I had about three seconds to evaluate the messy bodies of Kennedy and Clinton. Here’s the summary, they were both utter train wrecks of cuts, bruises, and possibly broken limbs. Clinton’s leg had been put in a makeshift caste. Kennedy’s head had been bandaged and blood seeped through.

At the fourth second, Flux beeped.

Like I had a chance to be a doctor or something. The kids clearly needed more than basic first aid. They needed a surgeon and miracle drugs or some super powered person with a magical healing rack. Either kind of rack.

Two seconds after my mind wandered down that rabbit hole, Flux beeped again.

“I don’t know!” I yelled at it, abruptly agitated.

My shout echoed softly. Clinton hardly noticed. The young man sobbed and rocked. He apparently hadn’t taken my presence into account. A central figure to his life bled out slowly and neither of us could do anything.

“Bandages?” I asked Flux.

Flux beeped.

My hands wrung together. Part of me remembered our conversation a few days before. The one where I’d warned Clinton this might happen. If it weren’t for the simple ease of calculating such an outcome, I might belief myself prophetic. It worried me.

I’ll even be honest, and say it made me a bit sad. I’ll spare you a blow by blow of how I felt because that feeling got squashed as I realized something else.

The doorway back to mole people land stood open still. It would stay open until the storage unit’s main entrance slid up.

I grabbed the young man’s shoulders. He blurred a bit then feel to the side. Kennedy’s head lolled around and his eyelids fluttered. They were both alive but on last legs, and I knew that I could do nothing.

“Clinton. Listen. You’re lucky. You’re really lucky.”

“Mister Millard?” Kennedy said weakly.

My heart sized as something pulled on it.

I ignored the broken spiky haired blond and focused on the taller boy. Or young man. Whatever you call people that seem like they’re twelve but really aren’t. “He’s hanging on and you’re in New York. Or close enough to it. Your brother’s here. Remember?”

Clinton’s eyes were glazed. They couldn’t focus on me despite only being a few feet away.

“He can be here in seconds. He might already see footage on the Hero Watch website. Wilhelm might have already sent him a note. But if not, you just need to make it around the corner. To the store. Call your brother. He’s faster than you. Fast enough to,” my words died off.

Clinton nodded rapidly. His head moving in jerks from inconstant power bursts. He’d already clued into what I’d been trying to say. We were both lucky that Clinton’s thoughts ran faster than a normal person. WhiteWash had been the one to tell me that.

He stood up and limped to the door. I stared at him, his boyfriend, and the pile of collectables I’d borrowed from other lockers. This had been why Wilhelm left me that address. This gateway and meeting the boys. That had to be it.

He’d used me as a pebble to change their lives. To perhaps save them by reminding him in a moment of despair, while giving me a way to get back to the role he’d assigned me.

He moved slowly but surely. Clinton didn’t spare me a second glace. I stared at his back. There were a million things a better man might have said. Anyone but me who’d been in this hero world. And I’d warned him before back at the restaurant in another country.

What would I say? “Death is a part of this life. If you can’t handle it, get out now,” and pretend my eyes weren’t rolling too hard?

Who was I to give him advice? We could sum my existence up as a jaded man with only a few years on him and zero fear of death. Granted my years were almost always action packed. If our versions of the hero world were pools, his life in Wilhelm’s school could be like a kitty pool with a lifeguard. I floated in the damn ocean with twenty foot swells and a life raft tied to my feet so I’d suffer regardless of how much…

Never mind. I lost the thread of my analogy. In sum, he and the other girls had ventured into the deep end. Once again, I’d sort of let it happen.

So, while I stared at his slowly moving back, thinking of all the words that should have been said to him, another set of self-centered thoughts occurred to me. That answers about Alice would be back there with all the walking, talking rats. And it would be a spoiler to tell you why now, but the answers are all there. They’re in this story and the last one. So, we’ll leave it at that.

Once he opened that door, my chance at getting back to the mole people world under my own power would slip away. There were vaguely established reasons for wanting to go back there. I hoped my earlier suggestion about Kennedy’s brother had been right and ran for the portal.

My body hit the portal. It resisted and my pain lanced through me. I sunk into darkness. My stomach clenched. Eternity pulled until my mind and vision were in different time zones. Here’s a better description. Imagine a belly flop with your face into inky waters.

Both legs gave out. I retched wildly upon dark dirt. Days of semi-healthy eating were ruined by a teleport. If only I could remember what to do with my stomach. Maybe I’d had it wrong all these years and the answer had been not to eat two hours before playing with portals.

