Rogue (17 page)

Chasing them would be bad.

Nick stopped and turned to Will.

“Chasing them would be bad,” he said.

“I couldn't agree more,” said Will.

“Hey, but I got a good name for these ugly bastards,” said Nick, turning back and suppressing an impish grin. “
Snake-
ers.”

They heard laughter behind them and turned to see Ajay leaning against the wall, doubled over; then he stood back up, laughing so hard he was having trouble catching his breath.

Will shot an urgent look at Elise:
Get him down the stairs. Fast.

She hurried over to Ajay, put a comforting arm around him, and slowly walked him down to the plaza level. Ajay kept laughing the whole way, gasping for breath.

“I mean it was funny,” said Nick, keeping his voice down, “but not that funny.”

“He's under a lot of stress,” said Will, walking down the stairs after them.

“I guess. To each his own, right? I haven't had this much fun since I snuck into the zoo after dark and jimmied the lock on the monkey house.”

“You actually did that?”

“Yeah, well, security nabbed me the second time. Caught a big dose of righteous hell from Pop for that one.”

“How'd the monkeys take it?”

“Aw, we got along
great.
”

“Why am I not surprised?” said Will as they reached the plaza. “By the way, I found Coach. He's over here.”

“Awesome!”

Will jogged past Elise and Ajay—she was whispering in his ear, trying to soothe him, and his laughs had subsided into sporadic giggles—and led Nick toward the circular wall in the center of the space. Nick turned a series of somersaults that got him to the wall just ahead of Will. Nick jumped up onto the wall, leaned over, and peered down through the crosshatched bars.

“Hey, Coach,” he said. “How's the water?”

Coach Jericho looked up from below, treading in place. “Why don't you jump in and find out, McLeish?”

Nick chuckled. “Fell for that trapdoor number, huh? Oldest trick in the book.”

“We have to hurry,” said Will, glancing back at Elise, who was leading Ajay through a series of deep breaths and slow exhales. “Those ones that ran off are probably going for help.”

“What, you think there's more of 'em?” asked Nick.

“No, Nick,” said Will. “I think twelve of them built everything you see here. This whole complex. All by themselves.”

Nick looked around and gave it some thought. “All this? 
Nah.
”

At that moment, from somewhere way deep on the far right side of the structure, they heard drums. Pounding deep and fast, but with purpose and synchronized rhythm.

Lots of drums.

“See, what'd I tell you? There's
gotta
be more than twelve of 'em,” said Nick, slipping off his backpack and taking out his coiled rope. “Don't worry, Coach, I got this.”

Then from the left side of the complex, which Will had begun to realize might be even larger than they'd thought, they heard a
second
set of drums.

“That's a call and response,” said Ajay, suddenly his calm, rational self again.

Another set of drums kicked in, behind them this time, and a few levels lower.

“They're sounding the alarm,” said Will. “Calling in reinforcements.”

Nick was securing one end of the rope to the bars near the edge of the wall. “Coach, can't you like turn into an eagle or something and fly out of there?”

“If I could do that,” said Jericho calmly, “don't you think I would have done it?”

“An eagle wouldn't fit through the bars anyway,” said Ajay.

“Good point. It'd have to be like a hummingbird or a woodpecker or something,” said Nick, finishing the knot. “That oughta get the job done.”

Nick dropped the rope down through the bars and it unfurled toward Jericho. He grabbed it with both hands and pulled himself out of the water. Nick grabbed the other end and started hoisting him up.

“How is he going to get through the bars?” asked Elise, joining them at the wall and looking down. “They're not wide enough.”

“We've been over that already and please leave it to me,” said Ajay, rummaging through his pack. “I've brought along a selection of moderately sized explosive charges, and if applied in the proper sequence, I believe I can detonate an appropriately sized hole—”

“I'm pretty sure we won't have time for that,” said Will, looking around, his senses tuning in to what was going on in a number of areas throughout the complex.

“I can try, then,” said Elise.

“No, Elise,” said Will firmly. “You need to save your strength.”

