Darkmouth (22 page)

I
n the library, the timer on the bomb wound down. Two minutes left.

The gateway pulsed briefly. It sent a tiny shock wave through the room, which traveled across the floor, pushing up eddies of dust.

From the space behind the bookshelves came a cough: an audible splutter that echoed around the abandoned room.

They all turned sharply toward the sound. Finn recognized it. He saw his mother's eyes widen and knew she recognized it as well. Mr. Glad grabbed her, lifted her to her feet, and placed his weapon at her temple.

“Hugo?” he called.

No answer.

“Hugo, I know you're behind the trick bookshelf,” Mr. Glad said. Keeping an eye on the shelf, he addressed Finn. “I was here the day your father built that thing, young
man. He has seen a lot of movies.” Finn felt the breath leave him for a moment, then caught it again. There was a violence building in Mr. Glad, his tightly clasped fists giving away the anger beginning to boil within him.

The only sound was the low rushing of the gateway and the rapid
tick-tick-tick
of the timer. Mr. Glad pulled Finn's mam closer.

Finn's heart felt knotted. He was trapped, cornered. He looked to Emmie, whose face told him she was way out of her depth here. This was not the adventure she had expected. So, Finn did what he always wanted to do when trapped. He called out for his father.

“He has Mam, Dad!” he shouted. “He's going to hurt her.”

“He can see that, you idiot,” scolded Mr. Glad, then focused again on the unseen figure behind the shelves. “Can't you, Hugo? You
are
there, I know it, like you're always there to remind me of my place. Like all the Legend Hunters. Countless numbers of them are alive thanks to people like me, yet it's always the Fixer who has to make the sacrifice. I've given my whole life to being an odd-job man.”

Mr. Glad pulled Finn's mother closer to the gateway.

“But you got a whole building, a whole street, a whole
town to call your own. You got Clara and, for all that he's worth, this idiot boy. What did I get? A certificate.
A piece of paper.
”

Spittle ran down the side of Mr. Glad's mouth; the gun now trembled under his fevered grip. He glanced over at the timer as it ticked down. Two minutes.

Keeping his eye on his mother, Finn took a step forward, a small one, careful not to rattle his suit.

“Right, I'm sick of talking to a wall. Come out, Hugo, and show me some respect.
They
show me respect,” Mr. Glad shouted, pointing his weapon at the gateway.

The bookshelf swung open. Hugo emerged from the dark space. Relief flooded through Finn. His father was here. Everything would be fine now.

“Whatever you need,” Hugo said to Mr. Glad, “we can sort out for you.”

“No, Hugo,” said Mr. Glad, steadier now, as if he had regained control. “I'm the Fixer, remember? I'm the one who does the sorting out. Me. Running. Fetching. Get this for me, Glad. Pick that up for me, Glad. Fix this, Glad. Well, this is one final fix. And, when the Legends reward me, it will not be with a scrap of paper to hang on my wall.”

Holding Finn's mother, Mr. Glad took another step toward the gateway.

“No!” shouted Finn.

“Clara has nothing to do with this, Glad,” said Finn's father, an edge of pleading in his voice.

“You're wrong, Hugo. You see, we ended up with three crystals, but two did fine for this device. That left me with one extra crystal as a means of escape.”

Mr. Glad pulled Finn's mother closer again, the light of the gateway almost lapping at them. “But I see now that I can send something far more valuable through there. You have always pledged yourself to this town. Sworn to protect it, to defend it, at all costs. But take away the armor, and the weapons, and the ego, and I always wondered how far you were really ready to go, how much you're really prepared to sacrifice.”

Finn's father moved forward a touch, the scarred breastplate of his armor catching the soft light of the gateway. The steel in his voice sliced through the air between them. “I will do what it takes.”

Mr. Glad held his gaze. “Let's see about that.”

He pushed Finn's mother at the gateway's center and let go. Her eyes widened and caught the reflection of the light. She fought the force of the push, but stumbled, unbalanced by the restraints on her arms and legs.

Finn ran forward and tried to catch her, but he was too late.

