Darwen Arkwright and the Insidious Bleck

by A. J. Hartley

  “Oh,” said Alex, who was stretching one hand back into the shimmering curtain of light. “You thought I came by myself? You really have to stop underestimating us.”

  Scarlett reached into her dainty purse and came up with a pistol, small but quite lethal. She raised it to shoot, and something hurtled past Darwen’s head, hit Scarlett hard in the face, and sent her sprawling. At first Darwen thought it was one of the stone spheres, but then it bounced. Darwen had known that sound all his life.

  A soccer ball.

  He turned, and there were Felippe, Sarita, and Calida’s mother. Last of all came Mr. Peregrine.

  Darwen stared at the teacher, almost overwhelmed by a relief so sharp it brought tears to his eyes. Mr. Peregrine met his eyes and nodded once, smiling. Darwen nodded back, then he pointed at the generator and shouted, “Get them out of there!”

  Scarlett was getting to her feet, but her unintended header had left her face warped and torn, and as she tried to adjust it, it ripped further. With a shout of frustration, she opened her mouth wide, and the great eel creature spilled slickly out, leaving the Scarlett suit crumpled on the ground.

  “Do you have any idea how hard it is to grow those things?” she spit, turning on Darwen. Her voice was slightly slurred, as if her eel lips and tongue couldn’t form the words properly, but the hard eyes were still Scarlett’s. “You will pay for it with your sorry, pathetic little lives. Scrobblers!” she roared. “Once and for all. Wipe. Them. Out.”

  Darwen looked around. The scrobblers, which had scattered during the attack of the Bleck, were regrouping and checking their weapons. Two of the hulking toad things were hopping slowly forward, their immense mouths gaping. To Darwen’s right, Mrs. Delgado was pulling the dazed and pale children from the wreckage of the generator. Rich and Chip were there, and Gabriel was unsteadily carrying the boy who Darwen had seen taken by the Bleck all those weeks ago: Luis. Gabriel was gazing into the boy’s still face, his own face tear-streaked, and suddenly Darwen understood.

  They were brothers.

  That story Alex had told him about how Luis had a brother named Eduardo who had searched for him until he had collapsed of exhaustion was about Gabriel all along! But he hadn’t been abducted by the Bleck. Somehow he had met Jorge, and the Guardians had put him to work.

  But even as the truth registered, Darwen realized just how desperate their predicament was. There was just nowhere to go, and the scrobblers seemed to be everywhere. As Darwen glanced frantically about, the massive helmeted creatures began calmly sighting their weapons on the humans. They were all going to die.

  “Get down!” Darwen yelled, running toward them.

  They turned as if in a dream, looking for cover just as the first shots came. One of the toads flicked its tongue at them, and Darwen was horrified to see the thing extend at least twenty feet. It struck the side of the generator, slamming the metal pod with a surge of energy, and stuck there. In that moment a new threat presented itself: the toads could direct the power from their backpacks through their bodies.

  The children and their would-be rescuers cowered behind the shattered generator as the scrobblers poured shot after deafening shot at them, and the machinery around crackled and exploded. Darwen hunkered down, scanning the anxious faces around him. Rich was rubbing his face as if trying to wake himself up, but there was no sign of Alex.

  “What is going on?” said Chip, disoriented. All of his usual cockiness was gone, and he looked young and frightened. “Who are those men with the . . . faces?”

  “I’ll tell you later,” said Darwen. “Just keep your head down.”

  It didn’t seem like they—the humans—had any choices, and the scrobblers knew it. While one or two fired occasionally to keep them pinned down, the others were coming closer, some of them switching to wrenches and crowbars as they approached.

  Rich was clenching and unclenching his fists as he tried to shake off the drowsiness of the generator. “If we can get over there,” he said, “we might make it to the portal.”

  “Where?” said Mr. Peregrine, moving in the direction Rich had indicated.

  “There!” shouted Rich. “I think I can make it. Get out of the way, and I’ll draw their fire.”

