D. MacHale - The Reality Bug

“No,” I said. “This isn’t how it’s supposed to work! You said it’s impossible for those quigs to be here, but they are. And our control bracelets should work, but they don’t. And Alex shouldn’t be lying dead out there in the gym because he wasn’t part of this jump, but he looks pretty dead to me. There are too many impossible things happening for me to risk letting one of those monsters eat us back to reality!”

“But-“

“You heard Saint Dane. He knew what you were trying to do with the Reality Bug. He messed with your program. Who knows what it’s capable of now? We’ve got to get out of here alive and figure out what happened.”

Aja nodded. I was making sense to her, for a change.

“I have no idea how to get us out,” I added. “It’s up to you.”

I could tell the wheels were spinning in Aja’s head, trying to figure a way to escape from the jump. Finally she said, “Our controllers were somehow taken offline. Whatever Saint Dane did, it happened when you pushed the reset button.”

“Right, no more pushing the reset button,” I agreed.

“But Alex’s controller is tied into the general grid. It’s on a different string.”

“Can you use it to end our jump?” I asked.

“Absolutely,” she answered with authority. “If it still works.”

I knew what had to be done. We had to go back into the gym, get to Alex’s body, and get his wrist controller. No problem, right? Yeah, sure. We quickly found the door that led from this locker room back into the gym. Aja and I cautiously opened it a crack and peered out.

The big gym was eerily empty. Not long ago it had been full of screaming basketball fans. Now the only person left in the gym was Alex, and he wasn’t doing any screaming. Not anymore. Question was, where was the quig?

“You sure this is the only way out of the jump?” I asked Aja in a whisper.

“No, but it’s the only way I can think of.”

“Then we’ve gotta take the chance,” I said. “Wait here.”

I started into the gym, but Aja grabbed my arm.

“Where are you going?”

“To get the controller, where do you think?”

“You don’t know how to get it off his arm.”

Good point. We had to go together. Aja and I then shared eye contact in a way that hadn’t happened up until this point. Though we were both Travelers, our relationship had been a battle from the get-go. But now we were about to step into danger. The look between us said it all. We were in this together, like it or not. I gave her a quick nod, and the two of us stepped into the gym.

The distance to Alex was only about twenty yards, but it might as well have been a mile. If the quig caught us in the middle of the gym, there was nowhere for us to run. We started out by walking slowly, but I think we both realized the faster we did this the better, because with each step we picked up the pace.

Alex’s body was lying right in front of the open doorway to the boys’ locker room. The quig was probably still in there. I had my eyes fixed on the door, waiting for it to spring out. Neither of us said anything for fear of alerting the monster.

As we got closer to the body, I realized I didn’t want to see what horror the quig had done to the poor guy. Fantasy or not, this was all too real. But there was no chickening out. Not now. We were only a few feet from the body and I felt as if we were going to pull this off.

I was wrong.

The quig sprang from the doorway, exactly as I feared. Without thinking, I grabbed Aja and pulled her underneath the bleachers. It was the only place to go. Because of the basketball game, the bleachers were extended out into the gym. The move saved our lives, for the moment.

The quig swiped at me with its massive paw just as I ducked under a metal rail. The monster’s hand smashed the rail, but one claw caught the back of my arm, slicing open the fabric of my jumpsuit. The stinging pain told me it had sliced through a part of my arm, too. But no matter how bad it hurt, I wasn’t about to stop now.

“Keep moving!” I shouted at Aja.

A complex steel framework held up the bleachers. The two of us crawled through the labyrinth, moving up and over and around and under, desperate to get away from the quig. I glanced back to see the quig was still coming. It was having a lot more trouble getting through the tangle of steel than we were. But that didn’t stop it. This thing was tearing the bleachers apart to get at us.

That’s when I got a brilliant idea.

“Get to the far side, hurry!” I shouted at Aja.

If my idea was going to work, we had to get out from under here as soon as possible. I kept pushing Aja from behind, forcing her to snake through the metal rails. Finally we made it to the far side and out from under.

“Which way?” she shouted.

“Stay right there!” I commanded.

Aja looked at me like I was crazy. But I didn’t have time to explain. Aja may have known computers, but I was a gym rat. Before I became a Traveler, I had spent every moment I could in gyms. I knew how they worked. I ran to a small silver box on the wall, flipped up the safety cover, and pressed the red control button inside.

Instantly the bleachers began to retract, with the quig trapped underneath.

“Brilliant!” Aja exclaimed.

It was the first nice thing she said to me. The two of us stood there, both hoping the quig would get crunched in the tangle of steel that was closing around it. All we needed was a minute to get the controller.

We didn’t get it.

With a horrifying roar, the quig crashed out from under the retracting bleachers, pulling pieces of steel frame along with it. Turned out my brilliant idea, wasn’t so brilliant. There was nothing we could do but run for our lives. We sprinted across the gym, maddeningly close to Alex’s controller. But there wasn’t time to get it. We ran out of the gym and down the corridor that led to the rest of the school.

I always felt like there was something spooky about an empty school building. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because I was used to schools being busy and loud. A quiet school seemed wrong. Well, this school was definitely wrong. The fact that it was empty was the least of the reasons. Aja and I ran down the long, glass-walled corridor from the athletic wing into the student center that was the main hub of the school. It was a huge, airplane hangar-size room from which all the rest of the school wings could be accessed. Aja and I ran to the center of the big room so we would be able to get a complete 360 view around. If anything was going to enter the place looking for us, we’d see it in plenty of time to run the other way.

“There’s gotta be another way to end the jump,” I said, gulping for air.

Aja once again hit a series of buttons on her wrist controller, then grunted in frustration. “This can’t be happening!” she shouted. “I have no control!”

There was no way around it. We had to figure a way to get past that quig, or at least distract it long enough to get Alex’s controller.

“You know this place,” Aja said. “Are there any weapons?” “In a school? Yeah, right.”

“Think, Pendragon! Is there anything we can use as a weapon?”

My first reaction was to say no, but that wasn’t helpful. I had to give it some thought and be creative. Was there anything in this school we could use as a weapon to beat a quig? Uncle Press had killed some quigs with spears, but there was nothing like that here at Davis Gregory High. We had also blown up a quig using the explosive tak, but there was none of that stuff around. What else could we use?

That’s when an idea started to form.

“These quigs,” I asked. “Lifelight created them, but are they real? I mean, are they just like real quigs?”