Zephyr Dorsey

“Setting Out Karl” from Tramp and the Time Capsule

            Sebbi rubbed his sweat-coated face against the shoulder of his sweater-vest and peered through the dirty windshield at the broken asphalt treadmilling beneath the old truck’s single headlight. A howl cut across the moonlit night, and he pressed down harder on the gas pedal and sank his lanky frame a little lower behind the steering wheel.

            A hunched form leapt into the headlight’s beam and stood to its full height. It bared its teeth and raised its clawed hands toward the light, then hunkered down again and scurried behind pile of rubble next to the street.

            Sebbi wished now that he had come during the day. The creatures were less dormant than he had expected.

            And I definitely should have brought one of Sasha’s guns, he thought.

            Another howl. Just behind him. This one more mournful than the others.

            “Quiet, Karl!” snapped Sebbi, turning his head and yelling through the missing back window. “You trying to announce us, or what?”

            Behind him, in the bed of truck, a young man with swollen red eyelids, wearing a pair of blue-jean shorts and a sleeveless shirt with an American-flag print, darted back and forth on bare feet, sniffing the air. His brown hair stood from his head in knots, and his eyes burned with a wild alertness.

            The truck’s left front tire hit a pothole in the crumbling road, and its undercarriage screeched against the pavement, scattering orangish red sparks and throwing Sebbi and Karl to one side. Karl fell to one knee but sprang up immediately, showing his teeth and growling.

            For a moment, Sebbi feared that one of the truck’s bald tires had blown, but when the ancient vehicle kept rattling forward as before, he kept his foot on the accelerator and continued racing over the gray-blue remnants of the road. The sooner his night’s horrible task was completed, the better.

            Up ahead, the old town hall came into view, shadowy forms swarming over its dilapidated structure like maggots over a rotten carcass. He glanced at his old friend in the rearview mirror. He could hardly believe it had only been a few weeks ago that Karl had been bent over his workstation, intent upon his project, his round face and magnification goggles giving him a distinctly owllike appearance…

*****

            Sebbi sat with his long legs propped on his desktop, flipping through the pages of one of the books he had dug out from the collapsed library. Beside him, Karl—wearing an American flag T-shirt and blue-jean shorts—stood leaning over the miniscule gearwork of his latest invention, his brown eyes comically enlarged behind his goggles, his hair standing out in tufts over each ear.

            Outside the barred window located between their desks, the rain fell steadily through a gray, windless day, and the creatures lay against each other in groups of three or four, keeping mostly dry beneath roof overhangs or inside the open doorways of abandoned shops.

            Hearing a groan, Sebbi turned his head.

            Behind him, on one side of the large room, a tarnished pole ran through the middle of a five-foot wide hole cut into the floor. On the opposite side of room were lined a half-dozen, narrow beds, their headboards against the wall. In the nearest bed, dressed in gray pants and a dark green blouse, Sasha lay diagonally, her brown hair hanging over the edge of the thin mattress and her bare, small feet twitching back and forth as they often did when she was emerging from sleep. She yawned and rolled over.

            Sebbi wanted to go over and cuddle with her, but it felt too weird with her older brother there in the room.

            “Why do you love that era so much?”

            Sebbi turned toward Karl and found him staring down at him, his thick eyebrows raised and his extra-large eyes focused on the book in Sebbi’s lap.

            Sebbi lowered his feet from his desk and leaned up in his chair. “The Golden Era? What’s not to love? It was the high point of civilization. A flourishing trade in useful goods, easy and efficient travel, a plentiful food supply, and phenomenal medical advances. And the sheer amount of entertainment options they had! It boggles the mind.”

            “What boggles the mind is how quickly they lost it all.”

            Sebbi shrugged. “The Cataclysm. It wiped out everything.”

            “Everything except this boring village,” said a soft voice behind them.

            They turned to see Sasha sitting on the edge of the bed, brushing the bangs from her dark eyes with one hand while reaching with the other for the pistol beside her on the bed.

            “There may be other towns or areas that survived,” asserted Karl, turning back to his work.

            “If there were, we would have heard about them by now,” countered Sasha, standing and stretching, absently pointing her gun’s nozzle toward the large room’s high ceiling. “There’s not even been a rumor of a rumor.”

            She walked lazily toward Sebbi and settled as lightly and gracefully into his lap as a cat.

            Sebbi placed his book on his desk, threw an arm over her lap, and kissed her on the cheek. “Good morning, sleepyhead.”

            Karl bent closer to his desk, trying his best to continue ignoring the recently burgeoning intimacy between his sister and his friend. “There has to be other communities,” he insisted. “It is illogical to assume that our town was the only population center in the whole world spared by the Cataclysm.”

