Max Quick: The Bane of the Bondsman (Max Quick Series Book 3)

by Mark Jeffrey

  Max put one more foot forward.

  Max! Think! This is not a good idea!

  He could not watch Fell Simon continue to torment this town in his name!

  Many more people are counting on you that just this one town. Max, please.

  “Sir! Look at what I found!” Everyone turned, including Fell Simon.

  An Army guy marched out four kids at gunpoint from the Butterfield Movie Theatre. Max’s heart fell. It was Tim Timson, Justin Blue, Will Turnip and Caddy Fenton.

  “Young Explorers?” Simon howled upon seeing their uniforms – and their clearly disheveled state. His eye flicked special venom at Timson, who disrespectfully wore his neckerchief as a bandana around his head. “Why, what would your Bondsman say? You are a disgrace!”

  “Geez. We were just watching a movie,” Timson muttered.

  Simon turned and motioned with his hand.

  WHAMM!

  Another Sky Chamber dropped faster than gravity.

  And the Iron Valley Movie Theatre was suddenly dust. Powdered brick and celluloid were pounded flat into the ground.

  “From what I recall the ending was a little … flat,” Simon chortled darkly. Then, he whirled to Griswold. “So. Want me to vanish more of your little town? Hmm?” He peered at the old man, trying to read him. “You really don’t care about the buildings so much, do you? I can understand that. You can always rebuild them. Well. How ‘bout if I vanish me some people?”

  Abruptly, Simon let fly a shrill two-finger whistle.

  Quickly, the Army guys brought back the disheveled mother. She was hysterical now, crying for her children.

  With one smooth motion, Fell Simon reached inside his black trenchcoat. Out came a squarish black gun. Without taking his eyes off of Grisworld, Simon pressed it against the woman’s forehead.

  She screamed. Griswold gasped.

  Simon cocked the hammer back.

  Clackity-click!

  He was going to do it. He was going to kill her –!

  That did it.

  Max lurched forward, pushing through the crowd.

  “Hey Simon,” Max yelled. “Hey, you on the bandstand. Bald guy in the stupid hat. Yeah, you.”

  Marvin Sparkle hissed a warning between his teeth, but it was already too late.

  The crowd parted. Fell Simon looked up, mild surprise on his face. He lowered his round sunglasses and drove his sweaty, sooty gaze into Max. There was a rustling as the news cameras all turned. Oh, boy. Whatever happened next, it was definitely going to be news.

  “Hey Simon. What’s wrong with you, picking on a nice mother like that?” Max continued. “Nice trenchcoat. Where’d you pick that up? Villains R Us?”

  The townspeople gasped collectively. This was nothing short of amazing.

  Max had assumed Simon would be furious. But instead, he seemed oddly exhilarated. There was a glint of fascination in his eyes. Already, he’d forgotten all about the woman. Simon measured Max, watching his defiance like a rare artifact that bore further examination.

  “Well,” Simon said. “Interesting. Tell me. Who are you?”

  “Who am I? Oh, c’mon. I’m insulted. Really? You’re ripping this town apart looking for me and you don’t even recognize me?”

  Max waited a beat and looked around. Taking a deep breath, he stared directly into the gaggle of television cameras in his face.

  He said, “My name is Max Quick.”

  A ripple moved through the crowd. Then jeering began. Some people started throwing things at Max yelling, Enemy! Enemy of our beloved Bondsman! Max ignored them. “I’m the one you want, right? So, no need to kill the woman. Simon says, let her go. I’m Max Quick. I’m right here. Right. Here.”

  To everyone’s surprise, Simon did let her go. It wasn’t an act of mercy, oh no. Rather, he’d simply lost interest.

  Simon grinned. This mouthy kid was clearly going to be a lot more fun.

  He lowered his gun and approached Max. Army guys closed in warily, weapons aimed at Max. They did not know quite what to make of this boy just yet. The television news crews crushed closer with the cameras and boom microphones aloft.

  When his face was mere inches away, Fell Simon said, “You … are Max Quick?” He looked Max up and down. He snorted derisively. “Really. You’re, what, eighteen? How could you have been alive in the forties when –”

  “That’s easy,” Max cut him off. “I’m Niburian. I don’t age the same. Everybody knows that.” For a moment, Max wasn’t certain if they actually did.