  But before either of them could move, the boy Darwen was used to calling Gabriel stepped forward. He had something in his hand, a water bottle without a cap, and as Rich gaped, Gabriel jerked it in Mr. Peregrine’s direction, splashing the teacher across the face.

  “That wasn’t very nice,” said Mr. Peregrine in an odd voice, his bandaged hand to his cheek.

  “Get out of the way,” Rich began, but then Mr. Peregrine took his hand away from his face, and everyone stared. Where the water had hit him, his skin was falling away, dissolving, and beneath it all was black and shiny.

  “Well, now,” said Mr. Peregrine, with a strange, lopsided smile that seemed to split his face. “It seems the cat is out of the bag.”

  He pulled the bandage from his hand, and two of the fingers came with it, the flesh melting where it had gotten wet. The long, bloodless cut across his palm looked pale and greenish now, and the wound was wriggling with maggots that scattered and fell as something long and black poked through. The rod-like limb was slick and ended in a cruel hooked claw, which sliced the wound wide from the inside. First the hand, then the whole arm peeled back, the insides pale, sickly, and glistening like meat left out of the fridge.

  “No!” gasped Rich.

  “Mr. Peregrine” twisted sideways, using his good hand to grasp the splitting flesh, which now reached his shoulder. He tore it back, peeling his chest open so that the thing inside could clamber out in a thicket of shiny black limbs. As the insect form stepped out of the ruined flesh suit, it shook its head, and what was left of Mr. Peregrine slipped to the ground. In its place were composite eyes and a black and gaping insect mouth.

  Darwen stared at the old man’s deflated body on the ground, and for a moment he could not breathe. It wasn’t horror. It was despair. Tears sprang to his eyes and all strength drained from him so that he swayed as if about to collapse.

  Not Mr. Peregrine. Not Mr. Peregrine.

  But even in his shock and misery, Darwen forced himself to look into the monstrous insect eyes, and he knew them.

  Mr. Jenkins.

  “Remember me?” said the insect in a harsh, brittle voice that stretched its dripping mouthparts. “I have looked forward to this.”

  And as Rich shrieked, the insect creature sprang at Darwen.

  The others screamed, spilling out into the open as they fought to get away from the creature, out to where the scrobblers were waiting.

  Darwen kicked and punched, but the Jenkins creature was too strong for him. It slammed him to the ground, its weight on his chest and its awful face inches from his throat. Its mouthparts moved, and its maw clicked open and closed in excitement.

  Then it shuddered and rolled off, dislodged by a firm kick to its head. Rich. Darwen scrabbled to his feet. He staggered back and into something hard: one of the tank bulldozers.

  There was a ladder fitted to one side. Darwen swung himself up and started throwing switches and pulling levers. A scrobbler fired at him, but the shot ricocheted off the armored plate just as the engine came roaring to life. If he could buy the others a minute, less, they might get out. He shoved another lever, and the great tracked juggernaut lurched forward.

  The scrobblers scattered again. There was no steering wheel on the machine, just a pair of levers. Darwen pushed hard on the left one, and the bulldozer slewed to the side, crates exploding into splinters under its massive tracks. Scarlett was shouting and pointing, but even as Darwen shrank low in his seat to avoid another flashing energy shot, he saw his target. The hideous, lurching clown loomed over him, its face set, its mouth moving in commands he couldn’t hear over the bellow of the engine. D
arwen slammed both levers, and the bulldozer surged forward.

  The clown turned to him at the last moment, its smooth amusement replaced with a deep, malicious hatred. It screamed once, and then the great plow of the bulldozer crashed through the glass case and into its body. Its head kicked backward, its body buckled and fell beneath the machine’s deadly treads, and it was ground to powder.

  Darwen saw the moment Greyling left. One minute the clown’s eyes were alive and full of wrath, the next they were just painted glass again. The leader of the New Council was gone.

