Scorched Earth

by Randall Pine

  The next frame showed Simon and Virgil standing over a crack in the earth, with the defeated mud-miner’s hand reaching up through the crevice.

  Simon was terrified and entranced. He couldn’t tear his eyes away. He clicked the gold lever again, and the frame shifted to another title screen.

  This one read, Part II: Consequence.

  A chill trembled through Simon’s bones. He didn’t want to see what was next.

  But he couldn’t look away, and there were two more frames to go.

  He pulled the lever.

  Click.

  Chapter 21

  Virgil was on a tear. He hadn’t played a game of Skee-Ball in almost a full week, and he was worried that he’d be rusty, but the workout with Gladys in the Stocks had paid off—not just because she had ensured the defeat of the mud-miner ghost, but also because now that his underhanded rolling arm was warmed up, he had thrown three nearly-perfect games in a row. The prize tickets were spewing out from the metal machine in a steady stream, pooling on the floor in a pile that almost reached his shins.

  He was having difficulty remembering a time he’d felt so completely and utterly victorious.

  “I can feel the molded plastic grip of that Nerf gun in my hands!” he proclaimed to the world as he rolled the last ball of his current game. It hopped up the ramp and plunked straight down into one of the 100 point holes without even touching the rim. He dropped another token in the slot, and as a fresh new set of wooden balls dropped down the chute, he said, “Simon, are you seeing this? Are you seeing this?!”

  He turned around and beamed across the room at his friend, but his smile quickly faded into a frown. Simon was sitting at the table with a purple View-Master pressed against his eyes. His mouth was hanging open like he’d forgotten how his jaw worked, and he was clicking the gold lever with a slow, trembling pull that somehow gave Virgil a cold fluttering feeling in the pit of his stomach.

  Virgil glanced uneasily around the room. The manager was nowhere in sight, and the only other customers were the teenagers he’d seen in the back room when they walked in.

  “Where did Simon get a View-Master?” he wondered aloud. He scratched his head.

  It was a pretty surprising turn of events.

  Night had fallen outside, and Virgil glanced at the window, but all he could see was the well-lit reflection of the Squeezy Cheez room, with its whirling red arcade lights and multi-colored neon roping. He was about to pull his eyes away from the window when a car suddenly pulled into the parking lot, illuminating the space outside with its headlights. The window’s mirror effect was broken, and in the new light, Virgil saw something that froze him in place and set the hairs on the back of his neck prickling up with alarm.

  The woman in the purple cloak was standing at the window, peering inside from beneath her hood, her entire body tensed and focused completely on Simon.

  “Simon,” Virgil said, but his throat was dry from the panic that was washing over him, and it came out as a whisper. He swallowed hard, then he called out again, louder: “Simon!”

  But Simon didn’t look up. He was so lost in whatever he was seeing in the View-Master that he didn’t even seem to hear Virgil.

  Virgil looked back at the window, every alarm bell in his head clanging. He watched with dread as the woman’s lips curled up into a smile, cruel and expectant, which could only mean one thing.

  She knew what would happen if Simon continued to click through the View-Master. And she was relishing the moment.

  “Simon!” Virgil shrieked.

  But still, Simon didn’t hear him. He was too focused on the frame in front of his eyes…even hypnotized, maybe. He had advanced past the Consequence image, and he was now staring at a painting that was so disturbing, his skin rippled up in goosebumps, and he lost the ability to breathe. In the picture, he was standing outside of what appeared to be a hospital. Virgil stood next to him, a frown on his face, and a single tear spilling down his cheek. As for Simon, he was positioned with his arms stretched out in front of him, almost like a mummy from the old horror movies, as if he were searching the air blindly with his hands. And in the image, he was…because there was a white bandage wrapped around his head, covering his eyes.

  As he watched the image, with his heart hammering in his chest, the picture began to change. Two tiny pinpoints of red color appeared on the bandage, where his eyes were…then they grew, spreading and spreading, until the entire bandage became soaked through with red. Then small drops of blood began to fall from the bandage and spill down his cheeks.

  In the View-Master image, Simon’s eyes had been removed, leaving empty, bleeding sockets behind.

  Simon couldn’t swallow. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t move. Every drop of moisture evaporated from his mouth and from his throat, leaving him an empty husk of a person, a dry, numb desert of flesh and bone.

  There was one more frame in the reel.

  Simon didn’t want to click the lever. He didn’t want to see what was next. He wanted to put the View-Master down, smash it on the floor, rip the reel to shreds, set it on fire, burn it to ashes.

  But he couldn’t. He couldn’t lower the plastic toy from his eyes, and he couldn’t stop himself from looking at the next image in the reel.

  From somewhere far, far away, he heard the ripples of Virgil’s voice, as if his friend was calling out to him from the bottom of a pool. He wanted to respond. He wanted to let Virgil know he was okay.

  Instead, he lifted his finger to the gold lever once more, and he began to pull it down.

  “Simon!”

  Virgil acted on pure instinct. He reached down and grabbed one of the wooden Skee-Ball balls. He wound up, took a step, and fired the ball across the room. Simon’s finger pulled down at the gold lever, and just as it was starting to click, the ball smashed into his hand with a loud crack.

