My Friends Are Dead People

by Tony Ortiz

  “Meesi, we need to start looking.”

  “I changed my mind. Let’s choose another one.”

  “How about the one on the right?”

  She nodded, and we ran through the tunnel, coming out shortly into a room with a rugged path circling up and around a cracked hundred-foot-tall boulder, slashed across with giant claw marks.

  Meesi crouched halfway up it, tired. After a minute, we started back up again. Meesi hurried slightly ahead of me and disappeared into a vibrating tunnel at the top. I was exhausted. I took a deep breath then jogged after her.

  “Meesi, you know where you’re going?” I panted inside.

  She was way ahead of me, gaping at the wall that was falling apart. I lowered my head and ran through the downpour of rocks.

  “You see something?” I shouted.

  Her eyes got bigger, and she suddenly fell to the floor and threw her hands over her head. Instinctively, I dropped and ducked my head between my legs to protect my face.

  “Meesi?” I whispered. “What’s going on?”

  I peered through my hands as the whole structure of the tunnel – top and bottom – shook violently. There was another deep tremor. Then another. The impacts kept on coming, quaking the wall violently, as if something was trying to get through.

  Meesi jerked me to my feet, and we ran out of there as one powerful blow split the tunnel in two.

  Meesi came to another unexpected halt before another fork. The left tunnel was dark, while the right was slowly being filled up with dust and falling debris.

  “Wait,” she ordered, hearing a distant growl in the dark tunnel.

  Neither of us dared to go in and ran through the one cramped with falling rocks instead. Thin beams of light coming down through holes in the ceiling flickered in and out as dark shapes passed by above our heads.

  Meesi froze in fear. Footsteps had entered our tunnel.

  “Run!” I yelled.

  Within minutes, we were in a room with two more pathways.

  “This door!” she said, dashing to the far right.

  And so we sprinted down another tunnel. This one had no falling rocks and no creatures moving overhead, but the ceiling was sagging downwards, forcing us to hunch over and even crawl in spots.

  Meesi ran her fingertips along the walls as she stood back up and then made a little sad moan.

  “Where does this lead?” I said.

  “I . . .”

  The pathway ended, and we were at another fork. This was getting maddening.

  “Which one?” asked Meesi.

  “You don’t know where these go?”

  “I don’t remember any more.”

  I couldn’t believe this.

  The footsteps were getting closer.

  “Left – no, right!”

  We sprinted down the right path. I was starting to think it was going to be impossible to get out. The mountain was just too big. Of course our path split yet again. Meesi ran into the one to the right without stopping to think.

  “You remember now?” I asked with a glimmer of hope.

  “I’m just guessing,” she responded a minute later. “If we keep going right, we’ll eventually get out of here.”

  “Or we’ll go right back to where we started.”

  “No. Well, I don’t know. Let’s just keep going right.”

  I didn’t argue. After all, she knew this place better than I did.

  Meesi tripped as dark shadows climbed the walls behind us. Whatever was following us was catching up. Another crash hit the wall directly west of us, sending out shock waves. Then another. It wasn’t stopping.

  “We’re dead,” muttered Meesi, walking slowly through the tunnel as the crashes continued. “We’re dead” a distant echo called back.

  “It’s going to be okay,” I tried comforting her, just then seeing that a landslide of rubble had blocked our way. “Now what–” I froze at the sound of a sharp scream. “Is that Katie?” I murmured to myself, trying to identify it.

  “No,” Meesi assured me, staring at the wall. “That was an yslas being killed. Why are they here?”

  “How do you know it was an yslas?”

  “I saw it. I can see through surfaces.” Meesi sat down miserably and bowed her head. “What is everyone doing here?”

  “Meesi, we have to keep going!” I said. “We can’t give up!”

  “There’s nothing we can do.”

  “There has to be! Kala didn’t give up! Meesi! We have to try and get out of here! Get up!”

  I picked up a rock from the rubble and tossed it aside. Meesi came over and helped. She closed her hands into a fist, and a large rock shattered. Each time she clenched another one shattered.

  By now, the footsteps were as close as they could possibly be. I tossed another rock over my shoulder. There was a solid hollow sound before it hit the ground.

