The Other Side – II
I stood and tried to get my bearings. Passing between dimensions is never pleasant, no matter how many times you have done it. My bones ached, and my head throbbed. Somewhere off in the distance, through a bank of thick, ugly looking fog, I could just make out the outline of a figure walking toward me. Walking may not be the best term… Inhabitants of the Other Side don’t walk quite so much as they shamble along. It is disconcerting at first, but they cover ground amazingly fast for how slowly they appear to be moving. It is an odd illusion.
Before long my headache had almost subsided, and I could make out the gray, slightly disfigured face of, Zed. He was doing his best to smile, but it’s a hard thing to manage when your face is stuck partway through the process of decomposition. In case you aren’t following, Zed is a zombie. I try not to use that term, because it has kind of a derogatory connotation. For the world he came from, Zed is just a mild-mannered farmer. It’s only to our world that he is terrifying. I prefer to call them Othersiders.
I smiled back at Zed, but out of the corner of my eye, I could just make out the damn portal turning red. I looked at it, green. Something was definitely wrong.
“How are things, Zed?” I asked politely, “Looks like you’re about ready for harvest.”
“Yeah, Will. It’s gonna be a good year, I think,” Zed managed. The muscles in his face didn’t quite work, but if you listened carefully, very carefully, you could just make out the words. As far as Othersiders go, Zed is about as articulate as it gets.
“Have you noticed anything funky going on with the portal?” I asked. Zed was a busy man. I didn’t want to distract him any more than necessary.
“Whenever I look at it, it’s green like it should be, but I don’t know, Will… It feels wrong. I don’t know how to explain,” he managed.
“Alright, Zed,” I reassured, “I’m gonna take a look around. Don’t mind me.”
“Okay, Will. Are you hungry? Sosha has a brain stew going,” the farmer offered. He was genuine, but my mentor had been vague about how the brain trees worked here, and I could never bring myself to sample the fruits of Zed’s labor. When I looked at them there on the tree… Let’s just say they hit a little too close to home for my taste.
“No thank you, Zed. The portal always manages to wreck my appetite.” Zed nodded his understanding, and tried another grotesque smile. I thought I might have seen some of the spongy muscle tear from the effort, and then the old Othersider shambled off to check the brains for ripeness.
According to my training, Othersiders are not undead exactly. There is no correlation between a dead human and an Othersider. It is just their resemblance to our corpses that caused that theory. I don’t know any more than that. What I did know there in the brain farm was that the portal was acting weird, on both sides, and that was a damn serious problem. It might mean there was someone messing with the barrier. I couldn’t convene a meeting of the mediums without proof of that though, so I needed to investigate. I walked down the dirt path between the hideous black trees that sustained the citizens here, and as always the path seemed to go on forever. Zed’s farm was hundreds of acres of neatly planted trees. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. I mostly just needed to think.
Suddenly, as I stood there, surrounded by the unsettling sight of all of these brains, I began to feel warmth on my face. The Other Side isn’t warm… What the hell was that? I looked up, and saw the sun hanging in the sky. The Other Side doesn’t have a Sun. Shit. Before my eyes the noxious-looking yellow fog began to clear, and the brain trees faded away, and after a few horrifying moments I was standing on a suburban sidewalk, under an idyllic blue sky. This was my neighborhood. Moving from one side to another without a portal is not possible… Not supposed to be possible, but here I was. I looked up and down the street, with my mouth hanging open, and sprinted as fast as I could to my house.
I arrived at my front door panting, and, of course, locked out. I didn’t take my keys with me through the portal. I live alone, in a small house an hour outside of Los Angeles. I didn’t have a spare key, because the last thing I needed was some kid finding it, waltzing into my house and falling through the damn portal, so now I was going to have to break in. I needed to see the damn portal and figure out how I had been dropped back in the middle. I snuck around to the side where no neighbors would see me, put a rock that had lived here longer then me through the window, and crawled in after it. I cut my arm on the glass and didn’t notice until I almost slipped in the blood on my wood floor.
With a towel held to my arm clumsily, I practically fell down my stairs and laid eyes on the most horrifying thing I have ever seen. The portal was gone. This couldn’t be happening. How the Hell could this be happening? As I made my way back up the stairs, there was a siren in the distance that I only half heard. Once I reached ground level, though, a movement in the window caught my eye. It was my neighbor screaming hysterically and running out of her house and down the street. I stepped outside and looked back in the direction she had come from. My eyes settled on her porch and my mouth fell open again. There was a figure standing on her porch.
It was Zed.