  One on level, it gave Max a certain thrill just to say these words. To brazenly announce, in public, on television, that he was Niburian! And to have everyone actually understand what that meant …!

  “Well,” Simon replied with a terrible smile. “I’ll take you back to the Bondsman with me. You’ll scream from a place so deep in your soul that you won’t know up until –”

  “Oh, blah blah blah,” Max said, rolling his eyes and making a little puppet motion with his hand. “Talk’s cheap. The reason the Bondsman wants me dead is because he knows I can take his stupid golden head right off his shoulders. And you think you scare me?”

  There was a moment of hesitation in Simon’s eyes.

  “Get in your Sky Chambers and get out of here and I might let you live,” Max concluded. And he meant it. He was ready to burst into conflagration. He wondered whether he would be able to restrain himself after what he’d just witnessed.

  Simon seethed at that. He raised his weapon. “Kill him!” he bellowed.

  Max burst into flame and whooshed.

  One, two, three Army guys, slammed to the ground so hard their lights went out immediately.

  The crowd ran in panic. Gunfire seared the air with noise and heat. Bullets whizzed.

  Four, five, six. Seven. A duck and roll and then eight.

  And then Fell Simon. Max knocked him to the ground and cocked a fist, posed to to sear Simon’s skull with white fire. Stars shot all along his form, making him look like a white-hot comet in the shape of a man. His face was barely visible to Fell Simon — who, oddly, didn’t appear afraid at all. He grinned like a ghoul, seeming to revel the surprise of this, the excitement of it. His eyes burned with fascination at Max’s power.

  “Simon,” Max gritted. The Army guys had regrouped, and they were firing at Max’s back. Max shrugged their bullets off with white flame. “You’re going to stop hurting these people. I haven’t killed anyone yet. But I will. I mean it.”

  But Simon only arched his eyebrows like a mad clown and howled with laughter. “Come on then, Max Quick! Kill me! Kill us all! You want to do it, oh, I can feel it, I can taste it! But I wonder: do have the courage to actually go through with it, though? DO YOU? DO YOU HAVE THE GUTS?”

  For a moment, Max faltered, recalling the Machine. But he was too far gone in his rage. “Simon. You’re going to die today. We’ll see how funny you think it is when —“

  Max felt the air from his lungs suddenly vanish. Tears streaked his vision, and a great roaring filled his ears. His stomach dropped from under him and his fire went out.

  Then, he was standing on a hillcrest overlooking the town. Marvin Sparkle had him tucked beneath one massive arm.

  “What are you doing?” Max protested wriggled out of Sparkle’s massive grasp. “What in the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “Saving you from yourself,” Sparkle replied darkly. “This is folly. What were you thinking, putting your face into a television camera? Now, everyone knows what you look like! The name Max Quick now has a face!”

  “But – what about them? What about the people of Iron Valley?” Max asked. “We can’t just leave all of them to Fell Simon!”

  “The whole world is like this,” Sparkle rumbled. “What is one more town? Fell Simon does this every day! We must leave them, if we would defeat the Bondsman. And besides: you heard them. They don’t want your help. Their beloved Bondsman is everything to them.”

  “You should have let me do i
t,” Max snapped, watching the confusion below. Fell Simon was already on his feet, barking orders, unfazed by his mysterious rescuer.

  “We can’t risk you like this,” Sparkle said. “We need you for bigger things.”

  “But I —“

  Thunder played across Marvin Sparkle’s brow. He was quietly enraged. He stabbed a giant finger right on the scar where he had once sliced Max open. “You owe the world, Max Quick. You owe everyone. Yes, you could have saved this town. But also, you might have been captured. All it would have taken was for you to lose focus for an instant, even with all your power. Someone could have knocked you from behind while your attention was was forward. Then you would have been a prisoner of the Bondsman and all would have been lost for the world. You owe us better. You owe everyone more.”

  Max closed his teeth and stewed on this.

  “Come. We must go to the Resistance. There you will see what is at stake, and how you can best use your power to fight.”