  “Jesse, yslas,” shrieked Meesi, ramming herself back into the rocks.

  Cosqué was painfully standing over us, gaping at the pile of rocks. Three more wounded yslas came limping behind him.

  “Cosqué?” I said, not sure if he was here to injure or rescue me, or if he even cared.

  Meesi turned to me and said softly, “Jesse, why are they here? They’re dangerous.”

  Cosqué’s bloodied head turned down at us. “Jesse, where’s the way out?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “What’s going on?”

  There was a sharp cry from the other side of the wall.

  “Jack is here. We have to get out of here before he kills us all–” His face twisted. He braced himself against the pain. “Do you understand? Jack is here!”

  Meesi grimaced at the name.

  “Close your eyes!” ordered an yslas just as a flash of red light sliced through the air.

  All of us closed our eyes just in time. Seconds later, it faded back to black and everyone started breaking rocks by placing their hands firmly on them, looking too depleted to use stronger magic. One yslas had broken through. Everyone moved to his end and climbed through. I waited next to Meesi, who was waiting for her turn.

  “He tried to blind the whole mountain!” she mentioned. “He-he’s coming.”

  Meesi turned to the wall, and whispered something in horror. The last yslas had gone through, and she hurried inside. As I started, my ankle was pulled back, caught between two rocks.

  “Meesi!” I yelled down the opening.

  Meesi wasn’t coming back, nor was anyone else. I tried pulling off the rocks, but I was stuck. This couldn’t be happening to me. How could they not know they left me? How could Meesi?

  “Meesi!” I yelled again.

  But no one answered.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The WRITING ON THE WALL

  “Don't leave me, Meesi,” I whimpered hopelessly. “You can’t leave me. I don’t know what to do.”

  There was nothing in here that I could use to free myself. What else was there to possibly do? There were certainly enough rocks to cover myself and keep hidden until Halloween was over. I could continue to scream, but there was a dreadful thought someone else might answer the call. I turned back to the tunnel, seeing only dust particles floating in the light.

  “Jacoby? Dorian?” I called out quietly. “Katie–” I heard two people talking further down. “Hello?”

  It switched abruptly to a different language. What language was that?

  “Please, help me!” I pleaded. “I’m stuck!”

  And then I knew. The language was German. A large body began to take form in the cloud of dust, and Lorseria appeared, crossing the ray of light streaming across the room. Four other tortics entered one by one, filing in close behind him. They were having a heated discussion. Lorseria gave one snarl, and they quieted down.

  Thinking there was nothing else to try, I clenched my hands into fists and took a deep breath. Before I knew it, I was slamming both hands into the rocks, cutting and bruising myself. The rocks shattered on its own, and I was levitat
ed into the air and rotated to face Lorseria.

  “Tell me where she is?” he rasped.

  One of the tortics spoke to Lorseria in their own tortic language. There were a lot of high-pitched squeaks that sounded like dolphin’s underwater.

  Lorseria turned back to me. “Tell me where she is, Jesse, and I’ll send you home.” His fingers snatched my waist.

  I screamed. “She–” I muttered. “She–” The pain was too unbearable. His claws were like the back of a porcupine.

  “Where is she?” demanded Lorseria impatiently.

  The pain eased. “Meesi is not here!”

  Lorseria didn’t believe it, nor did the others.

  “It’s the wrong country,” I said. “We came to the wrong place. Meesi’s not here.”

  Lorseria spoke to a tortic huffing hot fumes. “He’s no use. Kill him.” Lorseria dropped me and vanished down the hazy tunnel. One of the larger tortic picked me up and muttered an incantation at my heart. Through tears, I saw black light shining from the tips of his long fingers.

  “No, no,” I wept. “I-I . . . Mee-Mee-Meesi–”

  I heard Lorseria shouting. It was too late. A stream of black light flew out of the fingers and plunged into my heart, causing it to skip a beat, and another beat, and another.

  Liksa - inflec - lou, I heard him utter in the squeaky language, the last word alleviating the pain completely.

  I screamed.

  “Where’s Meesi?” he snarled. He brought up his pointy fingers. I stopped screaming.

