The Witch Hunter's Gauntlet (8 page)

“Can anyone tell me what these are?” she asked.

Ten of the weirdest birds Sam had ever seen were waddling around inside their pen. The birds were about three feet tall and had gray feathers with a white tail. They were ridiculously fat birds like turkeys, but with larger beaks and smaller wings. It was highly unlikely these things could fly.

Two of the larger
birds were pecking apart a chunk of watermelon.

“No
! Freaking! Way!” a boy to Sam’s left said in complete amazement.

“So anyone have a guess?” Professor Walsh asked.

“Dodo birds,” the boy said; his hand over his mouth as if he was afraid to say the words.

“Exactly right.”

Everyone pressed closer to the glass. Eight different people were crushed up against Sam
, but she didn’t care. As long as no one blocked her view she was fine. She could always breathe later.

“In 1657 Dr. Johannes De Groot trapped a few pairs of the birds on the
island of Mauritius and brought them back to Europe, where he raised and studied them. A few decades later the dodo bird was declared extinct and the De Groot family fell on hard times, so the birds were sold to Count Darius Elwood, a British adventurer and collector of bizarre oddities. We only recently acquired the birds when the last of the Elwood family passed away. Sadly, they are not capable of surviving in the wild, but we hope to find them a suitable environment some day.”

No one paid the slightest attention to Professor Walsh. Everyone was fighting for position to view the ridiculous birds waddling around on their tiny legs. They were so
awkwardly built Sam could see why they wouldn’t survive in the wild anymore; they would be easy prey for any predator.

Half an hour passed before Sam realized class was over. She only had twenty-seven minutes left to grab lunch before History class. After sprinting across campus and choking down a double cheeseburger in an
unladylike, but world-record-setting, time, Sam made it to History class with a whole minute to spare.

Unfortunately
History class was a total bust, something made all the more painfully clear thanks to her amazing biology class. Professor Spitz was quite possibly the most boring human being alive. Robots had more emotion than this guy, and not just those fancy new Japanese robots that look like kids and flight attendants and other creepy things, but those little Roomba vacuuming robots.

But that wasn’t even the worst part. Sam had dealt with boring teachers before
. But a little posse of five girls kept flashing nasty looks at Sam and whispering and laughing about something all class long.

After that came Latin
, where Ms. Gaunt wouldn’t let them speak English--which was a lot of fun for Sam who didn’t know a single word in Latin and only took the class because it was a dead language and she wouldn’t have to learn the words for automobiles, airports, computers, or other things made after the fall of Rome. After flipping through the book, though, it turned out that, while the language might be a little easier due to the lack of words, it was going to get really boring talking about farming and gladiators all the time. She was determined to stick it out, though; she knew it was exactly the type of class her parents would want her to take.

She couldn’t help but notice two girls that kept looking at her.
Sam had no idea why she was drawing so much attention lately. Finally one of them leaned over and asked, “Are you the girl who said that Tiffany Summers was a pathetic no-talent wannabe?”

Sam
was stunned by the question. It took her a second to remember that she had.

“How do you know about that?”

“It is her,” the girl said to her friend. “Rock on. Someone had to be brave enough to say it.”

“Yeah,” her friend chimed in. “You’re a hero.”

“What are you talking about?” Sam was thoroughly confused, but did not like where this was going.

“
It is so lame how everyone is pretending to be such big fans of her just because she is sort of famous,” the second girl said.

“Seriously, I don’t know what you are talking about. How do you know what I said about her?”

“The video,” the first girl said. “On the school’s home page. Haven’t you seen it?”

“
Oh no. Those idiots.”

“Somebody made a video about all the new
students on the first day. But you were the best,” the first girl said.

She didn’t even realize Sick and
Wrong had recorded her saying those things. At least it couldn’t have been up very long.

“Do you think Tiffany Summers has seen it?” she asked.

“Oh yeah,” the second girl said. “Her lawyers already made the school take it down. My roommate Serena is part of her little posse.” She rolled her eyes at that last part.

Sam guessed the girls in her earlier class were part of the posse too.
Just great. It was her first day and already she had ticked off one of the most popular girls in school. Her best hope was to lay low and hope that Tiffany’s posse would move on.

By the third week of classes Sam had fallen into a nice little routine, but today a thunderstorm had rolled
in just in time to drench her on her way to lunch, destroying the last shreds of excitement Sam felt about going to class that day. She had already had more homework in the last three weeks than she had ever had in two months at her old school. The fourth draft of her validating-her-existence paper was due in two days. So far, no one had written a paper that met with Professor Woolf’s approval.

To top it all off
, that morning she had discovered that the art class she took because she thought it would be a fun and easy class was full of people who were actually really, really supergood at art. One of the kids already had a full-scale exhibit of his work in a Manhattan art gallery. Sure, she later found out from a purple-haired girl who called herself Celestial that the boy’s mother owned the gallery, but still, his work was pretty impressive. His people actually looked like people.

The truly amazing part was that all of these amazing artists considered her a hero for telling Tiffany Summers that she was a poser. It didn’t seem to matter to th
em that Sam hadn’t actually meant to take a stand or anything. Sam was just grateful to have a class free from torment; she didn’t know exactly what the Tiffany fans in her Latin class were saying about her, but the pointing and giggling was getting old.

