The Big Game

by Sarah Jaune

  They moved through the trees on their side of the dam and saw absolutely nothing that would be of any use.

  “There are buildings on the other side,” Eli said as he pointed across the dam. “I think we have to risk crossing to see if we can find where they had the extra materials.”

  They didn’t find piles of leftover construction material. They didn’t see anything but perfectly manicured landscapes as they crossed over to the other side.

  What they hadn’t been able to see from the western bank was the gigantic hunting cabin that sprawled in the trees just twenty feet from the lake. It had three stories, made with finely hewn cedar that ran up the length of the house to steeply peaked roofs. The huge glass windows that all faced the lake looked like empty eyes on a mask. It was dark inside and appeared deserted, but the building still gave Eli the creeps.

  “I say we burn it down,” Ivy said fiercely. “I liked blowing up your dad’s boat.”

  “We can’t,” he sighed as he scrubbed at his chin and felt the stubble there scratch at the palm of his hand. “We might start a forest fire, and that would be devastating.”

  Ivy fumed for a good minute before saying, “How about I flood the whole place with mucky water?”

  Eli chuckled in appreciation. “Now that’s a plan.”

  CHAPTER 26

  HER FATHER’S HOUSE

  “Do you want to flood it first or deal with the dam?” Eli asked, even though he knew which he preferred. There were emotions in this that Eli wouldn’t ever be able to touch. It needed to be Ivy’s call.

  She chewed on her bottom lip as she studied the house. “Work first, then play. We might be caught.”

  He agreed with that assessment, even though it wasn’t nearly as satisfying as smashing the windows of the cabin and flooding it right now. “I’m going to see if I can find anything to smash the concrete.”

  Eli moved around the back of the house and found it just as well tended as the front. There was a screened in porch off the back that housed a grill and big tables and chairs. The construction from this place had clearly been cleaned up as nothing was out of place. Annoyed, but not completely surprised, he moved over to a wooden shed that had the same orange cedar as the house. It looked like a garage. It was a decent sized building, about the size of half a soccer field, with a garage door on the front, and a small door on the left side. He made for the small door and went to turn the handle, but his eyes fell instantly on the lock. Eli gave it an experimental tug and found that it was, indeed, locked. He had two options. There was a paperclip in his shoe that he could use to pick the lock, or he could break the door.

  He only used the paperclip now when he didn’t want anyone to know he’d been there, and at this moment, Eli really didn’t care. He gave a small yank and the wood around the locking mechanism splintered as the door swung open. He felt off to the side and found the switch, which he flipped. A light above flickered into life, and his mouth fell open in shock. He hadn’t looked at the depth of the building before, but it was impressive.

  There were several dirt bikes, a huge truck with monster tires, a decent sized yacht, a smaller fishing boat, a speed boat, a couple of four-wheeled bikes, and that was only what he could see from his vantage.

  “Did you find anything?” Ivy’s voice came in through the open door as she entered behind him. “Oh…”

  Eli turned slowly, trying to take it all in. “I have no words.”

  “I have a couple,” Ivy said through gritted teeth. “None of them are nice ones.”

  “We can steal those quads if we need to get away,” he told her as he pointed them out. “I’m going to search around and see if I can find something useful.”

  He found exactly what he needed in the back of the garage. There were about a dozen metal stakes that appeared to be for gardening.

  “Are these strong enough?” Ivy wondered as she tried to pick one up. “Daggers, this is heavy!”

  “It’s steel, so it’s plenty strong enough as long as I drive it in with enough force,” Eli confirmed as he picked up the bundle and plucked the one she was struggling to lift from her hands. He hauled them outside, then lifted them as a unit to carry over to the dam. He saw that there was about thirty feet of concrete which sloped down into the valley below. It wasn’t a huge lake, or a huge dam. He’d seen bigger, like the walls in New Orleans, but this felt like it grew taller every second that he stared at it.

  “How are you going to do this?” she asked quietly as she stood by his side just off to the side of the concrete wall.

  “Are there any aquifers nearby?” Eli asked her.

  Ivy closed her eyes and focused on the ground beneath them for a good five minutes before she said, “There is one about a mile downstream, but I don’t think it’s big enough to take the water.”

  “So we can’t send the water underground like we planned,” he sighed as he considered the hundreds of thousands of gallons before them.

  She shook her head and shrugged helplessly. “I don’t think there are any human populations close to here. We’re miles from the Eugene Township. I think it will just flow off into the ground. We’re going to lose animals, but some will sense it coming and run for it.”

  It wasn’t what he’d wanted to do, but Eli also knew that keeping the lake where it was would only encourage Ivy’s father. They wanted to send a strong, clear message that this sort of greed and stupidity would not be tolerated. Ivy’s father hadn’t earned any of what he had. He kept it through luck in birth and by magic.

