Chapter 2: Seven Days of Foolishness
The phone was screaming.
Caleb came awake with a gasp, one arm flailing, his cheek stuck to the carpet with dried drool. For a heartbeat he did not know where he was. Then the smell of detergent and old laundry reached him, and he understood that he was home. Not in the street. Not in the house. Home.
The phone buzzed again against the floor and skittered in a small circle. The screen read Dale - Manager. His stomach dropped. He snatched it up. "Hello? Hey, Dale. Hi."
"Where are you?" Dale's voice was flat, which was worse than yelling.
"I'm, uh, I'm at home, I—"
"It's 13:15. Your shift started at eleven."
Caleb pushed himself upright. Dried blood had crusted in his palm, and the gold necklace lay beside him on the carpet, curled like a small yellow snake. "I'm so sorry. I wasn't feeling well. I should have called."
"Yes. You should have."
"I can come in right now. I can be there in twenty minutes. I'll stay late, I'll cover whatever—"
"Marcus is on the fryer. We handled the lunch rush without you."
Caleb closed his eyes. "I'm really sorry, Dale."
"This is the third time this month."
"I know."
"I'm not going to do this every week, Caleb."
"I know. It won't happen again. I promise. Please, I need the hours."
The line went quiet. Behind Dale he could hear the fryer, the hiss of oil, a kid shouting an order. "Tomorrow," Dale said at last. "Ten a.m. Don't be late."
"Yes. Thank you. Thank you, Dale, I—"
The call ended. Caleb stared at the phone. He had just thanked a man for not firing him over a shift he had missed because he had been in a zombie apocalypse. He laughed once, a small ugly exhale, and then he looked at the necklace. He picked it up and turned it in the light. It was real gold, heavy enough to feel solid and light enough to feel impossible.
Something pale and blue hung at the corner of his vision. He had not noticed it until the call ended. It sat there, quiet as a stain on a window.
System message: Dimensional Teleportation: Available. Destination: Apocalypse Earth, Year 2048. Cooldown: None.
He read it several times. Hello? he thought. Nothing. Hey. Are you there? Can you hear me? Still nothing. The panel did not so much as flicker.
It had not been a dream.
He sat on the edge of the bed for a long while, going over what had happened: the smell, the axe, the way his body had simply stopped working. He waited for the fear to come back, and it did, but thinner than before, like a bruise that had begun to yellow. Underneath it something else had been growing since he woke. I walked into another world. I came back with gold. He had not been chosen to survive an apocalypse, and he knew it. He was not a soldier or a hunter, and he was not even a particularly good cook. But for the first time in six years something extraordinary had happened to him, and it had happened to him alone.
He told himself it was escapism. He had read enough novels and watched enough shows to know exactly what this was: a lonely nobody gets a glowing screen and a secret world. It was the story men like him told themselves when the rent was due.
And then he told himself it did not matter, because miracles that paid the electric bill were still miracles.
Megan's building looked exactly the same, and that was the first thing that struck him as he climbed the stairs. The same peeling paint on the railing. The same potted plant outside 4C that nobody ever watered. The same doormat with the faded welcome on it. He stood outside her door for a full minute.
Don't do this, said the part of him that still had a spine.
Just one conversation, said the rest of him.
He had spent the bus ride rehearsing. He would be calm and adult about it. He would tell her he had been selfish, that he had been so wrapped up in his own problems he had failed to see what she needed, and that he had changed. And then he would show her. He slid a hand into his jacket and touched the necklace in his pocket. Real gold. Look what I can do now.
He knocked. Footsteps and a low masculine laugh came from inside, and then the door opened, and it was not Megan.
A tall man in a grey hoodie stood in the doorway, tilting a beer bottle against his shoulder. He had a neat beard and the easy, comfortable posture of someone who had never been afraid of a bill. Caleb knew the face from the photographs.
"Hey," the man said, with a pleasant frown. "Can I help you?"
"I'm, um. Is Megan home?"
The man's smile widened a fraction. "Babe," he called over his shoulder. "It's for you."
Megan appeared behind him in Caleb's old college sweatshirt. For a second, something crossed her face, surprise or maybe even guilt, and then it hardened into an expression he recognized.
"Caleb. What are you doing here?"
"I wanted to talk. Just for a minute."
"We talked yesterday."
"I know. I just—" He swallowed. "Can we do it alone?"
Tyler leaned against the doorframe. "Anything you have to say to her, you can say to both of us."
Caleb looked at Megan. She crossed her arms. "Say what you came to say."
The rehearsed speech dissolved in his mouth like sugar in water. "I was thinking about what you said," he began. "About my not making progress. About not being there for you the way I should have. You were right. I haven't been good enough. But things are changing. I came into something. I can fix this. I can fix everything."
