The Interior

A story of time and terrors

“-a recursion.”

Gideon blinked. His head felt fuzzy. “What?”

Cooper’s brow furrowed, concern writ large. “You ok?”

Gideon assessed. “Yeah, man. I’m good.”

Cooper nodded. “OK.” He gave the whole squad some heavy eye work. “We’re on the Interior now. We’ve got to be on the look out for anything. Mimetic viruses. Temporal quagmires. All of it. OK?”

Collective nods. The twelve of them set off down the street, moving awkwardly in their hazard gear. Overhead, architecture took strange leaps. Office blocks and apartment towers intersected at disjoined angles. Trees sprouted perpendicular to the horizon. Birds flapped on elliptical paths, disappeared, reappeared again a few hundred yards from their point of origin. A fox darted across the road ahead of them, dragging a concertina of stop-motion selves after it.

“This place always weirds me out,” Gideon muttered.

Beside him, Kai shrugged. “I just try to think of the hazard pay.”

Cooper glanced back at them. “Quiet,” he hissed. “I think we’re getting close.”

They’d got word of an incursion by The Tumult. Gideon sniffed the air. It smelled of copper.

“Shit.” He swore quietly, checked the gauge on his heavy aura cannon, felt the seals at his waist with his spare hand to make sure they were tight.

“Showtime,” Kai whispered next to him.

There was a warehouse jammed into the street to the left of them, jutting out of the earth at a twenty-degree angle, sloping down into darkness. They fanned out. Gideon and Kai took an alley to one side while Cooper led the first three of them inside. Containment was key. They couldn’t let The Tumult sneak out around the edges.

The alleyway jagged and snagged, up, down, left, right. Dumpsters littered the place like confetti, piling up so they had to climb over them one after the other.

They heard banging up ahead, picked up the pace.

A small green door in the side of the warehouse was half-buried in the earth. Something was rattling it hard. Kai put himself to the edge of the doorframe, while Gideon shouldered his cannon. Then Kai slammed a spatial disruptor beside the door’s lock. They both counted to three their heads.

The disruptor ignited. The door disappeared. Reappeared a hundred yards up in the air. Started falling. Gideon didn’t give a shit. He just opened fire.

The aura cannon let out a heavy woomph. Psychic backwash ruffled his frontal lobes and the whole world briefly smelled of summer. Something on the inside of the door squawked, snarled, chittered. There was a sense of something fluttering.

“That ain’t the fucking Tumult!” But that was all Kai got off before something snagged him, a glittering silver arm of sharp angles and reflected light. Then Kai was dragged into the warehouse.

Gideon cursed, fired, cursed again, charged, fired again. The aura cannon hummed and sang and let out snatches of bird song. He saw the heat haze glow of it hit the thing retreating further into the warehouse. Heard it squawk. Behind him people were shouting.

He chased into the dark.

“Gideon! Gideon!” Cooper and the rest caught up with him near the back of the warehouse. “What is it?”

Gideon was searching the rafters overhead. “It got Kai.”

“Tumult?”

“Something else.” Gideon was panting. “Unknown. It’s big, though. Lot of arms. Some sort of mirrored surface. I clipped it a couple of times.”

Cooper swore. None of this was good news.

“Movement!” Someone yelled, and then the world was drowned in gunfire. Gideon wheeled, saw something dropping. And fuck, it was bigger than he’d thought. Its arms unfurled, long, and long, and long, a great shimmering embrace. They reflected Gideon and Cooper and the rest of them. And he fired and fired and fired.

The arms closed in. Closed down. Shut out the rest of the world. They were in a mirror dome. In a maw. In an ending.

The aura cannon shrieked like a banshee. Around Gideon, the air was hot with muzzle flares.

The mirror was an inch from his face. He was firing into his own reflection.

And then the world shattered. He shattered. The world fell apart.

And then they were standing on the street, panting hard, staring at each other in confusion, trying to figure out what the hell just happened.

“OK,” Cooper said. “OK.” He let out a breath. “That was a rough transition.”

Gideon looked to his left. Kai was standing there massaging his jaw.

“You good?”

Kai shrugged. “Transitions always get my fillings, you know?”

“Yeah,” Gideon said, “but are you good?”

Kai’s look was puzzled. “Sure.”

Gideon glanced over at Cooper, at all of them. He checked the gauge on his aura cannon. It was full.

“Something’s not right.”

They all looked at him.

“No shit,” Kai said. “We’re on the Interior.”

“You OK?” Cooper said. “The transition hit you hard?”

“Nah,” Gideon said. “Something else. This doesn’t feel like a normal switch over to this place.”

“Temporal lag?” Cooper was concerned.

But Gideon shook his head. “Déjà vu maybe?”

Cooper’s brow creased. “Let’s ingress,” he said. “But let me know if anything else feels off.” He turned to the rest. “We’ve got a busy day ahead. There’s word of an incursion by the Tumult up ahead.”

They made headway. The streets tumbled and twisted overhead. The Interior was always like this, always unique. Always a scrambled mix of home.

Except…

“I’ve seen this before.”

They all stopped. All looked at Gideon.

“We were fighting that thing,” he said.

“What thing?” Cooper’s brow creased.

“The mirror thing.”

“What mirror thing?”

It all seemed hazy to Gideon now. His head hurt. “In the warehouse,” he said. “It was falling on us, and then it shattered, and then…” He tried to put it together. “I don’t think we just got here,” he said.

“Oh shit.” Cooper closed his eyes. “Oh shit,” he said again.

And Gideon got it just before Cooper said it, just as the noise in his head crescendoed.

“We’re caught in-“

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Thank you for reading Something’s a Little Off. If you’re interested in sampling a few other stories, and reading an excerpt of my upcoming novella, why not check out the sampler linked to here.