The Monster War

by Alan Gratz

  Gonzalo made an adjustment on his raygun and aimed it at the dark slit that appeared between the opening doors. If Uktena came at them through that door they had another big battle ahead of them. Unless Martine could snake-charm it again.

  If an angry Archie came through that door, none of them was quite sure what they would do.

  Skritch. Skritch. Skritch. Something moved in the darkness, and even Gonzalo, fearless as he was, took a step backward as the thing came out of the shadows into the light.

  24

  It was Archie.

  His face was smudged, his clothes were torn, and everyone could see the crack in his arm—the crack that showed he was stone inside. He was dragging something behind him with both hands, which made him hunch forward like an ape.

  From where they stood, none of them could tell if he’d gone berserk again. Hachi tensed. Gonzalo aimed his raygun. Martine activated her shield.

  “Archie?” Fergus said.

  Archie straightened. “Hey,” he said. He smiled. “Took you guys long enough.”

  Nobody rushed to hug him. Not yet.

  “You’re not—you didn’t—” Hachi tried.

  “Lose control?” Archie said. “No.” He raised his eyebrows at Gonzalo, who still had Señor X pointed at him. “What good was that going to do if I had?”

  “It’s okay, Gonzalo,” Clyde said, and the ranger lowered his raygun.

  Kitsune looked sheepish. “When we didn’t hear from you on the shells, we thought—”

  “Oh. Yeah. Sorry. Lost my shell thingy in the fall. Moffett did try to make me lose control,” Archie told them. “And that fall didn’t help. Neither did having a Mangleborn dropped on me.”

  Archie tossed the enormous pair of antlers he’d been dragging behind him into the cavern.

  “You killed Martine’s great-grandmother,” Fergus said.

  “I did what?” Archie asked.

  “Never mind,” Gonzalo said. “And Señor X says it’s not dead, just sleeping.”

  “I snapped off its horns,” Archie said. “That put it down.”

  The League stared at the giant things, each of them thinking how difficult it would have been for them to defeat Uktena without Archie, and how much harder it would be if they ever had to take on their friend themselves.

  “I’m … impressed,” Hachi said, still skeptical.

  “See?” Fergus told her, as though he’d just won some argument.

  “I practiced my mantra. The one you taught me,” Archie told Hachi. “I kept saying the names and pounded on the walls, trying to bust my way out in case you couldn’t come get me. But you did. Thank you.”

  Everyone came forward then to congratulate Archie and shake his hand or hug him. Hachi kept watching him like she expected him to lose control any moment, but he seemed like regular old Archie.

  Fergus pushed aside Archie’s torn sleeve and ran his fingers down the crack in Archie’s arm. “You know, I had me an idea about this crack, Archie,” Fergus said. “I could put a metal brace over it, bolt it right into your arm, like they do with stone walls. Keep it from splitting open any wider.”

  Everyone stared at Fergus like he’d just pulled the pin on an aether grenade.

  “What?” he said to them. “Archie gets it. Don’t you?”

  “Sure,” Archie said. He pulled his torn sleeve back over the crack. “Yeah. Of course. Maybe later,” he said. He looked away, and Hachi punched Fergus in the arm. Hard.

  Ow, he mouthed silently.

  “Want to say good-bye to granny?” Gonzalo asked Martine.

  “No,” she told him. “I know where she is and how to reach her again if I wish to study her in the future.”

  Gonzalo shot the tuning forks again, and the huge seal closed, trapping Uktena in the prison that had been designed for her so long ago.

  “Now what?” Kitsune asked.

  “Now I’m done fooling around,” Archie said. “I want to take down Moffett and end this.”

  “We don’t know where she went,” Clyde told him. “She released Uktena and split.”

  “New Rome,” Archie said. “That’s where she’s going. I’m sure of it. New Rome, to get her revenge on the Septemberist Society. That’s where the headquarters is. But I’m going to catch her before she gets there, and I’m going to kill her.”

  A little of the dangerous fire they had all seen in Archie’s eyes at one point or another flashed, and the League was scared all over again. Part of Archie hated those looks, but a growing part of him liked that he could make people afraid.

