Game Over (2 page)

He wanted to get out of here. Fast. Now. But which way? Where to? The fog of confusion filled his mind.

Now he lifted his gaze to the buildings all around him. This was—it had once been—a great city. Golden spires, skyscrapers, domes, and arches soaring into the air. As his eyes traveled over the rising walls of the buildings, his ears slowly became attuned to a different kind of sound, soft within the silence, a steady spatter suggestive of life.

A fountain.

Even in his confusion, his heart rose, his hopes rose. He thought,
She travels by water.

With that, he lowered his eyes from the building tops—and he saw the corpse standing right in front of him.

His breath caught. It was so close, only a few feet away. One of the Boar Soldiers. And dead—dead most definitely. The pig face and part of the barrel-shaped chest and belly had started to decay. Some of its bones were visible through the ragged flesh. It wasn't breathing. Its eyes were glassy. It was staring and smiling that eerie rigid smile like the others. Definitely dead.

And it was holding a sword.

Stunned, so confused, Rick could only stand there, staring at the thing. It stared back at him.

Then, before he could recover from his shock, it lifted
the sword and swung the blade in a vicious arc toward his throat.

It was a killing blow, meant to sweep his head clean off. The dead Boar Soldier sent up a ghostly echoing squeal as it swung, and Rick screamed, too, in surprise and fear. At the same time, he reacted, moving on pure instinct. Despite the injuries that had ended his football career, he still had the reflexes of a star athlete. He squatted—fast—and the deadly blade swept over him, so close he could feel the breeze of its passing stir his hair.

The instant the sword was past, Rick sprang up straight and—still acting on instinct—stepped in to block the Boar's return stroke. He shoved the beast, both hands hitting its shoulder hard. Being dead, the Boar Soldier did not have much strength or substance—none at all really. The moment Rick touched it, the beast staggered back and fell to the pavement.

Rick turned to run and the second corpse grabbed him, its dead fingers wrapping around his wrist as its grinning, skeletal face leaned in close to him, its mouth wide as if to rip Rick's throat out with its teeth.

Rick let out another cry, a high-pitched cry of animal terror. He tore his wrist free of the dead thing's grip, feeling the claws scrape painfully over his skin.

Then he was running, running fast, his breath coming in panting sobs of panic.

Where was he? What was happening? Was this MindWar? Was it a dream?

Confused, terrified, he could form only one clear thought in his mind, the last thought he'd had before the creatures attacked him:

She travels by water.

He kept thinking the same thing over and over again. He had to find that fountain.

But now all the city's dead were waking. Rising from the seats in the taverns. Grabbing hold of the doorframes for support and slithering to their feet. The Boar Soldiers were picking up their swords. The Cobra Guards—now mostly skeletal snake remains like something you might see in a natural history museum—were slithering toward him over the ground, sluggishly at first, then with increasing speed. Those flying bat-things with the faces of women—the dead, rotten faces of screaming women—lifted into the air and began circling toward him. In whatever direction Rick looked, they were there, coming to life, coming to get him.

He ran to the corner. Dared to stop there for a second. He couldn't hear the fountain over the sound of his own desperate breathing, but the noise had not been far off. It had to be somewhere around here.

He turned to the left—and sure enough he saw it. In an open plaza at the end of the next street, there was a large round basin of rose marble full of silver water. A circle of small geysers flared up out of the water, dancing around a central geyser that shot high into the air. On the far side of the fountain there stood a fanciful building, something
out of a fairy tale: half a dozen red spires capped with onion-shaped domes of various designs, some striped red and white, others with diamond ridges of yellow and green, others pure gold.

The plaza was swarming with dead things, walking, slithering, flying. They all seemed to spot Rick at the same moment. And they all came after him.

Rick thought to turn and run, but the dead were behind him, too, slithering over the ground and running toward him and flying at him through the air with hoarse, echoic shrieks of rage. In another moment they would be all over him—their swords, their bared fangs, their sweeping claws. They would tear him to pieces.