  Darwen grabbed the levers to send the bulldozer toward the nearest group of scrobblers, turning to find the Jenkins insect on top of the bulldozer and poised to strike. He tried to dodge, but the insect claw caught him on the shoulder, and as he slumped backward, his shirt snagged on one of the levers. The machine leaped suddenly to the left and then locked itself in a slow, dizzying spin. A toad tongue shot through the air. Darwen leaned back as it missed his head by inches, but he felt the surge of electricity as it struck the bulldozer. The engine died in a puff of black smoke. Then he was being lifted bodily by those long, impossibly strong insect legs, and Mr. Jenkins dropped him heavily to the warehouse floor.

  Wordlessly the scrobbler troops corralled the captives, the children shrinking from the blank stare of the bloated toads. Darwen looked hopelessly up. There was no way out.

  The Scarlett eel glared at the shattered remains of the clown.

  “You haven’t killed him,” she hissed, pivoting on her tail and gaping at him between words so that her pointed teeth showed like rows of knives. “But you will be punished anyway.”

  “What are you going to do?” snapped Darwen with all the defiance he could muster. “Kill me?”

  “Of course,” she said. “Last.”

  Darwen looked wildly around. His eyes found Rich, but he still couldn’t see Alex. She must have been hit.

  Well, he thought. At least she was spared this.

  A strange silence had descended on the warehouse. Distantly there were the snaps and fizzes of broken machinery, but no one spoke, and even Mrs. Delgado’s tears were silent. The scrobblers raised their weapons, gazing blankly through their masks, but even they did not bellow or snarl. Everyone knew. This would be an execution, not a battle.

  One more moment of stillness and then . . . an electronic hiss from the portal.

  There was Alex, standing half in, half out, silhouetted in the flickering light, holding the gateway open for . . . whom?

  Not whom—what.

  Darwen caught the movement, which was quick, stealthy, and animal.

  No, he thought. It couldn’t be.

  Scarlett turned, puzzled, and for a second the scrobblers just stood there.

  And then in a blur of fur and claws, they came: the pouncels from the jungle locus, led by one that was slightly smaller than the others and that moved with a limp. They streaked in, and the scrobblers fell back, firing, shrieking, and bellowing as the pouncels flew at them. One of the toads shot out its tongue and caught a pouncel, zapping it lifeless before it pulled it into its sickening mouth.

  But then something like a rocket struck the toad, and it went down in a blaze of light and smoke.

  Someone had come with the pouncels, and he was shooting back. It was Weazen—he was alive!—and he was picking off the enemy like a tiny otter-sized sharpshooter, blasting openings for the boiling mass of pouncels, which dragged the scrobblers and gnashers down in a wild, animal frenzy.

  The thing that had been Scarlett Oppertune snapped its jaws, throwing the pouncels off, but there were too many of them, and they were too fast. Her hard little eyes found Darwen. She reached toward him, imploring, desperate, and without thinking he took a step toward her, extending his hand. She snatched at it, caught his fingers in her teeth, and held on, even as the pouncels pulled her backward. She didn’t bite down, just gripped like she was holding on to a lifeline. Darwen felt Rich grab his free arm so that he wouldn’t be sucked into the pouncels’ snapping fury and saw realization flash through Scarlett’s animal face: for her, it was over.

  Her jaws relaxed a little, and Darwen felt her slipping away, but then her grip tightened again, her bright eyes snapped wide open, and, with her last ounce of strength, she pulled herself close enough to whisper into his face, releasing his hand as she spoke. “If you ever find him, ask him how he knew your name.”

  And then she was yanked backward, and the pouncels fell on her.

  For a second Darwen stood where he was, stunned, dimly aware that Rich was dragging him back and away. Weazen sent a barrage of covering fire over their heads, and Darwen shrank back, Scarlett’s words rolling around in his head.

  Alex had stayed where she was, and Darwen, barely daring to glance back to the fight, led the children with Mrs. Delgado back to the portal and out. He paused only to see the Jenkins insect that had been chasing them being sucked backward into the surging throng of pouncels, where it fell, shrieking, and vanished.

  Darwen hesitated, his eyes flashing around the great chamber, searching.

  “Time to go, Darwen Arkwright,” said Weazen, who appeared next to him, his blaster at the ready. “He’s not here.”