  But even if he had earned enough on his own to build this lake, he didn’t have the right to steal the water from the rivers around him to do that.

  “How are you going to break the concrete?” Ivy wondered.

  “Hurricane force,” Eli said grimly as he focused on the center where a small spillway of water trickled down the edge of the dam, staining the gray of the wall until it was almost slate in color. There was a large water stain that told the story of the hundreds of gallons that used to spill over the dam, but that was before Ivy had rerouted the rivers. Now it was close to nothing. “It’s been here long enough that there is moss growing along it.”

  “I saw that,” Ivy said as she sat on a rock nearby and dropped her head in her hands. “Get to it.”

  He wanted to say something to make her feel better, but there wasn’t anything to say. The whole situation was too ridiculous as it was. Instead, Eli focused all of his anger, his energy, and his magic into the first steel rod, and shot it as fast as a bullet straight into the dam. It slid in like a knife through warm butter, and Eli knew that it made it all the way through.

  He grinned. It hadn’t even taken much energy. He let the second one fly and aimed for a spot right above the first hole, then the third, then the fourth. Each one he lined up so that they ran in a straight line up the dam. It took five at six foot intervals to make it all the way up, and by the time they were done, a few of the first holes were beginning to leak water.

  “Can you make those worse,” he asked Ivy as he pointed down.

  She waved her fingers and water began to pour through all five of the holes. “Keep going. It’s not weak enough yet.”

  Eli sent the next five just a few feet from the first holes, and Ivy kept working at them with the water. He only had two left and the dam was still stable. “I’m out of ideas,” he admitted grimly.

  “Through the middle,” Ivy told him. “Drive them down the middle of the holes you made from the top of the dam.”

  He chuckled appreciatively. “That is brilliant.”

  “If we were in any other situation, you and I would be destructive criminals,” she said pensively. “But in this case, I feel no guilt at all. My father ruined an entire ecosystem so he could have a private vacation home to fish from because that just screams good management to me.”

  Eli knew that feeling exactly. He maneuvered the last two steel rods into the air and floated them over to the middle of the dam, across where
a truck could drive. He lined them up, pulled in a calming breath and thought about Ivy’s devastation at the thought of her father being here when he wouldn’t even know who she was, and let them drop. He pushed with all of his might, forcing the steel straight down through the concrete until he felt them hit the dirt below the dam. Eli dropped his hands and waited.

  For a long moment when not even the birds’ songs could penetrate his ears, nothing happened, then a crack spread from one of the center holes, then another, then a third. Eli backed away from the edge and took Ivy’s arm, hauling her back with him.

  They watched in relief as the dam began to crumble.

  “I get to flood my dad’s house, now,” Ivy reminded him. “I want to do that before all the water goes.”

  They did just that. Eli threw a couple of rocks and broke several of the upper windows while Ivy shot water up through the broken panes. It appeared as though she took only the bottom sludge of the lake, leaving the clear water on top.

  “That is talent,” Eli laughed as he watched in awe while the house began to fill, and water spewed out the bottom crack of the door. “That’s way better than being able to run fast.”

  The ground shook beneath them and Eli spun just in time to see the dam crumble with a huge thunder of crashing water and cracking stone.

  If anyone was below the dam, they were in big trouble. Fear grabbed at Eli until he didn’t know how to breathe through it. He felt something brush his hand and looked down to see Ivy’s fingers grasping his. “I know,” she said sadly over the roar of the draining water. “I’m scared, too. I think it will be okay. Most of this forest is the Overseer’s private land, so there shouldn’t be people.”

  They watched it drain out, picking up speed as the water ripped away more and more of the concrete in its mad bid for freedom. He saw a couple of fish in the mix and knew that they likely wouldn’t survive. “This just sucks all around.”

  Ivy leaned her head against his shoulder and nodded. “We need to start heading back to the meeting spot or we’ll be late.”

  “Agreed,” Eli said as he turned back to survey the house and saw the windows, the ones on the lower level of the cabin that were still intact, covered in muck. He grinned. “Oh yeah, that’s perfect, Ivy.”

  They moved through the woods out from the lake a good half a mile before heading north. There weren’t a lot of roads, just one that they found that had led to the cabin from behind the garage, but it went southwest from the lake, anyway. It was difficult trampling through the thicker woods, but they didn’t see any people, either.

  They saw signs of people, though. They found cleared lumber, paths that appeared to be trampled by the dirt bikes, and trash strewn all over the place.

  “This is fantastic,” Ivy grumbled as she picked up a wrapper and stuffed it in her pocket.

  “We’re never going to get all of this cleared,” Eli said in disgust.

  “This one will burn,” she explained as the patted her pocket. “I can get rid of it tonight when we have a fire.”

  They continued on for almost two hours before they finally made it back to the meeting point. With relief, Eli saw everyone waiting for them at the edge of what used to be the huge lake.

