Whirlwind

by Robert Liparulo

  Taksidian gave him a one-shouldered shrug, as if to say, So? What he did say was colder still: “I respect your appreciation of him. I’ll be sure to put something of you next to your uncle’s finger, when I put my art back together.” He eyed Xander’s arms and legs, taking his time appraising each one, as if he were shopping for a tie.

  Xander spun to his right and leaped toward the wall of weapons. The nearest piece was a battered metal shield—A shield! his mind groaned. Why not a knife, a sword like the one too close to Taksidian to reach? He yanked the shield off the wall and almost dropped it. It was a lot heavier than it looked. He swung it around, expecting to make contact with Taksidian.

  But the man hadn’t moved from his spot on the other side of the room. He watched Xander with bored eyes, the knife gripped in a hand that hung down by his leg.

  “Back off!” Xander said, hefting the shield up with both hands, pumping it toward Taksidian. He glanced into the shallow concavity of the shield’s back side and saw a leather strap and metal handhold. Straining his muscles to hold the shield with one hand, he slipped his left arm through the strap and grabbed the handle. The shield seemed to get lighter, as though it had been carefully balanced to minimize arm stress when held properly. His right hand was now free. He flicked his eyes toward the next item on the wall: a long stick with a starburst of six-inch spikes jutting from one end.

  When his gaze bounced back to Taksidian, he realized the man was now three feet closer. Xander had not taken his eyes off him for more than a half second. The guy moved almost magically, without the slightest warning or wobble. Standing ramrod straight one instant, three feet closer the next.

  “Whoa!” Xander said. He swung the shield out and back, like opening and closing a door, trying to show Taksidian what he was in for if he moved closer. His guts shifted inside as he grasped the reason for the man’s calmness: Taksidian was a killer, and he was good at it. He knew the moves, could perform them as easily as breathing.

  A feeling of hopelessness washed over Xander. Who was he next to this guy? An ant to be squashed, nothing more. He wondered how it would happen. Maybe Taksidian would be standing in front of him before he knew it, the knife slipping effortlessly around the shield. Or the killer would torment him, moving in slowly, telling Xander the artistic merits of adding a fifteen-year-old ear, instead of a toe or arm, to the sculpture.

  Xander felt his jaw muscles tighten. Out of the corner of his eye, he gauged the distance to the spike-studded stick, the number of steps he would need to reach it, the number of seconds. He could do it: leap, grab, swing.

  Keep the shield up, he told himself. That’s what Russell Crowe, the Gladiator himself, would do. Xander searched his memory for something else useful. But this wasn’t the movies, and nothing came to mind. Nothing except a quote that seemed about right. He couldn’t remember who said it, Bruce Willis or Clint Eastwood or some other supertough guy.

  Looking at Taksidian over the top of the shield, he narrowed his eyes. He nodded and said, “Bring it on, punk.”

  CHAPTER

  three

  THURSDAY, AT THE SAME TIME

  Ed King cranked the steering wheel of the VW Bug and pushed his foot harder on the gas pedal, which was already depressed all the way to the floor. The car nearly spun out on the dirt road leading up to Taksidian’s place. It slid into the bushes; the sound of branches scraping the metal and glass matched the shrieking Mr. King had been hearing in his head from his jangled nerves. He swung the wheel around and got the car back on the road.

  Taksidian had led him up into the hills on the other side of the highway, then doubled back, burning rubber to his house. He had somehow known David and Xander had stayed behind to snoop around.

  “How?” Mr. King yelled out loud, smacking his palm against the wheel. “How did you know they were there?” He maneuvered through a hairpin turn in the road. The Bug’s rear end slid sideways. It smacked against a boulder, spun its wheels, and took off again.

  Not easy riding on two tireless wheel rims. By the time Mr. King had returned to the car to pursue Taksidian’s Mercedes, the man had slashed the Bug’s driver’s-side tires. Mr. King had driven anyway, panicked to reach a place in the universe where his mobile phone worked: he had to warn his children about Taksidian! The flat tires had peeled away long ago, making the car lean to the left side as though Mr. King weighed eight hundred pounds, and turning steering into a game of chance. Sometimes the wheels obeyed his directions, but mostly they slid willy-nilly all over the road.

  Still, he had done it. Down to the highway, a mile on blacktop—the wheels wailing metallically like tortured robots—to Taksidian’s long, winding drive, and— Almost there! he thought. Come on! Come on!

  The Bug fishtailed around the bend in the road where they had first hidden it in the bushes to approach the house on foot. There it was, the house, at the end of a long stretch of road. It was a simple place: single story, brick front, a patch of untended yard. The garage was on the very right side, a bay window—probably a living room—on the far left. Between them were a front door and a place where a window had been bricked up.

  The wheel rims spun in the dirt, forcing the car to swerve left. The front end bounded off the road, heading for the dense woods that lined both sides of the drive. Mr. King yanked the wheel right, correcting the car. It picked up speed as it approached the house. The Mercedes was parked on the pad in front of the closed garage door.

