The Dimension Jumpers Read online

  THE DIMENSION JUMPERS

  A Gealach Publication / 2015

  UUID# 5241F1FF-3DCB-4892-9D7D-ACADC5029B0D

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Copyright © 2015 by Adam Moon

  Cover Art copyright © 2015 by Sylvia Frost

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.

  For information contact Adam Moon,

  http://moonwrites.com

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  PRODUCED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  CONTENTS

  Part 1

  Diner

  New Arrivals

  Neil

  The Dog-faced Men

  Another World

  The Source

  Animal Infiltration

  The Wild Woman

  Steve the Pervert

  Subjugated Earth

  Sacrificial Lambs

  Doppelganger

  Part 2

  Fixing the Jumper

  Ambush

  Larry

  Marooned Traveler

  Group Dynamic

  Samantha’s Return

  Friend or Foe

  Treachery

  New Plan

  Weapon Up

  Hostile Home World

  Justice

  The Impostor

  Unexpected Ally

  Interdimensional, Intergalactic Rules

  Plan of Attack

  A Better Home

  Part 3

  A Family United

  War

  Flawed Plan

  The Deception

  Home

  The Awful Truth

  More by Adam Moon

  Part 1

  ✨

  Diner

  ✨

  JACK MAYBERRY ORDERED the Denver omelette as he locked eyes with his wife, Stacey across the table. She hated when he ignored the vegan diet she’d put them on last month. He smiled at her when he asked the waitress for three strips of bacon and cream for his coffee.

  Sandy, the waitress turned to her, saw the exasperated look and asked soothingly, “What can I get you, dear?”

  “I’ll take the meat eaters trio with a side order of extra ham.” To Jack she said, “If you’re going to get fat, I am too.”

  Jack smirked. “Good. We’ll be fat and happy together.”

  “I don’t know about happy but we’ll definitely be fat.”

  Sandy suppressed her look of disdain and said, “It’ll be right up.” She looked around at the nearly empty diner and shook her head. There was an older couple in the corner booth. They came every Saturday and stayed far too long. It hardly mattered today but on busy shifts their presence meant less money went in her pocket because they wouldn’t free up the damn table even when the doorway was blocked by hungry patrons.

  Larry was at the counter drinking his fifth cup of coffee. He was a retired fireman and a widower. She was pretty sure he’d mentioned having a grown-up kid out in the world somewhere but he hadn’t spoken about her in years so they were probably estranged. He didn’t like to talk about himself so it was his little secret. He talked about sports and politics to cover the fact that he didn’t really want to speak to anybody in a meaningful way.

  A middle aged couple sat across from their teenaged daughter, giving her some sort of stern lecture about college and her future, on the other side of the four foot dividing wall. They’d taken their disgust with their daughter out on Sandy when she took their order. In the old days she’d have spat in their coffee but she was numb to jerks after three decades of dealing with them. She knew she wouldn’t be getting a tip from those assholes.

  A businesswoman sitting alone ate a salad like she detested every single bite. She’d ordered ice water. Sandy hated people like her but the water drinking, salad eater was becoming the norm. In Sandy’s day, people ate meat and drank black coffee or beer. Nowadays they fasted and spent their free time at the gym. It was a brave new world and Sandy’s generation didn’t much care for it.

  A sweaty nerd walked into the diner, ringing the electronic buzzer above the door so Len, the owner, sat him in a booth.

  Len handed her the keys to the diner and said, “She’s all yours today. Call me if you need anything.” She was glad he left because he liked to be pampered. He’d sit at the front counter and order food and drinks for free all day. And of course, he didn’t tip because he owned the place.

  She put the order in for the uppity young couple and then went over to the nerdy young man to take his order. He was a nerd in every way. His clothes were disheveled and he had stubble that was just about to morph into a full beard. He adjusted his glasses too often and labored over the menu like he was busy thinking about something else entirely. Each time he turned to look at her he reached back and tucked the back of his shirt into his pants nervously.

  Sandy should have taken the day off. What a bunch of losers she was dealing with today.

  New Arrivals

  ✨

  JACK WATCHED the waitress as she walked away, mostly to avoid eye contact with Stacey. It wasn’t that he was afraid of her, but that he wanted to prolong the discomfort between them, if only to make a point: he hated her new diet.

  She cleared her throat. “I hope you enjoy your breakfast because I’ll be making salads for the rest of the week without dressing to make up for this feast.”

  “You can’t be with me all the time, honey. Are you going to be there when I order a double burger tomorrow at work? No. Can you stop me from keeping beef jerky in my glove box? No you can’t. I agreed to this diet because you were so enthusiastic about it but I didn’t know that you’d use it to start fights with me. This is a new side of you I haven’t had the pleasure of seeing before.” He said it all with a sarcastic grin on his face.

