Fourth Installment of Otherwise: The Children’s Crusade
by Christopher Bernard
     
Chapter Twelve: The Subway Stop That Time Forgot

“. . . and we were just starting to explore the books in the burned down library when she found us,” Petey said, finishing his description of the boys’ adventures since riding Dr. Sazerac’s balloon to a crash the day before. 
A look passed between a tall, black-haired, serious-looking young man, vaguely Eurasian, maybe seventeen, who Petey guessed was the Ruhtra the girl had mentioned to the guard, and Yram as Petey completed his tale.
“Command of Germanglish theirs not strong be,” Yram said to the young man. “Speak they like books the war in Acirema before.”
“Old Anglish! To its memory all praise!”
“To its memory all praise!”
The three boys and the young man and girl sat around a rickety metal table in a long, low-ceilinged room just beyond the metal door near the abandoned subway station bizarrely crowded with children like refugees from a pillaged school district. The room seemed part of some sort of headquarters or office. Other young people—some very young indeed, yet all of them with the grimly determined looks on their faces of grownups under pressure—were hard at work. They gave the boys little looks of alarm and the air was heavy with tension and hurry, as if something of great moment was pending yet the new arrivals were not so much interrupting the mission as throwing a wrench in it that needed immediate addressing.
The boys had been introduced to the young man as “boys from elsewhere,” a word that seemed to be part of a mysterious code the two seemed to fall into and out of while conferring with each other. The three boys had given their names and the specifics of where they were from, but these drew blank stares and seemed to mean nothing to the other two at the table.
Petey hesitated at the end of his story, but he had heard what they said and saw the look passing between the two and decided to ask the fateful question that had been on the end of his tongue almost as long as the crash.
“Is this Otherwise?”
The young man seemed startled by the question.
“What this ‘Otherwise’?”
Petey had memorized the description he had been given already twice before during his visits, or hallucinations, or psychotic breaks, or whatever they had been, years ago.
“Otherwise is where everything that might have happened but didn’t in the real world, in Howtiz, does happen. With,” he added, “all the consequences.”
The young man looked coolly at him.
“Boy, in your world would I wish to be. Why so sure you from where you come not this ‘Otherwise’?” he said. “How know you this real nicht be? And this be not ‘how it is’?”
Bumper’s eyes seemed to bug out of his head, and Petey detected the tell-tale signs of brain freeze.
The answer shocked Petey as well. The idea had never occurred to him, though he immediately saw how plausible it might look to someone from outside. 
It might even be true.
The thought cut through him like ice.
Chace turned very pale.
“How . . . could . . . ?” Bumper tried to get out. Petey had never told Bumper about Otherwise, so this was all new to him.
Chace leaned toward him.
“Don’t even try,” he whispered in Bumper’s ear. 
The young man ignored them and turned to Petey.
“Where you are from I do now know,” he said, with a glance at Yram, who gave him a pained look. “Though, admit I, with a long lost past my heart it aches.” He got up and walked around the table. He seemed to get a hunch, and stopped.
“Who the last war won?”
“Which one?” Petey returned.
“Last big one, all the world covering.”
Petey considered. He must mean World War II—that was the last “really big” war that everybody knew about.
“That’s easy,” he said stoutly. “The United States of America.”
Another look, this time more piercing, passed between the young man and Yram.
“Have the Permanent Emergency heard of?”
	“Never.” Petey turned to Chace. “Have you?”
	“Only what the mater sometimes calls the pater,” Chace replied coolly.
	“The Permanent Emergency since the Year of Victory in place.”
	“And when was that?” asked Petey, feeling his throat go dry.
	“1948.”
	“But the Allies won in 1945.”
	The young man snorted.
	“In 1943 the Alliance, to be precise, lost. Where did you your history learn?”
	“In school, like everyone else. America and the Allies won against the Fascists and the Nazis. They stopped the Holocaust! They freed Europe and Asia! It was the greatest victory in the history of the world!”
