***AS SEEN IN*** PLANET SCUMM EVERYTHING: VOL. 2

**Written by Hailey Piper**
*Illustrations by* Alyssa Alarcón Santo

Reptile

Hailey Piper

181 Downing Lane had to be the ugliest apartment building Lorna Camille had ever seen. The broken glass, barred windows, and buckling northern wall of poorly-set bricks said it had rejected all attempts at human habitation, as if every person who stepped inside was swallowed up, good intentions and all.

Why Serene wanted to meet here, Lorna couldn’t imagine. This looked a better site for a murder than a miracle, and they had been so at odds of late that Lorna could believe Serene might kill her here. It was unbecoming of sisters to fight over a man, Lorna thought, but fortunately there was no real fight. Serene didn’t know how far off track she was about Ben Westler’s feelings. He was going to propose, become Serene’s brother-in-law. It would be unbecoming of one sister to murder another, of course.

But Serene had promised a miracle, and when she appeared around the curb, she looked in a better mood than Lorna had seen all year. Her smile radiated down her white jacket and pants. “Inside.”

Lorna followed through the rusty iron door, into a lobby of patchy carpeting, soiled by rats, up untrustworthy steel steps, past peeling walls, shedding their wallpaper. There was no graffiti. Mid-city, rundown building, no evidence of kids with spray paint, no leavings by the homeless. It was unheard of, but not quite a miracle.

“How far?”

“Third floor, here we are.” Serene left the steps and led Lorna down a hall of broken doors, their destroyed apartments bare and rotting. All but one. “This is it. The miracle.”

“It’s a door,” Lorna said.

Serene stared at her the way a teacher might when a student just isn’t trying. “Open it.”

“Serene, if there are cockroaches-” Lorna grasped the filthy knob with her shirt sleeve and pressed against the steel door.

Humid air breathed across their faces the moment the door cracked open, a seal being broken. Then came the sunlight. Not the gray, smoggy pretender to sunlight that Downing Lane might see, but harsh, unbroken rays of the sun. Lorna had to shield her eyes until they adjusted. Dry dirt spread from the door’s other side, up to greening fields and lonesome trees that shot up taller than the apartment building. A shadow walked the distant horizon, its neck stretched to the sky.

Lorna’s fingers gripped the doorframe, her wrist in the cold hall, her fingers in the warm sunshine. “What am I seeing?”

“A long, long time ago.” Serene brushed past, poked her head through the doorway. “Have you ever smelled air so clean?”

The smells were foreign to Lorna. She had hardly ever left New York, let alone visited the baked, otherworldly plains ahead. “It’s prehistoric. How did this happen?”

“I don’t know. But I knew you’d love it.”

Lorna hid a smile. Of course she would. The whole world would, wouldn’t they? “And you only showed me.”

“I wouldn’t want to pollute the past with every gawker in the city. Now, here’s the incredible part.” Serene said it like this wasn’t the discovery of a lifetime. She clawed the soil for a pebble and tossed it into the air. Then she drew back and pulled the door shut.

“What was that about?”

“Would you say it’s landed by now?”

“Of course.”

Serene pressed the door again, the same crack in the air. The pebble hit the earth. A small blue lizard shot from around the outside of the door, chomped the pebble, realized it wasn’t food, and skittered off.

“The other side only moves when the door’s open,” Lorna said.

“You could observe something, leave, come back, have it still be there. A lot more interesting than teaching history, isn’t it?” Serene slipped inside and waved a hand. “Come on. We’ll get a tan while we’re here.”

Lorna followed onto the crisp earth. Behind her, the door opened from the foot of a cliff, its stone face broken by the rectangular doorway. Chilly air wafted out from the apartment hall. The sun was burdensome, the air heavy, but those were small inconveniences. Serene was right. She had found a miracle.

“How did you find it?”

Serene neared a tree that was millions of years old. Or perhaps it was only five. “Would you believe I was looking for a quiet place to kill you?” She waited for Lorna to make a face and then gave a shrill laugh. “You’re so silly.”

“Yes. I’m silly. Me.” Lorna stared at the distant shadow. It walked on four legs, its tail and neck reaching long as a city block, best she could tell. If she listened, she could hear its footsteps slam the ground. They weren’t reptiles, but with that echo, it was small wonder they had been called thunder lizards.

