“Hey, watch it!” he warned, shooting a dirty look at the closest tree. It slapped him across the face with a hand made of twigs and leaves. The branches creaked around him, giving the impression the whole forest was laughing.
“Just so you know, I’m going to come back here at a later date, cut you all down, and turn you into furniture. Ugly furniture,” said Cal, addressing the trees as a whole. “You have my word on that.”
Another branch swung at him. He skipped back, avoiding the strike, then raised the middle fingers of both hands, and waved them at the forest in general.
“You know they can’t understand you, right?” said Floora.
Cal continued giving the trees both fingers. “They can’t? How do you know?”
“Because they’re trees.”
Cal stopped waving his hands around. “Well, that’s disappointing,” he said, dropping his arms to his sides.
Being sure to keep out of the trees’ reach, he turned to the archway he’d seen from the forest. It was not, it transpired, made of ivory or wood. He’d definitely have preferred either of those over the actual building material used in the arch’s construction.
“My God, those are some big bones,” he said, leaning back. He whistled quietly through his teeth. “What the fonk did those come from? Godzilla’s thighs?”
A sign hung by two lengths of chain from the top of the arch. It creaked back and forth in the breeze.
“The Boneyard,” Cal read. “Wow. They really must’ve been up all night coming up with that.”
He turned and found one of the floating cameras. “Seriously? That’s the best you could come up with? Aren’t you guys supposed to be creative?”
“This isn’t good,” Floora whispered. “This must be a new zone. I’ve never seen it before, so I won’t be able to offer any advice.”
Cal peered through the arch. The other side looked just as pleasant as this side, with lush green grass, the occasional flower, and a few fluttering insects busying around between them.
“It doesn’t look so bad,” he said.
He felt Floora wriggling in the bag, as if trying to make herself even smaller. “It will be. They all are. Just wait,” she told him. “You’ll see.”
Cal rapped his knuckles against the archway, hoping the giant bone would turn out to be a prop made of Styrofoam. To his disappointment, it wasn’t.
Still, all that waited was a path, a grassy hillock, and some space butterflies. Just how dangerous could it be?
“I guess we’ll both see,” he said. Then, with a final rude gesture to the forest, and a quick check for any Sloorg action, he stepped through the archway and into Sector One.
Twenty-Eight
It started well. Later, when looking back, Cal would be able to say that, at least.
The first twenty seconds or so were easy going. Enjoyable, almost. Cal could have just about fooled himself into thinking he was setting off on a hike toward the picturesque mountain he could see rising in the distance.
Sure, he had a suspicion that it wasn’t going to be as easy as it looked. He was confident that everything would go wrong at some point, he just didn’t expect things to take a turn for the worse quite as quickly as they did.
It started when the butterfly electrocuted him, and just sort of snowballed from there.
Cal had felt pain before. He’d felt a lot of pain before, on a large number of occasions. Nothing had prepared him for the butterfly, though.
It alighted gently on the end of his nose, its little legs twitching, its colorful wings flapping slowly in and out.
“Hey, check it out,” Cal had said. He’d kept his voice low, afraid he might scare the delicate creature away.
And that’s when it had electrocuted him.
His jaw had clenched, his arms had locked, and he’d fallen backward, landing on Floora and almost crushing her. He then proceeded to squash her into the grass as he bucked and thrashed around, the butterfly discharging a surprisingly large amount of electrical charge directly into his face.
And then, the insect had fluttered off to join the others, leaving Cal spread out on the ground, gently steaming.
“What the fonk was that?” he’d managed to wheeze.
“Buzzerflies,” said Floora, her voice muffled against the grass.
“I do not like buzzerflies,” Cal had remarked.
And then, a second of the insects had landed on his forehead, and the whole ordeal had begun again.
Three buzzerfly encounters later, Cal limped across the grass with his hair on end and his eyebrows steaming, his gaze darting anxiously in all directions as he kept a look-out for more of the fluttering little bamstons.
Floora, who’d made a pretty compelling case for not being in the bag after Cal had almost crushed her to death, trotted along beside him. Her little legs moved at double the speed of Cal’s, but she still struggled to keep up. Every ten seconds or so, she’d launch herself into the air, fly unsteadily at Cal’s waist height, and alight a few paces ahead of him. It wasn’t the most elegant system in the world, but it stopped her from falling behind.
A buzzerfly came within what Cal considered an unsafe distance. He flicked at it with a gloved hand, while pressing the fingertips of the other hand to his temple.
“Fonk off.”
“What are you doing?” Floora asked.
“I’m telling this thing to fonk off.”
“With the fingers, I mean. Why are you touching your head?”
“Oh. Mental command over butterflies.”
Floora continued to stare up at him.
“It’s this thing from a TV show I used to watch. There was this guy who could control butterflies. He was part of a team of… well, not superheroes. More like sidekicks, I guess.” He shrugged. “Anyway, I thought it was worth a shot.”
“Was it a reality show?” Floora asked.
“No.”
“So… fiction then?”
Cal stopped trying to mentally control the buzzerfly.
“You raise a very good point.”
