Reality Rip (Chapter 1?)

Author’s Note: Hey everybody! First post on this site! Real exciting stuff. Still trying to work out what this site will be, but if it is just a sounding board for my writing then I figured I’d start with a story that I’ve been kicking around for a while. This could potentially be the start of a longer narrative, I’m not sure. It’s a little horror comedy thing that I think has some good jokes and imagery. It could definitely use another edit pass but that’s not what this site is about!

If Eric Pullman had been a character in a 90s sitcom rather than a 26 year-old oil change technician moments away from an excruciating and improbable death, his catch phrase would be “What are the odds!?”. As an eternal optimist whose life was a series of unlikely disasters, it was a phrase that he found himself saying aloud often. He found it was an effective way for him to deflate the seriousness of a grave situation, like when his mother and father were both diagnosed with a rare form of brain cancer that had progressed beyond the point of any form of effective treatment. The odds were pretty good, it would turn out, as the well they drew their water from had been contaminated by a battery manufacturing plant a few miles from their home. Only Eric was spared as he didn't drink anything that didn't come from a bottle with a label that either listed an ABV percentage or featured the word “electrolytes”.

He most recently found himself muttering “what are the odds” when his car refused to start this morning leaving him with no choice but to embark on a 4 mile walk to the oil shop on the hottest day of the year. He had made it half way when he swung a necessary detour to the Snack Stop for something to drink. Eric mentally repeated his mantra when he saw that they were out of Glacier Freeze Gatorade leaving him with the inferior option of Frost Arctic Blitz. He considered deviating from the “blue” branch of the Gatorade flavor family tree but everyone knows those flavors are for recreation and what he needed now was rehydration.

In a rare instance of back-to-back “what are the odds”, Eric was left pondering probabilities as he found himself holding an empty bottle of backup-option-blue Gatorade and looking at a bottle shaped form of blue liquid suspended in the refrigerated beverage case. The cool air blasting out of it chilled his sweat soaked T-shirt as he fixated on the perfectly still translucent blue shape, contoured for maximum gripability. He recalled reaching in, grabbing the bottle, and pulling it out. He looked down at his hand and sure enough, it was there. But the liquid hadn't come with it. That's not right. That's not how things are supposed to work.

Eric knew from the public service announcements he had passively absorbed since childhood that when you experience something that seems truly improbable–impossible even–that the best course of action is to ignore it. To shrug your shoulders and go about your day like there's nothing out of the ordinary. He recalls colorful puppets on TV repeating the clumsy rhyme “Never you mind, it happens sometimes!” after one of them threw a paper plane only to have it suspend itself motionless in the air. But he couldn't ignore this. He was so thirsty and he should have a bottle of frosty blue Gatorade in his hand but he didn't. What are the odds? What are the odds?

According to statistics that are kept strictly classified from people of Eric's station, it is estimated that only one in 100,000 people will ever be aware of a reality rip. It's unclear how many perceive a rip without acknowledging it or reporting it but it was assumed it was a number that is orders of magnitude greater. Most of them are perfectly benign disruptions to causality, like this one might have been had Eric not turned it over and over in his mind like a pebble in a rock tumbler.

As it were, the rip spread from the empty plastic bottle to the hand clutching it until there was no distinction between the two. He flexed his new translucent plastic fingers until they popped off, one by one, twisting into countless plastic spiders that skittered around the stained linoleum of the Snack Stop floor. What are the odds?

Most rips–even the ones that are consciously observed–don't harm anyone. They are simply annoyances. Car keys that slip through a pocket that is free of holes or steps that are an inch higher than they were the last time you walked on them. Unfortunately for Eric, this rip was doing tremendous harm to him and was quickly becoming a problem for everyone in his vicinity. He had no time to worry about any of his fellow Snack Stop shoppers, though, as he was more concerned with the inky black tendrils extending from the stump of his right wrist in a futile attempt to wrangle the plastic finger spiders.