	Petey’s conscience nagged him for exaggerating, after all he couldn’t be certain what he had just said was exactly true, but this guy was so exasperating, he deserved it!
	“What this ‘America’? ‘Acirema,’ of course, you mean. Everything backwards you have. The United States of Acirema until 1948 were not pacified.”
	“What do you mean,‘pacified’?” Petey demanded. “By who?”
	“By Izan, of course. All states disbanded and the name changed to Night Reich of Acirema. The country a kolonie of the Germanish empire ever since has been. You fellows from ‘elsewhere’ truly be!”
	“An elsewhere like our own past, most strangely,” said Yram.
	Even Chace looked shocked at this.
	“Impossible,” said Ruhtra. “And yet so.”
	He frowned and tapped the fingers of one hand against the knuckles of the other, then walked a few paces away and motioned Yram toward him. They stood whispering for a minute or two while looking uncertainly at the boys. 
	“I thought the expression ‘deciding their fate’ was one you only saw in books,” Chace muttered to Petey.
	As they talked, the girl said, in a louder whisper, “But Ruhtra, what if . . .”
	“Live by ‘ifs,’” the young man replied, “and ‘when’ we never shall reach.”
	A moment later they returned. 
	“Gentlemen,” Ruhtra said, almost apologetically, “To have to do this sorry I am. Your existence more in danger be than you possibly can know. In safekeeping we must for the time being place you . . .”
	“Safe!” said Petey. “From who? From what?”
	Ruhtra gave him an ironic look.
	“From yourselves first. Not for long it will be, we promise.” He added, almost to himself, and somewhat enigmatically: “Either way.” He motioned to Yram, who nodded and took out the Luger she had put in her pocket on entering the subway maze.
	“Sorry, fellows, I be,” she said, then motioned the pistol toward an inner door. “Please.”
	There are offers one can’t refuse, as Petey had learned from the movies, so the boys reluctantly left the long dimly lit room under the eyes of the busy young people there, watching them curiously as they trailed out into a dark, fusty jungle of brackets and piping, walls of rebar and metal gridding, clumps of hanging wires, dust-covered light bulbs, curtains of spider web, and the sounds of scurrying rats till, after what felt like they had been wandering through a labyrinth of mid-twentieth-century industrial technology for a quarter of an hour, they reached a small door under a dim light from a grid of thick glass in the sidewalk twenty feet above, with a defaced sign displaying a triangle in red and the words “DANGER 20,000 VOLTS.” 
Which the girl ignored, opening the door with one hand and motioning the boys inside. The door was so small, they had to crawl to get in, though once they were past the door, they found themselves in a cement-walled room, a cell just big enough for the three of them. A single bulb hung from the center of the ceiling. On the floor, there were the remains of someone’s supper.
	“Later back I will be,” said the girl, taking the dish from the floor. “To bring you something to eat actually you are able.” 
	“Can I have a coke?” asked Bumper, with nervous politeness. Bumper’s parents had bred good manners in their boy almost to a fault. He responded to danger with a politeness that grew more exaggerated with the extremity of the danger. 
“Yes,” said Yram. “Bring you a coke I can.”
Well that’s a nice surprise! thought Petey. At least it isn’t pronounced “ekoc.”
“How terrible feel we – how terrible feel I – about doing this to you I wish you to know,” the girl said as she stood at the door. “The danger you be in you cannot know. Or the danger we be in. And better to be safe it be . . .”
	“‘. . .  than sorry,’” said Chase. “Some clichés are the same even in Otherwise.”
	Petey gave Chace a rueful look. Now maybe he’d believe in it, wherever it actually was, if they ever got home.
	“But just how sorry you do not know you could be,” she said sternly at Chace’s quip. “And if you lucky you be, find out you will never.”
	Then she closed the door.
	“Now do you believe it?’ Petey said to Chace as they stood under the bleakly burning light bulb. Though he immediately regretted it.
