Refraction | Part 1 | Darwin's Steroids
25) Rifts
Here’s how it happened.
He had turned immediately off Twelfth and onto a side street, to walk in the middle of the road, something he had enjoyed doing since he was a child. There was no traffic at this time of night, and it gave him a sense of ownership and control to be able to amble right up the middle of the street.
Israel had been looking at the lone star visible through the city’s light pollution as he walked, and he glanced down just in time to stop himself from being hit in the neck by an arrow. Directly in front of him, about three feet off the ground, there was what Israel could only describe as a hole in the air. A rip, as in cloth, about twenty feet long by two feet wide, laying horizontally, so that one could look down into it. A crevice in space, from which an arrow had just been fired, had opened itself right in Israel’s path. The disorientation that washed over him was doubled back the fact that although he was looking down, he appeared to be looking side ways into the space beyond. Before him Israel saw an improbable a vista of tree tops, and partly cloudy, sunlit sky.
A clatter on the ground behind him announced the arrow’s return to earth, and Israel spun around quickly, hoping to find and claim hard evidence of the event. The arrow had flown a tight parabola and landed only a few feet behind the old man, he loped over to it and stooped to pick it up. In the moment he bent over a mighty roar erupted from the tear in space, now to his back. He toppled forward onto his knees, the force of the sound like a sonic boom, setting off car alarms down the length of the block. Israel became instantly and permanently deaf, his ear drums perforated, the tiny delicate bones within shattered beyond repair.
He shook his head, his body reacting now as though in combat. Old lessons, hard learned and deeply burned into his the fiber of his body, took over. He lay flat, and risked a look over his shoulder. His eyes saw something that his mind told him just couldn’t be. He felt his anus pucker; he tightened his grip around the arrow, and rolled himself into the slight protection of a parked car.
A huge reptilian head thrashed above the opening, bright orange, with incredibly brilliant green eyes. Israel estimated the head to be about the size and weight of a gas oven. The creature’s mouth snapped open, and Israel felt the street shake as another wave of sound crashed over him. A another arrow suddenly appeared, this one true to it’s mark, deep in soft tissue of the dragon’s lower jaw. Blood spurted from the great beast’s mouth, and pink foam began to bubble and spit from the flights of the arrow buried in the animal’s neck. The dragon whipped its head back and forth in a futile effort to dislodge the projectile. Its mighty skull smashed into a parked sedan with the force of a wrecking ball, bending the car’s frame and pulverizing the windows. With a sudden shuddering jerk the dragon dropped its jaw as though to let loose with another mighty roar, instead a torrent of blood flooded out, when an artery damaged in the missile attack finally gave way. Blood hosed out of the reeking mouth, showering Israel as he lay in stunned silence, now as frightened and confused as he’d ever been. The shining green eyes of the monstrous animal clouded grey and it slumped back into the gap, disappearing view.
Israel gathered himself and clambered to his feet. Moving slowly, off balance and uncertain, he made his way to the edge of the hole in space. As he neared its edge it began to zip itself closed. He chased it its length, but it seemed to flee from him and sealed, evaporating into the night air before he could reach it and peer inside.
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