Free Game Over by Andrew Klavan

can never trust your brain.”
    Her words surprised him at first, but when he thoughtabout it, he knew she was right. He could think of half a dozen times off the top of his head when he had done something really, really stupid and his brain had said to him, Great idea, Champ! You ride that skateboard down the steepest hill in town two days before training begins! Sure thing. What could go wrong?
    â€œBut if I can’t trust my own brain . . .,” he began.
    â€œRemember when you were angry with your father?” his mother said—and it was as if she had read his mind, as if she knew he’d just been thinking about that. “Remember when you thought he’d left us to go off with Leila Kent? You didn’t just get angry at Dad, did you?”
    Rick shrugged. “I guess not. I got angry at everything. I got angry at God. Dad believed in God so much and then he left—I thought he left . . . So I got angry.”
    â€œWhat do you think about your father now?” she asked him.
    Rick opened his mouth to answer, but no words came out. He was thinking about the last time he was in the Realm, when he was in the fighter craft doing battle against the Octo-Guardian in the midst of the living blackness of MindWar space. He had been forced to make a choice, forced to decide whether to stop Kurodar’s attack on Washington, DC, or to rush through the Breach and rescue Molly and Victor One right away. It was only then, only in that moment, that he had begun to understand what kind of choice his dad had had to make when he left home, what kind of sacrifice he had been willing to make out of love . . .
    â€œI’m not angry at him anymore,” he said. “I get it now.”
    His mom reached up and pushed his hair back off his forehead. “You won’t go into your dreams alone,” she told him. “You’ll never go anywhere alone. I promise.”
    When his mother was gone, Rick stood another long moment looking down at his bed. There was still a weight of fear lying at the pit of his stomach. But he couldn’t stay awake forever. He pulled back the covers and lay down.
    He reached up and switched off the light on the wall above him. He lay in the dark. For a long time, he did not dare to close his eyes. The silver moonlight came through the edges of the curtains. Now and then one of the flash-lights of the patrolling soldiers played its beam across the back of the fabric.
    You won’t go into your dreams alone.
    Rick’s thoughts returned to Molly. Her eyes gleaming in the shadows. Her lips on his . . . A simple answer to what had seemed an almost impossibly complicated question. An answer that had been there all along, waiting for him to find it.
    You’ll never go anywhere alone.
    Rick let his eyes sink slowly shut.
    Never alone , he thought.
    Moments later, he fell asleep—and the horror began.

9. BLAST ’EM
    THE ETERNAL BLACKNESS swept up out of the sarcophagus and seized the living Rick by the throat. At the same moment, Favian let out a terrified scream. The door to the church burst open and the dead swarmed in.
    It was a hellish scene. The darkness was swarming over him, choking him, swallowing him, threatening to pull him down into some nightmare without end. And the church, this strange, colorful church full of beautiful mosaics, was suddenly swarming with screeching Harpies, slithering Cobras, charging Boars, their bodies and faces half rotten with death, their skull-heads grinning as they charged across the nave to kill him.
    Rick couldn’t breathe. The edges of his vision were falling into shadow. He sensed the dead creatures of the Golden City storming across the church floor, through the church air. They were nearly on him, about to destroy him.
    Then— flash— a blast of blue light.
    Favian. Standing beside him. His eyes so wide with fear that you would have thought he would be running away as fast as he could. But—typical