SNAP! and the Alter Ego Dimension (6 page)

At the same time, Ulrich grabbed her arm and pulled her behind him, using his own body as a shield.

Tammy’s heart pounded.

What if the man shot Ulrich right in front of me? What if he shot them all? What if he let me live and gave me to my other self? What if I was left alone again in this horrible place?

She peered past Ulrich at the red stain on the fallen man’s shirt. It was still expanding as she watched, soaking through the cotton.
Was this a murder scene brought from earth, or were the alter egos shooting each other?

She remembered Hiroshi had said that, in this dimension, there were no weapons. And there had been the distinctive sucking, whistling sound always heard before a real person appears. The same sound they heard when Ulrich materialized.

She guessed that the wounded man had been playing
Snap
when this armed man shot him. The armed man must have been reflected in the monitor and brought here just as Hiroshi had been dragged through with his sister.

The silence was shattered as a sheet of iron and a sliding-door appeared behind the armed man. Startled and still disoriented from the transfer, he swung around and looked at the door, waving his pistol menacingly. Above his head appeared huge sections of aluminum tubes suspended from the invisible ceiling.

Tammy stood petrified. A growing pool of blood seeped across the grayness below the man on the floor. A twitching finger on his sprawled hand suggested he may still be alive.

“
Snap
!” she heard, and looked past Ulrich at the armed man. His alter ego had appeared next to him. Tammy was now certain she was witnessing an unfinished murder scene. A murder transferred here from another world.

She still stood dead still. Hiroshi, next to her, was also absolutely motionless, but remained clutching his sword tightly. A grimace betrayed his indecision over whether to strike at the gunman, his alter self or await events. Ulrich breathed deeply. Tammy was afraid to turn her head to look at Etsu, but guessed she was as petrified as the rest of them. They all stared at the strange scene unfolding right in front of their eyes.

“What the hell?” the armed man cried while he looked into the face of his counterpart. Tammy estimated that the gunman was around thirty years old.

“What’s going on? Where am I?”

The accent was Australian,
or perhaps New Zealand?
Tammy thought. Then she realized he was lifting his pistol to shoot his alter ego.

“Welcome to the Alter Ego Dimension,” the alter ego answered. “I’m your other self. Give the pistol to me. Here there are no policemen. Here nobody will ever know what you did today.” As the weapon continued to track the man’s other self, the alter ego lost its color and he backed away. “I know what you think,” it blustered. “Wait. Don’t shoot. Wait! Don’t!”

Then the alter ego turned and ran off into the grayness.

With total disbelief, Tammy saw the wounded man’s other self crawling from the grayness. It crawled slowly as if there was little strength left in his body. He crawled next to the wounded man and muttered softly, “
Snap
,” his lips barely moving.

Then he vaporized like mist before a hot sun.

Tammy knew that the man lying in the pool of blood had just died. And, she had no doubt; the Australian gunman was a cold-blooded killer.

She stared at the dead man, revolted by his death, but curious about what would happen next.
Would he be transferred back to earth?

Everyone must be thinking the same
, she reasoned, for still none of her friends moved. When a few seconds passed and he was still lying there motionless, Tammy felt he would stay.
Would anybody even know that he was murdered, or would he be missing from earth forever? Where did his alter ego go? Did it go to earth to die there instead of him, or was it now dead, too?

She wondered if all the missing people that were never found had been transferred here.
Probably not
, she reasoned, because their alter egos would have taken their place. Unless . . . unless earth people and their other selves died together here and it happened too quickly for the transfer . . .

Again the murderer swung his pistol in their direction. Tammy peered over Ulrich’s shoulder right into the muzzle. Her blood ran cold. Should the man shoot now, he couldn’t miss. Perhaps Ulrich and she would be killed by the same shot, but it was more likely he would take out the armed Hiroshi first.

“Please, sir, don’t shoot,” begged Tammy. “I’m Tammy Delport from South Africa. Etsu and Hiroshi are Japanese and Ulrich is from Germany. We don’t know why we’re here, but we know a bit about this place. Lower the gun and we can talk. We’ll tell you what we know . . . ” She pleaded.

The gunman glanced about him, his eyes darting nervously from side to side. Then he seemed to relax a little, motioned Hiroshi away and slowly eased the pistol’s hammer forward. Appearing calmer, he put the weapon in his jacket pocket.

The murderer was dressed surprisingly neat
, Tammy thought as she cautiously emerged from behind Ulrich. He was dressed in a dark beige suit with a white shirt and a striped tie. Not exactly how she’d expect someone to dress to kill. The tubes and sliding doors looked like they belonged in a warehouse or shed of some type, but unfortunately nothing of the warehouse’s contents had been brought here. It was only the air conditioning’s aluminum tubes, iron panel and the galvanized iron door, that had come through.

“Where am I? . . . Where are we?” the man inquired again. “And what the hell’s going on here? Why is there a man that looks like my identical twin? Why is he dressed exactly like me? How did . . . did I . . . float here?”

Hiroshi sighed aloud. Tammy thought he must be getting tired of repeating the same explanation over and over again. She definitely would be.

The man is a murderer
, she thought,
should they be helping him? Perhaps they should just leave him, let him fend for himself.

It should be fairly easy for him. After all, he was armed and could obviously defend himself against the other selves in this dimension. They should definitely not share their meager food supplies, the three little birds and the two tiny eggs, with a murderer.

Tammy spoke up to save Hiroshi the effort of explaining everything again. “You’re not on earth anymore, Mister. The man that looked like you is a copy, a duplicate of . . . yourself.” She nearly said, ‘an evil copy’. But how could something be worse than the original, when the original was a cold blooded killer?

“He’s your alter ego. Your good self, or your bad self, or your perfect self,” Ulrich put in. “We can’t tell.”

