Tut--My Epic Battle to Save the World

by P. J. Hoover

  Tia kicked at the dust of the mirrors. “Auntie N is going to be furious about this. I need to go.”

  “Wait!” I said.

  She spun on me, fixing her eyes on mine. “What?”

  “That’s it? We fight a monster together, and you just up and run away?”

  Not that I was sure what to expect. But still.

  She shrugged. “Yeah. I guess that’s it.” Then she grinned at me and sauntered out of the funhouse.

  I could have gone after her, but I had bigger concerns. If Apep was after me because I was immortal, then Henry was in danger, too. Worry filled me. I couldn’t let Henry get hurt again. I ran back to the picnic table, my panic increasing with each step. But I had no clue why I’d ever been worried. Henry and Thoth were still deep in the game.

  “We need to go, Henry,” I said.

  Thoth put up a giant painted finger. “Not in the middle of a game. Do you realize how rude that would be?”

  “But it’s dangerous here,” I said, glancing back in the direction of the funhouse. And in as few words as I could, I told them what had happened.

  “After the game,” Thoth said.

  “But Henry—”

  “—is under my protection,” Thoth said. At this a ripple seemed to pulse through the air, passing over the three of us, almost like a spell from the Book of the Dead.

  Henry’s eyes got wide—he must’ve felt it, too—but a huge wave of relief flooded over me. If that was true, if Thoth had truly just vowed to protect Henry, the same way Horus protected me, then Henry would be safe, at least while Thoth was around.

  “Fine,” I said. “But after this game, Henry, meet me back at the townhouse. Please,” I added, because Thoth was, after all, a god, and the more gods I had on my side, the better.

  14

  WHERE WE GO GRAVE-ROBBING WITH A BABOON

  It was nine-thirty at night when Henry finally showed up.

  “What have you been doing for the last ten hours?” I said the second he walked through the door. The shabtis had been trying to burn me alive with incense all afternoon. It seemed like no matter what order I gave them, they kept finding a creative way around it in their ongoing effort to cleanse me of Gil’s heathen cooties.

  “I’ll give you one word,” Henry said, holding up a finger. “Losing. I hate Senet.”

  “Then don’t play,” I said.

  Henry shook his head. “You try saying no to Thoth. That guy has some weird power. Have you noticed?”

  “He’s a god,” I said.

  “And what about that protection thing?” Henry said.

  “It’s a pretty big deal,” I said. I’d been thinking about that, too. With Thoth protecting Henry, I wouldn’t have to worry so much about him. But why was Thoth taking such an interest? “Having a god protect you is pretty unusual.”

  Henry brushed funnel cake powder off his shirt. “It makes me feel indebted to him.”

  “That’s because you are,” I said. “What word did he give you?”

  Henry kind of cringed. “He said I shouldn’t tell you.”

  “Shouldn’t tell me? Why not?”

  “He said I would know when the time was right,” Henry said. “That I should tell you then.”

  The gods and their games.

  “Well, that’s great. Make sure you don’t forget, you know, just in case it’s important or anything,” I said. “Anyway, we need to go.”

  I felt the tug on my pants. “Great Master,” Colonel Cody began.

  I didn’t have time for the argument. “Fine. But just you and a couple other shabtis. Nothing is going to go wrong. I swear, if it does, I’m never leaving the townhouse again.” I didn’t understand why it was so hard for things to go as planned. I’d been all set to tell Horus about the funhouse and the mirrors and the reflection of the monster, but Horus was nowhere to be found. He was as bad as all the gods. That’s why I needed Gil back.

  Colonel Cody beamed and immediately snapped his fingers. Majors Rex and Mack lined up, arms crossed over their green chests.

  “Do I at least have time to go to the bathroom?” Henry said.

  I gritted my teeth. “Please just hurry.”

  * * *

  Horus had told me to meet Hapi across the bridge, near the airport. We hopped on the Metro since Henry kept complaining about how beat he was. He’d been sitting on his butt all day. I was the one who’d had a confrontation with the Lord of Chaos at the funhouse. If anyone should be tired, it was me. But my heart raced. Once I got the sun disk, I could use this immortal thing to my advantage and find a way to lure Apep to me. I’d make him tell me where Gil was. And then I’d save Gil, imprison Apep, and be done in time for dinner.