At her feet, the blue lizard circled, curious. Why wouldn’t it be? It had never seen a human before, would probably go extinct before mankind could start hunting it.

There were bigger, less benign creatures in this period of time, Lorna remembered. The kind that would’ve happily hunted humans had they survived to see them exist. She scanned the trees, the plains, saw nothing she might view as a threat.

Except Serene was gone.

“We should stick together!” Lorna shouted, and then brought her fist to her lips. Shouting could summon the wrong attention. Showing the miracle had been sweet, but visiting was a mistake. They didn’t belong here. “Serene, where are you?”

Lorna jogged to the tree where she’d last seen her sister, circled it, but there was no one. Footsteps in the soil led back toward the cliff, the door. Her eyes followed.

Serene stood in the doorway. Her white jacket and pants were gone, replaced by a black dress that seemed out of season for the chill in New York. Had she brought other clothes? “Evening, Lorie. Just seeing how you’re getting on.”

“How I’m what?” Lorna started toward Serene.

The door was closing.

“Wait a minute, Ser—”

Her ears didn’t register the door slamming shut.

Aden couldn’t stop fidgeting while Bry cut the steel open. Not that he thought they would get caught—no one came to Downing anymore—but 181, like its sibling buildings, was a deathtrap. Rickety stairs, crumbling walls. No one cared about this place. Which made it all the less likely for anything valuable to be stashed here.

But Bry was insistent. Despite the crumbling of the neighborhood, the city, the country, the world, this door had remained firm. Rusty, but firm, as if held in place by what waited behind it, maybe vacuum-sealed. The snapped padlock clattered on the grimy floor in pieces. Bry set down his bolt cutters and rubbed his hands together. He and Aden pressed the door open together.

“—ene!”

Lorna burst through the doorway, slamming into the two boys. They collapsed in a pile on filthy debris.

“Serene?” Lorna scrambled off, onto her feet, up against the wall. “Serene, where are you?” Her voice rang empty through the hall. She looked to the two kids she’d plowed into. They looked not half as rundown as the building, but they certainly weren’t doing well. One of them had eyes on her purse. “Did you see another woman here? About my height, my—she looked a lot like me.”

Humming static erupted from the boys’ mouths. “NameAden.”

“NameBry. IDmade. Whysnailspeakadult. Wego?”

Lorna watched their mouths. They made odd shapes with their lips and jaws, as if unused to speaking. “You’re going too fast.”

“Noneuralsnailspeakslowgoes.” Bry shrugged.

“Can you tell me what’s happening to me?”

Aden knelt, picked up the padlock fragments, and placed them in Lorna’s hands. Then he pointed at the door.

Her hands began to quiver. It wasn’t possible. Serene couldn’t. She would’ve found a way to make money off this miracle. What the padlock suggested, what it meant, was unthinkable. Lorna’s fists curled around the fragments and threw them down the rickety stairs. They clanged a few times and disappeared.

“Okay.” Lorna grasped her head. “Okay, okay. Okay.” The implications were setting in. She wasn’t a stupid person. Now her mouth worked at odd angles, struggling to form the question. “One last thing. Can you tell me what year it is?”

They told her. She shoved them aside and ran.

Downing Lane was hotter than when she left, hotter than she could ever remember the city. The sky looked pale, like its blue had been put through the washer too many times. She recognized the neighborhood’s bones, but not its flesh. It had been left to wear out, go rotten, 181 being only the start.

She wanted to go home, but no cabs were driving through here. The subway, by sheer laziness of the powers that be, had not changed much, the pits still spewing their baked garbage smells that somehow lured most of the city down below. Subway cars had been remodeled, a couple of routes adjusted, but the map was recognizable.

The turnstiles were not. There were no sliders for plastic or paper tickets, no slots for tokens, no machines to change money into passage. Each passenger slid their arm along the side. The turnstile either let them push through or gave a buzzing alarm.

One young man tried to jump the turnstile and metro police were on him like flies. “NameTrad, IDmade,” he said, his words as involuntary as a sneeze.

Lorna didn’t dare try it. She returned to the surface.

