 |
 |
 |
Johnny Gage and Roy DeSoto
|
Galen, Pete Burke and Alan Virdon |
Mike Danko, Willie Gillis
|
Crossed OverPart 2 Read Part 1 |
John Gage sat on the damp ground watching the eastern sky lighten into hues of gold. The chill air made him draw his blanket even tighter. For an hour he'd been perched above the long valley, watching the world wake up. The air smelled like pine, not burning hydrocarbons. The breeze pushing the leaves in the trees produced soft whooshes that would have gone entirely unnoticed in the clamor of the city. If he closed his eyes he could easily imagine himself away in the mountains for a bit of fishing or camping. Any minute he expected to smell coffee brewing, see Roy emerge sleepily from his tent, hear Chet's litany of morning complaints.
Except this wasn't a fishing trip. This wasn't like any trip he'd ever taken in his entire life.
A silhouette appeared on the hillside below him. "Mind some company?" Pete Burke asked.
"Did you bring coffee?" Johnny returned, already knowing the answer.
"Don't talk to me about coffee." Pete claimed a patch of dirt and pulled his own blanket close. A jaw-splitting yawn forestalled his reply for just a moment. "You ask Alan. I went through massive caffeine withdrawal after we crashed here."
"I understand completely."
Pete shot him a sly glance. "You do, huh? According to your friend, we're all just some wild hallucination."
Johnny gave the astronaut a rueful smile, then focused on a bluebird flitting nearby. He didn't want to talk about Roy behind his back. "You're a pretty convincing hallucination to me."
"Thanks a heap." Pete stretched his back, producing a fine crack. "I don't blame him. This place takes some getting used to."
Being stuck in a TV show usually does, Johnny almost said, but he held his tongue. Only Roy knew Johnny's theory that the two paramedics had been inexplicably trapped in a Friday night television series, and Roy thought the idea was nuts. But Johnny clearly remembered sitting around the station once or twice and watching Planet of the Apes. He preferred Adam-12, but on some nights, anything at all on the boob tube was better than listening to Chet's stories or watching Roy and Mike play chess.
"Alan's going to want to move on today," Pete said. "He gets restless if we stay in one place more than a few days."
"Move on to where?"
"We've been heading northeast. The apes like living along the coast, so if we're lucky, we won't run into so many of them up there. You think your friend's up to traveling?"
Johnny considered the question carefully. Roy's concussion had kept him down most of the previous day, but it wasn't his partner's physical condition that worried him.
"We'll have to ask him. And I don't know if going north is a good idea for us. I don't know how we got here, but maybe there's a way back."
Pete snapped a small branch between his hands and started breaking it into smaller pieces. "How you got here - now that's an interesting question. You still don't remember?"
Johnny had struggled with his memories during the long, restless night. He remembered the call-out, just after lunch, to Mammoth Studios. They'd been on so many runs to the studio over the years that he practically knew the lot by heart. The blaze near the manmade lake hadn't been too serious, but soon after Marco and Chet turned their hoses on it, something shorted out. Brilliant flashes of white-hot light played against the movie screen of Johnny's memory.
"It was just some kind of explosion," he said.
"I don't know what kind of explosion throws you a thousand years forward in time," Pete said.
How did you tell someone he was a TV character? Johnny didn't know. He'd never done it before. Changing the subject was easier. "How long have you been here?"
Pete didn't hesitate. "Seven months, two weeks and four days."
Back home, elementary schools had just started putting Thanksgiving drawings and paintings in their windows. The fall television season hadn't been underway for more than six or seven weeks, and Planet of the Apes had been a new show. No way could Pete Burke and Alan Virdon have been trapped for almost eight months. Then again, maybe television time didn't work like regular time. Maybe Roy was right, and any minute now Johnny would simply wake up in Rampart Hospital.
"Ask me what I miss most," Pete suggested.
"What do you miss most?"
"Cheeseburgers. Big, fat, juicy cheeseburgers with the whole works. Lettuce, tomato, onions, ketchup, mustard and three slices of sweet pickle."
Johnny's stomach rumbled. "French fries on the side?"
"Absolutely."
It didn't seem fair that a man couldn't enjoy the pleasure of an ordinary cheeseburger. But Johnny knew life wasn't fair. He'd learned that growing up on the Indian reservation to which his ancestors had been exiled generations earlier. He saw unfairness every day on the job, in the faces of sick children, injured victims, grieving families.
