SPLINTERED

NICK WISSEMAN

Copyright 2011 by Nick Wisseman

Cover design by Beti Bup

“Splintered” first appeared in Bewildering Stories, issue 443, August 2011 under the pen name Tom C. Underhill.

The bleached blankness of the ceiling started to fold in upon itself. White tiles bent, collapsed, and vanished; rocks, clouds, and a second sun appeared. What had been dimpled monotony was fast becoming picturesque mountainscape, marred only by a thin tendril of smoke winding skywards.

Jason slammed his eyes shut in disbelief. Hours of blandness didn’t—couldn’t—just become a new world, no matter how much he needed one. He was imagining things again. If he concentrated, the illusion would be gone when he opened his eyes. Focus. He needed to focus.

He tried, but knew without looking that he’d failed. That the forms above him were still swirling, still coalescing, still…there. Then the pressure in his head returned and resumed squeezing his thoughts like a vise.

Until something hit his face.

“…out of it, Jason.”

Was that a woman’s voice?

“Snap out of it! There’s no time for this.”

He reopened his eyes in time to see a second slap descending on his cheek. After the hand rebounded and withdrew, he found himself looking at his ideal woman. Lines delicate and refined, curves smooth and full…A green-eyed goddess.

“Move, Jason. Now.” Her arm was poised for another swing.

Jason’s eyes narrowed immediately. “How do you know my…” The still-morphing surroundings registered again; not just the ceiling but the whole room was being superimposed by a ghostly background now, a translucent, volcanic landscape complete with shadowy magma and transparent rock. This secondary image suffused even the dazzling stranger, and…himself.

He understood her urgency.

But when he struggled to rise, his limbs were uncooperative, sluggish to the point of feeling drugged.

“Move, dammit!” The stranger gripped his shoulders and hurled him off the bed and through the window.

* * *

Jason regained consciousness to another “Move, goddammit, move!” He leapt to his feet, his arms and legs functioning as if the paralysis of a moment before had never been. A shower of glass fell from him as he rose, but he seemed to have no major injuries aside from the still-growing pain in his head.

Recoiling as she placed one of her deceptively dainty hands on his shoulder, he balled up both fists to strike. But she preempted him by gesturing to the building they’d just escaped, and he watched as the volcanic vista began spilling out of the structure’s confines and into the surrounding area. It was like a new photograph developing over an old one…

And all at once, there were two competing realities straining to coexist. The building, the trees, the air itself seemed to swell, to distort, to bulge at the seams. New matter fought with old for the same space; a bursting seemed imminent.

Turning back to the stranger, Jason followed without hesitation when she began sprinting in the opposite direction.

* * *

From roughly three miles away, Jason and the mysterious woman witnessed the annihilation of the place they’d just fled; in a shower of lava, brick, and charred organic substance, the two planes all but cancelled each other out.

“One of the worst I’ve seen.” She said this casually, sounding nowhere near as horrified as Jason felt. He couldn’t find the words to reply, but the sirens and screams did their best to speak for him.

Rising, the stranger motioned for Jason to do the same. “It should have stabilized now, though. Enough that we can go back.”

Jason blinked and halted mid-stand.

“Hard to fathom, isn’t it? But we don’t have any other choice.” She smiled and started walking.

“No.” He sat back down, his gaze still fixed on the fountain of debris ahead.

“Jason…” The woman shook her head reproachfully, but when she turned back to him, her face was smiling sweetly. “You have to trust me a little further. I got you this far, didn’t I? Just a little further, and then I’ll tell you everything.” She smiled again, even more dazzlingly. “Trust me.”

His lips started to form another denial, but the words never came; something inside him silenced the dissent. That same something then began to urge compliance, whispering that only catastrophe could result from further obstinacy…

By the time they were halfway back, Jason had completely forgotten about resisting.

* * *

Ash dominated the destruction, coating the twisted fusions that remained: volcanic rock merged with cracked concrete; scorched tree blended with broken brick; steel consumed by lava from the inside out. And where the strain of superimposition had been too much, there were only craters.

