But so did the Grigori fear for hers.
The bottom of the spear had wedged inside her mouth, and until I died, she was trapped because I held onto the thing with all the strength I had. She could not open her mouth to dislodge me, she couldn’t close it enough to kill me.
Stalemate.
I watched as her eyes darted about fearfully, waiting for someone to come to my aid—or hers. To one side I saw Bruk preparing to step in, and I was fairly sure that Naga, and Nova were planning the same.
The queen knew she was dead. And more. Garga stepped forward, axe in hand.
Even the Angara. She said. They all begin to look upon you as a leader.
The thought surprised and confused me, but I had no time to consider it.
Without warning I was in the air, and the Grigori was carrying me as easily as I would carry a doll. Her massive wings beat the wind ferociously, and glancing down I saw the other Grigori and Angara move in to attack the people of Sa Fasi, the Brontosaurs’ of the Hilleyans charging forward, and my beloved Nova in the middle. I cried out in terror. The upsetting vision ripped me in two, and was shrinking so fast that in seconds I could no longer see it—except in my horrified mind.
“Brandon, NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!” I heard Nova’s distant voice scream.
* * *
THE DREAM ENDS
* * *
THE GRIGORI FLEW AS IF possessed. Sa Fasi became a colored blur far below, the plains blazing by beneath me, then the forest, then the mountains. In what seemed like no time I saw Emibi—at least I think it was Emibi—appear in the distance, and very quickly it wasn’t in the distance anymore. We were flying through the gates, over the heads of humans and Angara, so fast I couldn’t see how we didn’t crash into anything. Then the queen skidded to a stop on the broken, concrete street, falling forward, and cracking my skull on the smooth surface.
But I held on.
Again, she stood and looked around for help from others. But none came. No slave moved, no Angara offered aid.
The terrified Grigori queen pounded me once more into the concrete, but I held fast, so she took once more to the air, flying crazy-fast into a tunnel, down long, darkening corridors, down, down, down, into a shaft that could have housed an elevator and seemed to go deep, deep into the depths of the planet. Deeper than I’d known you could go. I wondered if we would come out on the outer surface of Earth.
Then suddenly she landed, hard again, in a small chamber.
She lifted herself, and me, stumbling toward something that looked like a computer terminal that filled a wall. Very rapidly her fingers tapped a keypad beneath a reflective surface, and a door behind me opened with a swish. The queen lurched forward, still clamping her mouth tightly around me, and we entered a room filled with electronic equipment far more sophisticated than the little GPS devices.
Moving very quickly the Grigori raced to a lighted panel, tapped in more instructions, then stepped quickly over to a flat pad in the center of the room, slamming me on top of it.
LET GO! She commanded.
“NO!” I yelled.
She smashed me down again, even harder, over and over and over. I felt myself weakening.
LET GO! She repeated, so angrily my skull nearly exploded.
“NOOOOO!” I shrieked.
More slamming, but instead of releasing the spear and doing as she wanted, I jerked the shaft, then shoved it upward, hard, ripping the hole in her top beak even wider. Now it was her turn to shriek.
The two of us stopped struggling and lay on the pad at a complete impasse, both of us breathing hard, both of us bleeding profusely.
You won’t die. Just let go. She said. It sounded almost like a plea.
“No,” I answered, simply.
I won’t harm you. I just want you to go away.
“Well, too bad.”
I could feel frustration and fear from the Grigori. Her wings lifted purposelessly, then settled again. With her exhaustion her mind relaxed its control over me. My head began to clear. I looked around at the room, amazed at the sophistication of the equipment surrounding me. Screens and monitors filled with images of Pangea—the Place of Endless Dark, the Chutanga Islands, a metallic sphere in space, the plains of Sa Fasi, where a massive battle now raged. Brontosaurs, mounted Angara, pterodactyls, and Grigori, all fighting for their lives.
I guess in my astonishment I must have loosened my grip because the Grigori suddenly sprung away, and though the spear was still lodged in her mouth, she moved fast and was free of me. In a split second she was standing at a panel near the pad, her fingers wiggling, and not realizing what she was doing I stood where I was, crouched and ready for another attack.
But it didn’t come. Instead my world hazed and blurred, and suddenly I was standing on another pad—a different pad—inside a different room with different equipment, and different lighting.
There were men in lab coats, one wearing glasses, all staring at me.
“Brandon?” a familiar voice said.
I turned to that voice, and saw the last person in the world I expected to be standing there.
“Lena?” I said.
She was plainly as stunned to see me standing there as I was to see her. I looked around trying to understand, but I couldn’t. What had happened? Where was I? Was this APL?
No answers came, and only questions rained down on me.
Had I ever left APL? Was I part of some experiment? Had I…
“Nova?” I asked.
“What?” Lena said.
“Nova.” I felt tears forming in my eyes. “Where’s Nova?”
My mind reeled at the horrifying thought that I had been part of some holographic experiment, or test, or mind-fuck, and that none of it had been real. That the woman I loved so passionately, so fiercely, hadn’t been real.
“Brandon,” Lena said, gently. “Where did you come from?”
I looked at her. And it hit me. I had been there. And now I was back.
