We could see for a second that his vocal chords strained, his mouth gaped open and his hand stretched toward us, but it was all silent, his voice never reached us. Just before he disappeared, his helmet slipped back and I saw his pimply face one last time. In that moment he wasn’t a gang-member or a vicious bully, he was a sixteen-year old kid and he was scared out of his mind. Then the fields rippled and he was covered up, like a man drowning in a vat of swirling paints.
Then Kyle came out. He was very rational. He was almost always calm, even when he was tearing chunks out of your face with his visegrips. “So let me get this straight, team,” he told us in that fatherly voice I hated. “Mr. Simpson had wanted to get through our rip so badly that you felt sorry for his corpse and tossed it through. Then Steve came along and accidentally stumbled through after the body?”
“Nothing like that, Kyle,” I said, watching him slap his goddamn pliers into his palm like a school master’s paddle. Slap, slap.
“I pulled Steve out of his drug scene, you know,” Kyle said quietly. “I pulled Stevie up and out and then you guys tossed him into oblivion.”
Slap, slap.
“He might not be dead, Kyle,” I said, feeling a bit defensive. “He’s probably better off than we are. No one knows what’s on the other side.”
“I do!” shouted Kyle at me suddenly, glaring with those intense big yellow eyes of his. Then he looked down at his pliers again and I followed his gaze. The light from the fields shimmered and glinted on the shiny metal. Dark blood stained the jaws and ran down to smear the grips. I wondered briefly if Simpson’s blood still felt tacky in Kyle hands and cold fingers of nausea tickled my guts.
Kyle lowered his voice, all calm and reason again. “We all know why nobody comes back out of the rips. Because there’s nothing on the other side now, nothing but death.”
“He pulled his gun on us, Kyle,” I said.
“So you iced him, nice and neat. You guys are a pretty pair, alright. Couldn’t have just tripped him, could you Ray? Couldn’t just give him a nice judo throw, knocking the wind out of him and some sense in? No, you had to make an interstellar iceball out of him, you had to turn him into a sixteen year-old popsicle, zits and all.”
Ray stared glumly into the dancing colors, silently brooding. When he finally spoke he didn’t take his eyes away from the colors. “You know what I want to know, Kyle? I want to know what’s with you and those friggin’ pliers. Did your daddy beat your lil’ butt with his handtools, or somethin’?”
“No Ray,” said Kyle quietly, the snake tattoos jumping on his forearms the way they did when he was pissed. “No, but I bet your daddy beat your butt good, didn’t he? Too bad he never got a little carried away and tossed you over a cliff or out a window, like you did for poor old Stevie.”
Then Kyle stalked over to the Beamer, lifting the trunklid and dug out something that crackled like paper out of the darkness. He returned with a long paper sack in his hands, the type that liquor stores used to put booze bottles in so that drunks could pretend they weren’t booze bottles-back when there were liquor stores. He walked back to us and held it out a sack to Ray, grinning.
“Would you like a drink, Ray?” There was something funny about the way he held the bag. It was upside down, with the open end covering his hand. Ray’s eyes slid to Kyle’ side, to his holster. My eyes followed his, and widened. Kyle’s holster was empty.
“You gonna shoot or what, Kyle?” asked Ray in a dead voice.
Kyle waved the gun under his nose a bit, chuckling. The bag slipped half off, revealing black metal.
“Not a drinker? On the wagon, Ray?”
My hand slipped down to my gun, and Kyle caught it.
“Hold it right there, Paula,” he said, darting a glance my way. “I’ll shoot you both before you’ve got it out.”
I froze, but tensed to go for the gun if he shot Ray.
“You two were going to leave me, you were gonna step out. No need to deny it. You were going to leave me here, alone. ” he hissed the words between clenched teeth.
He pulled out his pliers then and reached up to grab Ray’s cheek with them. “Well, I’ve got just the thing to keep you around.” The tattoos on his arms did a snake dance as his muscles tremored with tension.
Sweat popped out on my skin and I could see sweat on his face and arms too, glistening oily beads that reflected the shimmering colors of the fields. I heard Beth coming up from the store, her sandals slapping on asphalt and crackling in the dead ivy that had once grown on the cement islands in the parking lot.
“Don’t kill each other,” she said, her voice sounding desperate. Her fear for our safety had finally overwhelmed her fear of the confrontation. “I know what’s wrong with you Kyle. You’re afraid we’ll all leave you here.”
Kyle laughed, his eyes snapping over to Beth, then back to Ray, who flinched at the touch of the bloody pliers.
“He’s nuts Beth,” I said quietly. “Over the edge.”
“I think he never wanted to see anyone leave,” Beth continued. “Perhaps each time he saw our fiery rip eat another one, a strip of his sanity came loose and burned with them. We’re all incredibly lonely. We all grew up in towns, where people and cars filled the air with noise and smells. How long had it been since you saw a movie Kyle, or caught a whiff of diesel fumes?”
“Fuck off,” growled Kyle, his lips lifting away from his teeth in a snarl.
“You don’t want to kill us, Kyle,” Beth said gently. Her face came into the light now, dusty tear-streaks and all. “We’re the only friends you have left now.”
This last struck home and Kyle looked at her, his mouth gaping like a fish, his eyes wide and lit with insanity. It was all the chance that Ray had, and he took it. He knocked the gun aside and it went flying away, firing inside the brown paper sack. The blast blew out the back of the bag and the sack gave birth to the black pistol in midair, like an alien bird. Before the gun clattered onto the dusty asphalt, Ray pulled out his shotgun. He struck Kyle just below the ear and he went down.
We stood there for a moment, guns out, panting and sweating. A breeze came up and glued grit to our moist skins. Blood trickled down Ray’s cheek and ran into his mouth, staining his teeth red. It looked like a terrier had taken a bite out of his face. Staring down at Kyle’s motionless form, all of us felt a new freedom. With this feeling came decision. Moving quickly, hardly speaking, we gathered together the camping gear from the BMW and what other belongings we wanted. Like parents on Christmas night, we shuffled past Kyle with muffled steps, hoping he would not wake up until we were gone. It would be harder to leave with his crazy eyes boring into our backs.
Standing at the brink of the rip with our backpacks full, we took a last glance at old Earth. Just over the horizon the moon hung high, looking white and clean over the dirty world. The parking lot was barren and empty, the rusting hulks of cars everywhere like a slaughtered herd of metal beasts.
Kyle slept peacefully on the asphalt, unconscious and undreaming. A clear spot in the dust had appeared before his blowing nostrils. Ray’s cheek had stopped bleeding, and he had his shotgun in his hands. Beth had a struggling cat tucked under each arm. We were ready.
“Let’s make sure that wherever we end up, we’re together,” I said, and put my hand on each of their arms. Together, we took a step forward. Swirling liquid color closed over us, and we left old Earth behind.
Although as years passed and Beth, Ray and I lost track of one another under the yellow sun of the new world, none of us ever forgot the man who had tried to hold us back. In the frontier boomtowns that dotted the wild landscape of Tau Ceti, I often wondered what had become of Kyle. Had he gone completely mad? Had he eventually stepped out? Or was he still back on old Earth, possibly the last man there, a beetle rattling about inside the ribs of an ancient behemoth that had long since died and rotted away?