The shattered ruins stood on either side of the abandoned roads. Glass and concrete littered the ground between the husks of old cars. The radiation levels on the display inside my helmet were disturbing. My suit was designed to handle this and more, but one small tear… I just would not think about that for now.
The hours passed with the bright spot of the Sun barely shining through the scars of the nuclear clouds overhead. I finally approached the rusted sign, still standing against all odds, on the bent metal bars. The familiar chipped white letters against the green backdrop that read “Welcome to Sesame Street.”
The familiar buildings passed by, as they had so many times before. I stepped over bone fragments as I traveled, both out of respect for the dead and out of fear of sharp edges damaging my suit. I did not expect what I would see next, the oversized skull, with the right half of the long-curved beak almost completely gone. He was always closer to my brother Ernie, but he was still my friend, even if I’d always kept him at arm’s length. I did that with everyone back then. I was afraid to let anyone get too close. He proudly carried the call sign of “Big Bird,” a nod to his heritage as the last of the Golden Avians. A once great race that would never again rise from these ashes.
I knew that I might see the remains of people I knew, but I was not prepared for this.
It was our side that had dropped the bomb. The scarecrow armies were pouring into our world from Oz. Ambassador Elmo advised the President of The United States to nuke the wormhole. Our military had to collapse the Einstein-Rosen Bridge, before we were overrun. General Kermit agreed and gave the order to send the weapon through the wormhole, hoping to do as much damage as possible to the other side in the process. There was no time for the people of Sesame Street to evacuate.
The Emerald Witch had already conquered that world and crowned herself queen. That was the start of this long-drawn-out war. It was a tragedy that this is what it took to finally get humans and Muppets to put the last of our ancient differences aside.
A lot of people said that she was originally a girl from our world, but whether I believed that or not, I did not know.
This wasn’t her only gateway, but it was her largest. She’d opened others in Paris, Tokyo, Nairobi and other major sites through which she sent massive dragons, flaming salamanders, and legions of Tinmen. But these were mere distractions to pull our forces and our eyes away from the real invasion.
Almost no one noticed the two-foot tall yet highly intelligent insectoids that slipped through the Sesame Street portal. These, along with the scarecrows, could hide in our world, establish a foothold, and decimate our ecosystems, along with our food supply, as their numbers grew exponentially.
She knew how our minds worked: how to distract us with a spectacle. Yet she intended to conquer our world through locusts, not elephants, giants, or dragons. And in the beginning, she almost succeeded.
“Come on Bert, keep moving,” I whispered to myself.
The remains of the old church stood at the end of the street. The wooden pews still sat where they had always been. A few desiccated figures lay hunched over in the pews. Many looked as if they were still praying.
The body at the front rested on the floor beside the podium. He still wore the black suit and cleric’s collar. Two pairs of elongated incisors extended from the upper jaw so that one pair of fangs flanked the other, with the longer just behind the shorter. The small wooden Cross still lay across his heart.
In life he had been sentenced to be a creature of the night, hiding in darkness, until this weapon shone on him with the light of a thousand suns.
“You are finally free from your curse my friend,” I whispered to the Count.
I stood for a moment, reflecting on the life of a vampire who had seen the arms of God open to him, and who firmly believed that the blood of Christ had been shed for his sins.
“What might the worlds be like, if we could all see what you saw?”
I sighed. “Perhaps you were right, and death is not the end. Perhaps you are now seeing greater things than we could ever see in this life.”
I looked around once, contemplating the war, the destructiveness of humans and semi-humans, and this world of death.
I reached towards the count’s shirt setting the cross to one side, loosened a button, and pulled out the amulet with its chain.
The Count guarded this hidden relic for generations. It had the ability to raise an army powerful enough to resist the Emerald Queen, and possibly to overtake Oz. But the Faustian irony was not lost on me.
I turned the mechanism in the designed fashion, and with a series of metal clicks, the center opened, like rose petals blooming inward.
I took a breath of relief, my hands shaking. The small red data crystal was still there and still intact.
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