The Nightmare Virus, page 6
First on the Arena sand.
First to hear the roar of a crowd from above, like thunder from a storm of bloodlust.
There’s no burst of sunlight. The shadows are wrong, they flicker too much, and the warmth comes and goes. It’s a good try, but it’s not enough. This is a world of darkness.
I take in my audience, hating them instantly. Tiny pinpricks of heads and clothing stretch in rising rings above me. They cheer, but not for any of us. They cheer for the sport. My predicament exists because of them.
I roar back.
Some of them laugh. Their cheers increase. I assess the light-gray wall rising from the sand. On an impulse I bolt toward it. Leap. Plant my feet, one, two—my hands scrape the stone, and I slide back to the sand.
The crowd howls at my attempt to breach the barrier and throttle them. They see me as an animal. I act like an animal. What am I doing, trying to climb a wall to fight people?
Am I that out of control?
A clash of inner voices hits me. One voice saying, This isn’t you. And another voice saying, This is the real you. A tiny echo of Crixus telling me to tamp down the anger tries to wiggle into my mind.
Before I can muddle through any of it, a clang comes from the opposite side of the Arena. Enormous wood doors fall flat, like dropped drawbridges, and a beast bursts forth, but not the type I’ve seen in films. No tigers on chains or half-starved lions.
Instead an enormous black bull charges onto the sand with four horns on its head. Rather than flesh and blood, it seems to be made of smoke and shadow, lacking the true intricacies of color.
The bull snorts and paws the ground, then scans the Arena, aware and bloodthirsty. It spots a clump of three noxiors cowering against the curve of the coliseum wall—two girls hugging each other and crying. A man with a puny mistspear tries to squeeze behind them as though to disappear. A fourth noxior clings to the gates from which we entered, begging the guard on the other side to let him back through.
Are they going to sit there and die so easily? Is there no fight in them?
The bull charges the three.
They scream, and the man splits off from the girls. The bull thunders across the Arena after him. The man turns and fumbles with his spear. He gives a weak throw, but it bounces broadside off the bull’s right flank, then skids in the sand beyond.
The bull gores him.
The crowd lets out a collective groan, laced with amusement. The man’s body thumps to the ground, blood marking the spot of his death.
He’s dead. Just like that. His real body Above is likely being shaken by the people with him who are still awake. Who still love and care about him. Crixus said this would hardly be a fight—it’s mere entertainment.
My ears ring. Some entertainment. The onlookers take pleasure in this, mere minutes after cheering on the reunion of a mother, father, and son.
When watching movies about gladiators, it never quite struck me how disgusting it is that another human could laugh at the death of others. It felt so far removed from real life, settled in a dirty, twisted past. Impossible in present day.
I suppose we’ve been so desensitized by fiction and film that seeing it in real life feels unreal. Detached. A show instead of a slaughter.
The bull wheels around and heads for the two girls. They scream and squeeze each other tighter. They look like sisters.
A spectator climbs over the wall and drops to the sand, shouting and waving his arms. The bull redirects toward the man, and I barely make out the shriek of one of the girls over the crowd.
“Daddy! No!”
“Hey!” I throw my mistblade. It pings off the bull’s shoulder, leaving no mark but getting the creature’s attention. The creature rounds on me and huffs as though to say, Finally, a fight.
The dad runs to the girls and uses himself as a shield. They cling to him desperately as though they’ve not seen each other in months.
I tear my gaze from the odd reunion, unsure what to make of it.
The bull paws the sand.
I stand my ground. “Come and get me, you beast.” I have no weapon now other than my building anger. I abandon Crixus’s advice. He didn’t send me into this Arena to tame the anger. He sent me here to die. All he gave me was a puny dagger.
He doesn’t expect me to come back.
I charge the bull and drop what little restraint I have left. Anger pours into my veins like water from a burst dam. Seconds before we collide, I leap into the air, over the bull’s four-horned head, and land on the other side in a somersault. I regain my feet and spin before the bull realizes he missed.