            “Old Man Jones says the Cataclysm shook the whole universe,” noted Sebbi. He had spent his whole life obsessed with the mystery of the Cataclysm and loved to share facts and theories about it. “He says that even the stars are no longer where they’re supposed to be.”

            “Old Man Jones is a crackpot,” rejoined Karl.

            “Maybe,” said Sasha, groggily giving the ammunition cylinder of her handgun a spin and leaning her head against the soft green fabric of Sebbi’s sweater-vest. “But that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.”

            Karl straightened his back and tilted his head, first to one side and then the other, trying to work some of the soreness out of his neck. He took off his magnification goggles and rubbed his eyes. His head ached, but he was so close to completing his project that he wanted to keep pushing on. Just a few more days. Maybe a week.

            ‘What’s it matter anyhow?” he said testily. “No matter what theory you apply to the past, the present remains the present, and we have to deal with it. Worrying about the past is a waste of time.”

            Sasha leaned up from Sebbi’s shoulder, and they exchanged a glance. Her brother had been grumpier than usual lately. She knew it was because he was devoting so many hours of work to his invention. But still… she would only cut him so much slack before unleashing her notoriously quick tongue to very quickly remind him of his manners.

            “The creek will be high tonight, dear brother,” she said, aiming her gun at a framed aerial photograph taken of the town sometime before the Cataclysm. “Good time for you to make a water run.”

            Karl turned his tired eyes toward the barred window and stared into the wet, overcast day. Across the street, one of the creatures moved languidly from one sprawled-out group to another.

            “Do you guys ever—” Karl interrupted himself with a cough.

            “You okay?” asked Sebbi.

            Karl waved him off, grabbing a cup of water from his workstation and clearing his throat. “Do you guys ever wonder if maybe we’re crazy?” He tilted his head back and drained his cup, some of the water running down the sides of his face.

            “I knew one day he’d develop a drinking problem,” murmured Sasha.

            “Crazy?” said Sebbi. “Why makes you ask that?”

            Karl wiped his chin with his hand. “Look at us. Three classic cases of reality avoidance. I’m working on upgrading these old computer components into something approaching true artificial intelligence. Sasha’s running around like she’s Annie Oakley—”

            “Who?” asked Sasha.

            “And you,” said Karl, pointing at Sebbi, “you’re trying to unravel a knot in space-time that only you think exists.”

            “And Old Man Jones,” protested Sebbi.

            “And Old Man Jones,” conceded Karl.

            Sasha stood and rose to her tiptoes and peeped down through the window-bars at the street two stories below. The wide crevices of the concrete sidewalk were filled with rainwater, and dirty rivulets down the street’s trash-strewn gutters.

            “I’ll collect the buckets,” she said, moving toward the back of the big room, her pistol raised near her shoulder and pointing almost backwards atop her bent wrist.

            “Fine,” sighed Karl. “Sebbi and I will go tonight.”

            He began toward the washtub to give his face a splash. All the humidity was making him feel sticky. And a little nauseous.

            Sebbi stood and took a few steps toward the washtub and talked to the American flag on Karl’s back. He spoke in low tones, as if telling a secret.

            “You’ve seen the calculations, Karl. There’s a point in space-time where all the equations break down, where no solutions are possible. And it occurs right when the Cataclysm happened.”

            “Yeah, yeah. But coincidence is far from a proof, my friend. That’s pretty much the first thing they taught us at the institute.”

            “The knot’s there, Karl,” insisted Sebbi. “The data proves it. I didn’t make it up.”

            “Maybe. Or maybe your equations are off.”

            “You’ve checked them yourself! There’s a knot in space-time, Karl. But if we could somehow jump the knot, get back to how things were before the Cataclysm, we could return to the Golden Era, back when they had good medicines and treatments. Maybe we could find a cure to the plague. Or at least some decent therapeutics.”

            Karl splashed his face again. His insides felt on fire.

            “I know, I know,” said Sebbi. “You think if time travel were possible, we’d’ve been visited by a time traveler by now or seen some evidence of it. But still, the math… You have to admit, Karl. Time travel’s not… illogical. In fact, everything in physics leans toward its probability. Actually, modern physics almost requires the possibility of time travel.”

            Sebbi went to the window and watched the creatures stirring on the other side of the street. He hoped they slept soundly tonight. The water source was close-by. If he and Karl were lucky, they wouldn’t even have to meet with one during their run. Of course, they were rarely lucky these days.

            The sound of a hacking cough behind him brought his attention back inside the room. He turned just as Sasha was re-entering the room and saw Karl’s swollen, red eyes staring at back him. The strength fled from his legs, and he dropped to his knees.

            Sasha’s dark eyes moved from Sebbi’s stunned expression to the face of her brother. The empty buckets fell from her hands and clanged to the floor. Karl was infected!