Will turned back to the pit and sized up the bars; the two rows formed squares, like a checkerboard, each square less than a foot across. Nick had pulled and Jericho had climbed up to just below the bars. He clung to the rope, shirtless, his taut muscles straining.

“You need to figure this out,” said Jericho, looking up at them.

“Coach, you look kind of wrinkled,” said Nick, leaning down to look at him more closely. “How long you been in there?”

“And you need to hurry,” said Jericho.

“And, dude, no offense, but you don't smell so great either,” said Nick. “What is that down there, a sewer?”

“I'm going to bend the bars,” said Will. “Stay right where you are, Coach.”

“There's something you need to know about these things,” said Jericho.

“Give me a second,” said Will.

Will closed his eyes, summoned up an extra charge of power from the base of his spine, and felt it ramp all the way up his back, down his arms, and into his hands. He spread his fingers and pointed them at the bars: A thought-form in the shape of a turnbuckle appeared just where he visualized it and he inserted it in between the bars just to the right of where Jericho clung to the rope.

Mentally turning the gears of the turnbuckle, Will focused and applied its expanding force to the bars on either side…and slowly each bar began to give, bending right and left, yielding with a rusty creak.

“What are you doing, Will, and exactly how are you doing it?” asked Ajay, wide-eyed.

Ignoring the question, Will paused to gather his mental energy again, then spent it all in a final burst that wedged the bars another few inches apart until they were nearly touching the next square over. Drained by the effort, Will nearly collapsed onto the wall, and the thought-form between the bars vanished with a snap.

“Give me your hand,” said Nick, thrusting his arm down through the opening.

Jericho grabbed hold of Nick's forearm with his hand, let go of the rope, and swung over until he was positioned below the opening.

“The drums stopped,” said Elise, looking up and around. “Is that good or bad?”

“I vote bad,” said Ajay.

“Maybe their arms got tired,” said Will, looking around.

Nick slowly lifted Jericho through the opening. First his head cleared, then the arm Nick was holding. But Jericho's left shoulder bumped into the bars, more than a few inches shy of clearing them.

“Can you make it?” asked Nick.

“Not without dislocating his shoulder,” said Ajay.

“Look away for a second,” said Jericho sharply. “All of you.”

“Why?” asked Nick.

“Don't argue with me, just do it,” said Jericho.

“Do as he says,” said Will.

Nick and the others looked away. Will closed his eyes but first blinked on the Grid; he had recently learned he didn't even need his eyes open for the Grid to function now. He saw Jericho's heat signature drastically change shape into something short and sleek, about the size of a small dog.

Nick reacted with a start, feeling a radical change in the arm he was holding.

“Dude, what the fritz was that?”

Will saw Jericho's smaller heat signature slip easily through the bars, hop over the wall, and flop onto the ground. Then it almost instantly expanded, in every direction. When Will opened his eyes again, Coach Jericho was lying on the ground next to Nick, panting and shivering.

Nick was staring back and forth from Coach Jericho to his own hand. “What in the name of Carl Yastrzemski was that?”

“That's what I
thought
I saw in the lake,” said Ajay, almost to himself. “When he was coming ashore.”

“Dude, I felt fur,” said Nick, “and…and a tiny wet little flipper.”

“What's the matter, Nick, haven't you ever held hands with an otter before?” said Elise.

Jericho looked up at her and winked. Elise knelt down and offered him a couple of PowerBars and water from her canteen. Nick untied and recoiled his rope, still shaking his head.

“He's actually, absolutely, positively a real shaman,” said Ajay, still almost whispering.

All around them, and much closer, the drums began again.

“What did you want to tell us, Coach?” asked Will.

Jericho took a long pull from a canteen, then wiped the excess off his chin. “They're cannibals.”

“Oh, really,” said Ajay, looking suddenly woozy.

“Good to know,” said Nick.

“How do you know that?” asked Elise sharply.

“They said they were going to eat me,” said Jericho, matter-of-factly.

