The Reality Bug

VEELOX

A. nightmare from my past had just sprung out of my brain and was standing in front of us. In the flesh.

Somehow Aja’s Reality Bug had found it in my memory and brought it to life. It was impossible, yet here it was. The quig looked exactly as it had on Denduron. It was like a prehistoric bear with an oversize head that was mostly jaws. It had big sharp teeth on both top and bottom that jutted out like a wild boar’s. Its body was covered with dirty-gray fur. Yellow spikes of bone ran down its spine. Its paws were huge and strong, with knife-sharp claws. But the thing I remember most about these quigs, like all the quigs from all the territories, were its eyes. They were yellow and angry and focused…

On us.

This one was smaller than the ones I remembered, about the size of a grizzly bear. But that was bad news because it was small enough to move through doors. We were only a doorway and a short corridor away from being eaten. The quig stepped over Alex’s lifeless body, stalking toward the locker room… and us. There was only one thing I could think of doing.

I closed the door on our end of the corridor.

Just in time too. A second later I heard the quig smash against the door with a sickening thud. I knew the beast wasn’t smart enough to open a door latch, so I didn’t worry about locking it. The only thing I could hope was that the door would hold if it tried to bash it down.

Aja was frozen in shock. Her eyes were wide and frightened.

“Where did that come from?” I demanded.

“F-From your mind,” she stammered out. “I told you, it’ll find things in your memory that you fear.”

“But you said Lifelight can only use reality,” I shot back.

“Isn’t that thing real enough for you?”

As if in answer, the quig smashed against the door again.

“But those monsters don’t exist on Second Earth. It’s from a different territory. From Denduron.”

“That’s impossible!” Aja shouted. “Lifelight can’t do that!”

The quig slammed into the door again, letting out a bellow of pain and anger.

“Well, it can now!”

The door began to splinter. A couple more hits like that and it would be on us.

“C’mon!” I grabbed Aja’s hand and ran. I didn’t know where to go, but we couldn’t stay there. We found a door on the far side of the locker room and blasted through. The door led outside, but once we were out, we both froze in horror.

We were near the large, football practice field. But there were no players scrimmaging today. Instead, we were faced with more quigs! The grass was swarming with them. They were all sizes, too. Some were as big as the beasts that had fought in the Bedoowan stadium on Denduron, others were smaller than the one from the gym. A few quigs were battling each other, trying to tear into each other’s necks. I knew where that would lead. These quigs were cannibals. If one went down, the others would pounce and chow. “The door!” I shouted.

It was closing behind us. If it locked, we were history. Aja reacted quickly and threw her foot out, wedging her shoe into the doorway just before it closed. If she had missed, we would have been quig lunch and I guarantee we were tastier than blue gloid.

I glanced back at the herd of quigs to see a few of them were lifting up their heads. They had caught our scent. In a few seconds they’d zero in on us and the dinner bell would ring.

“Back inside!” I shouted, and pulled the door open. After we ducked back in, I made sure to pull the door all the way shut. It was a good thing too, because a handful of quigs had spotted us and they were beginning to charge.

“Is there another way out of here?” Aja asked in desperation.

“I–I think so.”

We ran back through the locker room, past the door to the gym, just as… crash! The gym door smashed open and the quig stood there looking totally ticked off that he had to go through so much trouble to get lunch. Aja and I kept running through the locker room, headed for the door that connected it with the girls’ locker room. The quig chased us, awkwardly smashing into lockers that gave off a hollow, metallic thunder each time the monster slammed into one.

The door to the girls’ locker room didn’t have a latch, but it opened toward us. That was a huge break. There was no way the quig could pull a door open. We shot through and into a mirror-image locker room on the other side. We were safe, but for how long?

“Get us outta this!” I screamed at Aja.

“This isn’t as bad as it seems, Pendragon,” she answered.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“No, this is a fantasy. Even if we got attacked and killed by one of those beasts, we’d just wake up inside the Lifelight pyramid.”

“No,” I said. “This isn’t how it’s supposed to work! You said it’s impossible for those quigs to be here, but they are. And our control bracelets should work, but they don’t. And Alex shouldn’t be lying dead out there in the gym because he wasn’t part of this jump, but he looks pretty dead to me. There are too many impossible things happening for me to risk letting one of those monsters eat us back to reality!”

“But-“

“You heard Saint Dane. He knew what you were trying to do with the Reality Bug. He messed with your program. Who knows what it’s capable of now? We’ve got to get out of here alive and figure out what happened.”

Aja nodded. I was making sense to her, for a change.

“I have no idea how to get us out,” I added. “It’s up to you.”

I could tell the wheels were spinning in Aja’s head, trying to figure a way to escape from the jump. Finally she said, “Our controllers were somehow taken offline. Whatever Saint Dane did, it happened when you pushed the reset button.”

“Right, no more pushing the reset button,” I agreed.

