The Academy: Book 2 (42 page)

             
Somehow, not having the face on the body did make Asa feel better about it. As Mike Plode began cooking the meat over the fire, Asa thought of what Adam Trotter said about the Multiplier.

             
The old man’s words had disturbed Asa.
He was just a crazy old kook,
thought Asa.
He was lying to us. He was delusional. There’s no reason I should take Adam Trotter’s words seriously.

             
But then another part of him responded,
if the information wasn’t true, then why did they send a lightning bolt to kill him?

             
Asa groaned. The Academy felt threatened by Adam Trotters knowledge, he was sure of it.
Which means he was probably telling the truth.

             
Could the Multiplier that the Academy caught be part of the Hive?
It was possible. What unnerved Asa about this explanation was that he had previously believed that Joney, Edna and Michael, the Multipliers that had killed the Davids and hung them upside down behind Mount Two, were from the Hive.
And the Multiplier that Adam Trotter was describing sounds much different than these. These are dirty, unsophisticated, and uncivilized—the one that Adam described sounded suave, smart, and educated.

             
And he didn’t produce Salvaserum.

             
The food was cooking over the fire now, and Asa tried his best not to think about what he was doing. He wanted to turn his consciousness away from where his body was until his stomach was full. Then, he would do his best to forget about it.

             
Why wouldn’t a Multiplier produce Salvaserum? Was the Multiplier genetically altered? Or was it not Multipliers at all?

             
An image flashed in Asa’s mind. Travis and Volkner at the cafeteria during the Talking Ban last year. Volkner informed Travis that the young man he was sitting across from was
the
Asa Palmer, and immediately Travis began to drip Salvaserum uncontrollably.

             
It would be hard for a Multiplier to infiltrate the real world if they sometimes uncontrollably salivate black serum all over themselves. It could be possible that Multiplier that Adam Trotter spoke of was trying to get into human politics or something. I guess that he could paint his gums pink, and hide his identity.

             
The idea of a Multiplier getting involved in human politics, in having a say in government legislation, made Asa’s skin crawl.

             
Is this kind of Multiplier a new development? Or did my father help to create this?

             
And what was he doing around the Academy when he was captured? What else did Adam Trotter and other Academy scientists find out about him?

             
A vibration in the ground broke Asa’s thoughts like a hailstorm crashing through a pane of glass.

             
Something big is coming.

             
There was another vibration and Asa looked down and saw that he had a long strip of unidentifiable cooked flesh in his hand. He was nearly full; he realized that he had been diverting his thoughts from the meal, trying not to think about the sick thing that his body was doing as he ate.

             
There was a BOOM and another series of vibrations. The Sharks looked at each other with frightened expressions. Their scared, wide eyes and their fast twitches made them look like squirrels on a park bench when a human approaches.

             
Another BOOM, and then the ground was shaking even more intensely.

             
“A dinosaur,” Roxanne said.

             
“It smells our food,” said Mike, looking up at the long line of smoke from their cook-fire.

             
There was a quick succession of steps and then an unearthly, irate, demonic roar hit the Sharks with the force of a tornado. They could feel the vibrations from the sound waves in their chests, in the pits of their stomachs. Some deep-imbedded instinct of Asa’s told him to
Run! Run like hell!

             
But instead, he stood, and looked in the direction of the noise. He heard Boom Boom whisper, “spinosaurus” behind him, and then there was the shuffle of feet as the Sharks began to leave.

             
Asa had never seen a creature so large. In fact, no human, outside of the Academy, had ever seen a land creature so large. Each of its eyes was the size of beach balls, and it stood comfortably taller than forty feet. It cast a vast shadow on the ground below, where its two feet were making indentions in the earth with the length and width of a one-car garage. It let out another roar, and Asa stood, his feet planted by his terror, looking at the yellow, decaying teeth and the roof of the Jurassic mouth, which was black with red spots.

             
The spinosaurus leaned forward and began to sprint towards the Sharks; each of its muscular thighs (each of which had the girth of a full grown male bull) launched itself forward with alternating contractions that shot up dirt behind the giant as it raced forward. Asa dropped the greasy bit of Adam Trotter that he had in his hands and began to run.

             
He followed the path the other Sharks had taken down the road beside the jungle. They left Gabby, one legged and screaming where she had been abandoned near the fire. Asa grimaced at the desperation in her voice, but kept running. He was relieved when he heard the prehistoric creature pass her up, apparently not interested in the one wounded human when he could potentially catch a whole herd of healthy ones.

             
The dinosaur was gaining on them. Asa looked around him, and could not see Jen. They made their way around a bend, and Asa was uncomfortably aware that he was at the back of the pack, closest to the deadly jaws. The dirt beneath him was shifting, and the vibrations from the dinosaur’s steps were making it difficult for Asa to retain traction.