  INTO THE WOODS Marvin Sparkle and Max Quick went.

  The steel sun overhead grilled the turgid air with yellow heat. It would be a scorcher today.

  At first, the forest was a thicket of white birch trees, and the terrain was flat. The ground was covered in dead leaves that crunched loudly as they walked. Then the ground turned rocky and started angling up. Flecks of mica and quartz and red granite began to appear in random boulders and outcroppings, and the thin white trees gave way to darker oaks and maples with thick, twisting trunks.

  Sparkle unfolded a map from his pocket. He muttered, “Okay … think that was the White Birch Forest … so we ought to be seeing Sundapple Lake on our left pretty soon.”

  Max looked over his shoulder at the map and then to the surrounding terrain. Through the trees ahead of them, he saw a single mountain peak that seemed to glitter in the sunlight. He tapped Marvin and pointed at it, marveling. Giant spangles of bright blinding light shone off the very tip. “Ah yes. Diamond Knob,” Marvin said. “It’s not really made diamonds, of course. Just quartz, mostly. A giant deposit. Sometime in the deep past, when the earth here was restless, a massive seam of mica and quartz was thrust upwards, creating the mountain. And the peak glitters most of all.”

  Several hours later, they emerged into a brief rocky field. It was swarmed with Monarch butterflies and dragonflies galore. As they moved through it, Max was equally entranced and a little freaked out by just how many things there were flapping and whizzing around them. But as they re-entered the dark of the forest canopy, only the dragonflies followed them in, and even then only for a short distance.

  The smell of water greeted them next, wafting up on the breeze. “That would be the Sundapple,” Sparkle said. “Which would mean …” and here he looked in the opposite direction for some time before the trees thinned enough. “Ah! There. Look. Mount Griswold!”

  As Max followed his pointing finger, he saw a massive mountain — much larger than Diamond Knob. This was the same mountain he had seen back in Iron Valley from afar. It rose steadily from the roots of the earth, and then terminated in an uneven cup, as if the top of the peak had been scooped out. “That is Crater Pond at the top. Mount Griswold used to be an active volcano, around the time when Enki first came to earth, millennia ago. But eventually, it cooled off. The lava hardened into a big black bowl. Rainwater and snow fill it every spring. And over the summer, it empties out into Mirror Lake far below via Dapplegrim Falls.”

  Max wondered at the sheer size of the mountain — it was far larger than any other geological feature in the region. Beyond it in the distance, beneath wisps of cloud, lay another mountain range. But it was tiny in comparison. Marvin Sparkle noticed Max staring at it and said, “That is the Nurvenback Ridge. But we want to stay away from that. Very strange weather over there … and I do mean even more than usual for the world of the Bondsman.”

  SOON, Sundapple Lake appeared through the trees on their right. A strong wind stirred up white caps that rolled lazily across its surface. The air cooled significantly.

  “We’ll hug the shoreline and soon we’ll be there,” Sparkle remarked.

  “Where? The Resistance?”

  “No. Camp Griswold,” Sparkle replied, irritated. “But from there, we will find the Resistance.”

  But after another hour of hiking around the lake, Marvin became confused. He had expected to pick up a path he called the ‘Jungle Road’ half an hour ago — and they seemed to have missed it. “And it is not like me to miss something like that,” he said. “I am at home in the wild.”

  “Hey. Check this out. What’s this over here?” Max asked, spotting a rock formation ahead with a narrow passageway winding between its walls. “Is this it?” Max led and Marvin followed this time. They passed through a narrow canyon for five minutes and emerged suddenly on a sandy beach on the edge of Sundapple Lake. But the beach was completely enclosed in a horseshoe of stone all around — it was at once clear that it would be impossible hear or see anything going on at this beach from the woods behind them.

  “Hmm,” Marvin said. “Well. So much for your skills as a trail guide.”

  “And so much for yours,” came a voice from the stone canyon behind them. Out came Tim Timson, Justin Blue, Will Turnip and Caddy Fenton: the young Planet-Furious-to-be. It had been Justin who had spoken. “We’ve been following you for miles.”

