“I’ll take my chances,” he said. “Give me your blood and I’ll go with you.”
Renee stuck her arm out. “Do it, then.”
Sato stepped forward and grabbed her thin arm, leaning over to look at the soft skin in the bend of her elbow. A big vein pulsed, purple in the faint light.
“This might hurt,” he said, not sure why he showed any compassion. “I’ve never done this before.”
“Just do it. Nothing you do to me will be worse than when he leaves my head.”
As Sato readied the syringe, the needle only an inch from the vein, he looked up at Renee’s face. “Sometimes you talk like you’re this Chu guy, and sometimes like yourself. You really are crazy.”
“You wouldn’t understand unless you were infected. Stick me.”
Sato held his breath, then jammed the needle into Renee’s vein. He quickly pulled back on the syringe pump, relieved to see dark red fluid fill the plastic vial. He finished, pulled out the needle, then replaced the plastic cover. He put the whole thing into his right pocket. He put a bandage on her arm to stop the bleeding.
“Done,” he said, finally taking in a huge breath like he’d just surfaced after diving for oysters.
“That blood will never see the light of day; you understand that, right? The only way you will leave this mountain is by giving it up.”
“Just show me what you wanted to show me.” Half of him wanted to push her down and run for the elevator, but he knew he couldn’t. George would desperately need any information he could gather in his quest to find a cure or antidote.
“This way.” She walked toward a branch of the tunnel leading to the right, but paused after a couple of steps and turned toward Sato, her face devoid of expression. “What you’re about to see, you’ll never forget. Never. I promise you.”
Chapter
28
Trapped
With each step down the wet and musty passage of stone, the noises around Sato grew in volume. The screams and wails and shouts and piercing cries for help made him feel as if invisible bugs were crawling across his skin, trying to find a place to burrow toward his heart. His stomach clenched into a tight wad of tissue. He braced himself for the sight ahead, wondering if he’d ever see George or Mothball or Rutger or his other friends again.
They reached a place where a dirty curtain was stretched across the entire width of the hallway, swaying slightly from a breeze behind it. The awful sounds became ear-piercing, no longer muffled by distance. Sato was now only a few feet away from discovering whatever was wrong with these people.
“Prepare yourself,” Renee said. Then she reached out and yanked the curtain to the side.
For the second time in the last hour, Sato’s knees buckled. He fell to the ground, his shins slamming onto the hard stone as he stared at the chaos in front of him.
The passageway opened into a large chamber, tables and chairs scattered about the raggedy carpet, most of them broken or turned upside down. Hundreds of people—horrible, terrified, creepy-looking people—filled the room in a state of utter madness.
Their clothes were torn; bloody scrapes and gashes covered their bodies; big splotches of hair had been ripped from their heads. They attacked each other at random, moving from one to the other without warning. They coughed and spit and snarled and bit anything in sight. They cried one second, laughed the next, then screamed as if their very throats would burst. They climbed the walls until they fell crashing to the floor. They jumped and huddled and kicked and flailed their arms.
It was, without any doubt, the most horrific thing Sato had ever witnessed, and he knew he would spend the rest of his life trying to purge it from his memory.
“What is this?” He had to force the words out, rage clogging his throat. “What’s wrong with them? How could you do this to them!”
Renee knelt on the floor next to him, not taking her eyes off the mayhem before them. “So you believe me now, do you? You believe that he’s inside my head, controlling me, talking to you? That I am Reginald Chu at this moment?”
“I don’t care who you are,” Sato said. “I’ll spend the rest of my life making you pay for it.”
Renee tsk-tsked as she shook her head. “Hard to believe you’re only a young man—you speak more like an adult than most men I know.” She shifted until she was sitting comfortably with her legs crossed beneath her. “But this isn’t what I really wanted to show you. Let me show you the future.”
Sato finally tore his eyes from the sickening display and looked at Renee. “What?” he said, throwing all the hatred he could into the word.
Renee didn’t return his stare, looking instead at the people around them. “They’re like this because I underestimated the power of Dark Infinity. I can’t control it on my own—I need help. I need a partner.”
She pushed herself to her feet and walked forward, seemingly oblivious to the danger she entered. But then, as if spurred by the flip of a switch, every person in the vast room grew silent, freezing in place. After a few seconds, the people—every single one of them—calmly gained their composure and joined Renee in the middle of the chamber, lining up in perfectly straight rows. The formation filled the floor, as ordered and organized as any military group in the world. Not a sound could be heard as they all stood still, each one staring at Sato.
“He is in all of our heads, now,” Renee called out, standing rigid as she spoke. “We will do his bidding, whatever he asks, until that time he must leave us, and then we will return to the horror that is life without him. The day comes when he will never leave us again.”