	Chace shrugged.
	“Believe what?” asked Bumper.
	“Now I’d believe in the tooth fairy,” said Chace.
	Bumper was mystified.
	“You mean you don’t believe in the tooth fairy?” Bumper asked, appalled.
	Chace patted Bumper on the back.
	“Far be it for me to insult the tooth fairy,” he said. “But I have to admit: there are times I have my doubts.”
	Bumper nodded gravely.
	“Sometimes I do too,” he said. “Even about Santa Claus . . .”
	Chace frowned and mimicked Bumper’s nod.
	Petey felt he was about to burst. What did the tooth fairy and Santa Claus have to do with Otherwise? And he was haunted by what Ruhtra had said. Everything that had happened to them, and that had struck him as uncanny and horrible, fell into place if what the young man said was true. 
Yet, what if everything Petey had ever lived had been a mirage, and this horror (because it was a horror, almost beyond imagining, yet just possible enough to have been true all the time) what if this was “reality” . . . ?
	But what was this? A world where the greatest evil he had ever heard of had won? How could that be possible? 
	“Well, I can’t believe it,” he said, following his own thoughts.
	“What?” said Chace, with an ironic look at his friend. “You mean you’re the one who doesn’t believe now?”
	“Not that,” Petey said. “This. I can’t believe where we are. I can’t believe this is real.”
	“Well, if it’s your fancy Otherwise after all,” said Chace, “it’s just one possibility among a fabulous infinity of them all. Though it’s a pretty awful one.”
	“But you heard what Ruhtra said. What if where we’re from is ‘just one possibility’ and what if this is the ‘real world’ and we’ve managed somehow to, I don’t know, miss it—not live in it, never have lived in reality at all? What if we’re just some kind of dream that managed to escape into the real world?”
	“Watch it, old son,” said Chace. “You’re getting philosophical.”
	“No, I’m not, life is,” said Petey, more philosophically than he realized. “I’m just waking up.”
	“Dangerous thing,” Chace muttered. “Waking up.”
	Bumper looked back and forth between the two of them.
	“What are you two guys talking about?”
	“Oh to be young again,” said Chace (who was fourteen), with a nostalgic sigh. “When we were fancy free and not haunted by unanswerable questions.”
	Bumper scowled. He was old enough to know when he was being patronized.
	“I may be little,” he said, which is how he interpreted “young,” “but I’m not stupid!”
	“I didn’t say you were stupid, I said . . .’
	“Yes, you did! That’s what you meant!”
	“How do you know what I meant?”
	“Because I’m not stupid!” And Bumper looked like he was about to tear Chace’s eyes out or perish trying.
	“Stop it!” shouted Petey. “Behave yourselves! Don’t fight!” he added, echoing a mantra he had heard often enough from his parents. “Or we’ll never get home again.”
	Bumper slumped down on the cement floor and suddenly started whimpering. The other boys looked at him in dismay.
	Petey crouched down next to him and put his arm around the little boy’s shoulder.
	“I miss home!” Bumper sobbed.
	“Me too,” said Petey.
	Chace was about to say something sarcastic, but wisely kept it to himself.
	“We’ll get there,” said Petey.
	“Oh?” asked Bumper, between sobs. He gave Petey a skeptical look. “Just how, smarty pants?”
	“I don’t know how. But I know one thing.”
	“What’s that?”
“We got here.”
“That’s irrefutably true,” said Chace from the airy heights above them.
“So there’s a way back there. It’s like we slipped through a crack. We just have to find the crack again.”
“The miracle of reverse engineering, as the pater says,” said Chace.
Petey thought: And slip through even if it’s back to an illusion.
	But no: he must not let himself think that. This was the illusion, whatever people here thought. Where he and his friends had come from was reality. They had to get back to the real world. Though the journey might be a long one.
	Bumper wiped his eyes.
	“But what’s Otherwise?” he said. “And how can ‘otherwise’ be a place?”
