“Pogokhashman,” he croaked, eyes still tightly shut. “Take my hand!”
Something grasped his left hand, even as he felt himself being sucked down through his own thoughts, down a darkly pulsing rabbit^hole into nothingness.
Curiouser and curiouser, my ass! This is just plain ... weird.
Pogo had grabbed Elric’s white hand — not without some trepidation; he had been halhcertain the albino was going to push his fingers into the torch as well. An instant later, he was off to Wonderland.
Or something. Actually, what made it frightening is that it wasn’t really anything. The closest comparison Pogo could make was the light^show ride down to Jupiter in 2001. But that had been a day at the beach compared to this.
Bodiless yet achingly cold, he was tumbling like a meteor through shouting darkness. Streamers of thinly^colored something^onother flared past him, but although they looked like ragged clouds, he could sense that they were somehow alive, that it was their voices which raged and bellowed in his ears, enraged by his relative warmth and mobility. He could also sense that, if they caught him, they would do things to him he wouldn’t like at all.
Pogo closed his eyes, but it made no difference. Either he truly had no body — he couldn’t see his hands, his legs, or even his faintly embarrassing suede desert boots — and hence had no eyes, or the place he was, the things that shouted at him, were all behind his eyelids... in his brain.
But if the bits with Elric and the dungeon and that Rolling Stones guy, if they had all been a hallucination too, how come they felt real and this part felt crazy?
Pogo had just decided that it was time to contemplate seriously coming down from this whole trip, and was wondering how to do it, when he popped through a hole in a much more normahlooking sky and tumbled to a halt on an endless, grassy plain. A single hill loomed in the distance; otherwise the place was incredibly horing, like the kind of state park even his parents would drive through without stopping. Elric rose to his knees beside him, clutching Stormbringer in his blistered right hand. The albino looked very real and quite weary.
“We are here, Pogokhashman — wherever ‘here’ may be.”
“You mean you don’t know?”
“No more than you. Stormbringer, not I, has led us to this place.”
Considering all that had gone before, this new wrinkle worried Pogo rather more than it should have. He found himself longing for the shadowy dungeon, which had begun to feel quite familiar, almost homey. Could you get lost in an acid hallucination, somehow get off the proper track and go permanently astray? He dimly remembered from Cub Scouts that when you were lost in the woods you were supposed to stay in one place until people found you.
But somehow I don’t think that Mr. McNulty would’ve shown up with a compass and a canteen and taken me home even if I’d stayed in the dungeon.
“Bummer,” he said aloud, with considerable feeling. “So what do we do now?”
Before Elric could answer, a booming crash knocked them both to the ground, which itself trembled as if in sympathy. A vast globe of light bloomed on the distant hilltop, spreading and reddening.
“Whoah! Nukes?” Pogo asked, but he didn’t really want to know.
A moment later there was a rustling in the grass. Pogo looked down, then leaped to his feet with a shout of alarm. The plain was alive with serpents and rodents, hundreds, maybe thousands of them, and they were all moving in a single direction with the speed of complete terror.
“They’re runnin’ from the bomb on the hill!” he shouted, and searched his memory for nuclear attack information. “Duck and cover!”
Elric, too, was on his feet, shaking loose a cluster of panicked ground-squirrels from his boot. “I do not know what should frighten these creatures so,” he called above the whipsaw hissing of the grass, “and do not recognize the word you used, but they are running toward the hill.”
Pogo turned. The albino was right. The rush of small creatures bent the grass like a heavy wind; there were insects, too, flashing like dull jewels as they flew and hopped — all speeding toward the hill, where the globe of red light still hung, although it seemed to be fading.
“Look, Pogokhashman!” Elric now pointed in the opposite direction. Pogo turned again, frowning. His neck was beginning to hurt.
A dark line had appeared on the far horizon, a moving band of shadow. It was from this that the local fauna were beating such a hasty retreat. As he and
Elric stared, the line moved closer. It was hard to see clearly at such a distance, harder still because of the clouds of dust and chaff thrown up by the fleeing animals. Pogo squinted, and was glad for the concealing dust. What he could see was quite unpleasant.
“It’s weirddooking guys in armor. And —Jesus! — there’s a whole shitload of ‘em. Thousands!”
“If they are not a Chaos horde, they are a marvelous imitation,” Elric said grimly. “See, they are twisted and malformed.”
“Yeah. Ugly, too.”
Elric pushed Stormbringer into his belt and clutched Pogo’s shoulder. “They are too many to fight, especially with my runeblade in its diminished state. In any case, we are too exposed here, and we know nothing of this world.”
“What you’re saying is: ‘Let’s run away,’ right? Good idea.”
Elric seemed about to try to explain something, but instead turned and began loping toward the hill. Pogo hurried to catch up.
This is just like gym class, he thought, feeling a stitch already beginning to develop in his side. But at least in gym, you get to wear sneakers. What hind of a stupid acid trip is this, anyway?
It was difficult to run through the living sea of animals, but Pogo had already accustomed himself in the dungeon to stepping on furry things. Besides, one look back convinced him that the pursuing horde of beast-men would happily do the same to him. Gasping for breath, pumping his elbows with a determination that would have made his PE teacher Mr. Takagawa stare in disbelief, he sprinted toward the solitary hill.
Elric faltered, and Pogo suddenly realized how difficult this must be for a man who until minutes ago had been hanging in chains. He grabbed the albino’s elbow — it was astonishing how thin he was beneath his tattered shirt — and half- tugged him along, which made their progress even more agonizingly slow. Pogo was now feeling so frightened that a part of him considered just letting the pale man fall so he could run at full speed.
Once, back in junior high school, he had left Sammy lying with a twisted ankle after they had rung Old Jacobsen’s doorbell and run. Sammy got caught, and had to go to the emergency room too. Pogo had never felt good about that.
“C’mon, dude, we’re almost there,” he panted. The albino struggled on.
Something was echoing in Pogo’s ears as they reached the skirts of the hill, a mysterious, almost pleasant buzzing too low and soft to identify. There was something in the way it vibrated in the bones of his skull that he knew he should recognize, but he was too busy dragging Elric and dodging high-speed rodentia to
give it proper consideration.
They began to clamber up the slope. The greater number of fleeing animals parted and passed around the hill like a wave around a jetty, but enough accompanied Pogo and Elric to continue to make their progress difficult. One large, white, long-eared creature ran right between Pogo’s legs and bounded up the slope ahead of him. He was almost certain it had been carrying a pocket- watch.