I’m . . . not exactly sure how I did that.
As the bull regains traction, I catch my breath. Every inhale fuels my anger, my determination. It presses against the underside of my sternum like an inner weapon. It blinds thought. Banishes logic. It takes over my mind, promising power by emotion alone.
The bull rounds on me.
I plant my feet. Lean forward for impact.
The bull charges. Thunder cracks. Fury builds. Then my chest splits open.
Smoke bursts out of my body and propels me into the sky. I hover in the air for a moment. Giant black wings of mist unfurl from my back. The shadows that pour from my chest turn into a spear in my left hand.
I dive toward the ground as the bull reaches where I’d been standing moments earlier. With a shout I plunge the spear through the top of the bull’s skull and into the sand beneath. It splinters on impact.
The bull collapses.
I straighten, and the smoke wings disappear. The bull wiggles for a few disturbing seconds before succumbing to death, pinned to the sand like a bug to foam.
The pressure of emotion vanishes. I gasp for breath and survey the scene before me with fresh eyes.
The bull, dead.
The spear, broken.
The crowd, silent.
Time pauses. Then four men in armor enter the Arena with their own spears made of wood and metal that look very ready and able to stick me through. They surround me, but I have no interest in fighting them. I’ve emptied myself of my conviction and energy.
Whatever just happened has scared them.
Scared me.
The other noxiors cower against the inner wall of the Arena. A soldier holds the dad and two daughters at sword point.
Crixus saunters across the Arena and stops near the circle of foot soldiers. He crosses his arms and regards me.
“Well, well, well. You’ve been keeping secrets.” He smirks, but it doesn’t hide the wariness behind his eyes. “Tirones,” he says to the soldiers. “Bind him. We’re taking him to the Emperor.”
The spell over the crowd breaks at these words. As the soldiers—tirones—lead me away, bound by chains, the people are back to cheering again. They holler in a way that makes them sound far hungrier than when I first walked in.
I’m taken to a cell “to cool off.” I don’t need to cool off. My emotions are drained from doing . . . whatever I did. I made wings. Flew? And then killed an enormous Nightmare bull.
How?
Something tells me this shouldn’t be possible—some knowledge from my life in the Real World. But I can’t pull up details. This Nightmare brain fog is starting to grate on me. I close my eyes, and I think I sleep at some point. Time passes, but there’s no way to determine how much.
When Crixus comes for me, it’s to take me to the Emperor.
Does this make me a citizen now? It’d be nice to graduate out of their sick games. “Are you going to explain?” I ask.
Crixus opens my door with a creak of rusty hinges—how have they had time to rust? The Nightmare hasn’t been around that long. Whoever created these cells added the rust for effect. No detail left behind.
“Save your questions for the Emperor.” Crixus smells even more of blood, sweat, and something foul. Maybe they don’t have showers in this place. How are my olfactory senses even working? Isn’t this all in my imagination?
“Will the Emperor answer them?”
“I guess you’ll find out.” Crixus leads me through the training grounds to a double-gated door guarded by four soldiers, tirones.
There is no escaping the noxior indentureship. One can only be released from it. I like to hope that’s what’s about to happen to me. The tirones nod to Crixus as he passes, then lock the door behind us.
We exit from an alleyway into a wide road illuminated by the false sunlight that is really fire on the top of the coliseum walls. The road runs along the coliseum’s circumference inside the wall. Crixus hauls me aside as two chariots, each drawn by four horses, speed by. Racing through the streets? They could kill someone.
“Four horses to one chariot,” I say. “Overkill, don’t you think?”
“It’s called a quadriga.” Crixus resumes our walk.
I give him a side-eye thinking he must be joking. “It’s called Ben-Hur.” He really has embraced this whole Roman Nightmare world. “I don’t know if your knowledge of ancient Roman terms is concerning or just nerdy.”