Walking was misery in this heat. She carried her jacket block after block, into less rundown parts of the city. Floating lights bustled above, their advertisements adrift from window to window. Everything seemed so quiet, like the world she had left inside the door. If people were talking, she couldn’t hear them. There was only the trample of footsteps and the gentle rush of silent cars. They seemed to clank together and break apart at each street, but her head was too dizzy to piece out how it all worked.

In time, she found a library. By some luck, no one needed to swipe their arms to get inside. There were even people talking within, most of them elderly and sequestered to their own section. Anyone could pick up an electronic slate from the front and walk it wherever they pleased, select what they wanted to know. Not too different from any smartphone. Lorna hadn’t bothered to look at hers. After her meeting with Aden and Bry, she knew. This was as much a place for reading as for gathering, the way libraries had been in Lorna’s time.

There was only one person to search for. Serene Camille. And when that didn’t work, she tried Serene Westler. They were married three years after Ben was supposed to propose to Lorna. They had two children, both deceased now, and two grandchildren, also deceased. Ben, likewise, was deceased, his obituary and that of his children and his children’s children all matters of public record, easy to find.

Lorna pressed the slate away and covered her face. She had only left Ben a few hours ago to meet Serene at Downing Lane. Hours and years. She slammed her fists on the table, but the collision couldn’t bring back the time. In a way, Serene really had brought her to that building to murder her. Murder her time, her place. Murder and robbery. The more she thought about it, the harder she sobbed.

People were staring, she felt their eyes. What a different kind of city this had become.

If only Serene really understood what she had done, the impact. Finding her seemed impossible, but she wasn’t dead or else her obituary would have been available, like the others. She was somewhere out in the world. Lorna didn’t think the hunt was possible. This world wasn’t hers.

She asked the librarian if there was a way for her to make a phone call. Translating what she meant by that took some doing, but eventually the librarian pulled out a paper-thin slip of plastic and helped her call the Division of Public Protection, some national form of law enforcement that Lorna saw no point in coming to understand. She was still in this world for one purpose. Whosoever could reunite the sisters Camille, she would go to them.

“You won’t believe what I’m about to tell you,” she said to the phone.

DPP officers arrived to detain her. She was clearly unhinged to be telling stories like that. What they couldn’t figure out was who she was. Their machines couldn’t scan her arms or head. She was processed through paperwork, seen by a physician, and then by a psychologist. Through it all, what she said and how she said it triggered alarms in their heads.

She endured two weeks of testing and procedures. Every step of the way, she was compliant, taking every measure within her power to convince the authorities that she was a gift, not a threat. That became harder the more they believed her story. When they finally let her show them the door at 181 Downing, they brought her to different experts. They had her sign all kinds of documents, blind to how worthless those were in the scope of what she was telling them. She agreed to everything they wanted. There was little left to lose.

After four weeks, she met the Joint Chiefs of Staff. After another, she met in private with the President, little more than a figurehead, now. He comprehended little of what she meant, but assured her it was an honor to meet her.

A month and a half after she turned herself in to authorities, they brought her to the hospital in the dead of night. Armed guards in tactical gear secured the stairwell, elevators, and the seventh floor east wing, a senior hospice section. There, Lorna walked into a private room and closed the door.

An elderly woman, unrecognizable in her layers of wrinkled, folded skin, lay in a hospital bed. She would never leave this bed, rooted by plastic tubes that ensured fluid came and went at an even pace. Her eyes opened at the sound of the door and widened when they noticed Lorna’s approach.

“Oh.” Her jaw slackened, moaning, and she tried to skirt back in the bed, but her bony limbs were too frail to slide her deflated body anywhere. “Lorie, you’ve come for me. I’m sorry. Christ, my eyes. I can’t see you. I can’t see your death.”

That Serene mistook her for a ghost made Lorna smile. “I’m right here.” Her hand stroked the blanket until it found Serene’s fingers and squeezed. “Almost exactly the way you left me.”

Serene’s free hand reached across her, to Lorna’s middle, and brushed her fingertips against an abdomen of real flesh and bone. “You’re real. You got out.”

“I was let out.” Lorna squeezed harder, leaned close to Serene’s face. “Why wasn’t it you who let me out?”

“I forgot where the door was.”

“You put a padlock on it.”

A wretched smile wormed its way through the folds of Serene’s cheeks. “I lost the key, too.”