“You could understand them?” asked Ajay.

“They made their intentions perfectly clear.”

“So what the hell were you swimming in down there,” said Nick, making a sour face and looking at the pit, “marinade?”

“There's no accounting for taste,” said Jericho.

“Where did you come into the zone?” asked Will.

“In the swamp,” said Jericho, getting to his feet and stretching his long limbs. “Not far from here. This structure was the first big thing I saw. I worked my way toward it, and then—yes, McLeish—I fell through the damn trapdoor. I slid down some kind of slick tunnel that dumped me into that hole. Then the water started pouring in. It's been a fun couple of hours.”

“Just curious, how did you
know
they were going to eat you?” asked Nick.

“Let's just say it didn't require a human-to-snake-man dictionary.”

“For God's sake, what does that matter?” said Ajay to Nick, annoyed. “The point is if Coach was going to be the main course, now we're all part of the buffet.”

“We have to get out of here,” said Jericho. “Now.”

“Something's coming,” said Will, getting back on his feet, his energy feeling more fully restored.

Noise, energy, and bright flickering lights were issuing from the cavernous opening in the wall on the plaza's right side. Will recognized the harsh guttural barks of the snake-men, and this time it sounded like there were too many to count. The drums were moving with them, pounding out an angrier, more menacing beat.

“They're over this way, too,” said Elise, pointing back to the stairs.

More lights and the side-winding sounds of approaching snakes were coming down both of the staircases at either end of the plaza.

“Oh my freakin' gawd,” said Nick, staring at the large tunnel.

The lights—torches in the hands of dozens of the snake-men—were casting forward onto the walls of the wide passage the wavering shadow of something moving with them. Something at least twenty feet tall and as thick as a towering oak, swaying and bobbing in that same, familiar hideous way.

The shadow of a gigantic snake-man.

“Guess the big dog gets to eat first,” said Jericho.

“Check, please,” said Ajay.

“That is no dog,” said Nick.

“Get ready to run,” said Will, lowering his voice. “And do exactly as I say.”

WILL'S RULES FOR LIVING #10:

WHEN VISITING A FOREIGN LAND, IT IS ALWAYS WISE TO OBSERVE AND ABIDE BY THE CUSTOMS OF THE LOCAL CULTURE. UNLESS THEY'RE TRYING TO EAT YOU.

The first war party poured into the plaza from the staircase to their left, twenty-five or thirty of them. Torches held aloft, armored with thick, scaled leather and chain mail and armed to the teeth. A trio of drummers brought up the rear, wearing drums slung around their hips, pounding out a martial beat.

A second party, about the same size, spilled out of the right staircase moments later. All of them looked bigger, tougher, and at least twice as strong as the creatures they'd first encountered. Both parties halted at a single commanding gesture from a leader at the front of each pack, each of them half again bigger, tougher, and stronger-looking than the rest of their platoon—officer-class material.

“They don't look much like the ones we fought earlier,” said Elise.

“We probably ran into the types who maintain the temple,” said Will.

“Janitors,” said Jericho.

“Or the ones who do the cooking,” said Ajay, settling in behind Nick.

“Wimps,” said Nick, disappointed. “We fought the wimps.”

“This is their warrior class,” said Jericho.

With a precision that would have rivaled any military, both parties spread out in front of the staircase and took up defensive stances.

“Why aren't they coming at us?” asked Nick.

“They're disciplined,” said Jericho.

“Their orders are to guard the exits,” said Will, turning back to the large passage behind them. “Keep us boxed in. For the main attack, from there.”

At that moment, the larger party broke out of the cavern. There were at least a hundred in this group, urged on by a dozen drummers. More soldiers spread out to either side, where they set up precise formations, weapons poised to advance. Most of them wore shinier armor and carried long, lethal-looking spears, and they held large rectangular shields, like the imperial guard of a Roman phalanx.