	Chace groaned as he remembered having the same endless, irresolvable debate with Petey years ago.
	“Don’t even think about asking that question!” he said.
	“But I already did,” said Bumper innocently.
	“That doesn’t mean it gets an answer,” said Chace, definitively closing the discussion. 
Chapter Thirteen: The Link

	Petey, making himself as comfortable on the cement floor as cement would allow, told Bumper about his two visits to Otherwise (while Chace twisted his lips into a glossary of skeptical pouts, groaning at intervals to express the munificence of his self-denial in not crushing Petey’s claims with sarcasm): the first “when I was almost your age,” on a crooked yellow trolley to the land of the gentle Paonas invaded by the barbarous and brutal Korgans, about Sharlotta (he sighed a little when he remembered her, and his voice gave a little squeak), and how the two of them saved her parents and  ended the invasion in a great conflagration. 
Then the second time when he and “a friend” (he gave Chace a reproachful glance; Chace, who had never recovered from his “amnesia” about the adventure, suddenly looked as innocent as the snow) were swept out to sea and captured by old-time pirates, then held captive in the brig with a gruff bulldog and a fancy cat until a battle sank the pirate ship, and Petey and his friend and the cat and dog spent days clinging to a piece of wreckage until they were cast on an island ruled by foxes, and Petey and his friend were tried by a court of animals for the crimes of humanity against the animal kingdom over the centuries . . .
	“Wow,” said Bumper, “that sounds harsh! My mom’s vegan. But she lets me eat meat because she says if I don’t, I won’t grow.”
	Bumper, of course, was little. Chace gave him a look that suggested he might benefit from a diet that was strictly carnivorous.
“Do you think they would have put me on trial?”
	“I was eleven,” said Petey, letting that sink in. Age wouldn’t exactly have protected his young friend.
	Bumper blinked.
“So,” he asked somberly, “did they hang you?” 
“No,” said Petey. “The cat and dog testified in our favor, and we eventually escaped from the island.”
	Bumper grew contemplative.
	“And so you think we’re in Otherwise now.”
	“Yes. Though I keep hoping,” said Petey, “I’ll wake up and realize this is just a bad dream. But after what Ruhtra said, I’m not so sure I want to wake up, now, at all, ever.”
	Bumper put on his best daddy look.
	“What do you think, Chace?”
	Chace’s eyes perceptibly darkened.
	“Whether or not we’re in Otherwise,” he said, “we’re someplace that’s really, as the pater would say, ‘fookéd up.’” 
 	Bumper looked shocked when he realized exactly what Chace had just said. His mom, though she was lenient about what he put into his mouth, was not about what came out.
	“Oh!” said Bumper. 
	The boys settled down for a long wait, Petey in a corner with his forehead against his drawn-up knees, Chace sprawled near the opposite wall and staring at the ceiling, Bumper crouched near the door and absent-mindedly picking his nose. 
	Petey, for the hundredth time, went over what had happened since they launched in Dr. Sazerac’s balloon an eternity ago. Everything here was so familiar and yet so eerie! He couldn’t be just dreaming (which everyone had accused him of when he had tried to describe Otherwise to them), and yet it couldn’t be real! It was like the world he was used to, but everything was upside down. And backwards! 
	“Do you know what spiders do after they make their cobwebs?” Chace suddenly asked philosophically as he stared up at the ceiling.
	“Spiders?” Bumper asked with a quivering voice. He stopped mid nose-pick. He was scared of spiders.
	“They,” said Chace giving a deep yawn and stretching his arms as far as they would go, “take a lonnnng nap.”
	“How do you know that?”
	Chace pointed toward the ceiling.
	Bumper looked up.
	The ceiling’s four corners were veiled with cobwebs, with several more connecting three of them and one solitary web luffing like a sail mysteriously in the airless cell. A spider lay curled up in the web, asleep. Around it were the remnants of several ingested flies. 