Lorna sat on the bed. Her free hand reached Serene’s tired face, stroked her leathery skin, her wispy, shedding hair. “You could’ve changed the world when you found that door. History would’ve idolized you. Instead, all that door looked like was a cruel way to get rid of me. Why didn’t you just kill me?”

“Wouldn’t have gotten away with it.” Serene hacked out what might have been a laugh. “I didn’t plan it like this. We went inside and I thought we might let bygones be bygones. But you were so infatuated. You made it so easy to close the door and leave you.”

“How many months did it take?”

“With Ben? Less time than you think.” Another hacking, awful laugh.

“You took him. You took my life.”

Lorna’s hand found Serene’s neck. Hard to believe there was a throat buried deep in all that skin. She thought she might say something snappy, a great telling off before she crushed her sister’s windpipe, watched her squirm and struggle, her weak hands grasping in futility for just a little bit more life.

There was no point. She didn’t need to hurt Serene any worse. Serene only had to stop living. And she did, once all the death throes played out exactly as Lorna had envisioned them.

When the machines said Serene was dead, her tubes ceased their function and the door opened. Normal times, that would be a nurse or doctor or both, come to resuscitate or announce the time of death. Instead there was only an officer in tactical gear. Lorna had collected her end of the arrangement. Time to pay up.

“We have significant gaps in our history,” a bald man in a pleasant suit explained as he sat Lorna down in a room full of machines like she had never seen. His “snailspeak” was refreshing. “The early twenty-first century is almost a lost era to us. We don’t even have reference to most of its culture and numerous historical facts have been skewed.”

“You want me to patch the holes.”

“I want you to write everything you can think of. EverInk is far better at lasting than what people worked with digitally in your time, and it’s ecologically sound. It should last. We will give you a copy of what you’ve made, along with what we have. We can fit it on a bead no bigger than a drop of water.”

Lorna told him she would need a bigger physical container than that, but she did what he wanted. Her writing referenced anything she could think of—politics, discussions, movies, music. She wrote until she couldn’t think of anything left to write. Most of it was only allusions to events and media. With no way to reclaim what was lost, at least there was a record that they had existed.

Her next task was harder. She wrote the differences she could understand between her time and this new one, decades later. The government would provide an archive of all their known data, but her observations were scientifically unique and therefore of unprecedented value.

“A genuine time traveler,” the man said. She never learned his name.

The more she learned about this time, the less interest she had. She tried not to let disgust pollute her writing, but some disdain was inevitable. This was a bleak world she didn’t belong in. The authorities seemed to know it as well as she did. It made it easy to agree with their plans.

She didn’t even attend Serene’s service. If there were people who might miss her, Lorna didn’t want to know.

When every recording was made and Lorna had rested, the man and other officials escorted her back to 181 Downing Lane. No surprise, it had been cordoned off, made a black site. Even satellites couldn’t touch it. Government scientists had spent the past few weeks poking and prodding, but if any of them understood the doorway and its mechanism they never explained it to her.

The man in the suit shook her hand and introduced another man. “This is Diop. He’ll be our ambassador to the future. Hopefully a brighter one.”

Diop shook her hand as well. “I look forward to getting to know each other.”

Lorna scowled at the nameless man. “You didn’t explain how it works?”

“They explained. I understand.” Diop smiled like someone good at pretending. “It’s difficult to process, though.”

“Try not having a choice.” Lorna opened the door. Prehistoric warmth breathed down her face, not so different from the warmth of the future city. She wondered how hot it would be when she next emerged.

Diop had signed a waiver that he could not sue the government of the future for the years he would miss. He seemed to think he was headed for a better future. Maybe he was right.

There were no supplies to drop off. This was probably the least expensive mission the government had ever embarked on, and yet with all the overhead and oversight, Lorna imagined every step she took would cost millions. Funny, she hadn’t thought about money since she emerged. It had seemed to consume so many of her thoughts before Serene found the door.

“Do you have a family?” Lorna asked.

“Siblings,” Diop said. “No wife or kids, if that’s what you mean.”

“Good.”

The nameless man seemed befuddled at last. He was talking to scientists, military personnel, but between every empty handshake, he glanced Lorna’s way. “You’ve done so much for us. Are you sure there isn’t anything else you need? One hospital visit hardly seems fair.”

