Harry stared up at the mountain. He could just make out Jon as he climbed the steep slope. From the distance, Jon appeared to be only a couple of inches high. Harry waved once just before Jon disappeared behind a stand of pines, but Jon did not wave back.
What if something happens to the guy? Harry thought. He felt a sharp edge of guilt. Jon has been nothing but a friend and here I go spoiling the trip with a bunch of neurotic shit out of my past. Then he shrugged the feeling aside. Somehow he knew Jon wouldn’t hold it against him.
After unloading his fishing equipment, he walked toward a plateau about five hundred feet below the peak of the crag. He folded his arms and looked down on the small town of Tartan’s Crag. Jon had told him that the locals called it Tartan’s Rag—a nickname intended to mock the small, shabby, poverty-stricken mountain town.
Harry could see it all in a glance. The clean, white steeple of the local Presbyterian Church gave a feeling of hope to the skyline, drawing the eye away from the bleak shanties that pocked the residential section of the town.
Glancing to the west, Harry could see the main complex of an industrial site. It was a huge, monolithic structure that dwarfed everything else: seven stories of steel gray concrete occupying six square acres of land. Five huge smokestacks lined its roof, belching out chemical fumes into the mountain air.
No matter where you go, Harry thought, you can’t get away from it.
Harry walked toward the mountain stream and turned his mind toward fishing. It had been too long.
Just before he made his first cast, he held the fly in his hand and admired it. It was one of the few flies he had left that were made by his father and he was impressed with how cunningly the hook was disguised. For a moment, he wondered about using it. But the stream was shallow, so if the fly hit a snag, he could probably recover it.
Harry’s cast was perfect: a lazy arc through the sunlight, landing perfectly in the deepest part of the stream. He watched the bright, ginger-colored feather float downstream.
Before he was even ready, he felt a sudden strike and the rod nearly jumped out of his hand. On instinct he started to let out more line, but couldn’t do it fast enough. There was an incredible tug on the pole and, for an instant, Harry thought the rod would break. But then it snapped back and the line went slack. The fish had broken the line and gotten away.
“How stupid can you get?” Harry shouted out at himself as he dropped the rod to the ground. He spun about, stalking away from the stream. He couldn’t believe he had just lost one of his father’s flies. He only had about a half a dozen left.
It took nearly ten minutes before he started to calm down. I can’t let this ruin the day, he said to himself. In an effort to relax, he took several deep breaths. He realized he had walked nearly fifty yards away from the trout stream, and the caves, which lined the lower portion of the crag, were directly in front of him. One large cave in particular caught his eye. I’ll check that out for ten minutes and then get back to fishing. It’ll break my mood, he thought.
Harry smiled. I’ll be careful, he said to himself as he approached the cave. When he reached it, he ducked his head and entered warily. Taking out a small penlight attached to his key chain, he aimed it toward the back of the cave. Squinting his eyes, he stared into the darkness and was almost sure he saw something on the floor of the cave, though it looked suspiciously like a shadow. He shuffled forward, testing the ground with his left foot while his right foot was safely back, bearing most of the weight of his body. Finally he found it. His left foot came down on nothingness. He smiled and pulled away from the edge.
Although his eyes had grown accustomed to the dimness, he could only just make out the edge of the pit. Where does it go? he thought. What could lie at the bottom of it?
A shadow moved beneath his feet. His eyes widened and they followed the object as it rubbed up against his leg. It was the biggest rat he had ever seen. Instinctively, with no thought, he jumped away from it, but his jump brought him precariously close to the edge of the pit. He waved his arms desperately from side to side in a vain effort to catch his balance, but his momentum pushed him over the edge and into the hole. As he fell, he could hear his own terrified voice, a hysterical shriek echoing from the walls of the narrowing pit.
When Harry blinked his eyes open, he didn’t know where he was. He tried to recall where he had been and what had brought him here, but the effort only confused him. Not only did he not know where he was, but he also couldn’t recall who he was.
He grunted when he felt a sudden pressure against his genitals. Looking downward, he saw that his body was enveloped in an odd, greenish light. Some kind of mechanical arm was holding him up. Narrowing his eyes, he saw that the arm was attached to an amorphous, though vaguely pyramidal, shape. Suddenly, the metal arm began to move upward. He could see his feet lift from the floor as the steel arm swung in a short arc.
A driving spray of oily fluid pummeled his body. He opened his mouth to scream but could not. The bitter oil flooded into the back of his mouth and choked him, and he began to cough convulsively, kicking and struggling against the steel arm that held him. Seized by panic, he fought like a demon, throwing his arms out wildly and kicking against the steel harness. He barely noticed the minute sting of a small needle as it stabbed into his upper right thigh. In the next instant he went completely limp, engulfed by a rush of euphoria. He began to giggle foolishly. This is all just a crazy dream, he thought. A second later, he was asleep.
When consciousness returned, he lay in a prone position. As his eyes began to focus, he saw that his entire body was encapsulated in a clear, gelatinous material. A half-dozen ribbed plastic tubes were connected to his chest. He tried to follow them to their source, but they stretched into an unknown blackness.
The scene overwhelmed him and he could make no sense of it. I must be in an intensive care unit, he thought, and under heavy-duty drugs. But then he was struck by another realization: since he had woken, he had not taken so much as a single breath. He tried to breathe deeply and found that nothing happened; he could not even feel the movement of air into his lungs or the physical expansion of his chest. It was as though nothing was there. He was a disembodied entity, floating in gelatinous womb.
Am I dead?
He tried to move his hands and feet but could feel no sensation in his entire body, save for a thickening in the back of his throat. What had happened to him? The memory of falling and the recollection of his own screaming voice came rushing back.
Something to his left caught his eye. A vaguely familiar shape, pyramidal in form, glided toward him, its motion as smooth as a puck on ice. It had a single mechanical arm. Where had he seen it before? Attached to the end of the arm was the largest hypodermic needle he had ever seen. It was at least eight inches long. Harry’s eyes widened in terror and he tried to scream, but his vocal cords, like the rest of his body, would not respond. He felt the contact of the needle at the base of his neck penetrate upward toward his head. Time seemed to stretch into eternity before he slipped into merciful oblivion.