Silence. Tyler took a slow sip of his beer.
"I brought you something."
He reached into his pocket, and the necklace slid into his palm and caught the hallway light, delicate and warm. He held it out. "It's real gold, I promise. I want you to have it. I want to start over."
Megan looked at it. Then she laughed.
It was not an angry laugh. It was worse. It was the laugh of someone who found a thing genuinely funny. "Oh my God."
"What?"
"Caleb." She wiped the corner of her eye. "Is that from the Dollar Store?"
"It's real."
"It's clearly fake. Where did you even get it, the gas station?"
Tyler leaned closer and squinted at the chain. "Man, that looks like costume jewellery," he said, almost kindly. "Dude. It's okay."
Caleb's face burned. "It's real gold. I can prove it."
"With what money?" Megan's voice had gone sharp. "You can barely afford to eat. You think you can show up with some cheap necklace and erase everything?"
"That isn't what I'm trying to do."
"You're pathetic, Caleb."
The word landed. She said it quietly, like an observation. "You always say things are going to get better. They never do. I'm not wasting more of my life on promises."
She turned and disappeared into the apartment. Tyler gave Caleb a sympathetic grimace, the kind a person gives a stray dog. A moment later, Megan returned holding something small between two fingers, the engagement ring, a thin silver band with a modest stone. He had paid for it in installments, and the last one was still sitting on his credit card. She dropped it into his hand.
"Take it back. I don't want it."
"Megan—"
"Please leave."
The door closed, and he heard the lock click. He stood in the hallway holding a necklace and a ring while a television turned up in volume on the other side of the wall. He went down the stairs very slowly. When he reached the street, his hands were shaking so badly that he had to sit down on the curb.
She's wrong, he told himself. It's real. It's real, and I'll prove it.
The pawn shop smelled of dust and old coins. A bell rang over the door as he entered, and glass cases lined the walls, full of guitars and watches and power tools, the thousand small defeated things people trade for rent money. Behind the counter, a heavyset man in reading glasses was scrolling through his phone. "Help you?"
Caleb laid the necklace on the counter. The man glanced at it, and his bored expression changed. He picked it up, weighed it in his palm, and pulled out a small loupe to examine the clasp. "Where'd you get this?"
"It was a family piece."
"Mm." He set it on a digital scale, waited for the numbers to settle, and touched it with a drop of liquid from a small bottle. Then he looked at Caleb over the rim of his glasses. "Fourteen karat. Nine point two grams. Good condition."
Caleb's heart hammered. "Real?"
"As real as it gets."
A slow, trembling breath left him. He thought of Megan's laugh, and of Tyler's pitying face.
"I can give you five hundred and forty ($ 540,00 USD) for it. Cash, right now."
It was more money than he had held at one time in months. "Yes," he said. "Yes, that's fine."
As the man counted bills onto the counter, Caleb remembered the ring and pulled it out. "What about this?"
The man took it, squinted at it for exactly four seconds, and slid it back. "Eighteen bucks. The stone's glass, and the band's plated."
"It's an engagement ring."
"It was," the man said, not unkindly.
Caleb stared at the little circle of silver. Then he pushed it back across the counter. He was scammed; he paid almost two thousand for something not worth twenty dollars. "Keep it."
"I don't want it."
"Then throw it away."
He folded the cash carefully into his pocket and walked out into the late afternoon with a feeling that was almost joy. It was not only the money. It was the proof. She had laughed at him, and he had been right.
By evening, Caleb had a plan. It was not a good plan. It was the plan of a man who had been told he was pathetic and wanted to find out whether that was a permanent condition. He sat at the kitchen table with the notebook and wrote a list: Boots. Backpack, better one. Water bottles, filter. Food, lots. Knife. Machete? Is a machete legal? Flashlight, batteries. Things to trade. He crossed out the last item, wrote it again, and underlined it. What do people want in the apocalypse?
He spent forty minutes on survival forums and learned about lighters, batteries, salt, antibiotics, pain relievers, sewing kits, and duct tape. The next day, after his shift, he bought all of it. A sporting goods store sold him waterproof boots that cost more than he wanted to admit. An army surplus store sold him a tactical backpack, a hatchet, a machete, and a first-aid kit, along with a skeptical look from the clerk.
"Camping trip?"
"Something like that."
"Bears?"
"Worse."
At the supermarket, he filled a cart with beef jerky, canned beans, instant oatmeal, peanut butter, protein bars, and dried fruit, and he bought bottled water until the cashier asked whether a storm was coming. He had spent nearly four hundred dollars before he caught himself. At home, he sat for an hour looking at the remaining hundred and forty-something and thinking that he was an idiot. The electricity bill stayed on the table. He put the rest toward a gym membership instead.
