Those That Wake

THE PRISON

“IT’S CALLED A self-contiguous tesseract,” Remak said. They were all in the smaller clearing again. All their faces were turned toward him, and each showed a teetering inability to encompass what Laura had told them on her return.

“A tesseract is a cube,” Mike said, shaking his head, seeking to dismiss Remak, even in the face of a screaming void of alternatives.

“It’s a theoretical cube, actually,” Laura said, reeling off information as if by rote. “A shape that extends into a fifth dimension. Inside is a space larger than the construct can physically contain in four dimensions.” She looked around at an array of astonished faces.

“My first boyfriend was a science geek,” she explained, unsure whether to laugh or cry at the memory dredged up from another life. “He did a huge project on them. It was all I heard about for weeks, and I had to keep running him through it for the presentation.”

“It’s bigger on the inside than on the outside?” Mal’s somber eyes had gone a little wild, searching for a way to understand an enemy beyond his grasp.

“Yes,” Remak said, once he was sure that Laura had no more to add. “I’ve heard of research being done to create a tesseract, ideally something portable. Something the size of, say, a briefcase, which you could store an entire battalion’s equipment in. I understand that there’s a current school of thought that says black holes are tesseracts, that whole other universes exist within them.” He pushed on into the imponderables, every inch the scientist.

“So you’re saying that we’re in a black hole?” Mike asked angrily.

“No, no, that’s just incidental.”

“But”—Laura put her hand up, as though this were a classroom and Remak the teacher—”we are in some kind of enclosed space, like a room, aren’t we?”

“Not enclosed, exactly. Somewhere on Earth, there’s an aperture, and this aperture opens into a space that coincides with a fifth dimension. But the space doesn’t extend infinitely. In this case, it appears to be self-contiguous; that is to say, it folds back around on itself, meets its own edges. It’s only”—he squinted and shrugged—”maybe six miles across, maybe less.”

“And that’s why we’re on the same mountain again,” Laura said, “because the end of this place just leads right back to the beginning of it.”

“More or less. Its boundaries are only conceptual. It’s enclosed in the sense that you can’t continue to walk over new ground forever. Maybe ‘finite’ would be a better word than ‘enclosed.’”

“Who cares what word you use?” Mike said. “You’re only guessing, anyway. You don’t know what this is. We could all be hypnotized somewhere, or drugged, and none of this is really happening at all.”

“No. Too much interaction for that.” Remak shook his head. “Too much time going by. There’s no sense of compression or dilation. This is a real place, and we’re really in it. And it also explains what’s so special about this ‘goddamned wilderness,’ as you called it, and why they put us here in particular. Once we were dead, authorities could scour the entire planet and still never find us.”

“At least it has a name,” Mal said.

“So what?” Mike said.

“If it has a name,” Mal said, suddenly looking back at him hard, “then it’s known, it’s understood. We’re not fighting God.”

“Not just that,” Laura said. “He said there’s an aperture somewhere. If there’s a way in, there’s a way out.”

They all looked at Remak, waiting for him to point it out to them. Instead, he looked as if his collar were suddenly too tight.

“There’s an aperture, yes. But I have no idea how it’s sealed, or even if it can be unsealed. I don’t know what it would look like, or if it would be visible at all. And considering it only needs to be large enough to fit a person through, a finite space of about six miles suddenly becomes a lot larger than it seems.”

“What about Brath?” Mal said. “He’s not there anymore.” He put his thumb toward the nearby clearing where Isabel’s body still rested. “Laura said she looked over the edge and he wasn’t climbing down.”

“I didn’t see him between here and the next mountain, either,” Laura added, and then shook her head and moved her hands uncertainly. “The other this mountain,” she corrected himself.

“There is that,” Remak allowed. “Provided he isn’t out of sight somewhere, that may mean that he can come and go or that they can take him and reinsert him at their convenience.”

