“Great-just-what-we-need,” Owen moaned.
“More of the megafauna?” Simon asked.
Flangelo pointed at the mammoths and uttered a warbling shriek. The kids turned to look and went pale; the tusked brutes were crawling forward on their knees, making slow but steady progress. They’d cut the distance between them and the kids in half . . . and less than fifty feet away was not very far when the animals in question were each the size of a garbage truck.
Alysha gasped. “Over there!” she shouted, pointing, causing the others to turn and stare. Something was slinking out of the higher grass: a shaggy, reddish brown giant cat. Not a cat of the scratch, lick, and meow type . . . but rather the tear, rend, and roar sort.
It stepped out from the grass, revealing it was huge. Lion huge. It raised his head a bit, sniffed with its massive, fist-size nose, and let out a roar that chilled Simon and his friends. Opening its mouth like that made something else clear . . . something more alarming than its size: it was no lion. It had seven-inch-long teeth, one on each side of its upper jaw jutting down.
“Smilodon fatalis,” Flangelo said with a warbling whine. “Saber-toothed cat.”
“This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of,” Alysha said. “I mean, who outside of the Flintstones keeps saber-toothed tigers around for kicks! Didn’t anyone ever tell you that giant carnivores make bad pets?”
“It’s Biology,” Flangelo hissed. “Study of all life, not just what’s cute and fluffy. Now get yourselves free so we can leave before—”
Once again, Flangelo stopped midsentence, this time because of the eight-foot-long, five-foot-tall bundle of death that came bounding out of the grass toward them.
Simon froze. Again, he thought. I keep putting my friends in danger.
Owen didn’t hesistate; he grabbed it with velocity and hurled it at the nearest tree. Smilodons were agile, though—they were huge cats, after all. It twisted as it flew, landing feetfirst against the tree and springing forward again. Owen lashed out once more, this time using velocity to swing it around and fling it, with a loud splash, into the lake.
A series of powerful roars ripped out from the grass, and three more sabertooths came running out. They split up, each approaching the kids from a different direction. Simon got a grip on himself; this was something he could handle. Something he had to handle. One of the giant cats leaped, and Simon shifted gravity to pull at it from all directions. The beast was suspended in midair; it let out a whimper and flailed its baseball-mitt-size paws uselessly.
Another sabertooth ran at Owen, but Simon eliminated all friction on its paws. His worries about friction working on the uneven ground were unfounded—the beast slid helplessly past its prey. It kept going, unable to slow down as it skated over the dirt and through the grass. It smacked into and rebounded off a tree. The impact didn’t hurt it much, but it was still unable to get any traction with its paws. It slipped in another direction, yowling furiously.
The fourth Smilodon moved toward Alysha with a snarl, legs tensed for an attack. Alysha snarled back, raising one hand above her head and lowering the other by her knees. She generated a huge arc of bluish white electricity that spat and sizzled in the wet air. It was enough to make the giant cat hesitate, but it didn’t run away. It let out a low-pitched whine and tried to circle around her.
Alysha, her legs now free, shifted with it to keep her electrical arc between them.
“What now?” she yelled. “It’s too fast for me to shock it!”
“Hold on,” Simon said. He increased the gravity on her Smilodon, pinning it to the ground.
Alysha reached out and jolted it with an electrical charge that knocked it out.
Simon exhaled with relief; though he’d led his friends into terrible danger, he was able to lead them out of it, too. “We can do this!” Simon cheered.
A nearby trumpeting sound jolted him, perhaps the mammoth equivalent of saying, “Not so fast”; Simon whirled around in time to see a blur of white. A piece of ivory the size of a lamppost smacked him in his chest, lifting him up into the air and flinging him far, far back until he splashed into the lake.
The lead mammoth had reached them and hit Simon with a tusk.
“Simon!” Alysha, Owen, and Flangelo shouted together.
All the mammoths rose to their feet and bellowed, back to their normal weights. The floating sabertooth dropped to the ground, his regular gravitational pull restored, and the sliding sabertooth scraped to a halt, its friction back to normal.