  He snatched his phone out of his shirt pocket and looked at the screen. He had service. He thumbed the speed-dial button for Xander.

  CHAPTER

  four

  THURSDAY, 6:30 P.M.

  Taksidian smiled.

  The response plucked at Xander’s already frayed confidence. He swallowed and tried to hold his tough-guy expression.

  Do it, he told himself. Go for the spiky stick: leap, grab, swing.

  “How do you want it?” Taksidian asked. “Fast or slow?” He lowered and raised his eyelids, seemingly uninterested. “Either way’s fine with me.”

  Trying not to warn Taksidian of his intentions, Xander slowly turned his hips toward the weapon. He leaned back slightly on his heels and angled his feet that way as well. He tilted his head, hoping to hide the way his body went down as he bent his knees.

  Taksidian sighed. He looked at the weapon, then back at Xander.

  Xander’s heart sank. Okay, he knows. Now what? He thought about it and made a decision: do it anyway. But his body didn’t spring into action, and his mind seemed okay with that. Come on, he thought. On three. One . . .

  Music erupted, startling him. It was his cell phone, playing the soundtrack of Fistful of Dollars. His hand shot to his rear pocket, knowing Taksidian would take this opportunity to attack, would have to attack to stop him from answering the phone.

  The man raised the knife and scratched his cheek with its tip. “Answer it,” he said. “Tell your old man you need him. Yes, this might finish up faster than I thought.”

  Xander tugged the phone out, flipped it open. “Dad! He’s here, Taksidian! He has a knife!”

  “Where are you?” His father sounded out of breath.

  “In the house! Dad—!”

  “Where in the house, exactly?”

  “What? Uh, a room . . . at the front. It has a bricked-up window. I can’t get out!”

  Taksidian pushed a strand of hair off his forehead with the knife tip.

  “Xander,” Dad said, “get away from the wall, where the window was.”

  “I—” Xander glanced over his shoulder at the wall on which the soldier’s uniform was mounted. Getting away from it meant moving closer to Taksidian. “I can’t. He—”

  “Then duck!”

  Xander got it. He dropped the phone.

  Taksidian’s eyes watched it fall. For the first time, he showed an emotion other than boredom. His brows scrunched together in puzzlement.

  Both of them heard it, the high-pitched whine of an engine pushed way p
ast its breaking point. In the space of an eye-blink, its volume doubled.

  Xander dropped into a low crouch, spinning himself away from the wall. Pushing himself against a side wall, he pulled the shield up to his body. Just before he tucked his head behind it, he saw Taksidian’s eyes flash wide.

  The front wall exploded.

  The sound was deafening: metal and bricks slamming together with the force of a meteorite; wood and glass splintering, shattering. The entire house around Xander shuddered and let out a sharp groan. Debris pounded against the shield like three men beating at it with sledgehammers. Xander held firm, pulled himself into a tighter ball behind it. He felt a sharp crack on the back of his head, and a broken brick fell to the floor.

  Little bits of wall—plaster, brick, wood—rained down on him. A thick cloud of dust swirled into his space—over, under, around the shield. It swept into his mouth, down into his lungs. He coughed, hacking it out.

  He stood, fanning at the cloud in front of his face. Sunlight streamed in, making the dust glow and appear that much more impenetrable. He held the shield up and swung it out and back, out and back, hoping to clobber Taksidian if the man moved in to finish off his prey.

  Xander coughed. “Dad?” he said. “Dad?”

  The cloud thinned, revealing the crumpled front of the Bug. The car was more in the room than out of it. Only its back wheels and stubby rear end hadn’t entered. A huge hole in the house gaped like the mouth of a cave. Layers of house lined the edges: two-by-four studs, puffy pink insulation, bricks. The damage formed an uneven semicircle around the Bug. The top of this arch reached as high as the ceiling, which had buckled and cracked. A brick fell, bounced off the exposed concrete foundation, and rolled into the yard. Another dropped, landing with a thunk on the roof of the car.

  Among the debris on the hood was the woolen shirt from the soldier’s uniform. It was sprawled over the accordioned hood, arms out, as though a pedestrian had been knocked right out of his clothes. The windshield was shattered so completely, Xander could not see through it. The car’s engine continued to race, seeming to Xander like a movie soundtrack designed to accompany a tense scene in which the hero gets attacked.

  He snapped his gaze around the room. Taksidian was gone. He checked the floor, hoping to see his body. Bricks and plaster, weapons and artifacts, glass and severed limbs were scattered everywhere, but no bad guy.

  Crunching over the rubble, he moved to the VW’s side window and peered inside. The view was fragmented by the shattered glass, but painfully clear: Dad was slumped forward in the seat, his head pressing against the top of the steering wheel. While Xander watched, a thick rivulet of blood appeared from under his father’s head and ran down the arc of the wheel.

  CHAPTER

  five

  THURSDAY, 6:35 P.M.