“Pangea,” I said. “I came from Pangea, and I need you to send me back. SEND ME BACK!”
The look in her eyes said everything I needed to know. Nova was real, I had been inside the hollow sphere of the Earth… but Lena had no idea how to return me to that world. To my world.
To Nova.
“YOU HAVE TO FIGURE it out,” I said over a cup of coffee. The first I’d had in almost a year, apparently. “You have to send me back. The Grigori were attacking… Nova… Elia is pregnant and they’re going to eat her. I have to help. You can’t tell me there’s no way back to them.”
“Brandon,” Lena said, patiently. “I don’t know if any of it is even real.”
“It is real. It is. Look at my wounds. My scars.”
“But you could have gotten those any number of ways. And if we’re following the logic of your story, we an understand you. You’re not speaking any alien, Grigori, slave language.”
She was right. I hadn’t considered that. I was speaking English. And being understood.
“You fell through Milton’s floor into my lab and landed on that pad… activated it somehow. It was terrifying. The drill spinning, grinding, wires sparking and exploding everywhere, and then… you vanished. There was that all enveloping, blinding flash that you described as well, and you were gone. We had no idea where you were, or what had happened. You were both just… gone. Maybe you went into some kind of entertainment device…”
“Like a video game?” I asked.
“It’s more likely than that the Earth is hollow.”
“No,” I said. “No. It wasn’t a… it was real.”
She said nothing.
“Where did the pad come from?” I asked.
Lena sat opposite me, and the technicians she now apparently worked with all stood or sat around the room paying complete and focused attention.
“We found it in the Yucatan,” she told me, “investigating the asteroid collision that killed the dinosaurs.”
“The dinosaurs aren’t dead.”<
br />
“Yes,” she said, tentatively. “So you said. Brandon, are you sure about what happened? Your wounds are incredible, but maybe…”
“I know. You don’t believe me. But I don’t care. I just want to get back to Nova.”
She looked hurt.
“Who’s Nova?” she asked.
“My ma—my wife. Nova is my wife.”
Lena stared at me silently and I thought I saw real pain in her eyes.
“Just send me back,” I said. “I have to get back to her. She was right in the middle of a war…”
Still, Lena said nothing. I set down the empty coffee cup, and walked back to the pad.
“Just turn it on. Send me back.”
“Brandon, we don’t even know how it works…”
“Please,” I said, hot tears in my eyes. “You can’t tell me there’s no way back to her. Please, Lena.”
She only stared at me, silently, as did all her technicians.
“Please?” I begged.
* * *
NO RETURN
* * *
A. P. L. HAD APPARENTLY DECIDED I was incredibly valuable—too valuable to let wander around unsupervised, and though the cops wanted me downtown and booked for manslaughter, they had apparently been outranked. I was a prisoner inside Lena’s office at APL. I wanted to see my mother. See my sister. Let them know I was alive, but no one would let me call or leave.
All I ever saw was the inside of that one room, the two cops, a rotation of APL guards, some nameless high-ranking agent who never said a word, a couple of technicians, Dr. Lena Mizellier, and her husband, or ex-husband—I was never entirely clear—Dr. Iain Pompaneau.
Not that I had any satisfying answers for them, but they kept hoping that maybe some memory, or recalled moment would click things into focus about the pad and what it was really for. I was telling them my story for the eight hundredth time when Dr. Pompaneau, the doughy prick who was really in charge of the pad thing, asked me to go over the part where I’d been sent back to APL one more time.
“I’ve told you,” I said.
“Tell us again,” he said.
“I’m not going to tell you anything different than I did the last time.”
“Really?” he shuffled through some papers. “Because you’ve told it differently every time. Once the Grigori queen slammed your head four times. Once three times. Another time she bashed you into a wall. At the end she activated a panel on the wall. In three earlier versions she wiggled her fingers near the pad on which you stood.
“Really?” I said, surprised. “But… I’m telling you the truth.”
“We know you are,” Lena said.
“Especially about the parts where you had sex with Nova but not with Nala,” Pompaneau said, snarkily.
I glared at him, confused by his remark, then looked from him, to Lena, but she wouldn’t make eye contact with me.
“Lena?” I said.
“Brandon,” she replied, still not looking at me, “you have to understand our point of view. You see a play called Beasts and then you enter a world where you become—and fight with—beasts. We looked into it. The play has a lot of parallels to your story. Lost in a strange world. Speaking different languages. Animals that strip you naked. Having sex in front of an audience…”
“I’d… forgotten about that,” I admitted.
“You even used the word ‘danced’ at one point when talking about your actions avoiding the Grigori,” Pompaneau said with a sneer. He was entirely too pleased to be taking me apart. “So let’s start this over, one more time. State your name, please.”
“Fuck you,” I said.
“Brandon, please?” Lena said.
“Why are you pushing me?”
“Brandon,” she repeated. “Please! It’s the only thing keeping you out of jail!”
I sighed heavily and closed my eyes in frustration. I felt tears over a dead man I’d hated enough to kill.
“I didn’t mean to do that. I am so sorry I killed him—my God what I would do to get it back, but I was defending myself. He kept hitting me, and hitting me, and…”
I looked around and saw no one cared. No one except Lena, who seemed near to tears, herself.