             
Up ahead, Boom Boom turned around. He had somehow lit the vine coming out of one of the coconuts he had tied to his waist, and it was acting like a fuse, moving slowly up the vegetation towards the coconut shell. He spun, tossed the coconut high into the air, and then turned back to continue sprinting. The coconut detonated in the air before reaching the spinosaurus. Asa felt the heat of the blast, and bits of sharp coconut shrapnel that cut into his back.

             
The spinosaurus howled in sick rage, but kept moving towards its prey. Asa continued on, the back of his neck bleeding from where the fragments had hit him. They turned another corner and came to a straightaway in the dirt path. Feeling that he wouldn’t be able to outrun the spinosaurus for long, Asa made a quick decision and diverted off into the jungle, away from the group.

             
If it follows me, I’m dead.

             
Asa sprinted up an embankment thick with moist leaves and vines across the ground, threatening to trip him. He used his echolocation, as twenty yards into the trees the thick canopy above muted the light. He heard the parade of Sharks continue to sprint down the road, and heard the giant pacing after them.

             
God help them.

             
Asa continued to run. He was pumped full of adrenaline from the close encounter, and guilt at what he had just eaten. With food in him, he felt revitalized. He pushed himself into the unknown wild, his breath coming out hot in the humid jungle. Then he ran further. He didn’t know where he was going. He hurdled over trees, glided over a black pond, using his wings. He heard rustling in the dark pockets of jungle beside him, but didn’t slow. Minutes went by.

             
In some basic part of himself, he was shallowly aware that he was using one of his favorite coping mechanisms. Whenever his mother was dying he ran. Whenever he was scared nearly out of his mind by the continual Multiplier attacks last semester, he ran. And here he was, running through the Tropics, in a suit that had the capacity to electrocute him to death after eating a man that had told him about a Multiplier from outside of the Academy. It was too much to deal with right now. He ran to forget. He ran until the lactic acid dripped what felt like lava into his thighs, his hamstrings, his calves, his abdomen, and then he ran some more. He wanted to be numb. He wanted to hurt so bad that he couldn’t think of anything else.

             
At a point, Asa didn’t know how long it was, he reached this kind of meditative numbness where all that existed were the path and his pain.

After two hours of
sprinting at a blistering pace, Asa began to feel okay with thinking again. Not deep thinking, he wasn’t ready for that yet. And he wasn’t ready to walk yet, either. He jogged over the grass and looked out to his left.

             
When he was younger, his mother used to take him on trips to Galveston beach, and once they had stayed in a cabin in the Rockies. Asa had a love for running in scenic, beautiful places. He enjoyed being exhausted, and being able to glance out where ocean met sky, or where the jagged tips of the mountains cut into the clouds.

             
He admired his current place.

             
He was on the edge of a great canyon that stretched for miles and miles. Far below, brontosauruses ate leaves from remarkably tall trees, using their long necks that made those belonging to giraffes look insignificant. The dinosaurs were metallic blue, and at a glance they looked like gigantic gems on the sea of dark green grass. There were dozens of waterfalls that rained down from caves in the sides of the rock wall that made clouds of mist as the falling water collided with the clear pools that supplied the river below. A pure white hawk circled the valley, looking for rodents in the grass and small fish in the water. Dandelions, and sunflowers and roses grew wild. The river was slow moving and reflected the perfect blue sky above. Further out, there were smooth green hills that rolled out to the edge of the arena.

             
Asa had never seen anything so beautiful.

             
Painfully, he pulled his gaze from the view and looked out in front of him. Roughly one mile away, rising above the high reaching canopies that rustled in the breeze was a Home Base. The Sharks’ Home Base was now far behind him, and he was heading towards an opposing team’s initial shelter. Anxiety boiled up in his chest as he thought,
What if there is a whole team, still situated there, guarding their KEE? They’ll kill me!

             
But, he had no choice, really. He had to attempt to attain another team’s KEE. The alternative was to wait, cross his fingers, and hope that his suit didn’t electrocute him to death, which it probably would at some point, seeing as his team left their base completely unguarded.

             
And I want to earn my team’s trust.

             
He continued to run, but began to stay in the shadows as he grew closer to the base, aware that if a team decided to use defensive tactics, they might have guards. The Home Base grew nearer, and Asa could see a pterosaur along with pterodactyls roosting on the roof. The windows surrounding the top room were still intact.

             
He was half a mile away, his fear continuing to build when he was brought to the ground by a dark form that leapt out of the jungle. Upon the collision, he thought the word,
strong.
Asa was wrapped up in foreign arms and his feet left the earth as he was tackled. His shoulder and back collided with the packed dirt, knocking the wind out of him. He felt a warm body atop him, legs restraining his legs, and strong, unyielding hands pinning his wrists down.