The impossibility quickly became overwhelming. Jason lowered his eyes…And bumped into his guide, who’d stopped without warning.

“Look.”

He forced himself to follow her gaze and, despite how winded he was, found the breath to gasp: stretching before them was a blasted mountainside that receded to an endless plain. For the length of a house, the image was whole, complete with no overlap. But at its borders the combination and its unsightly consequences began.

Jason’s face broadcast his question.

“It’s a conduit now. A joining of the two planes.”

He frowned.

She smiled. “We cross. I’ll help you, though soon you’ll be able to do it on your own.” Gesturing ahead with one hand, she placed the other on his shoulder.

He snarled and shook her off, a guarded look overtaking his expression.

“Jason…”

That same compulsion arrested his defiance, and without any further struggle, he let himself be led onto the mountain and out of the chaos that had so recently been his home.

* * *

When he finally looked back, Jason found his old world still struggling with the scar of superimposition. Destruction made up the forefront, but just beyond New York stretched unsullied.

The merging hadn’t spread.

At least from what he could see; the window to life as he’d known it was only twenty meters wide. Picking up where this “conduit’s” borders left off, his new environment was completely independent of his old one…Aside from the catastrophic point of overlap.

With a sharp reprimand, the stranger jerked Jason’s attention back in front of him. That look behind was the last he managed; she kept him hurtling down the volcano-side at too reckless a pace to risk another glance—he was near to collapsing when they reached the slope’s base. Gesturing that he could finally rest by a small, scraggly tree, the woman continued on with a brusque “I’ll be back shortly.”

An hour after she’d vanished into the distance, Jason decided he should try to find her. Part of him rose out of a desire to protect her pretty smile if it was in trouble; another part whispered that she could only be trusted if he could see what she was doing.

Advancing at a brisk walk, he cleared the last roots of the volcano and entered the endless plain with fists clenched in readiness. A few steps later, his hands tightened even further as he noticed movement some miles ahead: the motion of a great, heaving mass.

Jason approached as stealthily as the open plain would allow, crouching low to take advantage of the waist-high grass. After a half-hour of creeping, he drew close enough to appreciate the sheer enormity of the beasts before him.

Thousands of an immense breed of buffalo ate, bred, and slept for as far as he could see. A teeming horde whose magnitude he couldn’t begin to comprehend…He fell to his knees, suddenly overcome by all that had happened to him.

The rumble of countless hooves brought him back; the gigantic animals were advancing. Not directly towards him, but at such an angle that the herd’s margins would pass over his position. They were approaching slowly, but their sheer numbers meant he had little time.

Jason began to rise, but halfway to standing he was frozen again, this time by the glittering effect the parting clouds had on the buffalos’ backs. As the sun shone through, its rays caught the beasts’ fur, and the rippling hairs formed a sea of illumination…

As irrationally as any moth, he made for the light.

* * *

Jason was sprinting by the time he reached the first buffalo. As he ran past them, the horde began to turn in on itself: those in front started to shy away; those in back pressed on obliviously. Within moments, he was surrounded by a sea of panicking giants. Finally realizing how much danger he’d put himself in, he panicked with them.

Freezing in mid-stride, he instinctively tried to make himself as small as possible…Until a frantic buffalo brushed against him. Even more terrified now, Jason screamed and jumped back at the same time the animal leapt back from him. He kept screaming, unable to stop as the buffalo around him started retreating again. Hopping from foot to foot and flailing his arms, he started making as much noise and motion as he could. It worked: before long, the horde was stampeding away in every direction. Miraculously unharmed, he collapsed, relief flooding though him and chasing out the adrenaline. He lay there for a long time, enjoying the receding thunder he could feel through the trampled earth.

“I thought I told you to wait for me.”

Jason narrowed his eyes as soon as he’d opened them. “Where have you been?”

“Making sure of the path ahead,” the stranger said. “Get up. We have a lot to do.”

“Not until you tell me what the hell is going on.”