But it was lunchtime and her spirits were rising as she ran from building to building trying to avoid the rain
as much as possible. Doc Frost and a crowd of upperclassmen in rain slickers holding beakers and rain gauges stood in her way. One of them pulled a small eyedropper out of her pocket and squeezed a single red drop into a large puddle. The spot where the drop hit turned to ice. Ice crystals spread out and froze the entire puddle.

This di
d not seem to surprise the rain-slicker people at all, although two of them were feverishly jotting down notes.

“Uh oh.
Scenario nine, scenario nine!” one of them yelled. “It’s not stopping.”

The ice spread out to neighboring puddles. Soon there was a sheet of ice the size of a kiddie pool in the otherwise warm and rainy quad, a sheet of ice that was rapidly expanding towards Sam.

“Quickly now, quickly,” Doc Frost urged. “Formula seven.”

Frantically the girl who first froze the puddle pulled out another eyedropper, this time with green liquid, and squeezed two drops onto the ice. The ice shuddered a little bit and suddenly vanished in a big burst of steam.

“Yes!” they all shouted together while trading high fives.

“Well done,” Doc Frost said with a strong dose of relief in his voice.

Sam decided to stay away from that area for a while, which meant she had to cross a larger puddle. She psyched herself up, resituated her backpack, and leapt.

She looked back at the puddle, impressed with her defeat of the Sam Curse. Suddenly she felt a hand pushing on the small of her back. With a surprised
high-pitched yelp, she fell face-first into the puddle.

“Good going there, cuz,” Zack said snidely behind her.

Sam picked herself up to the laughter of Zack’s idiot friends.

Her entire front was soaked. Thankfully
, her homework was safe in her backpack. She did her best to squeeze the water out of her shirt, which was pretty pointless in the rain.

“And they really think
you
stole the Lantern of the Blue Flame?” With a flash of his trademark cocky smile he turned and headed into the Student Lounge, his trio of idiots in tow.

Sam stopped in m
id-squeeze. Zack knew about the Lantern of the Blue Flame. When she thought about it, she shouldn’t have been surprised. The McQueens and the Hathaways had been rivals in all things weird, mythical, and scientific for generations. Zack would have grown up knowing everything there was to know about things like the Lantern.

The life Sam would have had if her parents hadn’t died.

Now fully depressed and standing in the rain, Sam decided to go inside and see if she could drown her sorrows in chocolate pudding. The instant Sam entered the cafeteria someone flapped a flyer in her face.

“Vote for Sherry Hoyle,” the flyer waver said with great enthusiasm.

“Vote for her for what?” Sam took the flyer just to get it out of her face.

“Student Council President,” the flyer waver said with a roll of his eyes that clearly meant that he though
t Sam must have been living under a rock.

“Vote for Sherry Hoyle,” he said to the people coming in behind Sam. She was clearly no longer important to him.

Not more than a second later another flyer was thrust into her hand. This one wanted her to vote for a Milton Hubble.

Every wall in the cafeteria was covered with posters of smiling faces asking for her vote. She counted at least twenty different people running for Student Council President and another forty running for Treasurer and Secretary and various other offices.

Since everyone running was a senior, and it was only the third week of class, Sam felt really unprepared to pick a candidate. But according to the wall of posters, she had four whole weeks until the election to think about it. She hoped someone would try to buy her vote with food or cold hard cash.

She was harassed twice in the food line by kids with flyers and once by Sherry Hoyle herself, shaking hands and promising to make sweeping changes. Sam assured Sherry she had her vote
, and Sherry wandered down the line to harass other hungry students. After filling her tray, Sam scanned the cafeteria for her friends.

Zoey
desperately waved Sam to hurry over. She was sitting at their usual table with Lucas, Jerry, and Lucas’ roommate Natch, who all seemed to be engaged in a heated debate that was boring Zoey to tears.

“The building is fine, assuming they don’t figure how to use the swipe cards.” N
atch was waving his fork around as he spoke. A macaroni noodle flew off and landed on Jerry’s shirt, but he didn’t seem to notice. “But we’d be separated from the main food source. We’d be stuck living on vending machines.”

“We could probably come up with some way to slide down onto the roof without touching the ground,” Lucas said before taking a bite of his cheeseburger.

Zoey caught Sam’s eyes, silently begging for help.

“What’s up
, guys?” Sam asked as she sat down next to Zoey.

“They’re figuring out what to do in the event of a zombie attack on the school,” Zoey said with intense disinterest.

“Right,” Sam said, trying not to be too insulting to the boys. Her dripping pants were making little puddles under the table.

Lucas put down his cheeseburger. “Natch here likes to make sure any place he li
ves is as zombie-proof as possible.”

“Hey, when the roaming undead come to feast upon our brains I don’t want to be caught unprepared,” Natch said with complete sincerity.

“Thanks a lot,” Zoey said twisting her spaghetti around her fork. “There goes my appetite.”

