He was still bent over, dry heaving when one of the two remaining men pulled the body out of the seat and dumped it over backward into the waiting cart. The third man took the opportunity to slip past the other and sit in the chair, firmly gripping the arms and wrapping his shins around the front legs. When the second man couldn’t drag him out of the seat, he buckled down the wrist and ankle straps. The man in the chair beamed at the audience as if he were about to be crowned king of the world.
Instead of being simply crowned.
AS RYAN MADE his way out of the caves, the entourage of people from his past trooped alongside and behind him. Their happy chatter began to fade as he approached the exit. And when he turned to look at Trader and his father, he saw their shapes rippling, then disintegrating like campfire smoke in a breeze. A terrible sadness struck him. He didn’t want them to go, but he couldn’t make them stay. Outside the cave, Ryan the passenger became Ryan the captain, the sole commander of his own body. Fully conscious as he filed along with the others toward the square, he understood that he had been hallucinating, that he had been talking to ghosts, to imaginary presences. That he had been utterly lost in those hallucinations. It was worse than any jump nightmare he had ever suffered because it was real. And because he knew without a doubt that he was being held against his will, and made to perform like a puppet or a mutie in the zoo.
He wasn’t alone.
Krysty, J.B., Mildred, Jak and Dean stumbled along beside him, lost in their own inner worlds, raving to themselves.
Something terrible had gripped all of the companions, and it was toying with them.
Ryan knew he had to gather Dean and the others and get out of there while the getting was good. Even as he shook free of the leadenness that still hung upon his limbs, thunder boomed at his back, then came the hot wind, then the sting of the pale-yellow snow.
He stopped walking and turned to face it.
The initial jolt this time, the plunge into the perfume of the flower fields, was less shocking to his system. He slid into it like a well-worn pair of boots. And almost at once, he had a profound sense of well-being. All the wrinkles, the doubts were smoothed away.
He stood there, eye shut, head tilted back, mouth wide open, letting the spores fall on his tongue and dissolve there. They tasted like grains of sugar. Time passed, the snow drifted over his ankles and up to his shins, but he didn’t care.
He was happy. He was content.
Trader and his father, Baron Titus, were by his side again.
Passenger Ryan knew this couldn’t be. But the body in which he was trapped felt their presence, their physical warmth. It even smelled Trader’s cigar smoke. When everyone moved in close to the chair, Ryan’s body moved along, too. When they grinned and chanted, it grinned and chanted. It knew that bloody murder was about to be done.
In all his days, in all his battles, Ryan had never seen men fight each other in order to be the first to die. He had never seen men rejoice at the prospect of their own destruction. Passenger Ryan felt the body rejoice, as well, and was disgusted. Not only did he have no control over the emotions that it felt, but also they weren’t and never could be his emotions.
He wanted to look at the others, but he couldn’t make the head turn; it was locked straight ahead, at the man scrambling into the chair. Ryan sensed that his friends were feeling the same thing that he was, that they were smiling like he was. The insanity was like an infection. Not just out of character. For the companions he knew, it was out of the question. And yet none of them could break free and stop the horror.
The man strapped in the chair was filthy and raggedy, beard matted. His eyes burned like blue coals in his head; he was missing most of his front teeth. With all the dirt that encrusted him, it was hard to guess his age, but he was probably somewhere between twenty and thirty years old.