Crossroads
Chloe Grant saw stars.
Their blind leap of faith rewarded her with a coppery taste of blood in her mouth. It was, as is said, not the fall that kills you, but the landing. In their case, the landing itself didn’t serve to kill anybody, though, it just hurt like hell. The kind of fall that would cover you in green and blue spots.
To escape the living tide of a swarm of dog-sized insects surrounding them, they had backed up and ran through the blinding light of the Anomaly. Mischchenko gasped in surprise, Ruiz shouted in pain, and Grant herself felt the world spinning all around.
The Anomaly, connecting two different points in time, failed to offer them stable footing on the other side. In the Appalachian mountain woods of 2024, the glowing orb of light had been hovering inches off the forest grounds. On the other side, the Anomaly must have been hovering several feet above the ground, because their combat boots found no solid footing after their leap of faith, and the three field operatives from Future Proof immediately tumbled down a grassy knoll.
That’s why Grant saw stars. Bit the inside of her cheek. Black-gloved fingers tore up loose earth and turf where she grabbed the ground in a futile attempt at braking her fall.
The bright spots and blinding light refused to subside. She not only saw stars, but something far more breathtaking.
Light. Everywhere.
All around them, orbs of light shimmered… scintillating, glittering, blinding. Spinning, hovering, glowing, flashing, flickering. Some of them flared up, growing brighter. Others dimmed. One of the Anomalies flickered and vanished, and another opened seconds after, like an exploding sun.
Dozens and dozens of Anomalies surrounded the agents. So many Anomalies that their combined light engulfed the world around them.
The trio had landed on some kind hilly grasslands. Something resembling a blue sky almost shone through the brilliant curtain of anomalous luminescence. The light drowned out anything beyond their immediate environs.
Even their black body armor and jumpsuits looked bright gray under such brilliance.
The sights were stunning and invited Grant to ponder what this meant. Mischchenko cut those ponderings short as she yanked at Grant’s arm, helping her back up.
The three operative scrambled.
Just like the light, noise also surrounded them. Even through the helmet, the Anomalies sounded like they were singing. Like a choir of wind chimes. Amplified by their numbers in close to proximity to one another, and… eerily pleasant to the ear.
Through that soundscape, the skittering and scuttling sliced through. The swarm of mutant insects poured through the anomaly atop the hill down which the agents had tumbled. Chitinous bodies with flightless wings scampered and poured out like pulsating waves of black tar, flowing down the hillside.
Acting on instinct, Grant and Ruiz fired more shots. Their futuristic EMD rifles hurled bright blue electric blasts at the small creatures—and the Anomalies reacted. Lightning arced between the blasts and Anomaly orbs, crackling and flashing ever brighter. A pulse of pure pressure pushed the agents and insects both backwards, away from the reactions, staggering and stumbling the agents and dispersing the front rows of the living flood of insects.
Then the mad chase continued.
Ruiz swore.
The dog-sized bugs hit by blasts immediately fell, only for the living tide to wash over them and sweep them up in pursuit of the three human agents.
The volley of shots had accomplished nothing but a strange chain reaction—
Mischchenko yelled something at them; something about conserving their batteries, though her words were otherwise incomprehensible—static crackling and fuzzy clicks almost eclipsed the speech Grant heard in her headset.
The agents turned tail and ran.
They ducked past another Anomaly, swerved past yet another, and the tide chased them. The humans had no idea where to go, avoiding the Anomalies on instinct. They were just trying to outrun the insect swarm. Its horrid buzzing mixed in, tainting the pleasant chimes of the Anomalies.
The coppery taste of blood only grew in Grant’s mouth, coating her tongue in a terrible film. She wanted to spit, but couldn’t because of the helmet. And she suppressed her instinct to unload her EMD’s battery for more suppressing fire against their pursuers, as another survival instinct kicked in. Having seen the chain reaction between EMD discharge and the Anomaly cluster was almost like…
Touching the stove. She still had the scars to show from touching a hot stove as a kid.
The chain reaction now resembled that hot stove, so she wasn’t going to place her hand on it.
She was going to keep her hands off it. And like that, she stopped her finger from squeezing the trigger.
Ruiz and Mischchenko must have shared that sentiment. Their run took them outside the cluster of hovering, star-like orbs, though black spots remained in Grant’s vision, long before and after she screwed her eyes shut.
The grassy hills sloped down to a wide and serene beach of bright white sands, with no signs of humanity or life otherwise.
The mutant insect swarm chased them from the cluster of Anomalies. Their hundreds over hundreds of black bodies glistened in the broad daylight of this age—wherever, whenever they were now.
The creatures looked like a crossbreed between locusts and wasps. Sleek, deadly, and with snapping mandibles, their flightless wings glistened in beautiful rainbow colors. Had they come from the future to feast?
Once they had gained distance from the cluster of Anomalies, Ruiz decided to belay Mischchenko’s previous order. He took more potshots at the swarm, downing another handful of insects. It wasn’t even close to making a dent in the unstoppable onslaught on their heels.