  “We saw you were successful,” Pablo grinned at Ivy. “We heard it start to go, and it was spectacular to watch. I couldn’t believe how fast it drained.”

  “We were lucky,” Ivy said. “Eli was the one who broke the dam, though. I just helped a bit. It was a full concrete dam that I wouldn’t have been able to destroy alone.”

  Pak grunted and gave her a grin before pointing to the rivers.

  “He’s right,” Eli said to Ivy. “Without you, the water would just continue to flow through this lake. So what did you do?”

  “Not much,” Pablo admitted. “We tracked the men down, but they’re holed up in a fortified cabin. We scouted it out and decided to wait until you two were back before we made a move. If things go wrong—”

  “Which is likely,” Oliver interjected as he strolled over to them.

  “Which is likely,” his dad agreed evenly, “then we didn’t want to be split up. We’re going to eat first, then wait for full dark. At that point, we’ll go in.”

  “So you haven’t missed the fun part,” Oliver informed Eli earnestly.

  Eli quirked an eyebrow at that. “Are you planning to offer me up as a sacrifice or something?”

  Oliver grinned and changed the subject. “We caught some fish before the lake was drained, so eat up.”

  They ate quickly and cleared away the fire ring before they set out. It was staggering to watch how well the Sasquatch hid the evidence of their presence when they put their minds to it. Eli wouldn’t have known that anyone had even stood there, at the edge of the diminished lake, let alone that several adult Bigfoot had sat down to eat.

  “The men were in one of the cabins along the lake front before the water went out,” Pablo explained as they made their way along the old shoreline. “When the water started to drain out, which came with a massive explosion, we watched them take off for the dam.”

  “They also have people out trying to see what’s up with the rivers,” Oliver told them. “We heard them talking about it.”

  “How many men does he have stationed out here?” Ivy questioned quickly. “Why would he have so many out here? That seems like a stupid thing. It’s just a house.”

  Eli snorted. “Technically, it’s a mud pit, Ivy.”

  From the little light they had from the moon above, he could see her eyes flash in amusement. “Okay, so security might have been a good idea.”

  “What are you two talking about?” Pablo demanded quickly.

  “I flooded his big, fancy house with the gross lake water,” Ivy told him bluntly. “I’m not even sorry I did it.”

  Pablo stopped and stared at her in surprise. “You did what?”

  “It was that or burn it down,” Eli interjected quickly. “We decided not to cause a forest fire.”

  “Your father isn’t going to be the one who has to clean it up,” Pablo pointed out evenly.

  Eli’s heart fell as he realized that his dad was right. Ivy’s dad would simply make someone else clean all of the mud out of every nook and cranny. “Oh.”

  Ivy shut her eyes and bit hard on her lip. After a moment, she said, “You’re right. That was thoughtless of me.”

  “I get why you did it,” Pablo said as his voice gentled, “but ultimately someone else may pay for your actions. You have to always be looking two steps ahead to see what’s down the road.”

  “I think he’ll abandon it,” Oliver put in. They all glanced over at him as his round face split into a smile. “I mean, the lake is gone. What’s the point in a damaged house near a stinking, old lake?”

  For the first time, in a long time, Eli didn’t feel like punching his brother. It was oddly unsettling.

  CHAPTER 27

  UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCE

  “It’s over and done with,” Pablo said with finality. “You didn’t mean to cause harm to others, and I think Oliver might be right in thinking that he will give up on this place.”

  Pak grunted, then pointed to one of the other Sasquatch. He was one of the younger adult males that waited at the edge of the group.

  “Right,” Pablo nodded to the young male. “Yung has offered to take the lead on the raid of the cabin. He is the only one among the Sasquatch who has no younglings.”

  “There’s no need,” Eli protested immediately. “I can—”

  Pablo held up a hand. “Do not dishonor his offer, Eli. This is their home, their forest, and their families. They may need our help, but this is still their fight. Pak is in charge, and it is his call.”

  Eli tried not to let his feeling show. He felt about two feet tall at that moment. His dad was right, of course, but that didn’t make him feel any better about it. “Sorry,” he muttered as he shoved his hands into his pockets. “Lead on.”

  They reached the cabi
n, which somehow he and Ivy had missed when they passed it earlier in the day, not long after that. Only a single light shone inside, and if he squinted, Eli could make out at least one person pacing in the cramped one room cabin. They crouched near some bushes close to the muddy edge of the lake.

  “We need to scare them away, hopefully enough so that they don’t come back, and do all of this without being seen,” Pablo said.

  Something cold touched Eli’s cheek, and he turned to see Ivy’s filthy fingers coming towards his head. He fell back onto his butt with a grunt of surprise. “Hold still,” she ordered as she smeared mud all over his forehead. She reloaded and went after his cheeks and nose. Ivy cocked her head to the side, considering him. “That will do. You’re not recognizable, now. My turn.”