This time, I didn’t bother mopping up my mess. I stood up and looked around. Darkness extended either direction. My eyes were still overloaded by the television screen. I put a handout, found a wall, and slowly marched in a direction. They were all the same.

I couldn’t hear fighting. There should have been some. Clinton had run from someone up here. A larger mole person. One of their leaders. Some angry worm mount with spirals of teeth that buzzed like a chainsaw.

Where were the girls? The tree of them and their glowing powers should have lit up like beacons. Clinton had been staying for them. Because he felt some sense of responsibility. They had to be nearby.

The earth shook. A foot slipped. Down I went, slamming into the wall. My head throbbed. A welt formed and the skin under my hair moistened. It’d taken me days to get near clean and heal up, and all of it had been ruined.

I lifted myself gingerly, using the wall. Well, my legs lifted me. The point still stands that I got back up only to fall over as the earth below me shook again. I repeatedly tried to stand. My thinking fuzzed with each rattle of dirt. Part of me stopped to register more important issues.

If I wasn’t on Earth, should the dirt below me be called earth? I’d been on Mars once, but I hadn’t called it the mars under my feet. It hadn’t been the feeling of mars squishing between my toes.

Flux beeped.

I nodded.

“Right.”

My voice sounded faint. I coughed then fumbled down the hall before another merthquake could send me to the ground. You’re right though, merthquake was an utterly stupid name. The butchery of Mole and earthquake made no sense. Ted would tell me to just call it a quake. Nice and simple.

See what happens when I’m left alone in the dark? I think stupid. Not stupidly. It’s like my brain turns to babbly mush and tries to come up with smart sounding ideas, like “Get to the Alice” in some deep slurring voice.

Onward I went. The dirt quakes came on. All around me the sounds of material crumbling filled the air. Flecks of sod fell into my hair. More were in between my toes. I kept going, trying to figure out which way went down.

That’s where I’d find the girls. At or near the planetoids core. That’d been our stupid plan upon first being launched at this planet. We’d go to the center of the place, put a bomb in it, and explode everything. Or collapse all the fragmented moons. Somehow it went sideways. The girls followed what called them. I followed them because of a distant sense of reasonability and journalistic integrity.

Fine. I can hear you laughing at the idea of me having journalistic integrity. Like I existed to get to the truth of a good story.

The boys had been out to be supportive of their friends during a time of woes. Clinton and Kennedy were now out of the picture and hopefully getting bedrest and male nurses or whatever. My dad and Hans were out of the picture. Lady Alexandria had made her cameo and left. Knowing a force of nature like Lady Alexandria, she’d show up again.

There are two people we haven’t seen much of since I’d left the moon. Cindy, and my sister Brittney. By extension, I hadn’t seen much of their unicorns. They’d be next. Abruptly showing up to be uselessly aggressive when things truly mattered.

I kind of hoped to see my sister again. She’d been so vibrantly annoying. Plus, she had a mechanic horse that could serve as a nightlight.

Flux beeped.

The sound threw me off. I’d forgotten Flux cast off a dim light, but its hovering form over my shoulder did nothing to illuminate the rest of our surroundings. So, that didn’t work in my favor. The problem had to do with my eyes. They took forever to adjust. Some time later I could almost see my own feet and the dirt vibrating.

I kept on marching. Last time we’d wandered down here for days, utterly lost and confused as to which way got us out. The girls weren’t around to guide me. I needed help.

“Flux?”

It beeped.

“Do you know where to go?”

It beeped again.

That had to be a yes. Which meant the damn toaster humper had simply been letting me fumble around uselessly. I gestured with a hand. “Well, could you?”

Off it went. I kept a brisk pace with the high-speed robot, hoping that this time wouldn’t end up in a jump across some pit.

The world shook repeatedly. The passageway I’d been wandering in grew smaller. I could only imagine a playground of baby mole people hiding back here. This route could be a shortcut to some useful place, or an utter dead end.

Flux slipped through easily enough, beeping happily all the while. Its joyous sounds served as the only source of life besides the rumbles. I closed my eyes, ignored the size of the hole in front of me, and got down on my hands and knees.

It couldn’t kill me. It wouldn’t kill me. Being in a closed space meant nothing and I didn’t have nightmares of coming back to this exact sort of hell hole. On the other end there would be more dirt, another tunnel, and an endless journey. I knew for certain those kids from the cave in shortly after my eighteenth birthday were long dead and buried.

Those were Ted’s kids, for anyone playing the home game. I’d been trapped in a cave in with them. I couldn’t remember the exact details of how we got there, and I’d failed to link their faces with Ted’s until after we had our whirlwind engagement half a year ago.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

And if you wonder why I couldn’t remember Ted’s face. Well, imagine yourself in trapped, running out of air, with children. You don’t get to notice the other adult’s face. You don’t get to pay much heed to his insane ramblings. You see their faces and how miserable they are.

