Chương 55: Book Two - Chapter 5: "What's a Scooby-Gang?"

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The same image flashed across all three screens: a graphic close-up of a rotting boar's skull, hollowed out and fitted over a person's head, the animal's severed neck flaps hung loose against the man's collar.

"For most of my life, I believed that the capacity for self-sacrifice was either present in a person or not. I believed that selflessness was a fixed trait, like temperament or pain tolerance." The boar's head nodded as he spoke. The mouth didn't move, though; the male-sounding, bass-heavy voice came from inside, muffling all the words. Two red lights coming from somewhere behind us illuminated the garage door; the crimson light washed out the spray-painted words I'd noticed moments before.

"You're about to enter the instrument I built to test those beliefs." He paused; the boar's head shifted slightly, a subtle gesture, yet enough to clearly convey he was looking directly at one of us.

"Though in your case, Liam, I suspect this next zone is redundant. You've already been tested. And failed. Didn't you?"

"The fuck did you say?!" Liam yelled loud enough to make Isabel flinch. He planted himself where he stood, shoulders high and tight, as the cords in his neck clenched in time with his fists.

"You don't know shit about me, Piglet!"

"It's a boar, you imbecile." The bass-heavy voice had to be some voice modulator inside the head. The color drained from Liam's face as he turtled; his head dropped, shoulders pulling up around his ears. I'd seen that look before on people who'd just heard their own worst thoughts said out loud. It was the posture my mother took when the doctor delivered the early-onset ALS diagnosis. He'd obviously worked something out internally that he wasn't ready to share.

I added discussing it with him later to the growing list and tried not to think about what else the boar guy already knew about us.

"You will address me as…" A momentary hesitation.

"The Boargore King."

"Is this for real?" Isabel asked, turning to me. Tre shook his head.

"How is this place so incredibly unserious and also the scariest place in existence?" I spoke to the screen.

"Is that like… What is that? A pun?"

"It's the name of the person holding your lives in one hand and the exit in the other." That shut us up. The shot of the King cut to a wide, high angle on an open concrete floor with a garage door at the far end. Letters were sprayed across it, but the camera sat too far back for me to read them.

"You have to escape my basement via this loading dock." When the image cut back to the Boargore King, I stepped closer to the largest screen. Past the tusks, past the preserved muzzle (clearly the work of a skilled taxidermist), inside the open mouth of the boar, a pair of human eyes caught the light. There was a man inside. Just some guy. A guy who already knew things about us we didn't know about each other.

"As you proceed, you will face impossible choices. What will you give of yourself to save the others? Who among you is ready to trade their life so another may live?" That hot, heavy feeling hit me. The one you get when a room full of people stops and stares at you. I kept my eyes on the screen and clicked my skeletal fingers together once, but I was fairly sure everyone was looking directly at the back of my head. Maybe that wasn't true; I didn't turn around to confirm it either way.

And besides, it's not like anyone else was volunteering to do insane things in the name of saving us all.

"You must choose amongst yourselves." The boar's head moved slowly from left to right, sweeping its milky eyes across the four of us.

"Think that's her?" Liam asked us through gritted teeth.

"Who?"" Summer." The desperation in Liam's voice sounded like unchecked anger. I thumbed the Companions app open. His Fear had risen to seventy, which told me the game was interpreting it differently.

"No way," Tre said, pointing at the center screen.

"That's a dude." Liam didn't look convinced. Frankly, neither was I. If Maltheris could turn Tre into a killer doll, why not turn Summer into a man? Nothing in this place was outside the range of possibilities. And why did it matter? Knowing his identity wouldn't change the fact that a guy wearing a hollowed-out, rotting head, like a character mask at Disneyland, was barking orders at us from a TV. And if he could answer us in real time, that meant he had to be seeing us from somewhere.

If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation. As I looked up to search the ceiling for cameras, I was surprised to find there was no ceiling, at least not where I expected it to be. The walls ended about twenty feet off the ground. Above them, exposed I-beams crossed the ceiling another thirty feet up. It was an industrial skeleton you'd expect to see in an airport hangar or a giant warehouse.

Suspended heavily from those beams was a massive, thick slab of solid steel roughly the size of the room itself. It hovered in the shadows, looking exactly as if the original ceiling had been cut free and hoisted high into the air for some ungodly reason. I couldn't spot any cameras and quickly forgot to keep looking as I stared at that giant metal slab, wondering what part it would play in someone's death. Would I be under it when the cables finally snapped?

If it came flying down toward Tre or Isabel, even Liam, I already knew what I would do.

"Is she here?" Liam raised his voice over the Boargore King's.

"Is Summer here?"

"My basement is fairly full at the moment. Perhaps the person you seek is within. Happy hunting, Liam." The screens blacked out. Tre whistled.

"It must smell like shit inside that head, eh?" No one laughed. Tre held his grin a beat past the joke, waiting on takers. I'd been running with his bad jokes since we were kids, and even I let that one hit the floor.

"Hey." I examined Liam.

"What was with that thing he said to you?" He tugged the bottom of his shirt.

"What're you talking about?"

"The boar guy said you've already been tested. And failed. What's that about?"

