Ancient Fire
Page 11
It’s a headline in the National Weekly Truth, one of the few remaining “papers” still actually printed on paper. I see it when Dad and I are standing in line at the grocery store in Glen Ellen.
It’s been a few weeks now, and we occasionally get secondhand news about Clyne that way. The online Chronicle had its own, more serious, article called “The Return of Bigfoot,” describing footprints people had seen near here. I think they were Clyne’s. I hope he manages to stay safe.
A couple weeks ago he left an orange on our doorstep, with the word Hello carved in the peel.
Luckily, I found it before the DARPA agents did.
There are only a couple around at any given time lately. But they follow us everywhere. One is behind us in line at the grocery store now, getting ready to tail us home.
We don’t see Mr. Howe much, but he uses the agents to keep tabs on us.
His current fascination is with slow pox. The situation’s getting a little scary—a couple cities are on the verge of declaring quarantines.
As it turns out, that’s what Mr. Howe wanted with the scrolls from the library at Alexandria. He didn’t actually care what was on the scroll; he wanted the scroll itself, the parchment, the goatskin.
Most of the livestock back in Thea’s time were carriers of slow pox, and Mr. Howe figured if he could get a sample of animal skin—like the parchment—he could extract the slow pox DNA and make his own batch.
Dad wonders if maybe that’s what’s causing the outbreaks in the first place. The time stream is still out of whack. Recently another plane, this time going from Chicago to Mexico City, managed to land before it actually took off, after disappearing off the radar screen. But that was so unbelievable, it wound up in the National Weekly Truth, too, a few days before the “Lizard Man” story about Clyne.
With all the strange things happening, Dad has a strange idea of his own: He thinks maybe Mr. Howe got his strain of slow pox perfected after all, and it escaped from the lab and caused the outbreak.
Or rather, it escaped from the lab in the near future, but strains of the disease have come back in time to start infecting us now.
I hope that doesn’t mean I helped cause it by becoming unstuck in time in the first place. By messing up the time stream with my WOMPER charge. I wonder if Dad feels that way, too. Or Mr. Howe.
No, I’m pretty sure Mr. Howe wouldn’t worry about it.
Dad and I talk about that in the truck, and he tells me again and again not to blame myself. But that’s what I’ve been telling him about Mom’s disappearance, that he couldn’t have known what would happen and he can’t keep making himself miserable, not if there’s a chance to get her back. But he doesn’t buy it at all.
We get home, and the DARPA guy pulls up right behind us.
As Dad unpacks the groceries, I go to my room and check the Comnet for messages. For the first time in months, there’s one from my friend Andy:
Sorry it’s been so long. I miss having you here. Strange things have been happening since you left. Like my little sister saying she’s been talking to my great-grandma a lot lately. Except, my great-grandma’s been dead for years. Weird, huh? My parents have been taking her to doctors, but she won’t change her mind. I don’t even know what my great-grandma looks like. How have you been? How’s California?
Hey, Wall, I miss you, too, I start to write back. But I leave the reply unfinished. What can I say? That his sister will be all right once we get the fabric of time patched back up? That I’m friends with a girl who’s more than a thousand years old, and that I know a talking dinosaur, too?
How could you even tell anybody who wasn’t there?
That’s the worst part of it, really. I’ve become kind of a secret myself, like a part of DARPA. Kind of a shadow, living a different life from everyone else.
Maybe that’s what Mr. Howe meant by “Danger Boy.”
The danger is getting cut off from the world you know, because you’ve seen worlds no one else can even imagine.
But Andy’s isn’t the only message waiting for us at home.
There’s a slip of paper, stationery from some old hotel, lying on the floor in Dad’s lab, next to the time sphere.
It’s in Mom’s handwriting. It says Help.
The DARPA agent sees it, too, and he’s already on the phone to Mr. Howe, who I know will come rushing over now, and this might jump-start everything again.
“Dad, I have to go outside and take a walk,” I tell him.
“I understand.” He thinks I’m confused and upset about the note from Mom, knowing she’s back there in time and knowing she wants our help.
I am upset and confused, but not for the reasons he thinks.
I walk down the path to the spot where Thea and I came through the Fifth Dimension. I stand in front of the oak where I hid my Seals cap.
There seems to be so much left to do.
Help, Mom wrote. How? When?
I tried to go back to a “regular” life after Alexandria, but maybe this is my regular life now, moving around in time.
Maybe I am Danger Boy.
I need to ask Dad a couple things first, then I’ll be back for the cap.