  “She . . .” I sniffed. I couldn’t give her away. I couldn’t. “She’s on the other side.”

  “Of the mountain?” He spun me around so I faced the opening in the landslide. “Did she go through there?”

  All the tortics sniffed the air. I took a sniff, breathed in some dirt, and sneezed. But just before I did, I smelled the same exact thing I had smelled at the stadium – a decaying foul odor. I hit the floor as the tortics walked through the wall. Seconds later, Meesi poked her head out of the opening. “It worked?” she said. “They’re gone?”

  I nodded happily. “I thought you had left–”

  “I wouldn’t leave you. I had to spend time conjuring Jack’s smell – we gotta go.”

  I was relieved to get out of there. I didn’t want to ever see another cavern in my life. “Where’s Cosqué?” I asked inside a pulverized passage.

  “He left me.”

  “Meesi, I need to find my friends.”

  Meesi slowed at the next fork in the tunnel, thinking it over, and then turned into the one furthest to the right and continued to choose the rightmost path.

  “You can’t just pick the–” I said, just as I fell through a waist-deep hole, covered with sticks and roots.

  “Sorry,” said Meesi, lifting me out of there.

  “Sorry?” I said, confused.

  “Jack made this hole. I covered it back up to set a trap for the tortics. Why are they here?”

  “Jack,” I half-lied.

  Meesi got on her hands and knees and crawled through a short passage. She stuck her head out and said to me, “I’ve fallen through two times.”

  I remembered Katie telling me that Jack liked to play pranks. All of a sudden I felt gloomy. I hoped Katie, Jacoby, and Dorian were doing better than we were. Katie was with Jacoby so she had to be safe. I didn’t have a weapon at all. And it was getting too dark to search the grounds for a sharp object. I did have Meesi though.

  As I crawled out into a short tunnel, I saw a fluorescent green glow coming from the wall.

  oUt, BuT iT iS tHrOuGh

  “What’s that mean?” said Meesi.

  I walked back to where the writing started. The glowing text was very familiar. “Meesi, it starts over here,” I whispered because the place was extremely quiet.

  We walked along the wall, reading it.

  EvErY eNtRaNcE iS bLoCkEd OfF. ThErE iS a WaY oUt, BuT iT iS tHrOuGh ThE tUnNeLs UnDeR tHe MoUnTaIn.

  “No, no,” said Meesi, stopping dead in her tracks. “We can’t go down there.”

  “Why not?” I said.

  “I’ve never been there and there’s no light in there.”

  “There’s no lights anywhere, Meesi. This is all the light we have.”

  “And the lamps and the explosions,” she added.

  “Meesi, you said you’ve been everywhere. Why can’t you find the way out then? Did you really forget?”

  Meesi paced in front of me for a second, thinking. “Okay,” she decided.

  Both of us cautiously shuffled down a steep path that the writing had gone in, reading it as we descended.

  ThErE iS a WiTcH hIdDeN dEeP uNdEr ThIs MoUnTaIn WhO wIlL kNoW tHe SeCrEt PaTh OuT. HeR nAmE iS jOlU, aNd As LoNg As YoU dOn’T tAlK tO hEr ShE wIll sHoW yOu ThE wAy. YoU mUsT nOt CoMe ClOsEr ThAn TwEnTy ReD vInEs Of HeR. ShE iS oVeR pRoTeCtIvE oF hEr TeRrItOrY aNd WiLl CaSt A cUrSe On YoU.

  At this point, the writing curved down into a hole in the floor. I stuck my head inside. “It keeps going,” I said, listening to my echo.

  Without a moment’s hesitation, Meesi climbed down a dusty rope ladder. After a few seconds, I grabbed onto the ladder and slowly followed.

  ClImB dOwN, iT wOn’T bE mUcH lOnGeR. YoU wIlL bE aBlE tO sEe ThE mOoN iN aN oWl HoOt. ThIs Is A sEcOnD tElLiNg: YoU mUsT nOt CoMe WiThIn TwEnTy ReD vInEs Of JoIu. ShE wIlL sPeAk To YoU, aNd YoU wIlL nOt UnDeRsTaNd HeR aT fIrSt, BuT cOnTiNuE tO lIsTeN aNd In TiMe YoU wIlL. ShE wIlL sHoW yOu ThE wAy. YoU mUsT fOlLoW hEr, AnD

  I jumped off the rope ladder onto a stone floor of a round den. The writing realigned itself with the floor, wrapping around the walls.

  sHe WiLl GiVe YoU a HeLpInG hAnD.