Over the next six days, a pattern emerged. Every night he told himself the same thing: Tomorrow. One more day of preparation, and then I go. He worked his shifts at Big Duke's, flipping patties and dropping fries and scraping grease off steel until his forearms ached, and he bore Dale's silence and the other cooks' jokes with flat patience. I'm going to another world, he thought, as a coworker called him slow. I came back with gold. Then he went to the gym and did push-ups until his arms trembled and ran on a treadmill until the room swam. He lifted weights he could barely manage and lay on the locker room floor wondering whether he would throw up. He slept five hours a night and ate chicken breast and rice. His body hurt in ways it never had before, and strangely he did not mind. It felt like doing something.
But there were nights when the quiet of the apartment became unbearable. The refrigerator rattled, and the walls seemed to lean closer, and he lay thinking of Megan in his old sweatshirt, with the loneliness pressing on his ribs until he could hardly breathe. On those nights he opened his laptop and did what lonely men do. He was not proud of it. Afterwards he lay in the glow of the screen, hollow and a little disgusted with himself, and then, because shame never lasted long, he turned his thoughts back to the necklace.
Five hundred and forty dollars in one afternoon. If the first trip had paid that much, what would the next one pay? A thousand? Five thousand? He began to imagine apartments. He began to imagine walking into Big Duke's to quit. Without noticing, he began to imagine Megan's face when she heard. I struck it rich, he thought, drifting toward sleep. I really struck it rich.
Twice he tried talking to the system in his head: Hello, anyone, a question about the gold, and twice he got nothing. The blue letters had faded days ago, and there was only the ceiling in his vision. He did not think about that. He should have.
On the seventh night he ran out of tomorrows.
He packed. He laid everything out on the bedroom floor like an offering: boots, machete, hatchet, a backpack stuffed to the seams. He tried the straps on his shoulders and felt a small, absurd pride. He did not look like a soldier. But he did not look like a man who had been laughed out of an apartment, either. He checked the clock on his phone. It was 10:14 p.m.
Nothing was stopping him. There was no cooldown, no lock, no waiting period. He could have gone on the first night. He could have gone any night. He had simply been afraid.
He sat on the edge of the bed with his hands on his knees. The apartment was quiet, and even the refrigerator was still. "Okay," he said, to nobody. "Okay. I'm ready."
A pale blue panel bloomed in front of him.
System message: Acknowledged.
Caleb jumped. It was the first message he had seen in a week. "Hey. You're back." He caught himself and stared at the floating window. Where have you been?
The panel took its time.
System message: I have spent seven days observing Earth. The majority of your species is shortsighted, greedy, prideful, and easily manipulated. You are an unremarkable example.
You were given access to a multiversal system. You used the first week to buy boots, a machete, and used the rest of your time on pornography. You did not open one menu. You did not ask one question about your gifts. Your preparation was inefficient, your supplies are inadequate, and your trade goods came from a forum written by strangers.
I have concluded that continued binding to this candidate is a poor allocation of resources. I am prepared to unbind. Your access will end. Your memories will remain. The system will not return.
He read it once. He wanted to argue and went looking for the argument and found the shelf empty. Every line was accurate, and that was what made his face burn. He had been given a door out of his own life and had spent seven days standing in the doorway buying equipment and calling it strategy.
"No," he said. "Wait."
The panel did not move. He dropped to his knees on the carpet with both hands out, as though the screen were something he could hold on to. He knew how it looked: a grown man on the floor of a bad apartment, begging a light. He did it anyway.
"Please. I know I'm not special. I know I screwed up the first week. But it's the only thing that's ever happened to me, and I'll learn it. All of it. I'll be smarter. Just don't take it away."
Nothing. The refrigerator kicked on and rattled through the silence. He thought of Megan's laugh and Dale's quiet and the cold, tired feeling that had followed him for six years, and how it had gone away for exactly one afternoon, in a dead house, with a stranger's gold in his hand.
System message: Request evaluated. Continued binding is granted. This is not a reward. It is an observation period. I will be watching your decisions closely. Do not waste it.
Caleb nodded, as if it could see him. He did not notice what the message had not said. There was no promise in it, no warmth, no we'll figure it out together. It was not the voice of a mentor offering a second chance. It was the voice of an examiner turning a page.
System message: Dimensional Teleportation: Departure available. Destination: Apocalypse Earth, Year 2048. Proceed?
He wiped his face with his sleeve, pulled the backpack onto his shoulders, and tightened the straps. His hands were still trembling. But this time they were not empty.
"Yes," he said.
The panel did not correct him, and the room went away.
[author] [/author]
Dale is a manager and owner of Big Duke's fast food. He plans to expand his establishment and cover more areas soon, but he's not sure when to start the expansion.
ns216.73.216.88da2
and then Add to home screen.