  “Let’s go,” Archie said. He turned and stalked off toward the ladder up.

  “All the king’s horses and all his steam men couldn’t put Humpty together again,” Kitsune whispered when he was out of earshot.

  Martine nodded. “The entropy of an isolated system never decreases,” she said. Everyone looked at her. “Humpty Dumpty. The Second Law of Thermodynamics.” She took their silent confusion as an invitation to elaborate. “The higher the entropy, the higher the disorder, thus it is increasingly improbable that Humpty Dumpty can be returned to his earlier state of lower entropy.”

  “Does anybody understand what she’s talking about?” Hachi said.

  “I do,” said Fergus. He watched Archie, who walked away muttering to himself. “Every new thing that happens to Archie makes it more likely he’ll crack—and less and less likely we’ll be able to put him back together again when he does.”

  25

  Buster was growling deep down in his boiler room long before any of the rest of them heard the booming in the distance.

  “Raycannons,” Gonzalo said. He drew Señor X. “Aether rifles too. Somebody’s fighting. Lots of somebodies.”

  They were thirteen hours into a quick march north and east from Sonnionto up through the Appalachian Mountains, past the Powhatan city of Totopotomoi and north of the Yankee town of Baltimore. By Clyde’s estimate, they were still half a day away from Philadelphia, but the explosions were close enough and loud enough to warrant a detour.

  Buster crested a ridge, and the League of Seven crowded the bridge windows and gunwales to see. Stretched out before them along a broad, rolling, tree-dotted plain was the biggest battle any of them had ever seen. Thousands of soldiers wearing dark blue United Nations Army uniforms charged forward with oscillating rifles and aether pistols, filling the air with blue raygun beams. On ridges above them, three mobile raycannons rained down hot death.

  “Who are they fighting? Manglespawn?” Hachi asked.

  Buster’s telescopic lenses clicked into place. No—it wasn’t monsters the UN Army was fighting. It was First Nations tribesmen!

  “Piscataway, maybe?” Clyde said. It was difficult to see from this far out. “Susquehannock? According to the map, we’re just south of Peshtank.”

  “But why would UN soldiers be fighting against either of those tribes?” Archie asked. “They’re all members of the United Nations!”

  “Let’s find out,” Clyde said. “All hands, prepare for battle!” he called into his speaking trumpet. Clyde flipped a switch, and the steam man rumbled as its left arm transformed into a raycannon.

  Buster ran up to the fight, and Clyde stepped over the UN’s battle lines. The UN soldiers gave a cheer—to them, Buster was Colossus, a United Nations steam man cavalry unit, come to join the battle.

  BWAAAAAAT! Clyde fired Buster’s big raycannon, carving out a deep trench between the UN forces and whatever tribe that was fighting them. “You guys cut it out now!” Clyde called through his external speaker. “I ain’t kidding!”

  The ragged bunch of rebels turned their raygun fire on Buster, but it didn’t even slow him down. Clyde fired into the sky, trying to scare them. BWAAAAAAT! Men and women dropped their oscillating rifles and ran away screaming.

  “Wow. That was effective,” said Hachi.

  “I think we may have had a little help,” Archie said.

  Kitsune had snuck up onto the bridge and was perched i
n the drummer’s chair behind Clyde.

  “What’d you make them see?” Hachi asked.

  Kitsune grinned. “Just Buster as himself,” she said. “A ten-story-tall dog. Who also breathes fire.”

  Clyde fired the raycannon one more time just to scare off the stragglers. Men and women in the UN line cheered, and Clyde steered toward the flag that marked the location of the commander in charge: General Robert E. Lee. General Lee was a white-haired, bearded man in his fifties, wearing a smart blue UN uniform with the knee-length coat buttoned all the way to the top and tied tight at the waist with a belt of gold braid. From one side of his belt hung a sheathed saber; from the other hung a raygun holster. Archie knew Lee from the Septemberist headquarters—he was the current head of the Society’s Warrior Guild, as well as being the war chief of the United Nations of America. If he was here, things were doubly bad.