The stranger shook her head and laughed. “I wondered when you’d stop snarling and ask.” Settling in beside him, she let her knee press carelessly against his side as she plucked one of the few unbent blades of grass. “You know, I might miss this plane the most out of all the possibles. That is if we fail, which we won’t. Not if you do more listening and less sulking.”

Thrilling at her touch despite himself, he angled his face to look into hers. “Possibles?”

“The infinite number of planes representing every branching in time. A reality for each of history’s options. Every option its own universe, every choice its own manifestation. Components of the multiverse, if you’d prefer the sci-fi term.”

Jason snorted. “Sounds like impossibles.”

“Clever.” Her smile took the sting out of the sarcasm. “But whether you accept it or not, the possibles are collapsing, and everything that ever was or could have been will die if we don’t reverse the process.” She smiled again.

He didn’t. “We?”

“You’re marked for this, Jason, even if you don’t know it yet…Look at your hands.”

Slowly, grudgingly, he did so…and immediately sprang to his feet.

The stranger laughed again, longer this time. “Don’t be so alarmed. You’re not a bigot. It shouldn’t bother you that much.”

He stared at his skin, darkened to a healthy brown and still darkening. His forearms also seemed to be thicker, expanding a little more with every heartbeat. And in the back of his head, a ball of emotions was forming and overlapping with his own.

Jason screamed and flailed even more violently than he had with the buffalo.

“Jason. Jason! Calm down. You’re just blending with this plane’s version of you. It’ll stop once we cross into the next possible, which is why we need to keep moving, so there’s less to reverse. Jason…God damn her. Don’t tell them anything.”

“Jason!” a new voice called.

Curious despite his revulsion, Jason refocused just enough to register that his guide was running in the opposite direction of two more strangers dressed in white.

* * *

“Jason! Jason, calm down!” The new male stranger seemed to want to say more, but his breathlessness overcame him.

The new female seemed in better shape, despite her doughy figure. “Don’t be alarmed, Jason. We’re here to help. I need you to sit down and relax for a second. Just sit down and relax, please…Jason?”

He could hear the pair, but only barely: their words seemed to come from a distance rather than just a few yards away. He did stop moving, though.

“All right, Jason, you can stay standing if you prefer. But I think we’ll sit.” The couple sat down slowly, eyeing Jason concernedly.

He kept his gaze on his hands as they clenched and unclenched at regular intervals.

The male stranger cleared his throat and wiggled his mustache before beginning. “Jason…”

“How do you know my name?” Jason raised his head and looked directly into the man’s brown eyes.

“What’s wrong, Jason?” The woman answered for her partner, who seemed a bit taken aback.

“My hands…My body…How, god dammit, HOW?!?”

The woman looked worried now too. “Jason?”

He made a broad, encompassing gesture at the alien horizon. “What in the hell is all this?”

“This?” She seemed legitimately puzzled.

“That,” he gestured again, before marveling at how familiar she suddenly looked. And then he wondered why on earth they were pretending not to see the insanity around them, why they were trying to deceive him like everyone else. “And how do you know my God damn name!?!”

The woman glanced over at her partner for help, but the man was totally at a loss. “Jason…what’s bothering you? You’ve been so nervous lately.”

His expression reverted to blankness. The foreign emotions in his head were solidifying, and he could hear a whisper now: the beginning of someone else’s inner monologue, in a language he couldn’t understand.

“Jason.” The man tried his best to reenter the conversation. “We’re just a little concerned by your behavior the last few days. It’s been…less than appropriate, and we were wondering—”

The unmistakable staccato of gunfire cut through Jason’s confusion.

* * *

Whirling, Jason scanned the idyllic landscape for the shooter and found what looked like a marine a hundred yards distant, blazing away at…nothing. And then suddenly it was something, another spectral scene coming into focus. A wasteland filled with ghostly warriors killing each other with weaponry he’d never seen before. Upon closer inspection, the marine he’d seen first was slightly transparent as well…but not enough to protect his torso from the bullets that churned it into red mist.

Turning back to the pair of strangers in white, Jason found to his even greater bewilderment that the two hadn’t even batted an eye at the phantom madness coalescing just a football field away. They still looked concerned, but they were gazing only at him.

