It wasn’t until half way through fifth period that that “something” that Natalie had mentioned that morning happened.
It’s hard to describe how we knew when it happened. It’s like a candle lighting up in your chest, or a switch being flipped in your head, or a string that you never knew was wrapped around your spine getting a sudden tug. I guess it felt a little like all of that.
I practically jumped out of my seat when I felt it. Even after six months, I wouldn’t say that I was used to the feeling. Walking quickly to the front of the room where Mrs. Henderson was looking over papers, I put my planner on her desk.
“I need to go to the bathroom,” I said.
Mrs. Henderson looked up at me, frowned, but signed my pass anyway.
“Thanks,” I muttered, snatching my planner back up. That feeling was particularly distracting.
It was hard not to run right out of the school. But I kept my pace steady past the windows of the other classrooms, past the secretary who was watching me like a hawk from her perch behind the glass. I gave a half-hearted wave in an attempt to look nonchalant. As soon as I was out of her visual range, I bolted for the door. I had to be quick to get past school security. I burst from the doors and took off as fast as I could towards the tennis courts.
The tennis courts were across the school parking lot and on the edge of campus. Past their fences was a strip of forest. No one except Natalie and I knew that the density of the forest was limited to the borders of the forest only. Six months ago, a rather large open area had appeared right in the middle. That’s where I was heading.
I was passing the tennis courts when I spotted Natalie. She was already entering the forest, coming from somewhere from the west side of the school. She had a streak of blue paint down her chin.
“What took you so long?” she barked at me.
I would have said something back to her if I wasn’t already puffing for breath.
She threw out her hand and there was a flash from her fingers. Not three feet in front of Natalie, a large circle of light appeared, haloed with rings. Without breaking her stride, Natalie threw herself right through the circle.
Her transformations happened so fast that I could hardly tell what happened. In the early days of this phenomenon, I video recorded her once. Slowed down to more than half speed, it looked like this: Natalie ran or jumped into the light, the light wrapped around her, like if she had run right into a silk curtain. Then there’s a bright flash again and the light sort of shattered, and there was Natalie, still in full motion, completely changed.
She told me there’s more to her transformation process, stuff that I don’t, and would never, see. All I knew was that I hardly recognized Natalie when she’d finished transforming. Her short hair had suddenly grown longer than her waist and somehow was already in a high ponytail. She was clad in—I kid you not—a spaghetti strap bikini top, a miniskirt, thigh highs, and heeled boots. Oh, and a green trench coat of thick leather to top it all off.
But back to the present: Natalie transformed and we’re still running through the forest. I could hear Natalie cursing between breaths. Judging by the way she was stumbling every fourth step, I guessed her heels were sinking into the ground. It wasn’t so bad though; you should have seen her try to run in the wet of fall and winter.
We finally passed from under the trees and into the clearing. The clearing was perfectly circular, and right in the middle crouched our target. Natalie called them ODBs—outer-dimensional beings. This one was about fifteen feet tall with strange angular protrusions. Its skin was a deep blue and the teeth it bared in our direction looked like an extension of its face rather than a feature of it. All six of its fingers flexed, gouging the earth with nails like ice picks. If the looks didn’t give away the fact that this thing was, literally, out of this world, then the fuzzy static edges of its body would. It crackled and shifted like bad TV reception out of the days of antenna receptors.
Natalie jerked to a stop and I slowed down next to her. My knees were shaking and it felt like my lungs were about to burst. I doubled over.
“Stay here, Brent,” Natalie said.
No need to tell me, I wanted to say but was too out of breath to do so.
“It’s about time you showed up!” Natalie shouted, now addressing the monster in front of us. She threw out her hand again. “I had to suffer through five classes today!”
With a light flex of her fingers, the gun that was nearly as big as Natalie herself and probably twice as heavy, unfolded in her hand, like a pop-up book illustration. She dropped to her knees with a grunt and then gave a dry laugh. “Try this,” she muttered, and pulled the trigger. A burst of green light shot out of the muzzle and headed right for the ODB. It jerked to the side and the blast went into the trees, leaving them unscathed.