  “Private Clyde Magoro of the United Nations Seventh Steam Man Regiment, sir!” Clyde said, snapping to attention and saluting as soon as he and the other Leaguers were outside Buster. The steam man plopped his big brass bottom on the ground and wagged his tail.

  General Lee frowned. “The UNSM Colossus?” he said. “The Colossus was reported lost with all hands under Captain Custer in Pawnee territory a month ago.”

  “Ah, yes sir,” Clyde said. “Not exactly.”

  General Lee looked over the odd collection of kids, and then up at Buster, who was thumping his back leg against his brass body like he was scratching at a flea.

  “Who’s piloting Colossus?” General Lee asked.

  Clyde rubbed the back of his head. “Well, nobody at present. It’s a long story, sir, and that’s a fact. But Archie here, he says all I really need to tell you is that we’re the League of Seven.”

  “Thirty days hath September,” Archie said.

  “Seven heroes we remember,” General Lee answered. But he still looked incredulous until Archie lifted an overturned cannon and set it back on its wheels. Recognition dawned on his face.

  “You—you’re—” General Lee said.

  “Archie Dent. The strongman the Septemberist Council was getting reports on,” Archie said darkly. The strongman the Society created. He breathed deeply, trying not to get angry, but he could feel the rage building like a coming storm. “I’m what you always wanted. And you got the rest of your League too.”

  General Lee ushered the seven of them and Mr. Rivets into his tent, and Clyde gave him the best summary he could of everything that had happened.

  “First things first: I think you’re due for a promotion, Mr. Magoro,” General Lee said. He called to an attendant. “Bring me some captain’s stripes for this young man.”

  “Captain! Dang. Wait’ll I tell Mrs. DeMarcus.”

  “Can’t have the leader of the League of Seven be a lowly private,” General Lee said. He pinned the silver bars on Clyde’s collar, and Clyde stood ten inches taller. “As for the rest of you, you’re just in time. That Monster Army Moffett created’ll be here any time now, with her and three Mangleborn at the head of it.”

  The League looked around at each other. Three Mangleborn? At once?

  “I’ve decided to make our stand here,” General Lee said.

  “Where’s ‘here,’ sir?” Clyde asked.

  “We’re just outside a tiny Yankee village called Gettysburg,” Lee told them, gesturing at a map on his table. “There’s not a lot of civilians, and it’s got good, defensible hills and a wide-open battlefield. And we’re going to need it. I have fifty regiments, a hundred raycannon, and three more steam men are on the way. It’s going to be a bloody thing, but I mean to do it before those monsters reach Philadelphia, or wherever it is they’re headed.”

  Clyde whistled. “That’s the biggest fighting force the United Nations has ever had in one place at one time.”

  “It will be if they don’t all run off first,” Lee said. “I’ll be lucky if half those seventy thousand warriors show up. Just this morning I had a third of my troops go AWOL, running home to fight for their own tribes.”

  “Fight who?” Fergus asked.

  “Each other. The Cherokee and the Muskogee are at it again. So are the Choctaw, Pawnee, and Illini. The Council of Three Fires has declared war on the Cree, and the Iroquois are invading Acadia. The United Nations is falling apart: it’s civil war. It’s that Dragon Lantern. Moffett’s stirring up Manglespawn, and they’re stirring up Mangleborn. And you know what happens to people when Mangleborn get inside their heads.”

  Archie felt like everyone was trying very hard not to look at him right then.

  “We need UN forces in a dozen places right now,” General Lee said, “and I have to pull them all back here to Nowheresville in Powhatan territory to take on twenty-five thousand Manglespawn we probably can’t beat to begin with.”

  Twenty-five thousand Manglespawn? Archie’d had no idea. He’d wasted so much time, done so much moping. It was time to stop being Achilles sulking in his tent and take care of Moffett once and for all.

  “We’re here to help, sir,” Clyde said.

  “We need to take out Moffett first,” Archie said.

  “And what about the three wee Mangleborn she’s bringing with her? Or the twenty-five thousand Manglespawn?” Fergus asked.

  “If we don’t take her out, she could make forty thousand more Manglespawn, and raise half a dozen more Mangleborn.”