“Go find him,” Tammy urged the man on. “Because he will keep trying to catch and overpower you. If he succeeds, you will be kept here, in storage, in this dimension, forever. Then he’ll replace you back on earth. You need to find him and kill him. Perhaps then you’ll return to earth. From wherever you came . . . ”

The man looked at her without any expression on his face. Then he looked at the grayness that surrounded them all, to the tree with the perfect flat leaf canopy on a five meter square hill and the incongruous chunks of warehouse behind and above him. He shook his head in disbelief.

“The man that you shot, it was him that was transferred here. You only came through because you were standing behind him. Everything that was reflected by that man’s computer screen, or stuff that the monitor could ‘see’ as if in a photo, came with him,” Tammy paused to let the man process what he heard.

Hiroshi then added: “That’s how it works around here. And that is about all we know.”

“Really?” the man asked, frowning. He rubbed his chin. “I’m not on planet earth anymore? We’re not on earth?”

“Right. My other self called it the Alter Ego Dimension,” Tammy said.

“The
what
? That’s crazy.”

Everything was too incredible to be easily believed. Tammy looked at her friends, unsure what else she could tell him.

“What the hell are we supposed to do here?” the man demanded.

“Nothing,” Hiroshi said.

It was obviously not explanation enough for the gunman, so Ulrich spoke out to keep him talking and keep him calm.

“A person gets trapped here, forever, if his other self can overpower him. Sort of shut down, we think, like switching off a computer program. Unless you can overpower him. That’s why he ran away when he realized you were about to shoot him.”

“So, you should go now. Catch and kill your other self. It’s your only hope,” Tammy wanted to be rid of the killer. “Go find you alter ego.”

“But he’s got pistol,” Etsu whispered as she stepped even closer to Tammy. “We need the gun. We can shoot alter egos when we’re too weak to fight hand to hand.” She looked at the murderer and asked more loudly. “Why did you kill that man?”

The man stared at Etsu for a few seconds.

“I didn’t set out to kill him,” he began, pointing at the corpse. “He, Chris, was my boss. He wouldn’t give me a pay rise, just because his wife was coming on to me,” the man spread his hands and, for a moment, looked really sad. “But I didn’t want anything to do with his damned wife. The more I told him that, the less he listened. He was depressed. He even took drugs to help him, but nothing worked. The depression drove his wife further away from him. He was so miserable. The saddest man I’ve ever seen.” He looked at the body on the floor with a sad expression on his face. “So, this morning I decided to help him out of his misery. To give him the gun.” His voice tailed off as he stared at the corpse. Tammy said nothing, waiting for him to continue. “The gun went off when I got frightened . . . I didn’t mean to . . . I didn’t know he would drag me with him to. . . wherever we are.”

If his story was true, then he wasn’t really a murderer, Tammy thought. Or was he lying? Most murderers are liars, justifying their rage by distorting the truth.

“What’s your name?” Hiroshi asked. “Where are you from?”

“Nick,” the man answered without looking at Hiroshi. “Nick Hoover, from Australia.” When he finally looked up, he addressed Ulrich. “Can we walk around here?” he asked. “Safely, I mean. I can’t see where to tread.”

“Yes, there is a flat floor or something below this grayness,” Ulrich replied. “You can see about five meters all around. But be careful, Mr. Hoover, your other self knows what you think even as you’re thinking it. That’s why it’s very difficult to beat them. Or surprise them.”

“Nick,” said the Australian. “Nobody calls me mister. And thanks, thanks for the heads-up. I . . . I’ll be on my way then, to search for my . . . other self. Cheers.” Nick turned around and Tammy watched him as he cautiously walked off into the grayness.

“Thank heavens,” Tammy sighed pleased. “We’re rid of that guy.”

“But we need his gun,” Etsu moaned.

“We don’t have enough food for him, Etsu,” Tammy said. “Let him go his own way.”

“He’s a dangerous killer,” Ulrich answered. “I don’t buy his story. He was too willing to tell us everything. He could kill us for our food.
Ach
, he could kill us to
be
his food . . . Let us continue with the digging.”

Tammy looked back to the corpse, now silhouetted by a halo of fresh, crimson blood. This was the first time in her life she had seen a dead person. Actually seen a person die. She could hardly believe what was happening here. It felt as if she was trapped in the worst nightmare imaginable.

She wondered about the dead man.
What would happen in his world back home? Did he have children? Family? Did his wife really despise him? Was Nick telling the truth about him? Was he so miserable that he could only find peace in drugs, drugs to help blind him to his problems? Was he at peace now?

Her eyes wandered over the body’s brown pants, brown socks and dark brown shoes. He wasn’t a big man. Definitely bigger than herself, but she was cold. Her feet were freezing. She could do with a pair of socks and shoes . . . even though they would be too big for her. Rather too big than too small . . .

She could not believe that she was considering what she was actually considering. She was about to loot the corpse of a dead man. Never in her life would she have considered putting on a dead man’s socks and shoes. What was this place doing to her?

“Hiroshi, Ulrich. May I ask you a favor?” The two youngsters looked enquiringly at her. They’d hardly moved.

“Of course,” Hiroshi said and lowered his sword.

“That dead man, Chris . . . ” She pointed at the body. “Can I have his pants, socks and shoes? Will you undress him for me, please? I’m so cold.”

“Of course,” Ulrich echoed Hiroshi and they moved to the body. “He doesn’t need them anymore.”

“Ulrich, help turn him over so we can undo his pants,” Hiroshi said.

Etsu picked up the mug and checked to make sure that it wasn’t broken.

“Maybe we can use it,” she thought aloud.

As Tammy watched her friends work on stripping Chris, she again felt nauseous, squeamish.
How terrible! We’re like tramps preying on a dead comrade,
she thought.