Memory Maze

by Gordon Korman

  Mako!

  Marcinko would have been instantly bent if the strength of the onslaught hadn’t sent him staggering backward. He crashed into a mailbox, and the pain of the collision doubled him over, breaking the eye contact. Panic-stricken, he turned and ran, knowing he dared not look back for fear that those eyes would seize him again and he would be lost.

  He sensed rather than heard Mako’s footsteps behind him, but there was no urgency there, no real chase. Why?

  A moment later, he had his explanation. A powerful blow struck him from the side, driving him into a blind alley. The attack dropped him to the litter-strewn pavement, and he looked up to see a boy not much older than the Opus kid, but twice Jax’s size, built like a football player.

  Marcinko raised his fists to fight back, but it soon became clear that the brawl was not going to be a physical one. Wilson DeVries gazed down at him with a mesmeric punch equal to the tackle that had put him in the alley. Marcinko battled back, sealing his mind to the intrusion. He was a match for this teenager, and perhaps more than a match. Marcinko was not the most naturally talented sandman, but he had one advantage — the experience of using his gift to scratch out a living against all odds — and no kid had that. Slowly, he began to see his own image appear as he bulled his way into the boy’s mind.

  “Listen to me,” he breathed. “The next time you see Elias Mako, knock his teeth down his throat! He’s your enemy! Do it to him before he does it to you….”

  It almost worked.

  Mako turned the corner and stepped into the gloom of the alley just in time to spot Wilson’s haymaker coming his way.

  Mako said one word: “Stop.”

  There was no time for Sentia’s director to hypnotize Wilson, who was already under Marcinko’s power. Yet the dark eyes crackled with such ferocity, his voice resounded with such command, that the meaty fist froze in midair an inch from Mako’s jaw.

  Then he transferred his electrifying attention to the trapped sandman, who was helpless to do anything more than stare back. “That’s better,” said a mellow voice, almost kindly. “Be a good boy and come with me.”

  It sounded enormously reasonable, even inviting. But as Marcinko got up and followed Mako and Wilson to a waiting limousine, a tiny thought still nagged from a distant corner of his brain: that whatever had happened to Evelyn Lolis must have started exactly this way.

  The Quackenbush Bentley was parked in the main drive of the school on Monday afternoon, blocking the bus lane as if that was the privilege of one of the most expensive automobiles in the world.

  “Whoa, check out that car!” Felicity exclaimed, impressed. “It must be at least the governor visiting. I mean, who in this dump would be picked up by a sweet ride like that?”

  At that moment, Zachary slipped out from behind the wheel and surveyed the milling students. At last, he recognized Jax and waved. “Nice to see you again, Mr. Jack.” He opened the rear door and stood waiting for his passenger.

  Jax felt the heat from his face crisping the air around him.

  Felicity gaped. “You’ve got a limo?”

  “It isn’t mine,” Jax said quickly. “It’s my — dentist’s. They offer pick-up service.”

  She looked at him in disbelief. “I must be going to the wrong dentist.”

  Jax rushed into the car before he could be caught in any more obvious lies. “Listen, Zachary, from now on do you think you can park a couple of blocks away? The Bentley kind of stands out.”

  “Certainly, Mr. Jack. From now on, I’ll stop in front of the mortuary, where a limousine won’t look quite so out of place.”

  The drive to the Quackenbush estate took half an hour, long enough for Jax to enjoy a few snacks from the minibar. Eating kept his mind off the job that lay ahead — keeping a dying man alive by a technique that had never been tested, using a power Jax himself still didn’t fully understand.

  All that Opus and Sparks hoopla had better be true or I’ll have one very ticked-off billionaire on my hands!

  Avery Quackenbush received Jax in a palatial sitting room just off the master bedroom. Instead of the usual nurses, he was accompanied by a bald man in a business suit and white lab coat.

  The billionaire performed the introduction. “Say hello to Dr. Pavel. He’s a big pain in my neck, and you probably won’t like him either. He’s in a lousy mood most of the time because it’s his responsibility to keep me from dropping dead, and that’s not the easiest job in the world.”