"It's worse for Alan," Pete said. "He left behind a wife and kid."
Roy had a wife and two kids. Johnny swallowed past a sudden lump in his throat. "I'm sure he'll see them again. That you'll get home some day."
"That we all get home again," Pete reminded him. "You're stranded here, too."
Another subject Johnny wanted to avoid. He climbed to his feet. "Tell me, where's the nearest place to rustle up breakfast around here?"
"If you don't mind cold fruit and stale bread, I'd recommend the cave just around the corner."
They made their way back into the small subterranean hideaway. Alan and Galen were tidying up the bedrolls, sweeping the ground clear and setting out the meager meal. Roy was awake but quiet, curled up on his side, dark circles under his eyes. He was tracking every move Galen made and didn't immediately notice Johnny's return.
"How you feeling?" Johnny asked, crouching beside him and resting a hand on his shoulder.
The lines on Roy's forehead eased a bit. "Where'd you go?"
"Just taking in the local scenery. Kinda pretty."
"There's a village about four miles up the river," Alan said. "It'll take Pete and me a couple of hours to get there and back, but I think it's worth the time. We'll see if we can trade for some more food and some clothes for you two."
Johnny glanced down at his uniform. He wouldn't pass inspection, not with dusty pants and an untucked shirt, but he liked his blues. "What's wrong with what we've got on?"
Pete picked up something that looked like a purple apple and took a large bite out of it. "Nothing's wrong with them," he said as he wiped juice from his chin. "Except you're like a big neon sign that says, 'Hey, Urko, look over here.'"
The name sounded familiar, but Johnny couldn't place it. "Who's Urko?"
"He's the general in charge of the army," Galen said helpfully.
"We're number one on his hit list," Pete added.
"If all goes well, we should be back before lunch," Alan said. "While we're gone, Galen will stay here and keep you company. Don't go outside - it's too dangerous with so many patrols in the area. If Pete or I run into any problems, we'll lay low and be back as soon as possible. Then we'll head out."
Roy tensed beneath Johnny's hand and asked, "Head out where?"
Alan replied, "North. Toward where Sacramento used to be."
Roy didn't argue, which surprised Johnny. But soon after Alan and Pete left for the village, Johnny saw his partner pull on his boots. Galen looked up from where he sat whittling a piece of wood.
"Call of nature?" Johnny asked.
"Yeah," Roy said. "For you, too. Galen, we'll be back in a few."
"Don't go far," the chimpanzee warned. "You heard Alan."
Roy nodded. "I heard him."
Outside, the sun had fully risen. Johnny couldn't complain about the pleasant weather, and he appreciated the lack of smog in the air. Roy blinked painfully against the daylight and took a moment to get his bearings. When he started down the hill, loose soil crumbled beneath his feet.
"Where are you going?" Johnny asked, startled.
"Away from here," Roy answered.
Johnny followed on his heels, cursing himself. He should have known that a quiet Roy DeSoto was a brooding Roy DeSoto. Well, sometimes a quiet Roy DeSoto was simply quiet, but more often than not he was chewing on something like the station mascot Henry with a particularly vexing bone.
"Just exactly where?" Johnny asked doggedly. "You heard Alan."
Roy kept edging down the slope, grabbing for occasional handholds on trees or rocks. His jaw was set stubbornly. "Sure I did. Ape patrols. Ape armies. Ape gorillas. You know, Johnny, I served in the army for two years, I don't remember seeing any apes anywhere."
"You're starting to worry me. You ever hear about living in denial?"
"That's fine with me," Roy retorted. "Better to be in denial than to be psychotic."
They reached a dirt road running along a crystal-clear river. Johnny looked longingly at the water, contemplating a nice morning scrub, but the current looked too swift to be safe. Roy followed it downstream as confidently as if he'd been studying a map all night long. Under any other circumstance, Johnny might have enjoyed the hike. Unlike the dry hills and desert vegetation of L.A. County, the landscape was lush and green, similar to Northern California. Birds sang in the trees above them, as cheerful as could be.
"This isn't a hallucination," Johnny insisted, struggling to keep pace with his partner's quick strides. "I'm real, that tree over there is real, that hill is real. How do you explain it all?"
Roy kept going, his gaze fixed firmly on the road. "I don't have to. Sooner or later, things will become clear. I'll just wait for that moment."
"And what if we run into this Urko guy? What then?"