"How should I know?" Liam threw his arms out, turning away from me. I put my palms out.

"Okay. Relax." Tre looped his thumbs under his overall straps.

"When is it gonna—" A loud buzzer drowned out the rest of his sentence, as a digital-green timer appeared in the upper right corner of my vision, counting backward from six hours. Zone Two Incineration: 5: 59: 59 Six hours sounded like a long time in theory. Thinking about the map, which was mostly fog, I tried to predict how much total walking we'd have to do and how many rooms we'd lose time exploring. When the numbers started adding up, I had to fight a sudden desire to run away.

Not that there was anywhere to go but forward. The door on the other side of the antechamber rolled open, releasing an odor that reminded me of the parking garage at the hospital I'd brought Mom to too many times to count. The light from the antechamber spilled into the first few feet of the newly revealed corridor, reflecting off damp concrete floors and thick slabs of welded metal walls, closer together than the room we were standing in, creating a narrow pathway.

There was just enough room for two people to walk shoulder-to-shoulder without brushing against either wall. Cramped, damp, dark corridors awaited us, and that was probably as good as it would get from here out. Beyond what I could see of the walls and floor was an absolute dark that the dim beacon barely managed to chip away at. Isabel strode past me.

"Time's wasting, guys." She didn't look at me as she went by. I didn't mind not going first. What I could have lived without was the feeling that I'd pissed off the first new friend I'd made in an embarrassing number of years. The claustrophobic hallway had the same wide-open ceiling as the previous room, but was so narrow that we could barely walk comfortably alongside each other. The walls were thick slabs of welded metal; ugly, sloppy seams visible every five feet or so.

Dark patches of rust bled through in places the welds hadn't taken cleanly. Tre climbed onto Liam's back, and Isabel and I walked side-by-side. We started slowly, easing away from the pool of light cast from the antechamber, like wading away from a dock into a murky swamp. The space between work lights reminded me again of the forest in Zone One where it was too dark to see anything clearly. Now, I saw fuzzy shadows and distorted silhouettes moving in the dim corridor ahead.

Real or imagined, they made my body clench either way.

"Nora," Tre said.

"Just picture everyone's white eyes floating in the dark, like the Scooby gang does."

"What's a Scooby gang?" Liam asked.

"Oh, sweet baby Jesus!" Tre pressed the back of his hand to his forehead.

"They took his memory of Scooby-Doo?" He shook one tiny fist in the air.

"Is there no line these rat bastards won't cross?!"

"Seriously, though, that's a weirdly specific memory to erase," Isabel said.

"Maybe Maltheris just hates dogs," Tre offered. The group chuckled uncomfortably. All of us were pretty unsettled, wondering what other random memories Maltheris stole. Beyond the "what" was stolen question was the "why?" Why did he take Scooby-Doo from Liam's brain? It all seemed so arbitrary. My boot touched a sticky spot on the ground, making the same sound as a sneaker peeling off a movie theater's dirty floor.

Without light, it was hard to tell what we were stepping on or in, and though our beacon of dim light grew closer, its ambient light hadn't reached us yet.

"Gross," I said.

"Did anyone else step in that?"

"In what?"

"No clue. I can't see shit, Tre."

"Oh, wait," Isabel said. A harsh LED glare cut the darkness, casting bluish light across her face as she tapped her phone to unlock it. The flashlight flared to life.

"Hey," Tre whined, "how come you get a phone, and Nora's stuck with the LifeLine?" The flashlight went out. [UNAUTHORIZED ITEM DETECTED: ZONE PURGE INITIATED] I took the message as the absolute end. We're being purged. My hands clawed at the air behind me, searching for Tre on Liam's shoulder. The phone screen stayed lit, hitting Isabel from below in a moldy greenish wash that made her skin waxy. The screen split down the middle.

A slimy purple tongue curled out and affectionately licked Isabel from neck to cheekbone." GAH!" Isabel hurled the phone. THUNK. It bounced off my head before hitting the concrete.

"Ow!"

"Sorry!" Isabel cringed. The phone landed screen-up, throwing off enough of a green glow to see its tongue lapping at air. Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack. Six wire-bundle legs punched through the edges of the glass, three on each side, and lifted the screen off the ground, mouth up. The screen's glass peeled open, the side bevels stretching thinner to widen the mouth. Its tongue unfurled, thick and slick and way too long, dragging across the concrete before reeling back with grit stuck to the underside.

Liam and Tre screamed at the same time. That phone had been with her since Whisperwood, and it hadn't occurred to me that it was also probably filled with pictures of whatever family Maltheris had led her to believe was real. She'd sat on the bathroom floor for hours unable to remember what her parents looked like and never reached for it once in front of me. Did she no longer trust what was on it? The phone-thing swung its open face toward Isabel, trembling on its new legs.

The tongue slid out again, seeming to taste the air for her.

"Did it wave at me?" Isabel asked as it took off in a fast-jittering spider sprint, carrying its mouth's glow as it disappeared ahead.

"You created life. Congrats, Mommy," I said.

"Shut up, Nora," Isabel replied.

"I thought it was funny."

"Thanks, Tre," I said. The work light was still a long way off, in the same direction that thing had run.