"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.
Alabama Zack, our hero and 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 Zack was arrested and jailed for murder.
Zack has amnesia: he can not remember how he arrived on that platform, let alone whether or not he had anything to do with the man's death.
Zack has met three people who are helping him to recover his memory and prove his innocence: the doctor, whom Zack met on the train station platform, the P.I. Cork McGraw, and Cork's maid Matilda.
In last week's chapter, Zack received a note from a strange figure in the middle of the night. The note was from the inquisitors, the rulers of the realm. It instructed Zack to finish the mission he had been assigned when temporarily released from prison (to discover what the doctor knows), and it also reattached the green tracking device used by the realm to monitor and recapture its prisoners.
“Friends, I am not from this dimension,” the doctor began to his suddenly rapt audience in Cork McGraw's study.
Cork, Matilda and our hero sat in a row of kitchen chairs before the doctor, who sat at ease in the lounge chair with his back to the tall window. The morning light still cast a shadow on the street outside. Zack had awakened the doctor at dawn to show him the note, and the doctor had suggested the group session to, as he put it, reveal his secret, double life.
Cork already understood that reality was multidimensional. He had run across dimension travelers on a few occasions in his work, and he had accepted the transporter chair in payment because he secretly thought it might come in handy. He was shocked to learn about the doctor, however: he had known the doctor for over ten years and the two had rarely broached the subject, let alone discussed that the doctor himself was from another world.
For her part, Matilda only knew one thing about other dimensions: that she and Cork had traveled to another world to bring Zack back. What mattered was that Zack had returned, and now she could feel his warm presence in the chair next to her.
Zack stared at the doctor. He could not believe they were talking about this. He recalled his dream of when he was 9 and found himself no longer in Alabama, and he felt a strange unease about the evening before – something had happened before he went to sleep, something he did not want to think about.
Cork and our hero spoke questions over each other: “Where are you really from, doc?” Cork said, while Zack asked, appalling himself, “How do I stop it?”
The doctor laughed and held up his hand. “One at a time now. Cork, I'm from 1940s America, if that tells you anything, which it couldn't possibly unless you've been there. It was a singular experience, incomparable to anything I've found elsewhere. Perhaps, since we have reached this understanding, I'll take you there sometime.”
The doctor turned to Zack. “Zack, you have a rare quality that I have been sent here to find and aid. Most of us – dimension travelers, that is – jump between dimensions using a transporter device, like Cork's red chair here.” He motioned to the chair placed cautiously in the corner. “A transporter amplifies the energy of the user's thoughts to push the user into the other world. But Zack, you don't need a transporter. You have the ability to jump using the power of your imagination alone, and I assume you realize that you have done this on multiple occasions during the course of you lifetime.” Zack shook his head no, but the doctor continued. “If you think back to those times, you will recall that you were caught in a flight of fancy and imagining the other world before you found yourself there. That is all you have to do to jump between worlds. It is a rare quality, and we now find ourselves in the company of two with that gift.”
The doctor finished and turned to indicate Matilda, whose eyes widened.
“So that's why she was able to go with me after Zack,” Cork said. “What an amazing gift!”
The doctor smiled, because he could tell that neither Zack nor Matilda was thinking that the ability was a gift. Zack sat rigidly with his gaze fixed on the floor, his face set. Matilda's eyes were shocked wide, but the doctor thought she probably had not fully realized what he had just told her.
In his work – the specialty of teaching those with the natural ability to jump dimensions how to use their skill – he had often seen Zack's reaction to the truth. He was going to fight it. This in spite of the fact, the doctor surmised, that Zack knew he wasn't in his home dimension, and that deep down he must know he had jumped many times before.
The doctor laced his fingers on his knee, closed his eyes and bowed his head. He could feel the group waiting for the next piece, but were they ready for that? He had never before had the learning process complicated by a murder – and he had never before known a murder victim. The man in the brown suit had been an old friend of his from the Academy in 1940s America. He had no idea how Charles had come to be on that platform: Charles was an historian and scholar, not a dimension traveler. What had happened to bring him here? And what did Zack have to do with it?
“I know … I knew the dead man,” the doctor said, and he looked up halfway through to see Zack's blue eyes turn to steel.
“You … knew!” Zack cried, springing out of his chair at him. The doctor leapt up to protect himself from the onrush. He tried to back behind the lounge chair, but his legs caught and he stumbled. Cork saved him, wrapping a big arm around Zack just before he reached him. “Liar!” Zack yelled, and the floor shook as he and Cork struggled. “How could you keep that from us?” With a burst Zack broke free; he turned and pushed past Matilda to the stairs.
The doctor looked at Cork, who seemed slightly put off as well. “Full of surprises today, aren't we doc?”
Next week in our story
(Zack) did not notice the buckboard waiting in the shadow of Claytons' dry goods store, nor did he hear the clink of the bit and whispered giddyup as the buckboard moved to follow him – until rapidly approaching hooves rumbled into his thoughts.
Chapter XX (link to come)
Start at the beginning
Cover for “Alabama Zack” designed in Canva using a Pixabay photo as background (image source).
Text written by 
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