The Prize: Book One

by Rob Buckman

  CHAPTER - TWENTY: Fun House

  "Well, she went out with a bang,” Penn laughed. Ellis spun, furious, slashing at him. Penn skipped backward out of reach.

  "You dirty frigging pervert!”

  "That's it, Princess. Keep thinking you want to kill me.”

  "What?” Ellis snarled.

  "Come on! Keep thinking about killing me. That's all, nothing else.” Penn called, beckoning her toward him with both hands.

  "What the hell are you talking about?” She screamed, slashing at him again.

  "Don't you get it? It's this place! It gives you what you want, or what you fear the most!"

  "That's insane!"

  "Is it? Here…” He pulling out a canteen and thrust it toward her.

  "I don't want a frigging drink you fucking asshole…”

  "Take it!” Ellis tried to slap the canteen out of his hands, but Penn pulled it back out of reach.

  "Drink damn you!” Penn yelled. By this time the rest of the troopers had gathered around, half-grinning, half shocked at the unfolding argument. Something in Penn's voice made Ellis pause. She took the canteen and hesitantly took a swig. She expected water, but what she got was wine.

  "What the hell?...”

  "I told you, I want a vintage '67 Chateau Montelena, and that what I got.”

  Ellis took a longer sip, savoring the taste. She was no connoisseur, but this was good, very good, and chilled to perfection. Wiping her lips with the back of her hand, she gave the canteen back to Penn, an odd look on her face. Overhead, the girl limp body still hung from the vines like some kind of gruesome, perverse fruit, a counter point to Penn argument. Ellis tried to remain clear-headed, but the body haunted her. It brought back too many horrible memories she fought to suppress. Memories of violent, perverse sexual scenes from her childhood flooding her mind.

  “If you don't believe me, tell me where the Thrakee bodies went?” Penn declared. Everyone looked around. All eighteen bodies were gone.

  “What…the…fuck?” Class stammered. ”Where the hell did they go?”

  “It's not a question of where they went,” Penn said, “but were they real in the first place.”

  “That's crazy, Penn. Look at the wounded, look at the dead. They were real!”

  “True, but we stood here in this room expecting Thrakee, stood here waiting for them to attack, and they did.”

  “Hold Mother of the Prophet! That's not possible,” Carras muttered.

  “When we saw that group of them running through the town, I counted no less than sixteen. Five died in that pit trap. That left eleven remaining to enter the building. Class killed two outside, which left nine. We had no less than eighteen dead here and another seven of eight run away.” Penn spoke slowly, Ellis counting in her head. ”But, more importantly, when did you hear of the Thrakee running away from a fight?”

  “Never. They just keep coming until you, or they are all dead,” she admitted. ”Do you think the building created them?”

  “I think this building controls the whole damn planet as well as the exclusion zone around. But knowing that won't do you a damn bit of good.” He looked up at the body and shook his head.

  ”A fantasy can kill you just as dead as the real thing, and just as quick. Let's just hope none of you Girl Scouts gets a fixation about another attack.” Penn looked at the three dead troopers lying on the floor. He'd made his point, and he just hoped they'd remember it. Thinking about it a little deeper, it also answered the question of what the pyramid did with all that power it collected.

  "What do we do now?” someone asked.

  "Think about elephants, small, fuzzy, harmless pink elephants and let's get the fuck out of here!” Penn let out a long shuddering breath, looking with haunted eyes at Ellis. What he feared he could not, dare not, put into words. Ellis took a deep breath, and pulled herself together, nodding in agreement.

  “Spread out and see if you can find a way up out of this room.” She snapped, suppressing a shudder as she caught sight of Trooper Zinary out the corner of her eye.

  "Yes, Major.” The Captain dragged his eyes away from the dangling vines and turned to pass the order to the reluctant troopers.

  "I meant out of this building!” Penn said as he watched Carras gather up the troopers and began a search.

  "I know you did,” she murmured, “but I have my orders.”

  "That includes getting yourself killed? Maybe like that?” Penn murmured softly, pointing over his shoulder. ”Or worse?”

  "I'll try not to.” Ellis didn't want to think about what she wanted the most. If Penn was right, it was a very dangerous road to go down.

  "Damn it woman, I don't want you to get killed!” Penn blushed. He'd never meant to say those words out loud. A voice cut her off before she could respond.

  "Major! We've found a way up, and it looks clear.”

  "On my way.” She replied, looking over her shoulder at Penn for a moment, trying to see behind his words. His impassive face gave no clues as to what he was thinking. Penn shook his head and turned away.

  "Thanks a lot. You were a great help." He sighed, looking up at the unseen ceiling as he gathered up his belongings.