He had only one hope. Mariel. And she traveled by water.

He charged toward the fountain. He was sick with fear. He could feel it coursing all through him like a sort of liquid electricity: lightning flashes in the fog of his confusion. But as fearful as he was, he knew he was somehow beyond fear too. Something had happened to him in these months since he had first entered the MindWar Realm. Something had returned to him, in slow stages at first, and then all at once. He wasn't sure what it was exactly, but it felt like a sort of pulsing power at the core of him, a pulsing light that radiated out from his center. Whenever the fear threatened to overwhelm him with its darkness, that power, that light, beat it back and he pushed on.

It was not a new thing. He had always had that power
and light inside him when he had stepped onto the football field in the old days. He lost them for a while after the truck had crashed into his car and shattered his legs. He had retreated to his room, locked the door, drawn the curtains, and played video games hour after hour. But the power and light had returned to him almost fully now; he could feel it. His mother, he knew, would have called it
faith
. Well,
faith
was as good a word as any. Whatever it was, it pushed the fear back, beat by beat, and kept it from taking him over. It gave him strength even as the dead surrounded him.

Using that strength, conquering his fear with it, he ran right into the thick of the attack.

In a few steps the dead were all around him. The ground was alive with them. The sky was dark with them. They besieged him on every side.

Rick plunged through them like a quarterback with the ball, hitting one hard with his shoulder, straight-arming another in the face. Whenever he touched them, they collapsed to the ground. Wherever they fell, a passage of daylight opened before him.

Dodging the flashing swords, the lunging Cobras, the swiping claws of the flying Harpies, he faked left, and charged right, and ran down the corridor of daylight as fast as he could.

He neared the fountain. And, yes, she rose up before him! A thrilling sight. She always was. Beautiful and majestic, queenly and yet warmly kind, Mariel's figure took shape
in the silver water and sprang up from the heart of the geyser itself. Instantly, she stretched out her hand to him, and the hand burbled out like mercury until a gleaming sword grew from her fingertips. It was the same sword she had given him before, its graceful hilt ending in a model of her own lovely face.

Rick shouldered another Boar Soldier aside. He cried out and kicked back the head of a Cobra. He straight-armed a Harpy as she screamed down at him. He reached out and grabbed the sword.

The moment his fingers closed around the hilt, he felt a new surge of strength and courage blossoming inside him. It was as if Mariel, in handing him the weapon, had somehow added her unshakable faith to his own.

“Rick! Over here!”

A new voice. He looked up—and there was the sparkling blue form of Favian, his other MindWar friend. The flashing blue sprite was standing in the doorway of the fanciful building. The door was open behind him, and as so often in the past, Favian was beckoning him with a glittery hand: “This way! Come on!”

A Harpy shrieked down at Rick out of the sky, its face half rotten. Rick swung Mariel's blade with all his might, and the face was gone—the head was gone—and the body of the beast came crashing down. A huge skeletal Cobra rose up off the earth, baring its fangs, ready to strike. Rick didn't even pause from the last blow but continued the motion, sweeping the blade back at the Cobra. The sword
struck hard, scattering the Cobra's bones in a dozen different directions.

And still the dead came on. Rick had to jump up onto the edge of the fountain's basin to get away from their reaching claws and fangs. Balancing on the slippery marble, he ran around the basin's arc, then leapt off it and onto the building's steps. Another moment and he raced up to where Favian was standing—Favian with his features twisted in anxiety as he stared fearfully at the charging dead. Favian was more of a worrier than a warrior. He had never had much courage. He said so himself. And yet he had somehow always been able to come through when Rick needed him most. He stood his ground now until Rick was beside him.

Then Favian moved like a flash. He always moved like that: like a flash of sparkling blue light, barely substantial. He flashed away through the building's half-open door. And Rick, as he so often did, as he so often had to do to keep from getting himself killed, followed after him.