  “Archie’s got a point,” Hachi said. “Any other heads we cut off will just keep growing back unless we cut her head off first. So to speak.”

  “Cutting off her head sounds like a good plan to me,” Archie said, and they all gave him that look again.

  “I think I have a lot simpler idea,” said Clyde.

  26

  The Monster Army massed just beyond the Gettysburg plain, a snarling, writhing horde of grotesque shadows. Behind them, in a cloud of green mist, the League of Seven could see the vague shape of mountains moving behind them.

  Mangleborn.

  “He’s right. There’s three of ’em,” Clyde told the other Leaguers by shell. “Two big ones and one small one. And by small I mean Buster-sized.” He watched the great lumbering shapes through Buster’s magnified eyes, high above the line of nervous soldiers.

  “Crivens! Where’d they come from? How’d they get free?” Fergus asked. He waited with the rest of the Leaguers on the ground.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Hachi said. She activated the aggregator on the personal wave cannon she held.

  “She’s right,” Clyde said. “All that matters is we stop ’em.”

  One of the Mangleborn roared in the distance, a thundering sound like a drowning panther, and the line of UN soldiers started to back away. General Lee rode out into the empty plain on a steamhorse and wheeled to face his warriors.

  “Men! Women! Listen to me! Five score years ago, our elders brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all tribes are created equal,” Lee said. “Now we are engaged in a great war—a monster war—testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and dedicated, can long endure.” Tendrils of steam rose off Lee’s horse in the cool morning air. “The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here. But it will never forget what we do here. It is for us, the living, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work our elders so nobly advanced—that these United Nations shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the tribes, by the tribes, for the tribes, shall not perish from the earth!”

  The soldiers cheered. Chippewa, Mohawk, Shawnee, Choctaw, Yankees, Seminole, Cherokee, Muskogee, Illini, Algonquin, and more. They stood beside each other, with each other, ready to fight to preserve the Union, no matter what came howling over the ridge.

  “Warriors,” Lee bellowed. “Oscillators at the ready! Aggregate aether!”

  The massive line clicked and hummed as fifty thousand oscillators, pistols, and raycannons drew energy from the aether.

  Lee ro
de his steamhorse over to where the League stood. “You ready to do your part?”

  “We’ll take down Moffett,” Archie said.

  “And then we’ll handle those Mangleborn,” Hachi told him.

  “I sure as Hades hope you can. Good luck,” General Lee told them, then rode off to lead his troops.

  “You find her yet?” Hachi asked Clyde via shell.

  “Got her,” Clyde told them. “You ain’t gonna like it.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Right in the middle of all them Manglespawn.”

  “Can you hide me?” Archie asked Kitsune.

  “I think so,” she said. “But that’s a lot of brains to fool. And some of them aren’t very human anymore.”

  “I just need you to hide me long enough to get close.”

  “Lemme just shoot her,” Gonzalo said.

  Hachi shook her head. “We’ve talked about this. You get close enough to shoot her, she’s close enough to use that sonic scream of hers on you. Or worse, the Dragon Lantern. Hopefully Kitsune can keep Archie hidden until he’s on top of her. If she figures it out somehow, he’ll be all right. But you’d be dead. We all would be. There’s no sense sending in anybody but Archie.”

  “I can do it,” Archie said.

  “You just focus on what you need to focus on,” Hachi told him. “Don’t go thinking bad thoughts. And don’t listen to those Mangleborn.”

  Archie could already feel the giant monsters tugging at his consciousness. Probing his brain. They knew him. They knew he was here. The Jandal a Haad. And soon they would call to him.

  He couldn’t lose control. He wouldn’t. Not here. Not now. Not ever. He closed his eyes and whispered the beginning of Hachi’s mantra. Talisse Fixico, the potter. Chelokee Yoholo, father of Ficka. Hathlun Harjo, the surgeon. He had to be better. For them.

  “We better get to it,” Clyde told them. “It looks like she’s whipping them into a frenzy. Battle’s gonna start any minute now, and that’s a fact.”

  “We’ll be right behind you,” Hachi told Archie.

  “I won’t be long,” he promised them, and he walked off toward the Monster Army.