	Bumper was about to yell in panic when there was a noisy clanking from the cell door. A moment later, it opened with a squeal, and Ruhtra and Yram entered, crawling through the small door.
	They stood up under the single hanging bulb and looked down solemnly at the boys, who remained on the floor. The cell felt suddenly very crowded.
	Ruhtra glanced away and cleared his throat.
	“An apology to you I feel I owe,” he said. “Who you are I couldn’t be sure, and our position here precarious be. Even we about spies must worry. About you I had absolutely sure to be. But all our researches with nothing about any of you.came up. According to all official records, you not to exist.”
	Chace pinched his arm hard.
	“Ouch!” he said. “I exist, all right. I feel pain, therefore I am. Not sure about you guys,” he added, giving the other two boys a glance. “You could be figments of my imagination. Though if so, I never knew it was so weird.”
 	“Oh you, truly, exist,” said Ruhtra. “Though best it might be if we all figments of someone’s imagination were and not in the cage of reality locked. But the three of you in a peculiar state be—both here and not here. Officially nonexistent, but, in all practical respects, the most real thing there be, precisely because not recognized as being at all.” He paused, looked hard at them before continuing. “Dissidents to the occupation we be. To a network called the Link dedicated to liberating Acirema from Izan we belong.. Dedicated to the destruction of Izan, to the liberation of Acirema. Because not possible it is in a world with them in it to live. At all.”
	He paused and gave them a long stare. Yram gave him a worried look, but said nothing.
	“This you need to know about us: that we of children are entirely made, from as young as four and five to as old as myself, seventeen, and a few even older, but kept among the young so suspected we not be by Izan. The adults to Izan rule long have capitulated, calling this ‘to be mature,’ to ‘grow up,’ to ‘accept reality.’ But our position be that certain realties there are to accept one must never. And that to change those realities we can and must—to them overthrow and new realities to create, out of imagination, passion, ingenuity, determination, and, not least, out of memories of a kinder and freer way of life before our conquest, brief as it shall be, by this evil. And with a little luck, the chance be that our way goes. That the lesson of history be, over and over, down the ages: just when despair most justified seems, a stubborn good seizes and takes. Our memories and our dreams to us give hope and us keep alive. This, we believe, the lesson of life itself be, down upon us millions of years: the life that the earth itself be, has been and shall be, until the end of time. And we a duty have—some call the blessing of reality itself—on that lesson to act. In our case, this dictatorship to bring down.”
“Do they call it fascism here?” asked Petey.
“To Fascismo allied it is, it divides with it Eporue, across the Eastern Sea. Our duty is our world from both Fascismo and Izan to liberate. The adults childish call us. We it call—”
	Suddenly the roar of an explosion echoed down the tunnels outside.
	“Tihs yloh!” Ruhtra said to Yram in alarm. “That ours be?”
	“Not that one,” said Yram.
	All five of them froze and listened. At first there was a long, deep silence, strangely hollow and empty, as though the elaboration of steel and concrete that surrounded them were waiting for another explosion. Then a muted sound of screaming, as of a mass of panicking children, rolled by in a muddy roar just outside closed door of the cell. Petey heard one word in the white noise: “Poliz!” that immediately washed away.
	The young man and woman—looking suddenly much younger than their actual years, more vulnerable than their pretense of competent command had led them to appear to the boys—stared at each other with faces drained pure white. 
	“A mole!” Ruhtra said in a strangled voice. 
	A distant sound of tumult, shots, shouting echoed through the subway tunnels.
	“Izan,” said Ruhtra, having retained control of himself.
	“Plan . . .,” Yram ventured, with a look of despair, “. . . Zero?”
	“Not enough bombs primed,” the young man replied coolly. “Only a platoon’s worth with us take down.”—He sniffed at the air, reminding Petey of his family’s pet retriever smelling something undetectable to his human owners. Then Petey smelled it too, smoke penetrating from the tunnels outside, mingling with the noise. Every so often a single scream pierced the tumult.—“Burning the papers at central.” Ruhtra paused. “Betrayed we may be but no excuse to play martyrs to betray the cause.”