  Dr. Pavel shook Jax’s hand. “I want to tell you up front that I don’t approve of this ‘treatment.’ What exactly are you planning to do to my patient?”

  Jax was tongue-tied.

  “Don’t let this overpriced sawbones intimidate you,” the tycoon prodded. “You’re a master at what you do.”

  “I’m not really sure exactly how this is supposed to work,” Jax admitted. “I’m going to hypnotize Mr. Quackenbush and try to relax him. I guess the idea is that, over time, I might be able to slow down his metabolism.”

  “And the science behind this is … ?” the doctor prompted dubiously.

  “A lot happens with the mind that science can’t explain,” Jax replied, a little annoyed at being criticized for something that hadn’t even been his idea in the first place. “That doesn’t make it magic or supernatural — it’s just something we haven’t figured out yet….” His voice trailed off as he recognized where he’d gotten that explanation. It had come from Dr. Mako, his worst enemy.

  “Good answer!” Quackenbush approved. “Now let’s get on with it. I’m not getting any younger.” To the doctor, he said, “Beat it, so the kid can do his thing.”

  “Of course I’ll be staying to monitor your vital signs,” Pavel sniffed.

  “If I had vital signs, I wouldn’t need either one of you!” the billionaire growled. “Oh, all right — but get in the way and you’re out on your ear.”

  Eventually Jax and his subject faced each other across an elegant tooled-leather tabletop. Jax took a deep breath and peered into the tycoon’s faded gray eyes. It was not a smooth hypnotism. A mesmeric link required submission, and Quackenbush was used to being in charge. It wasn’t natural for him to submit.

  “You are feeling drowsy,” Jax suggested.

  “Says you!” came the belligerent response.

  Jax bore down, focusing his strength into his deep purple gaze. Maybe this frail old man was the alpha male in the boardroom, but when minds were wrestling for control, the advantage always went to the guy named Opus.

  The PIP was very faint at first, and blotchy around the edges. As the detail filled in and Jax could see what his subject saw, he realized that the tycoon’s vision was failing along with the rest of his body’s functions. Jax’s image of himself was indistinct, and the tubes and wires that were inside Quackenbush’s field of vision were just a blur.

  Jax was at a loss for a moment. This was the point when the mind-bender would give his subject a task to perform or implant a post-hypnotic suggestion to be triggered at a later time. In this case, though, the goal was less specific. He could not order a person to slow his heart rate or reduce his metabolism. If that were true, hypnotists would be medical magicians, commanding broken bones to heal and damaged organs to repair themselves. The only way he had half a chance of helping Avery Quackenbush was by relaxing him.

  “You are very calm and tranquil,” he said, feeling like a novice hypnotist on his first day at Sentia. One of Mako’s favorite lectures was that there were infinite ways to bring a subject to a desired state.

  “You’re floating on a cloud, weightless, boneless, and free of any care in the world. Gravity has no hold on you; nothing pulls you down. You feel total satisfaction, happiness, even joy….”

  Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of Dr. Pavel checking monitors and readouts. It would have been helpful to know what these indicated, but he dared not let his attention wander, for fear of weakening the mesmeric link.

  He tried a few other
descriptive scenarios — lying on feather beds, drifting on a gentle current, swaying to soft, beautiful music. At one point, he was aware of the doctor taking his patient’s heart rate and whispering, “Remarkable!” Jax couldn’t be sure exactly what that meant, but it sounded encouraging. He was really too tired to think about it much. A yawn escaped him. It was hard to come here after a full day of school, when he was just so sleepy….

  He sat bolt upright, suddenly aware of what was happening to him. This wasn’t his drowsiness — it was Quackenbush’s! With a flicker of one eye, he checked the antique grandfather clock over the tycoon’s shoulder and realized in shock that the mesmeric link was nearly half an hour old. It hadn’t seemed anywhere near that long. Mind-benders frequently implanted post-hypnotic suggestions to be activated days or even weeks later. But it was unusual to be connected to a subject for more than a few minutes. Anything longer than that left the hypnotist’s mind exposed. And now Quackenbush’s relaxation was beginning to leach into Jax.