"There's no such thing as an ape general," Roy insisted.
Johnny tried to think up a persuasive argument to get Roy back to the safety of the cave. The senior paramedic could be amazingly stubborn, though. His stubbornness had helped convince Johnny to join the paramedic program. It also made Roy a great paramedic because he never gave up on a patient, no matter how dire the prognosis. But it also drove Johnny crazy at times.
"What about Galen?" he said. "He's not just some guy in a chimp suit."
Roy grimaced. "Maybe, maybe not. They can do a lot with Hollywood makeup these days."
Denial. Deep, all-encompassing denial. Johnny heaved a sigh. But all he could do was try to keep track of their surroundings and follow his partner down the road. Soon he was sweating from the quick pace, and he longed for a canteen of water.
"We don't have any food or water," Johnny pointed out. "Or a map."
"We've got our wallets."
"You see any convenience stores?" Johnny asked. No answer. He tried a different approach. "You don't even know where we're going."
"I asked Alan where they found us yesterday. He said about a mile down river, where it forks and goes underground. I figure that's a good place to start."
Johnny wished he'd had his morning cup of coffee. He also wished that Roy's plan didn't make so much sense. He supposed it couldn't hurt to inspect the spot where the astronauts had found them, but he didn't know what Roy hoped to find. Some magic way back to Los Angeles? Some kind of weird portal through time? This was Planet of the Apes, not Star Trek.
He wouldn't have minded so much being stuck in Star Trek, though. All that high-tech equipment, transporting all over the universe with female yeomen in very short dresses -
A shout interrupted Johnny's intergalactic fantasies.
"You there, halt!"
Johnny halted as ordered. He spun around to see a gorilla sitting on a horse about fifty feet behind them. Although he considered himself prepared, the sight still stunned him. A gorilla with a helmet, uniform and rifle. Sitting on a horse in the middle of nowhere. Until that very moment, the strangest thing Johnny had ever seen was a drunken transvestite tap-dancing in the middle of Sunset Boulevard. Not even Miss Ebony Shay, as the man had called himself, could compare to a talking gorilla on horseback.
Roy had stopped beside Johnny, but Johnny couldn't tear his gaze away long enough to gauge his partner's reaction. He just hoped Roy didn't do anything stupid.
"Identify yourselves," the gorilla demanded.
Roy did something stupid.
"Fireman DeSoto, L.A. County," he said, stepping forward with his hands on his hips. "You want to make something of it?"
Johnny grabbed Roy's arm and tried to drag him back, but the other man was resolute.
"My partner and I are a little lost," Roy continued. "We're looking for our squad. It's red and shiny and has some lights on the top. Have you seen it?"
"Quit it," Johnny warned in a low voice.
"How about a phone?" Roy pressed. "Is there a phone around here?"
Johnny stepped forward. "Don't mind us, okay? We're just out for a little walk. Nothing to worry about here."
The gorilla started to unsling his rifle. "You're both under arrest - "
If Johnny knew one thing, it was that absolutely nothing good could come from being arrested by an ape. He tugged on Roy's arm. "Run."
"He's not real," Roy insisted.
"Tell me that after you get shot," Johnny hissed.
Roy stood squarely in place for another split-second, then apparently thought the better of his actions. He and Johnny dashed for the trees and the river. A shot cracked through the air, and a chunk of tree trunk exploded not three feet from Johnny's head. More shots. The sound of the horse gaining on them. The two paramedics ran along the water, crushing grass and wildflowers beneath their boots.
"You and your great ideas," Johnny said bitterly.
Roy started to reply, but caught his foot on a root and went sprawling into the river. With a strangled yelp he was sucked under the turbulent current. Johnny splashed in, icy water rising to his waist. He felt himself tilted and tumbled, and in a moment found himself submerged in blueness. He choked and flailed, broke the surface, saw Roy floundering just inches away, wrapped one arm around his partner's waist.
"You all right?" he shouted.
Roy coughed raggedly on a mouthful of water. "Yeah! You?"
"Fine. Let's get out of here." Johnny's toes now barely scraped the river bottom. Gaining purchase with every step, he hauled Roy toward shore. Together they stumbled up the grassy bank and dropped to their knees on the kind, firm ground.
The gorilla was waiting for them. He took aim squarely on Johnny's forehead.
"Fleeing arrest is a crime," the gorilla announced with malicious glee.
