Nightmare Academy Part 23

Morgan looked at the hotel clerk as he answered. "No, especially if anything happens to those children. Even if someone were hired simply as a stooge, as a decoy, if harm came to even one of the children, that person could face the same charges as an accessory."

The little clerk was clearly shaken by that, looking at Morgan, then at Farmer, then at Morgan.

"However, if such a person were to help us save the children from any harm, that would certainly change the picture for the better."

The little man was shaking, but remained silent.

Mr. Bingham threw some papers into his briefcase and fastened it shut. "Leave Mr. Springfield in the Maze while the computer finishes the program. An apt closure, don't you think?"

On his way to join the others going out the door, he stopped by Elisha's little TV stage. "So I imagine you've learned what it is you came to learn, but of course, like yourself, that knowledge is only temporary. After today, the Knight-Moore Academy will cease to exist, even as a memory, and your investigation will be moot. But make no mistake: What we've learned here will definitely live on-in schools, in films, on television, in recordings, in textbooks-and my friends and I will simply wait. After all, when the world does fall into chaos, such as we've demonstrated here, someone will have to take charge, won't they?"

"It'll be all about power," said Elisha.

"And we will have it," said Bingham with a wink. "Good-bye."

Bingham crossed the room and disappeared through the door.

The thin technician with the ponytail came over to Elisha, said, "I'm very sorry," and threw a lever.

With a neck-wrenching spin, the whole platform where Elisha was sitting rotated until she was facing the wall behind her. A panel in the wall opened, the platform pitched forward, and Elisha tumbled into a tight, elevator-sized cavity.

It was an elevator. It lurched upward, rotated, came to a stomach-turning halt, opened, pitched forward, and threw her out.

There were shouts and squeals of alarm. "It's Sally!" "Where did she come from?" "Is that the way out of here?"

She looked up from the floor and saw Britney, Melinda, Ramon, Tom Cruise, and so many others gathering around her, their faces longing for answers. "What's happening, Sally?" "Where are we?" "What's going to happen?"

The elevator was gone, of course, hidden behind a panel that closed immediately. She got to her feet, looking at all the frightened faces looking back at her, all the kids of different sizes, shapes, colors, and backgrounds, clothing askew, hands and faces dirty from the big struggle with the gate and the front door.

Warren stepped forward, still blotchy with white paint, and extended his hand. "Glad you're okay, Sally"

She appreciated his handshake. "So they got you, too."

Warren nodded, exchanging a glance with Tom Cruise and the other kids who weren't here by choice. "There were guards. Security people, I guess. They rounded up everybody. We're all here."

Nearby was Brett, standing in the middle of the vast room, exploring the white, featureless walls with frightened eyes, looking helpless. Rory and his big gang of toughs were cl.u.s.tered together, looking scared-they wouldn't be slugging and bullying their way out of this problem.

At the far end of the room, standing alone and looking very small in this huge, empty sh.e.l.l of a house, was "Alexander." Elisha took a good, long look at him, for the picture spoke volumes. So this was Alexander, the great leader, and this was his mighty revolution! He had made it to the top, to the pinnacle of power. He'd taken the mansion.

And the mansion was empty.

"My name isn't Sally," she said. "It's Elisha Springfield. Jerry's real name is Elijah, and he's my brother. And I guess you've figured it out: This whole thing was one big lie, and Harold Carlson hasn't conquered anything."

Harold "Alexander" Carlson just stood there, speechless, crestfallen, staring at the walls while his followers stared at him. He had no orders to give, no new visions for the future.

BOOM! An explosion, close enough to shake the floor!

They ran to the windows and could see a ball of fire and billowing smoke where dorm A once stood. At the very edge of the campus, a huge yellow bulldozer was rumbling and squeaking onto the field.

"OOOH!" The sound of a faraway explosion totally rattled the little man. He jumped from the bench, jerked back by the handcuff around his wrist. "Okay! Okay! n.o.body hired me to take a rap for murder. I was just supposed to sit there in the hotel in case anybody came in asking questions. I didn't know-"

"Be quiet!" Farmer yelled. They were his first words since being arrested.