  He silently cursed his big mouth. He never in his wildest dreams thought he'd ever say something like that to her. Shaking his head, he tested the water once more, finding it clean, and free of alien microorganisms. Now it was just water, and nothing else. Any thoughts he'd had about leaving vanished when he realized the sunlight streaming through the open door had slowly dimmed without anyone noticing. The entrance, or exit no longer existed.

  "Figures.” He shook his head and follow Ellis through the vine forest. He found her at last in a heated conversation with two female troopers near the top of a ramp. The look they gave him wasn't friendly.

  ”What's up?" he asked.

  "They want out, and I can't say I blame them.”

  "Forget it. The front door is closed. The only way out is up.” The younger, trooper Callis quietly burst into tears.

  Vanira put her arm around the younger woman's shoulders, and led her back to the others, whispering to her. Penn wondered what their deaths would be like. Would it be like the girl below, or something worse? It hurt him to realize that there was no way he could change their fates.

  "Remember those two Thrakee outside?” He said softly to Ellis. ”Now you know why they were there.”

  “Scared spitless,” she said.

  “That would be my guess, and it takes a lot to scare a Thrakee.”

  The remainder of the team bunched together as they moved, knives out for mutual protection. They'd left their useless weapons behind, along with the power packs, thereby reducing their load by a considerable amount. Ellis even dumped her comm unit, useless now, and nothing more than dead weight she had to carry around. So much for updating General Tandy on their progress. On the plus side, she wouldn't have to listen to his constant bitching, and complain about Penn. They found themselves in a maze of identical passageways. Every surface identical to every other, the walls, floors, ceiling all the same tones and textures. All covered with blue, green, and silver icons, with an odd-looking hieroglyphic script, reminiscent of Arabic that wound between them in no discernible pattern. Penn suspected that if you could read the script, you could tell where you were, and where you were going. To make matters worse, at Ellis's direction, troopers counted one hundred paces to a crossway, and another hundred to the next. They soon discovered their compasses were useless, the needles stayed in the same position no matter which way they turned.

  The passageways remained the same no matter which turning they took. One hundred feet to the next crossing, and the next. They tried stationing a trooper at each cross passageway as the Penn walked in a square, but that didn't help. Penn felt baffled, which way to go? Penn had no more idea than anyone else. They walked for hours, the view unchanged except for a few glimpses of the Thrakee. The lizards made no attempt to attack, and looked more concerned with f
inding a way up and out of this maze, much as they were doing. At last, Penn trailed behind the others, trying to calculate the size of the task ahead. From the aerial holographs Ellis showed him, he estimated the planet's atmosphere was approximately 150 miles deep. If the tip of the pyramid was above the atmosphere that would make the base of this pyramid some 300 hundred miles on each side, and the footprint covered an area of some 90,000 square miles. With a limited amount of food and water, it was impossible to explore that large an area with what they had. Even if they could find the outer wall, just to walk around the base was a grim prospect. They'd have to walk over 1,200 miles.

  "Hold up there, Ellis. This is no good.” Penn stopped, leaning against a wall. The pulsing sound, just outside his hearing, grated on his nerves.

  "Tell me about it.”

  "Let's go back to square one, and start again.”

  "How the hell do we do that?” Dana snarled, gripping his knife tighter. ”We're fracking lost.” The sound was starting to get on everyone's nerves.

  "Not really,” Penn answered, smiling despite his jangling nerves, “the up ramp is just around the corner. Follow me.” Penn hadn't seen a ramp of course, but he concentrated on the ramp being there, and two corners later, it was.

  "How the hell did you do that? Photographic memory?” Captain Carras asked.

  Penn just shrugged. For some reason, even though she was still angry with him, Ellis was impressed. Penn didn't bother dissuading them from their belief in his extraordinary abilities. But he knew they still didn't understand the truth about this building.

  "Okay, people. Now comes the hard part.” Penn knew his next suggestion would take a leap of faith. ”Get something to blindfold yourselves with, and no cheating, or this won't work.”

  "Do what he tells you.” Ellis ordered, unsure of what Penn had planned.

  She took her pack off and pulled out a tee shirt. The others did little to hide their displeasure in taking part in Penn's experiment, but the prospect of wandering around these endless passageways was even less appealing. After ensuring everyone had their blindfolded in place, Penn walked to the front of the line. Each had his hand on the shoulder of the trooper in front of him. Now came a leap of faith. If he were wrong, he'd know in about three steps. What he'd do after that, he didn't know. Wrapping a strip of cloth around his eyes, he took a deep breath, letting it out slowly, clearing his mind of everything. He didn't try thinking the walls weren't there as that would probably have the opposite effect. Like meditation, he blanked his mind of everything except the moment, and his breathing before taking his first firm step, anticipating nothing, wanting nothing, then a second and a third. Nothing happened, so he simply kept walking, hearing the troops shuffling along behind him, feeling Ellis's grip on his shoulder. With his senses working overtime, Penn 'felt' something and slowed, his hand reaching out. He stopped, his hand braced against some hard surface in front of him.