  “If you think this is a fight, then you ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” she said, playing along.

  Their fights were like this, with neither of them truly angering the other. They were good natured arguments.

  He watched a feeble looking nerd come in and order breakfast. There was a basic, reptilian part of his brain that detested nerds, like he was still a jock in high school and the nerd needed a wedgie in the worst way. Of course, those days were long gone and Jack had outgrown juvenile pranks, but that old feeling remained, weak but ever-present. He was just better at controlling himself nowadays.

  He saw a handsome young man enter the diner, holding hands with a girl around twelve years old. He was clearly her father but that meant he must have conceived her in his late teens or early twenties. Jack was glad he’d waited to have kids, although Stacey was becoming increasingly impatient with him.

  The young man and his daughter took a seat at the counter and the waitress smiled her first genuine smile of the day. The daughter started talking a mile a minute to the old hag.

  Jack noticed Stacey staring at the father and daughter in that wistful kind of way that meant an argume
nt would develop soon. He could already imagine the cogs in her head turning, as she daydreamed of a family life in the near future. And he knew what would happen when she broke out of her trance and looked back at him: she’d get mad at herself and then she’d get mad at him.

  He threw a piece of toast at her chest to break her concentration. She snapped out of it and threw it back at him, but that faraway look was still there, hiding behind her eyes. He hated her for it.

  Neil

  ✨

  NEIL THOMSON LISTENED to his daughter Kim as she relayed every detail of the past week to their waitress, Sandy. Sandy, it seemed, yearned for their return from the moment they’d last left, and she’d yearn again when they finished up their breakfast and left. She was a tough older woman in need of good people in her life, and she’d latched onto Kim almost as hard as Kim had to her.

  He enjoyed listening to Kim’s laughter, especially because it was so hard to coax out of her lately. Neil and Kim’s mom were about to get locked into a custody battle and only Neil and his lawyer knew it. But tomorrow morning their worlds would be tipped upside down. His ex-wife would call him, or worse, her asshole boyfriend would come over to his house or his work and threaten him with bodily harm. The guy might even knock him around a bit. But Neil was willing to bear anything they threw at him because he was starting to think Kim just wasn’t safe around her mother anymore.

  He’d divorced Kim’s mom, Peggy, three years ago. It had been an amicable break-up at the time, but then Brian, her new boyfriend came into the picture and everything went to hell almost immediately. For the first couple years Neil thought Brian was just a jerk who hated him because of his history with Peggy but in the last year he came to the realization that Brian was more than just a jerk, he was a reckless, aggressive junky who treated Kim and Peggy like dirt.

  He knew he was right about Brian when Peggy was rushed to the emergency room six months ago and then again last month. She refused to tell him what happened the first time but this last time a nurse let it slip when she assumed they were married: she’d accidentally overdosed on black market opiate pills. He checked Peggy’s exposed arms while she was still sedated and sure enough, found track marks from whatever injections she’d administered to herself. He didn’t know enough to determine which drug she was taking but he assumed it was heroine. Her teeth had rotted halfway out of her mouth and she was covered in sores, like bugs had been feasting on her body for a long time. He didn’t know if she was taking meth, heroine, crack, or all of it and then some, but he was certain if she took a drug test, she’d fail it miserably. He decided at that moment, last month at her bedside, that she was within her rights to destroy her own life but he’d be damned if she dragged their daughter down with her.

  As if to verify his fears, Kim had begun to lose a lot of weight in the past couple of weeks and refused to speak of her home life anymore. Neil wasn’t proud to take his daughter from her mother but he was going to do it anyway. Peggy had once been a good person but Brian and the substances he’d introduced her to had changed her. She was a different person and Kim deserved better.

  He let Kim talk him into ordering waffles and ice cream, with a little encouragement from the waitress, and then he sipped his coffee and daydreamed of the new life he would forge for Kim. She might be confused and scared at first, but she might end up dead if he left her with her mom. He only had one option and he was going to exercise it tomorrow morning.

  The Dog-faced Men

  ✨

  A BRIGHT FLASH of light lit up the diner, blinding everyone. When the light faded, all the clocks were blinking like they’d been reset and then the power flickered back on. Neil’s phone had shut off. A woman yelped when her coffee spilled in her lap and a man by the windows stood and leaned over, looking outside to see what had caused the flash. A young nerdy guy adjusted his glasses. An older guy Neil had seen at the diner a few times stood up and demanded, “What the hell was that?”

  The man at the window backed away, grabbing his wife’s shirt and pulling her with him. He was stammering and afraid. The nerdy guy saw him and ducked under his booth in fear of the unknown.

