Black (48 page)

But his flesh didn't burn.

The shadow moved on, just ahead of him. His strength began to fade.

The wall of bats was moving toward the village. No! It would reach them long before Tom could sound any warning.

The animals and birds howled and shrieked in aimless circles of confusion.

Here in the shadow was death. Ahead, before the shadow, there was still life. The life of the colored forest. The life that allowed Tanis to execute incredible maneuvers in the air with superhuman strength. The life that had fed Tom's own strength over the previous days.

One last wedge of hope lodged stubbornly in Tom's mind. If only he could catch the shadow. Pass back into the life ahead of it. If only he could summon the last reserves of his strength from any fruit on the trees, from any life in the land.

If he could just stay ahead of the bats.

The fruit was falling from the charred trees and thudding to the ground like a slow hail. Tom veered to his left, dipped down and grabbed a piece of fruit, and bit off a chunk of flesh. He swallowed without chewing.

Immediately, strength returned.

Clenching his hands around the fruit, he tore forward. Juice seeped around his knuckles. He shoved another bite in his mouth and swallowed and ran.

Slowly, very slowly, he gained ground on the shadow. Why the bats didn't swoop down and chew him to pieces, he didn't know. Perhaps in their eagerness to reach the village they ignored this one human below.

He sucked down two more chunks of fruit and chased the shadow for ten minutes in a full sprint before catching it. But now his panic had left him. The moment he passed in front of the canopy of bats, his strength surged.

He snatched a piece of unspoiled fruit and ripped off a huge bite.

Sweet, sweet release. Tom shivered and sobbed. And he ran.

With a strength beyond himself, he ran, gaining on the shadow, on the approaching throng shrieking high above him. First fifty yards, then a hundred, then two hundred. Soon they were a massive black cloud well behind him.

From a hill he could see their approach with stunning clarity. From this vantage point he saw what was happening in a new light. The black forest was encroaching on the green in a long, endless line that blocked the sun and burned the land to a crisp.

He raced on, vision blurred with tears, screaming in rage.

The sky above the valley was empty when Tom broke from the forest. It was, in fact, the only sign that there was anything at all askew. At any other time at least a dozen Roush would be floating in lazy circles above the village, or tumbling along the grass with the children. Now there wasn't a single one to be seen. No Michal, no Gabil.

Below, the villagers went about peacefully, ignorantly. Children scampered between the huts, laughing in delight; mothers cuddled their young as they sang softly and stepped lightly in dance; fathers retold their tales of great exploits—all unaware of the approaching throng that would soon tear into them.

Tom tore down the hill. “Oh, Elyon,” he pleaded. “Please, I beg you, give me a way.”

He ran into the village screaming at the top of his lungs. “Shataiki! They're coming! Everyone grab something to defend yourselves!”

Johan and Rachelle skipped toward him with smiles on their faces, waving eagerly. “Thomas,” Rachelle called. “There you are.”

“Rachelle!” Tom rushed up to her. “Quick, you have to protect your-self.” He glanced up the hill and saw the wall of bats above the crest. Thousands of the black creatures suddenly broke rank and poured into the valley.

It was too late. There was no way they could defend themselves. These weren't the ghosts with phantom claws that they had learned how to combat with fancy aerial kicks. Like Tanis, they would be pummeled by the bloodthirsty beasts.

Tom whirled around and grabbed both of their hands. “Come with me!” he demanded, sprinting down the path. “Hurry!”

“Look!” Johan yelled. He'd seen the coming Shataiki. Tom glanced over and saw the boy's wide eyes looking back at the beasts now descending on the village.

“The Thrall!” he cried. “The Thrall. Run!”

Rachelle sprinted by his side, face white. “Elyon!” she cried. “Elyon, save us!”

“Run!” Tom yelled.

Johan kept wanting to turn around, forcing Tom to repeatedly jerk him back down the path. “Faster! We have to get into the Thrall!”

Tom urged them up the stairs, two at a time. Behind them, screams filled the village. “Don't look back! Go, go, go!” He shoved them roughly through the doors and spun back.

No fewer than ten thousand of the beasts dived into the village, claws extended. The screams from the villagers were overwhelmed by a high-pitched shrieking from thousands of open Shataiki throats. Talons swiped like sickles; fangs gnashed ravenously in anticipation of meat.

To his right, a Shataiki descended on a young boy fleeing down the street. He fell to the ground, smothered by a dozen bats, who sank their talons into his soft flesh. The boy's screams became one with the Shataiki's shrieks.

Not ten paces from the boy, a woman flailed her arms wildly at two beasts who had attached themselves to her head and gnawed madly at her skull. The woman whirled
about, screaming, and despite the blood covering her face, Tom recognized her. Karyl.

Tom groaned in shock. All around the village, the helpless fell easy prey to the bloodthirsty Shataiki.

And still they came. The sky was now black with a hundred thousand of the creatures, streaming over the hills into the valley. He knew it was this way in every village.

Tom slammed the large doors shut, gasping. He threw the large bolt and turned to Rachelle and Johan, who stood on the green floor, holding each other's hands innocently.

“What's happening?” Rachelle asked in a trembling voice, her wide green eyes fixed on Tom. “We have to fight back!”

Tom ran across the floor and shut the rear doors that led to an outer entrance.