Sato slowly got to his feet, nausea and despair threatening to consume him. In the understatement of his young life, he told himself he had seen enough.
“I’m sorry he’s doing this to you,” he half-whispered. “Fight it if you can. I promise we’ll try to save you.”
He didn’t wait for a response. He turned and ran.
Behind him, he heard the piercing cry of Renee’s voice, echoing up and through the air as if she’d used a bullhorn. “He has my blood in his right pocket! Don’t let him leave with it!”
And then came the sound of hundreds of people running and screaming in a synchronized cry of pursuit.
“Can you pull him out yet?” Master George asked for the twentieth time in the last ten minutes, pacing the floor of the command room.
“No,” Rutger replied, his eyes riveted to the nanolocator monitor. “But his heart rate is spiking again—I didn’t think it could possibly get higher, but now it’s in the danger zone.” In his hands, Rutger held the Barrier Wand, programmed to wink Sato back from the mountaintop.
“Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,” Master George whispered under his breath.
“Should’ve gone with ’im, I should,” Mothball said from her chair in the corner. “Bugger, I should’ve ruddy gone with ’im.”
Master George stopped, turning toward his tall friend. “Perhaps, my good Mothball, perhaps. However, we all agreed that this was the perfect opportunity for Sato to snap out of the haze of his past and find himself. If you were there to save him, he might never truly join us.”
“He needs to make it back to the execution cliff,” Rutger said. “Until then, there’s nothing I can do.”
“He’ll make it,” Master George said. “I know it. And when he returns, he’ll truly be a Realitant, the shade of his parents’ death no longer a crutch to bind him in shadow.”
“Very poetic,” Rutger muttered. “But the way his heart’s racing, we’ll need to give him a transplant as soon as he gets back.”
“Just keep that Wand ready, Rutger. Keep it ready.”
Sato gasped for breath as he ran through the dimly lit tunnel; it hadn’t seemed so long the first time he’d walked through its winding path. The escalating screams behind him brought horrible images to his mind of what would happen if he were caught. Every muscle in his body begged him to stop, but he kept running, limping slightly from the pain in his shins, especially on his right leg.
Worried the blood-filled syringe in his right pocket might break, he reached in and pulled it out, gripping the plastic cylinder once again like a dagger in his hand. It almost slipped from the sweat on his palm—he shifted it to his left hand while he wiped his fingers dry, then switched back.
He kept running.
He turned a corner and saw the elevator up ahead, its steel cage open and ready for him. He could see the lever mechanism inside the sliding mesh door. He was almost safe.
The hollow echoes of his pursuers bounced through the tunnel like thunder crackling along open plains. Sato heard noises of feet stomping on stone, kicked rocks, heavy breathing, grunts. He heard Renee shout something; he couldn’t make out the words, but the intensity of the screams jumped a notch.
Sato looked over his shoulder and saw the pack of crazies only thirty feet behind him and gaining ground. Renee led them, her eyes focused, her hoard of followers on her tail, waving their arms, shaking their fists. It was like the villagers chasing Frankenstein’s monster—the only things missing were pitchforks and torches.
Sato faced forward again; so close, the elevator was only a few feet away. He reached up, slipped the backpack off his left shoulder, then his right, still running, still holding tight to the blood sample.
He windmilled his left arm and threw the backpack forward. It landed with a thud in the back corner of the elevator just as he crossed the threshold of the cage. He reached out with his free hand and slid the door shut with a squeal and a clank as it landed home. The latch to close it was small and weak—Sato knew it wouldn’t last long. He closed it anyway then knelt on the floor and pushed up on the lever with his shoulder, screaming with the effort until the thing finally snapped into position.
With a lurch, the elevator started moving upward just as Renee and dozens of the screaming mob slammed into the cage, clawing at the steel, screaming and spitting. Hundreds of scabby fingers squirmed through the small openings, some of the crazies climbing onto the elevator, others violently pulling and pushing on the door. Sato scrambled to the far corner, staring at the sickening sight.
The elevator had only gone up a few feet when dozens more of his pursuers crawled beneath it and gripped the floor through the checkered holes, hanging on, pulling toward the ground. The cage slowed to a stop, the weight of the people too great. Sato knew if he could make it to the narrow shaft cut into the stone above, then the psychos clinging to the side would have no choice but to let go or be crushed to death. He jumped to his feet, kicking at the fingers below him, stomping repeatedly in a ridiculous dance, watching in triumph as those he smashed let go and fell to the floor.
The elevator stuttered and paused, screams coming from above as the topmost section entered the main elevator shaft and crushed several of the inmates who still clung to the side. The cage slowed again, and Sato closed his eyes before he could see the gruesome results. He heard the thumps of bodies on the stone below, and the elevator lurched upward again, regaining its normal speed.