Introduction
"Alabama Zack" is a 40-chapter science fiction serial, published in the Scholar and Scribe community once a week on Wednesdays.
You can start the serial from the beginning by visiting the Curated Collection.
Previously in our story
Our hero, a war veteran, found himself standing on a train station platform in another time and dimension. At his feet lay a man in a brown suit. The man was dead, and our hero was arrested and jailed.
Our hero could not remember how he had arrived on that platform, let alone whether or not he had anything to do with the man's death.
In last week's chapter, we discovered that our hero cannot admit that he is in a dimension other than his own, though he subconsciously knows that he is.
Our hero braced himself as the keys rattled in the lock of his cell door. He had spent three days alone in the cell in the strange world, and he was on guard.
He gaped at the jailer that stood in the door frame when the door finally swung open. He was looking at a pig-man.
The jailer looked mostly like a regular man – except that he had a pig's nose, with big, gaping, wet airholes, and beady little pig eyes. The nose had fine blonde hairs on the sides, like a pig's snout; it wiggled around sniffing the air, like a pig's snout; and the end was a round, flat, pink stub that protruded from the man's face, just like a pig's snout.
Behind the lead jailer on either side were two more pig-men. Six eyes shifted about, each pair inspecting a different part of the cell.
“Step back away from the door,” the lead jailer said. Our hero complied, eager to put more distance between himself and the pig-man's nose, which still hadn't stopped sniffing the air. The jailers walked through the doorway one at a time and then re-arranged themselves in their original formation. “What is your name?” the lead jailer asked.
“Zack,” he answered.
“Where do you come from?”
“Alabama,” he replied, and the pig-men behind the lead jailer looked at each other, probably because they had no idea where Alabama was. The lead jailer didn't blink or waver from his questions. “And what is your purpose here?”
“To explore,” he said, not knowing his answer until the words popped out of his mouth. The lead pig-man cocked his head as though he didn't understand the words, or perhaps he was just puzzled by the look of surprise on our hero's face. He turned around and, extending his normal man arms, drew the other pig-men into a huddle. They conferred together for a minute; then the leader turned back.
“You will come with us now. Turn around and put your hands behind you.”
They shackled him and led him out into the corridor, where concrete painted green was lit by a row of fluorescent bulbs. They turned him left and walked past door after wooden door, toward a black point where the corridor disappeared in darkness. It seemed like the floor slanted, like they were moving deep into the earth. Our hero tried to look behind them, to mark the way out, but the jailers shoved him forward. Finally, when the corridor felt dank and deep and dark roots pushed through minute cracks in the concrete, they approached the end, closed off by yet another wooden door.
“Prisoner 1749,” the lead jailer called out, to no one and nothing that our hero could identify. The door they'd stopped before looked like all the other wooden doors, and the green concrete on either side was smooth and flat, except for a few small cracks. But then the door talked.
“And what is his name, and where is he from?” it asked.
“Zack and Alabama,” the lead jailer said.
“Then he is Alabama Zack,” the door replied.
The lead jailer leaned forward and patted the middle plank. The boards parted and rolled back like elevator doors.
The scene before them was like nothing Zack had ever seen.
Next week in our story
In the glow of each light stood an assembly; or rather, some lounged in an elevated position on the rock – in natural seating formed from each unique array of boulders – while others stood, with pig-man jailers like our hero, before those lounging. There was a babbling inquisition going on: those lounging on the rock asked questions of the ones standing before them, and this scene was repeated ad infinitum throughout the cavern.
Chapter V (link to come)
Start at the beginning
