"Hey, you remember what I said last year, right? We're Zombie Boy and Ghost Boy. I'm not ever gonna leave you."
"Promise?"
"One hundred percent."
***
In which Alistair fights the monster that possessed his friend alongside his friends, while trying...
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Chapter Forty-Eight: A Body At The Munson Trailer
(Vecna's Curse)
***
Blood.
It was all Alistair could taste, all he could feel. Blood was drowning his lungs and choking his throat and draining out beneath him in a sticky red pool and pouring in a crimson waterfall from the crater in his chest, his shirt going red with blood, and it just kept pouring out of him and filling his lungs and choking him as the impact of the Mind Flayer's tentacle still reverberated in his bones and the darkness crept in, the cold freezing him inside out, begging whispering coaxing screaming at him to give in and die, his heart had failed and his lungs were failing and there were screams ringing in his ears, he should just give in and die but he was alive he wasn't dead was he dead was he a zombie a corpse a living dead boy no he was alive alive alive!
"You're not."
Alistair whirled, seeing those he loved standing there, his friends, his sister. Cami was the one who'd spoken, her face streaked with tears, eyes red and puffy from crying, but her voice was hard as steel.
"You're not him," she snarled. "You're not my best friend. You're something dead wearing his face, an imposter. You're not alive. You're dead. You're supposed to be dead."
And then it was ringing out, a chant of cries, crying out one thing.
Dead!
Dead!
Dead!
DEAD!
Alistair wanted to cover his ears, but his limbs were frozen, and then he was falling, screaming out a frozen scream, the blurry haze of Starcourt fading into darkness as he kept falling and falling, the blood falling upward, and in his ears he heard something, the same noise he'd heard at school, but he still didn't know what it was.
And over it, he heard something else, quiet and cold, yet it cut through him like a knife, like a bullet, like a tentacle of melted human flesh.
"Alistair."
The noise droned. Alistair fell.
"It's almost time, Alistair. Your borrowed time is nearly up."
Alistair finally landed. He sat up and turned, seeing something behind him.
"And you'll be where you truly belong."
Before he could see what it is, the slam of the Mind Flayer's tentacle through his body shuddered through Alistair and the blood was rising up and the cold was shadowing him and the screams and the noise rang in his ears, and—