"I didn't know they were going to kill the kids, I swear!"

Nate, Sarah, and Morgan closed in on the frightened man. "Keep going," said Nate, and it was far more threat than request.

"They never killed the kids before. All the other times, all the other years, they were signing up kids who volunteered. They had the kids for two weeks and then the kids went home and everything was okay, no problem, n.o.body asking questions, nothing." He took a breath, his eyes searching the ground. "I should have suspected something when they started signing up runaways, kids who were already missing."

Nate took hold of both his shoulders and locked eyes with him. "What are you saying?"

"It's the fifth year, the last experiment. I don't know what they're doing up there, but this time they have to erase everything-not just the campus. I mean the kids, everything."

"How do we get there?"

"The road's gone. They took that out yesterday. There's a tunnel ..."

It was all Nate could do to keep from crushing the answer out of the man. "WHERE?"

The man rattled the handcuff. "I'll take you there, just let me loose!"

Elijah was getting toward the end of his strength, singing crazily, jumping suddenly, trying to be unpredictable, but his theory was proving out.

Whenever he paused to rest, the warm, welcoming environment of the family room of a big log house surrounded him like a fluffy comforter, steady, stable, and unchanging. The girl in the chair kept right on smiling and babbling, her fingers still tapping away the same little coded message.

Whenever he acted crazy, doing new, unpredictable behaviors, the environment got sketchy, the textures foggy, the sensory illusions of smell, touch, and sound dull.

Most of all, the whole world froze for a minuscule moment every six seconds, like clockwork.

So Elijah realized he could still know things, and what he knew right now was that the computer running this mad ride was reloading and processing information on a six-second cycle, a fact he could detect only because he'd been in this place for so long he could hear it and feel it.

As long as everything happened predictably, like one step following another, an exhale following an inhale, a scratch following an itch, the computer could handle it.

But if he gave the computer new information it wasn't expecting-silly songs with the last word changed or not rhyming when it should, or goofy antics that weren't predictable-then the computer had to process all that new information, which took time, and this horrible, crazy world would actually blink, just for an instant, every six seconds.

It was that blink he was watching for as he made a blithering fool of himself, and after several crazy, exhausting cycles, he knew when to expect it, like dancing to the rhythm of music. His dear sister was right; behind the couch where he'd been lying, where usually he saw only a wall of huge logs, the round shape of a lens would flash into view, quick like the click of a shutter, every six seconds.

The projector, at six o'clock.

"Okay," he said to himself and anyone listening, "one more time."

He jumped to one side of the girl's chair, then back, then back where he started, and then jumped in place, whooping out a stupid song he hoped the computer hadn't heard before-"Back up the batter and Whoof! In the flutter and wowie, look at us bang on the roof! "-it all had to be new information!

The wall blinked after six seconds. He saw the lens. He hopped, went to his knees and clucked, stood up again, spun in a circle- The wall blinked again. Now he was sure where the lens was, even if he couldn't see it.

He grabbed the chair the girl was sitting in and yanked it high over his head. The girl remained exactly where she was, sitting in midair, still smiling at him and telling him he could create his own truth any way he wanted it.

With all his strength, and quite glad about it, he brought the chair down where the projector was hiding and felt the chair connect with something. There was a crash and the tinkling of gla.s.s. The girl sitting in midair began to flutter, her voice turned to static, and then, like a flame blown out, she vanished.

Now all this was new information, too. The pleasant family room was looking foggy, out of focus, and within six seconds Elijah caught sight of a real wall beyond the log wall-and the steel rungs of a ladder.

He ran forward, arms outstretched, eyes locked open to see the next blink.

There were the rungs again, embedded in the wall just two feet to the left, within reach!

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 cla.s.sroom 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 h.e.l.l. 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.

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 CLa.s.sROOM . . . 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.

He stared another moment, and then ...

Oh, great ...

It finally sank in: The computer was executing a program, setting off charges to destroy all the buildings-with this building the last on the list.