  A large boulder blocked the rest of the text. We quickly walked around it and skidded to a stop. A figure that must have been the witch was sitting underneath the last of the writing. Her bony arms were wrapped around her knees, and her head was tucked in. She sat motionless while her black robe and long black hair blew about wildly.

  “Jesse,” said Meesi, cowering behind me.

  I had figured out the meaning of the writing. We had made a terrible mistake.

  FeEl FoRtUnAtE tHaT yOu WiLl SuRvIvE fOr OnLy A lItTlE lOnGeR.

  “We have to climb back up,” I whispered, keeping my eyes on the witch. “The writing brought us down here. It wanted us separated from everyone else. We were tricked, Meesi. Meesi!”

  Meesi was transfixed by the witch. I wanted to think it was Jacoby who wrote it, but this really wasn’t like anything he would do.

  Meesi looked harder at the witch, whose shriveled body was outlined by a glow.

  “Jack!” she sputtered, her voice cracking.

  I inched over to the side, keeping an eye on the top of the witch’s head and her rattling limestone necklace. There was one last word and it was the only word that I was hoping it wouldn’t be.

  JaCk

  Meesi started treading backwards, but I wanted to see the front of the witch and cautiously crept around it. “Hey!” I said.

  I still couldn’t see the witch’s face. It was tucked too far down into her lap.

  “Meesi, we’ll go right after this,” I whispered, taking a soft step forward. “I just have to see if–”

  “I don’t want to be here anymore. What if it comes back in here?”

  “The witch must be with him. But she’s not moving. It’s like she’s dead.”

  The witch’s lifeless shape was really beginning to give me the creeps. Meesi was right: it was time to go.

  “Jesse, the-the ladder,” trembled Meesi. “It’s gone.”

  I looked up. The hole was still there, but there was no ladder.

  “Jesse, the witch . . .”

  The witch was gone.

  “He did lure us down here,” I said as a large boulder dissolved. The next to go were the tangled roots on the floor, then the rocks and the plants.

  “It’s trying to take us again,” said Meesi.

  “Can you fly?” I a
sked.

  She shook her head.

  “What can you do? Can you climb out of here? You said you can see through walls. Maybe we can dig a hole where it’s thin.”

  Meesi grabbed my hand. There was nothing left in the den. Everything had disappeared.

  Then the loveliest voice came from high above us. For a fleeting moment, I wondered if it was a voice from heaven.

  “Anyone down there? Jesse?” It was Katie. Her voice was calm.

  “Get us out of here!” I shouted. “He’s taking us!”

  “What?” replied Katie faintly. “Hold on.”

  “No, no, no, Katie, we don’t have time to hold on! Katie!”

  The longest few seconds passed.

  “Katie!” I shouted.

  “Katie!” repeated Meesi.

  A rope hit the top of my head.

  “Grab on!” Katie called from above.

  Meesi and I were already clinging onto the rope, waiting. We were lifted out of the hole in three short yanks.

  “You okay?” said Katie, helping us to our feet moments later. “We saw the writing. I knew you would follow it.”

  I glanced over Katie, making sure she was okay. Apart from some dirt and a cut on her arm, she was fine.

  “Jack was going to take us,” I said to her.

  “I know.”

  “Where’s Jacoby? Didn’t he lift us up?”

  “No, Cosqué did. Jacoby is–”

  “Where’s Jacoby?”

  “Jesse, Jacoby is hurt.”

  “What?” I blurted, only now looking up at the top of the path, where Cosqué was standing over Jacoby.

  I hastily scrambled up to them. Jacoby was lying on his back. His eyes were blackened and half-shut, and webbed creases crossed his face and arms. He looked like he was dying. I dropped to my knees.

  “He’s okay,” said Katie calmly. “He said–”