All those snapping mandibles, working together, could probably strip the armor from their bodies in seconds, then eat the flesh from their bones even faster.
Mischchenko shouted, “What the hell did I just say?”
Ruiz stopped firing.
“This way!”
The team curved away from the Anomalies, running for the beach.
Without mercy, without stopping, the insects changed direction in perfect harmony, like a well-drilled army. They honed in on the three agents without fail. The living tide curved in the exact same direction, giving relentless chase.
“Water! Get… get in the water,” Mischchenko shouted, losing more and more wind as they ran and ran from the unyielding swarm.
Grant didn’t hesitate. Didn’t question it. Her mind was too busy imagining the swarm, all around her, suffocating her. Eating her alive. Thus, she ran. Mischchenko’s orders were as good as any others to secure their survival now.
The soaking sensation inside her combat boots immediately turned her socks into sponges, while water splashed up to their waistlines. In a frenzied charge into the ocean waves, the agents sloshed and splashed, all holding their EMD rifles up high to secure them from exposure while backing up from the swarm. Even so, even with how useless the weapons seemed against this menace, they all aimed at the big bugs.
The ocean afforded them time to breathe. They panted in their helmets. And their labored, winded breathing still fizzled with static.
This swarm would not follow them into the water. The living tide had stopped just short of entering the watery waves where they lapped against bright white sand. The locust-wasps scuttled up and down the beach, searching for a way to reach or find their prey, and always shying away, backing up from the wet waves like frightened animals.
The tide shook Grant, but its waves weren’t strong enough to sweep any of the agents away.
Against the coppery taste in her mouth, she had never been so glad over the stinging scent of saltwater, burning in her nostrils.
Still, the insects refused to wade into the water like the humans had.
The three field agents waited. Watched.
The insect swarm flooded up and down the beach, visibly confused over having lost their free lunch.
This finally afforded Grant some glimpses of the Anomalies. So blinding was their combined light, and so erratic their patterns of flaring up, flickering, and dimming, that Grant gave up on counting after thirty orbs.
One of the Anomalies flickered, then vanished entirely. Grant suppressed the urge to swear out loud, in case that had been the one they fell through to get here—potentially stranding them in a time millions of years ago. Or thousands of years in the future? Who knew?
Yet the many Anomalies remained.
Where did they all lead? How was this even possible?
None of the records she had pored over at Future Proof could have prepared her for this. And Grant sensed the same air of fascination from her colleagues, who, like her, stood in stunned silence.
They stood in the ocean waves of this alien beach, waiting as minutes passed them by like the elements, and the briny water soaked them, while the mutant-insect swarm slowly changed direction, dispersing, turning, and eventually leaving. They had given up on their prey.
The flood of creatures poured back uphill, heading towards the Anomalies. Were they responding to the sounds?
Only once the swarm was far out of sight, did anybody speak up.
“Good thing they don’t like water, huh?” Ruiz mumbled into their radio intercom.
Mischchenko cackled. Without doubt a stress response. Grant followed up with her own: a litany of profanities without rhyme or reason, just venting into the void of their closed radio comms, as they were stranded somewhere in another era of Earth’s history, or somewhere in Earth’s future.
The swarm crawled its way back up the grass hills, pouring into an Anomaly at the edge of the cluster, until the last ones of them vanished. Even the ones that had been stunned by EMD shots were gone, dragged along by the living avalanche. Perhaps devoured.
Hard to tell.
“I hope one of you got an idea which Anomaly we just exited from,” Grant grumbled, “because I sure as shit can’t tell them apart.”
Ruiz said, “On the bright side—sorry, pun not intended—those bugs went in a different one, right there at the edge of the Anomaly… crossroads? This is like a crossroads, huh?”
Mischchenko emitted a shuddering sigh.
“We better not waste any time—get back to those Anomalies—start knocking on different doors till we find the one back home. I don’t know about you two, but I am not getting stuck here, wherever ‘here’ is. I got family to get back to.”
Dripping with oceanwater, they slowly marched back up the beach, then the hills. Their advance started cautious, slowed by the weight of their drenching. Then courage or fear drove their pace, swifter steps into the blinding jungle of light.
The rest of the landscape around them looked so familiar and yet so alien. So untouched by mankind, so distant, yet so vibrant—its grass glistened bright green in the sunlight and the light of Anomalies.
Grant’s mind reeled with the possibilities, as to what time they had wound up in. What if there was a way to navigate these wormholes?
And she wondered how it was even possible for so many Anomalies to appear in a single spot like this. Connecting different eras, bridging disparate worlds that had existed and would exist on their planet. Crossing all through time.
Crossroads.
On cue, halfway back up the hills, an Anomaly flared up brightly. A man ran from it.
He wore armor. Ancient armor. In his hand, he clutched a sword, and sandals clung to his bloodied feet. Cloth on his body was dyed in a bright blue, while the rest of him was covered in a slick, dripping crimson. Whose blood it was would have been impossible to say, leaving no space for examination, for this stranger from the past ran headfirst into the next Anomaly, vanishing as abruptly as he had appeared.