“Are these the only two entrances?” he demanded.

“What is—”

“Tell me!”

“Yes!”

No Shataiki could get into the Thrall without breaking down the doors. He turned back.

“Listen to me.” He paused to catch his wind. “I know this is going to sound strange, and you may not know what I'm talking about, but we've been attacked.”

“Attacked?” quipped Johan. “Really attacked?”

“Yes, really attacked,” he said. “The Shataiki have left the black forest.”

“That's . . . that's not possible!” Rachelle said.

“Yes, it is. Possible and real.”

Tom walked over to the front doors and tested them. He could barely hear the sounds of the attack beyond the walls of the Thrall. Rachelle and Johan remained still, hand in hand, at the center of the jade floor where they had danced a thousand dances. They had no way to understand what was really happening outside. They had no idea how dramatically the colorful world they had known so well just a few moments ago had forever changed.

Tom walked up to them and put his arms on their shoulders. And then the adrenaline that had rushed him through the forest and into this great hall evaporated. The full realization of the devastation racking the land beyond the Thrall's heavy wooden doors descended upon him like ten tons of mortar. He hung his head and tried to remain strong.

Rachelle placed a hand on his hair and stroked it slowly. “It is all right, Thomas,” she said. “Don't cry like this. Everything will be just fine. The Gathering is in a short time.”

Like a flood, despair swept through Tom's chest. They were doomed. He strained to maintain a semblance of control. How could Tanis have been deceived so easily? What a fool he'd been to even
listen
to the black beast! To even go near the black forest.

“Please, don't cry,” Johan said. “Please, don't cry, Thomas. Rachelle is right. Everything will be fine.”

An agonizing half hour crept by. Rachelle and Johan tried to ask him questions about their plight. “Where are the others? What will we do now? How long will we stay here? Where do these black creatures live?”

Each time, Tom shrugged them off as he paced about the great room. The jade hall would become their coffin. If he did answer Rachelle or Johan, it was with a nondescript putoff. How could he explain this betrayal to them? He couldn't .They would have to discover it themselves. For now, their only objective was to survive.

At first the Shataiki attacks on the outer Thrall came in waves, and at one point it sounded as though every last one of the dirty beasts had descended on the dome, beating and scratching furiously to gain entrance. But they could not.

An hour must have passed before Tom noticed the change. They had sat in silence for a good ten minutes without an attack.

He stood shakily to his feet and crossed the floor to the front doors. Silence. The bats either had left or waited quietly on the roof outside, waiting to attack the moment the doors opened.

Tom faced Rachelle and Johan, who still, after all this time, stood in the center of the green floor. It was time to tell them.

“Tanis drank the water,” he said simply.

They stiffened, mouths gaping. Together they dropped their heads, obviously unfamiliar with the new emotions of sorrow washing through them. They knew what this meant, of course. Not specifically, but in general they knew something very bad had happened. It was the first time anything bad had happened to either one of them.

Silently their shoulders began to shake, gently at first, but then with greater force until they could stand it no longer, and they threw their arms around each other and sobbed.

The sting of tears returned to Tom's eyes. How could such a tragedy have happened at all? For a long time they clung to each other and cried.

“What will we do? What will we do?” Rachelle asked a dozen times. “Can't we go to the lake?”

“I don't know,” Tom responded quietly. “I think everything's changed, Rachelle.”

Johan looked at Tom with a tear-streaked face. “But why did Tanis do that when Elyon told us not to?”

“I don't know, Johan,” Tom said, taking the boy's hand. “Don't worry. Earth may have changed, but Elyon will never change. We just have to find him.”

Rachelle tilted her head back and raised her hands, palms up. “Elyon!” she cried. “Elyon, can you hear us?” Tom looked on hopelessly. “Elyon, where are you?” Rachelle cried again.

She dropped her hands and looked despondently at Tom and Johan. “It's different,” she said.

He nodded. “Everything is different now.” He glanced up at the green-domed roof.
Except for the Thrall.
“We will wait until morning and then, if it seems safe, we will try to find Elyon.”

33

T
he night had been pure agony for Tom. He'd awakened screaming, soaked in a cold sweat, at two in the morning. He couldn't go back to sleep, and he couldn't bring himself to tell Kara about the nightmare. He could scarcely comprehend what it all meant himself. The images of the black wall of bats spreading over the land and then tearing into the village hung on him like a sopping, heavy cloak.

The early morning hours had been torture, relieved only in part by the onset of a new distraction.

“Do we have Internet access?” he asked Kara at six.

“Yes. Why?”

“I need a distraction. Who knows, maybe a little crash course in survival may help me out in the land of bats.”

She looked at him, taken aback.

“What?” he asked.

“I thought we were more interested in how that reality can save this world than how to build weapons to blow away a few black bats for Tanis.”

If only she knew. He couldn't bring himself to tell her, not yet. She would never understand how utterly real it all felt.

“I need a distraction,” he said.

“So do I,” she said.

They spent the next three hours browsing subjects on Yahoo! that Tom thought might come in handy. Maybe Tanis had been onto something with this idea of his to build weapons. If they were right, the only things that were transferable between the realities were skills and knowledge. He couldn't take a gun back with him, but he could take back the knowledge of
how
to build a gun, couldn't he?