  “I can’t leave him!” said Darwen. Tears suddenly burned hot in his eyes, and he shouted at the top of his lungs, “Mr. Peregrine! Mr. Peregrine, where are you?”

  He took a step into the warehouse, but Weazen caught his arm with one tiny but powerful claw. “It’s not safe—the whole place is going to go up,” he said, pulling at Darwen so he had to stoop to look the little creature in his pale masked face. “He’s not here.”

  Darwen’s eyes fell on a painted hand—the last shattered remnant of the laughing clown—and then, as one of the pieces of equipment wired to the generator exploded with a burst of orange flame, he let Weazen pull him back toward the portal and out into his own world.

  “How much does Chip remember?” asked Alex as she watched Rich and Darwen pack.

  “Don’t know,” said Rich. “He’s not talking—not to me, anyway. Looks kind of spooked.”

  “Like he’s a butterfly that got hit with a book?” asked Alex.

  “Kind of,” said Rich.

  “Good,” said Alex. “Do you know how he ended up there in the first place?”

  “The thing that called itself Mr. Peregrine took him,” said Rich. “Whittley must have seen some stuff, but he was pretty out of it. We all were. In the generator you sort of lose track of who you are. I wouldn’t be surprised if Chip’s a bit hazy on what actually happened.”

  “Probably good,” said Alex. “Though no one is going to be hazy about us going home without Mr. P.”

  There was a long silence.

  Alex began, “You think he’s—”

  “No,” Darwen cut in. “Scarlett—Miss Murray—said something about talking to him if I found him. I don’t know how those flesh suit things work, but I don’t think they are the bodies of the people they look like.”

  “So you think they’re, like, cloned from living tissue or something?” Rich asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Darwen.

  “Like they keep the real person alive and grow the suit—or whatever it is—from the person?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You think that’s why the fake Mr. P smelled weird and didn’t want to get wet?”

  “Rich,” said Darwen, giving him a hard look, “I really don’t know.”

  “Rich is right, more or less,” said a voice. They turned to find Jorge watching them cautiously.

  “You,” said Alex.

  “Darwen,” said Jorge, ignoring her tone. “Rich. Alex. I’ve come to say thank you. What you did last night was extremely . . . brave and, er, courageous.”

  Darwen nodded, but he didn’t speak.


  “The Guardian Council wishes to honor you,” Jorge began, but Darwen cut him off.

  “The Guardians told me to stay out of it,” he said. “I acted against their orders.”

  “That’s true,” said Jorge, looking uncomfortable, “but given the outcome—your success—they are prepared to overlook the nature of your behaviors.”

  “Is that right?” said Darwen quietly, smiling.

  “How nice of them,” said Alex, whose face was stern.

  “This honor,” said Rich, “not some kind of cash prize, is it?”

  Before Jorge could respond, Darwen spoke. “I won’t be taking any of their honors,” he said. “In fact, I don’t think that the Guardian Council and I are going to be on speaking terms from now on.”

  Jorge’s face clouded. “What do you mean? You are their mirroculist. You work on their instructions.”

  “Yeah?” said Darwen. “I’m not sure I like the kind of instructions I’ve been getting. I was told that the Guardians wanted to make a deal with Greyling. I was told to abandon the people who live here, the rainforest itself, even my friends. Now, I don’t always know what the right thing to do is, but I know that some things are worth fighting for, and I never abandon my friends. So unless there’s something else you have to say, you can be on your way.”

  For a moment it looked like Jorge was going to argue, but then he nodded simply, his face set. He half turned to leave, but stopped himself. “We think Mr. Peregrine is still alive,” he said. “He seems to have been taken by Greyling two months ago in preparation for . . . everything. He knows a great deal that the enemy might find useful. Rescuing him is a priority for the Guardians. Whether you choose to work with the council on this is, of course, your decision.”

  He walked away, and the three students watched him go.

  “He sent me the oven door,” said Darwen.

  “Mr. Peregrine?” said Alex.

  “The real Mr. Peregrine,” said Darwen, “not the Jenkins thing. It may have been the last thing he did before they took him. We have to get him back.”