Whitney walked around the bed a few times inspecting the machines that Robbie had been hooked up to. She knew the choice was obvious if the kidnapper was telling the truth. She had the sinking suspicion that these were clay models of her friends. They weren’t even breathing.
Her sleepless, confused mind tried to make sense of everything but common sense rejected it. How was she going to be transported to another world by clutching someone’s forearm? Was that really Trent or Tara?
Her twisted thoughts fought with one another until she stopped on the side of the hospital bed opposite her friends. As she stared at Trent and Tara, she slowly extended her right hand toward Robbie. The closer she got, the more her hand shook like a leaf in a wind storm.
She grabbed her wrist with her left hand and tried to stop the trembling. Her palm hit the cold flesh of Robbie’s forearm and she wavered. Whitney wrapped her fingers around the crusty skin and squeezed.
12
Whitney felt intense pressure as she glided through a tight, dark, twisting tunnel. Her hair was blown straight back from the incredible speed. She became dizzy from the corkscrew-like descent.
The trip came to an end when Whitney’s shoe bottoms hit black pavement. She couldn’t tell if she was still out of sorts from the ride to get there but the surroundings looked like video game graphics. They were realistic, lifelike graphics that carried an animated feel.
A ravaged city with fissured roads and busted buildings lay straight ahead. The gray clouds lingering in the orange sky hid the sun and gave the landscape a post-apocalyptic dystopian feel. Whitney shook her head to see if her vision would return to normal but her left arm still looked animated.
Am I in a video game of some sort? Is this even real? Nothing around here looks real; even this paved road doesn’t look real and yet, I am standing firmly on it. What am I supposed to do here? Run into the city and rescue my husband and friend super hero style?
A voice that sounded like a boy going through puberty came from behind her. “There you are.”
She spun around. A boy who looked like a teenager walked toward her. Shaggy, sandy brown hair swept to the side came down and covered his right eye. The skinny teen smiled, exposing his pearly white teeth.
He said, “I’ve been waiting for you. People keep entering my body, making it impossible for me to ever escape this coma. I need you to help get these people out of me so that I can finally go home and see my mom and dad. That’s all I want.”
Whitney began to tear up. “I’d love nothing more than to help you do that. What do we have to do?”
Robbie said, “The first thing we need to do is rescue your friends and get them out of here. Then I can chase away everything else that is fake.”
Whitney asked, “It’s fake?”
Robbie held out his arm as a direction marker and they walked toward the city.
He said, “Yeah, everything in here is fake except for the people that enter through my body.”
“What exactly happened to this city?”
Robbie replied, “I still haven’t been able to figure it out. Looks like it was involved in a major battle of some kind with chunks of steel buildings blown out like that.”
Almost every skyscraper and all the smaller buildings had sustained major damage. The two walked into the forest of steel structures and just as the sun came out from behind a cloud, a triangular high rise swallowed the golden rays.
The city was eerily quiet and the blown-out pieces of the buildings had never been cleaned up from the streets. Whitney and Robbie had to navigate around huge, boulder-sized pieces of steel.
“So what happened to my friends that we have to save them?”
Robbie, who was breathing heavily, spoke in short bursts. “They got caught. Got caught by them.”
“Who is them and caught for doing what?”
Robbie stopped for a moment and wiped his forehead. “The people in the game are the only way I can explain them. They caught your stupid friends after they invaded my body. He told me that you were going to invade my body too.”
“Who are you talking about? Who is he and who is they? This is too confusing.”
Robbie shook his head. “You don’t have to know about that. All you need to know is that you and your friends are going to die when he gets back. Then I will finally be free.”
Is he talking about the kidnapper? This is starting to feel like a set up. Have I been lured to my own death? Trent and Tara did look dead and they weren’t breathing. Is my body not breathing in the real world?
All the worlds she had recently visited only added to her confusion.
“What do you mean, we are going to die?”
Robbie said, “Jeez, he told me you were stupid, but what does die mean to you? He told me that you guys are trying to kill me but the joke is going to be on you.”
“Robbie, listen to me. He is lying to you. He has warped your head into some kind of crazy thinking but I can promise you that my friends and I aren’t here to hurt you. We just want to go home and we want the same for you.”
Robbie chuckled. “Ha. He said that was what you were going to say. Doesn’t matter now. It will all be over soon.”
Whitney didn’t like the kid’s cold tone and turned around, planning to go back to the telepad. She took six steps and was greeted by a dangerous-looking search party. Fourteen men with black assault rifles closed in on Whitney.
She looked at Robbie and warned him. “You’re making a big mistake.”
One of the men jabbed her in the small of the back with the butt of his rifle and forced Whitney to walk into the middle of the city. The men were fitted in shiny white bulletproof protection from head to toe with a tinted visor over the eyes of their helmets.
They led her to an enormous silver skyscraper and pushed her through an opening covered with broken glass on the ground level. The glass crunched under her tennis shoes and Whitney worried that some might poke through the thin rubber soles.
