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.”
“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.
