Half an hour later I felt Senna stir.
"Make a sound and we'll both end up in dungeons or worse,"
I whispered.
She remained silent. Silent for sweltering hours till we were safely beyond the boundaries of Fairy Land.
Finally I crawled out of the pile. Looked back. Yes, we were clear of Fairy Land. There was another wagon maybe two hundred yards back. I doubted the driver of that wagon would concern himself with us.
I hauled Senna down and unwrapped her.
She was bathed in sweat, hair matted down, clothing clinging to her body. Her face was pale, except for the shockingly dark bruise below her chin.
"Sorry," I said. "I don't like to hit anyone. Never a woman. I'm sorry."
Cool, in-control Senna was gone. The gray eyes were narrow.
The full lips drawn back, baring her teeth like a snarling wolf.
"Sorry?" she hissed. "No. No, you're pleased with yourself, David.
You're not sorry. But you will be."
She was wobbly. So was I. But she climbed down off the wagon by herself. She tripped and fell in the dirt. I jumped down beside her and started to help her up. Reached for her. She took my hand. I yanked it back.
Couldn't let her make contact. I backed away. She followed, off the road, into a stand of shade trees.
She was shaking with rage. Her face was muddy. Road dust and sweat.
"You betray me?" she demanded, voice weird. Madness.
Insanity. The face of a murderer in the moment before she strikes.
"It's not a betrayal of you. But I'm not betraying April, either."
She erupted in a stream of obscenity, spitting the words at me, eyes bulging, face red, raging, hurling the filthiest insults imaginable.
I turned and walked away. Nothing I hadn't heard before, I knew all the words, but the shrieking, out-of control rage was like nothing I'd ever seen.
"Get back here!" she roared.
"I don't think so, Senna."
I kept walking. But now the trees were no longer dappled with late-morning sunlight. Darkness, like a storm cloud. I hesitated.
Dark. Almost like night.
And the trees . . . through the trees, a cabin made of logs.
My stomach lurched. A cabin? That cabin? Here? No, impossible. But there was the flag hanging limp beside the front door. There was the number of the cabin. The name of the camp.
No, no, no. Impossible. What . . . what . . .
I tried to stop myself, but now I couldn't, now my legs were moving all on their own, faster, almost running, yes, I was running.
Running on rubber legs to the cabin. Everyone asleep. Everyone asleep but that one stupid kid in his bunk.
I was at the door. Just suddenly there. Open. Staring through the door, seeing his back, the back of the counselor in the white windbreaker.
He was tiptoeing. Moving silently through rows of snoring, wheezing, sleeping kids. Toward the one, the one kid who was awake. He was trying to be asleep, he really was.
"No," I said. "Leave him alone."
But he was going for the kid. The little kid. The little weakling, the little wimp, the little wussy who wouldn't fight, wouldn't stand up for himself.
I had to do something. I had to stop Donny, had to yell, had to grab a stick, had to pick up something heavy and slam it down on his goddamned head, had to kill him, had to stop it stop it stop it.
Get up, you weakling, get up, you wimp, you disgusting coward, get up and fight, I can't help you, can't help you, all I can do is watch, that's al , al I can do is wait and watch and cry and cry, sniveling coward.
I could shout, "Leave him alone!" I could do that, couldn't I?
Why couldn't I? Why couldn't I?
"Because you're weak, David," a voice whispered. Senna's voice. "That's why he picked you, because you're weak."
"Him, he was weak. Him, the kid, the kid was weak, that's why.
He couldn't even —"
The voice laughed. "Are you that blind? Are you that deluded?
Look at his face, David."
No, no, no.
"See the crying little boy? See him cower? Do you see his face, David? Who is that, David? Who is that you see? Who is the sniveling little weakling?"
"Aaaahhhh!"
I jumped up out of the cot, screaming, screaming, "Stop, stop, stop!" I beat at him, beat at him with my fists, hammered him, ripped at him, and hit nothing but air.
The cabin was gone.
I was standing beneath trees dappled with late-morning sunlight. My fists were bruised, torn from slamming the tree trunk.
