“That would work,” Hacker said excitedly.
“There’s just one problem. Actually, there are a million problems with this harebrained idea, but there’s one fundamental problem.”
Hacker frowned. “What’s that?”
“I’ve never ridden a motorcycle. I have absolutely no idea how.”
Hacker brightened.
“Is that all? I’ll teach you. It’s easy. It’s like riding a bicycle.” She paused, tapping her cheek again. “Only mechanized. And faster. And harder to control. And much more dangerous. And worse for the environment.” Her brow furrowed again. “It’s nothing like riding a bike actually. I take it all back.”
“You’re not exactly inspiring me with confidence.”
“We’re getting ahead of ourselves anyway. Maybe the motorcycle doesn’t even work. Maybe the distance from our side of the chasm to where the energy field sits is too far to cross. We need to collect some data and then reassess. The first thing we should do is figure out how far it is from here to the other side of the chasm. Whether we use the motorcycle or build a glider or do something else, we’ll need to know that information.”
“Makes sense,” I admitted. Talking about the width of the chasm was better for my blood pressure than talking about me trying to jump a motorcycle across it. “How do you propose we calculate the distance?”
“I told you I saw some surveying tools.” Hacker went across the building to rummage around in a large box on the floor. She held up a small boxy object triumphantly. It looked like binoculars, only skewed, as if it had been built by someone who had heard of binoculars, but had never seen them before. Hammer rummaged around some more and pulled out a waist-high tripod whose colors matched that of the boxy object.
“What’s that stuff? I asked.
“Well this is a tripod,” she said without a trace of sarcasm, gesturing at it. I wanted to throw my water bottle at her. She then held up the boxy object. It had three lenses on the front of it: a big one in the middle, and two much smaller ones on either side of the big one. “And this is a laser rangefinder. It shoots a laser out. The laser will bounce off of something and then back at the rangefinder. Since the device knows the speed the laser travels—namely at the speed of light—the device uses that number along with the time it took the laser to bounce back to calculate how far away the object the laser bounced off is. We’ll use it to determine the distance across the chasm.”
“Pretty cool.”
“Now aren’t you glad the part of my brain that knows how to use this equipment wasn’t instead filled up with information about the Spiderman?”
“It’s just Spider-Man, not The Spiderman,” I said immediately, but Hacker had quickly covered her ears. She cautiously uncovered them once my lips stopped moving.
“Weren’t you even listening? You’re liable to shove out of my head with the Spiderman nonsense something that’s actually useful. The human brain is a computer. It only has so much space on its hard drive. I don’t want you overwriting something important.”
She said all that with a perfectly straight face. I was pretty sure she was serious. Hacker was odd. I was starting to wonder if she was somewhere on the autism spectrum.
I grabbed the tripod and followed Hacker out of the building. She had the rangefinder. I took my bottle of water with me. I hadn’t suffered any ill effects yet from drinking it, so I planned to drink more soon.
We trooped back over to the chasm. Overlord still floated overhead. The countdown shining below its node read less than five minutes remaining. Remaining until what, though? Surely the Guild didn’t expect we could figure a way over the canyon in this short of a time.
I took a long look at the canyon with the idea of me jumping a motorcycle across it in mind. It looked even bigger than I remembered.
And I was going to try to jump over half of it? On a motorcycle? As a motorcycle novice? With no superpowers and no parachute?
“Oh, hell no!” Too late I realized I had said it aloud.
“What?” Hacker asked, puzzled.
“Just thinking out loud,” I said, embarrassed.
At Hacker’s direction, I put the tripod down at the edge of the chasm. I was happy when I backed away from the edge again. Hacker mounted the rangefinder on top of the tripod. She stood behind it, making adjustments to it. Then she peered through it, pointing it down at the wall on the other side of the chasm. Soon, she turned to me. Her face was lit up with excitement.
“It’s only two hundred and twenty point three feet wide,” she said breathlessly. “You only have to jump half that length. Knievel jumped over fourteen buses back in the seventies, clearing a hundred and thirty-three feet. And he had to stick the landing. You can do one hundred and ten feet easily, especially because you don’t have to worry about the landing. You just have to get past the energy field.”
“Oh sure. It’ll be easy.” I felt a little sick to my stomach. I realized I had hoped in my heart the canyon was way too wide for us to continue to play around with this crazy plan. “A walk in the park. I’ll just go from never having been on a cycle before to flying through the air on it for over a hundred feet. Simple. You sure I can’t travel three hundred feet instead? A mere one hundred sounds like too much of a piece of cake.”
Hacker ignored my sarcasm as if she hadn’t heard it. Her eyes shone with enthusiasm.
“First we’ll have to make sure the bike is working. If it is, I’ll give you a crash course in riding. I already checked and saw it has an almost full tank of gas, so that’s not a concern.” I really wished she had used words other than “crash course.” “We’ll need to build a ramp, of course, so you can get the proper elevation to travel the hundred and ten feet. We’ve got plenty of wood and tools for that. We’ll have to do some calculations to figure out the speed you’ll need to hit and the right angle for the ramp. But that’s just simple math a monkey could do.”