  Keal hammered against an old, splintered board until it came away from the nails that had held it to the ceiling for who-knew-how-long and fell to the floor. He backed down a stepladder to appraise the area that was now ready for new wood.

  When he had come to the house—tagging along as Jesse’s nurse—he could never have guessed what he was getting himself into. Time travel. A kidnapped mom. Vicious brutes, out to kill little kids.

  He turned to glance at Toria, only nine and already more familiar with danger and grief than Keal was. She was sitting on the floor at the junction of the second-floor hallways, doing what she called homework, but it looked to Keal like she was coloring a drawing of the house. She looked up at him and smiled.

  Who’d want to hurt such sweetness? Keal thought, winking at her. He had known the King kids only a few days, but already felt something for them that might have been love. Maybe it was the intensity of the experiences they had shared: battling Phemus, finding the future ruins of Los Angeles, saving Nana from getting pulled back into history. Maybe it was that they seemed like good people, and bad things—very bad things—were happening to them. All he knew for sure was that he wanted to protect them, to use his training as a former Army Ranger to show them how to fight, help them get their mother back, and prevent more harm from befalling them.

  He closed his eyes. In this house, that wouldn’t be easy. Wasn’t he supposed to have kept Jesse safe? And look what had happened to him: stabbed and in the hospital at that very moment, maybe recovering, maybe not. He vowed to do a better job with the Kings.

  He returned his attention to the task at hand. He was working on the walls Phemus had knocked down the day before.

  Before that destructive attempt to get Xander, David, and Toria, the walls had been positioned at the bottom of the staircase that ascended to the third-floor hallway of doors.

  There had been two walls: the one closest to the stairs had boasted a metal-fortified but ultimately pointless door; the second one, six feet from the first, had been disguised to look like the end of the short hallway, which ran toward the back of the house from the main second-floor hallway. Pushing in just the right spot had caused a secret door to pop open.

  Keal understood the logic that had gone into such a configuration. The secret door would not have been very secret if it flaunted hasps and locks and deadbolts. But because bad people came out of the portal doors upstairs, security was essential. That’s where the other wall and door came in.

  And who knew? Maybe it had worked in the past, keeping all manner of time travelers out of the house. It just hadn’t worked yesterday. For whatever reason—probably a stern order from Taksidian—Phemus hadn’t let it deter him from his mission of getting the kids. From what Xander had told Keal about the attack, the wall had slowed down their attackers long enough to let the children escape, so it had done some good.

  Keal had decided to reconstruct the walls pretty much the way they had been, with one difference: he planned to make both walls extra sturdy, and he would find a way to make the inner door impossible to break through.

  Earlier in the afternoon, Ed King had called to say he and the boys were going on a “mission,” and would Keal mind picking up Toria from her elementary school? Afterward, Keal and Toria had stopped by the lumber store for the items they would need to make the house right again.

  Thinking about it now, Keal laughed.

  “What’s funny?” Toria said.

  “Ah, nothing,” he said. “I was just thinking that putting these walls up was making the house right . . . but how can this house ever be right?”

  Toria pressed her lips together and furrowed her brow. She said, “I know what Xander would say. He’d say the house will be right when we rescue Mom and get out of it. For good.”

  Keal nodded. “I like that idea.”

  Worded that simply, their task in the house sounded easy. But he knew that finding Mrs. King meant going in and out of different times in history—times that seemed always to be full of life-threatening dangers. Even if—yes, that was the word, he thought glumly: if—they were able to rescue her, they couldn’t just leave. They had found out that the future of mankind was no future at all. Sometime soon, there would be a war that wiped out Los Angeles—Keal had seen the ruins himself—and presumably the rest of the world. Jesse thought there was something they could do to fix things; in fact, he had said it was their duty to change the future. It was hard for Keal to disagree: if there was something they could do, they had to try to do it.

  Toria was watching his face as he thought all of this, obviously not liking what she saw. He forced a smile and said, “That’ll be a great day, huh? Saying adios to this crazy place once and for all.”

  She grinned and returned to her drawing, adding a tree trunk beside the gray house. His heart ached for her, a sweet little girl who’d experienced more trauma, grief, and frights than any kid should have to face.

  He noticed a few nails protruding from the ceiling and climbed the ladder to pound them in.

  “More hammering?” Toria complained.

  “’Fraid so.” He glanced over his shoulder at her. She had a hand pressed over each ear. L
oudly, he said, “Maybe you should do that in your room.”

  She shook her head.

  Keal shrugged, angled his arm to strike the nails, and stopped. He looked back at Toria again. Hands still in place to ease the sound of his pounding, she was looking down at her drawing. Her long, dark hair hung all the way to the page.

  “What did you say?” he called.

  She looked up, removed her hands. “What?”

  “Did you say something?”

  “When?”

  “Just now.” He was sure he had heard something. He listened.

  “What?” she said.

  “Shhh,” he said. “Thought I heard—there!”