Silence. Only the soft rustling of leaves.
I was alone. Senna was nowhere to be seen. But of course she could be anywhere. She could be one of the trees. She had that power, that I knew. The power to confuse men's minds and appear to be anything.
That power and, I knew now, the power to see my dreams. And through those dreams, the truth.
I felt dead. My heart . . . I was dead, wasn't I? Dead and going through the motions of life. Playing the hero and nobody giving a damn.
Chapter
XXI
It's funny, you know. We're free. We make choices. We weigh things in our minds, consider everything carefully, use all the tools of logic and education. And in the end, what we mostly do is what we have no choice but to do.
Makes you think, Why bother? But you bother because you do, that's why. Because you're a DNA-brand computer running Childhood 1.0 software. They update the software but the changes are always just around the edges.
You have the brain you have, the intelligence, the talents, the strengths and weaknesses you have, from the moment they take you out of the box and throw away the Styrofoam padding.
But you have the fears you picked up along the way. The terrors of age four or six or eight are never superseded, just layered over. The dread I'd felt so recently, a dread that should be so much greater because the facts had been so much more horrible, still could not diminish the impact of memories that had been laid down long years before.
It's that way all through life, I guess. I have a relative who says she still gets depressed every September because in the back of her mind it's time for school to start again. She's my great-aunt. The woman is sixty-seven and still bumming over the first day of school five-plus decades ago.
It's sad in a way because the pleasures of life get old and dated fast. The teenage me doesn't get the jolt the six-year-old me got from a package of Pop Rocks. The me I've become doesn't rush at the memories of the day I skated down a parking ramp however many years ago.
Pleasure fades, gets old, gets thrown out with last year's fad.
Fear, guilt, all that stuff stays fresh.
Maybe that's why people get so enraged when someone does something to a kid. Hurt a kid and he hurts forever. Maybe an adult can shake it off. Maybe. But with a kid, you hurt them and it turns them, shapes them, becomes part of the deep, underlying software of their lives. No delete.
I don't know. I don't know much. I feel like I know less all the time. Rate I'm going, by the time I'm twenty-one I won't know a damned thing.
But still I was me. Had no choice, I guess. I don't know, maybe that's bull and I was just feeling sorry for myself. But, bottom line, I dried my eyes, and I pushed my dirty, greasy hair back off my face, and I started off down the road again because whatever I was, whoever I was, however messed up I might be, I wasn't leaving April behind.
Maybe it was all an act programmed into me from the get-go, or maybe it grew up out of some deep-buried fear, I mean maybe at some level I was really just as pathetic as Senna thought I was.
Maybe I was a fake. Whatever. Didn't matter.
I was going back to the damned dragon, and then I was getting April out, and everything and everyone else could go screw themselves.
One good thing: For now at least, I was done being scared.
I drove myself hard. Walked as long and as fast as I could.
Drank whateve
r water I could find. Ate fruit off the trees and wild onions. I had time but I didn't want to waste any. Maybe Nidhoggr would come, maybe not. If he didn't kil me outright I wanted a chance to go back to Fairy Land and do whatever I could. Help Jalil. Make some doomed attack on the fairy castle. I didn't know, just knew I wasn't going to give up, however it came out with Large and Crusty.
I had time to think. Walking across meadows, through fields, beneath trees, alone, no one to talk to, you have time to think.
So far all I'd done was cope. React. Deal. I was getting tired of that. I mean, okay, I'd been pretty much up to my rear end in alligators so I couldn't blame myself too much for failing to come up with a ten-point plan.
And I was still deep in reptiles. At least I guessed dragons were some kind of reptile. But maybe it was time, just the same, to start thinking long-term. About the others. About Senna. About what might prove to be a long time in the asylum called Everworld. It was just hard to plan when the next event was going back to see Nidhoggr. It was night when I reached the place where we'd first met Idalia and run into the satyrs. Which meant I wasn't far from the cave that led down to Nidhoggr's lair. And to Hel's domains beyond that.