The insect harassed him for a few more seconds, then got bored and fluttered off. Once Cal was sure it wasn’t some sort of clever bluff, he continued up the side of a low hillock and stopped when he reached the top.
After double-checking to make sure the buzzerfly wasn’t sneaking up behind him, he looked down into the valley that spread out ahead. The path had stopped at the entrance to Sector One, and all that lay ahead was more green grass and blue skies.
“Is this it?” he asked. “Shouldn’t a boneyard have, like, I don’t know. Bones? Maybe a yard of some description?”
“You’d think so,” said Floora.
She glanced at the pocket on the front of Cal’s bodysuit. It took him a moment to work out what she was getting at.
“Aw… fonk,” he muttered, unclipping the pocket cover and fishing inside.
“Hey, iiiiiit’s Perko!” sang the face on the Preypad.
Cal immediately clamped his hand over it. “Shh. Shut the fonk up,” he hissed, bringing the device closer to his mouth. “I know who you are. God knows, you’ve told me often enough.”
He tilted his head left and right, limbering up for the next sentence.
“I need your help.”
“Perko’s your pal! Of course, I’ll help! Just tell me how!”
“You can start by dropping your fonking volume by ninety percent,” said Cal, glancing behind them. No sign of the Sloorgs, but that didn’t mean they weren’t coming.
“How’s this sounding, partner?” asked Perko. He remained as gratingly enthusiastic as ever, but was no longer shouting.
“Better,” said Cal. “Now, how do we get to the Boneyard?”
“You’re standing in it, good buddy!” Perko replied. “The Boneyard is Sector One.”
“No, I mean the actual Boneyard. The part with the bones.”
“This zone’s hub is fifty-seven paces away. That’s where the action is!”
C
al turned, looking around. There was nothing but rolling green on all sides. “Which direction?”
“Any direction,” Perko chimed.
Cal removed his hand from the device’s screen and glanced down at the animated face. “What does that mean? How can it be fifty-seven paces in any direction?”
“Need help choosing a route, old pal?”
The face became a spinning arrow. It spun quickly at first, then slowed to a stop and flashed. “Try thataway! Or…”
The arrow spun again. When it stopped the second time, it indicated a completely different direction. “Thataway! Or…”
It spun again. Cal shoved the Preypad back in his pocket and closed it over.
“Yeah, I get the point,” he muttered.
He looked down at Floora. She was standing by his feet, raising up on her tiptoes to give herself a better view behind them.
“I can’t see the gate,” she remarked.
“Huh?”
“The entrance. The archway. It should be behind us, but I can’t see it.”
“It’s right over…”
Cal stopped. Sure enough, the entrance was nowhere to be seen. “It has to be that way, because when we came through we were looking directly at that mountain,” he said, pointing off toward the cliffs he’d seen in the distance.
“You mean that mountain?” Floora asked, motioning in the opposite direction.
A similar mountain stood a few miles off in that direction. Cal flicked his head between them, and soon came to the conclusion that they weren’t similar mountains, at all.
“They’re the same,” he said. “They’re exactly the same.”
Floora stuck a thumb in her mouth and chewed anxiously on the nail. “What does that mean?”
“What, ‘same’? It means—”
“No, not ‘same’. I know what ‘same’ means,” the Floomfle replied. “I meant, what does it mean for us? For our odds of survival?”
Cal put his hands on his hips and regarded both mountains. Or, the same mountain twice.
“I’m no scientist,” he began. Having only known him for a short time, Floora had no idea quite how much of an understatement this was. “But I have a theory.”
“Perception field?” Floora guessed. “Altering how our brains are processing visual input?”
Cal hesitated. “Yes. Yes, it might be that,” he said, pointing at her. “Or, could it be a big mirror? Which is what I was going to say.”
Floora smiled up at him.
“Oh, you’re serious?” she said, when he continued to look expectantly at her. “No. I think it’s the perception field thing.”
“Right.” Cal nodded as he looked at both mountains again. “And what does that mean?”
“What does it mean for our odds of survival?”
“No, what do those words together actually mean? What’s a perception field?”
“It’s a neural filter that—”
Cal placed his thumb and index finger close together. “Smaller words.” He gestured to one of the hovering cameras that continued to follow them. “For the people watching at home.”
Floora blinked a few times, then tried again.
“It’s a machine that affects our brains. It makes us think we’re seeing, hearing, and even feeling things that aren’t there. It can also hide things that are there,” she explained.
“So, what are you saying? None of this is real?” Cal asked, gesturing around.
“Not necessarily. Some of it could be,” Floora replied. “Maybe all of this is real and the forest wasn’t.”
“The forest felt pretty real,” Cal said, rubbing his jaw.
He could still feel the aches from where the trees had punched him. That, coupled with the burning sensation in his shoulder, told him he had a big problem on the healing-factor front.
“The fact of it is, we don’t know what’s real and what isn’t,” said Floora.
Cal eyed her suspiciously. “Are you real?”
“Yes. I’m real.”