Simon’s formulas had stopped working: he was unconscious . . . or worse!
“I’ll get him,” Owen said, but he paused as the lead mammoth charged. Flangelo shifted to sparrow form and flapped away. Alysha dove to the side, ducked under the gigantic tusks, and rolled next to the mammoth’s foot as it crashed into the muddy ground. She reached out and hit him with all the electrical charge she had left in her.
The mammoth shrieked in pain and shrank back from Alysha for a moment. But only a moment—the jolt hurt it, nothing more. It trumpeted in rage and reared up to strike. “Oh, no,” Alysha moaned; she started to roll away as a manhole-size foot dropped down to crush her.
The foot never connected. Owen was standing, his arms outstretched, focusing his velocity formula on the creature. Beads of sweat slid down his forehead, joining the light rain, and with great effort, Owen knocked the immense Columbian mammoth backward. It fell on its hindquarters and toppled over with a wet thud.
Owen grabbed Alysha’s hand and yanked her to her feet. “Are you stuck?” he asked, yelling over the angry trumpeting of the mammoth as it tried to right itself. She nodded and poured all her strength into tugging a mud-trapped foot.
Owen kept a hand on her and activated his chromatophores, camouflaging them both. They were frighteningly close to the mammoth, though; close enough that it could surely smell and hear them. “Hurry up,” he hissed.
The mammoth got to its feet just as Alysha shouted, “Got it!”
Owen got a firm grip on Alysha and used his velocity to fly them up and away, narrowly avoiding the mammoth’s tusk-strike.
Flangelo, back in sparrow form, chirped anxiously as he flapped over the lake—Simon was down there, probably drowning.
“Put me down, Owen,” Alysha said. “I’ve got to make plasma, and I don’t want to accidentally get you.”
Owen returned Alysha to a relatively solid patch of ground, as far from the herd as he could. He noted the sparks around her as she began drawing in as much electrical charge as she could from the air around them. Without him touching her, she was no longer camouflaged: she would be trampled or smashed if he didn’t do something.
A sabertooth reared up and lunged. Owen caught it in midair and flung it at the lead mammoth; the panicked Smilodon clawed and bit frantically at the behemoth as it tried to get a grip.
Owen let go of his camouflage, making himself fully visible, and then launched himself past the faces of the mammoths. He used his chromatophores to shift from one bright color to the next, making sure every prehistoric beasts’ attention was on him, not Alysha.
Two mammoths veered toward her, so Owen used velocity to grab chunks of mud from the ground and fling them in their faces. The falling rain and a quick wipe from their trunks kept them from being blinded, but the attacks kept them angry and distracted.
Flangelo swooped wildly, zipping right up to the faces of the mammoths and pecking at them to keep their fury diverted from Alysha. Each attack brought him closer to being swatted by trunk or tusk, but he didn’t dare stop.
Alysha was dimly aware of her friends’ efforts, but it was taking increasingly more concentration for her to work at ionizing the air. She was focusing on invisible electrons, shuffling them from atom to atom, as if playing an imaginary game of checkers.
The air around her began to crackle as the ionization process grew ever more intense. Her hair began to frizz and, finally, stood on end as the electrical charge around her increased. There
it was again—that scary feeling of power growing inside of her, building more and more, all the while becoming harder to hold back.
Hold on hold on hold on hold on, she thought desperately. She clenched her fists and squeezed her eyes closed as she strained to keep the gathering storm from breaking free too soon. Simon’s in the lake, those things are going to kill us, I’ve got to get this right, I have to own the power . . . Then she hit that point, that level which she knew she couldn’t go past. She only had seconds left.
“Guys!” she yelled. “Clear out!” She managed to open her eyes a sliver, narrowly seeing Owen zooming toward her with Flangelo in human form, clearly being dragged along by Owen’s velocity. Then, through the glowing air in front of her, she saw massive shapes coming closer, closer, until they were almost on top of her.
She didn’t know if Owen and Flangelo had made it behind her or not, but it didn’t matter—there was no more waiting. She clamped her eyes shut again, feeling the hot breath of some gigantic animal on her, and then . . . Light.