Not my favorite tourist destination. And I was beat. Not in a state to go underground. I wanted to see the sun shining bright in the sky before I walked down into that realm. Maybe that was silly.
But I wasn't going to walk from night into hell.
I began stripping low-hanging branches of the more tender end-twigs, I piled the twigs and leaves all together. Wasn't exactly clean sheets on a Beautyrest, but leaves are better than hard, cold ground. They'd insulate me a little and keep the dampness from wicking up through my clothes. That was fine. But there was no way to sleep and keep a watch at the same time. I'd have to take my chances. Maybe I could start a fire, which might scare off a wild animal but would just draw a satyr or whatever closer.
I fell asleep and endured half a day of school. At lunch I talked to April. She was fine, she said, the other April. She was fine but scared and lonely and violently pissed. I told her we were on it, me and Jalil and Christopher. Maybe that would help, knowing that.
When I awoke again in Everworld I was shivering, shuddering.
Teeth chattering. Cold? It wasn't that cold, was it?
The shakes grabbed me and squeezed me. My teeth chattered uncontrollably. Chills. Fever, that's what it was. I had a fever.
And the nearest aspirin was a universe away. No, wait, April still had Advil. All I had to do was ask her. She . . . April? Do you have that Advil? But no, of course not, April was . . . somewhere.
I was sick. Bad sick. Too sick to think straight.
I felt my insides rumble. I got to my hands and knees and crawled away from my bed. Couldn't do that here, I knew that much. Crawled away, fumbled with my belt . . .
Awake in the park. Little kids playing on the elaborate jungle gym. I was walking in bright sunlight. No, I was running, shirt off, hot day, throwing the baseball.
My own stink. Lying in it. Dark. The chills had subsided. Now I could just feel the burning. So hot I wanted to take my clothes off but that was a bad idea. I felt for the sword. Yes, still had it.
Back across. Wide-awake, healthy, normal. In the real world.
Real-world David understood what was happening. Everworld David was sick, delirious, passing into and out of sleep, back and forth across the barrier between universes.
I was worried. About him. Me. The David who was crapping and puking his insides out. Anyone could show up, anyone could do anything they wanted to me. I was helpless. Defenseless. As weak as a baby.
Hooked up with Jalil. He'd had no updates. Everworld Jalil was working around the clock. I told him to tell himself that the other me was sick. Not to count on me.
Dark trees. A face looking down at me. Senna? Senna with those huge gray eyes filled with concern? No. Hallucination.
Dream. Wish. All of the above.
Real-world me was frazzled. This was crazy! CNN — Breaking News every half hour. This had been going on for two days now.
How much time had elapsed in Everworld? How long had I been lying there, sick, dammit, I had to get up and get on with it. Ticktock.
My heart, no the ruby in my chest, would turn to dragon's fire, burn me alive from the inside out.
And what would that do to me, to real-world David? It might kill us both. No way to know. Or it might mean escape from Everworld. Escape from the mad world of gods and myths and aliens. Imprisonment forever in the real world. How would I live now? How would I go through the motions, the school, the tests, the college, the jobs, the life, the already-tired life that awaited me?
Everworld. Dry heaves. Nothing to puke. Nothing left inside me.
Rain pouring down, making mud everywhere. I lay on my back, mouth open, trying to slake burning thirst with a drop a drop another drop. Hour after hour. Rain on my face, my chest, all around me, running into my eyes and ears. Drop . . . drop in my dust-caked mouth.
Real world. My dad was in town for a visit. We were sailing in a boat some navy friend of his owned. Out on Lake Michigan, bearing away south to bring the skyline of Chicago into fuller view.
The horns of the Hancock, the building blocks of the Sears Tower.
Going through the motions of conversation with my dad, digesting the latest update from Everworld, fearing the next.
Sweating when it wasn't hot, a sympathetic reaction, feeling my own pain.
Ticktock. I know you're sick, dammit, hut get up. Get up! Move or it may all be over.