  Jax tensed his body in the hope that physical alertness would extend to his mind. But a moment later, he heard the doctor murmur, “Heart rate rising …”

  I can’t wake myself up without doing the same to Mr. Quackenbush!

  There was no choice but to sink back into this stupor and just hang on.

  He might have dozed off if it hadn’t been for the ache in both knees. It traveled up his legs into his hips and across his lower back. Stiffness, too, the kind that came from sitting too long in one place. And his neck, his shoulders —

  It’s not my pain! It’s his!

  This was what it felt like to be ninety-six and dying! And Jax was picking it up through the pain center in his subject’s mind.

  With a sense of dread, Jax realized that he was entering completely uncharted territory here. Even at Sentia, no one had ever stayed linked for this long. Where would this end? He was plagued by nightmare thoughts straight out of horror movies about brain transfers. There he’d be, trapped inside a wasted ancient wreck of a body while Quackenbush fled the scene in a stolen twelve-year-old model, scarcely used. What if this had been the tycoon’s plan all along? In a long life filled with successful business deals, surely this would count as the greatest transaction of them all!

  Bail out of this!

  Every fiber of his being screamed at him to break the connection, to escape while he still could. But what about the money — what about Mom and Dad and the life they’d never have again without it? And what about Avery Quackenbush, who was fighting for his life? Jax had made him a promise. Surely that had to count for something.

  “You are very calm,” he mumbled aloud again, although this time the message was intended for himself. Somehow, he had to find a safe place between zoning out and freaking out.

  The session was approaching the one-hour point when he finally made it. It wasn’t comfort exactly, but even pain and misery became the new normal if you were stuck with them long enough. He crawled into an alcove in his mind and huddled there, enduring. This had to be over soon, although no one had ever talked about the timing of it. He hoped he’d know when the moment was right.

  And then a bullet whizzed by his right ear.

  The gate before him crashed down and Jax was carried forward in a crush of men — armed men, weighed down with helmets and heavy equipment. A moment later, he was over his waist in icy water, pounding through the surf.

  Am I hallucinating?

  He wanted to ask the soldier beside him, but the man was dead, bleeding from a wound in his chest, right next to his grenade.

  Grenade?

  Jax looked down at the object he was gripping so tightly with both hands, holding it high, above the waves. It was a rifle.

  All along the beach, soldiers exactly like him were splashing toward the safety of the shore. No — not safety. They were taking withering fire. Bodies dropped. White water churned pink with blood.

  A shell burst overhead and he landed face-first in the surf, choking on sand and salt. He came up gasping and spitting, his heart pounding with fear. But it was not Jackson Opus’s fear at this hallucination. Because this was no hallucination. It was Avery Quackenbush’s real memories of landing on Omaha Beach in the World War II D-Day invasion.

  That’s impossible! Jax thought frantically. This can’t be just a memory! No memory feels this real.

  Braintree’s words came to him: The mind you’ll be entering is a museum housing nearly a century of memories and experiences…. Your twelve years of life cannot possibly prepare you for the onslaught….

  Off to the left, an unfortunate landing craft struck a bobbing mine. The amphibious vehicle exploded in a geyser of water and flame. Jax could see bodies flung clear, along with the debris. A fragment of shrapnel glanced off his helmet, stunning him momentarily. If its path had been a few inches lower, it would have killed him.

  He might have stood there, overwhelmed by terror and sheer sensory input, if the waves of men behind him hadn’t pushed him forward onto the beach. Here the whine of incoming bullets was like an attack of enraged mosquitoes — deadly ones. Soldiers were dropping all around, alive one moment, gone the next, often without a sound. The living flopped down right along with the dead, in an attempt to stay under the barrage. Boot camp had taught them to slither on their bellies, and Jax did that now, inching ever forward. It was pure horror — crawling not just over sand but also over your dead companions. In an instant, he understood how this memory of seventy years ago could be so present and so alive. This experience could not be taken in all at once. It could only be compartmentalized — filed away to be dealt with in bits and pieces small enough to be processed and understood. Avery Quackenbush had been reliving this ever since the actual D-Day. And now Jax was reliving it through his mesmeric link with the old soldier.