“But Alex’s controller is tied into the general grid. It’s on a different string.”

“Can you use it to end our jump?” I asked.

“Absolutely,” she answered with authority. “If it still works.”

I knew what had to be done. We had to go back into the gym, get to Alex’s body, and get his wrist controller. No problem, right? Yeah, sure. We quickly found the door that led from this locker room back into the gym. Aja and I cautiously opened it a crack and peered out.

The big gym was eerily empty. Not long ago it had been full of screaming basketball fans. Now the only person left in the gym was Alex, and he wasn’t doing any screaming. Not anymore. Question was, where was the quig?

“You sure this is the only way out of the jump?” I asked Aja in a whisper.

“No, but it’s the only way I can think of.”

“Then we’ve gotta take the chance,” I said. “Wait here.”

I started into the gym, but Aja grabbed my arm.

“Where are you going?”

“To get the controller, where do you think?”

“You don’t know how to get it off his arm.”

Good point. We had to go together. Aja and I then shared eye contact in a way that hadn’t happened up until this point. Though we were both Travelers, our relationship had been a battle from the get-go. But now we were about to step into danger. The look between us said it all. We were in this together, like it or not. I gave her a quick nod, and the two of us stepped into the gym.

The distance to Alex was only about twenty yards, but it might as well have been a mile. If the quig caught us in the middle of the gym, there was nowhere for us to run. We started out by walking slowly, but I think we both realized the faster we did this the better, because with each step we picked up the pace.

Alex’s body was lying right in front of the open doorway to the boys’ locker room. The quig was probably still in there. I had my eyes fixed on the door, waiting for it to spring out. Neither of us said anything for fear of alerting the monster.

As we got closer to the body, I realized I didn’t want to see what horror the quig had done to the poor guy. Fantasy or not, this was all too real. But there was no chickening out. Not now. We were only a few feet from the body and I felt as if we were going to pull this off.

I was wrong.

The quig sprang from the doorway, exactly as I feared. Without thinking, I grabbed Aja and pulled her underneath the bleachers. It was the only place to go. Because of the basketball game, the bleachers were extended out into the gym. The move saved our lives, for the moment.

The quig swiped at me with its massive paw just as I ducked under a metal rail. The monster’s hand smashed the rail, but one claw caught the back of my arm, slicing open the fabric of my jumpsuit. The stinging pain told me it had sliced through a part of my arm, too. But no matter how bad it hurt, I wasn’t about to stop now.

“Keep moving!” I shouted at Aja.

A complex steel framework held up the bleachers. The two of us crawled through the labyrinth, moving up and over and around and under, desperate to get away from the quig. I glanced back to see the quig was still coming. It was having a lot more trouble getting through the tangle of steel than we were. But that didn’t stop it. This thing was tearing the bleachers apart to get at us.

That’s when I got a brilliant idea.

“Get to the far side, hurry!” I shouted at Aja.

If my idea was going to work, we had to get out from under here as soon as possible. I kept pushing Aja from behind, forcing her to snake through the metal rails. Finally we made it to the far side and out from under.

“Which way?” she shouted.

“Stay right there!” I commanded.

Aja looked at me like I was crazy. But I didn’t have time to explain. Aja may have known computers, but I was a gym rat. Before I became a Traveler, I had spent every moment I could in gyms. I knew how they worked. I ran to a small silver box on the wall, flipped up the safety cover, and pressed the red control button inside.

Instantly the bleachers began to retract, with the quig trapped underneath.

“Brilliant!” Aja exclaimed.

It was the first nice thing she said to me. The two of us stood there, both hoping the quig would get crunched in the tangle of steel that was closing around it. All we needed was a minute to get the controller.

We didn’t get it.

With a horrifying roar, the quig crashed out from under the retracting bleachers, pulling pieces of steel frame along with it. Turned out my brilliant idea, wasn’t so brilliant. There was nothing we could do but run for our lives. We sprinted across the gym, maddeningly close to Alex’s controller. But there wasn’t time to get it. We ran out of the gym and down the corridor that led to the rest of the school.

I always felt like there was something spooky about an empty school building. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because I was used to schools being busy and loud. A quiet school seemed wrong. Well, this school was definitely wrong. The fact that it was empty was the least of the reasons. Aja and I ran down the long, glass-walled corridor from the athletic wing into the student center that was the main hub of the school. It was a huge, airplane hangar-size room from which all the rest of the school wings could be accessed. Aja and I ran to the center of the big room so we would be able to get a complete 360 view around. If anything was going to enter the place looking for us, we’d see it in plenty of time to run the other way.

“There’s gotta be another way to end the jump,” I said, gulping for air.

Aja once again hit a series of buttons on her wrist controller, then grunted in frustration. “This can’t be happening!” she shouted. “I have no control!”

There was no way around it. We had to figure a way to get past that quig, or at least distract it long enough to get Alex’s controller.