The air in front of Alysha turned blue, then white, and then a bright pinkish hue. I whirled around and shielded my eyes just in time, because a split second later the colors burst outward in an eruption of ultraheated plasma.
The sound was deafening, tearing through my speakers and roaring across my entire apartment. The searing brightness of the light filled my living space through my Viewing Screen, leaking past the fingers over my face. It was less an explosion and more like someone bringing the sun down for a quick game of supernova.
A moment later, it was over, and I was able to look back at the Screen. All the grass for a hundred feet in front of Alysha was gone; the once-swampy ground was charred black and cracked, with steam rising from where puddles of water once sat. Alysha had wisps of purplish smoke curling gently off her hands and hair, but she was unhurt. She’d channeled the explosion but had been untouched by it. She looked back and smiled wearily when she saw Owen and Flangelo. Both looked well, though they’d been knocked to the ground from the explosion. They were staring at Alysha with eyes wide and mouths drooping open.
“You okay?” she asked. They nodded silently.
Alysha stumbled and started to fall, drained from her exertion. Though exhausted, too, Owen and Flangelo managed to grab her by the arms and keep her propped up.
“Thanks,” she mumbled. She peered through the dissipating mist and saw the sabertooths and the mammoths sprawled across the ground, traces of plasma-smoke rising from their charred coats.
“Did I kill them?” she asked.
“Nah,” Owen said, his voice hoarse from weariness. “I think you just stunned them.” Indeed, though only patches of the shaggy sabertooth fur remained and there were pink burn streaks on the mammoths’ skin, I could see that their chests rose and fell with ragged breaths.
Apparently, Alysha’s spreading out the plasma attack to cover the whole battlefield had diffused the energy enough to knock the beasts out but no worse. Alysha sighed. “Good. That worked out nicely.”
And that’s when the last sabertooth burst out of the lake behind them and leaped at the trio.
CHAPTER 29
THE UNSINKABLE SIMON BLOOM
Let’s not forget poor Simon. Getting hit with a mammoth’s tusk and hurled into a lake was not the best approach to going for a swim. At the very least, it made it tricky for Simon to hold his breath, which he, being unconscious, was not doing anyway.
The lead mammoth’s attack hit Simon hard; solid ivory was about as soft and cuddly as a baseball bat. That, combined with the impact of hitting the water at race car speed, should have left him with countless broken bones or, more likely, dead. Add the whole sinking-to-the-bottom-of-the-lake thing, and Simon’s remaining part in this Chronicle should have been from beneath a tombstone.
Which was what made his opening his eyes so surprising. Unfortunately, he also opened his mouth wide in an expression of surprise and panic. It’s worth noting that opening his mouth underwater wasn’t the smartest thing for Simon to do; it should have been just the latest on his laundry list of deadly problems. But let’s address the being-crushed-or-killed problem before the drowning-quickly one.
Thanks to the octopus trait he’d taken on, Simon was much more flexible and resilient. He was still a human being with muscles, bones, organs, tissues, and all that, but they were now much harder to damage with the impact of, say, an enormous mammoth’s tusk smacking him like he was a flesh-colored golf ball.
There was no breakage, no puncturing, no internal bleeding; Simon just got a nasty bruise all across his left side and chest. On the other hand, the one-two punch of the tusk-strike and smacking into the pond’s surface did knock Simon out, and that was a bad thing to be when at the bottom of a lake. No amount of flexibility would save him from drowning.
That was the funny thing about Simon waking up underwater: he was breathing. When you’ve spent twelve years of your life breathing air in one way, you catch on swiftly when you start breathing in a totally different way. Simon felt at his throat and gasped from surprise at what he found there.
Stunned at his ability to gasp underwater, he gasped again, though he felt terribly foolish afterward. He continued to touch the area around his throat, sure that humans weren’t supposed to have multiple slits in their throats where he did. Especially not slits that rose and fell so rhythmically. It didn’t take Simon long to realize what they were.