	The blood in the faces of the three boys suddenly drained away to the dead white of the other two. The thought dawned bleakly on Petey: Is Plan Zero to blow themselves up, to take down the attacking Izan with them? 
	 Ruhtra carefully opened the metal door and he and Yram crawled through and led the boys out to the tunnels, which were quickly filling with smoke and clearer echoes of the rough clangor of attack and high-pitched screaming punctuated by sounds of shots.
 	A small mass of the children had already filled the main, dimly lit tunnel that the Izan had not yet found; they were eerily silent, disoriented and lost. At the sight of Ruhtra and Yram they stopped and stared at them, half hopefully, half despairingly.
	Ruhtra seemed to fully regain his authority at the sight of the frightened children. The distant noises were coming closer. Hard decisions had to be made fast.
	Attack the attackers and face near certain annihilation—or try to escape, with possibly the same result? Petey could see the bleak choice at war in the older boy’s countenance.
	Then Ruhtra’s face slackened into a look of grim seriousness.
	“For more survivors we cannot wait,” he muttered in an aside to Yram. “If to save these we can.” 
Yram looked appalled but said nothing.
Ruhtra gestured toward a hefty fourteen-year-old nearby.
 	“Ganzor,” Ruhtra said in a stage whisper, “your battalion take to the old storm reservoir, and for instructions wait.” 
	“All day we have not eat. At least lunch can we have?”
	“And where that be? White Castles our style not just yet.”
Ruhtra looked at a beautiful Slavic girl standing just behind Ganzor. 
“Tatiana, your troops take through the West Village sewer to the Chelsea warehouse.”
Tatiana nodded unsmilingly.
“What if already it they have took?”
“Then it burn down,” he said. “And your people scatter. If hear from you I do not, I will know.”
She again nodded unsmilingly.
“Where Dewitt?”
	A thin squinting fifteen-year-old who looked more like a math nerd than a militant, waved from the back of the crowd.
“Your people hide in the service tunnel from the Little Flower’s days that never on any map was found, then south move after the Izan the station clear and in the old Staten Island ferry landing take cover.”
	“What about Chingu’s people?” asked Ganzor with a reproachful look.
	“Go back now we cannot go,” Ruhtra said. “Who we can we save. And the best for them hope.”
	“The survivors they will torture!” Tatiana blurted out.
	“Quiet!” Ruhtra said. “All of us they will kill if here they us find. Now, everyone, go!”
	“Where you go?” asked Dewitt.
	“Better for you, better for us, you not to know. Now move. But our motto remember: ‘Silent, secret, sudden—success!’”
	Petey watched as various motley groups of kids—this may have been Otherwise, or maybe it was the Real World after all, but kids, it seemed, were kids, all different and all alike, everywhere and at all times; they were all a bit like Bumper, in fact—a combination of silliness, vulnerability and innocence, everyone looking a little lost and wearing clothes never the right size and always a few years out of fashion, with awkward limbs and soft faces and shining eyes that betrayed an obstinate clarity, like an unforgiving mirror—all of them faded away, in eerie silence, down the tangle of shadows that made up the abandoned subway tunnels. As suddenly as the tunnels had filled, they were now empty, though the distant noise from the abandoned station had not let up.
The three boys followed Ruhtra and Yram down a service tunnel they hadn’t noticed just across from them. Darkness, oil and dust closed around them as the metal door shut behind them with a hollow clang.  
_____

Christopher Bernard is a prize-winning author of both poetry and fiction. The two earlier stories in the “Otherwise” series are If You Ride A Crooked Trolley . . . and The Judgment Of Biestia (winner of the Independent Press Award in Preteen Fiction and short-listed for the K M Anthru International Literature Award).