  We got off at the airport Metro stop and walked over to the bike trail. Hapi was already waiting, arms crossed and feet planted like he planned to wait the entire evening if necessary. Yes, he had a baboon head, but everything else about Hapi was normal, at least for someone who works in a funeral home. He wore a black shirt and black pants with a huge key ring attached to one of the belt loops by a chain.

  “Tut, what are you doing here?” he said, with about as much emotion as a wad of chewed-up gum.

  Had Horus seriously not told Hapi that we were coming instead of him? I was going to declaw Horus.

  “Your dad isn’t feeling so great,” I said. “He sent us instead.”

  “You’re late,” Hapi said. No emotion about Horus. No emotion about seeing us. I dreaded the moment when Hapi would bust at the seams from holding in every feeling that ever ran through that baboon brain of his.

  “It’s great to see you, too,” I said, flashing him what I hoped was an endearing smile. Sure, Hapi and I got along. Of Horus’s four sons, Hapi was the most trustworthy, the most responsible. If I had to pick one of them, he was definitely the one I’d want to go grave-robbing with.

  “It’s my fault,” Henry said, extending his hand for Hapi to shake.

  Hapi only looked at it and bared his teeth.

  When you considered what Hapi did all day, mucking around with dead people’s insides, Henry was better off not shaking his hand, anyway.

  “Okay,” Hapi said. And then he swung his leg over a bicycle. I hadn’t noticed before, but there were two more bikes lying on the ground next to him. Two. And it’s not like Horus would have ever been caught dead riding a bike. Hapi had been expecting us after all. What a liar.

  “Did you bring me a helmet?” Henry said. “I seriously never ride without a helmet.”

  “You might be immortal,” I said. “You probably don’t need a helmet.”

  “Might? Probably? That’s no reassurance,” Henry said. “People die without helmets.”

  I’d never had to worry about helmets in my life, but I could see Henry’s point. Getting hit on his bicycle was maybe not the best way to test for immortality.

  “We’ll stick to the path,” Hapi said.

  “Just don’t fall, okay?” I picked up one of the bikes and swung my leg over. Henry ran his hands through his messy blond hair and did the same. The three shabtis ran up my legs and perched on my shoulders.

  “Don’t forget the shovels,” Hapi said, pointing to a nearby tree. Two huge shovels leaned against the trunk.

  “How are we supposed to ride our bikes with those?” Henry said.

  “Just grab one, Henry,” I whispered under my breath. “Make it work.”

  For as little emotion as Hapi normally showed, as a baboon, he was really quick to get angry. I didn’t think he would hesitate to pull off Henry’s eyebrows, given the least excuse.

  Henry and I grabbed the shovels and laid them across the handlebars of the bikes. And then we proceeded to follow Hapi down the bike trail toward Old Town.

  “So where are we going?” I called ahead.

  “To a grave,” Hapi said.

  “Whose grave?”

  “Oh, I bet it’s George Washington’s,” Henry said from behind me. With the shovels, there was no way we could ride
side by side.

  “It’s not George Washington,” Hapi said. “He’s not in his tomb at Mount Vernon, anyway.”

  “What?” Henry said. “Of course he’s in his tomb. I’ve been there five times.”

  “And you’ve seen his body?” Hapi said.

  “Well, no,” Henry said.

  “That’s because he’s not in there,” Hapi said.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Hapi doesn’t make jokes,” I said. I couldn’t believe Henry hadn’t figured that out by now. “If he says that George Washington isn’t in his tomb, then George Washington isn’t in his tomb.”

  This, I think, was why Hapi liked me. I got his awkwardness in social situations. I got the way he didn’t know how to react. I understood when I’d ask him a question and he wouldn’t answer for ten minutes.

  “Okay, then it’s that Female Stranger,” Henry said. “No one knows who she was. That would be the perfect place for us to go.”

  I figured this game could go on forever. There were about a million graves within biking distance.

  “It’s not the Female Stranger,” Hapi said.