“Jason?”

He stared at the new woman with open disdain. She was either unbelievably oblivious, crazy, or both.

Swiveling back to the battle that was raging with increasing clarity, he immediately spotted the first stranger. She was beckoning from the epicenter of the violence, amidst a storm of men and metal…

Jason had already sprinted ten yards before the pair behind him found the breath to try and call him back.

* * *

The soldiers who stopped to ponder their surreal circumstances were shot down almost immediately. The rest, exhibiting extraordinary discipline, ignored the planar limbo and kept killing; they were still shot down, but not as quickly.

Too far in now to turn back, Jason could only grit his teeth and keep running when his path was blocked by the sudden materialization of a soldier in red. The marine should have eclipsed Jason’s view of anything in front of him, but even as he drew nearer he could still make out the plains of the current possible through the man’s translucent body. And even when the soldier was shot through his left breast, wind-blown grass was still discernible behind the rush of crimson…

The bullet passed just over Jason’s left shoulder, causing him to stumble. Righting himself before he fell, he kept running and started screaming.

He did his best to dart around the fighting, dying spirits. But navigating the twin terrains—one real and one becoming real—was rapidly getting more difficult; shortly after the near miss with the solider in red, Jason lost his balance and stumbled into a soldier in blue. The marine, solidly flesh and blood, jumped back too quickly for Jason to react, trained a gun…and fell, beheaded by a stray shot.

Ten steps later, another solider in blue stumbled into Jason’s path, firing at a target he couldn’t yet see. He braced himself for a second impact…only to pass through the soldier as if he were a hologram. The bullets the soldier continued to fire ghosted through Jason as well, exiting his chest without effect. After the shock wore off, he swerved sharply to his right.

Another half minute of scrambling and he was almost there. The new voice in his head was sobbing hysterically, and Jason felt tears streaking his own cheeks, but he was only a few strides away from the still-beckoning stranger. He reached out…and a fully-formed bullet sped through his right calf.

Staggered, he managed to finish stumbling to the stranger before collapsing. She supported him by looping her arms under his and then nodded in the direction they needed to move, towards a point where the barren ground seemed the firmest and the lush plains the weakest.

His eyes clouding, Jason murmured an assent and let himself be dragged towards a destination thick with corpses.

* * *

He could still feel the pressure, even half a mile from the point where they’d crossed over. The tension was fainter…but it was definitely there, and it was rising. The remaining soldiers looked like they could sense it too; their firing was more sporadic, their bewildered looks and yells more frequent. Finally acting human, first a few, then most, then all started to flee. Some ran for their original plane, some for the one Jason and the stranger had just left, and some just looked lost, never making it beyond the overlap as they stumbled around erratically.

No one escaped.

With a rush and a hideous pop, the blending finalized, and men who’d been opposed in life were united in death. Pierced by coalescing branches, swallowed by rising earth, distorted by excess air, every soldier screamed, and every soldier died.

Most of the terrain perished with them, as space designed for one plane buckled and caved with the density of two. And then in a final, terrific explosion, the entire area simply burst.

Jason vomited, wiped his mouth, and vomited again.

* * *

His leg held out for several hours, but when it collapsed, Jason’s determination did as well. He’d only been free of the first presence in his head for a few minutes before a new jumble of emotions had intruded. And this world was so barren and desolate, and those men had died so terribly…“I can’t breathe.”

“Easy, Jason. We won’t be in this wasteland that much longer. Easy now.” Her hand squeezed his shoulder with just the right amount of pressure to bring him back.

He lay panting on his side for some time. When he’d finally regained his breath, he sat up slowly, registered that the stranger was crouching next to him, and narrowed his eyes. “Who are you?”

She smiled and rearranged her legs to sit down fully. “I suppose we can spare a few minutes. But I think it might be best to start with who you are.”

His look became even warier.