Because before all this started happening, I considered myself a decent guy. Now here I was, hoping a planet of mole people would cave in on itself and take the entire race with them.

Dirt fell around me. I ignored it and kept crawling. My thoughts rambled off to any one of a dozen different events exactly like that cheery one from seconds ago. They came and went, and still I shuffled forth through the long unending tunnel.

“how long,” I huffed but couldn’t breathe right. The tunnel had grown too tight and all the emaciation in the world couldn’t make me fit properly.

Dirt shook. It crunched on me and the world grew tighter. My eyes rolled beneath tightened eyelids. I started to see utter nonsense. Black dots popped like bubbles and bits flaked away. I took a slow breath then coughed.

My heartbeat sped. Both arms struggled to get out of the tightened passageway. I needed air. The spots grew. My eyes refused to open. Dirt filled my nostrils. I tilted my head and tucked it into a shoulder to get room. Wet coughing wrecked my body, sending the dirt around me falling away.

Blacking out would be unacceptable. I got loose enough to get a fresh lungful of air and clawed my way forth.

Flux beeped.

I could feel the weight of untold tons above me. Dirt that clung to my body. It should have crushed me but whatever deity ran my life saw fit to give me enough room to panic. I dug through crumbling dirt. Flux, that floating toaster fucker, had led me into this hellish hole.

Flux beeped again, then gave a jaunty tune.

I cracked open an eye and found myself facing barely an illuminated cave. My arms were free, and I stood up, wiping off dirt and pretending I hadn’t been panicking back there. You should pretend too, I’m very manly and not at all mildly chaotropic.

The earth rattled. I put out both arms to ward off the sides of the room. They obeyed my orders and stayed standing.

“Flux?”

It spun a lazy circle around me. I blinked a few times then shook off another layer of dirt.

“Where are we?”

Its robotic eye narrowed and shifted to different parts of the cave. After a moment of careful study, Flux bounced up and down then spun again in a circle. That proved useful so on I went.

I don’t want to bore you with hours of repetition and hunger trials, so let’s fast forward and say the world around me shook violently for much longer, and the ground caved in. Which certainly did happen.

I panicked because falls often resulted in brief unconsciousness. Or maybe it was my feet no longer being on solid ground.

Okay, let’s also say that a lot of uneven surfaces stuck out of the merth, and remember that it was pitch black, and my dexterity isn’t the greatest. Sure, I can outrun a Lagrange Lizards on Zigeron Seventeen A, but that mean I can dodge rocks while sliding.

Funny thing. When you’ve been knocked on your ass as many times as I have, the line between dreams and reality blurs a lot. Doing drugs or being subjected to them takes a fuzzy line and mushes it. One image often blurred into the next. Smells crept into each other.

I could smell freshly tilled dirt. It tickled and hung heavy in the air. My chest heaved weakly. An arm tingled but I couldn’t tell which one.

My eyelids fluttered.

Idle humming filled the air. The tune had no rhythm or reason to its flow. It paused and changed pitches. That stopped, and fingertips lightly caressed my face.

“Sexy Adam fell down the hole. Bumped his head and set free his soul,” Alice said.

I cracked open an eye. Everything blurred and tilted sideways repeatedly. It kept tilting until the horizon stopped spinning in a circle.

“Where?”

“I think I get it now,” she said in calm tones. “This is the same place as always. Where I am. Where we are.”

The words were long gone before my addled mind registered them.

I looked at Alice. Her body stood in two places at once. A light from the giant face shot through the raven-haired version of her, projecting the second one in spurting burst. As if that cheerleader Alice was a projection through a screen. A shadow with color.

And I could barely wrap my head around it.

“You're thinking about something, lover, baby, my Adam, and that makes you forget to talk.”

The large mouth in the background moved with those words.

“It would be so nice if something made sense for a change,” I said. The two Alice’s I knew. This might be a nightmare butt it didn’t feel like a dream.

“I'm afraid I can't explain myself, Adam, baby. Because I am not myself, you see?”

She smiled, and the face in the darkness with one eye smiled at the same time. Flux beeped.

My heart seized. The floating eye robot had never been in one of these before. It’d always been absent during my dreams. I couldn’t wrap my brain around what that implied either. Part of me simply didn’t want to. In the long run it’d matter, or it wouldn’t. Flux played its role in this madness. It kept me supplied with reminders of my place as a poorly drawn stick figure.

But I stared at the eye behind Alice, and I wondered about Flux.

