Game Over Read online

  “Something like that.”

  “Just do me one favor, okay?” Molly said. “Don’t die. Can you remember that? I mean, even for a dumb jock like you, those are very simple instructions: Do not die.”

  “How do you spell it?”

  “Very funny. I laugh and laugh at your hilarious jokes.”

  Even in the night, Rick could see the fear in her eyes just as plainly as he could feel the fear inside his own heart. He kissed her one last time. He wrapped his arms around her. “I won’t die,” he said. “I promise.”

  He wished he felt sure that he was telling the truth.

  8. FEAR EFFECT

  THE MOMENT RICK stepped into the house—the moment he saw his mom and dad standing together in the living room, waiting for him—the moment he saw the looks of deep anxiety on their faces—he felt his heart drop so fast, so hard, it was nearly comical, even to him. A few seconds before, out in the brassy cold, he had felt so warm inside, full of Molly’s presence and his feelings for her and her feelings for him, that for a few moments everything had seemed simple. Good. Now, here, inside, in the warmth, a chill went through him, making him shudder. It was the chill of fear.

  Down the hall, behind the closed door, his room was waiting for him. His bed. Sleep. Those dreams . . .

  He stood for another second, looking at the painful worry on his parents’ faces. There seemed to be nothing to say.

  “I guess I better get to bed,” he said. Again, he heard the pale sound of fear in his voice and he hated it.

  In his room, he undressed slowly. All the while, he eyed his narrow bed as if it were some kind of prowling animal—an animal that might suddenly leap at him. He pulled some sweatpants on over his scarred legs and worked his way into a T-shirt. Then he just stood there in the center of the room, staring at the bed.

  There was a soft knock at the door. His mother came in.

  Rick could not get over how different she seemed now that his dad was back. When the Traveler was gone, she had seemed to grow old instantly. She stopped wearing makeup. Her hair got gray and frizzy. Her shoulders started to stoop. Now that Dad was back, it was as if a fresh flood of life and youth had rushed through her. The lines on her face seemed to have disappeared almost magically. She looked wide awake and alert and her eyes were full of light and humor.

  The funny thing? She had never lost faith in her husband. He had pretended to run off with an old girlfriend in order to keep the MindWar Project secret and to keep his family safe. But Mom had never believed it, not even for a second. It was Rick who had gotten angry at his dad, Rick who had lost his faith in his father . . . and because of that, had lost his faith in . . . in everything.

  Now, as his mom came close to him, he saw her eyes move quickly down to his arm, the scratches on his wrist. Rick flinched. His father had looked at the scratches with cold scientific curiosity, but Rick knew his mom felt a wound in his flesh as if it were a wound in her own. Back in his football days, he had never been sure whether he or she hurt worse after he took a hard sack.

  She reached out and gently touched the scabs on his wrist, as if she might have some magical healing power in her fingers. Then she looked up at him quickly, directly into his eyes. “When you were little, I used to sit outside your bedroom door until you could fall asleep,” she said with a small smile.

  He returned her smile but lopsided, ironic. “I remember. I was scared I would have bad dreams.”

  “Do you want me to sit outside tonight?”

  “I don’t think it would help, Ma.”

  “No. I guess not.”

  “I guess, in the end,” Rick said, “everyone has to go into his dreams alone.”

  His mother studied his face closely. It made Rick feel weird. Kind of exposed. His mother probably understood him better than anyone else in the world. A lot of times she knew what he was thinking even before he did. When she looked at him closely like that, it felt as if she might be reading his mind. Rick didn’t know whether to try to hide from her or just let her see everything. He didn’t know if it mattered what he did.

  “Did you and Molly work things out?” she asked him.

  He snorted. “You saw that coming, huh?”

  “My super X-ray future vision.”

  That actually got a laugh out of him. “It was weird,” he said. “After all that worrying, trying to find the answer, the answer was right there. It was so easy.”

  “Funny how that works,” Mom said.