  Marvin Sparkle look both horrified and startled. “That’s … impossible,” he said.

  “That’s what Turnip here said,” Caddy Fenton said. “But I told him he was wrong.”

  “So you all got away from Fell Simon?” Max said.

  “Oh him? Yeah. We gave his guy the slip, easy. We do that all the time here in camp.”

  “Where are you guys trying to go?” Will Turnip said. “You’re obviously lost. And you’re obviously running from Fell Simon. By the way … we loved the way you stood up him! We’ve never seen anybody do anything like that before!” The foursome regarded Max with clear admiration in their eyes.

  For his part, Max was still slightly in awe that he was actually speaking with Planet Furious — and that somehow, even in this timeline, the members of the band had all ended up together. He wondered whether his own presence — and the synchronistic influence it now exerted — had something to do with it.

  Max looked at Marvin Sparkle. Weighing for a moment, Max turned to the foursome and said, “Hey. Can you give us a second?” When they nodded, Max pulled Sparkle out of earshot.

  “Listen. I know these guys. They can be trusted.”

  Sparkle gaped at Max. “You’ve only just met them …”

  “No. Well, yes … here. But in the other timeline, these guys are really well known. I know who they are.”

  “But do you know them personally?”

  “Well … no,” Max admitted. “But I can tell you they’re rebels by nature. And they are no friend of the Bondsman’s.”

  “You are certain about this,” Sparkle asked.

  Max nodded with a fierce gaze. “Absolutely, 100%.”

  Max and Sparkle returned to the foursome. Sparkle said flatly, “We’re looking for Snake Island.”

  They looked at him like he was mad and began talking at once. “Nobody goes there!” “That place … has poison snakes living in all the trees! They drop down on you!” “All the kids who go out there never come back!”

  Then, Will Turnip explained: “Back the 1880’s, a family lived out there. They were all killed one night when there was a fire and they had to make a run for the boat. All the tree-snakes dropped down them — hundreds of them! And bit them to death.”

  “But you know where it is,” Sparkle said, rising to his full, giant height. They moved back a step.

  “Yes,” Will Turnip said, exchanging glances with his three companions. “We do. If you really want to go there anyway … follow us.”

  THE SIX RETRACED the route that Max and Sparkle had travelled, more or less. But the four boys scrambled up a pile of boulders they had passed by
— and other the side, a trail began that had been hidden previously. “Jungle Road,” Justin Blue explained.

  They followed this path for about an hour, and then another vast body of water — much, much larger than Sundapple Lake — appeared through the trees. The clean water was dappled with golden sunlight through the trees. “That’s Mirror Lake,” Caddy Fenton said. “Snake Island’s out in the middle, past the Rock. But you can’t get out there during the day — not without being seen.” Even from this distance, Max could make out white wooden docks with lifeguard towers.

  Abruptly, they arrived in the well-worn trails of the out edges of camp. Signs were nailed to trees everywhere — brown wooden signs with painted yellow lettering. They pointed the way to various places in the camp.

  At that moment, they heard the sound of a bugle playing some military-sounding call. It was distorted and crackly, like an old recording blaring out of a rusty PA system.

  When it was over, other sounds quickly followed. A far-off screen door slammed with a wooden crack. A kid’s voice shouted something unintelligible. Another voice escalated into shrill, screeching laughter.

  There was a smell of fire on the wind.

  As they continued along the Blue Diamond Trail, as the signs told them it was called, they came upon twenty olive-green canvas tents mounted on old wooden platforms, arranged in a circle facing inward. A chewed sign nailed to a tree said: ERITH CAMPSITE. Presently, several girls stumbled out, dazzled by sunshine.

  “This way,” Caddy Fenton said. “If you don’t want to be seen. We’re on the girl’s side of camp — we’re not supposed to be here, and neither are you.” They left the main trail and skirted it from under the cover of brush and trees.

  “What’s going on?” Max asked.

  “Everyone’s being called to the Admin lodge. That bugle call is the signal to fall in, line up for inspection.”

  “Is that unusual?”

  “Yes,” Fenton replied. “Very. It’s after lunch — so it should be fourth period. Something’s going on.”