“Hey, in a zombie situation it is every man for
himself,” Natch said unapologetically.

“I would so be zombie food,” Jerry mumbled as he speared a kernel of corn with his fork.

Sam felt a strong need to change the subject.

“What is with the army of flyer wavers?”

“Apparently people are taking this election very seriously,” Zoey said, hopping on the new topic.

“I see that. But we barely know anyone here yet,” Sam said. She wasn’t prepared to call shaking hands with Sherry Hoyle in a lunch line officially knowing her.

“It doesn’t matter,” Natch said. “It’s all about establishing yourself. This whole school is one big crazy Darwinian experiment, and the smart people are picking out their places in it.”

“Oh great, now you got him started,” Lucas said slumping down in his chair.

“Think about it; most schools usually have two or three top athletes, smartest nerds, most popular girls, whatever, who compete to be the big dog. But this place collected bunches of those kids from other schools all over the country. There are four quarterbacks in our dorm alone. There are going to be massive power struggles to prove who is the best of the best.”

“Well, I think the title of most popular girl is already taken,” Zoey said
, pointing to the far end of the cafeteria where Tiffany Summers and her groupies were sitting.

Sam watched as Zack not-so-
gently pushed another boy aside and sat down next to Tiffany. An unholy alliance was forming over there. Her life was about to get infinitely more difficult.

“Well
, that’s not good,” Zoey said, clearly reading Sam’s thoughts.

“I know.” Sam hoped that the shiver going up her spine was due to her being completely soaked.

She knew it wasn’t.

“Do you really think she is still after you?” Lucas asked.

“Maybe not her, but someone wrote LOSER thirty-seven times on our door this morning,” Sam said. It only took her a second to wipe them off the dry erase board, but it was not a fun way to start the day.

“Bummer,” Lucas said between bites.

“I cannot believe that Tiffany and Zack are friends.” Sam rested her head in her hands.

“Why not?
It is a strategically beneficial relationship,” Natch said in that condescending voice of his. “He gets to hang with the popular girl and she gets to jump-start her failing career with a live performance in fabulous Las Vegas.”

Sam was not connecting the dots on that one.

“What are talking about?” she asked.

Natch
set his fork down on his tray. “Well, his parents do own the Camelot casino in Las Vegas. I’m sure Zack can sweet-talk them into letting her perform there.”

Sam was dumbfounded.

This must have been obvious to anyone looking at her because Lucas said, “You didn’t know that? Aren’t they family? I mean I know you’re not close or anything. But I think if I had a relative anywhere in my family tree that owned a casino I’d be all over it.”

“But how would you know, if you didn’t know?” Jerry asked, pulling himself away from his butterscotch pudding.

“Good point,” Zoey added. “Besides it isn’t like he goes around bragging about it like a normal person would. Or at least I haven’t heard about it. How did you know?”

“The Camelot is where they held the Gameco National Video Game Championship,” Lucas said. He seemed to sink a little lower in his seat as he said it.

“Wait a minute,” Zoey said, pointing sharply across the cafeteria at Zack. “He was a finalist at a competition held in his parent’s own casino?”

“I’m surprised he didn’t win,” Natch said flatly.

“Thanks a lot.” Lucas looked up and to the side the way some people do when they are trying to remember something. “I don’t think he cheated. He is actually pretty good.”

“Yeah, didn’t he actually beat you twice last night?”
Natch asked with a mischievous look on his face.

Sam couldn’t believe her ears. “Have you been hanging out with Zack?”

Lucas held his hands up in surrender as he spoke. “Listen. I know you don’t get along with your cousin. I don’t like him either. But my parents couldn’t afford for me to come here, so to pay off part of my tuition I have to let Dr. Zhang hook electrodes to my head while I battle Zack on
Hyper-Urban Assault
for some sort of crazy psychological study about how video games affect eye-hand coordination and strategic planning and problem solving and blabbity blah blah blah. So me, Zack, and a couple other people play games after class a couple times a week.”

“You could have told me that before,” Sam said. She would have understood.

“Yeah well, it is a little embarrassing. Plus, I am actually getting bored of video games, which is really traumatic for me,” he said. His mouth smiled, but his eyes didn’t.

“Tired of
smooshing poor innocent turtles and storming the castle to rescue the princess?” Zoey asked playfully.

“You haven’t played a video game in a while have you?” Lucas asked in an accusatory tone.

“I don’t really have the time. Oh-” Zoey yelled angrily as she jumped out of her seat, rubbing her shin. “What was that?”

A two-foot tall robot
with outstretched Frankenstein-style arms and tank-tread wheels rolled out from under the table.

“Feed me,” the robot said in a creepy buzzy robot voice.

“Hey Esteban,” Natch said.

“Hey
Natch,” the robot buzzed.

“What is that?” Zoey asked. She seemed more curious than angry now.

The small camera mounted where the robot’s head should be swiveled to look at her.

“Hello
Zoey Dalal, my name is Esteban Ruiz. Pleased to meet you.” The robot tipped forward slightly as if bowing. “Sorry for bumping into you.”

“Uh, hello
, Esteban,” she said examining the camera closely. “That is quite all right.”