He stays in character. No smile. No response. One hand keeps its grip on my forearm, and the other holds the hilt of his gladius. It’s not like I’m going to run. I want answers, and so far, it sounds like he’s taking me to them.
Homes and apartments are built into the thick walls of the coliseum, strings of laundry crisscrossing the sky above our heads. Market stalls exist underneath the dwelling spaces at street level. “Who all lives in here?”
“Citizens.”
“All citizens?” I ask. “What about the houses outside of the coliseum?” We passed several on our way here.
“Abandoned. Some people refuse to enter the coliseum. They’re not interested in learning to survive and earn their right to live here. Non-citizens.”
“So you kill them?” I ask, disgusted.
“Tenebra kills them.” Tenebra. This world. “Citizens don’t leave the coliseum unless it’s absolutely imperative. If a citizen leaves the coliseum without permission, they lose their citizenship.”
“How can someone leave while it’s on fire?”
“The fire won’t burn a citizen.”
That explains why Crixus could part the flames for me and why they still scorched my skin. “And yet if a citizen leaves without permission, you kill them?”
Crixus shakes his head. “You keep thinking we want everyone to die. That citizen would merely return to noxior status and have to earn their citizenship again. Earn our trust again.” He gives me a hard look, not breaking his stride. “You saw what was out there.”
I think of the hooded and cloaked people who dragged Erik away as he clawed at the road. Who killed James the Vetter. Who caused our cart to crash and crush a man. “The Spores.”
“You learn quickly.”
“What does it matter? We’re all dying in the Real World anyway.”
“Not all.”
I snort. “What does that mean?” Nole and I studied this Nightmare. We watched people use up their final 22 days and then get trapped in the Nightmare coma, withering away in a matter of days.
“How long have you been infected, Cain?” Crixus dodges my question.
Now that I’m not consumed by angry energy, I’m able to think about other things, though thinking about life in the Real World seems hazily distant. Like an old stew of memories neglected and then vaguely stirred. I try to pull up a timeline of my real life but can’t seem to settle on exact numbers.
I instinctively pat my pocket for my time card, but it’s not there. Obviously. My clothes followed me in here, but not the items in my pockets. Go figure. No sticks of gum either. And here I thought this place couldn’t get worse.
“I believe this is my fourteenth . . . maybe fifteenth . . . time in the Nightmare.”
Crixus shakes his head. “Unbelievable.”
“Now I get to ask a question. Am I in trouble with the Emperor or about to be rewarded?”
I’ve been hauled away for a night in jail a handful of times—mostly for getting caught with Nole when he did something illegal like breaking into research labs or stealing books from important libraries. It felt a bit like this. Except this time I don’t know how I broke the rules of this twisted universe. It’s hard to apologize to the Emperor if I don’t understand my crime.
“Save that question for the Emperor,” Crixus says for the second time.
“So he’s in charge of this place?”
“In a way.”
I’m in the Nightmare that killed my brother. Anyone labeled “in charge” is likely untrustworthy. But the man in charge is also the one with knowledge. How much does this Emperor know about this dreamscape? “He’s got to be the Draftsman.”
“Why do you say that?”
“He’s the Emperor. The villain is always the guy in power.” He must have some control. Some leg up on everyone else in this cursed place.
“He’s Emperor because he escaped the Tunnel faster than anyone else. Well, until now.”
“Until now?”
“Until you.”
The Emperor’s citadel is encased in fire. By now I shouldn’t be surprised. Flames encircle a tower that stretches far above the rest of the coliseum lighting up the turrets and spires with swirls and tongues of heat, but they don’t crackle. They don’t burn. I’m getting major Moses-and-the-burning-bush vibes the longer I’m in this place.
The citadel gives light, but it’s not the type that makes you turn your face upward to soak it in. It’s a harsh, hot thing that makes me want to turn my back on it. The more time I spend here the more I crave true light.
“Do you ever get a sunrise in this place?”
He gestures to the citadel. “This is our sun. It dims at evening and brightens in the morning.”
