D. MacHale - The Reality Bug

“Pendragon! What a surprise!” she exclaimed. “And who is this?”

“This is my friend Loor,” I answered. “She’s a Traveler. Where is Aja?”

“Another Traveler?” Evangeline said. “How wonderful! You two are just in time for dinner.”

She stepped back to let Loor and me inside.

“We need to find Aja, Evangeline,” I said urgently.

“But surely you have time for some gloid,” she said sweetly. “We’re having your favorite. Blue. You like blue the best, don’t you?”

Yeah, right.

“Where is Aja?” Loor demanded. She didn’t care if she sounded rude.

“She’s not here,” Evangeline answered. “Please, come into the kitchen and eat.”

She turned and walked down the hallway, headed for the kitchen.

“If she is not here,” Loor said, “where else could she be?” “I don’t know,” I answered.

We followed Evangeline through the house, toward the kitchen. No way I was going to get near any of that blue gloid, but we had to find Aja. I stepped up to the kitchen door, swung it open, and saw something that froze both Loor and me in our places. It was impossible, yet as real as can be.

Evangeline was scooping big ladles of blue gloid into white bowls. But that wasn’t what shocked us.

“Sit down, you two,” she said with warm hospitality. “Plenty of room.”

Loor and I didn’t move. That was because there were already two dinner guests seated at the table. As impossible as it was, sitting there, chowing down on huge spoonfuls of blue gloid, were the two cowpokes from the mountain ravine in Zetlin’s fantasy.

“Howdy there, you two!” one of them said. “You come by to return our horses?”

“That’s right nice of you to go out of your way!” the other one said. He then looked at Evangeline and said, “Ma’am, this chow sure is tasty.”

“That’s kind of you to say,” Evangeline said, blushing.

What was going on?

Loor asked me, “Do you smell that?”

At first I thought she meant the gloid, but I took a whiff and realized it was something else. Something was burning.

“Evangeline, are you cooking something?” I asked.

Before she could answer, a door opened from the far side of the kitchen and another guest arrived.

“Gunny!” I shouted.

Yup. In walked Gunny Van Dyke, dressed in his bell captain uniform from the Manhattan Tower Hotel.

“Hey there, shorty!” he said. “I see you made it off that dam. You going to introduce me to your friend?”

I was numb. My brain wasn’t computing any of this.

“This is… this is… Loor,” I said numbly.

“Osa’s daughter?” Gunny exclaimed. “I am very pleased to meet you.”

Gunny reached across the table, holding out his hand to shake Loor’s. Loor reached out, looking as dazed as I was. And there was a gunshot.

The smile froze on Gunny’s face. He pitched forward and fell face first onto the table. Gunny had been shot. Both cow-pokes dove away from the table and hit the floor. Evangeline screamed and huddled behind a counter. I looked across the room to where the shot had come from.

Standing in the doorway was Saint Dane. He was still dressed in his black cowboy outfit and had a smoking six-shooter in his hand.

“You cheated, Pendragon,” Saint Dane exclaimed. “There’s no fun in a challenge if you cheat. Now you two will just have to pay the price.”

From behind him, the desperados entered with guns drawn.

I was absolutely, totally frozen in shock. Things were happening so fast and seemed so impossible, I couldn’t even begin to figure out what to do.

Luckily, Loor could.

She quickly grabbed the end of the kitchen table and flipped it up on end. Cutlery and gloid flew everywhere as the desperados opened fire. Bullets slammed into the table, shredding it. But Loor’s quick thinking had protected us. At least for the time being.

“Outta here!” I shouted, and we ran for the door to the hallway.

More gunshots were fired as bullets ripped through the kitchen, barely missing us and instead slamming into the kitchen walls. The instant we ran out the door, we discovered where the bad smell had come from.

The mansion was on fire.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the entire downstairs hallway was full of horses. I’m serious. It was like being in the frenzy of wild horses back in the blacksmith barn, times about a hundred because the animals were terrified by the fire that shot flames and smoke out of the rooms on either side of the hallway. Loor took the lead, pulling me behind her, pushing her way through the terrified mass of horses. She actually shoved some of the big animals out of our way. Good thing she was here. I probably would have been trampled.

We made our way back to the front door, but it was engulfed in flames. No way we were getting out that way. “Upstairs!” I shouted.

We ran up the wide, carpeted stairway to the second floor. I figured that with any luck, we could make our way to the back of the house and get out of a window before being burned or shot or trampled.

“How could this happen?” Loor shouted as we ran up the stairs.

“You’re asking me like I know?” I shouted back. “I’m just as freaked as you are!”

We got to the top of the stairs and ran down the hallway, headed for a window on the far end. We were just about to throw it open, when the window shattered. Loor and I both fell to the ground as bits of glass rained down on us. Saint Dane’s desperados were outside, waiting for us.

We were trapped.

Another gunshot was heard that smashed a picture hanging right next to my head. We both spun toward the stairs to see a ghastly sight. Saint Dane was standing on the top stair, backed by the burning flames from down below. He was like a demonic shadow standing there, with two six-guns drawn.

“Time is running out, children,” he chuckled. “What’s your next move?”

I pushed Loor into a bedroom off the hallway and slammed the door shut. This wouldn’t get us out, but at least it would buy us a few more seconds to think.

“How can this be?” Loor demanded to know.

My shock was wearing off now, and my brain was beginning to function. An idea was forming. It started when we first saw those cowpokes seated around Evangeline’s table. With each new disaster, my theory became more real.

“There can only be one explanation for all this,” I said. I then lifted my arm, and pulled back the sleeve of my jumpsuit to see… I was right.

I was still wearing a silver control bracelet. Loor lifted her arm to see she was still wearing one as well.

“But we removed these,” she said, totally confused.

“We thought we did,” I answered. “But that’s because we didn’t know the truth.”

“And what is the truth?”

“We’re still in the jump,” I said. “This is still part of the fantasy.” Crack!

A bullet tore through the door. Saint Dane had come a-knocking. I pulled Loor across the room and we huddled down behind the bed.

“Why did we not see these before?” she asked.

“Because we thought we were out of the jump,” I answered. “That’s how it works, if you give yourself over to the fantasy, you won’t see the bracelets. But as soon as I realized we were still in the jump, they appeared.”

Crack! Crack!

Two more bullets splintered the wood of the door.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are!” came Saint Dane’s singsong voice from the hallway.

“So then none of this is real?” Loor asked.

“Real enough,” I said. “But it’s time to get out.”

I lifted my arm to look at the control bracelet and the three buttons. The one to the far right was supposed to end the jump, but obviously that didn’t work. The one in the middle was supposed to change the jump, but the last time I tried using that, we almost got eaten by quigs. The button to the far left was my only choice, so I hit it.