And I’ll be gone before Mr. Howe gets here.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As the whole “Danger Boy” series migrates and morphs from traditionally published form into the ebook you now hold (or, at least, read on your screen), all the people who were there at the beginning, in those four previous acknowledgements, should consider themselves -- these many moons later -- still thanked, loved, appreciated: the friends and family who provided the encouragement (or sometimes the literal space to write), my former editors at (sadly now defunct) Tricycle Press, and later Candlewick, who helped whip those early manuscripts into shape. All of them -- all of you -- thanks so much for being, well, time travelers, and riding with these stories from their past, into the future.
At the present moment -- for that is all we time travelers ever actually have -- I want to especially thank my agent, Kelly Sonnack, for being such a good steward of the books’ conversion to the format you currently enjoy, and as well, longstanding “Danger Boy” cover artist Michael Koelsch, who took many of his “boss” covers from the book series and worked his magic so they’d look equally cool in download land.
And of course, thank you, dear reader, for taking this story into your home, and, hopefully, your heart. Happy voyaging.
Eli’s adventures continue in Episode 2!
DANGER BOY
Dragon Sword
The old king stands by the lake, looking over it as for the last time, waiting.
Waiting for a woman. A woman who’s never touched land.
After a moment, she appears from under the water, calmly floating up, then hovering just over the surface. The woman remains utterly serene, as if rising from a lake then standing above it were scarcely remarkable. She seems very patient, as though she could wait a long time to take tired kings into her liquid embrace, take them into the lake with her when their hearts are broken for the last time.
This king is very tired. He’s seen too much war, too much bloodshed — and knows he’s caused a lot of it.
When he was younger, he never thought he’d wind up hurting like this. He thought everything would be perfect.
The king is going to throw the sword into the lake, let this water sprite have it, because this sword, it seems to him now, is the root cause of all his misery.
He remembers pulling it from the rock when he was younger; he remembers thinking it would make him invincible.
That was a lie. It only made him king. Now, no more lies. Just water. And silence.
He holds the sword above his head, ready to fling it into what he thinks will be its final resting place.
“Arthur.”
It’s Merlin’s voice. The old wizard is always speaking at moments like this, breaking the king’s concentration, never quite taking anything seriously enough.
This tim
e Merlin’s pointing. Out at the water. The serenity is even draining from the Lady of the Lake’s face. There’s a swirl of foam and bubbles next to her, and something unexpected. An intruder.
It was just supposed to be the king and Merlin here, alone with the water sprite, to dispose of the sword. The sword and a whole lot of bad memories.
But there’s someone else. Someone who’s kind of…fading in. Thrashing about in the water, gasping for air, trying to swim.
Is it another wizard, here to challenge Merlin? Or perhaps a spirit, the wandering ghost of some man killed by the king in a forgotten war?
The king can’t tell. But Merlin doesn’t seem worried. He seems, in fact, slightly amused.
But then, Merlin always seems amused, no matter how bad the situation.
The small caps and breakers in the lake are shredded apart by the frantic splashing as the intruder buzzes through the water like a small, agitated shark.
As the trespasser draws near, the king lowers his sword and lets it rest in the mud by his leggings.
It’s a boy coming to them. Out of the water. A boy.
Soon to be a man, but not quite. About twelve years old.
Wearing jeans and a baseball cap—though the king wouldn’t have the faintest idea what to call them.
“Hello,” the boy finally gasps.
“Well met,” the king says. “Or, perhaps, not so well. Merlin, is this one of yours?”
The boy looks from one man to the other, then back at the king. “Arthur?” The boy speaks with the strangest accent the king has ever heard.
But the conversation is interrupted. The water starts bubbling and churning again. And another boy begins fading into view.
And don’t miss Eli Sands’s further adventures!
DANGER BOY: Episode 3
Trail of Bones
When a time-battered Eli Sands lands in the year 1804 at the launch of the famous Lewis and Clark expedition, he has no idea he’s about to take part in the frontier adventure of a lifetime!
DANGER BOY: Episode 4
City of Ruins
When Thea is infected by slow pox, Eli and his friends head to ancient Jerusalem to find a cure.
DANGER BOY: Episode 5:
Fortune’s Fool
The Danger Boy stories reach a climax in the forthcoming adventure that ends in a reckoning from which no one returns unchanged.
Mark Williams is a fiction writer, playwright, and journalist. He is the author of the LA Times Bestselling Danger Boy series for young adults. As a journalist, he’s written for Variety, the Los Angeles Times, and The Los Angeles Business Journal, and is currently a columnist for Below the Line, covering Hollywood and its discontents. His plays have been produced in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and London, and he’s written comic books, short stories, and video game scripts. He teaches workshops on creative writing, genre studies, and storytelling for the Walt Disney Company and other places. He lives in Southern California, raising a couple “danger boys” of his own.