D. MacHale - The Reality Bug

“Why are we still here?” I asked.

“I’ll override you and end it myself,” Aja said. She hit a few buttons on her wrist controller, and frowned. “What’s the matter?” I asked. “It’s not responding.”

“Not responding?” I yelled. I hit the right button on my controller a dozen more times. It still didn’t work. Aja’s fingers sped over the silver buttons on her wrist controller, trying to find the right combination that would put her back in control. She didn’t find it.

“Alex!” Aja yelled out to the phader, who was still standing on the opposite end of the corridor, working his wrist controller. “Get back to the core and jam a shutdown. Get us out of here!”

“Are you sure?” Alex called back. “What if-“

Grrrrrr.

The sound came from out in the gym, where Alex was.

“What was that?” Aja asked. She started to walk curiously toward the corridor that led to the gym, but I grabbed her arm to stop her.

“I don’t know,” I answered. But the truth was, it sounded familiar.

“Alex,” I shouted, “is something out there?” The phader looked around the gym and shrugged. “I don’t see anything.”

Grrrrrrrr…

There was something out there all right, and it was getting closer.

“We gotta get outta here, Aja,” I insisted.

“I’m trying!” she said while pounding out buttons on her useless controller.

I then heard what sounded like a scraping sound, as if something sharp were being dragged over a hard surface. I knew that sound. It felt so familiar, yet I couldn’t place it. What was it?

A second later it hit me. But it was impossible. Not here. Not on Veelox. Or on a fantasy version of Second Earth for that matter. Or wherever we were. There was only one other place where I had heard a sound like that. It was on a territory far from here. The sound brought back horrible memories from a place I would never forget.

Denduron.

“Hey!” shouted Alex with surprise.

Aja and I both looked up. We saw the phader framed in the doorway to the gym. He was now looking off to his right… and he looked scared.

“Who thought this thing up?” he asked with a shaky voice.

“What is it, Alex?” Aja asked.

Alex took two steps back, the fear showing in his eyes. “I’m gonna get back to the-“

He never finished his sentence, because a set of strong jaws closed around his throat. Aja screamed. I took a step back in surprise. The beast had appeared from nowhere. It leaped at Alex, knocking him down.

“How could that happen? I thought the phaders aren’t really here?” I yelled, trying to keep my head together.

“They aren’t!” Aja screamed. “This is our jump. He’s not part of this.”

“Yeah?” I cried. “Tell that to Alex… and the quig that just killed him.”

At that moment the beast looked up from its victim and stared down the corridor at us. The sight of blood dripping from its teeth was all too familiar. It was a quig from Denduron. It was in my high school gym, in my fantasy…

And it had just set its sights on us.

(CONTINUED)

A. nightmare from my past had just sprung out of my brain and was standing in front of us. In the flesh.

Somehow Aja’s Reality Bug had found it in my memory and brought it to life. It was impossible, yet here it was. The quig looked exactly as it had on Denduron. It was like a prehistoric bear with an oversize head that was mostly jaws. It had big sharp teeth on both top and bottom that jutted out like a wild boar’s. Its body was covered with dirty-gray fur. Yellow spikes of bone ran down its spine. Its paws were huge and strong, with knife-sharp claws. But the thing I remember most about these quigs, like all the quigs from all the territories, were its eyes. They were yellow and angry and focused…

On us.

This one was smaller than the ones I remembered, about the size of a grizzly bear. But that was bad news because it was small enough to move through doors. We were only a doorway and a short corridor away from being eaten. The quig stepped over Alex’s lifeless body, stalking toward the locker room… and us. There was only one thing I could think of doing.

I closed the door on our end of the corridor.

Just in time too. A second later I heard the quig smash against the door with a sickening thud. I knew the beast wasn’t smart enough to open a door latch, so I didn’t worry about locking it. The only thing I could hope was that the door would hold if it tried to bash it down.

Aja was frozen in shock. Her eyes were wide and frightened.

“Where did that come from?” I demanded.

“F-From your mind,” she stammered out. “I told you, it’ll find things in your memory that you fear.”

“But you said Lifelight can only use reality,” I shot back.

“Isn’t that thing real enough for you?”

As if in answer, the quig smashed against the door again.

“But those monsters don’t exist on Second Earth. It’s from a different territory. From Denduron.”

“That’s impossible!” Aja shouted. “Lifelight can’t do that!”

The quig slammed into the door again, letting out a bellow of pain and anger.

“Well, it can now!”

The door began to splinter. A couple more hits like that and it would be on us.

“C’mon!” I grabbed Aja’s hand and ran. I didn’t know where to go, but we couldn’t stay there. We found a door on the far side of the locker room and blasted through. The door led outside, but once we were out, we both froze in horror.

We were near the large, football practice field. But there were no players scrimmaging today. Instead, we were faced with more quigs! The grass was swarming with them. They were all sizes, too. Some were as big as the beasts that had fought in the Bedoowan stadium on Denduron, others were smaller than the one from the gym. A few quigs were battling each other, trying to tear into each other’s necks. I knew where that would lead. These quigs were cannibals. If one went down, the others would pounce and chow. “The door!” I shouted.

It was closing behind us. If it locked, we were history. Aja reacted quickly and threw her foot out, wedging her shoe into the doorway just before it closed. If she had missed, we would have been quig lunch and I guarantee we were tastier than blue gloid.

I glanced back at the herd of quigs to see a few of them were lifting up their heads. They had caught our scent. In a few seconds they’d zero in on us and the dinner bell would ring.

“Back inside!” I shouted, and pulled the door open. After we ducked back in, I made sure to pull the door all the way shut. It was a good thing too, because a handful of quigs had spotted us and they were beginning to charge.

“Is there another way out of here?” Aja asked in desperation.

“I–I think so.”

We ran back through the locker room, past the door to the gym, just as… crash! The gym door smashed open and the quig stood there looking totally ticked off that he had to go through so much trouble to get lunch. Aja and I kept running through the locker room, headed for the door that connected it with the girls’ locker room. The quig chased us, awkwardly smashing into lockers that gave off a hollow, metallic thunder each time the monster slammed into one.

The door to the girls’ locker room didn’t have a latch, but it opened toward us. That was a huge break. There was no way the quig could pull a door open. We shot through and into a mirror-image locker room on the other side. We were safe, but for how long?

“Get us outta this!” I screamed at Aja.

“This isn’t as bad as it seems, Pendragon,” she answered.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“No, this is a fantasy. Even if we got attacked and killed by one of those beasts, we’d just wake up inside the Lifelight pyramid.”