Weekend - By Christopher Pike Page 0,46

eyes. "Hell, I feel so dizzy. What's wrong with me?"

"It's the flu," Park said, swaying slightly in his chair.

"Never had flu like this," Sol mumbled, his head nodding.

"How's Robin?" Kerry asked.

"Ask her yourself when she wakes up," Lena said slowly, staring at an empty milk glass in her frozen hand.

"We have to get her to eat," Shani said. Her hike must have taken more out of her than she had realised.

The room was receding, fogging at the edges, as if she were slipping down a translucent tunnel. It was a struggle to keep her eyes open.

"Juice is better for her if she's accumulating wastes in her blood," Park said, yawning like a hibernating bear.

Angie stood abruptly. "I'm going to bed." She was halfway to the hallway when she collapsed.

"Angie!" Lena called, stumbling out of her chair, kneeling by their fallen friend. "What's wrong?" She shook her, but Angie remained out cold. Lena turned to the rest of them for help. None was forthcoming.

Shani saw everything through dream glasses. The situation was desperately wrong, but she couldn't understand why.

"This can't be," Lena said in useless denial, trembling, her hand going to her throat, her eyes rolling in their sockets. She dropped beside Angie.

Like a melting Gumby, Park staggered to his feet. But his knees buckled, and his height was halved. In dumbfounded amazement, he stared at his right hand as he tried to form it into a fist. Then he toppled forward.

Sol planted his face in his plate.

Kerry rolled out of her chair like a bag of potatoes.

And at last Shani thought she understood. She turned her head slowly towards Flynn. It was all she could move. Her arms were nailed to the table. Her legs were made of cement. The lights swirled like drunken fairies with sparklers. A wave of wrath permitted her a last moment of clarity.

"You," she breathed in loathing, wishing she could spit in his face. He hadn't spoken all night. He had been waiting.

Yet he, too, was fighting to remain erect, and his incredulous expression denied his guilt. "We've been...

drugged," he whispered. The Carlton Castle turned into a ferris wheel.

"Who?" she managed as she slid towards the table linen. But if he answered, she wasn't awake to hear him.
Chapter Nine
"Shani! Shani! I think she's coming round. Shani!"

Shani opened her eyes. The room was dark, quivering with candlelit shadows, hissing with the breath of serpents. It must be a nightmare. She closed her eyes. Her head throbbed with pain. She wished she could wake up-

"She's fading out again." That was Angie.

"Shake her." That was Sol.

"I can't reach her." That was Flynn. "This handcuff has me pinned."

Shani ventured another look. Their dinner-table fellowship was now equally spaced around the perimeter of the floor of the recording studio she had wandered into earlier, deep in the bowels of the Carlton Castle. The curtains outside the double-plated glass were drawn. Except for candles in red cups rimming a round Plexiglas container in the centre of the room, there were no lights. Within the clear container, their long tongues flicking with hunger in the bloody glow, were snakes. A continuous rattle filled the muffled air. She was not dreaming.

"Oh, no," she whispered.

"She's awake," Angie said.

"Try to stay calm, Shani," Park said. "We're all together."

Attached to the top of the snake bin was the aluminium pole that had lowered and raised the microphone. If the pole was raised, the covering would be removed, and the rattlers would be set free.

There were at least a dozen snakes, each individually isolated by partitions of glass, equally sized servings of poisonous pie. The temperature was icy. Shani's guts were burning.

"What's going on?" she mumbled. Her right arm was stuck, handcuffed at the wrist to a ring and bolt in the panelling a foot above the floor. She was not alone in this regard. "I feel sick."

"Someone who mustn't like us drugged and dragged us down here," Lena said, pinned opposite the closed entrance door, at six o'clock. Kerry slouched an hour over, head bowed, still unconscious. Shani had Park to her immediate right, Flynn to her left.

"That Robin," Angie cursed, on the far side of the snakes, next to Sol and the door. "She's out for revenge."

"Robin couldn't have picked up a gallon of milk," Park said, "Never mind have dragged us down here."

Shani shuddered from the cold, her intestinal cramps, the snakes. One, she was sure, had its eyes on her.

"She was just pretending to be sick," Angie said bitterly.

"No one's that good an