ZOMBIE WATERFALL -ROUGH DRAFT- MARK ANTHONY MASTERSON 2002
Chapter 1
The young man calling himself Harold Curtiz watched from the window of the hearse-drawn carriage as the thick bushes outside the forest about a hundred yards from the road shook suddenly and the sound of gunshots accompanied a flock of nightingales erupting into the violet sky, unable to turn away as he saw a human figure stumble from the bushes, head lolling at an obviously neckless angle, one eye empty of jelly, the other occluded and white, below that a man's jaw dripping with flesh, legs jerking upward spastically, gusts of buckshot twisting its torso, driving it forward to the clearing where another human figure stood up from the tall grasses, this one in black armor, plastic visor reflecting the rising sun, raising his flamethrower in a smooth motion while shouting wordlessly and dousing the harried corpse with gas and fire, pulling on the trigger for a long second, releasing it and watching the body catch, crackle, and shamble on, then yelling and pulling it again, backing up and pulling, sending ejaculations of flame over the dead man who finally fell to what was left of his knees and was still, immolating in supplication to the dark soldier, who then turned and seemed to watch Harold as the caravan moved steadily on.
The young man whose official papers all declared him to be Harold Curtiz and so must be Harold Curtiz leaned forward to tap on the glass separating him from the driver.
The older man started, then reached forward to turn up the volume knob on the rusty radio. Harold tapped again.
The coachman's shoulders dropped, and he wrapped the reins that ran to the steering wheel around his post. With a clear grunt, he pushed the stencilled window aside. "Again?"
"No, we don't have to stop," said Harold with the smile that had yet to have an effect on the grizzled driver. "I just wondered... well I thought, I mean, I didn't know this sort of thing happened so close to the school."
The driver ran his gloved hand across his stubbly jaw and glanced to make sure the old highway was still running straight. "What thing?"
"That," said Harold, gesturing towards the black smoke now rising behind them now. "You know."
"Oh. That."
"Yes. Could you turn the radio off?" It was only hissing static now, with occasional snippets of what seemed to be techno beat and advertisements for Mexican soap, but it was loud enough to be a distraction.
The driver shook his head, seemingly unable to imagine why anyone would want to interrupt a perfectly good program, but the customer is always right, even if he wasn't paying the fare himself, he should certainly cough up for the tip, especially if he wanted to get back anytime, ever, and needed the services of anyone skilled enough to be part of this caravan, that's for sure, the weight of the world on their shoulders, these drivers, ain't no one can get too near the radiagical engines, think just anyone knows how to steer these things, nossir, and not navigate while time-clad, that's for sure, but if you say you want to talk rather than trust the skills of professional, been doing this for fifteen subjective years, well, you just go on because you're the boss, and turned the knob down a hair.
"Better?" he asked.
"Thank you," said Harold. "So, does it?"
"Does what?"
"Does this happen a lot?"
"You asking me daft questions? It seems to happen more often than it should, yes, but I make no bones about it, as you're a student type and that's as between you and them."
The young man put away the copy of Trenton's Understanding F.F.U. he'd had in his lap and stopped smiling. He put his hand through the window to grip the shoulder of the driver's frayed tuxedo coat.
"I want to know if the Walkers get this close to the school often, you lousy past-time hack," he said, his voice dropped and flat. "I don't want your folksy shit, I don't want to have to drive this thing myself, and I don't want to ask again."
He patted the shoulder twice and leaned back, returning to his former earnest smile.
The driver furrowed his brow and stared straight ahead. He coughed with gruffly concealed concern. "It's the Alley. Your university's only about a hundred miles from the Alley and fifty from the coast. You know, them pirate ships and all." He glanced up into the lightening sky. "You get some Eaters, and you get some Guardsmen coming through, but it's no danger. Not like it used to be."
"You get many Error Messages coming through?"
"What?"
"Never mind. Say, if we use time-cladding in the coach here, then how do the Walkers make it through the Alley?"
The driver snorted and unwrapped the reigns. "Something tells me you don't know much, study boy. A way with words, but that's about it. And if'n you think there ain't a flame gun cocked and ready to wipe out whatever's inside that coach you're in, then you best do some more reading." Then he swiftly snapped the glass window closed and pulled a second steel barrier across.
The young man calling himself Harold got a queer half-smile on his face and looked out the window at the distant palm trees in the fog. One hand reached out to find his book again.
The window and shield were flung to the side, "And no more pissing til we reach the station!" then just as quickly slammed shut.