A monster followed. Chased him.
Its appearance froze the blood in Grant’s veins. And all three field agents from Future Proof froze where they stood, standing rooted to the grassy grounds like statues.
At the size of a horse, the terrible creature chasing the ancient warrior featured four long, stalky limbs, all ending in deadly claws. Its upper torso was hunched and the silhouette of its gaping mouth revealed long, jagged teeth that could mangle and entrap their prey. This predatory beast crossed the hills in frightening, leaping bounds. It vanished into the next Anomaly that the ancient man in armor had run into, gone again as fast as it had appeared.
A streak of crimson amidst the blinding light, from the blood that had coated its gray and slender body.
“Holy what the hell?” Grant blurted out.
“My word,” Mischchenko said with trembling voice, “my cue. Let’s get the hell outta here!”
Neither Ruiz nor Grant needed to be told twice.
With EMD rifles raised, ready for any threats to leap out at them from the Anomalies, they waded into the maze of glowing orbs, seeking one atop a hill.
The eerie singing chimes welcomed them like a heavenly choir. Now, though Grant’s heart pounded like a drum, she sensed a deep resonance between these Anomalies.
A hum. A thrum, resonating with her own pulse, all the way down to her very bones.
It was both menacing and soothing somehow. Awesome in the original sense of the words. Like standing in the presence of something divine—something that could wink you out of existence by accident, and very prone to such mishaps.
“This one, I think,” Ruiz said.
“Wait,” Mischchenko answered.
Too late. Ruiz walked into an Anomaly atop a hill.
“Shit.”
They followed him in.
No crossroads awaited them on the other side of the blinding light. The resonance also felt weak here.
Fierce winds howled all around them, strong enough to shake them in their boots, and cold as ice. The sky was red and bleak, drowning in clouds of dust on the wind, and ominous thunder rolled in the distance.
Only a desert of rock and sand yawned all around them.
A monstrous shriek echoed across this wasteland.
Mischchenko shook her helmeted head and was first to back right out, returning through the Anomaly to the crossroads. The others followed.
“One down, huh,” Ruiz muttered, “how many more to go, now?”
“Shut up,” Mischchenko said, leading them to the next hill, with confidence and dread alike in every stomping step of her stride.
EMDs still raised in anticipation of the worst, they walked into blinding light.
Grant’s heart fluttered. She stifled a shuddering sigh of relief at the sight of Solomon’s new Anomaly Stabilizer, the upgraded Anomaly Locking Device.
They were back in the foggy Appalachian woods. The generator attached to the ALD chugged with merry rhythm. And no insect swarm in sight.
“Shit, I can’t believe it,” Ruiz said. “Holy shit.”
“Stay on your damned toes,” Mischchenko said. “Ruiz, you and me, quick sweep. Grant, you lock that Anomaly now.”
Wait—
Something inside of Grant screamed to rebel, to resist. She could barely believe what she herself was thinking, yet it couldn’t be helped.
They had stumbled upon something incredible. If Future Proof’s R&D department—or really anybody among humanity at large—if anybody could study all of what they had just experienced, who knew what revelations awaited them?
Grant finally gave her protest a voice. “Wait, wait, what—what about—what about the pterodactyls, putting them back, or stabilizing this Anomaly? I mean, we got everything recorded on helmet cams, but I think R&D should investigate this place.”
“Grant,” Mischchenko sighed. Shades of disappointment, grief, and despair turned her next words sharp, sharper than Spencer had ever spoken to her. “Are you out of your damn’ mind? Do you realize how dangerous that place is?”
A crossroads of Anomalies.
“Yeah,” Ruiz butted in, “you wanna hear my two cents, I say we send the big birds to containment, get this bad boy locked up. I’m with Mischchenko on this.”
“Thank you,” she replied to him.
Grant shook her head. She was torn. She agreed with them, and every fiber, every survival instinct in her was screaming at her to just lock up the Anomaly.
Yet she could not help but wonder what they might lose by losing their connection to that crossroads.
She turned to stare at the Anomaly. Much fainter than with the resonance amplified between the many of them hovering together in a cluster, the one’s solitary presence here still emitted an eerie, pleasant chime, nearly inaudible, though Grant now almost felt more sensitive to it.
A nervous laugh escaped Mischchenko’s throat. Then she said, “Shit, whatever, I know how you’re feeling, Grant. I wanna know more, too, even if it’s just so we can deal with these things more safely, hell, save more lives, maybe. And, hey, like you said, we got it all on headcams. Trémaux’s going to have a field day with it, let’s—”
Burch had warned them about the pterodactyls.
That it might only be at the last moment when the beating of their wings heralded their presence.
In line with the warning, a huge flap echoed across the mountain woods like a thunderclap, and a winged beast descended upon them.
Mischchenko was the first to react, but her EMD’s shot missed, hitting only a pine tree.
The pterodactyl screeched in response.
Right when it pounced on her.