Dr. Morbid's Castle of Blood (Masks)

by Hayden Thorne

  I led Ridley down a path, which mercifully didn’t have any corpses. Panting, I didn’t let up as I ran, and I hoped that we’d be safe for a little bit longer as I noticed that Wade’s fire flickered a lot. I guessed that she was as tired as everyone else was—probably more so since she was doing all of the offensive work without help, while Peter and Ridley took care of the rear and protected us.

  The pathway ended, and we stumbled into an open area. It was the center of the maze, judging from all the other paths terminating there from all directions.

  “Oh, great,” I hissed, turning around and around. “Which path do we take?”

  “None,” Ridley said, and I heard him gulp. “They’re all blocked.”

  Sure enough, from every open path that linked to the maze’s center, corpses appeared, slipping past the entryways and slowly moving toward us. The path that we’d just taken was blocked off as well, as Peter had torn down parts of the hedges behind us.

  I looked at Ridley. “I’ll see you at the shrink’s office in a week.” Sad part was that Ridley nodded in agreement.

  Chapter 12

  “On the count of three,” Ridley said as we stood close to each other. “One, two, three!”

  We started blasting corpses randomly considering how many there were coming after us, and we moved around in a never-ending circle. Here and there, corpses were either swallowed up by force fields or small fireballs, the latter making me think that Wade was probably at the lowest point of her energy levels. Either that or shooting out small fireballs was her way of using a sub-machine gun. Whatever the reason, it helped by and large, though the damage quotient appeared to be less than her fire whip and those bigger fire bombs. Those corpses that managed to slip past Wade and Ridley’s arsenal got kicked back by the winds. At least it looked that way. I mean, they’d be advancing slowly, their stiff feet dragging across the stone ground, and then, BAM! There’d be this rush of strong wind screaming down at them, and they’d suddenly fly backward as though they’d been punched with a wrecking ball, knocking down whatever was in their wake. They looked like a bunch of nasty-ass bowling pins flying all over the place.

  “Althea!” I screamed when I noticed Wade’s flames sputter more and more. “Get us out of here!”

  Since I was stupid enough to listen to Ridley and leave my knives behind, I frantically looked for weapons whenever corpses were killed. I spotted a smallish sword lying a few feet away, and I abandoned Ridley for a moment to claim it, aiming the torch at three corpses that were in my way and blasting them with fire. Once I had the sword in hand, I rushed back to stand as close as I could to him.

  “Wade, you’ve done your job,” I said. “Take it easy now. Let me fight them off while I still can.” Wade the Magic Torch sputtered and then calmed down, her fire looking smaller and less bright than before. Yeah, she was seriously tired.

  I swallowed and tightened my hold on the sword, hoping that my sweaty hand wasn’t going to mess things up for me. When the nearest corpses came close enough, I charged forward and swung, slashing at them again and again and cutting down on their life points. Since they were obviously so advanced compared to me and my own life points relative to this stage in the game, they didn’t go down at all, but at least I was able to reduce those points somewhat to make it easy for Peter to swoop around me and blast them away with wind power, sending them somersaulting off. Then I focused on the next few corpses that came close. As it usually happened in a game: shampoo, rinse, repeat.

  I guess it helped that I was practically insane from terror and revulsion that I never let any of them touch me. Seeing them up close was enough to crank up the violence meter past the stratosphere, which powered me all the way through.

  Every once in a while, I saw Ridley charging forward as well to use his power punches, which Peter also supplemented with his own version of hand-to-hand, throwing damaged corpses back, which I was sure ate at their life points even more. My arms were screaming. My left hand held up Wade, and I could only use my right hand to fight with the sword. My weapon might be small, but it wasn’t as easy to use as those knives. If I could, I’d use both hands, but there was no way in hell I was going to let Wade go.

  I wasn’t sure if it was nothing more than a half-crazed brain that made me see something flash from the corner of my eye, but something did. I turned and saw nothing but corpses either getting blasted away or disappearing under another force field. I shook my head and hacked again.

  “What in heck?” There it was again! I blinked and looked, and sure enough, it happened for real.