That’s a no then. There’s no sun, no moon, no stars. Never will be.
“The Emperor built this citadel to give us light so we’re no longer lost.”
How can someone build from fire? “So he’s the Draftsman.”
“No, he created it after he was trapped here like us.”
That’s not how ImagiSerum works. At least, I don’t think so. What I’d give to have my full mental clarity back.
We approach the citadel to silence. Crixus parts the flames like he did in the coliseum gateway, and I walk through the entry into a courtyard. Shadows contradict the glow of the fire. Moving. Almost alive and with substance. Is that a shadow—or a creature? As I turn my full attention to the movement, any shadow I thought I saw melts into the ground before I can make out specifics.
The inside of the citadel is made of stone. No fire burns inside. I expect rustic stone, archer windows, and spiral stairs into dark corridors, but the interior of the citadel is a mix of modern and ancient Rome. Stone spiral steps move as escalators, and we step on them so quickly I have no chance to glance at the mechanism. Light comes from scattered small window squares in the wall, letting in the fire glow from outside. The escalator pauses at each landing that leads to a new corridor but then ascends again after a few moments. It feels otherworldly.
We reach the top, a broad open landing with a floor-to-carved-ceiling window, completely open with no glass or lattice. If I wasn’t paying attention, I could walk right out of it and plummet to my death.
Crixus stops halfway to the enormous window, faces the stone wall to his right, and knocks. The escalator continues to slide into the floor and disappear.
Crixus knocks on the wall again, and this time it melts away. Strings of gold slither from the cracks in the ceiling and spread along the wall until it forms an elaborate peaked frame to double doors, which open of their own accord.
“Go on in,” Crixus says.
“You’re not coming?”
He shakes his head.
I shrug and walk through the doors. I likely have an hour or two left inside this place, so if things get weird or dark—well, darker than that doomed Tunnel I’d been trapped in—at least I’ll wake up soon.
“Come in! Come in!” The voice that beckons is casual and young. I’ve heard it before. In the Arena, calling out the last name of the boy who reunited with his parents.
I enter the foreign space and make it only a few steps before pulling up short. The hexagonal room has walls made mostly of floor-to-ceiling windows, open and also without glass. But what throws me most is that the room is split into what seems like two worlds.
On my left are sofas that look as though they’ve housed a thousand naps on their cushions. A coffee table with scattered cans of soda. Steam rises from a box of fresh pepperoni pizza.
The right half of the room couldn’t be more different. Thick-trunked redwoods rise through holes in the ceiling. Scattered pine-needle flooring with moss-covered stumps surrounds a low crackling campfire. Fishing poles, woodcutting axes, and old-fashioned metal lunchboxes rest in a pile beside a fallen log. Hot dogs roast over the flames.
My mouth waters.
The only thing off about these two scenes is their coloring. Dim, like a photo that needs some hardcore editing to ramp up its exposure and brightness.
“I didn’t know if you’d be more the man-cave type or caveman type, so I set up both.”
It takes me a while to locate the source of the voice. A young man—not much older than me steps forward from the center of the miniature worlds. He’s pale like he hasn’t seen the sun in . . . ever. Dark hair combed but mussed at the same time. He wears a white draped tunic, pinned atop his shoulder, and strapped sandals. A laurel crowns his head.
Hail, Caesar, blah, blah, blah. Is this their Emperor?
He studies me with a tilt of his head. “I’m sensing man cave.”
I look at the forest and a pang of longing hits my chest. Last I spent time in nature—tangible, touchable nature that wasn’t on the other side of a screen—was when Nole took me camping as a kid. Before I learned about the shadows of life.
“Definitely man cave. You look like the forest is about to devour you.” The trees melt down into the floor, the campfire turns to smoke, then ash, then dirt, and the ratty carpet from the lounge side of the room spreads across the forest floor, shoving the pine needles out a window. Beanbag chairs spring up with a popcorn cart and a big-screen TV.