Cal frowned. “Am—"
“Yes. You’re also real,” said Floora, who was getting a handle on Cal quite quickly. “We’re both real. Beyond that? It’s anyone’s guess.”
They both looked in opposite directions at the same mountain.
“Fifty-seven paces in any direction,” Cal said. He flexed his fingers in and out, creaking the gloves of the bodysuit. “You ready?”
Floora shrugged. Her little wings twitched anxiously. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”
“OK. Let’s try this way,” Cal said, deliberately picking a direction that hadn’t been suggested by Perko.
They set off down the hill, Cal counting each step below his breath.
They were five paces in when darks clouds drifted in overhead, five more when the warm summer breeze became cold and biting.
By the time they’d gone thirty steps, the grass had died beneath their feet, and the sky was a broiling morass of black and gray. The light was sickly and tepid, painting a pale yellow wash across the now desolate terrain.
Every so often, a buzzerfly would flutter past, a blue luminescence in each wing now clearly visible in the gloom. Cal continued to watch them warily, but it was becoming clear that insect-based electrocution was not necessarily the worst of his problems.
“Fifty-six,” said Cal, stopping.
The ground beneath his feet was dry and dusty now, the icy wind howling little vortexes of grit into the air all around them. Floora coughed and shielded her eyes from what, from her angle, must’ve looked like a raging sandstorm.
“Should’ve stayed in the bag,” Cal told her. He started to bend, then thought better of it and took a step back first.
Once he was sure he wasn’t accidentally going to bob his head beyond the fifty-seven pace mark, he crouched and motioned for Floora to climb up onto his back.
“Here. Get on.”
Floora looked unsure, but only for a moment. She fluttered her wings and caught a strap of Cal’s backpack with both hands. Swinging herself up, she used the bag’s clasps as footholds, and clung to the single thin carry-strap on top of the backpack as if it were a set of reins.
“I’m on.”
Cal straightened. He took another pace forward and stopped again. “OK. One more makes fifty-seven.”
He took a series of deep breaths, then shot a look to the cameras hovering overhead. Behind him, the whole world was a desolate wasteland, with the buzzerflies the only reminder of the paradise it had once been.
“Here goes nothing.”
Cal took a step forward.
Sure enough… nothing.
He and Floora both braced themselves, waiting for something to happen.
Still nothing.
“Should something be happening?” Cal whispered.
“I don’t know. I think so,” Floora replied.
Reluctantly, Cal fished in his front pocket and retrieved the Preypad.
“Don’t say anything!” he warned it, before Perko could open his animated mouth. “I thought you said fifty-seven paces in any direction?”
“That’s right!” Perko chirped.
“There’s nothing here,” Cal said, holding the device so the animated assistant could get a good look around. “See? Nothing.”
“You’ve only taken fifty-six paces,” Perko told him.
“No, I took fifty-seven,” Cal insisted.
“I have to beg to differ, good pal!” said Perko. “Eighteen and forty-two were technically half paces.”
“Oh,” said Cal.
Replacing Perko in his pocket, Cal took another step forward.
And with that, the whole world changed.
Twenty-Nine
The change was invisible. The actual process of it, at least.
One moment, Cal was standing on a wasteland with nothing for miles in any direction, the next he was standing on a wasteland with an enormous junkyard of giant decaying corpses looming in front of him.
The sky, which h
ad been a palette of grays, was now a fiery red ridged with angry black clouds. Ash rained from it, drifting as a sulfurous charcoal fog that snagged at the back of Cal’s throat and nipped at his eyes.
“Well, this has rapidly taken a turn for the worse,” he muttered, rubbing the back of a gloved hand across his eyes as he tried to clear them.
He took a backward step. Then another. The world steadfastly refused to return to the way it had been just a moment before.
“Do you think this is the Boneyard?” Cal asked.
“I think there’s a pretty good chance, yes,” said Floora. “You know, what with all the bones, and everything.”
“That’s definitely an indicator,” Cal agreed.
He’d been expecting a place called ‘The Boneyard’ to be well stocked with bones, but he hadn’t been prepared for anything like this. They were gathered in long stacks, each dozens of feet high and several times as long.
Together, they formed a rectangular… not building, exactly, but something close.
“A yard,” he realized. “It’s a literal yard built out of bones.”
There was one way in, as far as Cal could tell—through a set of giant shark-like jaws that led into a passageway formed by two walls of rotting remains.
“I guess we go that way,” he said, trying to disguise the shake in his voice.
“There might be a Hunter in there,” Floora whispered.
Cal sighed. “Yeah. Figures. But I don’t think they’re going to let us just walk around it.”
“No,” Floora agreed.
“Unless they haven’t thought of that,” said Cal.
“They’ll have thought of that.”
“Unless they haven’t!”
“They’ll definitely have thought of that,” Floora insisted.
“I’m going to try,” said Cal. He pointed himself away from the entrance and walked half a dozen paces.
The world shifted around him, so the toothy archway loomed dead ahead.
Cal tried again, about-turning and walking away from the entrance.
A moment later, he found himself back there.
“See?” said Floora. “Told you.”
The Hunt for Reduk Topa Page 24