An uncharacteristically sober cashier noticed that the man vibrating in front of the beverage case wasn’t just tweaking as he saw the tendrils whipping around and hit the reality rip emergency alert on his phone. The alert set off the alarm at the nearest Continuity Preservation Agency department, who leapt into action and clambered into their aging transit van to save the world. His phone then pinged all the others in the area to let them know that, if it wasn’t too much trouble, they should get as far away from his location as possible. The secondary effect of the emergency alert button was to cause every phone in the vicinity to emit an ear piercing screech, a sound closer to a human screaming when encountering imminent death than the usual mechanical alerts that similar warnings might produce. When confronted with a rip, it was best to avoid directly observing it with any of one’s senses. The sound of a primal scream was a defense mechanism, not dissimilar to the ones a person can create with their own voice, as it would drown out whatever sounds the rip produced. Ideally, the app would also shine a laser into the eyes of everyone in the vicinity to render them blind but that was still being held up in the research and development department.

The screams may have protected bystanders but they did little for Eric. He reached his remaining hand out toward the thin tendrils snaking from his stump but found that he was unable to force them back inside his body or reassemble any of his hard or soft tissues through sheer force of will. The best his efforts could manage was to turn his remaining hand into tiny stop motion animated prehistoric humans, complete with loincloth and stone-tipped spears. They swarmed the tendrils, stabbing at them like they were a cornered mammoth. They managed to impale a few tentacles before being summarily dispatched as the remaining ones coiled around them and squeezed until their heads burst like party poppers with a spray of confetti and the faint scent of gunpowder. The surviving cavemen retreated under a promotional endcap for Takis, vowing to get their revenge.

One of the bystanders, 57 year old postal worker Caroline Rayes, reflexively stomped one of the aforementioned living plastic spiders, which she immediately came to regret as it meant the rip was now also her problem. The checkered linoleum tile of the convenience store melted under her stomping foot, becoming a primitive CGI animated grid, the kind that might have been used to illustrate the concept of “warping space-time” in an educational video, and sucked her down into a void that used to be the concrete foundation of the Snack Stop.

Meanwhile, the Continuity Preservation Agency team that had been dispatched to deal with this situation was being held up by a freight train that, despite the complaints that had been registered at every Greencourt city council meeting for the past 3 years, continued to block street intersections for over 20 minutes at a time.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” Agent Foxylady punched the steering wheel. “What is this shit?! This can’t be legal!”

“It’s not, sir,” piped up Agent Silverbullet from the passenger seat.

“Then why is it happening?!” His left hand clenched the wheel as his right ran through the remains of his thinning hair.

“The law isn’t enforced, sir.” Silverbullet cleaned her glasses for the dozenth time in this pitstop.

“Then what is the point of the fucking law!?” A fine spray of saliva flew from his mouth and coated the inside of the windshield of the windowless transit van that served as their mobile headquarters, as well as Silverbullet’s just re-cleaned glasses. “Ghosttown, wanna do something about this?”

Agent Ghosttown was in the cargo area of the van, a pair of meta-optic goggles on her eyes and a well-worn wireless keyboard balanced on her lap. “Yeah, that’s kind of what I’m doing right now. Try yelling some more, maybe it will help me concentrate.” She mashed at the keyboard, seemingly without rhyme or a reason to any outside observer. With every keystroke, an array of needles and scanners suspended on delicate mechanical arms from a gyroscopic stabilized rack mounted to the ceiling of the van traversed the exposed brain matter of Agent Killershark. A rack of displays connected to vitality sensors along his body assured Ghosttown that, despite his deep anesthetized state and the open hinged door on the base of his skull, he was still alive.

Foxylady remembered his HR mandated mindfulness training and took a deep breath and counted slowly to ten. “Alright…Ghosttown, could you please do something about the train that is currently blocking our path and endangering countless lives?”

More scattered keyboard tapping. The soft whirring of the mechanical arms as they prodded specific points of Killersharks brain and detected the resulting change in brain waves. Ghosttown remembered her HR mandated open communication training and censored her response. “I’m working on it. You know it’s a very delicate process to avoid any unintended collateral damage–”

“We don’t have time for delicate processes, get rid of the damn train!” Foxylady punched the horn for emphasis, which did little to move the stopped train.

“Fine! Damn!” Ghosttown hit the key command to execute the best sequence she had been able to devise under the less than ideal circumstance. Each of the articulated needles snapped to their programmed coordinates and delivered calibrated shocks to Killershark’s grey matter.