“If they can do that,” Mal said, “then they know we’re still alive. If just keeping us in this prison isn’t good enough, then why not send back an army with machine guns to get us?”

“Resources,” Remak said. “Or value. Maybe we’re just not worth that much trouble. For whatever reason, whoever they are, they have access to something like this”—he waved his hand around him at the forest and the mountain and the sky—”but they don’t have the facility for something like that. Furthermore, I’m fairly confident that they can’t see us or hear us in here now.”

“Why?” Mal wanted to know.

“In a normal forest, you can set up microphones that transmit to wherever you are, or you can use aircraft. Not here. You wouldn’t be able to transmit into or out of this space, as our cells can attest, and I know there aren’t any aircraft flying by. Whatever information they have they’ve either gotten from Brath or they’re going to get from Brath.”

“Wait.” Laura was shaking her head. “The aperture. Why would the door be down there somewhere? Wouldn’t it be as close to where we woke up as possible? I mean, why come through in the middle of the field down there, then drag all of us up the mountain and leave us in that spot?”

“That’s”—Remak gave it a second—”true.” He looked down at the hard ground, searching the dry, lifeless grass with careful eyes.

“And there was no one in the clearing when Brath left,” Mal threw in. “So, if they send someone back through, he’ll expect the area to be clear.”

There was suddenly an energy pulsing through the group of them, their bodies recharged with purpose.

Getting back to the first clearing was a hair-raising maneuver. Only Laura was small enough to make it through the woods, so moving around the slim ledge around the side was their only choice.

Mal went first, his feet with only a slim lip to tread, and the handholds that stuck out poking and gouging at him. Often he had to put all his weight on his arms and shoulders, his body just hanging out over a long drop. And he had to assist Remak and Mike, guiding each one of them, establishing hand- and footholds. In some instances, he had to give up one of his own handholds and steady his companion traveler, supporting both of them with only the strength of his one arm. The tree limbs were surprisingly stubborn and wiry for such lifeless-looking things, as though this was to be their state for eternity. Like an old photograph, everything in it was dead, but also changeless and preserved forever.

Mal’s arms and legs ached fiercely by the time the rest of the group met Laura in the clearing. They stood milling about, each anxious to stay clear of the vicinity in which Isabel rested, motionless and terrifying.

“I don’t know what this is going to look like,” Remak said, “or what direction it’s going to come from or when—”

“Or if,” Mike interjected.

“Or if,” Remak allowed.

“The best we can do is wait,” Mal said. “And watch as much of the area as possible.”

“And supposing”—Mike again—”a door does open and people do come in and they all have machine guns?”

“We make a stand here,” Mal said with no budge in his voice. “It’s that or wander back and forth until we starve to death. You can go back and wait until the danger is past.”

Mike glared back at him.

“I’ll stay,” he said.

And they waited.

They each stood, their backs to one another, facing either forest or the opening to the empty gray-white sky.

Laura watched the others from the corners of her eyes.

Mal flexed his arms and hands, cords of muscle and vein running down them, working the ache out.

Mike heard his stomach rumble, hoping the others hadn’t heard it.

Remak, the automatic loose in his relaxed hand, spared brief glances at the time.

“I had a dream,” Laura said. “My parents were fighting, like, really, really fighting. Like they would have killed each other if I weren’t standing between them. And their yelling stopped, and instead of words, black stuff came out of their mouths and their eyes. Just a little at first, like they were crying, and then lots of it, like a flood of black vomit.” Laura’s voice slowed as her breathing became deep and long and even. “The black stuff came out like a tidal wave. I was … drowning in it. My parents were, too. It was, like, alive; squirming, trying to push its way into my mouth and nose.”

“Did you die?” Mal asked, his voice almost inaudible.

“No.” Laura looked up at him as if from far, far away. “No. I swam away, managed to break the surface. But I had to leave my parents behind. Underneath.” She drew breath in and let it out in an aching sigh.