  He went on smiling at the memory another moment: he and Molly among the moonlit trees. Then he stopped smiling. He met his mom’s steady gaze. The words seemed to come out of him on their own, without his will. “I’m scared, Mom,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “I’m scared something’s wrong with me. Because of the Realm. The Breach. I’m scared something’s wrong with my brain. I mean, I’m not afraid of Kurodar. I’m not afraid of his monsters or his men. Or that is, I am afraid, sure I am, but it doesn’t bother me. You know? When it comes down to it, I’ll fight them. I’ll fight anybody.”

  His mom nodded. “I know you will.”

  “But when you can’t trust your own brain . . .”

  For the first time tonight, his mother’s eyes widened a little in alarm. “No, don’t do that. Don’t trust your own brain, Rick.”

  “What do you mean? Why not?”

  “Because. Because your brain can steer you wrong, that’s why. If you want to do the stupidest, ugliest, meanest thing in the world, your brain’ll come up with excuses for you to do it. You know it will. It happens to everyone. Everyone who ever cheated on a test or hurt a friend or stuck a needle in his arm or got behind the wheel of a car when he was drunk—they all thought they had perfectly good reasons to do it. Their brains told them so. You can never trust your brain.”

  Her words surprised him at first, but when he thought about it, he knew she was right. He could think of half a dozen times off the top of his head when he had done something really, really stupid and his brain had said to him, Great idea, Champ! You ride that skateboard down the steepest hill in town two days before training begins! Sure thing. What could go wrong?

  “But if I can’t trust my own brain . . .,” he began.

  “Remember when you were angry with your father?” his mother said—and it was as if she had read his mind, as if she knew he’d just been thinking about that. “Remember when you thought he’d left us to go off with Leila Kent? You didn’t just get angry at Dad, did you?”

  Rick shrugged. “I guess not. I got angry at everything. I got angry at God. Dad believed in God so much and then he left—I thought he left . . . So I got angry.”

  “What do you think about your father now?” she asked him.

  Rick opened his mouth to answer, but no words came out. He was thinking about the last time he was in the Realm, when he was in the fighter craft doing battle against the Octo-Guardian in the midst of the living blackness of MindWar space. He had been forced to make a choice, forced to decide whether to stop Kurodar’s attack on Washington, DC, or to rush through the Breach and rescue Molly and Victor One right away. It was only then, only in that moment, that he had begun to understand what kind of choice his dad had had to make when he left home, what kind of sacrifice he had been willing to make out of love . . .

  “I’m not angry at him anymore,” he said. “I get it now.”

  His mom reached up and pushed his hair back off his forehead. “You won’t go into your dreams alone,” she told him. “You’ll never go anywhere alone. I promise.”

  When his mother was gone, Rick stood another long moment looking down at his bed. There was still a weight of fear lying at the pit of his stomach. But he couldn’t stay awake forever. He pulled back the covers and lay down.

  He reached up and switched off the light on the wall above him. He lay in the dark. For a long time, he did not dare to close his eyes. The silver moonlight came through the edges of the curtains. Now and then one of
the flash-lights of the patrolling soldiers played its beam across the back of the fabric.

  You won’t go into your dreams alone.

  Rick’s thoughts returned to Molly. Her eyes gleaming in the shadows. Her lips on his . . . A simple answer to what had seemed an almost impossibly complicated question. An answer that had been there all along, waiting for him to find it.

  You’ll never go anywhere alone.

  Rick let his eyes sink slowly shut.

  Never alone, he thought.

  Moments later, he fell asleep—and the horror began.

  9. BLAST ’EM

  THE ETERNAL BLACKNESS swept up out of the sarcophagus and seized the living Rick by the throat. At the same moment, Favian let out a terrified scream. The door to the church burst open and the dead swarmed in.

  It was a hellish scene. The darkness was swarming over him, choking him, swallowing him, threatening to pull him down into some nightmare without end. And the church, this strange, colorful church full of beautiful mosaics, was suddenly swarming with screeching Harpies, slithering Cobras, charging Boars, their bodies and faces half rotten with death, their skull-heads grinning as they charged across the nave to kill him.

