Dream Park

Owen's foot slipped a fraction, and he had to move nimbly to catch himself. He turned his head and gri

The pale green aura blinked and went red.

"Hold it!" Chester's voice was frantic, and the tension left the lines so fast that the bomb almost slid back down the incline.

S.J. crept closer to the bomb, and swallowed hard. "It's tick­ing..." When he turned to look at them all of the color had left his face. The bomb's red aura was darkening smoothly toward black. Part of his head went dark as he leaned close. "Chester.

I think it's go

Shadow had entirely engulfed the bomb.

Henderson was incredulous. "An atomic bomb? He can't do this! Just what the hell does Lopez want from me? There's no way

-wait a minute." Alex could see wheels turning behind his eyes. "The black fire. Everybody empty your pots onto this thing! Mar­gie, you're carrying ashes? Dump it. It'll stop the priming charges. Who else has black fire? Or ash? Who's got Guinevere's pack?"

Dark Star and Holly still had anti-fire, and they snatched up their packs and dumped them out, fingers shaking with excitement as they searched for the makeshift firepots. Ollie dumped the ash from Gwen's pack onto the corroded casing. The blackness began to spread through the ash.

"S.J., Margie, heap it on while-what the hell are you doing?" Waters had pulled a leverage bar out of his pack, and was pry­ing at a hatch in the nose of the bomb. "We can't just pour the stuff on, chief. We've got to try to stuff it as close to the primer as possible-" His voice was shaking, and his ski

Griffin hesitated only a second, then rushed to help. "Get out of here, Gary," S.J. panted. "I can do this myself."

"Stop trying to be a hero, friend." Griffin yanked the bar from S.J.'s hand and squeezed it into the narrow crack, leaning his weight against it. Distantly he heard Chester telling the others to clear out. The door popped open. Alex sniffed. Odd- "Thanks and get out," S.J. hissed, grabbing the bar back. "No sooner said..." Griffin slapped the Engineer on the back and hightailed it. The gravelly surface of the slope gave that stom­ach-sinking two-forward-and-one-back traction of a sand dune, but Alex sprinted anyway. Wondering why they ran. He had sniffed cordite and hot metal. The primer had abeady gone off; the bomb's explosion was retarded only by the black fire. How could they outrun an atomic explosion?

Just below the volcano's lip, he looked back.

S.J. was still shoveling anti-fire and ashes into the hatch, and had pushed Margie away. She said something to the boy that Alex couldn't hear, and Waters snapped at her. She ran stumbling up the slope. Owen went down after her, to help her the last several yards to the top. They both arrived gasping.

And that cleared the volcano, except for Waters. "Run, you lit-tie idiot!" Henderson bellowed, and Alex was surprised to hear his own throat echoing the words.

Tony McWhirter was already a good way down the slope, haul­ing Acacia behind him by one arm. Alex heard him shout back at them: "Come on!'~ The others were bounding after him, and Alex joined them.

He was halfway down when a voice called from above. "Keep going! Keep going!" He looked back over his shoulder and saw S.J. at the rim of the volcano, just as the airplane's egg hatched.

It outlined Waters with a halo of light and flame. The ground shook as if a giant's palm had slapped the earth, and then the sound came.

Alex lost his footing and tumbled, falling across a split rock that began to gush steam. He fell into Holly Frost, who frantically tried to regain her balance before cascading with him in a rolling heap. Everywhere geysers of steam erupted from the ground, and he managed to roll around them more by instinct than thought.

By the time he reached the bottom he was totally out of breath, u

and dusted himself off, coughing, looking for bodies to count. Mi­raculously, there were no black auras.

Then he remembered, and his eyes searched the top of the vol­cano for a certain young Engineer. It was difficult for him to deal with what he felt at that moment: hope, fear, anger... and what else? All of them absurd, all of them real as a cut finger. He saw a plume of black smoke rising, rocks rolling, and nothing else. S.J. was gone.

Acacia read his mind. "He knew he wasn't going to make it, Gary."

Griffin fought with his emotions. "All right, dammit, he knew. But did he know he was dying for nothing?"

"What do you mean?"

"He's right, Acacia," Henderson had the same mixed emotions warring on his face. "That was no atomic bomb. Even in 1945, they weren't that small. We'd all be blown to hell and back."

"Well then, what... ?"

"Decoy, dammit. Another decoy." He watched the smoke churning at the top of the flattened peak. "That crazy little bas­tard. He's going to make a hell of a Lore Master one day . .

he shook himself out of it.

Most of the Garners were back on their feet, although none of them looked too steady. They clustered around Chester like little children around their mother. Numb, disbelieving, and con­fused.

Holly rubbed a scraped knee. "What now, Ches?" There was no sass in her voice.

"Regroup and rethink. I guess we had better go back for Maibang." He tried to force some life into his voice, but Griffin saw the shallow backward glance toward the top of the volcano and knew what he was thinking: Three down. And the day was yet young.

The brush was blackened and burned away, and great pockets of earth were tarry scorch marks.

"Where did we leave him?" Acacia asked, her voice whispery with ugly anticipation.

Alex could only guess. "There used to be a patch of shrubs around here, and a group of low trees..."

The group was about to spread in search when Dark Star waved her arm. They followed her toward a cluster of black fingers

standing up from black ground: charred trees, still standing. There they found Maibang's smoking bones.

Gina sat down and cried. Henderson poked in the ashes with the tip of his toe, as if looking for something, some tiny symbol of victory in the midst of stu

The Haiavaha. It had found the little guide and had finished what the Fore started.

Chester was muttering to himself, so softly that Griffin almost thought himself imagining it. Ever faithful, Gina came to his side and massaged his shoulder, trying to comfort. He flinched away at first, then began to relax, some of the tension draining from him. The other Garners seemed to go into neutral, waiting for their leader to unscramble his thinking.

Griffin fidgeted, then plopped down next to Henderson. "Lis­ten," he said, "we need to talk. We have some unsolved logic puz­zles here. I don't know any of the answers, but I've got some in­teresting questions."

Chester didn't look around. "All right. Shoot."

Griffin paused to collect his thoughts. He ticked off questions on his fingers: "First. The bomb in the crater was just an ordinary bomb. Where's the great super-weapon the ghost Marines told us about, the one that was supposed to help win World War II? Sec­ond, why weren't the enemy guarding their egg if they valued it so highly? Just where were they? Third, if the super-weapon is hid­den somewhere, why wasn't there a second blank spot on the map? Dammit, why was the first blank spot there if we couldn't get anything of value at the volcano? Why did Maibang get killed off like that, without any chance for us to save him? I mean, if he's a vital part of the Game, how could that happen?" He paused in frustration. "Or does any of this make sense?"