Laughing, she propped herself up with her elbows and began tapping her left foot to a private beat. “I know that sounds evasive, but I’ll get back to me. That’s a promise.” The beat increased in tempo. “So like I said before, the universes are collapsing, falling in upon themselves from every possible angle and dimension. What should have been an infinite number of paths are converging into one, with catastrophic results…as you’ve already seen.” The stranger glanced back over at him. “You look good as an albino, by the way.”

Jason jerked his gaze away from his rapidly bleaching hands.

“Remember that it’s only temporary. But the larger process isn’t, and I’ve been helping you because you’re the only who can reverse it.”

It was his turn to laugh, but once he started he had trouble stopping; in short order, he was howling. After a minute of this, his chest ached from the strain. But the hysteria kept coming.

“Jason.”

The awestruck note in the stranger’s voice cut through his panic like nothing else could have, and he was finally able to bring himself back under control. Once he’d done so, he looked over and found her pointing into the distance.

Jason followed her arm with his eyes, and the last chuckle died in his throat.

* * *

Miraculously, his leg managed the headlong sprint. But as he sat catching his breath on the porous, uncomfortable boulder the stranger had stopped in front of, Jason doubted his tattered limb had anything left. His focus, though—and that of the latest presence in his head—was on the line creasing the horizon.

The shimmering, translucent blue band was spreading quickly, already stretching as far as he could see. It was hard to tell exactly how high the phantom line was off the ground—they were still at least a hundred yards away—but even the lowest point had to be at least twenty feet up. When the strip solidified, it would eclipse the sun.

But it was the fish that captivated Jason and the stranger’s attention. Long and finned, short and stunted, flat and smooth: creatures of every size and shape swished through the wraithy river.

“I have to admit I’ve never seen that before…” Out of the corner of his eye, Jason could see the stranger shaking her head and staring just as hard as he was.

They watched for perhaps another half hour as the river kept elongating. Even with his focus on the fish, though, Jason could sense that the scene was solidifying…And suddenly he felt like time was running out. “Who are you?”

The stranger kept staring at the floating aquarium. “I think the best description would be a failed version of you.”

Jason shook his head. “Try again.”

Chuckling, she glanced over at him. “Believe it or not, had the timing been different, it would have been me lying there in that hospital, waiting for something—anything—to break the monotony.”

He snorted.

“But not everyone was unaware of the coming collapse. My plane’s been preparing for millennia. Researching, predicting, keeping tabs—laying plans.”

The fish looked agitated. Jason could only shake his head again.

“Truly, Jason. And you’re lucky we have been, or everyone would be lost…But then not everyone wants to be saved. That couple for instance. Members of a lover’s alliance, an organization of inter-plane soul-mates who need the blending to continue for their love to exist.”

Jason’s eyebrows raised despite himself, and after a moment he gestured with his head towards the now near-solid river. “They want this?”

“So much that they refuse to consider the true implications. Love blinds them to anything but the idea that one plane would allow them to be together.”

“Wouldn’t they be, though?”

“Only in death.”

The conversation would have been over anyways; the bursting of the river just ensured it.

* * *

Water merged violently with air, and the resulting explosion flung droplets far enough to wet Jason’s feet. Eventually, the spray dissipated and the blue river became visible again, but now it was pocked by red swirls. And then, finally coming to terms with existing in two planes at once, the river began to pour downwards, creating a waterfall of infinite width.

“Come on, before we get flooded out.” The stranger stood up and started walking in one motion, headed—as usual—towards the spectacle and not away from it.

“Aren’t you going in the wrong direction, then?” Jason stayed sitting, resolved not to move as he watched fish after fish tumble down the falls and splash into the lake forming below the river.

Still walking, she called back in terse, simple words. “That’s a Join. We need to cross.”

Jason shook his head and…stopped, the motion arrested by an internal force. That same compulsion, stronger than before, forcing his damaged legs to push up, walk, and then run. He fought it, screamed inwardly…and lost. Again.

But there was one saving grace: this time, when he caught up to the stranger, the memory of the coercion remained.

* * *

Jason still scaled the tree after her, but he did so hesitantly, torn between following and running. His face must have betrayed his doubts; the stranger frowned as soon as she looked back.