  Rick couldn’t breathe. The edges of his vision were falling into shadow. He sensed the dead creatures of the Golden City storming across the church floor, through the church air. They were nearly on him, about to destroy him.

  Then—flash—a blast of blue light.

  Favian. Standing beside him. His eyes so wide with fear that you would have thought he would be running away as fast as he could. But—typical Favian—scared as he was, he was not running anywhere. He had gathered the diminishing energy inside him and sent it zigzagging out of his outstretched hand like lightning.

  The blast smacked against the darkness and drove it back—away from Rick, down into the coffin. Horribly, Rick felt the blow as if it had hit him too. As the darkness sank away from him, he staggered backward, his mind reeling. He let out a hoarse gasp and dragged in a fresh breath of air.

  “Rick, behind you!”

  He didn’t need Favian’s warning cry. He knew what was coming.

  He spun round, Mariel’s sword gripped in his hand. He faced the swarming dead.

  His vision was filled with the screaming skull of a rotten Harpy. It was sweeping down out of the high church shadows, its long talons swiping at Rick’s face.

  There was a loud metallic sting as Rick raised his sword and blocked the talons with its silver blade. Then he turned and swung the weapon almost like a baseball bat, sending the Harpy pinwheeling through the air. He didn’t wait to see where it landed and swung the sword back just in time to block the thrusting open mouth of a half-rotted Cobra Guard. The sword’s blow removed the Cobra’s head, and the beast dissolved in a snap-and-fizzle of purple light.

  With the same motion, Rick raised the sword above his own head crosswise. The horizontal blade caught the powerful downward blow of a Boar’s sword. Dead Boar and living man froze like that together, sword to sword. Dead though he was, the Boar was strong. He was trying to force his blade down through Rick’s skull by sheer muscle power.

  Rick lifted his foot and kicked the Boar in his putrid stomach as hard as he could. The Boar went flying backward, knocking over two other Boars as if they were pins in a bowling alley.

  “There are too many, Rick!” Favian shouted. “Run!”

  Rick could hear the panic in the blue man’s high-pitched cry, but all the same, he knew the sprite was right. They had no chance against this mob of creature corpses. They had to get out of here.

  Rick glanced over at the large coffin in the center of the nave. The darkness was bubbling and seething in there, as if it were preparing to leap up again and seize him.

  And the waves of dead creatures kept pouring toward him.

  “This way,” Favian cried.

  Favian had a big advantage in these run-for-your-life situations. He didn’t have to run. He just flashed away like a streak of light. A single second—a single line of glowing blue—and he was no longer standing beside Rick at the coffin but was instead at a door in the back of the church. It was a great heavy wooden door with iron reinforcements. Favian was using both hands and all his might to drag it open.

  Mariel had taught Rick that he could manipulate the Realm’s reality. With enough focus and concentration, he could bring the power of his spirit to bear and actually change the shape of things in MindWar. Not only could he turn himself into the shapes of the various monsters he saw—for a brief period, anyway—but if he really worked at it, really brought his old quarterback focus to the game, he could even occasionally flash like Favian too.

  What else might he be able to do?

  He didn’t know. But this would be an excellent time to find out.

  Because now he was surrounded. The dead creatures had spread out around him in a circle and were now closing that circle like a noose. Cobra fangs darted at him, Harpy talons slashed, and Boar swords jabbed, each looking to slip a strike in past Mariel’s flashing sword. Where the large sarcophagus blocked the dead’s advance, the darkness within was beginning to surge and rise and lick at the edges of the box. Even if Rick could focus his mind enough to flash away, there was nowhere to flash to. He had to think of something else.

  “Rick! Come on!” Favian shouted. He had the heavy door fully open now. But there was just no way for Rick to get to him.

  Rick turned in every direction. On every side, the screaming creatures closed in.

