Tripping Incarnate (eBook)

2

First Crossing

Wyeth woke up in the dark. It was real dark. He lifted his head and looked around, saw nothing. He blinked to make sure his eyes weren’t shut, and then pulled a hand in front of his face and wiggled his fingers. He couldn’t see them, either.

And then he remembered what had happened. He’d been hit by a truck while riding his bike home. But if that was true, why wasn’t he hurting like mad? Moving cautiously, he sat up, expecting stabbing agony of pain from injury. There was none. In fact, his movements came with surprising ease, as if his creaky joints had been miraculously lubricated. He moved his hands down his front, finding that his jersey seemed extra loose and disheveled, probably from being ripped during his fall from his bike. That wasn’t it, though. It was more like it was too big for him—way too big. His lycra bicycling shorts, when he managed to stand, fell down to his ankles.

“What the…?!” He froze. His words had sounded foreign, like those of a child. On the verge of panic, he bent down to pull up his shorts, and found their spandex waist large enough to accommodate a girth twice his own, and the legs, which normally covered the top two-thirds of his thighs, now reached the ground!

“Crap!” he squeaked, still in the childlike voice. Okay, he was officially panicking now. What to do…what to do? That’s it. Find something familiar. What happened to the bike? Find the bike.

He knotted the waist of his shorts so they wouldn’t fall off, and then with fingers splayed, he swept his arms before him as he moved slowly forward—and as soon as he lifted a foot, his bike shoe fell off. His foot came back down half on and half off the shoe, and he lost his balance and fell down on hard, sandy ground. He cast about and found his shoe. It was huge, like a Bozo shoe—which went right along with his giant clothes.

Remaining seated, he resumed the sweeping motion of his arms. The fingers of his right hand contacted something. It felt like a creosote bush, but its branches seemed larger than they should have. Following a branch with his fingers, he found the tip and rubbed his fingers over larger-than-life leaves, and pulled them to his nose to find the strong scent of creosote.

“Just what the hell…crap!” his boyish voice squeaked again. “What is going on?” he asked the darkness.

There was a noise—soft chirping—a cricket. And then a deeper sound, distant rumbling. Gathering light to his left caught his attention, and he snapped his head around to discover an approaching set of headlights, accompanied by the unmistakable rattle of a large diesel engine. A semi? Sounded right.

He got his other foot free of the Bozo-sized bike shoe and stood with his feet inside oversized bike socks. Maybe the truck’s headlights would allow him to spot his bike. He thought of trying to flag down whoever it was, but he was too far from the road, maybe thirty yards, and he wasn’t going to go running through the desert in the dark and step on a scorpion. That thought made him scramble to put his feet back in the big bike shoes.

The truck approached quickly and zoomed by. It wasn’t a semi like he thought, but some kind of military vehicle with a canvas back—a troop transport. He should have known it was military, since they were the only ones that still used diesel. Everything else used fuel cells. Funny how he was able to make out its shape in the dark. Except that it wasn’t as totally dark as he thought. The lights of El Centro cast enough residual light to silhouette the truck. Anyway, that didn’t matter right now. He’d spotted the handlebars of his bike in the momentary glare of the truck’s headlights, and he shuffled toward it, making sure to keep his feet in his bike shoes.

His bike was huge, just like everything else seemed to be. He felt with his hands, inspecting. The front wheel was a pretzel and the down tube was crushed from underneath. The rear wheel was twisted around the seat- and chain-stays, and the chain was wrapped like spaghetti around a mangled derailleur. Amazingly, the handlebars and front fork didn’t have a scratch—which made sense, since he was struck from behind.

Before that happened, he’d been about three-quarters of the way down I-8 to Dunaway Road, where Bleeker Street—his street—peeled off to the right and then angled north. There was no way he was going to drag that mangled bike home, even if it wasn’t that far. He decided to walk it on the road in his bare feet. There was a nice wide shoulder, and there was practically no traffic on his street, no matter the hour. He’d be home in no time. He fished his keys and wallet out of his bike’s seat bag, and carried them—they were huge in his suddenly tiny hands—toward home. Once there, maybe he could figure out what in the hell had happened.