“You know this place,” Aja said. “Are there any weapons?” “In a school? Yeah, right.”

“Think, Pendragon! Is there anything we can use as a weapon?”

My first reaction was to say no, but that wasn’t helpful. I had to give it some thought and be creative. Was there anything in this school we could use as a weapon to beat a quig? Uncle Press had killed some quigs with spears, but there was nothing like that here at Davis Gregory High. We had also blown up a quig using the explosive tak, but there was none of that stuff around. What else could we use?

That’s when an idea started to form.

“These quigs,” I asked. “Lifelight created them, but are they real? I mean, are they just like real quigs?”

“They’re as real as you remember them,” Aja explained. “Lifelight took them from your mind. It doesn’t matter what real quigs are like, only what you remember about them. If you believe they can sing a song, they’ll be able to sing.”

“Then we need a dog whistle,” I announced.

“A what?”

“Quigs are incredibly sensitive to high-pitched sound.

They go nuts when they hear it. If we can find some kind of whistle, we can keep that quig back long enough to get to Alex’s controller.

“Perfect!” Aja exclaimed. “Where can we find a whistle?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

“Ugh!” Aja exclaimed in frustration.”Think! Is there anything we can use to make that kind of sound?”

We heard something that sounded like the rumble of thunder. I took a quick look around and saw movement outside the windows. I wanted to scream. The quigs outside had found us! They were peering in through the windows, staring at us, probably deciding the best way to attack. Suddenly I wished that I could find a hundred whistles.

A hundred whistles.

An idea was sneaking around the edges of my brain. “Pendragon,” Aja whispered. “We don’t have much longer.” I had it. A hundred whistles. Plan B was starting to take shape.

“This way!” I shouted, grabbed Aja’s hand and ran off. I led her through the student center to the wing housing the school offices. It’s where the principal hung out and where the secretaries worked. If I was right, we’d find something there that would help us stop the quigs.

The office was dark and deserted. I made my way toward the long reception desk when suddenly… crash! A window blew out. Aja and I jumped in surprise and looked to see that a quig had smashed it and was now crawling in. Crash! Crash! Two more windows blew, followed by more squirming quigs. They knew exactly where we were. Either my idea was going to work, or Plan B was going to put us on the quig menu.

“What are we doing in here?” Aja asked. I could hear the growing terror in her voice.

“A hundred whistles,” I answered while continuing on toward the reception desk. “We may not have a single whistle, but I might be able to come up with a hundred.”

I was looking for the public address system. Every school had one for announcements and whatnot. I really hoped that Davis Gregory High was one of them. It was our last, best hope.

Crash! Crash! Two more windows shattered and glass rained down. The quigs were coming from all over. It was now or never. I found the PA system under the long reception desk. Now the trick was to figure out how to use it.

There was a power switch that I immediately threw. The lights on the machine blinked to life. There was a long row of buttons that I guessed operated the speakers throughout the school.

I was about to turn every one on, when I saw a toggle switch marked “All speakers.” Duh.

I flipped it on.

The first quig had gotten inside and was now standing up. It would charge in seconds.

I cranked the volume knob to fifteen. If it had gone to twenty, I would have cranked it to twenty. I then grabbed the microphone. It was on a stand, with a trigger to turn it on. With a quick look at Aja, I hit the button and turned the microphone toward the amplifier.

They call it feedback. We’ve all heard it before, a thousand times. I’m not exactly sure what causes it, but it always seems to happen when the volume is turned up too high on something that is amplified. I think it has to do with an overload that the system can’t handle and… to tell you the truth, I didn’t care how it happened. I only cared that it happened now.

It did. The piercing sound screeched out from the speakers. It was horrible… and beautiful. The quigs began to bellow, just as they had on Denduron when I blew the dog whistle. It was perfect. They couldn’t function. I quickly took some Scotch tape and wrapped it around the microphone to keep the button depressed, then leaned it against the amplifier. Unless it blew a fuse, we had our hundred whistles.

Aja grimaced in pain from the horrible sound, but still managed to smile.

“Can we go now?” she shouted.

The two of us ran out of the office, headed back toward the gym. The horrifying sound was piercing the entire school. As we ran, I looked outside and saw quigs fleeing in terror. Compared to a little old dog whistle, this feedback was monstrous.

Aja and I ran through the student center and down the long corridor back to the athletic wing. I had no doubt that the quig in the gym was in just as much agony as the rest of them. Now all we had to worry about was whether poor Alex’s wrist controller would work.

We made it back to the gym and peered inside. Sure enough, our friend the quig was on its back, writhing in pain. With a quick look of relief to each other, Aja and I started into the gym.

And the screeching stopped.

Just like that. Maybe the amplifier blew. Maybe the power went out. Maybe, maybe, maybe. All that mattered was that our hundred whistles had fallen silent.

And the quig was back on its feet, ready to roll.

(CONTINUED)