Once they were in position, the star of the show arrived, writhing out of the shadows with a supple grace that belied its extraordinary size. Twenty feet seemed about right, thought Will, as tall as a two-story house. Its arms had the size and definition of tree trunks, armored at wrist, bicep, and shoulder with bands of iron. It carried a gleaming golden trident at least twelve feet long and as thick as a flagpole, the business end of each blade festooned at the base with a trio of cruel-looking hooks. A leather-studded hood adhered to its long angular face like a glove, and a round band of what looked like gold circled the crown of its head.

“King Mamba,” said Nick.

But Will sensed this fearsome creature didn't rule by size alone, as if that wasn't enough. A foul, keen intelligence radiated from its oval reptilian eyes, which sought them out from across the room, using the force of its gaze as a blunt instrument. A long red tongue slithered out toward them a few times, maybe four feet, tasting the air.

Searching for fear,
Will thought.
Like any snake, it can taste it.

The curve of its long mouth already angled toward a grin, but Will thought it took on an added degree of sneer as it sized them up.

“It's trying to scare us,” said Jericho.

“Working,” said Ajay, his voice quivering.

The snake king took in a deep breath and flared out its hooded neck with a snap, like a parachute opening.

“I don't suppose you could speak nicely to it,” said Ajay, hiding behind Nick. “Like you did with the daisies.”

Will did give it a try, sending out a mental probe in the snake king's direction. He saw the monster tilt its head to one side as the probe approached. Curious, momentarily, then annoyed, like it had just noticed a gnat.

The thing summoned up some strange source of eldritch energy. Blinking on the Grid, Will saw a thin veil take shape all around the monster's head like a protective barrier, and then his probe vanished, just as if that gnat had been vaporized by a bug zapper.

“No luck,” said Will; then he turned to Elise.

I want you to try something. I know you've never done it before and you probably think you can't pull it off. But I need to ask you to try.

Then he told her what he had in mind. Elise looked at him skeptically.

That's not happening.

Yes, it is. If you can do this, you can do that. You take the one on the right. I'll tell you when.

The snake king raised his trident and issued a harsh stream of orders to the two war parties. While it continued to harangue them, Will turned to his friends, who were all staring at the giant snake.

“Everybody ready?” asked Will.

“As we're ever going to get,” said Jericho.

Will sent Elise another message:

Let 'em have it.

They both turned toward the two war parties guarding the front of the stairs. Both concentrated hard and shot the same thought commands at the leaders of the two packs: images, arranged in specific order, one after the other, like a rebus.

Will saw the thoughts land and take immediate effect. The two captains growled and whipped their heads around from their leader and the humans in front of them to their opposite number in the other war party:

That's your enemy, there. Disguised as some of us. Bad bad. Attack attack. Kill kill.

And other vivid word pictures to that effect.

Both captains pointed at each other, raised their weapons, and charged across the plaza at each other, barking out orders and frothing at the mouth. Shocked, but pulled along by their blind adherence to the chain of command—helped enormously, Will thought, by an almost laughably low threshold of intelligence—both war parties followed, albeit with slightly less enthusiasm than their leaders, at least initially.

Their lingering reluctance vanished the moment the two captains savagely collided with a crash near the middle of the room, their swords clashing and clanging, and both parties tumbled after them into a lethal melee, chopping and hacking at each other. From that moment on, training, instinct, and bloodlust took over.

Elise watched for a moment, then turned to Will with no small amount of amazement.

It worked. I can do it, too.

I told you so.

The snake king stared at this spectacle in astonishment. He'd obviously been expecting them to attack, but in a radically different direction.

“Now,” said Will.

Ajay and Nick broke toward the stairs on the left, and Will followed closely behind, skirting the edges of the fight in front of them. Jericho and Elise ran toward the stairs on the right.

Not one of the savages in that scrum in the middle paid the slightest attention to them. As both groups reached the base of the stairs, they heard a deafening shout: the snake king laying down the law. He pounded the staff of his trident into the ground and his shout echoed through the chamber like a crack of thunder.

The shock wave had the desired effect: The two captains and their war parties snapped out of their mesmerized state and stared at each other in amazement, as if to say,
How the bleep did this happen?