  To Jax’s amazement, his sudden realization of what he was living through did nothing to lessen his panic. He could not be killed here because he was not actually here. Even Quackenbush obviously did not die on Omaha Beach because he was still alive seventy years afterward. Yet the terror that he felt belonged to Corporal Quackenbush in the heat of battle, primal and gut-wrenching and real. He clambered up and over a barrier made of loose rock, ducking under a line of iron “hedgehogs,” huge obstacles that resembled gigantic metal jacks. Beside him, a tank struggled against one of these, unable to move it or pass over it. As Jax watched, a caterpillar track was ripped clean off the armored vehicle, leaving it an easy target for the barrage coming from the bluff some two hundred yards ahead.

  At this point, the mission became appallingly clear. Hundreds — thousands — of American infantry scrambled across the beach toward the base of the escarpment. They were expected to make it up the steep slope with German snipers shooting down at them from fortified pillboxes and artillery casements.

  It can’t be done! They’ll pick us off, one at a time!

  But as he reached the bottom and began to climb, he understood that the choice of whether or not to go on was not his. That decision had been made by Corporal Quackenbush a long time ago. Jax could not imagine such courage, but he felt it pulsing through his veins.

  His fear had already rendered him breathless; now the climb took away what little wind he had left. He made his painstaking way handhold by foothold, his rifle slung over his shoulder. If he needed it at an instant’s notice — well, that would be too bad, wouldn’t it? As it was, the invading GIs were hopelessly outgunned by the enemy soldiers in the pillbox above them — heavy machine guns firing down, ripping holes in the terrain all around.

  We’re sitting ducks!

  His sergeant appeared at his shoulder, shouting over the din of battle. “If we can get past that pillbox —”

  The man never got to finish his thought. A stray bullet ricocheted off a rock in front of them and struck him in the throat. He was gone even before he collapsed.

  Now leaderless, the small company hunkered down behind their sergeant’s body. There was grief, anger, panic
, and every emotion in between. Jax heard none of it. In an almost trancelike state, he got to his feet and made a bull run at the pillbox, bent double against the slope. Bullets hailed all around, but miraculously none of them found him. He was now close enough to make out the muzzle of the machine gun protruding from the narrow slit in the concrete bunker. Leaving his feet in a desperation dive, he hit the ground and rolled up against the base of the pillbox. He took a grenade from his belt, and pulled the pin.

  One … two … three …

  He reached up and shoved it inside through the opening. Hunkering down, he held on to his helmet and prayed.

  He felt the walls of the pillbox and the very ground itself jump. Strangely, though, he didn’t hear the boom of the explosion, just a dull thump. The machine gun fell silent. Barely daring to breathe, he raised his head and peeked inside the concrete bunker.

  The scream torn from his throat was barely human.

  Jax came awake, still crying out in horror, to find Dr. Pavel shaking him by the shoulders. “Snap out of it! You’re all right!”

  “I killed them!” Jax wailed.

  “No one is dead.” The doctor’s tone was insistent, yet soothing.

  “But …” How could he explain what he’d seen inside that pillbox? Death, yes, but so much more. The merciless science of an exploding grenade in a confined space. It was impossible to recognize that the remains had been people just a few minutes before.

  “You’re in Avery Quackenbush’s residence,” the doctor informed him, “and you’re perfectly fine.”

  Jax took stock of himself. He was in a cold sweat, trembling, his heartbeat rapid and shallow. But Omaha Beach was thousands of miles and seventy years away. He was in the sitting room, opposite the slumbering billionaire.

  Slowly, he began to get himself under control. “How long … ?”

  “Close to an hour and a half,” Pavel replied.