A dozen strong hands seized him from behind, the ground dropped away under his feet, and pain erupted everywhere.
Sunday July 24, 1988
3:00 A.M.
His arms were on fire.
He didn't remember waking up. He wasn't sure he had. For a moment he thought he was dreaming, his nightmare come to haunt him once again, only this was a new part, after the cone-faced thing began to howl. He tried to open his eyes, and saw only darkness. The world had a damp, fetid smell. He couldn't move his fingers. He could feel burning in his shoulders and his wrists, but otherwise his arms were numb. He kicked feebly, and his body began to twist. He was suspended somewhere, adrift above some vast black abyss.
Far off in the darkness he heard coarse laughter and dim, whispering voices. The cone-faced things were talking about him, Jay thought. He remembered his name then; somehow that helped. He tried not to listen to the voices. They reminded him of the trees in his dream, whispering secrets, terrible secrets he did not want to hear.
Then there were footsteps coming up behind him, and the fear rose in his throat. They were coming after him, and when he tried to run, his legs pumped uselessly against nothing.
The blindfold was ripped off his face. Sudden light stung his eyes. Jay closed them, whimpering feebly. "Cut him down," a familiar voice said, close at hand.
Someone grunted. Against his best instincts, Jay opened his eyes a crack. His vision was blurred and painful. The room took shape around him. A basement, he thought groggily. He was hanging from a pipe, swaying in the air, dangling by his arms. A human centipede advanced toward him, hands full of shiny metal, while a man with an eyeless face watched from below. Sascha, he thought, but when he tried to say the name, nothing came out.-
Then he was falling. His legs tangled under him, unable to support his weight, and he collapsed, his head hitting the damp stone beneath a solid crack as he fell. Jay groaned.
"Give him another shot," a distant voice said. " I don't want to take any chances with him until we reach Ti Malice." No, Jay tried to say. All he produced was a moan. Someone kicked at his broken rib, rolling him over with a foot. Then there was a bright light shining in his eyes, a sharp pain inside his elbow. After that he slept.
11:00 A.M.
Chrysalis smiled at him. Brennan thought it was strange to see her again, because he was pretty sure that she was dead. Or maybe she'd just been out of town.
He smiled back tentatively. Now that she was back, how would he explain her to Jennifer? And vice versa? He decided to worry about it later and reached for her. They embraced and he pulled back to arms' length to look at her. His smile froze.
Chrysalis was deteriorating before his eyes. Her crystal flesh clouded with corruption and fell away from her face and body in rotten chunks. Blood ran in sluggish tears from her eyes, her breath whispered in a ghastly rattle from her laboring lungs. He held a corpse in his arms. He felt guilt tear angrily at him and with her last gasp she said, "Brennan," and he awoke soaked with sweat and shaking from horror and anesthesia reaction.
"How do you feel?" someone asked from his bedside. "Fine," Brennan lied. "Where am I?"
Brennan turned and looked at the speaker for the first time. He was a young man in a white lab coat with a stethoscope around his neck. He looked like a cross between a surfer boy and a palomino pony. Dr… Finn. That was his name.
"The Jokertown Clinic," Dr. Finn told him. Brennan nodded wearily.
"You know," Finn went on, "it's most astonishing that you're with us at all."
Brennan nodded again. He was groggy and disoriented, but he was starting to remember things. The fire. Mother. The ceiling collapsing.
"It seems," Dr. Finn said, watching him closely, "that a fireman found you in a secret subterranean room when looking through the wreckage of the Crystal Palace. Apparently you were saved from the flames by… something… that was only a charred, fleshy mass covering your back when the fireman discovered you."
"Mother," Brennan whispered. His mouth felt as if it were full of wet cotton batting and his right arm was a hunk of unfeeling meat encased in a plastic cast. He sat up and swung his legs onto the floor, fighting sudden vertigo that made his head swirl as if he were in the middle of a three-day drunk. His arm was totally numb, but he knew that the numbness would wear off unfortunately quickly. "Where are my clothes?"
"You're in no condition to leave the hospital," Finn said gravely. "Your arm was broken pretty badly, and you've lost a lot of blood. You've also got some burns on your hands and face. You should rest for at least a day."
Brennan shook his head. "I've no time to rest."
"I can't be responsible if you leave the clinic," Finn said, his tail twitching in distress.
"You're not responsible for anything. I am." Brennan stood, and almost immediately collapsed again when he was struck by a severe attack of vertigo. "Now, where are my clothes?"
Finn shook his head. "If you're really determined to leave, I won't stop you. Wait here a minute and I'll find your clothes. It may take a while because everything's a mess this morning."
"The fire?" Brennan asked.
"No. The Crystal Palace was destroyed, but there were actually very few injuries from the fire. It seems that half the staff was up all night partying with the rest of Jokertown, and the other half is being run ragged trying to treat the results of that partying."
"Partying?" Brennan asked. "Why?"
"Oh, I guess you couldn't have heard. Senator Hartmann was nominated for the presidency last night. All of Jokertown's gone Hartmann crazy."
Somewhere in the darkness, the voices were arguing. "It's not fair," the first voice said. "We need the kiss, too. He spends so much time with him. How long is he going to keep us waiting?"
"As long as he desires," the second voice said. "It is not our right to question the master's comings and goings. Ti Malice does things in his own time, for his own reasons."
"We ought to kill them both," the first voice said. "They're dangerous."
"No," said a third voice, a woman's voice, "not these sweet ones. The master will want to taste them, to ride them, to feel them beneath him. The master will want to hear them scream."
That was enough to open Jay's eyes.
"What about us?" He saw the centipede man pacing, his voice high and nervous. "What if he likes them better than us? We'll never get the kiss. I can't stand it when he goes off."
Jay lay facedown on a decaying, foul-smelling couch, his head turned to one side, arms tied behind his back. At least he hoped they were tied behind his back; he couldn't feel them anymore, and when he tried to move his fingers, there was only numbness. The upholstery smelled of piss. His head was pounding, and his ribs screamed at the slightest motion. He was still in the same dank cellar. He could see an old hot-water heater a few feet away, its pipes eaten by rust. Beyond it was a second room, larger than the one he was in, where shadowy figures waited in the faint light that poured through grime-encrusted windows. Jay tried to count them, but there were too many, some of them moving around. When he tried to concentrate, his skull felt like it was about to split open.
He must have groaned, or whimpered, or somehow given away the game. The argument stopped suddenly, and he heard footsteps. Rough hands turned him over toward the ceiling. Sascha stood above him. The telepath looked a little worse for wear. His hands were trembling, and strands of dark hair were plastered to his pale forehead with sweat.
"What," Jay said. It was all he could manage. His lips and throat were dry and raw. "What," he repeated.