Then all that went away as the dark haired Alice strode towards me. She smiled. Light projected through her from the other figure, then the second Alice appeared briefly. That one smiled too, a broken stutter that went away in a single blink.

Raven haired Alice blipped out too. The smile in the background went away and so did everything else. My mind clicked on. That special feeling of both surfacing for air and stirring from slumber.

In that space of shallow awareness before I woke, Alice’s words drifted one at a time as if carried by a meandering breeze.

“Oh Adam. They were wrong. It was better to be loved than feared.”

I found myself face down in dirt, again. That same eye opened, staring a hole in the ground that went nowhere.

A single bright point sparkled in the distance. It simmered then nothing else existed. My head fell to the floor to peer through the crack. There were colors swirling in the distance around that bright point. Too many colors that meant something impossible. Scratching distracted me. My eyes blinded and the sight in the distance became less important. I pushed myself up slowly and looked around.

Flux hovered nearby, staring at me. It tilted down to peer at the hole I’d had my face in. The gap tightened. Not-Earth rumbled and shifted into position, blocking me off from the impossible swirl in the distance.

I stuck a finger into it and found the surface harder than ever to get through.

“What the fuck does that mean,” I mumbled.

There were a dozen possibilities, and I’ll share some facts to explain why trying to figure this stuff out is stupid. We can easily imply the following, Alice had reached her core self. A one-eyed smiling thing in the darkness. Which, you know, is absolutely fan-fucking-tastic in its implications. The world around us was collapsing somehow, in time with Alice reaching that spot.

Flux was a floating eyeball. That face of third Alice was missing an eyeball. Hans feared Flux because he hadn’t invented the robot yet, and it shouldn’t exist. Flux had traveled through time. Flux scared Wilhelm.

Obviously, we were dealing with things well beyond a mere mortal mind like mine. Sure, I’d once been bathed in a pool of mind-expanding chemicals so intense I could see all of creation for about five seconds. I’d also blocked out most of what I saw. Of course, I haven’t shared that adventure because it happened on a Tuesday, and Tuesdays suck. So do Mondays and Tuesdays.

Even if I knew what it all meant and why it linked together, I couldn’t do anything useful. Flux refused to copy me objects of actual value. I plopped down and tried to understand.

Understanding didn’t come. Exhaustion did. My head swam and I tilted to one side then passed back out. The nightmare I had that time involved tentacles, jesters with jingling bells, and some other giant dude with a robe and toga. He looked like the idiot General type hero if I’d ever seen one.

During that wonderful nightmare, my outstretched hand had firmly clasped an unmoving mole man’s ass. Imagine my surprise. I bolted up, stared at my hand in horror, then screamed “Flux!”

It beeped. Because Flux has other noises.

“I need to dip my hand in gas and light it on fire!”

Nothing. A second later Flux’s green lasers went into effect.

They went on for a long time.

There plopped a life-size replica of the Purple Prose. That damn ship stretched on for half a mile at least. Under it and all around the base were more bodies. I don’t mean celestial ones, in case you somehow thought there were other options. The nonsense surrounding my life had morphed from a long endless tunnel, to a cavern, to a cave in, to some wide open area with no visible sky and an endless sea of dead corpses everywhere.

Plus, the excessively annoying and ever present Purpose Prose.

The deceased were all mole people. I strode along the ground inspecting. Each one died with weapons in their hands. Endless collections of sticks and guns and some of the fanciest maces I’d ever seen. They made no sense, branched across every type of technology level I’d ever seen, and ventured into the weird. One dead mole man had giant rubber dildos that were hooked together by a chain that might have been modeled after sperm.

Let’s pretend it wasn’t.

Another man had some sort of claw extensions on his feet and hands. Two more had throwing stars that were bigger than my head.

This dead field went on for ages. Partway through it I felt sick. A few steps later and even my jaded mentality couldn’t keep up with the sheer numbers of dead.

Naturally, Flux got footage of the messy miles of bodies. It went on for a while. I eventually took my shirt off and wrapped it around my mouth and nose. Even a seasoned man such as I couldn’t get over the smell.

Imagine a million monkeys’ shit on each other, rolled around in it, bathed in a river, peed in it, then drank it, and recycled that some more until you got a level of foulness that only a mother could love. Mixed enough metaphor? Perhaps disgusted at my usage of a mother’s love to describe this level of ick? Well, by the time I’d reached the center of an endless field, I’d about driven myself insane with an internal rant. Which is why I distracted you with something foul instead of recounting every single odd body I came across.

