The Magnificent 12

by Michael Grant

  Leaving flame and fire behind, the Destroyer approached a house that looked vaguely familiar. He blinked his dull eyes at the mailbox. The name on it read “MacAvoy.”

  Something about that seemed familiar.

  He used one massive fist to crush that mailbox, but the way it was squashed left the name still readable.

  The mail had spilled out. Brightly colored junk mail on slick paper. That kind of paper was tasty, but Mom had said not to eat it because then she wouldn’t know all the best deals at Safeway.

  She liked to wait for sales on Nutella.

  The Destroyer frowned, which was not easy with a metallic face and dead, lifeless eyes. What was Nutella? What was Safeway?

  What was Mom?

  It was like something was in his head trying to squirm around in there and make him think about . . . about stuff. Strange stuff.

  But he had no time for strange stuff. He was the Destroyer! He had a reason for existence: destruction. He had a mission: create so much destruction that everyone fled the city and Risky could lay a perfect trap for Mack.

  Mack. That was another of those squirmy things in his head. What did it mean? Why was it in there?

  He frowned harder still and scrunched his eyes and even pounded the side of his massive bullet head. What did that word mean?

  Mack?

  In frustration, the Destroyer punched a hole in the roof of the nearest car.

  “Hey! Stop that!”

  The Destroyer was almost relieved to have someone to vent his anger on. And there she was. A girl. The one he’d thought of when Risky was trying to teach him about smashing idols and knocking over butter churns.

  He did not know her name, but yes, she seemed familiar. He pounded the side of his head again, trying to get the faint memories either to come together and form a picture, or to go away and stop confusing him.

  “Hey. Hey, it’s me, Camaro,” she said. She was bold, that was for sure. He stood about ten feet tall, and she was barely half that.

  He tried to say that word. Camaro. But it came out all muddy and garbled. “Unhargo?”

  “Yes, Camaro Angianelli. Duh. What do you think you’re doing?”

  The gole— er, Destroyer had to think about that for a minute. What was he doing? Well, he was being the Destroyer. He was scaring all the people out of town. “Chkaring peepill?”

  He said it as a question. Somehow Camaro understood. (But then she always had understood him, hadn’t she? Even when no one else did.)

  “Scaring people? That’s your answer? You’re scaring people? Why?”

  The Destroyer’s thought process was not exactly swift. After all, he was the Destroyer, not the Jeopardy Contestant. He patted his chest with one massive fist. “I m er Geshtroer.”

  “You’re the Destroyer?” Camaro rolled her eyes. “Why, because that dye-job redhead said so? Destroyer, please.”

  The Destroyer was feeling anxious. He needed to destroy. He needed to scare people. It was who he was, after all. It’s what he was.

  Camaro must have sensed this, for she said, “You need to destroy something? Is that it? Will you be happy if you have something to destroy? Well, there are people in all these houses. And we don’t want to hurt people, do we?”

  The Destroyer had to think about that for a while. Camaro lost patience waiting for him, sighed, and said, “Look, I have something you can destroy that’s totally empty because it’s Saturday. And it may make some people unhappy, but it will make a whole lot of kids happy.”

  This sounded okay to the Destroyer, who, frankly, was just weary from all the thinking. So he followed Camaro meekly, contenting himself with kicking over the occasional trash can as they made their way several blocks to a building that, quite honestly, was pretty old and run-down and should have been replaced long ago.

  And that’s how Richard Gere Middle School39 came to be utterly destroyed as the children of Sedona watched and cheered.

  Twenty-one

  They made the Pale Queen’s forces pay a price. That they did. For a long, desperate mile, the Magnificent Eight plus Stefan fought.

  Other forces joined the fight, but were helpless. The air force again bombed the column of evil, but with no effect. A second Coast Guard cutter arrived and shelled the column and also had no effect.

  Two helicopters with San Francisco police SWAT teams showed up. The black-helmeted, heavily armed officers stood with the Magnificent Eight and fired steadily at the advancing horde. The bullets took a toll and, along with Charlie’s speargun, slowed the advance, but not by much, and the SWAT team was running low on ammunition.