Roy spat out more water and lifted his head. When he spoke, he sounded hoarse and defeated. "He wasn't fleeing arrest. I was. Leave him alone."
"Shut up, Roy," Johnny suggested.
"Both of you get up, hands on your head," the gorilla announced. Then his head cocked, as if he heard something disturbing.
Johnny listened hard. He heard metal clanging. The unnaturalness of it stood out in the wilderness setting, and made him remember another detail of the fire at Mammoth Studios.
"I've heard that before," Johnny murmured. "Like an Errol Flynn movie."
The clanging stopped. Lightning shot out of the clear blue sky, a sizzling bolt that struck just over the small rise behind the gorilla. The soldier turned to look, and in that moment Johnny scrambled to his feet and tipped him out of his saddle. No stranger to horses, Johnny also let out a yell and slapped the horse squarely in the flank. The palomino dashed off with the soldier clinging desperately to its side.
More lightning came out of nowhere, accompanied by a howling wind that whipped Johnny's hair and made whirlwinds out of dirt and leaves. His only instinct was to go to the ground and cover his head, but in disbelief he saw Roy staggering up the hill against the forces of nature. Johnny caught up to him with effort, and a second later was looking down on the second strangest thing he'd ever seen.
Only a few dozen feet away, a corpse on the ground. Johnny had seen plenty of dead bodies on the job, but never one whose head had been separated and flung away from the body. Over the decapitated victim stood a brown-haired man wielding a long, bloodstained sword. The sword, pointed at the sky, channeled the bolts of supernatural lightning down into the stranger's arched body.
Seeing a man - any man, even a murderer - electrocuted like that turned Johnny's stomach upside-down.
The lightning and wind began to die, but the unusual storm only transformed into something odder. A shimmering, translucent wall of sparkling silver shot out of the ground and reached for the clouds. It hissed like the static on a TV set, and divided the two paramedics from the carnage. Clearly visible through the silver, the brown-haired man fell to his knees.
"Hurry," he called to the paramedics. "Go through before it's too late!"
"Go through what?" Johnny yelled back.
"If you want to go home, go through!"
Johnny looked at Roy, who stood with his mouth agape. The senior paramedic moved closer to the wall. His hair stood on end from a charge of static electricity.
"Don't touch that!" Johnny snapped as Roy's hand reached out. "Are you crazy?"
The stranger shouted, "Go through!"
"This isn't any weirder than anything else so far," Roy said. He turned his blue eyes on Johnny. Hope and fear warred for dominance in his expression. "What have we got to lose?"
"Roy - " Johnny started, but his protest died in his throat as Roy touched the wall and vanished.
Utterly vanished.
Two seconds later, wet and disgruntled and bewildered, Johnny followed.
***
A cop's face swam into Johnny's vision. A young kid, maybe just out of training. Behind him, the dark wall of an alley and the flash of police lights.
"You all right, pal?"
"He's okay," Roy said from somewhere nearby.
"You're firemen?" someone else asked.
"We were in an accident," Roy said. "We're from Station 51."
Johnny realized he was standing against a Dumpster. The reek of old garbage and even older urine assailed his nose. Beyond the cop and the patrol car, sunshine splashed down on a street that looked remarkably like Wilshire Boulevard.
Los Angeles. Home. He couldn't remember getting there, but he'd never been so grateful to see it.
The cop had a partner, a black man standing with Roy by the hood of the car. "Where's your car?"
"It's back a few blocks," Roy lied, shifting from one foot to the other, his hands tugging on his belt. Johnny recognized the signs of excitement in his partner. Roy continued, "Can you patch a call through to our captain? Hank Stanley, Station 51. I'm Roy DeSoto, that's Johnny Gage."
"You want to sit down? You don't look so good," the rookie cop told Johnny.
"Yeah, okay," Johnny said, and let himself be steered into the back of the police cruiser.
He sat gratefully on the cracked vinyl. Through the windshield he could see Roy talking to the black cop, whose face was familiar. Maybe they'd run across him on the job -
No. Not on the job.
Johnny put his head back and groaned.
To be continued . . .
Author's Notes: Grateful thanks to Cindy and Susan for their great assistance! Any remaining typos, goofs, etc are entirely my own fault. Coming next . . . when is L.A. not L.A.? Will Roy get over his denial? And just what the heck is Connor MacLeod doing in this story, anyway? Read Part Three