Jalil, it was all going to come down to him. He would save us, save us from Nidhoggr's fire, maybe. Maybe. But not April, we knew that in our hearts. We could use Jalil's telegraph to ransom Nidhoggr's toys, but April? She would go to Ka Anor.
I looked at my dad. He was still navy, despite being long retired. He was still navy.
You don't leave your own behind.
As the leprechaun said. Dad, "Bull manure."
I was up, up and crawling, with the sun beating down on me through a gap in the branches overhead. Was I awake? Yes, now, but I'd started moving while still asleep.
The rain had stopped. Now the sun was baking the mud and I was crawling. Where were my clothes? I was down to the gym shorts I'd been wearing when we crossed over that first time. Did I take them off in my fever? Shoes. One shoe. No, there was the other, right there in my hand,
I saw mental images of satyrs laughing. Pictures of Senna, concerned. Flashes of April holding Advil in her palm. All of it false, of course. Or maybe most of it.
I crawled. Beneath the shade of trees. The sword. I found it. I buckled it on with numb fingers. It may have taken me half an hour and God, the weight of it dragged at me.
I crawled and stopped. Crawled and stopped. So thirsty. And hungry now, too. Starving. A good sign, right?
Chicken soup. What a cliche. Mom's chicken soup came from a can. Chop a can open with my sword. The sun was gone.
Shade. Sleep. And when I awoke again in Everworld I was aware.
I was me. One of me, anyway.
I stood up, shaky, trembling, almost falling down again. I leaned on the wall of the cave. "Hope it's the right cave," I croaked.
I staggered, stumbled, fell so many times I stopped caring whether my knees were being shredded. I was cold again. The fever was gone and the cave was cool and I was barely dressed. At least twice I fell asleep. The real-world me was getting pretty exasperated. He/I was scared. He/I was feeling powerless to affect things. He/I felt sorry for me. He/I was distracted from real life by the latest sudden onslaught of breaking news: This just in, another weird hallucination followed by two more hours of hurting myself.
And on top of it all, meetings with a desperate April. With Christopher who said, "No, man, it's not going well anymore.
There's trouble."
And all the while, as I progressed, as I made my way into the Underworld, it was not Nidhoggr's face that loomed up before me l
ike a waking nightmare. It was Hel. Nidhoggr could only kill me. Hel could do so much worse.
Despite everything I was growing stronger. The hunger was awesome. The thirst I slaked a bit by licking condensation from the walls of the cave. I remembered Senna's reminder about Persephone. How she was kidnapped, taken to the Underworld, and because she ate the food there was doomed to return for part of each year.
Great story. Maybe true. I didn't care. I'd have drunk water from Hel's own hand.
Down and down. Down I went, closer to her. Closer to the dragon. Forever. I would never make it. Jalil would pull it off, all unnecessary.
And yet, where was Jalil? Where was Christopher? They should have arrived, bearing the Daghdha's magic talismans. But the cave was empty. What had Christopher said the last time I'd seen him on the other side? Something . . . my brain was a mess.
Like someone had thrown a wild, drunken party in there.
"You're walking down the wrong damn cave, that's why there's no one here," I muttered.
And then, I turned a corner. A corner into a room filled with more gold than Fort Knox had ever seen, and all the jewels in the world.
"Nidhoggr," I whispered.
No answer.
I began to climb the mountain of gold. And then he noticed me.
The vast head rose high, high above me. A stray five gallons of dragon's napalm dribbled between his teeth and melted its way into the gold.
"Human," the dragon said. "I do not see my stone, my spear, my sword, or my cauldron."
"No," I said, speaking as loudly as I could.
"You are not looking well."
"No."
"You have mere hours left, human. The stone in your chest is impatient to burn you."
I nodded. "Yeah. I know all that. I also know how you can get your stuff back."
The dragon looked at me. "Have you come to urge me to fall into the trap the fairies have laid for me?"
"No. I know about the trap. They're in bed with the Hetwan.
That's partly what this is all about."
The huge eye before me widened in surprise.
"The fairies want your treasure. The Hetwan want to invade the Underworld, and they don't want to have to fight you to do it."
Discover the Destroyer Page 9