Maybe I was becoming as crazy as she was, but the more she broke down the steps we needed to take, the more the plan started to sound feasible. Maybe we could do it. Besides, as long as that glowing timer counting down wasn’t the time we had to complete the test, we had all the time in the world to practice and figure out how to pull this off. After all, there was plenty of food and water in the building.
I found myself grinning. Hacker’s enthusiasm was infectious. That, or the heat was beginning to addle my brain.
“It’s a good thing there aren’t sharks down there,” I said, pointing at the canyon.
“Huh?”
My grin got wider. “I’d hate to jump the shark.”
“What?” Hacker looked at me like I had sprouted a second head that was talking about Spider-Man again and the amazing friends he had. “There’s no indication there’s water down there. Even if there was water, there’s also no evidence this planet developed life at all, much less life like sharks.”
After the Spider-Man debacle, I wasn’t about to try to explain a Happy Days episode to her. “Forget it. I was just making a dumb joke.”
“A very dumb one,” she agreed solemnly.
Hacker must have been really fun at parties.
Hacker nudged me and pointed up. The timer was winding down and was almost at zero. We watched it with apprehension. I knew we both hoped we hadn’t flunked this test because we hadn’t figured out a way to cross the canyon fast enough.
The timer hit “00:00:00.” The digits, once green, now turned red.
Other than that, exactly nothing happened.
No, that’s not quite right.
At first, I thought it was my imagination.
Then I realized it wasn’t.
The sky was darkening. Not all at once, but like a camera shutter closing in slow motion. Darkness was spreading slowly from all around the edges of the horizon. It was as if someone had spilled a bottle of ink around the edges of a huge funnel in the sky and the ink was slowly trickling inward toward the center.
As the sky got darker, I sta
rted to hear a weird noise. It grew louder and louder. It was like someone had made a recording of thousands of chirping cicadas and was slowly turning up the volume of it. The sound gave me goosebumps and made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.
As that cicada-like noise increased in volume, there were slight whizzing sounds in the air. At first it was just one or two. Then the number of the whizzing sounds increased as the darkness closed in more above us. The new sound was like bullets zooming past us. Unfortunately, thanks to my time as the Old Man’s Apprentice, the sound of whizzing bullets was one I was all too familiar with. I suppressed the urge to duck. I had no idea what I would be ducking from.
Hacker and I looked at each other, not knowing what the heck was going on or what to do about it.
Suddenly, the water bottle in my hand jerked. I felt the pants of my costume getting wet.
I looked down to see a stream of water coming out of a hole on the side of my partially full bottle. Confused by how that had happened, I lifted the bottle to eye level to look at it.
There was now something in the water bottle. It was wormlike, and about the size of my pinkie. It was shiny black with gruesome orange stripes. One end of it glistened red, pink, and white, like a fresh open sore. The other end of it tapered into what appear to be a tail.
The thing swam in a frenzy around in the water, around and around the perimeter of the bottle. For some reason, I got the impression the water confused it, as if it wasn’t used to it. The creature made a slight sound as it swam, like the cicada sound now coming from all around us, but in miniature.
The rest of the water had drained out of the bottle now. The creature glistened at the bottom, coiled up like a tiny snake. Then it suddenly straightened out like a snapping whip. The red, pink, and white part was now pointed straight at my probing eye.
I don’t know exactly what made me jerk my head out of the way. But, some survival instinct made me do just that. My hand holding the bottle jerked to one side; my head jerked to the other. A split moment later, the creature burst out of the bottle like a bat out of hell, right over my shoulder. It sounded like a bullet whizzing past my ear.
My heart thudded in my chest at the near miss. I looked at the now empty plastic bottle. There were now two holes in it: one high on it, the other near the bottom. The holes were perfectly round and about the size of my pinkie.
Just like the holes all around us in the rocks.
Overlord’s countdown, its statement that we needed to find a way across the chasm before it was “too late,” the worm that had exploded into and then out of my bottle, the unseen things whizzing by us, the ever-increasing cicada-like sound, the darkening of the sky, the holes in my bottle matching the holes in the rocks all around us . . . the pieces fell into place in my mind like the tumblers of an opening lock.
The approaching darkness in the sky wasn’t darkness at all.
It was a swarm of worms that could make Swiss cheese out of hard rocks.
13
If these swarming worm things could bore through hard rocks, what in the world would they do to human flesh?
Then another thought hit me: The building didn’t have holes in it. Just countless pinkie-sized indentations.
I dropped the water bottle like it was a hot coal.
“We need to get into the building. Now!” I cried.
I’d say this for her—Hacker didn’t hesitate and she didn’t ask a bunch of questions. She seemed to catch on immediately to the danger we were in. She took off like a gazelle toward the building.
I was hot on her heels.
The approaching cicada sound grew deafening. Alien worms whizzed all around us. There were so many I could see some of them now. They rocketed past in all directions like miniature black missiles. I felt a stabbing pain in the back of my right thigh.