Was he being coy? Did he not know they let Lorna get away with murder? They told her that was okay, if only she did them a favor. She wondered how many such favors were parsed out every day, and then remembered none of that mattered, because almost everyone present would be dead the next time this door opened.

She had only one more request. “Don’t let anyone forget me this time.”

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A rumble ran through the forest of fungal trees, shaking their trunks so hard that a cloud of yellow-white spores rained across the trampled path. Most days, this was a still place. The people had tried to cut it down, make the pathway easier, but it was used so seldom that they could not remember to cut, and often nature fought back. A lizard the size of six people lay across the path, dormant as the forest, and the people stepped off the path to bypass it. Too many had been eaten by lizards last time. That, they remembered.

At last, the procession reached the great stone cavern secured by the Ancestors who first found the Door to Eternity. None of the carnivores could enter here; they were too large. Only small creatures and the people could slip through the dark doorway, guided by firelight, to where the cold slab of rusted metal stood embedded inside ancient stone.

They squatted down in a cluster, their head caps touching, and were silent.

Elder Lavia pressed their bulbous arms together, overgrown with spore infections, and led the people in prayer. Soon those infections would burst, the coming of new children, but before that, Lavia would see the door open again. So few of the people survived to witness two Openings. Lavia had remained celibate until now. Few could last for so long.

When prayers were finished, Lavia shuffled to the door and slid their arm inside a twining hoop of weeds. There was another way to open the door, a small, metal shape that stuck out midway along one side, but none of the people could grasp it, and whatever let the door swing had been long ago replaced. The Ancestors, in their wisdom, made the opening easier. All children of the people had a right to the knowledge within. The miracle within.

The Door to Eternity swung open. A cool breeze floated across Lavia, same as when they were young. Sometimes that breeze seemed imagined, as if no air could feel so refreshing, but here it came, good as Lavia remembered it. They could have stood there for a day, but today was not about them.

It was about her.

The last human emerged into the stone cavern. Many of the people began to hum in disquiet. They had never seen her like before, not even in historical art. Lavia was embarrassed, but remembered that shortsightedness was why the Door to Eternity was opened every hundred years. So that Lorna Camille could gift the people with the truth.

She widened her maw and bared her teeth, but Lavia wasn’t afraid like the children in the crowd. Lorna did this last time, and Lavia knew she wasn’t going to eat the people.

“You look familiar. Was Lavia your sire? Your grandsire?” She spoke the people’s language of hums and grunts, but with a strange accent.

Lavia’s sire had wondered if that was how the people spoke a hundred years before, but Lavia knew better. Lorna was doing her best. “I am Lavia myself.”

“Then it’s good to see you again. I just left you.”

“Short, for you. For me, a lifetime.”

Lavia spoke to the people in a faster speech, the flashing colors that writhed across their cap. Sometimes the colors were hard to discern beneath their many growths, the coming of many children. They told the people that Lorna was here to clarify the people’s history, to explain what had been, and to record what was new.

The cavern had been prepared for her. She needed water, like the people, but ate things like the carnivores, the spawn sacks that weeds made, even parts of the trees. She made waste like the carnivores, but Lavia knew this was hard for her now. It was why they wanted so badly to remain celibate, wait until the door reopened.

When Lorna sat on the soft bed of weeds that was built for her, Lavia squatted beside her and showed off their arms. “Do you see? I am with children. Like you.”

Lorna stroked her abdomen, where long ago a woman whose name the people would never know had prodded to be sure Lorna was real. She didn’t touch Lavia’s arms, but looked closely at them. “They will be beautiful children. I’m sorry they won’t meet you like I was lucky enough to.”

Lavia hoped that would be recorded. Maybe Lorna would meet their children or children’s children at the next Opening and tell them the greatness of their sire and grandsire.

Seeing Lavia sit beside the last human encouraged the people. They shuffled closer to Lorna, first the historians who wanted her to settle disagreements, and then the most curious, the young. They waited at her feet while history changed before them.

Lorna held a slab of dried tree in her hands and pointed one slender digit. “You let your geography data skew. This is how the continents were shaped.”