  Henry hesitated, then tried again. “Okay, then, it’s the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier of the American Revolution. Isn’t it? Almost no one knows about it.”

  “It’s not the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier of the American Revolution,” Hapi said.

  He might not have been getting annoyed with Henry’s guesses, but I didn’t want to hear any more of them. What I wanted to do was get on with finding the sun disk.

  “Please don’t guess again, Henry,” I said.

  He snapped his fingers. “But I have it this time.”

  “Are you two hungry? We could stop for clam chowder,” Hapi said.

  “I’m starving,” Henry said at the same time I said, “No.”

  Hapi smacked his lips together. “Maybe afterward.”

  He and Henry could go hang out together. I planned to get the sun disk securely back to my townhouse and then plot out exactly how I was going to get Gil back and save the world.

  “I hear you have some changes back at the funeral home,” I said, going for a subject change. “Nephthys is there. Auntie Isis is gone. And Tia is living with you guys?”

  “Tia makes good cookies,” Hapi said. “Buttercream pistachio. Chocolate drop. Mexican wedding cookies. And last week, we had this funeral service, and she made these peanut butter cookies that were better than ambrosia.”

  That was a pretty big compliment, coming from Hapi. I would have sworn a scrap of emotion slipped into his voice. A normal human would have been drooling.

  “Tia makes cookies?” I said. Of all the things I could imagine Tia doing in her spare time, donning an apron and using a hand mixer did not top the list.

  “She said she’s going to make a German chocolate cake next week,” Hapi said.

  It made me want cake really bad.

  “And everything is cool with her living there?” I said.

  “Sure,” Hapi said. “Except we all miss Granny. You remember how much Granny likes cookies.”

  I hadn’t remembered this small detail, but I filed it away in case it might come in handy in the future. If I ever needed a favor from Auntie Isis again, I’d make sure to show up with a plate of macaroons as a peace offering.

  “Wait. Auntie Isis isn’t there?” Henry said, and he sounded really worried. I couldn’t imagine why Henry would care one way or the other.

  “Nope.” Hapi looked up at the sky while he biked, like he didn’t even have to watch where he was going.

  “Where did she go?” I asked.

  “You’ll have to ask Auntie N,” Hapi said.

  I had no plans to visit the funeral home, Tia or not, so I figured I’d just ask Horus.

  “Who’s Auntie N?” Henry said.

  “Nephthys,” I said. “She’s a goddess just like Auntie Isis.”

  “She’s nothing like Granny,” Hapi said. A hint of agitation crept into his voice. I’d better be careful.

  “Right. But they’re sisters. And they both like mummification and dead people,” I said, because that at least kind of justified my remark. Truth was, I hardly knew Nephthys. I had creatively found ways to avoid her over the years. Sure, she was Anubis’s mom, and he wasn’t all that bad, but she was also married to Set, of all people. And hanging out with the wife of Horus’s sworn enemy was not how I chose to spend my immortality. It was one more very good reason not to go anywhere near the funeral home.

  “Lots of people like mummification and dead people,” Hapi said.

  I didn’t know what kind of people he hung out with, but I didn’t say a word.

  We got to Old Town, and Hapi slowed down. He wove his bike around people, but if anyone noticed his baboon head, they didn’t say anything. Nobody even looked his way.

  It was times like this that I was reminded just how powerful the gods were. For thousands of years, I’d lived my immortal life, pulling on my Osiris-given powers. I’d used the Book of the Dead a handful of times—not nearly enough. But the gods … they could do whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. If Hapi didn’t want hundreds of people to see that he had a baboon head, they wouldn’t. I’d gotten too used to Horus, who wandered around the townhouse hanging out on his scratching post and playing with catnip toys. Not that I thought Horus was weak. Horus was one of the most powerful gods in existence. He just rarely let his powers show.

  Henry and I, with our shovels—well, they just weren’t going to work. After two blocks we had to take them from the handlebars and hold them straight up and down. It probably looked pretty weird, riding our bikes while carrying shovels, like we were some kind of cycling Grim Reapers, but I knew I couldn’t count on the memory spells I’d relied on for so long. With my powers from Osiris acting so wonky, I couldn’t count on anything. How had Gil kept people from knowing who he was? It would have been really great to know. But no. Instead he had to leave and then go get himself kidnapped. It was so not helpful.