The light enveloped her. She disappeared completely.

Hugo had already reacted, covering the distance between himself and the gateway in a few strides. Without pause, he leaped straight after Clara.

The gateway swallowed them both.

Gone.

F
inn stood frozen, concussed with shock. He waited for his parents to reemerge. They would surely be back as quickly as they had gone. But there was nothing except a ripple across the deep yellow light of the gateway, like a pebble had been tossed into a pool.

Tick-tick-tick.
The blue liquid in the canister burbled.

There were thirty seconds left on the timer.

“Well,” said Mr. Glad, bursting into a delighted smirk, his arms and gun hanging by his side. “Wasn't that something!”

Finn's rage propelled him toward Mr. Glad. In the half second it took to reach him, his mind flicked through the nights of training, the endless hours of repetition, the dozens of possible moves, all there to be plucked out at the precise moment he needed them. This moment.

Then he simply barreled himself at Mr. Glad's
stomach, hitting him hard and sending him flailing toward the gateway.

One leg already out of view in the glowing portal, Mr. Glad managed to regain his balance. He steadied himself and stopped, a foot in both worlds, as he glared at Finn. “That wasn't very clever, was it?”

But Finn saw the change in the gateway before Mr. Glad did.

It trembled, wobbled.

Its glow deepened.

It collapsed, its jaws biting down on Mr. Glad, who crumpled, dropping his gun and wriggling and fighting until he was horizontal, his lower half lost in a ring of hungry light.

Mr. Glad screamed.

Around him, the gateway pulsed and gulped and strained, trying to close but blocked by the thrashing body in its mouth. Mr. Glad reached out in a futile search for something to hold on to. Light began to flood through his body, pouring through his nose, his ears, his eyes.

On the floor, the liquid in the canister began to boil. The timer went
ting
.

Then a most surprising thing happened. Mr. Glad stopped fighting his fate. Instead, he matched Finn's
stare, grinned, and looked to his wrist. Finn and Emmie followed his sightline and saw a trigger poking out from his sleeve. Mr. Glad pressed it.

As he did, the gateway's pressure finally overcame him. He convulsed as brilliance flooded through his body and blew him into a million points of sparkling light.

The bomb woke up, its metal exterior turning as the canister of bubbling blue liquid rose from the center.

A white flash ran along the wires, sparking the crystals where they sat and sending a shiver through the entire device.

Then nothing.

From outside on the street, they could hear screaming, the panic of a mob under attack. But inside there was silence once again.

“Maybe it isn't working,” said Emmie.

The bomb exploded.

T
he blast turned the room blue before subsiding into a fine mist that drifted across the library and settled slowly on the floor, on the shelves, and on Finn and Emmie.

They sat up from where they had dived, layered in blue, spitting warm liquid from their mouths, their hands sliding on the now damp floor.

In one of the jars, on the edge of a shelf high on the wall, a desiccated ball rattled. The same thing happened in a jar lower down. Then another. The shelves began to shake under a clatter of vibrating glass as the rattling spread from shelf to shelf, from jar to jar.

“That's not good,” said Emmie.

Finn opened his mouth to reply. Nothing came out but a dribble of blue.

The library was cacophonous with waking Legends,
the oncoming march of an invading army being roused from a coma.

Finn jumped to his feet and ran toward the device. All around him, jars began to fall from their heights, smashing to the ground, where their desiccated spheres rolled free, the last spasms before Reanimation. He stood at the device and stared at the computer screen. It was filled with lines he didn't understand. Something very significant suddenly occurred to him. “I don't know what I'm doing!” he screamed at Emmie.

She slid over to him, shouting over the noise. “Do what looks right!”

Amid a shower of breaking glass, balls began to expand and scream, a howling chorus of reanimating Legends.

Finn thought of his mother and father, somewhere on the other side of the air, a whole world away. He heard the chaos of the street outside, a town in tumult.