True, Gilio had only given Simon one octopus attribute—the flexibility. But Simon had touched the symbols for octopus DNA in the Teacher’s Edition of Biology, and, as noted, Biology abilities are transferrable by touch. Simon’s connection to the Books of Physics and Biology was apparently enough to allow him access without Gilio intending it. So Simon had absorbed many—perhaps all—octopus attributes, and as mentioned earlier, they most certainly had gills. And now, so did he.
Simon didn’t realize the why of this, yet. For now he was content to focus on being alive. That and staying alive. More importantly, he thought about his friends. While he was at the bottom of a lake, his friends were on the surface, fighting for their lives. That would not do. He used his gravity to reverse the normal pull into a push, launching himself up through the water at three times a normal falling rate. He burst through the surface of the pond and flew high into the air.
Simon opened his mouth and gasped, sucking in air and reveling in its fresh taste. It was a delight to breathe normally again, to taste the air as it moved through his nose and mouth. He noted the peculiar sensation of his gills closing up, presumably disappearing until needed again.
Simon hovered in midair for a moment, squinting to make sense of the scene before him. Down by the lakeshore, Owen and Flangelo were facing Alysha, who was turning and stumbling toward them. Beyond them were mammoths and sabertooths lying on the charred and smoldering ground.
Simon smiled: his friends had done it! He couldn’t wait to celebrate their victory and tell them about his remarkable new discovery. He shifted gravity so he was falling toward them, zooming through the raindrops that smacked against his already soaked face and body. He was so intent on reaching them that he didn’t notice the Smilodon until it was too late; the beast was already out of the lake and pouncing on his friends.
What happened next was almost too quick for me to follow. Owen and Alysha, sluggish after all their formula use, moved too slowly, but Flangelo was a hair faster. He shoved Owen toward Alysha, placing himself between the Smilodon and the kids.
At the same time, Simon instinctively stretched his arms out toward the huge cat, as anyone might do when they saw something disastrous happening far away. Normally such automatic reactions were futile, but Simon Bloom was far from normal.
He felt the result instantly; the gravitational pull around the sabertooth changed, yanking it back from his friends. Even so, Simon wasn’t in time; the beast’s claws raked Flangelo’s shoulder and side, tearing through his clothes and his skin. Simon followed through with g
ravity, hammering the Smilodon into one of the fallen mammoths; it connected with a thump and lay still.
It would only be much later that Simon would realize he hadn’t actively triggered his gravity control; he’d reached out with his arms and the formula had somehow responded. An important detail . . . but for later.
That moment, however, Simon focused on getting to Flangelo as soon as possible. He tore through the air and landed by the bleeding man’s side just as the startled Alysha and Owen caught him midfall.
Simon stared at the bright red of the wound, almost hypnotized in his horror. True, the injury would have been much worse had Simon not stopped the Smilodon, but the damage was done. He had to do something! But what?
Simon felt a mental flash from his backpack, still on the ground where he’d dropped it when the mammoth had knocked him into the lake. The flash was a message from the Book, tucked cozily inside during the entire battle.
The apple, was all it said, but that triggered memory flashes for Simon. The apple with a bite missing. Ralfagon chewing. The apple whole, as if never bitten. Simon whispered the words of his space-time formula, focusing on an image of Flangelo as he was before the attack.
Flangelo was sagging in Owen’s and Alysha’s arms when the four gushing claw marks began to ripple like the surface of the storm-smacked lake behind Simon. Before his startled friends’ eyes, the slashes shrank and the blood flowed in reverse. The red stains on Flangelo’s and Owen’s clothes and the spatter on the ground rose up into the air and returned to Flangelo’s body.
After a moment, the blood and wounds were gone: not healed so much as never happened. Simon had moved time backward around Flangelo’s wound, making it so it never happened. Even the rips in his shirt were gone. If someone were to look at the sabertooth who’d attacked Flangelo, they’d find the blood gone from its claws . . . though it would still be unconscious from Simon’s gravity-attack. As with the apple at Ralfagon’s office (and with Sirabetta at the end of the last Chronicle), the time-reverse was highly localized to its target.
The Octopus Effect Page 15