***
The actual Harold Curtiz, the man who had been born with that name, had of course already known all this nucleagician and temporal triage stuff. That's why they had invited him to join the graduate program, something to do with a paper he'd submitted on Crash Theory. The official letter in the valise praised it for being "remarkably hep, man" and so ahead of the curve that "we laid that track down about two years ago, so you got bones."
The young man in the coach didn't think there would be much trouble with this impersonation of his old friend. Not for the length of time he'd be there. He had his good memory, he had the required texts; any gaffes could be explained away as zone feedback (and he wasn't sure that wouldn't be the case anyway. They'd crossed at least three on this leg of the journey alone). He had been a student. This was simply a greater magnitude of bullshit.
The certifiably genius, graduated, studying, hard-working Harold had believed in the power of bullshit. Part of the paper which had attracted the notice of the school (the part that didn't hurt the impostor's brain - the mathemagics was scrambled nonsense, which he vaguely understood to be part of the point) had an aside which postulated that the Crash was just as much psychological as cosmological. The body affects the mind and the mind affects the body, as is well known, and all the particles of the Universe are its body and human beings are its only known mind. Romanian physicists and entropy bombs aside, officer, what did the Universe in was occluded aetheric arteries caused by centuries of accumulated human bullshit, resulting in a massive cosmic thrombosis and Time Crash. Take them away.
The genuine Harold's paper less facetiously posited that the effects of the Crash were not limited to the Aftershocks, Error Messages, Doubling and other spectacular physical phenomena. He was sure that there had been severe mental damage done to the collective unconscious, as well as the little individual unconsciouses.
"It's like this, Dylan," he said that night in the cornfield, dropping the empty vodka bottle. "And I know you don't want to hear it. But listen. And listen. What's that movie? Hitchcock. The one you like? Listen."
"Jesus, I'm listening. You drunk bastard," said the younger Dylan, who in those days had not yet found himself taking up his friend's work for his own purpose.
"What's that movies? Doesn't matter. I'm telling you this because you're a friend, right? We went through it together and we're both here. Okay?"
Dylan laughed. "Okay."
Harold took a deep breath. "Okay. It's this... you're on pause. You're always going to be on pause. Because you were there, then. You were, let me say this, you were then, when it crashed and the math proves that it's stuck inside you. When you can't breathe. You know."
Dylan shook his head. "I don't..."
Harold grabbed him by the sleeves of his autumn jacket. "Look, you... I know you. And you and the grave. You go to that grave every fucking week. Yeah, big intellectual man just said fuck. Fuck. I'm drunk. Yes. But listen. I have to tell you. You're stuck. You're stuck there, on the lake. In the fire. Okay? You don't want to hear this. But your brain, okay, it was being axe... accessed, big emotion, okay? when they Crashed it. The math... you're a bad sector. You got scratched and that, that, that's why you couldn't finish school. You can't move away from it. Part of your brain is then, still, see?"
The young blonde man stood still, a solid expression on his face. "You don't know what you're talking about."
Harold's bearded face crumpled with emotion, a clenched fist muppet. "Dylan, Dylan... it's everyone. Everyone. Everybody who got swept in, or dred - dedged - dredged from past-time, too. But us, us especially. We were then. Which doesn't mean anything. Don't, don't look at me like that, man. I'm -- you're a bad sector, I ran the numbers on you, it's so clear. It's not about, you know... What's that movie?"
Dylan exhaled. "Vertigo?"
"Yeah. You seen it. On pause."
"I haven't seen Vertigo for eight years, Harold. No one's seen Vertigo for eight years. Why don't we go home?"
Harold had tears running unnoticed into his beard as he released Dylan and looked up into the starless sky. "I just... I just want you to know. It's not your fault. It's not the way you thought it would be." He smiled quickly, as if with realization. "I miss everybody."
The language in the thesis was gussied up with fringineer jargon, but still boiled down to 1) We're all messed up. 2) We miss everybody. That's what every book on F.F.U. says, Harold, and I only read the introductions. Why you deserved this free ride, I don't know, but thank you for dropping out of the race.
The young man's eyes closed, but the room where Harold's breathing echoed, the fire, and the open grave were waiting for him. He opened his eyes again. A mountain under the rapid sun in the distant west eroded and rose with the look of an amateur Gumby cartoon, undulating in a flux field near the time zone border.
We're gonna use bullshit to change fate, okay, Harold? We're gonna find her. They have everything we need, and we have all the lies they want.
"It's all about bullshit, Harold. Just remember. You're the bullshit master," said the young man called himself Harold Curtiz, who had once been Dylan Hermes, and who was now whoever he had to be.