no air. We are struggling to find a solution. The world we know is over. All that’s left is a barren wasteland of charred ruins, punctuated with dead, black trees. We haven’t met a living survivor in two weeks, in our slow walk to London, no animals either. Just piles of corpses.”

“April. One year since the apocalypse. We have survived this long, but I can’t see the light. We struck gold and found some filters for our rebreathers, but our supplies are scarce. It’s cold all day long, it almost always rains. This red sand is everywhere. London looks like a dead desert. This is what’s left of our world.”

“May. Our last oxygen tank. Raida is crying. He knows what it means. We are going to play rock paper scissors for it. Both of us wanted to leave it to the other, so the winner is the one who’s going to die first. Such a pair of idiots we are, huh? But I’ve made up my mind. Whatever the result, we’ll fade together. I can’t live in this hell without him.”

“NO! NO! NO! NO! hOw diD it cOme tO thiS? HOW dId iT cOMe to This? I JuSt WanteD to BecOme an ASTRONAUT to SEE EXODUS aNd meeT the DevSk AnD thE shOiGa. I wAnTed to LIVE! LIVE! LIVE! HoW diD itcome tothiS? Howdiditcometothis? HOW HOW HOW HOW?”

“wHY diD yOU hAvE to gO fIRsT?! WHY!”

“RAIDA. I’M COMING WITH YOU. I’M COMING WITH YOU. I’M CO”

Silence.

Marin’s voice fell into silence. Tears punctured her tired eyes. That wasn’t her. She wasn’t the Marin O’Rilley who lived that nightmare. Yet...

“I... can feel it, H.H.. I can feel it... as if I was there. How... How is that possible? It’s like... those memories... it’s as if I lived them. But...”

H.H. put her hand on her shoulder, hugged her gently.

“It’s alright, mom, it’s alright. This is why I do what I do. To understand what caused this. To understand what the truth is. And to protect us all from whatever lurks in that dead world.”

“...You’ve been there, haven’t you?”

H.H. didn’t reply, didn’t nod, but didn’t deny it, either. He wouldn’t say it. He couldn’t tell her where he found the diary. Yet, that scene was still fresh in his mind. The scene of those two skeletons, preserved by whatever miracle had happened, hugging each other in the face of death. Crystallized in the red sand, under that sullen, vermillion sky. And that diary lying near them, tossed aside by that other world’s Marin, to share one last kiss with her loved one, seconds before she drew her last breath.

**

“I fail to understand, Major. Your mother... wrote it?”

“Not my mother. The Shadow Gallery version of her, if that makes sense. And this helped me confirm the divergence date. March 12, 2014. The day that world ended.”

Zojimbo frowned, not entirely convinced. Or, maybe, simply not wanting to accept that his hypothetical paradox, the paradox of the two Zojimbos, was actually correct. In that other world, kid Zojimbo died when he was two years old. That was a harrowing prospect, being dead but still alive to tell the tale.

“So, uh, what are we going to do with...”

Alarms blaring.

A siren. The emergency call signal.

Boost sprinted towards the console, grabbing Zojimbo and dragging the scientist with him. Soldiers frantically joined them, creating a cacophony of panicked voices.

“Byle! Status report!”

“Code red, sir!”

The images on the screen changed sporadically, too much motion blur to make out the scene. Garbled words recorded from the body cam came through the speakers on their side. Ondra was running, running and shooting.

“They’ve found us! They’ve found us!”

Stozzen and Grumsley were on the ground, waving their arms towards their comrades, pleading for help. Stozzen shouted, crawling towards the camera.

“Seamus! SEAMUS!”

One instant later, a dark shape leapt on him, then another, then another. Ondra panicked, running away from his fallen comrades. Then, a lightning bolt struck, twice, three times, hitting both downed men as the creatures stormed them. Ondra gasped for air, threw his gun away, then ran, ran as fast as he could.

“It was a trap! A trap! They killed CHT6! It’s them! It’s HIM! Bring us back! Bring us...”

Another lightning strike. Digital noise. The audio cut short.

The screen lingered on total blackness for a long second.

Then, the image feed came back. Ondra was crawling, breathing heavily, praying. A black mass stood in front of him. Tens, hundreds, thousands of gray, faceless, humanoid entities with shining eyes. And, behind them, a towering silhouette. Immense. Magnificent. Two skeletal wings with a thin membrane spreading from its back. Four blazing lights opening on its head. Long, ghostly limbs reaching for the ground.

Boost shouted.

“Mission aborted! Zojimbo! Close the portal! Now!”

Zojimbo emerged from his trance, scurrying over to his machines, accessing the terminal. On the screen, Ondra stood up. He had heard it. Close the portal. Close the portal. But he was still inside. No, they couldn’t close the portal, not while he was still inside. That was unfair. That was unfair. He managed to win against his fear, breaking into a full sprint, leaving the creatures behind. He could almost see it in the distance, the faint glow of the way out. Not even one kilometer away. He could do it. Just fifteen more minutes. They could wait for him, they had to wait for him. He gasped, panted, running and running as the screeches piled on, the crowd of nightmares tailing him. He couldn’t die here, he thought. This couldn’t be the last day of Seamus Ondra. He had so much he wanted to do, so much! Why had he volunteered to lead CHT7? Why? Why didn’t he leave it to Boost, since he was so adamant about doing it? Because he wanted to be noticed, to rank up in the Fledermaus pecking order? That was dumb, that was stupid! He was stupid! He ran faster, faster, oxygen leaving his lungs at a breakneck pace as he felt the horde, that violent, revolting black mass coming nearer and nearer. Yet, he could still see it, that glimmering light in the distance. His beacon. His way out. His...

The light flickered.

“No, no, no...”

Faster. And faster. And faster. He ran faster. But the light flickered. Again. And again.

“No, not now, not now!”

Fading. Disappearing. The lab. The people. The tether to safety.

But he didn’t have time to despair.

He felt his body, his bones being crushed. The fingers of a giant hand closing around him, pain radiating from every pore of his body. He felt his helmet breaking, the rebreather ripped off with it. And, in front of him, those four, flaming furnaces, looking directly into his bodycam.

Static.

The camera feed stopped.

Black screens all throughout the control center. Every feed had gone dark.

The portal had fully shut down, all power cut off.

Silence.

Absolute, dead silence.

Not one word.

Then, he spoke.

General Heinz-Harald Boost spoke.

“The entirety of CHT7... has been lost.”

With those heavy words, it dawned on them, all too quickly. The weight of their failure. Boost stared at his soldiers, seeing the fear in each of their eyes. It was time to face it. It was time to move. He roared, his voice overpowering the murmurs, deafening the scientists.

“Byle! Start analyzing the footage we retrieved. Zojimbo! Run a check on the machines. Pritchards, call all xenobiologists we have on duty...”

Frozen on a side screen was the last image from the reconnaissance drone, the last thing captured before the portal was closed. An aerial view of what was once called London. Of what was occupying it, what was filling its dead ruins. Something only hinted at by the results of CHT4. Something that was thought to be unique. Something that shouldn’t have existed.

“We might have a problem.”

His voice lowered, until he could hear the cries, the words, the whispers, his own heartbeat.

And the echoes of an inhuman wail, transcending dimensions, across space and time.