The dusty building had tan walls and bold yellow carpeting lining the floors. They pushed her toward a marble staircase and Whitney started the ascension. Her calves burned as passed the fourteenth floor.
The armored men kept poking Whitney in the back with their weapons as her pace slowed toward the end. They finally stopped on the thirty-first floor and one of the men rushed ahead of her. He opened a door and Whitney walked through and into a hallway of what appeared to be an office building.
The men directed Whitney into one of the rooms and her heart stopped. She locked eyes with her lover.
“I love you, baby,” Trent said, bringing tears of joy to her eyes.
“Oh my God, I love you too. So much.”
She finally glanced over at Tara and tried to provide a look of hope but it didn’t seem to help very much.
Her friends were tied to the chairs they were sitting in. They looked desperate but they were alive, not looking morbid and decrepit like their bodies back in Dankstone.
A few of the armed men put down their weapons and sat Whitney on a wooden chair. They used heavy yellow rope to secure her legs, arms and body to the chair. The coarse wraps chafed against Whitney’s rough skin, causing blood blisters to rise to the skin.
The men pushed her chair over by her friends in the open office room. The rectangular room had three solid walls and one made of glass windows. The three prisoners had their backs to the wall of windows.
Whitney said, “How did all this happen? What is all of this? Do you guys even know?”
Trent spoke calmly. “All I remember is that we were having a great time on the honeymoon and I wake up inside here. Some teenager was telling me I needed to come into the city to escape and then I was surrounded by a bunch of people armed with assault rifles.”
“That seems to be an unoriginal move they have perfected because they did the same with me. Some anonymous man apparently kidnapped you and has been putting me through living hell to get you two back. Tara, I am so sorry. How did you en
d up here?”
Tara shook her head and her braids swung from one side to the other. “I don’t really know either. That asshole threw me out of that canoe and I was in here before any other memories come to mind. It was all so strange.”
“So I guess nobody knows how this works inside here. We are inside someone’s body if you didn’t know. The guy kept calling it Dreamland. It seems too surreal in here, like a video game gone wrong. Are these real people in here even?”
Tara said, “Well, this is great. None of us really know why we are here, how any of this works or how we can get out of here. So, we’re just going to die here? Is that what we’re looking at?”
“I won’t let that happen,” Whitney pledged.
Tara scoffed. “Pffftttt whatever.”
“What do you mean, pffftttt. Don’t you pffftttt me.”
Tara started to get angry. “I’ll pffftttt whoever I damn well please, especially some bitch who drags me into something that’s going to get me killed or even worse, stuck in here.”
Trent tried to calm everyone down. “Alright ladies, let’s just take a few deep breaths and try to figure this out now.”
Whitney said, “I do know something. If we get back to the telepad that we came in on, we can get out of here. It should stay in the same place so that is good.”
Trent asked, “Great, so you can get us there?”
Whitney ground her teeth. “Well, I think so, but I’m not really sure if I know the exact way through the city.”
Tara said, “You’re not inspiring too much hope here, girl.”
“No, I remember. I can get us there. We just need to figure out how to get out of here. Do the guards come back? Have you guys eaten?”
Tara said, “They give us these pills that are supposed to have nutritional value and they actually work. I haven’t been too hungry. They taste like shit, but they do that and inject us with liquids. It’s strange but it seems to work. They only come in once a day.”
Whitney tried to wiggle around and loosen up the ropes, but they were very secure. “If we are stuck in here, I don’t think it will be much longer. The kidnapper said he was doing this so that he could pull off what he called a super heist, I think. I’m hoping once he is done, he will let us go.”
Tara said, “Well, that’s some wishful thinking right there. What if the mufucker gets shot and dies while he is trying to pull off this super heist? Did you ever think about that?”
Whitney gave Tara a dirty look. “Are you going to do anything but complain and act like a baby? It’s your fault you were thrown in the water by the way, screaming like a little girl.”
“Fuck you for dragging me into this. I stuck my neck out to help you and you cut it,” Tara said.
“Whatever then, maybe we shouldn’t be friends,” Whitney responded.
Tara said, “We aren’t friends anymore. When you came in here you barely looked at me so you could ogle your husband…”
Whitney cut her off. “Well excuse the hell out of me for looking at the man I love. At least I have someone I love and don’t keep playing games with other people.”
“Ladies, ladies…” Trent’s attempt to calm the situation was cut off.
Tara yelled, “No, you were basically just a virgin until last year. Have you told your lover boy that yet?”
Whitney couldn’t believe her friend would cross the line like that. “You…you bitch. How dare you? Who the fuck do you think you are?”
Her friend sounded stunned. “Tara. Remember? The person that you dragged into this mess. The one that can kick the shit outta you if it came down to it.”
The anger slithered around Whitney’s chest as she was ready to explode. “You wish you could kick my ass. I would crush you in a second.”
Tara retorted, “Yeah with those puny little arms. It would be like me going to a daycare center and beating up one of the babies.”