            “No!” she gasped. “Karl, no!”

            “I’m sorry,” said her brother, looking from Sebbi to his sister with unfathomable sorrow. “I’m sorry.”

*****

            Sebbi turned off the pickup’s single headlight as he pulled near the town hall. He eased the truck to a stop and sat listening, intently watching the area around him. The creatures roaming the plaza were certainly stressed about something, but he could not tell what. It looked as if they were furiously digging up the turf of town square. But why? Digging wasn’t normal creature behavior.

            In the back of the truck, Karl whimpered and began pacing circles. Sebbi looked into the rearview.

            “I guess we better do this quickly, huh?” he said to Karl’s red-eyed reflection.

            He opened the truck’s door slowly, trying to prevent its usual creak, but it made no difference. The door moaned noisily as it swung, the loudest door-opening in the history of the world. He waited a moment to see if any of the nearby shadows stirred. When none did, he unclenched his teeth and stepped out of the cab and onto the uneven pavement, leaving the door ajar and the truck’s engine idling.

            “Are we alone, Karl? Are any of them near us?”

            Karl sniffed the air and rocked from foot to foot.

            “Well… we’re here,” said Sebbi solemnly, looking away from the sad, swollen eyes staring down at him. “I guess this is goodbye, buddy.”

            Karl stopped shifting and gazed toward the commotion on the plaza.

            “You were a good friend, Karl. This—This isn’t fair, what’s happened to you. I want you to know, I’ll never stop trying to find a cure. You understand? I’ll find a way to jump the knot. Whatever it takes.”

            For a moment, Sebbi thought—hoped—he saw a look of recognition behind those red-rimmed eyes. Karl’s jaw, already somewhat distended by the disease, ground as if trying to form words. Then a terrible group-howl from the town hall filled the air, and Karl threw back his head and answered the cry. He leapt from the truck and began running toward the tumult.

            Sebbi, gutted, watched his old friend go.

            Halfway to town hall, Karl stopped running and turned and stared back toward the truck. Sebbi raised a hand to wave, then couldn’t follow through with it, the gesture feeling too small for such a soul-crushing moment, and he stood there, his arm partially elevated.

            “I won’t give up, Karl,” he whispered. “I’ll find some way to jump the knot. I swear it.”

            Then Karl whirled around and bounded toward the writhing horde of creatures beyond.

            Sebbi began toward the open door of the idling truck—but stopped suddenly when he spotted three creatures trotting in his direction.

            He darted behind the truck. Had they seen him? Smelled him? They were so close, he could hear their panting.

            The air cracked with a sharp tat-a-tat-tat.

            Was that gunfire?

            Slowly, Sebbi raised himself to peer over the side of the truck.

            More gunfire. They creatures on the plaza flew into a frenzy, howling and snarling and scattering in all directions. He had seen the flashes of the gun that time, coming from the place where the creatures were digging.

            Another barrage of gunfire lit up the plaza, and the shadows between the truck and town hall shifted and churned. It took Sebbi a moment to realize that the enlarging shadows were a horde of creatures barreling straight at him.

            He lunged forward and threw himself into the cab, jerking the door closed with a loud creak just before several creatures slammed into the side of truck, rocking it violently. He struggled for what seemed half an eternity to get the truck’s transmission into drive, then stomped on the accelerator. The truck jolted forward, its big engine roaring. The creatures were knocked aside, and he felt the sick bump of at least one body as it passed beneath the truck.

            Breathing again, Sebbi shifted the truck into a higher gear and concentrated on as much of the deteriorated road as his one headlight illuminated.

            A creature’s face jutted in through the open driver’s side window, its sharp teeth snapping at Sebbi’s shoulder. Sebbi slammed his elbow between the creature’s blood-red eyes, and it fell away, its crooked spine slamming into the pavement, and its body rolling for several feet behind the racing vehicle.

            The truck bounced, and Sebbi shot a glance at the rearview mirror and saw a creature staggering across the bed of the truck toward the cab. Hearing the tinkling of glass, Sebbi looked over the dash and saw that one of the creatures had smashed the truck’s remaining headlight, throwing the road ahead into a darkness lit only by a partially cloud-covered moon.

            Sensing the creature in the truck bed drawing near to the missing back window, he slammed both feet against the brake pedal and spun the steering wheel hard, slinging the truck around and into the creatures running alongside. Then he let off the brake and stomped his right foot on the gas, keeping the wheel fully turned. The creature in the back fell sideways, hung for a moment over the side of the truck, then lost its balance and fell out.

            Sebbi flung the wheel in the opposite direction and aimed, the best he could judge in the intermittent moonlight, toward the firehouse.