This was it. Morgan Riley had given himself one last chance. He had studied for months. He had harnessed every ounce of disappointment that he could feel radiating off of his parents whenever he entered their presence. But it hadn't been enough. He had failed the bar exam for the fourth time. After a fifth of Jim Beam he had found himself walking down the train tracks at 3 in the morning, his heavily annotated textbook in hand. With a feral scream to heavens that earned him a few “Shut the fuck up”s from nearby residents, he had torn the textbook to shreds and scattered it to the tracks. In a better universe, he eked by with a passing grade. But that world was no longer to be due to the meddling of Agent Ghosttown and Killershark’s natural abilities. Instead, at 9:37 the following morning, a 103 car long fully loaded freight train hit the patch of rail covered in highlighted fragments of law book and derailed, partially due to a warping in the track due to the neighboring municipality voting no on the modest millage needed to maintain it (which was not influenced by Ghosttown’s reality rip hacking but rather the fault of citizen apathy). The train ended up embedded in an embankment and Morgan went and got his realtor's license.

The train was no longer in their way. It was instead 27 miles further east on the track, where it had derailed half an hour ago.

“There! No more train!”

“Thank you! I appreciate your contributions to the fucking team!” Foxylady floored it, squeezing every ounce of horsepower out of the van’s overworked V6 engine.

By the time they screeched to a stop in front of what had once been the Snack Stop, the situation had worsened.

What had started as a simple continuation of the age-old battle between caveman and tentacle monster had developed into a multi-generational war between two diverging civilizations. One side of the convenience store was the domain of the Cro-magnon Coalition, organized into a dozen or so tribes of affiliated hominids. Although they may disagree on certain issues, like what the lights in the sky meant or whether dead bodies should be buried or eaten, they were united in their fight against their sworn enemy: The Grasping Tendrils. Seemingly without any ideology or purpose, the tendrils existed solely to consume and spread. And they looked really, really gross, which the Cro-magnon Coalition did not care for much either. They were ensnared in a constant war, the Cro-magnons raising up generation after generation of foot soldiers to sacrifice against the neverending tide of inky black tendrils.

The more fortunate of the former occupants of the Snack Stop were adrift in an endless vector graphics void, orbiting some invisible center of gravity. The less fortunate had either been consumed by the Tendrils or used as raw materials for the Cro-magnon war machine. The few intact remnants of Eric’s body were given a position of honor in the Cro-magnon’s half of the divided territory of the store, placed behind the glass of the now empty sports drink case. It was considered a necessary right of passage for a Cro-magnon to make a pilgrimage to see the body of the Creator in order to thank Him for giving them life as well as spit on Him for bringing the Tendrils into the world.

“Fuck! What the fuck!” Foxylady spat in rage as he and Silverbullet hopped out of the van.

“It would seem it's too late for our usual plan of action to be sufficient,” Silverbullet observed. The usual plan of action in such occurrences would be to take on the role of armed robbers, kill everyone inside, and then wipe the area into a neutral, lifeless state. Since everyone that had been in the Snack Stop was now dead or worse and the door itself was entwined by otherworldly tentacles, this would no longer be an option.

Foxylady barked through the open door of the van, “Ghosttown! Talk to me! What can you do here!”

Ghosttown swallowed her initial response and said, “I think I can purge the area of the rip temporarily…long enough for you to create a reason for why the place will be a crater after we are done.”

“Perfect! Fine! Ok. Silverbullet, can you see any solution that doesn't result in all of our deaths? My head is throbbing so hard I'm only seeing shades of grey.”

Silverbullet surveyed the area for anything that could help. “Hm. The store keeps their propane tanks next to the door. We commandeer a vehicle, alter the tanks to be more volatile, like this was an action movie, and then drive into them to detonate. No more questions about where the store went.”

Silverbullet could always be counted on to keep a level head when confronted by the impossible and stupid. “Beautiful, let's make it happen.”

As Silverbullet smashed out the window of a white 1988 Oldsmobile Cutlass parked a few spaces over from the van so she could hotwire it, Foxylady couldn’t help but recall when he had joined the Continuity Protection Agency. He had been so full of hope then, a bundle of youthful optimism with a full head of vibrant red hair.