  A flash of light—the way light poured through a crack. Was that Althea trying to break in? I almost fainted from joy when another flash broke through the shadows and mayhem in another part of the courtyard.

  “It’s Althea!” Ridley cried, sounding excited. “She’s trying to get through!”

  I let out a whoop of joy and used that to feed my aching muscles for a bit longer. I didn’t realize it till then that I was stepping closer and closer toward Ridley and that it was the force of the wind that gently pushed me back while I fought, or at least whenever I stepped away. Peter, it looked like, was trying to get us all together in one group. Before I knew it, Ridley and I were standing back to back, and I could feel something like a solid wall of rushing air spinning around us.

  More light broke through the scene around us, and this time, the cracks were several. Small ones, large ones, on the ground, the air, the sky—they kept tearing up the scene. It was bizarre, seeing physical, jagged cracks appearing in mid-air or even cutting across a small group of corpses as they were nothing more than a part of a painted scenery. Then the lights flashed more and more quickly, the cracks spreading and expanding, till it looked as though we were about to get swallowed up in brightness.

  “Ridley!” I yelled, pinching my eyes shut as we were suddenly flooded with blinding whiteness, and I felt myself pressed hard against Ridley’s back by Peter as the wind literally tightened around us.

  I heard Ridley yell when the brightness gave way to a sudden, sharp feeling of being snapped back through space as though we were both at the end of a bungee cord. As a group, bundled together by Peter in wind form, we tumbled through light and color and warmth, howling till our voices cracked.

  Then the light vanished, the spinning stopped, and we hit the ground in a mass, tumbling, sliding, rolling, and tangled up. Then, BAM! We all slammed against something big and super hard, and we all yelped in pain, though we finally stopped moving.

  I didn’t know how long it took my brain to stop whirling around in my skull, but I sure as hell was dizzy for a while. I figured that the others were, too, because no one moved for what felt like a billion years, and we just lay there in a crumpled, twisted heap, all groaning and cussing.

  “Wow,” someone said from what sounded like a major distance. Eventually the ringing in my ears stopped, and I recognized Brenda’s voice. “That’s a gnarly game of Twister you guys are playing.”

  “I took a picture. I’ll email it to everyone.” That one was Althea, by the way. Bitch.

  I finally cracked my eyes open, and what I managed to see through my glasses—which rested cockeyed on my face—was something that could easily be turned into a horror movie involving teenagers and gore. Like Brenda said, we looked like we were playing an intense game of Twister because we were literally knotted in a ball. Arms, legs, torsos, and heads were all over the place, and I swore that someone must’ve hit me so hard in the ‘nads that my dick now poked out between my butt cheeks.

  Well, at least everyone was back and safe. And in one tangled piece.

  “Oh, Christ, oh, Christ, oh, Christ…” Freddie groaned from somewhere southwest of my right knee. “I’ll never be able to breed ever.”

  “I’m so glad I’m wearing jeans, not a dress,” Wade stammered, her voice a bit muffled. I guessed that she was unlucky enough to be buried under a pile of boys who were bigger than her. “Or I’d be tearing the balls off wh
oever’s got his appendage jammed against my girl parts.”

  “I can’t feel my foot.” That was Ridley, who sounded like he was on top somewhere.

  “Eek! Stop! Stop! Oh, my God, that was so wrong!” Wade yelped.

  “Sorry! Sorry! I couldn’t feel my foot! I didn’t know where it was! I’m sorry! Please don’t tell my parents I accidentally sexually harassed you!”

  “Let me say that it’s going to be a real bitch trying to get ourselves untangled,” Peter said, his voice tight, from somewhere northwest of my left kidney. “We’d better hurry. I’m upside-down, and certain body parts are starting to shrivel from lack of blood.”

  “Get used to it,” I said. It occurred to me then that I was literally lying on my right cheek, and I had no idea what the rest of my body looked like. “I live with that every day.”

  “Oh, lord, Althea, are you videotaping them yet?” Brenda asked.