  "What?” Ellis asked, peeling off her blindfold.

  "We're there.”

  “Oh my lord!” She breathed.

  They stood in the center of a vast open space with no walls as far as the eye could see. In front of them, where Penn had stopped was a single, massive support column that appeared to hold up the pearlescent ceiling some ten feel above their heads. Though he'd done the math in his head, Penn wasn't going to try to explain how they'd walked three hundred miles to the center of the pyramid in less than twenty minutes. The down side was that they'd lost the last man in the train, trooper Pretrov, their explosives man, but the others were too spellbound to notice his absents at the moment. Penn bet that he'd looked, and in doing so brought the walls back into existence. He was now trapped in an endless maze with no way out, unless he had the nerve to do the experiment again. Even so, there was no guarantee he'd end up here. Hopefully they wouldn't need his expertise before this was over. Penn didn't want to contemplate his fate.

  'Holy crap!' Carras exclaimed, blinking in surprise at the seemingly endless expanse around him.

  "Where the hell did all the walls go?” Romm asked as he pulled his blindfold down.

  "I don't think they were ever there.”

  "They sure as hell felt real!"

  "Now what?” Ellis asked, looking at the gigantic pillar.

  "You wanted an elevator," Penn thumped the massive column, "I think this is it.”

  He ran his hand over the smooth surface, hoping he was right. He and several others had taken over an hour to walk all the way around, but there was no door. Penn thumped the column in frustration, and without warning, a section of the wall pull silently back then sideways to reveal a small room. If this was their elevator, it had just enough room for two people at a time.

  “Pair off, big and small.” Ellis commended after a quick look inside. ”Class, you will have to go by yourself.” She said, looking the big man up and down. He grinned.

  “I bet we could squeeze in there,” Class said, grinning from ear to ear and blowing the Captain a kiss. Carras just gave him a dirty look.

  "Who goes first?” Penn asked, wanting to see the look on their faces.

  "I think someone should go up to whatever floor this goes to, have a look around, and come back down,” Squad Leader Dena gave Penn a dirty look, ”at least that way we'll know what we are getting into. Don't you think so, Major?”

  “Yeah, Penn is our point man, right?” Sergeant Jaxx added with a nasty grin.

  With a slight sigh, and a shake of his head, Penn entered the elevator, not that he expected anything different from this bunch of Girl Scouts. He looked at Ellis, seeing her nibbling one side of her lower lip, but he couldn't tell if it was worry about him, or what he was doing. Maybe both. With no button or controls on the inside wall all he could do was wait. A moment later, the door slid soundlessly shut, fusing itself seamlessly with the wall. At least he didn't have to stand there looking at the bunch of grinning idiots outside all waiting to see if he got killed in some horrible way. As the door started to close Ellis took a half step toward him as if changing her mind at the last moment.

  CHAPTER - TWENTY ONE:

  He felt no movement, but ten minutes later the door slid open onto a different room. Penn walked out cautiously and looked around. The room appeared to be no different from the passageways they'd explored, the walls covered with the same colorful motif. Several passageways led off in several directions, but rather than explore, he quickly stepped back into the elevator, not wanting to risk investigating this area alone. When at last the door opened again he saw Ellis standing there, a worried look on her face.

  "Where the hell have you been?” she snapped in greeting. The rest of the troop didn't look all that happy to see him either.

  "What?” Penn asked, puzzled.

  "You've been gone two hours!” clearly she'd thought Penn had run off to go after the Prize by himself.

  "What are you talking about?” He knew he'd been in the elevator less than twenty minutes. ”No way, twenty minutes at most.” Ellis looked at him a moment seeing no reason for Penn to lie.

  "Christ on a crutch!” she muttered. ”Now the place it screwing around with time as well.” With the level of technology they seemed to be dealing with, there was no telling what this place could do.

  "Come on, Princess, let's go for a ride." Penn motioned her inside, and reluctantly she grabbed her pack and stepped in.

  The space was tight, and even with their backs pressed against the circular wall with their packs between their legs they were almost touching. Standing face to face, each tried to avoid the other's eyes as they waited for the door to close, diligently inspecting the spotless walls for something, anything to keep their eyes from meeting, but at last, they did. Without them noticing it, the incessant grating sound in the background slowly changed. Instead of the otherworldly sound that could be music, it changed, now sounding soft and lilting. Even the air inside the elevator subtly changed, now filled with the scent of spring and flowers after a rain, invoking memories
of bright sun on placid water. Without them being aware of it, they both slowly relaxed, the tension of the situation gradually drained away.