She stared at him for a second longer and then dropped on top of him, grabbing him around the chest and pushing off the oak’s trunk in one smooth motion. Jason only had a moment to flail uselessly in the air before they splashed into the portion of the floating river the tree stood next to.

Unprepared for the impact, Jason’s lungs were empty when he hit. The stranger kept her hold on him, however, seemingly determined that they sink like stones. Which they did for the first fifteen feet…until their descent started to slow.

After a few more seconds, Jason began to feel the water below him pushing up almost as strongly as the water above him was pushing down. And then suddenly both directions were pulling as well; he felt like he was being compressed and elongated at the same time. Distorted even as he suffocated, drowned, and died…

His head broke the surface, the stranger’s arms threw his body with a familiar strength, and Jason found himself gasping on a muddy bank. When he’d recovered enough to take in his surroundings, he realized it was a different bank and a different surface; he’d crossed into a fourth world.

“We need to move, Jason. We’ve wasted too much time.” Her voice was uncompromising.

Still breathing greedily, he finally looked up at her. “You almost…killed me…You bitch.”

“I think the point of no return is approaching. Let’s go.”

The stranger started walking, and before he knew it, he was following.

* * *

Over the next few hours, Jason tried several times to turn away from the stranger’s path, but his limbs wouldn’t obey his mind. At least he was still conscious of the coercion, even if he was helpless to resist it…And at least the force ordering his direction was also holding his leg intact, letting it function despite its rapidly worsening condition.

He’d resisted making conversation for most of the latest march, worried that doing so would erase the knowledge of the compulsion again. His new appearance was also too disgusting for words, and the accompanying mental squatter was providing enough chatter on its own. But when night began to fall and blur his surroundings, the words came out before he could stop them: “Were you planning on stopping anytime soon?”

“We should be close.” She actually sounded a little disconcerted.

And then he began to feel it: not a building of pressure, but a lessening. “I think we’re here.”

Whirling, she confronted him in the twilight, noticeably afraid even in the gathering darkness. “How can you tell?”

The loss of pressure was still slight, but it seemed to be accelerating. “It feels like…a vacuum is forming. Like the area is deflating.” He stopped talking when he noticed how many stars there suddenly seemed to be. How many twinkling points of light were next to him.

Around him.

In him.

And the night’s blackness was being enhanced by something darker still; he could barely make out the stranger’s form at all now.

“Jason, listen to me.” She sounded frantic. “We’ve arrived: this is the point of no return. If you concentrate, you can reach the nexus—the locus of all the blendings—and put an end to the collapse. If you don’t…we’re lost. I can’t help you anymore. You have to do this on your own.”

Something was definitely pulling him now, trying to expand him from all angles, along every inch of his body, inside and out. “What the hell is happening to me?!?”

The stranger’s voice was effectively disembodied now; Jason could no longer see anything of her. “We’re blending with a plane where there’s no Earth! You’re about to be cast into outer space! Concentrate, dammit! FIND THE NEXUS!”

“HOW!?!” His own terror was amplified by the crazed screams of the newest intruder in his head. He couldn’t think, couldn’t focus like he knew he had to…

“Jason!”

He was bloating outwards, distending unrecognizably and irretrievably—

Until a thought occurred to him. An incongruity he latched onto, stabilized himself upon, and exited the planes and the compulsion with.

* * *

He sat cross-legged, his eyes closed to shut out the maelstrom just ahead of him. The infinite number of overlapping shapes, colors, peoples, realities…possibles. Shadowy jumbles that created an unending array of cultures and creatures, one upon the next upon the next. Utter chaos, but within that anarchy lay the answer. He’d known it from the moment he arrived; he was just waiting for the strength to wrest hold of the truth.

And the question?

This point would be the last to solidify, the last to join. Everything else would blend in piecemeal fashion, a combination here, a fusion there. But here…This would mark the end of all things that all things had known, signify the final transition from multiplicity to monotone.

The question was whether he let it happen.