  “Yep. It’s a keeper. I just need to use the right kind of background music for it when I edit the hell out of it and post it online.”

  Bitch.

  * * * *

  The next hour or so was spent with us being examined closely, one by one, with Dr. Dibbs all serious and official, while Brenda seemed to be struggling to wipe this shit-eating grin off her face. I made sure to glare at her when it was my turn to be looked over for physical damage, infections, and mental instability.

  “You’re mocking our pain,” I said. “We could’ve all been stuck in that stupid-ass game.”

  “Oh, I’m so glad that you’re all back, for sure,” she said without skipping a beat while turning my bared right arm to find cuts and bruises. “I just can’t get that image of the superheroes all lying in a literal ball against the wall.”

  I narrowed my eyes at her when she moved to my left arm and then ordered me to lift my shirt, so she could check my front and back. “Be glad that you’ve got Althea’s pictures and video as keepsakes. You can watch that video again and again if you want to relive the moment.”

  “Oh, I plan to, hon. No worries there.” Then she stood up, pinched my cheek, and then ruffled my hair. “You’re fine. Just a few light bruises on your back. Good job.”

  A few aspirin pills later, we were once again sitting on the floor of my “classroom,” and I made sure to give Wade my chair and desk since it looked like we destroyed the ones she used earlier because they were standing in our way when we tumbled back into the real world, a knotted ball of humanity. Dr. Dibbs, Althea, and Brenda all briefed us about what happened, but we pretty much knew what was going on outside, thanks to Althea’s frequent communications. We found out that we had about four minutes left to spare, and that Althea’s efforts at trying to punch her way through the game as well as possess the characters in order to communicate brought out new “adjunct powers” according to Dr. Dibbs, which she should be able to develop even more during the heroes’ practice rescue missions. I’d no idea what “adjunct powers” meant, but seeing as how I wasn’t a hero, I figured that I shouldn’t care.

  That hacker guy—O’Keefe (if that was his real name)—was good in what he did, but he was nowhere near Arachnaman’s level when it came to super villainy.

  “I wonder what he meant when he said that his mind-reading powers were accidental,” I said. “I mean, sure, he was able to have that mental link with his brother, and that was how he learned how to mess around with a game, but ‘accidental’?”

  Everyone shrugged and shook their heads.

  “It seems like a very minor power,” Brenda said as she leaned against a wall, studying us. “Maybe he was a genetic experiment that was only partially successful? Or it wasn’t even meant to happen?”

  “It’s possible. Kind of creepy thinking along those lines, but considering how things have turned out for Vintage City because of those geneticists, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone might’ve messed around when he wasn’t supposed to and only managed to partially manipulate this kid’s DNA,” Peter replied. “We might never know, now that he’s disappeared.”

  “I wonder now if he’ll come back and work with Arachnaman.” Wade swept her gaze across the room. “My gut tells me that he won’t. Like, his powers were only good for this one shot at getting back at us. They’ve probably weakened because of it, or they might deteriorate. I have a feeling that if Arachnaman comes back, it’ll just be him. He’s already way too smart and good at what he does to depend on little brother for extra help.”

  Everyone murmured either their agreement or their doubts. Althea was set to hack into Renaissance High’s database to see if she could find something on O’Keefe, though she was convinced that he’d have erased his tracks pretty darned well by now.

  As for Trini and Dario, who weren’t there…

  “I’m afraid we had to purge their memories,” Dr. Dibbs said as he sat at his desk like he always did when I had “school” there. “But don’t worry. The process is very safe, and we didn’t have to use it on full blast, so to speak. Their knowledge of your true identities only happened in a matter of an hour, probably a little more, and that includes briefing time here as well as the actual game-playing. It didn’t take much for us to erase that moment in their lives.”

  “I hope there aren’t any side effects,” I said dourly.

  “No, there aren’t. Just a sudden desire to take a nap, which I believe they ended up doing after we dropped them off near their home. A bit of hypnotism worked into the program to enable them to function automatically from the moment we erased their memories to the moment when they walked through their front door.” Dr. Dibbs spread his hands out in front of him. “They go inside, greet the family, and go upstairs to sleep. When they wake up, they’ll remember nothing but their time spent window-shopping downtown, which was where Miss Althea found them.”

