Nightmare Academy (41 page)

He closed his eyes, tried not to feel the room he was in, tried to sense only the ladder—

His hand locked onto a steel rung that wasn't there.

No! It
is
there! The
ladder
is real! Climb, Elijah! Climb, no matter
what your senses tell you!

He pulled on the rung. Somewhere inside his nervous system, a faint message was delivered: You're lifting yourself. All around, on every side, he was still in that pleasant family room in the big log house and nothing had changed; but he groped, then he grabbed another unseen, almost unfelt rung, and pulled again. Now his toe found a rung, and he pushed with his leg.

He was climbing out of there, no matter what the room said, no matter what he thought he was seeing.

BOOM!
Another explosion rattled the valley, the shock wave bounding off the mountainsides and rolling through again, shaking the ground and quivering the mansion. Elisha and all the kids could only watch helplessly as dorm B blossomed toward the sky in a cloud of smoke, fire, and splinters.

“They're erasing the campus,” said Elisha. “They're going to cover up everything they did here.”

Warren was beside her, looking out the same window. “So what are they going to do with us?”

Elisha couldn't say it. She didn't even want to think it. “Can we break these windows?”

“We've tried.”

“Let's try again.”

Even an ax in Rory's hands simply bounced off the thick Plexiglas.

Warren called out, “Okay, everybody,
do
something! Grab a tool and do some damage, find a weak spot, a crack, a door, anything!”

Even Alexander complied, grabbing a shovel and looking for any seam or crack he might be able to pry open.

BOOM!
There went the main classroom building, all of Ms. Fitzhugh's artwork, all the foreign language materials, all the history and social studies books. Ashes, fragments of desks, and tattered pages floated through the air like snowflakes.

Nate and Sarah could hear the explosion, even feel it in their feet as they followed the little hotel clerk through the woods to a narrow tunnel hewn and blasted out of the rock.

“Looks like nothing but an old mine,” said a marshal.

“It used to be a mine entrance,” said the little man, “but they bored it out to use as an escape tunnel. They had this whole thing planned from the beginning.”

“So how do we know you're not bluffing?”

BOOM . . . OOM . . . OOM . . .
oom . . . oom
. . . This time the sound of the explosion came echoing at them through the tunnel.

“Sounds like this will get us there,” said Nate, clicking on a flashlight. They'd all been advised they would need lights.

The marshal waved to his men. “Okay, Wyrick, Perkins, Bocelli, up front with me. Springfields and Morgan, stay close behind. Hanson, stay here with the suspect. The rest of you take up the rear.” Then he reached into his belt and produced a spare semiautomatic pistol, handing it to Nate. “You may need this.”

Nate received it. “Thanks.”

They plunged into the black, endless throat of the tunnel.

Elijah kept going through the motions, clinging with desperate hope to each rung of the ladder, hoping the faint sensations of gripping and climbing were the correct ones. The pleasant room around him was starting to warp and ripple as the colors, sounds, and even smells, became . . .
less real.
He kept going, grabbing and pulling, stepping and pushing, rung after rung—

His head broke into the clear, suddenly, as if he'd just broken through the surface of a lake. Though his body was still floundering in a swirling, fluttering nonreality groping to find the next rung, from the neck up, the world was real. He could see cables and wiring, a vast steel gridwork supporting lights, holographic projectors, movable walls and panels, color and sound generators. It looked like the most expensive movie sound stage ever built.

He could clearly see the rungs of the ladder now, embedded in the concrete wall he was climbing, and directly above him, a catwalk. He pulled himself out of the swirling light, out of the weird, fuzzy static until, like a drowning man flopping into a boat, he rolled onto the catwalk. Below him, the pleasant family room, several disjointed hallways, even some phony forest, wavered and rippled as if they were under water.

He'd had enough of this place. There was a door at the far end of the catwalk. He pulled himself to his feet, then limped and staggered through that door.

He was in a control room, most likely the place where they concocted and controlled his continuous, mind-frying hell. Strangely, the place was deserted. Only a few consoles and monitors were still operating. The sound of frantic voices and clanging tools was coming from somewhere, like a video playing. He dragged himself farther into the room, looking about, trying to find the source. His eye caught a glimmer of light behind him—

He turned to see huge screens on the wall, and immediately recognized his sister and most of the student body, all banging, gouging, prying with garden tools, trying to get out of a huge, white room with high windows.

His mind was tired. He watched them struggle, but nothing connected; nothing made any sense.

His mind was tired. He watched
them struggle, but nothing connected;
nothing made any sense.

Then one piece fell into place: Those windows look like the mansion's windows.

Next piece: It's the mansion.

Final piece: They're trapped inside!

Immediately below the screens, a computer monitor flickered, running through columns and graphics. He stumbled to it, stared at it. It meant nothing to him.
What . . . what is this?

There were lines of information in bright red: DORMITORY A . . . DORMITORY B . . . MAIN CLASSROOM . . . LIBRARY. To the left of each line, four zeroes and the flashing word DONE.

Below these were the rest of the campus structures, all listed in green, preceded by four digits and the word STANDBY. The numbers before DORMITORY C were counting down, just going through 410.8 and dropping fast.

At the very bottom was the line, 055.5 STANDBY MANSION AND CONTROL CENTER.

Elijah sat at the console, staring at the monitor, then studying the big screens above. One showed the kids trapped in the mansion; another showed a burning pile of rubble and a black column of smoke. A third showed a dormitory—with the letter C on the corner.

Was all this supposed to mean something? He just kept staring, his mind an exhausted, burned-out blob inside his head.

Elisha was banging with an ax on the seam of the front door, guessing where a hinge or a latch might be, but the structure was solid, her desperate blows futile.

Rory came along. “Let me try.”

She stood back, and he struck the seam so hard it broke the ax handle. He threw the broken end down and just stared.

“There has to be a way,” she said.

Rory looked at her a moment, then said, “I want you to know, I really did like your brother.”

BOOM!
This time it was dorm C. Beyond the smoke and flame they could see another bulldozer standing by.

Elijah saw the explosion on the big screen, and then—

He saw the line “DORMITORY C” go from green to red. The numbers were all zeroes, and the computer reported with the flashing word DONE.