  We pedaled through Old Town, dodging cars and horse-drawn buggies and buses; Hapi even made us ride down a cobblestone road. Henry kept covering his head with one hand. He looked like he was going to have a fit every time a car went by. Maybe on the way back, I could find a makeshift helmet for him to wear.

  “It’s just on the other side of Old Town,” Hapi said, not bothering to turn and see if we were still following him. He kept looking up at the moon instead. It may have been my imagination, but I swear it looked dimmer than normal.

  We pedaled ten more blocks out of Old Town, but even then, we didn’t slow down. We biked past the marina and only stopped when we got to the marshy area beyond. Hapi hopped off his bike and leaned it against a huge tree that had fallen over, so I did the same.

  “Why are we here?” Henry asked. He stayed back, near the path, even while Hapi waded into the tall cattails and swamp grass.

  “Grave’s up ahead,” Hapi said.

  “I’ve looked at lots of maps. There aren’t any graves here,” Henry said. “The nearest cemetery is half a mile back.”

  “I never said it was in an official cemetery,” Hapi said, and a chill settled over the humid air around us. “And you aren’t going to find this place on any map.”

  I trailed after Hapi, the shabtis on my shoulders, because if Hapi said there was a grave up ahead, then there was a grave up ahead. But with each step I took, the chill pressed harder in the air around us, and small whispers filled the empty spaces. Fog lifted off the ground, masking our feet and legs.

  “Come on, Henry,” I said.

  He didn’t budge.

  “You shouldn’t stay back there alone,” I said. Thoth may be protecting Henry, but he wasn’t around now. Henry was way better off being near Hapi, no matter where he was going.

  Henry finally grumbled under his breath and then followed.

  The deeper we trudged into the swamp, the louder the ghostly whispers around us became. Hapi waved his long arms around
and mumbled words that sounded like spells.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I’m removing the protective spells,” Hapi said. “This whole place is covered with them.”

  This whole place was covered with something. Things kept brushing against my legs as we walked through the fog and the marshy water. Bugs bit at my skin … bugs I normally should have been able to push away with a single thought. I couldn’t remember ever having a mosquito bite, and now I probably had fifty.

  Henry reached out and snapped off a cattail. Hapi spun around and bared his teeth right in Henry’s face.

  “The dead don’t like being disturbed, Henry,” he hissed, dragging out Henry’s name. And if I were Henry I would have probably peed my pants because the entire world seemed to freeze around us in that moment.

  Henry let the cattail fall from his fingers. “The dead?” he managed to say.

  “They’re everywhere,” Hapi said.

  Henry looked down into the dark swamp water we walked through. “They are?”

  This thought didn’t make me the least bit happy either, but I kept my mouth shut.

  “This whole place,” Hapi said, looking from side to side. “It’s a huge graveyard.”

  Flashes of people fighting filled my mind. A war of godly proportion. And in the images, I saw Gil, standing at the front of the line, battling in a war of the gods. He was covered in blood and dirt, and his dark hair was matted against his head. Darkness filled the sky, pulsing with each moment of the battle. Gil swung two swords and evaded arrows and spears.

  “Gil was here,” I said, unable to believe my vision, but knowing it was true. “There was some kind of fight.”

  Hapi nodded his baboon head slowly. “Thousands of years ago, before you were ever born, Tut. The battle between the gods was fought all over the world, from one distant corner of the earth to the next. When they reached this place, the end was imminent. Gil fought bravely with us. He nearly died in this battle.”

  I gasped as the truth hit me. “It’s when Gil got his scarab heart.”

  Hapi nodded. “Gilgamesh fought his way to the front lines, past others who had already fallen. Apep was ready to destroy everything. The world was being cast into darkness. It had nearly reached the point where we wouldn’t be able to stop it. And Ra couldn’t get near Apep. But Gil crept up behind Apep and distracted him, giving Ra the chance he needed to imprison Apep. But just before Apep was trapped by the sun disk, he struck out with a mortal blow, stabbing Gil directly in the chest. Gil—”