  We all turned to Althea. How did she know they were out? Did she start reading minds as well? She shrugged. “Spur of the moment stuff—I knew Trini loves playing video games, so I texted her by worming my way into her phone to see if she could help us out. Those things are so easy to possess, especially when I’m hooked up to a bunch of laptops.”

  I shook my head. I guess it was all good if neither of them could remember my Majorly Embarrassing Nerd Moment ™ with those knives. As far as Althea went, I suppose I was better off not making any references to my Legolas fighting methods and humiliate myself by reminding her about it. “Man, this is nuts. And let me tell you, I’m swearing off computer games. Except for Pac-Man and Tetris. Those I can do and not freak out over because of post-traumatic stress syndrome.”

  “Yeah,” Freddie piped up, rubbing the back of his neck. “That was way too close for comfort. And you know, sitting alone in that damn banquet room, not able to talk or move while surrounded by dead people? That really sucked ass.”

  “I wanted to burn the whole freakin’ castle down,” Wade said, making a face. “It was nasty.”

  Peter shrugged, smiling sheepishly. “I was lucky enough to be able to move even though I was still confined. I tried to stay above those bodies while I waited and avoid looking at them.”

  A few more minutes followed, during which we started talking all together, sort of like a moment of depressurizing. Brenda, Dr. Dibbs, and Althea consulted with each other—most likely regarding Renaissance High’s database and maybe other things as far as tracking O’Keefe down was concerned. Still, that stunt of his wasn’t considered as threatening as any attacks aimed at Vintage City overall, though I would’ve argued against that. Vintage could’ve lost its superheroes save for Magnifiman and Spirit Wire. All the same, I kept my mouth shut, thanked the cosmos that the ordeal was over, and then demanded pizza.

  “Oh, yeah.” Ridley scrambled to his feet, brushed off his clothes, and trotted off to make the phone call.

  In the meantime, people moved around to stretch sore muscles and raid Brenda’s back room for something to drink. I stayed behind, gingerly rubbing my back. Then I felt a gentle tap between my shoulders and fou
nd Peter standing behind me, giving me a silly grin.

  “Good job back there, by the way,” he said. “I saw what you tried to do, helping Wade like that when she was starting to fade. That was mighty honorable of you, Eric Plath.”

  I blinked. “It was? That’s what you call it? Huh—I’ve never been called that before. Usually I’m a whiner or a drama queen.”

  “Well, those, too, but you’re still ace in my book.” He leaned close and kissed me. And, shocker of all shockers, I didn’t grab him by the collar and yank him back when he pulled away, so he could give me a thorough tonsil job. I thought that a quick kiss on the mouth was plenty sweet.

  I guess I must’ve hit my head harder than I thought.

  “I’m sorry I got everyone in this mess,” I said, drooping a little when it hit me. “All I wanted was to come up with a birthday gift for you that’d be something you’ve never seen before. I didn’t expect to get us all sucked into the game because of some psycho’s brotherly love thing, which, by the way, is creepy as hell.” I shrugged when Peter’s brows went up. “I mean, you know—you’ve got everything you need or want. Can’t really top that, can I?”

  Peter smiled and tweaked my nose lightly. “You already have. In fact, you always do. I’ve never had anyone go through all this trouble just for a birthday gift, Eric. I hope you know how much that means to me.” When I said nothing because my face was burning and I was in danger of toeing the ground and going, “Aw, shucks, it ain’t nuthin’,” Peter chuckled, flicked my bangs off my face, and said, “Now let’s go get some pizza, you big sap. All the power used up in the game drained me of everything I ate since I was born.”

  If I was the big sap, what would he be, the sugary bastard? Well, whatever—he still got me all icky-giddy and stuff with all that sweet talk.

  We were alone in the room at that point, and I could hear everyone else yakking in the main customer area. Peter and I took our time walking out, arms resting around each others’ waists, while we talked about stuff.