The machine had been labeled with yellow sticky notes at each end of the large light switches. One had
D
scribbled on it and the other
R
. The switch was currently in the
R
position. His dad liked simplicity, Finn reminded himself. Even in disorder. The notes had to mean
desiccate
and
reanimate
. They had to, otherwise they were all about to die.

He pressed the switch to the D position. He figured that if the device could reanimate all these Legends it should still be able to desiccate them all too, like his father had originally intended.

Maybe.

The dial was a third of the way up. Finn hesitated over it, but a
smash
as something large fell from a height encouraged him to turn it up high.

His finger hovered over the large red button, and the awful things that might happen rushed through his mind.

He could destroy the house.

He could accelerate the waking of the Legends. Who would destroy the house.

He could desiccate Emmie.

He could desiccate
himself
.

“What if I desiccate the whole town?” he called to Emmie, his heart pounding, the enormity of the decision beginning to crush him, narrow his vision.
I could always just run for it
, he thought.

“Just do it!” yelled Emmie. “We're all going to be dead anyway in a minute.”

Finn smashed hard on the button.

A shock wave tore across the library, knocking Finn and Emmie off their feet as the blast burst through the
walls and swept out to the street outside.

Back in the library, all was quiet. Finn prodded himself to make sure his body was still in one human-shaped piece. He looked at Emmie to see that she was all there too, then lifted his head and saw the floor was calm. The Legends were spheres: shrunken, hard, unmoving.

“You did it, Finn,” said Emmie, punching the air with delight.

On the floor in front of them, a single hard ball twitched lightly. It rocked forward. Then it hopped a little and began to expand with a growing, guttural scream.

Finn grabbed Mr. Glad's abandoned weapon from the floor beside him. “We'd better go,” he suggested.

Emmie already had.

T
he wave pushed quickly across the street, across the town. As it struck each Manticore out there in Darkmouth, they froze wherever they were, midattack, midchase, midriddle, and imploded one by one, shrinking into little spheres.

Whooop.

Whooop.

Whooop.

The blastwave traveled on, rippling up lanes, rolling into the remaining open gateways, slamming them shut. On it went just beyond them, quickly weakening, failing, and then dissipating completely, well short of the edge of Darkmouth.

On one of those streets, Emmie's father stood, breathing hard, surrounded by a carpet of desiccated Manticores.

And, as yet unknown to the people of Darkmouth, every goldfish within a thousand yards had vanished from its bowl.

On the street outside Finn's house, people emerged from behind walls and cars, picked themselves up off the concrete, limped in search of assistance, and tended to the wounded. Sergeant Doyle stood in the center of the road, panting heavily, a baton in one hand and a small can of pepper spray in the other, alert to any new chaos. There must, he thought, be a psychopath somewhere who needed escorting; a dangerous gang that needed infiltrating.
Anything
to get away from this place.

Those who could moved toward the house once again, picking up stones, shoes abandoned in the panic, anything they could find. One man lifted a desiccated Manticore, weighed it in his hand, and judged that it would make an excellent missile. He lifted his arm to launch it.

From the house, there was a sound not unlike a roar.

The crowd went mute.

Some kind of crunching echoed from deep inside.

The crowd shuffled forward a little to hear better.

There was another roar. Closer this time.

Having hidden inside the house throughout the Manticore attack, the man who had broken down the
door in the first place reappeared, tumbling backward, bouncing his way across the threshold. He turned and barged a path through the crowd.

After they watched him run all the way across the street and around the corner, the mob's attention again turned to the house. From inside came a bowel-shaking growl.

Finn and Emmie burst out through the doorway.

They stopped at the wall of people spilling out over the yard and onto the street. Finn waved his weapon at them, its barrel bulging. “Go!” he shouted, but even the pistol didn't seem to shock the crowd from its stunned stupor. “Now!”

He grabbed Emmie's wrist and pulled her through the crowd.

“That's the boy!” shouted someone.

“Grab him!” demanded another.

“You do it. I've had enough,” insisted someone else.

There was another great roar from inside.

A shadow passed behind the door.

A very large shadow.