  The scene outside the diner window was straight out of a horror movie. Four men, well they were almost men, were approaching the diner with weapons in hand. Everything looked natural about them, like their height and build, but their clothes were weird and their faces were covered in fur. They weren’t beards because the hair circled their eyes too. Their noses protruded ever so slightly, but enough to be immediately noticeable. They looked like a cross between a man and a dog. They wore black rubber vests and tight canvas pants. But they also wore looks of fury as they walked towards the diner.

  An elderly couple ran out the front doors, spurred on by fear but they were both dropped by a large net shot from a gun that wrapped around their bodies. One of the dog faced men dragged them away as they screamed in horror. For a split second Neil worried that they were going to be eaten.

  Something had gone terribly wrong.

  Neil stood and told Kim to go with Sandy back into the kitchen. He passed the young man and his wife as they backed away.

  His breath caught in his throat. If he didn’t know any better, he’d guess the planet was under attack by aliens. He turned and ran just as a volley of gunfire pierced the front windows. The dog faced men were firing warning shots since none of them came close to hitting anyone. But the next volley might be kill-shots if they didn’t find a way to escape.

  Neil was almost at the door to the kitchen when the building rumbled and his vision wobbled. His ears popped and the sun dimmed. But the eeriest part was that the gunfire ceased altogether. He turned, expecting to be stunned by what awaited his eyes outside the windows but he wasn’t prepared for what he saw, even though he expected the unexpected.

  Another World

  ✨

  HE CLUTCHED THE COUNTER and wheezed, “Kim, get out here.”

  The old man was hyperventilating. “I don’t understand. What is this?”

  The man who had been backing away from the window was shaking and sweating when he brushed past Neil and led his wife behind the counter where they both crouched low, hiding.

  The view outside was different. There was no traffic or the old familiar parking lot. There were no buildings or roads. Everything was lush and green, as far as the eye could see. The sun was no longer rising, but setting. And the air tasted funny, like it might be dangerous if they breathed it in for too long.

  The dog-people with their guns were as absent as the Earth they knew. That was the only reason Neil inched forward with Kim’s hand in his.

  She asked, “What happened, dad? Where are we?”

  “We’re about to find that out. Be ready to run back into the kitchen if I tell you to, okay honey?”

  She nodded. They were ten feet from the still intact, but bullet riddled windows when an animal scurried past that resembled nothing Neil had ever seen before. It was bald and pink, as big as a cat but nothing like a feline, and it was as quick as lightning. Luckily it ran from the diner instead of towards it.

  The woman who’d spilled coffee in her lap sidled up beside him. “Where’s civilization? Did we go back in time?” She chuckled nervously as the words escaped her lips. She knew how silly her question was so Neil didn’t respond. Something unnatural had happened to them so he didn’t mock her for her knee-jerk theory because the truth might be just that absurd.

  A middle aged couple gathered their composure and joined them. Their teenage daughter stayed behind in the booth, hugging her knees. She looked to be about seventeen.

  And then something bizarre happened. A bird as big as a car flew straight at the diner. It was unlike any bird any of them had ever seen. It had a long skinny neck but its plumage was odd in that it was thick and fa
r too colorful. It was pink and yellow, blue and green, with little flecks of silver here and there. The mottling of colors alone was enough to make everyone dizzy. Its wings flapped awkwardly as it came at them.

  Neil maneuvered Kim behind him to block her with his body, but the bird didn’t crash through the window; it swooped upwards and missed the building entirely. Its underbelly was completely bald of feathers. Its skin was leathery and black as night.

  The old man pulled out a revolver and aimed it at the window. He was nearly in tears as he said, “I don’t know what’s going on.”

  The nerd joined them now, hiding behind the group like they were his human shield. He looked over Neil’s shoulder and asked no one in particular, “Does it look safe out there? What should we do?”

  Neil was perplexed by the question, partly because it sounded absurd to do anything at all. After all, they had no clue where they were. What if the diner had been somehow moved to another planet or sent back in time? The notion was crazy but it had to be considered. What would happen if they left the diner and then it vanished again, stranding them there?

  Neil said, “We don’t know what’s out there. We need to stay inside.”

  The hatchet faced woman with the coffee stain on her pants said, “We don’t know that it’s dangerous. We should go out and have a look.”

  “You can do whatever you want, lady. I’m not taking my daughter out there. What if the air is poisonous? What if the wildlife thinks we look tasty? I’d rather stay back and hope we somehow return home.” But if they did, those odd men with their guns would be waiting for them. In a way they were lucky to have left, even if none of them felt very fortunate.

  The middle aged couple inched closer. The woman asked, “Do you think whoever sent us here might send us back? If so then we’re staying too.” The notion that someone or something had done this to them was bizarre but the situation called for a bizarre explanation.