She retrieved a black hunk of char to draw corrections. Small beads dotted her flesh. It was written that those beads contained everything the humans ever learned, long dead before the time of the people, but Lorna said there were no machines left that could read them. It was fortunate she was able to learn the language of the people as it evolved.

When the historians finished, half the day had passed and many of the children had wandered off to play. Lavia was embarrassed again that they would squander this opportunity. Most, if not all of them, would be dead by the next century when the door opened once more.

One small child nestled close to Lorna’s side. “Were you alone?”

“I’m never alone,” Lorna said, and stroked her middle again.

“But someone to talk to.”

“Sometimes other humans would come with me. They would stay a couple rounds, but after that, it gets hard. A little ways into the future is interesting. Too much is culture shock. A lot, and you don’t feel like you’ll ever belong. Once, a lot of humans went inside with me, for refuge. The door only opened for us because of a rockslide. When they found out the other humans were gone, they went off together to repopulate the world. They didn’t make it. Eventually none of us do.”

The child pointed at Lorna’s middle. “Did one of them put the baby in you?”

“Oh, this one’s father died before I went inside.” Lorna stared past the child, toward the back of the cavern. The door awaited her, as it always had. “He died long ago.”

Lorna bore no colors atop her head to reveal her feelings, but the tired slump in her body language told Lavia a truth unwritten in the people’s histories. The last human bore the knowledge of the people, of the humans, of the world, but she had a story of her own that she told no one. And had Lavia asked, she would have widened her maw, friendly, told them it was nothing worth telling. Maybe that was true. Lavia still wished to know. Lorna might have thought it inconsequential, but she was the only living human, and it was the only living human’s story. In countless years, perhaps even she would be gone.

That would be so far ahead that Lavia couldn’t fathom it.

The day drew on, Lorna passing out information, the children failing to understand it, but their minds awakened with possibility. As last time, the people argued whether one or more of them should accompany Lorna, to be thrust ahead into the hopeful progress of a century to come. While most thought it was a good idea, none wanted to volunteer. The people were making strides with vine-work, teaching it to peel away layers of earth, uncover what remained of geological layers that might be useful someday. They wanted to see that progress unfold.

Lorna slept awhile, at which time half the people left. By night there was only Lavia and a handful of historians, all of whom would leave before morning when the lizards became most active. When Lorna awoke, it was time.

“I loved seeing you again, Lavia,” she said. “I hope your grandchildren will meet me at the door next.”

Lavia would will it so. “Is there nothing we can do for you?”

Lorna stepped through the door, into the coolness of many millions of years ago. “Would you leave the door open for a few moments? I’ve spent eons here, but I’ve hardly taken the time to know this place. Not since the start.”

Lavia understood there were more dangerous creatures than the lizards on the far side of the door, carnivores that could consume even the last human, but there was no refusing Lorna. They let the door hang open and waited, watching her.

She sat on a dry patch of soil, legs crossed beneath her, the weight of her middle nestled like an egg on her lap. Black shapes crossed the distant sky. Somewhere distant, a tree crashed, thoughtlessly trampled at the edge of a forest where a nameless animal that weighed many tons had let its tail swing wild. Creatures were dying, others hatching. A small, blue lizard slid past Lorna’s feet, the same that had mistaken a rock for food, minutes and eons ago. Scales had frayed along its neck where it was beginning to shed a skin.

They were alike, she and the lizard, both timeless here, and yet shedding their layers. The world beyond the door was her skin. Each time the door opened, the last time became near useless, only evidence that there had been a before and a promise that there would be more skins to shed. Everything that mattered in one instant became a relic in the next. Arguments, money, thoughts, children. All of it, dead scales peeling off a lizard’s hide.

Her hands clasped her swollen gut, palms pressed. Beneath them, a kick. She wondered how many more centuries she would visit before the labor pains began and she was forced to give birth in a world that could neither understand nor help her and her baby. Maybe they both would die. Maybe there was something wrong with the baby, afflicted by the past, the future, the door.

Or maybe, someday, there would be a new last human.

She had dragged this out enough, could feel Lavia’s nervousness. The people had lives to return to, and she did not. She glanced over her shoulder and gave them a final smile. “That’s fine. I know you’re anxious. You may close the door now.”

"Reptile" by Hailey Piper [Issue 7 Full Story]

Reptile

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