  The police officer in charge, Captain Molly O’Neill, identified Mack as the leader and said, “What can we do to stop those things?”

  “You can’t,” Mack said.

  “All right then, what can you do to stop them?”

  “We need more time to get our strength back,” Mack said. “As you can see, we’ve made a hole we can shoot through, but we don’t have the power to kill the whole force field.”

  “I’ve seen you online, kid: you can do plenty.”

  “This is different,” Mack said. “She is fighting us. The Pale Queen. Her magic is in that barrier. Her determination is in all these evil creatures. We push, she pushes back.”

  “You telling me all is lost?” Captain O’Neill demanded.

  Mack shot a glance at his friends. They had taken turns firing the speargun. In between they had grabbed up rocks and thrown them. Stefan had become very good at grabbing spears in midair and throwing them back, sometimes hitting his target. Jarrah was beside him the whole time.

  “We’re short four people,” Mack said. “With twelve, we have a chance. With eight, all we do is lose slowly instead of quickly.”

  “So where are the other four?”

  “Maybe in the city. Maybe not. Listen, you want to help? Put out the word through your forces, through TV, radio, everything, so that everyone in the city hears it. We’re looking for some twelve-year-olds who may have just popped into the city unexpectedly. They might be a bit lost and disoriented. Find them. Get them to . . .” Mack looked back at the city, now much closer than before since they had retreated. The causeway was very close to passing beneath the Golden Gate Bridge. “To the bridge.”

  “The bridge?”

  Mack locked eyes with Dietmar, who nodded.

  “The bridge, Captain O’Neill. We’ll make our stand on the Golden Gate Bridge.”

  The police officer nodded, squared her shoulders, and began speaking into her radio.

  Xiao took Mack’s arm. “I must go.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “There may be something I can do,” she said. “It is time for all the forces of good to fight, whatever the risks.”

  She squeezed his arm and began the swift transition to her true shape. In seconds she was a dragon once more, a turquoise serpent with a fierce face, who slithered away into the sky, heading toward the city.

  “Okay, what next?” Captain O’Neill demanded. Somehow a dragon had barely fazed her. It was that kind of day.

  “Get hold of the Coast Guard and all the other forces, as well as your own people; tell them to focus on the front edge of the column—that’s where the hole is. Take over the speargun. We need to get to the bridge.”

  “You’re running out?”

  Dietmar spoke up. “Don’t be a fool! This is Mack of the Magnifica. He does not run!”

  Mack was a bit taken aback by that. Even more when Valin said, “He does not run. Nor do we.”

  “We have one chance, Captain,” Mack explained. “We get to the bridge and find the other four waiting for us. Or . . .”

  “Or what?”

  “Or the world is enslaved and all freedom dies.”

  Twenty-two

  Mack led his tired, frightened forces down the causeway. It looked like retreat. It felt like retreat. The stone causeway was still growing ahead of them, rising from the sea.

  An
earthquake rattled them so badly it knocked them all to their knees. Mack could see the tall buildings of the city sway just ever so slightly. He saw the bridge sway even more.

  Behind them the roar of gunfire and the furious cries of the Pale Queen’s troops faded slowly. Mack felt terrible guilt at that. Had he just left innocent people to die?

  Three heavy military helicopters swooped overhead and circled to land just behind where the SWAT team was still firing the speargun. The Coast Guard cutter was also firing steadily until a bolt of fire hit its deck gun.

  The bridge loomed huge now, almost overhead. Mack saw people lining the railing, pointing, aiming cameras at the incredible battle, at the causeway, and down at his little band of Magnifica.

  They had reached the just-emerging tip of the stone causeway. Any farther and they’d be walking in water. But now the causeway was doing something strange. Okay, its very existence was strange, but up until now it had just been a sort of stone roadway. Now the tip, the end of it, was piling higher and higher. The earth groaned as the stone grew.

  “It’s making a ramp up to the bridge!” Rodrigo said, pointing.

  “It’s not for us,” Mack said. “We need to get up there now, ahead of that mob back there.”