And then a Minotaur appeared, bending through the frame, unfurling itself in the flickering light at the front of the house. It raised itself up to its full height. Once again, the crowd screamed, shouted, panicked,
flailed, and fled in all directions, falling into one another, clambering for an escape.

Finn and Emmie were dashing away when Emmie tripped. Finn tried to help her up, pulling her arm around his shoulder, imploring her to keep moving. All around them, the mob was in pandemonium.

“Come on, Emmie!” Finn yelled. “Please!”

As the Minotaur loomed closer, Finn pointed the pistol, found its slim trigger, and aimed squarely at the Legend, telling himself,
You can't miss, you can't miss, you can't miss
.

Just as Finn pulled the trigger, a fleeing local clipped him in a panicked dash to safety. Finn missed, flying backward under the force of the shot, a red glob firing into a tree and sucking it inside out, exposing light, crumbling wood where there had been dark bark. The woman standing beside it at the time was briefly the luckiest woman in Darkmouth.

Finn lay winded, clicking the trigger uselessly. Evidently, Mr. Glad hadn't designed it to fire more than once.

The Minotaur moved toward him, sweeping within inches of Sergeant Doyle. Finn watched as the policeman searched his belt for something to stop it. It was as if he could see exactly what was going through Sergeant Doyle's mind: his baton would be useless; a
squirt of pepper spray would hardly reach the creature's chest, never mind its eyes. . . .

Doyle ran to his car, sprung open the trunk, and began rummaging through it.

As the creature strode closer, Finn searched for something else that might be useful as a weapon, pulled the helmet from around his neck, and threw it at the giant. It bounced pathetically off the Legend's skin and onto the road.

Steam pumping from its nostrils, each eye a deep and merciless well, the Minotaur reached him.

“Hey, you big lump, over here!”

Finn peered around the Legend's thick leg to see Sergeant Doyle waving a neon reflective jacket around his head. “Come on. Pick on someone your own size!”

The creature ignored Sergeant Doyle and refocused on Finn, fixing its bleak eyes on him, great snorts of anger rattling above vicious teeth.

Finn gulped.

Then there was a pop and a fizz as a blinding light burned itself into the Legend's skin. The Minotaur roared in anger and pain as the white light died out, revealing Sergeant Doyle aiming a smoking flare gun.

The Minotaur moved away from Finn and Emmie and
toward this new threat. Sergeant Doyle backed off and fled to the safety of his car. The Legend grabbed the underside of the vehicle and heaved it off the road, where it tipped helplessly on its side. Sergeant Doyle, meanwhile, made a break for the wall at the front of Finn's house, half falling over it into the yard. He lifted his head to see the creature coming for him, vibrations shaking him with each of its pounding steps. Sergeant Doyle's hands quivered as he reloaded and gripped the flare gun.
Wait
, he ordered himself.
Wait
.

The Minotaur loomed over the wall. Its horns appeared first under the street light, followed by the deep, wet nostrils, chipped tusks sprouting from a foaming open mouth. Sergeant Doyle pulled the trigger.

The flare had no time to light before it was launched straight down the Minotaur's throat. The Legend swallowed it, shook its head, and belched. From within its gullet came the muffled fizz of ignition. A burst of white phosphorous shone through the creature's ears, nose, and mouth.

It stumbled backward and Sergeant Doyle raced toward the house. As he reached the doorway, he felt the strangest sensation, a numbness through his chest. It was odd to him that his legs moved, yet he was not moving.

He looked down at a large claw piercing through his ribs. The Legend withdrew it, and Sergeant Doyle's world went sideways.

Slumped on the front step, his right cheek pressed against the concrete, Sergeant Doyle watched the Legend stalk back toward the children. But Finn and Emmie were gone. Sergeant Doyle had bought them some time at least. The Legend scanned the area for them, before bounding off toward the far end of the street.

At the front of Finn's house, Sergeant Doyle hauled himself up against the door frame and examined the hole in his uniform. A dark stain was seeping through his shirt and coat. His breathing grew shallow, his eyes heavy.

He thought of the stain that would never come out.

He thought of Tahiti.