The fizzing outer-dimensional monster turned its eyes on us, like it was sizing us up, or at least sizing up Natalie and her gun. Then its arm shot out, crossing the space between us with ease. I hurled myself to the side. The wind scraped at my back. I landed hard on my face and groaned as I rolled over. I was pretty sure my nose was scraped but I ignored that as I scrambled to my feet and searched for Natalie. I could just see her over the blue, muscled arm between us. She had rolled away in the opposite direction of me, using her giant gun for momentum. She made it look easy, throwing her body over the gun and righting herself in one fluid motion. She fired again.
The blast caught the monster in the shoulder, severing the limb and sending the being spinning. As the giant arm next to me started to splinter into light, talons still buried into the earth, I caught sight of something very fast and very blue in the corner of my eye.
My feet began to move before my brain had finished processing what it was seeing. I said I was quick on my feet. I barreled right into Natalie, knocking her off her feet. Four foot long talons whizzed by us as the monster completed its spin and fell to the ground.
I pulled away from Natalie. “Are you okay?” I asked.
“You jarred my shoulder real good,” Natalie said, brushing my hands from her arms.
I frowned and rocked back on my heels. Her words made my chest ache with a dull sting. No matter how many times Natalie dismissed my value in these crazy escapades, it still hurt.
God, it still hurt.
“As long as you still have your shoulders,” I grumbled. Natalie got back to her feet.
The ODB was getting its feet back underneath it as well. It looked like there was a freaking glitter fountain pouring from its side. Blood. The sparkly stuff disappeared before it could reach the ground. Natalie hefted her gun off the ground. A one second aim and then fired.
Her aim was off and the monster hardly had to shift to dodge the beam. It began to run along the perimeter of the clearing, quickly working its way towards us. Natalie was pivoting and shooting in rapid fire. Green bursts of light were shooting into the trees like rockets. The being pushed off the ground, rushing us and closing fast.
“Natalie!” I yelled in warning, back pedaling as fast as I could. Natalie shifted and fired and not twenty feet from us, the being burst into a million sparks and was gone.
It took me a few moments for me to realize that I wasn’t about to die. My heart was hammering against my ribs in a staccato rhythm. The harsh rushing noise I was hearing, I realized, was my own panting. Already the adrenaline was starting to ebb and the throbbing from multiple bumps and bruises started. My nose was stinging.
Natalie flexed her fingers and the giant gun folded into itself until it disappeared. She turned to me and grinned, striding toward me. “That wasn’t too bad, was it?”
“That was a little close for my comfort,” I said, appalled to hear that my voice was an octave higher than normal.
Natalie laughed. “Oh, Brent.” Then she turned to light, from the tips of her boots to the ends of her hair. The light shattered and fell away from Natalie, like the shell from a broken egg, except that the pieces fell up into the sky instead of to the ground. And when they disappeared, Natalie like she normally was, short hair and all, was standing next to me. “You worry too much.” She winced and rotated her foot. “I think I might have done something to my ankle this time.”
“Those boots are completely impractical. You can hardly walk in them out here, let alone fight in them,” I said. “Can’t you get different shoes? Change or something?”
Natalie shook her head, watching her foot roll in circles. “I told you. It comes with the territory. There’s nothing I can do about it, even if I wanted to. Besides, the boots are kick ass and make my legs look awesome. But that outer-dimensional princess must have had industrial strength ankles or something—ow.”
I sighed.
Natalie had tried to explain the bestowal of her power to me before. That the gun, the outfit, the intuition, even the slight increase in strength and speed, were in thanks to a princess from another dimension. According to Natalie, she had stumbled through a rift space that bridged our two dimensions that had opened by chance. But outer-dimensional beings can’t last in our dimension for long and the princess died here, but not before storing her gifts and knowledge into the large gaudy ring that now sat on Natalie’s finger. The rift didn’t close though, and every once in a while a being from there ends up in our dimension. Why go through the trouble of trying to intercept them? Why risk our necks if they’re just going to die here anyway?
“We can’t just very well let them roam around, can we?” Natalie said when I asked. “Imagine all the chaos that would create! So we’re, like, gatekeepers.”
Her eyes sparkled when she told me that.