  A thought came to him.

  In video games, as your character advances, he acquires powers and weapons along the way. You might start out with just the Blade of Nastiness, say, but pretty soon, if you kill enough monsters, you acquire the Fire Sword of Genuine Incredibleness and then the Lightning Sword of Really Cool Headsplitting Greatness until finally you have the most powerful weapon of all, the Death Blade of All-Around Awesomeness . . . or whatever.

  This same thing had happened to Rick here in the MindWar Realm. When he had first met Mariel, she had given him a sort of rusty iron sword that he could just barely thrust through the body of the wounded Spider-Snake. But by the time he had to do real, desperate battle against Kurodar’s security forces, she had coated the sword in steel, strengthening its blade and perfecting its design until it was a master weapon he could wield against the Realm’s most powerful security bots.

  But weapons weren’t the only thing that got better in a video game. There were also powers—they also got upgraded as you went along. And that also happened here in MindWar. In his first trips into the Realm, Rick had used his concentration to turn himself into the likeness of one of the Alligator Guards who patrolled Kurodar’s forces. Later, he could not only take the shape of a soldier Boar, but, if he focused well enough, he could even sometimes flash around like Favian.

  So if the video-game analogy continued . . .

  As the dead Harpies and Cobras and Boars closed in on him, slashing with claws and fangs and swords, closer and closer to tearing him to pieces, Rick shifted his focus to the silver blade of Mariel’s sword. Maybe if he could charge it with the energy of his spirit . . .

  It was hard—so hard—to focus with that horde of death-dealing monsters closing in on him. But then, as a quarterback, he’d often had to focus with a horde of three-hundred-pound linemen thundering at him, so . . . he recalled that experience. He steadied his mind. He steadied his heart. He focused his spirit on the blade.

  Almost immediately, the blade began to glow, and then glow brighter. It surrounded itself with a nimbus of bright yellow light. Rick focused hard and the metal of the sword actually began to pulse and throb with his inner energy.

  A Harpy shrieked and dove at him out of the sky.

  Do it! Rick thought.

  He released the energy of the sword. It was like setting off an explosion. The spirit energy he had pumped into the sword burst out of it
. The yellow glow flashed white, expanding in one great and sudden blast.

  The dead creatures never saw it coming. They were all charging, closing, striking when the blast hit. It caught them mid-attack and hurled them backward. The Harpy that was in the midst of dropping down on top of him was thrown upward, sailing all the way to the church ceiling, where it smacked into a mosaic and then dropped down thunk at Rick’s feet like a stone. The other monsters—Boars and Harpies and Cobras, all of them—went tumbling into one another, some dropping to the mosaic floor, others stumbling on their heels, their arms pinwheeling for balance.

  But Rick never lost his focus, not for a moment. He never stopped working the Realm with his spirit. The moment the ring of monsters was blown back, he dissolved himself into a Favian-like flash and streaked away. A split second later, he was standing beside his blue friend at the open door at the rear of the church.

  “That was AMAZING!” Favian cried out with wild excitement. “That was . . . that was . . .”

  “Tell me what it was later,” said Rick. “Now, let’s bounce!”

  “Oh, right, smart idea,” said Favian—and good thing, too, because even now some of the dead were clambering to get their balance back, coming out of their dazes and getting ready to renew their attack.

  In a dazzling blue streak, Favian flashed through the doorway, leaving the heavy door to start swinging shut behind him.

  The effort of focusing his spirit had worn Rick out. He had no more flash in him. He grabbed the door with one hand to hold it open. Then he slipped through into the shadows beyond.

  He found himself standing on the top landing of a spiral staircase of heavy stone steps. The blue glow of Favian was receding around the spiral, out of sight.

  Rick found a large wooden plank leaning against the wall in here. Obviously, it was meant to rest in the door-frame holders and keep the door barred.

  Rick set his sword aside, hoisted the plank across the door, and set it in place. That ought to hold the dead for a little while, he thought.