A different heat started to build in her midsection as Whitney ruminated over the conversation. “I’m glad we got this out of the way. They say tough situations really reveal one’s character. I guess it’s true. You had to put up with one little part of this whole thing.”
Tara interrupted, “One little part. You got me fucking kidnapped and thrown into some crazy world. One little part.”
Whitney fumed. “Think about all the things I’ve had to deal with. Do you ever stop thinking about yourself for a second? While I was fighting for my life, you were having sex my friend. Talk about friendship now.”
Tara said, “You think getting me killed is anywhere close to having sex while we waited for you, then you must be a lot dumber than I thought.”
Her comments stoked the growing fire inside Whitney and the heat started to reach all her extremities as her fingers tingled. The temperature kept rising and Whitney looked down at her right arm.
The skin on her right arm began to shift and move and was replaced by a silver reptilian covering. The ropes around her arm frayed and exploded. She could feel her body expanding and the wing started to extend from her right arm.
13
The thick yellow rope around her legs and body creaked and frayed before busting apart as a silver-skinned beast started to take shape. Her two golden horns poked up into the rafters and she tried to lean forward to fit in the room.
With bug eyes and dropping jaws, Tara and Trent stared in awe as Whitney kept growing into a dragon.
Whitney had to lie on her tender stomach to fit in the room. She extended her wing and shattered the glass windows and broken bits rained down over thirty stories and landed on the street below. Her friends still gazed at her in amazement.
She leaned her head over toward Trent and worked her long neck around to the back of the chair. She nibbled on the ropes until she got a feel for the distance. She clamped down with her razor-sharp teeth and sawed right through the wraps. Trent wiggled around and the ropes came off as he stood up and threw them aside.
Whitney worked her head over to Tara’s chair and helped to get the ropes off. The two still stared in awe at the newly formed dragon.
Whitney broke the stunned silence. “Trent, I’m going to move over by the window. You two need to get on my back. You know where to grab onto and you can show Tara. I’ll just roll out the window and then we can fly out of the city.”
Trent said, “If you say so.”
Whitney wiggled on her sensitive belly over to the ledge of the thirty-first floor and made the mistake of looking down. Her heart skipped a beat as she had never liked heights. Trent climbed up on her back.
He said, “Alright, Tara, you need to get up here and grab right under this scale here. And hold on tight.”
The door to the room sprang open and two men ran in shouting. They aimed their weapons. Whitney opened her mouth and greeted the men with a fury of flames, fully engulfing both. The primal screams of the men haunted Whitney’s ears as she watched their skin melt off the bones like candle wax dripping to the flaming floor. She didn’t know if this was real or not, but she had never wanted to kill anyone.
Another man ran into the smoky room and Whitney opened her mouth.
She couldn’t bring herself to set this man ablaze. She thought about whether he had a wife or kids.
The armored man raised his rifle and started shooting. Whitney’s hand had been forced and she let another inferno fly from her open mouth.
Trent screamed, “We can go now. We’re both ready.”
Whitney felt a tremendous pain in her left wing as she rolled off the ledge of the building and started a tremendous free fall. She saw the gray clouds and sky and flipped around and spread her wings.
She was moving her shoulders and torso like she had always done, but her wings weren’t working, only the right one was.
They continued to drop like a rock and Whitney panicked as they crossed the fifteenth floor and picked up speed. She extended her right wing further out and leaned to that side. She slowed the out-of-control descent and used all her str
ength to extend the left wing further out.
Tear-shaped drops of dark scarlet blood fell from the wounded wing. She caught enough wind resistance to stop the fall and start gliding forward, above a road and in between all the buildings. They soared about fifteen feet over the concrete surface and rose as Whitney navigated through the damaged city.
The excruciating pain screamed at her to stop putting pressure on the wounds and land, but she forged ahead. A shaft of golden sunlight sneaked in between two skyscrapers and the silver dragon shimmered in the rays. Whitney tried to maintain complete concentration because she had to remember where the telepad was and fly through an unknown city and fight off the pain from three gunshot wounds. No big deal.
She wanted to do what any normal person would; cry, curl up into a ball and give up. That would have been the easiest thing to do. She fought away the overwhelming urge to give up and found a street that she recognized faintly. The telepad should be only about a minute away.
A thundering hail of gunshots rang out, breaking the city’s silence. The echoing sounds reverberated off the busted buildings. A smattering of bullets ricocheted off Whitney’s silver scales that sounded like they were crafted of steel. The bright silver sparks flickered and died as Whitney turned right down a side street.
She quickly veered back to a street on the left so that she wouldn’t get lost while also staying out of the line of gunfire. She rose quickly over the smaller brick buildings on the outer edge of the city and closed in on the area where the telepad should have been. Every muscle in her body ached and she clenched her jaw, expecting this to be the home stretch.
She glided to the area where the pad had been, but it was gone. Straight ahead, Robbie was sprinting away with the vinyl record-sized telepad under his arm.
The Whitney Powers Paranormal Adventure 3 Book Bundle Page 33