It seemed like it took forever to get there, enough time that when he finally stood in his driveway, the eastern sky was brightening. The sun would be up in a little while—good. When he got to the front door he found a doorknob as high as his chin. Had he been suddenly transported to the land of the giants, or what? This was definitely getting pretty creepy. He had a fleeting urge to hum the Twilight Zone theme song, but such humor escaped him.

Fumbling with the keys, he managed—with much more effort than he remembered—to push open the huge door to his prefab house. Habitually, he ran his hands over his head—and instead of smooth baldness, he found a full head of hair! He had to reach up to the light switch, and when he flipped it on, he found a house built for a giant. The proportions were correct, but it was he, he realized now, who was diminutive.

He moved to the bathroom and the door-length mirror on the interior side of its door. The hallway carpet felt incredibly soft after walking on concrete for almost a half mile.

“Jesus!” he gasped. He stared in shock at his reflection. His jersey was shredded, alright—and bloody around the neck. But the person who stared back at him… “I’m just a little kid!” His voice matched the reflection. A reflection he hadn’t seen since his grade school days. He pulled his small hands up to his face and found smooth skin with peach fuzz instead of whiskers on a wrinkly, age-spotted countenance. He undid the impromptu waist knot from his bike shorts and they fell to the bathroom floor. The torn, bloody jersey had become repulsive suddenly and he pulled it up over his head like a dirty bed sheet. Standing naked, he inspected his full-length reflection. His body was cherub-like, absent of adult body hair or features. Even his prominent Adams-apple was gone—or yet to develop!

He searched his mind, trying to find an explanation for what had happened to him. Yesterday evening, he’d been riding his bike back from Samrose’s and then something had hit him from behind. Since he hadn’t heard it until the last second, it couldn’t have been a diesel, and thus likely not military. Hydrogen was the most abundant element, and there had been hydrogen stations in remote areas for decades—but you couldn’t get sufficient quantities of hydrogen for a fuel cell except from one of the stations. Diesels could get functional fuel in the form of French fry grease from a restaurant or oil from the crushed seeds of a crop of sunflowers or jojoba bushes if the network of stations ever broke down. It was the kind of scenario the military must consider—where does the fuel come from if the supply is cut off?

So, it was probably a civilian vehicle that nailed him—what, last night?

These things he considered while staring at his naked reflection. Had he gone back in time? It sure looked like it. There was no mistake the kid staring back at him was a younger version of himself, complete with the brown eyes which had later turned olive green.

Definitely Twilight Zone city.

Okay, what about the time-travel theory. Did it hold up? If I’ve gone back to when I was, say, ten years old, he mused, it’d be 1963, and this house wouldn’t exist. Check that theory off. What, then? Was I smacked hard enough by that truck or whatever to have been sent through some bizarre wormhole into a parallel dimension? That was stretching it, big-time. Of course, the little kid looking back at him made that stretch not quite so long.

Well, it was daylight, so maybe a look around or talking with someone. Yeah, that’s it. Go next door and talk to Bob. Maybe he’s a little kid now, too. Trouble is, dumb ass, you can’t go around looking like you’re wearing a circus tent for a shirt. And by the time you roll up your pants to accommodate your new, shorter self, it’d look like you were wearing salamis around your ankles.

Great, just great.

“Ah…scissors!” he said triumphantly to his reflection while holding up a finger of realization. “A pair of cut-off blue jeans shouldn’t look too strange, and then a little needle and thread action…” He got busy with crudely tailoring the dimensions of a shirt and jeans using scissors and his needle and thread repair kit. The result was a set of clothing that looked a little bulky in places because of doubled-over material to make up for a greatly diminished girth. But overall, it wasn’t too...