It felt like it was only yesterday that he had completed his initiation by feeding the body of his paternal grandfather, plucked from his home timestream years before he would ever meet the mother of his children, into the corpse intake of the Causality Collapse Engine. He had fumbled the body a few times, slick as it was with blood and the viscous residue of the time shunting process, but he had eventually managed to slip it down the shoot into the grinding teeth of the shredding mechanism. With the destruction of his genetic predecessor he was severed from the flow of causality, marking him as something that should not exist. Only then could he turn the crank of the giant capsule vending machine that would grant him his new identity. A single plastic bubble from the innumerable collection representing every CPA agent that had ever or would ever be rattled down the spiraling ramp to land in his hands. He eagerly cracked it open to get to his prize and his pride melted into a familiar burning shame. From that day forward he would only be known by the name on the silver badge in his hands: Foxylady.

“Alright, it’s good to go.” Silverbullet announced as the engine of the Oldsmobile roared to life. “Now I just need a bit longer to rig the accelerator up.”

“No time for that!” Foxylady barked as he was shaken from his reverie. “I’ll just drive it. We can’t risk this getting any worse. You ready with that purge, Ghosttown?”

“Why don’t you blow yourself up and find out!” she called back.

“Great. Let’s get this over with.” Foxylady climbed into the driver’s seat. He reversed to the edge of the parking lot. “On three! Three…Two…One!” He saw the telltale retina searing refraction of a temporary rift purge surrounding the Snack Stop, which returned it to appearing like the perfectly mundane convenience store that it had been up until very recently.

He floored it. For a moment he considered staying in the car. Colliding with the edited propane tanks and going up in a magnificent inferno. But that wouldn’t solve anything. He would technically get out of work for a reconstitution period but he wouldn’t even be conscious to enjoy it and it would be unpaid time off anyway. So he did the professional thing and dove out of the car, rolling as he hit the ground in a way that was not as cool as he hoped it was.

Eric felt a stomach churning wave of disorientation. He was holding the door of the drink fridge open and reaching for a bottle. He was mildly disappointed from having to settle for his backup flavor but he felt something else as well. There was a word for it that just wasn’t coming to him. What was it again? “Oh yeah, that’s right. Deja-vu,” was his last thought before the car smashed into the propane tanks outside causing the entire store to erupt in an improbably large fireball.

Foxylady raised his hands to his eyes to shield them from the heat, not anticipating just how large the explosion would be. “Jesus Christ! That work?”

Ghosttown’s eyes swept over the scrolling readout of observations being fed out from Killershark’s brain. “Let’s see…” She hit a key command to close the temporary purge, colliding the two conflicting states of reality back into each with a sound like a semi trailer getting its roof peeled off by a low highway overpass. The Snack Stop was a smoldering ruin. None of the victims inside were anything more than ashes. “As much as I’d like to watch you keep driving cars into buildings…yeah. We got it. This is no longer a rip, it’s a careless driver that ran into some propane tanks and cratered a convenience store. Who wants lunch?”

“I could eat,” Silverbullet said as she climbed back into the van. “Who’s turn is it to pick?”

Foxylady took a moment to stretch his aching back before returning to the driver’s seat. “Ugh, it’s Killershark’s.”

“Permission to disengage the editor, sir,” Ghosttown sneered, in malicious compliance with the CPA guidelines.

“Permission granted, ma,am.”

Ghosttown pulled the plug that led from her battered computer terminal to the base of Killershark’s skull and flipped the hinged portion of his skullcap closed. It sealed up with a hiss like a jar of pickles opening and he lurched back to consciousness with a start.

“Greek! Greek food!” He wiped the drool from his mouth and slipped on a cap branded with the logo of a minor league baseball team that was somehow both a plate of nachos and a pirate.

“Great! Mr. Souvlaki’s it is.” Foxylady pulled out of the parking lot and made it a few miles down the road before hitting stopped traffic. “Oh come on! What now?”

“It appears that there is a train stopped while a blockage is cleared further down the track,” said Silverbullet consulting the traffic update app on her phone.

Foxylady resolved to just let himself get blown up next time.