Opening his eyes again, Jason stared at the eddying universes before him and peeled the layers back by ones…by tens…and then by thousands, until they all lifted with a rush, leaving an enormous, red mass behind, seemingly of all planes and none. Cleft in its middle, it looked like nothing so much as two textured spheres smashed together.

His strength had arrived; Jason rose to his feet to seize the answer.

* * *

A cacophony of voices steamrolled through his thoughts as he entered the red mass, his body flickering with the possibilities of countless physical variations. Each step only increased the weight of the multiplicity, and ten feet in, his resolve began to waver as he felt himself disintegrating into diversity…

Jason brought himself back by shutting his eyes and focusing on the stranger’s lies. After pausing to evict his unwanted mental tenants, he started walking again, eyes still closed. He continued until he knew it was time to stop.

Confident that it was safe to see again, Jason opened his eyes and found himself at the point where the two spheres merged. He knew phantasmal madness was still swirling about just outside, but here all he could see was the vibrant pink of the deformed orbs. Opaque but not solid, the spheres pulsed in time with his own blood, each vibration punctuated by bursts of miniature lighting…

Her voice was an intrusion, but the knowledge that it no longer had any hold over him stabilized Jason’s calm.

* * *

“Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Her presence was nauseating. “You don’t belong here.”

The stranger’s eyes narrowed and she stopped walking towards him. “Jason…”

“And neither do I; the collapse shouldn’t be stopped.” He smiled.

She didn’t. “Jason, you’ve seen the destruction with your own eyes! There’s no stronger proof! We have to reverse the process.”

“For whose benefit?”

The stranger looked rattled. “There are countless souls in the balance.”

“Really? I’m pretty sure mine is the only one.”

“That’s…the most selfish thing you possibly could have said.”

Jason’s smile widened. “Exactly.”

Clearly at a loss, all the stranger could manage in response was a halting step he made her retract with a shake of his head. Her eyes voiced the question.

He answered quietly. “The planes never changed you.” And then he closed his eyes, focused fully, and made her disappear.

Taking a deep breath, Jason concentrated even harder and let everything buckle and blend.

* * *

A bleached ceiling. Sterile walls. An uncomfortable bed.

He was back.

Jason took a long, slow breath before easing himself off the bed. Noting with satisfaction that his leg was fine, he walked calmly to the door. It was locked, but instead of pounding it in frustration like he would have only a few hours before, he shrugged and lay back down.

But luck was still with him: almost as soon as he’d reclined, Jason heard the jingle of keys. Raising himself to a sitting position, he smiled at the woman when she entered.

“Well good morning, Jason. I’m glad to see you’re in such fine spirits today.” She looked exactly as she had on the battlefield, noticeably plump and clad in the same immaculate white uniform. Pulling a chair next to his bed, the woman returned his smile and opened the overstuffed black binder she’d carried in with her.

He studied it for a second and then reached down to stop her.

“Jason, could you please keep your hands to yourself?”

Ignoring her, he gently flipped the binder back to the first entry: an identification sheet. With his name, his measurements, his picture.

And the first stranger’s eyes.

Leaving the binder in his increasingly confused visitor’s lap, Jason rose and walked over to the tiny mirror hanging slightly askew in the adjoining bathroom.

His eyes…were his own. The stranger was gone.

Returning to his position next to the now thoroughly bewildered woman in white, Jason carefully removed the pen resting above her right ear, smiled at her again, and crossed out the line on the first page that read “Axis 1: Schizophrenia.”

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Thanks for reading “Splintered.” If you liked it, would you mind leaving a review? Even just a few words would be awesome—it really helps.

Looking for something else to read? Check out The Red Wraith, my historical fantasy set in Early America. The protagonist is a Native American who becomes the focus for magic’s reentry into the world.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nick Wisseman lives in Bear Lake, Michigan with his wife, daughter, forty cats, and thirty horses. (Okay, so there are actually ten times less pets, but most days it feels like more.) He’s not quite sure why he loves writing twisted fiction, but there’s no stopping the weirdness once he’s in front of a computer. You can find the complete list of his oddities on his website:

www.nickwisseman.com