“When did you dream this?” Remak said, his body half turned away from his quadrant. “Right before we woke up here?”

“No,” she said. “On the train. Yesterday. I mean, whatever day Homeland Security came to my house.”

“In your dream,” Remak said, “was swimming away hard?”

“Not the swimming itself. But”—her eyes flickered toward Mal for no reason—”leaving my parents behind. Not hard, exactly, but sad. So, so sad. I would never have done that, really. But I did in the dream.” She winced, and found she didn’t want the attention she was getting. “You had a dream, too, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Remak said. “Right before I woke up here. I dreamed that I was in a hallway, guarding a door. A man I didn’t recognize came up and wanted to get by. He was very insistent at first, and then, when I wouldn’t let him by, he became physical.”

“But you kept him out.”

“Yes. It was my duty.”

“We all had dreams,” Laura decided, looking at Mike and Mal.

Mal nodded.

“I was in an apartment,” he said. “Something was trying to smash down the door. I wouldn’t let it through, though.”

“Was it hard to keep it out?” Remak asked.

“Yes. It felt like the hardest thing I’ve ever done, maybe.”

“When did you dream it?”

“A while ago. The night after I went into the building with the doors.”

Laura looked at Mike.

“I was in a long, dark hallway,” he said. “It was in a school, I guess, but it went on forever. There were kids there. The hallway was thick with them. They were . . having trouble, shouting. Screaming, really. Something was tearing them apart. Eating them. I could hear it from far down the hall, beneath their screams, the sound of them being torn apart. I felt responsible. It was my job to do something about it. I pushed my way toward the thing. I couldn’t see it, but I could … I could feel it.” The dream was pulling him back toward it. He stopped himself abruptly.

“And?” Remak encouraged.

“I did my job. I stopped it.”

“How?”

“I just did. Isn’t that enough for you, you pushy son of a bitch?”

“But you dreamed it right before you woke up here, right?” Remak said.

“Yeah. When I woke up from it, I was here.”

“She dreamed, too,” Laura said, forcing herself to look down at Isabel. “I’m sure of it. But I wonder,” she said to Remak. “Did Brath?”

Mal, waiting with interest for Remak’s response to her theoretical question, was the first to see something. He happened to be looking in the right direction, out toward the plain at the gray-white sky. Which was not the plain and the gray-white sky all of a sudden. There wasn’t even a cliff anymore, but instead more forest, greener, more alive. Mal hadn’t done anything, hadn’t even blinked. Just as when Annie had showed him the building. It just came into his head like a lost memory, suddenly returning for no reason, as if the building before and the forest now had always been there and he had simply forgotten to see them.

He opened his mouth to speak but caught his words when he saw Brath coming from between the trunks and branches into the little clearing.

Mal didn’t hesitate this time. He was on top of Brath immediately, and before a look of surprise had even crossed Brath’s razor features, he had already suffered two blows to the head from Mal’s malletlike fist.

Laura saw it happen, saw the sudden burst of determination and anger flash across Mal’s grave features. In that one moment, she would have sworn he hated Brath, Brath’s betrayal, more than anything in the world.

Remak was at Mal’s side, standing over Brath’s body, but Mike was caught, staring dumbly at that sudden absence of sky and the sudden presence of more forest.

“I’m not sure this is a tesseract at all,” Remak said slowly, looking at the forest suspiciously through the lenses of his glasses.

“What difference does it make?” Mal asked him. “Isn’t this the way out? And we’d better use it.”

“Wait,” Remak said. “Leave your cells here. We can be traced through them,” he said to Mike’s unwilling and uncompromising expression. “But in here they’ll just be dead signals.” Remak dropped his own where he stood.

“Mine was broken,” Laura said. “It’s back at home.”

Mal flung his back into the forest behind them, and wasn’t sorry to see it go.

Mike, sneering, looked as if he was considered winging his own cell directly at Remak. Instead, he let it fall to the dead grass.