“You know what?” I said, quietly, barely containing my anger, my sadness, my fear, my horror, my guilt, my raw, frayed emotions about Nova, and if she was even real, if I was I insane, if I was I not, “Bruk was real, and Bruk was right. ‘Life is short, then you die.’ ‘Life is a race that no one wins.’ ‘Live before you die, because you will die.’”
No one said anything in reply, so I continued.
“My name is Brandon Mack,” I snapped because I couldn’t contain it any longer. “I went to Pangea, I fought dinosaurs, I befriended Bruk, and Elia, and Kiga, I loved Nova, and you know what? Life is too goddam short. I told you about it, already. Several times. And I am done talking about it.”
I fell silent, determined to say not another word. Everyone waited for a while, until they realized I was serious, then Pompaneau wiped his face with his hands, and moaned.
“And you think you have that choice?” he asked through his fingers. “That you can just stop talking?”
I said nothing. He lifted his head and scowled at me.
“You belong to me, Mack,” the fat prick said. “Whether you speak again or not… until I say otherwise.”
I leaned back in my chair, with an expression of ‘who gives a fuck’ branded into my face.
“You want to see your mother again?” he asked. “Your sister?”
That got me, and he knew it.
“You have to go through me. And to go through me, you have to talk. You have to tell your story again.”
“And what’s my ultimate end, here? At what point am I done having to talk to your fat ass?”
“Is that a serious question?” the prick asked, irritated.
“Yes, it’s a serious fucking question!” I yelled.
“Brandon, calm down,” Lena pleaded. “I’m begging you…”
“Fuck you, calm down! I need to get back! There is a real urgency here that you do NOT seem to understand…”
I guess I’d gotten a little out of control, and now it was time for the cops to get involved, because the local policeman who’d first figured out I was still hiding in Milton’s machine over a year ago leaned forward into the light, with his best ‘good cop’ routine.
“Mr. Mack, this is important. We need to…”
“This is NOT important, okay?” I snapped. “NONE of this! You just think it’s important! That all this bullshit is important! But it’s not! Your little jobs, your little worries about bills, about fashion, about Netflix, and Wi-Fi… about what dumbass restaurant to go to! I have very little time, okay, and you are wasting it! Nova needs me, and I need to get back to her!”
“Tell us about Nova?” Lena said, plainly trying to get me back to calm.
“Oh, fucking hell,” I said, more frustrated than ever. “I told you about Nova.”
“Help us to understand…” Good cop said.
“Screw your understanding! Let’s go back to the pad…”
“There are some inconsistencies in your story that…”
“You disappear for nearly a year…” Pompaneau interjected, apparently feeling he was the only one who could get this back under control, “just vanish with a billion dollars worth of equipment to God knows where—then suddenly reappear, without that equipment—claiming you were inside the Earth, which—contrary to all known laws of physics, astrophysics, and common sense—is hollow like a frickin’ beach ball and filled with dinosaurs…”
“I claim nothing. I told you what happened, and you don’t believe me. The problem is on your side.”
“You think all that really happened?”
“I KNOW it happened!”
And that’s when the jackass laughed at me. Just… fucking… laughed.
“Jesus, man, seriously?” he said, condescension dripping from every syllable
. “And you can’t see how maybe your story is just the teensiest bit unbelievable? How you went off and lived some wild fantasy life in a land of eternal sunshine, and panther men, and monsters, and evil, flying lizards… a place where you met some sexy little slut named ‘Nova’ who liked to run around naked, and play with tiny horsies, and tyrannosaurs, and your dick, especially…”
And that was it. I’d had enough. I shoved my end of the table, which was exactly opposite Pompaneau’s, slamming it directly into his fat chest. Something cracked and he screamed, falling backward a bit until his body had slipped partly under the table, and his chin was resting on its surface. I kept on shoving until his lard ass was pinned against the far wall of the interrogation room and pressing against his neck.
He gurgled and choked out more screams, his face pale and horrified, as I came quickly around the table for him.
“NO!” he yelled. “Please! Don’t hurt me! DON’T HURT ME!”
I stopped only a foot or so away from him, my fist raised, fully intending to pummel him into unconsciousness, or worse. He was lucky I came to my senses and stopped before showing him how short life could really be.
“So…” said the ‘good cop’ with a grin, “tell us again how you didn’t mean to lose control and kill that kid.”
I turned to him, and felt my face fall. I had—by once again acting on instinct—made my own situation infinitely worse.
* * *
THE TRUTH
* * *
TWO GUARDS STAYED to keep an eye on me, but the others had all finally gone, leaving me alone with Lena.
“It’s okay,” she said to one of the guards. “You can wait outside.”
The men looked at one another, looked at me, then did as she asked. And just like that, we were alone, her standing nearby, me slumped over the table I’d tried to ram through Pompaneau’s chest, handcuffed to a chair. I shook my head and rested my forehead on the polished surface. How had I become my own worst enemy? I was never going to get back to Nova. If Nova was even real.
The Hollow World: (Pangea, Book 1) Page 30