Will pushed Ajay ahead of him to the landing and then hesitated long enough to look back and see the snake king wave his trident forward and shout out another slightly less thunderous command that wasn't hard to translate:

Kill
them,
you idiots!

The war parties, many of them wounded and limping, refocused their wrath on the two groups of humans who just now were disappearing around the first landing of the stairs and gave chase. Will stayed behind one additional beat as Ajay and Nick ran ahead, just long enough to see the rest of the king's army rush forward from the tunnel with a bloodcurdling cry, all of them now in pursuit, while the drummers charging behind them went into overdrive.

Don't stop for any reason,
Will sent to Elise.
Until we're back in the swamp.

The war parties and the regiment behind them split into two groups to follow them, just as Will had figured they would. He picked up his pace and raced to the top of the stairs just as Ajay and Nick were getting there, Ajay slowing down to reach back and grab something out of his pack.

Elise and Jericho were already waiting under the archway above the passage leading out to the maze.

“Go, go, go!” shouted Will, urging Nick and Ajay along as he came up behind them.

They followed the others through the archway into the maze, but Ajay slowed even more between the stairs and the exit to carefully scatter a few handfuls of small objects he took from a pouch.

“What the heck are you doing?” asked Jericho as he waited by the arch.

“There's no point in bringing these things along if I don't get a chance to use them,” said Ajay.

“What are they?” asked Will.

“Explosives, a few shrapnel bombs, some tear gas, and a few that throw out a weaponized spray of hydrochloric acid when you step on them,” he said cheerfully. “A real mixed bag of Halloween treats.”

Ajay scattered the last of his little booby traps—they looked like clusters of nuts and bolts crossed with multicolored gumballs—then scampered out under the archway after the others.

“Coach, take the lead. Get everybody past the trapdoor!” Will shouted. “Elise, stay with me.”

Will stopped with Elise on the far side of the archway and turned back to the entrance. They tensed and waited until they could hear the clamor and slithering of the approaching warriors charging up both stairways.

“Now,” he said.

Will covered his ears. Elise took a deep breath, leaned forward with her arms bent back, and sent a howling shriek through the mouth of the entrance. Will heard and felt it bounce off the stones, echoing back and forth in the enclosed chamber, shock waves reverberating so powerfully that the stones themselves seemed to tremble, and then the sound rushed out through the only places it found to escape—down both sets of stairs. They heard screams and shouts from the stairwells as the shock wave crashed into the leading edge of both ascending columns.

“Now get going,” said Will.

“What about you?” asked Elise, bent over and panting for air.

“I'll be right behind you.”

Elise squeezed his hand and hurried out into the maze. Will took a few steps after her into the passageway, turned, looked up, and focused his mind on the long snake carving in the center of the immense stone archway. He summoned up another powerful mental charge—shaping it this time into the form of a cannonball—and sent it hurtling at the keystone of the arch.

As the thought-form made impact, the archway reared and buckled at its midpoint. The whole structure trembled and then the artful masonry around it collapsed as the central stone gave way. The entire structure dropped to the ground, raising a cloud of dust and burying the entrance to the building with a thick wall of debris.

Will turned and staggered away into the maze, dizzy and light on his feet. A stream of blood gushed from his nose, and he wiped it away on his sleeve. He wasn't sure if he was feeling the effects of just this particular exertion or if the whole encounter was starting to exact a cumulative toll, but he knew his reserve was close to running out.

From inside, on the far side of the pile of debris, he heard a series of small explosions detonating, followed by a series of screams and shouts of pain and alarm and then the slightest whiff of some acrid gas. The survivors of the sound blast had made their way up into Ajay's Halloween minefield.

Will turned the first corner into the maze and headed for the turn around the trapdoor.

A few turns ahead of him, Elise and Ajay had caught up to Nick and Coach. Ajay was taking a certain amount of pride in pointing out that they were quickly negotiating their way back through the maze by following the fluorescent pink tags he'd left behind on their way in.