“Let’s get going,” Mal said impatiently.

Remak nodded and moved into the brush. Mike, without his characteristic hesitation, followed, disappearing quickly into the green. Laura spared another look at Isabel and moved away, and Mal came directly behind her.

They moved through forest, not quite impenetrable, but still difficult going. Poked and scratched, torn and bedraggled, more than they had been from their climbing and hiking, they emerged after ten minutes onto a gentle slope that headed toward rolling hills alive with grass. It was warm here and there was wind, and the sun was in a sky magnificently blue.

They were at the top of a slope, and down from there they could see intermittent houses and, farther off to their right, a collection of buildings that resembled a town.

“Are we still in New York State?” Mal asked.

“I think so, judging by all these sugar maples.” Remak was squinting at the trees.

“Someone there will know,” Laura said, staring down at the town. “Or there’ll be a sign nearby.”

“So,” Mike said, several steps ahead, “what are we waiting for?”

“We need to know what we’re going to do,” Remak said.

“Get the hell out of here and go back home.” It was obvious, to Mike, at least.

“We need to find out who did this,” Remak said. “Who can do this.”

“Screw that,” Mike said.

“Mike,” Laura said, with a concern that disarmed him momentarily, “do you think we can just catch a bus and go home, that whoever did this is just going to leave us alone?”

“I don’t bother them, they don’t bother me.”

“All right. Bye,” Mal said, turning to the others. Mike bent his lips but didn’t move on. He didn’t particularly care for this new trend of being called out.

“I need to go speak to my people,” Remak said.

“The CIA,” Mike supplied, and was ignored.

“Will they know what this is all about?” Laura asked.

“They know something,” Remak told her. “And they’ll certainly be interested in what I have to tell them.”

“I still need to find Tommy,” Mal said, touching his back pocket with the photograph. “I might be able to track Annie down.”

“I need to know what’s going on, too,” Laura said. “What kind of a life I can have back.”

“If they’re hunting us,” Mal said, “then splitting up makes their search harder. I’ll go with Laura.”

“You’re kidding,” Mike deadpanned. “Really?”

“If anything”—Remak mixed it around in his mind—”they wouldn’t expect us to want you two on your own. This could work.”

Laura looked at Mal’s calm face. He was no older than she was, but they spoke to him as an adult, trusted him to do something like this. She was still somewhere in between to them, still saw expressions of pleasant surprise when adults heard her say something perceptive or wise. But she could see what they saw in Mal, too: the quiet, unconscious confidence that came with having survived whatever disaster his life had been up to now.

“We meet in Manhattan,” Remak said. “Someplace anonymous and crowded. The big movie theater on Broadway and Thirteenth.” He glanced down at his watch. “It’s eleven forty-five. We meet there at this time, two days from now, no matter what.”

He got nods from Mal and Laura.

“Don’t use credit cards or bank cards or cells for anything. They’re just pins in a map that can tell them where we are,” Remak said. “Go. And take care.”

Mal looked at Laura and got a nod, and they took off.

Mike watched them for just a moment, then started away as well.

“Wait,” Remak said. “You need to stick with me.”

“So, let’s get the hell away from here, already.”

Remak was watching the figures of Mal and Laura recede.

“Wait here,” he said, and inexplicably started to turn back into the forest.

“What are you talking about? We have to go.”

“We will in one minute. Wait here.”

“Maybe,” Mike muttered as Remak disappeared back into the dense forest toward the clearing that held only Isabel’s body and Brath’s unconscious form.

A minute later, Mike heard it echo sibilantly from out of the forest. The sound would never have reached Mal and Laura, let alone the houses far beyond. But there was no mistaking it from where Mike was: the crackling hiss of the gun that had ended Isabel’s life, a sound he’d never forget.

Moments later, Remak reappeared, and without looking at Mike or slowing his pace, he hurried down the slope himself.

Mike, his hands suddenly trembling and his legs weak, followed.