For the first time I was grateful for all the running I had done at the Academy and that the Old Man had made me continue doing during my Apprenticeship. Despite the pain in my thigh, I sprinted past Hacker.
I got to the building before she did, no doubt smoking all my previous sprint records. I flung the door open. I paused impatiently, waiting for Hacker to catch up. A worm hit the door’s metal right over my head with a loud ping, making me flinch.
Moments later, Hacker barreled past me through the open door. I spun inside, slamming the door behind me.
Once inside, I heard worms hitting and bouncing off the building’s metal walls with increasing frequency. The sound reminded me of sitting in a parked car during a gathering hailstorm.
Hacker was bent over, with her hands on her knees, panting. I knew how she felt. My legs ached from the sudden sprint. My chest heaved from exertion.
Hacker said something. I couldn’t hear her over the thunderous pelting the building was now getting from the alien worms. The sound competed with the equally loud cicada-like sound.
Hacker moved closer. She yelled in my ear so she could be heard.
“Remember when I said you were dumb for examining the rocks?”
“Actually, you said the rocks were dumb,” I yelled back.
She pondered that, tapping her cheek again. I had a hard time keeping my eyes off her heaving chest. Her small breasts were so close they almost touched me. They rose and fell like a bellows. What a bizarre time for my creepiness to kick in.
“You’re right,” Hacker yelled. “I forgot. What I had said aloud was that the rocks were dumb. What I had said in my head was that you were dumb. Anyway, I was wrong. Sorry about that.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that. So I didn’t say anything. Hacker didn’t say anything else, either, though she didn’t move away from me. You couldn’t tell from looking at her face, but I got the sense she was scared. Or maybe I was just projecting.
I certainly was scared.
Instead of dwelling on my fear, I twisted to look at my right thigh. It was bloody right above the back of my knee. Apparently one of the worms had hit me during our run here. It had sliced through my high-tech protective costume like it was made of tissue paper. Fortunately, the wound was not deep. The worm must have merely grazed me. Dumb luck.
Hopefully the worm didn’t carry diseases. Getting infected by alien cooties was the last thing I needed. We were in enough trouble as it was.
The interior of the building was now dark and gloomy thanks to the worm swarm. They had blotted out most of the sunlight coming in through the window and skylight. The skylight and the window were black with tiny flashes of red and orange, the worms were now hitting the building that furiously. This must have been what going through a Biblical plague was like.
Hacker and I stood silently in the near darkness. I feared that any second now the window or skylight would crack open and a horde of writhing worms would come swarming in and put a permanent end to my fears.
Thankfully, that did not happen. In fact, after a while, the opposite happened: the onslaught outside slowed. The thickness of the worms on the surface of the skylight and window visibly thinned.
Then, like a switch had been flipped, it suddenly stopped. The incessant pelting we had heard ended. In contrast to what had been going on, the sudden silence seemed stark and unnatural. The interior of the building brightened again as sunlight shone through the window and the skylight.
The onslaught probably only lasted for a couple of minutes, though it seemed much longer. Apprehension your insides were about to be ventilated by a mass of alien worms tended to slow down one’s perception of time.
“Do you think it’s safe to go back out now?” I asked Hacker. I spoke louder than I probably needed to, but my ears still rang from the cacophony of sounds we had just undergone.
She shrugged. “Do I look like the worm whisperer?”
Helpful.
I went to the door and cautiously cracked it open. A mass of alien worms didn’t rip through my throat and give me a tracheotomy. I opened the door wider. Everything outside was as still and quiet as it had been when
we had first arrived here. The sky was clear and the sun shone brightly overhead once more.
I stepped outside. Off in the distance by the canyon, Overlord still floated overhead, seemingly unaffected by the recent swarm of worms. As I watched, the countdown glowing under it reset, going from all zeroes to 48:00:00. It changed to 47:59:59 and then 47:59:58 and so on, the seconds ticking down again.
It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what was going on.
“According to Overlord’s countdown, in two days the worms will return,” I said, calling out to Hacker who was still in the building. “Hopefully we can get over the canyon by then. On the plus side, if we can’t, we can always take shelter in the building again.”
“Maybe not,” her voice called back to me. “Come take a look at this.”
I went back into the building. Hacker stood next to the far wall. When I got close to her, I saw it immediately.
Three circular holes, grouped together like bullet holes on a target at a gun range, were punched through the metal walls. This was in one of the spots where the walls had been nearly worn through before the worm swarm had occurred.
Hacker and I looked at each other silently. Without even speaking to coordinate it, we spread out and carefully examined the rest of the walls of the building.
We found several more worm holes, each one having been punched through a part of the wall that had been worn thin previously.
The building was no longer secure from the worms. We had gotten lucky this time in that the few worms that had penetrated the building hadn’t hit us. We might not be so lucky next time, especially since the building’s walls were already holey in spots and looked even more worn than before.
It was as clear as the noses on our faces: We had to get over the canyon and end this test in less than two days. If we couldn’t do it in that time, we would turn that old expression on its head:
Instead of the early bird catching the worm, we late birds would catch the worms.
Literally.
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Omega Superhero Box Set Page 34