In the middle of the nightmare, sat a clear ten-foot-wide path of pristine dirt. I wept with manly relief and dove past a pile of worms. It served as the only refuge in this nonsense.

In case you’re wondering, not special happened because it was the center. I simply got a few minutes to breathe and ponder life. After a moment to center myself, it was time to match onward. Alice’s situation might be beyond my control but finding the trio of girls would be my next best course of action. They could alter reality, I felt pretty sure that’d lead me to Alice.

“Flux?”

It beeped.

“What the fuck happened here?” See? Score one for journalistic integrity. I tried.

Flux gave one of its long low tones that did nothing to clear up my confusion.

“This is too many. What’s the ratio on bodies to feet? This, I think this is worse than the tidal wave on Miami.” That tide wave had wiped out an ass ton of empty apartments, but no one actually lived in Miami. Most of the property turned out to be tax ductions.

Flux beeped. I stared at its camera eye.

“I hope they’ve conserved this out for you people at home. It’s, it’s an utter mess.”

Maybe I’d seen worse. Maybe I’d walked into a plague riddled city in the middle ages and watched dead bloated bodies float down the river. Because time travel happens to all of us.

It wasn’t specifically the body count that bothered me. The choice of victims certainly didn’t have me feeling guilt at my earlier words about wiping them all. Wishing genocide on an entire race couldn’t be considered healthy but who gives a fuck about that.

What made this horror show truly horrific, is that it made no sense. I couldn’t reconstruct a sane scenario. There were obvious signs of battle all over the dead bodies, but they weren’t consistent.

It seemed like every single body the students had destroyed in their escape had ended up here. There dozens of others with wounds that didn’t match Clinton of Kennedy’s styles. Leticia might have punched some of them into oblivion, but the ones with claw marks made zero sense. A good chunk were probably sword wounds or some other sharp object. A collarbone had been split down to the chest which might have matched an ax wound.

. I’ll spare you additional details but let’s say that most parts that belonged inside weren’t anymore and leave it at that.

Giving up would be the best option. I pointed anywhere but here and asked Flux, “This is the right way, right?”

It beeped once then bobbed above the corpses, floating further into madness. I stayed still and took a few deep breathes. The air tasted tangy and thick. My head still swam from the likely conscious upon falling a few hours before. I could probably blame the colors and weird dreams on one too many smacks to my noggin.

At some point, I found two mole people I recognized. There were the queens. The red and white ones. Beyond dismembered but clinging to each other. Both feet halted. I stared at the pair, shuddered then shook my head.

Someone out there, please explain to me what the hell I should have taken away from this carnage?

I couldn’t tell you how long the walk stretched on for. I couldn’t accurately describe how my brain grew numb, then raw, then screamed at me, and went numb again. At least once.

The aimless stagger left me starving. That’s unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Dead bodies make more noise than my belly. It’s a perk of decomposition. I couldn’t figure out what my dreams meant. Probably important but let’s pretend it doesn’t matter and move on.

Here’s what mattered. At some point I found another clearing. This one far larger than the one before. There, Cindy and Brittney’s unicorns stood in front of another dazed trio.

I’d found my missing field trip members.

***

Oddity Study Highlights

Name: Think I’m Losing my Mind

Translated from Technobabble by Captain Longhall, the sucker currently in charge of Area 51

Somewhere out there, a famous quote rattles on about the definition of insanity. It’s doing the same shit repeatedly and expecting different results. Such as taking a shit and expecting to be done with the whole mess.

I’ve been writing these journal entries for ages, expecting to be done. Truth is they locked me in here. Not even sure I’m me anyway. Might be a clone or a robot or some vat monkey with a cap on its head and a mirror that doesn’t work right. Not even sure if I’m taking over for someone else or someone else is taking over for me. That’s the beauty of bureaucracy. Just walls of documents, maps, grids, people asking me what to do with them. We make a decision and some powered smuck is shoved into a black site for ages.

The beauty of my job is that if medical fringe science can solve it, someone’s shoved it in me. My mind’s backed up on a computer in case it’s needed to make decisions and my body is under psychic control. That mind is protected by psychic fields so strong that it’s created a third version of me that can tell if the first two are compromised. I have implants somewhere that keep my mind functioning despite frequently partaking of the blessed sauce that is my savoir in troubled times.

Here’s the thing. I know I’m alone in here and trying get these notes straightened out. I know the walls should be some of the most heavily fortified ones in existing because the documents I’m working with are that sensitive. But I can hear someone talking. It ain’t me. I may be on a fourth month bender that’s sure to mean liver failure in another few days, but I’m not the one talking. It should be impossible.

It says that there’s been a mistake somewhere. Not with me. But with everything.