He was inside. The blue streak of Favian shut the building's door behind him. The cries of the dead outside instantly grew dim. The bright-yellow light of the sky was extinguished. For a few seconds, before his eyes adjusted, Rick couldn't see. The shadows of the interior obscured everything.

Then his vision cleared.

He was in a church, a strange and beautiful church with colorful mosaics covering every inch of the walls. A
dark, sad-eyed Virgin Mary gazed at him from a framed painting on one side of him. A sternly frowning Christ peered down at him from the ceiling above.

The main portion of the church—the nave—was open. There were no pews, no statues, only a large floor, which, like the walls, was covered with richly complex and colorful mosaic tiles.

There was nothing else there. Except the sarcophagus.

More dead
, thought Rick.

Indeed, the sarcophagus could have held half a dozen corpses. It was a huge coffin, its sides covered with elaborate mosaics like the ceiling, walls, and floor. It was surrounded by four stout and towering columns, also covered with mosaics. And it was open—the coffin had no lid.

Rick glanced at Favian—Favian, whose face was always pinched with worry and fear. “What is this place?” he asked him. “This city? How did we get here? I can't remember . . .”

Favian's figure of fluctuating blue light shimmered. “Mariel and I had to sneak in when the darkness spread.”

“The darkness?”

“It spread over everything everywhere,” Favian told him. “The Scarlet Plain. The Blue Wood. The Ruins. Everything. This is all that's left: the Golden City. It's all that's left of MindWar.”

“The Golden City,” Rick murmured. The heart of MindWar, the battery that fed the place with energy. But why was it full of dead creatures? And what was this darkness Favian was talking about?

He did not really understand, but he turned away from Favian, back to the sarcophagus. He had the powerful sense that he should look inside, that he had to look inside—and at the same time, he knew that he very much did not want to look inside, not ever. He felt as if he were in one of those dreams where you have to do what you know you shouldn't do.

He took a long breath. He could still hear dead things outside the church. They were pounding on the great wooden door, crying for his blood. He ignored them. He stepped deeper into the building, deeper into the shadow, closer to the sarcophagus.

Favian flashed along by his side.

“I don't think you should do that,” he said. “Really. Don't look in there.”

Rick ignored him. He kept moving toward the enormous coffin.

“This place, this church. It's so strange,” said Favian, worried. “Like a ghost church or something . . .”

Rick still didn't answer. All his attention was focused on the sarcophagus. It was drawing him, pulling him to it.

He reached it now. Holding his sword in one hand, he put his other hand on the edge and leaned over the side to take a look.

He gasped at what he saw. He could barely comprehend.

The sarcophagus was full . . . of nothingness. An impenetrable, incomprehensible darkness. A darkness that went down and down forever, deeper than death itself.

Rick stood staring into it as if hypnotized. He felt something inside him drop open like a trapdoor, all his courage falling through it into that eternal nothingness.

And suddenly, like a great wave, the dark swarmed up out of the coffin and seized him.

2. THE AWAKENED

RICK'S EYES FLASHED
open and he started screaming. He reached out frantically in a panic. Was he being swallowed by the darkness? Had the nothingness claimed him forever? Was he dead? Was he in hell?

He fought off the panic. He touched his chest with his hands. He felt his heart pounding, his lungs heaving as he gasped for breath.

Alive!
he thought.
I'm still alive!

He lifted himself up on one elbow and looked around him. He saw his desk, his laptop. His jeans and sweatshirt crumpled on the floor. He saw his football posters and football calendar tacked onto the wall. The harsh glare of sunlight was breaking through the parting of the curtains over his window.

He was in his bedroom. In his family's house. In the MindWar compound. Safe. Alive.

His heart slowing, he sat up on the edge of his bed.

Another dream
, he thought.

The dreams came every night now, every night since his return from MindWar. Each one of them was more
realistic than the last. Each time he woke it was more impossible to believe it had not been real, that he had not been somehow swept into the MindWar Realm again without using the portal. Which was impossible. So yeah, it had to be a dream. But it sure did seem like the real deal.