  “Vargran?” Valin suggested, frowning.

  “If we do, we’re powerless again,” Sylvie said. “It is the dilemma of our power: to use it is to lose it. To fail to use it is to die.”

  Mack usually appreciated Sylvie’s philosophical musings, but in this case it was just a bit depressing.

  “Look!” Jarrah cried. “It’s Xiao!”

  Mack squinted and looked close, thinking, I wonder if that’s her? And then realized it was pretty unlikely to be some other turquoise dragon.

  She came slithering beneath the bridge and landed beside them.

  “Where did you get to?” Charlie asked her.

  “Visiting friends and relatives,” Xiao said. Had it been Jarrah, Mack would have thought it was a sarcastic answer. But Xiao wasn’t really the sarcastic sort. Occasionally, but not often.

  “We need to get off this causeway and onto the bridge,” Mack said. “Can you help us?”

  She could, but only three at a time. The last two were Mack and Stefan.

  Stefan was gazing back toward the battle. The cops and marines were falling back, getting closer every second. The murdering horde was just beyond them.

  Mack had the definite feeling that there might be fewer cops and marines still standing than there had been to start with.

  The Coast Guard cutter was burning and veered away. A helicopter lay crumpled and sinking beneath the waves.

  “You know what I said about you being under my wing?” Stefan said, not taking his eyes from the terrible conflict.

  “Of course,” Mack said.

  Stefan looked at Mack, and to Mack’s amazement there were tears in his former bully’s cold blue eyes. “I don’t think I can protect you from what’s coming.”

  Mack didn’t know what to say. Just then Xiao reappeared, and the two boys climbed swiftly onto her back, Stefan behind Mack.

  As they rose into the air, Mack heard Stefan whisper, “But I’ll make them pay.”

  It was a wild ride up to the bridge. The bridge is an object that is both delicate and massive. Past one end lay the brown hills of Marin County; on the other end, the green trees and hills of the Presidio park, and beyond it the city of San Francisco.

  To one side of the bridge there was the bay with its sailboats and ferries and hulking great cargo ships. To the other side there was the Pacific Ocean, though something new now dominated that familiar view.

  As they rose through the air on Xiao’s back, Mack saw the full length of the causeway. The creatures looked small from up here. Small but not harmless. They bristled with weapons both natural and manufactured. Mack saw a creature he’d never seen before, nor imagined in his darkest nightmare: he saw the source of the firebolts that lanced out at helicopters and ships. It was a deep-red, six-legged, twisting, curling, wormlike thing with a head as smooth as a snake’s but for two hornlike protrusions, one on either side. One was red and dripped liquid fire. The other was blue. As the creature moved, it casually crushed Tong Elves and Skirrit. It even dared to push aside the giant Gudridan. And unless Mack was very much mistaken, it occasionally shot out its forked tongue and sucked in a Lepercon.

  It was hard to feel sorry for the Lepercons. Mack had had a run-in with them before and didn’t like them one bit.

  Jets now flew higher, out of the monsters’ range, and fired missiles that were no longer wasted on the impenetrable barrier but were aimed at the hole Mack and his friends had made. Two missiles arrived without more than a second’s notice and flew right into that opening.

  The explosion was incredible and everyone cheered, including the people who lined the rail on the bridge.

  “You people need to get off this bridge!” Mack yelled, realizing that they were in great danger. In fact, he told them: “You’re in great danger!”

  “Hey, it’s that kid from YouTube!” someone shouted, and pretty soon camera phones were swinging back and forth between Mack and the advancing army of the Pale Queen. Very few people ran away, which was certainly what Mack felt like doing.

  Police had not even stopped traffic onto the bridge yet. Of course they were busy, but this, Mack knew, was a disaster in the making.

  A disappointed sound went up from the onlookers as the smoke of the missiles’ explosions cleared and showed the monsters still coming.

  “Get off this bridge, you idiots!” Mack yelled. “Do you want to die?”

