Mothball had never felt such an instant rush of happiness as when they thumped onto the bottom and the doors of the lift slid open. Sunlight spilled in, though even the brightness of it looked somehow . . . off, like everything else. As if the light was too yellow, too disproportionate to the shadows it created.
Master George slipped through the opening as soon as the elevator doors opened wide enough, holding his Barrier Wand before him like it was a weapon. On the trip down, he’d done his best to examine the device and make adjustments to the dials and switches that ran along its one side. The button at the top—the one that would initiate the Chi’karda Drive and wink them to somewhere that was hopefully a lot safer—looked so enticing to Mothball that she almost reached out and pushed the ruddy thing herself.
They filed out of the elevator and stumbled their way along a narrow section of towering red and orange rock, finally emerging into the vast expanse of the canyon floor. Things looked just as wild there, but on a grander scale. The mighty cliffs that rose up from the rugged valley wobbled and bent and bubbled just as much as the walls inside the headquarters had, but the terror of the sight was magnified. If those cliffs cracked and crumbled, it’d be the end of the Realitants. And the end of the members of the Fifth Army, who bustled about the banks of the river, looking up at the one anomaly that outshone the rest.
The long rip in Reality ran the length of the valley, disappearing at both ends, and hovering in the air at least a hundred yards above the ground. It shone with a glowing blue light that pulsed every few seconds, its luminescence flashing more brilliantly before fading again.
And what Mothball and the others had seen from the balcony was still happening—odd-looking bodies were falling from the blue gash, but none of them had reached the canyon floor yet. About halfway down, they were whisked away—as if caught in a stiff wind or the gale of a hurricane—toward the cliff walls on both sides of the canyon. They perched by the hundreds on jutting rocks or held on to crevices in the stone with gangly arms and legs.
And they weren’t human.
Tick had finally closed his eyes, unable to take one more second of the troubling sights all around him as he lay helpless, strapped to the bed. But there was nothing he could do with his ears. Unable to use his hands to cover them, he had no choice but to listen to the awful wails and moans that streaked through the air and pounded his senses. It was as if he were in some experiment run by a madman to see how much he could scar a kid’s brain for life.
He tried his best to focus his mind on other things. On the odd exchange between Jane and Chu before they’d left him alone. She’d obviously been scheming inside that head of hers and had come to a big decision—something that obviously didn’t involve him yet. He hated to admit it, but he felt as if he had to place some hope in Jane, that she might turn back to those feelings she’d expressed before to him of wanting to do good. Tick didn’t see how it was possible to survive this mess unless she joined forces with him against Chu and all the weird things going on with Reality.
But the sick feeling in his stomach told him the chances of that happening seemed awfully slim. There’d been something sinister about the way she’d been looking back and forth between him and Chu right before they left. And the words she had said—and the way she’d said them—made it sound as if she was up to no good at all. Maybe she’d finally slipped past some threshold from which she’d never come back. Maybe Mistress Jane was finally evil through and through.
The door popped open to reveal Chu. His face was draped in shadow, but there was something about the way he stood in the midst of the shaking that told Tick that the man had moved past his panic attack and was back to business. His next words, shouted over the terrible sounds, removed all doubt.
“We’re putting you back in the Bagger, boy. Time to go for a little ride.”
Sato was finally getting his spirits back. He’d been in a daze since leaving the Thirteenth Reality, trying to come to terms with everything that had happened. But ever since George had pushed the button on that weird little box and the world had turned into a freak show, he’d slowly awakened back to his normal self. And now his first concern was the army he called his own; they were in obvious danger from the nightmare that had ripped open in the sky above them.
He ran forward a few steps, squinting against the sun to look at the creatures that had flown out of the blue gash and attached themselves to the side of the canyon cliffs. They were dark and gray and gangly, almost humanoid . . .
And then it hit him. They were too far away for Sato to get the greatest of looks, but he knew what they were. The remainder of Jane’s creatures, transformed by the Fourth Dimension, were here.
Even as he had the thought, the gray monsters started scampering—and flying—toward the floor of the canyon.
Chapter 53
Overrun
Mothball didn’t like the sight of all those gray creatures descending toward them. She didn’t like it at all.