  Now, finally, the people on the sidewalk—there’s a sidewalk running along both sides of the bridge, wide enough for four or five people to walk abreast40—headed either toward the city side or the Marin side. They could clearly see that the living stone of the causeway was rising up, curling toward the bridge itself. And it was plain to see that neither missiles nor cannon nor rifles nor Charlie’s speargun could stop the onslaught. The SWAT team and the few marines would be lucky to get out alive.

  “Everyone, out!” Stefan yelled, and that had even more effect than Mack’s warning. “Off this bridge!”

  “But we have to be here,” a voice said.

  There were two people who looked like they might be twelve years old. One was a boy. He was black, tall, gangly, and wearing a T-shirt from the band Rancid over khaki shorts. On his feet: sandals.

  It was impossible to miss the fact that he was dressed for some place warmer than San Francisco.

  By the same token, it was impossible to avoid noting that the other kid was rather overdressed for the Northern California climate. She wore a hugely puffy down jacket with a hood lined in fur, thick gloves, a scarf, and insulated stretch pants. She had dark goggles pushed up onto her tumbling blond hair. And, strangest of all, she was standing on a snowboard.

  The boy had spoken. The girl seemed inclined to just stare.

  “Who are you?” Mack demanded.

  The boy answered. “I am José. Five minutes ago I was waiting for a bus in Espírito Santo.”

  “How did you get here?”

  “You tell me,” José said. “I am watching a video of you, and you gave us words to say. And here I am.”

  A slow smile formed on Mack’s lips. “You’re one of us?”

  “I don’t know what I am.” José looked around. “Or where I am. Is this Brazil?”

  “What? Why would you think . . . ? Never mind; it’s San Francisco.” He pointed down at the battle below. “That’s the Pale Queen’s army.”

  “Those are, like, monsters or whatever,” the blond girl said. “This is not Banff.” She looked around some more. “This is, like, a bridge or whatever. Monica was just showing me this stupid video and—”

  Just then two missiles went arcing overhead, broke the sound barrier loudly, and hit the leading edge of the monster army.

  “You’re part of the Magnificent Twelve now,�
�� Mack said. “That’s Jarrah, Xiao, Dietmar, Sylvie, Charlie, Rodrigo, and Valin, and I’m Mack. And that’s Stefan.”

  “Uh, right, so I’m going to call my mom, okay? Right.” The girl pulled out her phone and started to dial. “Oh great, straight to voice mail. Mom? It’s Hillary and I am, like, in San Francisco and they are having some kind of war or whatever and—”

  Hillary was interrupted a second time, this time when the ground began to shake. It was the most severe quake yet. The bridge swayed extravagantly. Mack fell onto his back and, looking up, saw the vertical cables like ropes being yanked and released. The main cable, the one that was as thick as a subway tunnel, vibrated and swung just a little, but that little felt like a lot down on the road itself.

  The quake went on for a long and frightening while. Both of the new Magnifica were yelling and praying. The more experienced Magnifica knew they were unlikely to be killed by a quake and much more likely to eventually be clubbed, stabbed, beheaded, disemboweled, or eaten by one of the Pale Queen’s minions or the queen herself.

  The instant the quake settled down, Mack jumped to his feet and said, “Xiao, Jarrah, Valin: you three are strongest in Vargran; teach the new kids.”

  “No one is teaching me—” Hillary began, but Stefan moved in close.

  “Huh,” he said, meaning, “No time for nonsense.” He took the phone from her hand and tossed it over the side of the bridge.

  In extreme emergencies it’s sometimes useful to have a bully.

  “So, we are ten,” Mack said to Dietmar and Sylvie.

  “But not yet twelve. Will ten be enough?”

  Dietmar shook his head. “I believe the enlightened puissance has a logarithmic rather than linear progression. Like the Richter scale.”

  That got him a pair of blank stares. So he explained.

  “Two Magnifica are twice as powerful as one. But three may be six times as powerful as two. And four may be twelve times as powerful as one. The final two, or one, may increase our power a thousand times. Do you see?”

  But seeing was about to become a problem. As so often happened in the San Francisco Bay Area, a wall of fog was advancing swiftly from the sea. It was like a great, gray fist aimed right at the Golden Gate.