  The View-Master went flying out of Simon’s hands, and he howled in pain. “Ow!” he shrieked, shaking out his hand. He looked around, dazed, until his eyes finally fell on Virgil. A strange look of confusion crossed his face. “Virgil?” he asked.

  Virgil didn’t respond. He just exhaled with relief, doubling over, placing his hands on his knees and taking a few deep breaths.

  “That was close,” he whispered to himself.

  “Why did you do that?” Simon demanded. He held his injured left hand in his right, inspecting the red welt that was already rising up above the bone there. “What’s the matter with you?!”

  Virgil looked up at Simon and blinked. “What?” he said. “I—well, the View-Master, it—you, like—you were in trouble. The woman….” He indicated toward the window, but the car outside had shut off its headlights, and they couldn’t see anything anymore except the reflection of the room.

  “That hurt!” Simon whined.

  “Yeah, but the woman in the cloak…!” Virgil said, gesturing wildly toward the window. He looked back at Simon, bewildered, unsure how his friend could be anything less than grateful for what he’d done. But there was a small part of him that pointed out that he’d just injured his best friend’s hand pretty severely on nothing more than a hunch. He let his eyes slide back across the room, to Simon’s surprised and angry face, and then he lowered his gaze in embarrassment and uncertainty…and when he did, he saw something that made him catch his breath. “Simon,” he whispered, raising a shaking hand and pointing at the ground by Simon’s feet. “Look.”

  Simon glanced down at the ground. The purple View-Master lay on the ground, perfectly intact. But there was something different about it now…something chilling.

  There were thin, metal blades extending from each of the viewfinders.

  The last click of the lever had activated a spring that shot them through the eyepieces. Simon had pulled the lever enough to spring the trap, but Virgil’s wooden ball had caught his hand just in time; the Vi
ew-Master had gone flying just as the knives burst through the viewfinders.

  Simon had been nanoseconds away from suffering the consequences of them having trespassed on the clearing. He had been a sliver of a breath away from losing both eyes and being rendered blind.

  He suddenly felt dizzy. The world upended, and he slumped out of his chair, and onto the ground.

  Virgil ran across the room, sliding to a stop next to his friend. He threw his arms around his shoulders and hugged him tight. “Man,” he said, unsurprised to find that he had tears in his eyes and a lump in his throat. He took a deep breath and then laughed, because he didn’t know what else to do. “That was…man. That was close.”

  Simon was too far gone into shock to share Virgil’s demonstrations of emotion. He hugged his friend back, then pulled away and looked at him with wide, unbelieving eyes. “How did you know?” he asked.

  “The woman,” Virgil replied. “The woman in the cloak.” He gestured to the window. “She was out there.”

  Then, as if on some slow, silent cue, they both turned their heads to look at the glass.

  “She is out there,” Virgil corrected himself.

  They clamored to their feet and sprinted toward the front door. Another car passed through the parking lot, and they could see the shape of the woman in the cloak running across the parking lot, in the direction of the Juniata River.

  “She’s trying to get away!” Simon hollered.

  “Not this time!” Virgil called back, running hard toward the door.

  They had almost made it out of the building when the ceiling of the Squeezy Cheez shattered, and a thick pillar of lightning exploded down into the room.

  Chapter 22

  The entire world around them seemed to shatter and crack as the lightning column smashed into the restaurant and shot its sizzling bolts in every direction.

  “Down!” Simon screamed. He gripped Virgil by the shoulder and pulled him down to the ground. A bolt of lightning exploded over their heads, blasting into the wall, missing them only by inches.

  The bolt disappeared, and the lightning column recalibrated. It shot a new bolt across the room. It forked into two ends as it flashed through the air, one electric skewer for each of them. Virgil kicked the table in front of them, toppling it onto its side. The wooden top absorbed the electricity, and the bolt retreated. The lightning column hummed louder; it almost sounded annoyed.

  “She’s getting away!” Virgil cried out over the electrical din.

  Simon looked back over his shoulder, out at the parking lot. Beneath a streetlamp across the street, he saw the cloaked figure of the mysterious woman slipping away down an alley.

  “We have to stop her!” Virgil hollered.

  But Simon shook his head. “We can’t!” he yelled back. He nodded toward the far end of the room, and Virgil peeked over the edge of the table. The group of teenagers in the other room had been run through by the energy bolts. They were suspended above the floor, their feet dangling freely, beams of light shooting out from their eyes and their open, screaming mouths.

  “We have to save them,” Simon said. “We have to stop this.”

  Virgil looked helplessly out the glass doors, at the alleyway where the woman had disappeared. “But…” he began quietly.

  “I know,” Simon replied. “I know. But Virgil, we have to help them. That’s what heroes do.”

  Virgil looked back at his friend. His face became hard and resolute. He gave one quick, curt nod. “That’s what heroes do,” he agreed. “But after we save them, I’m going after that woman, and I’m going after her hard.”

  Simon agreed through gritted teeth.

  Virgil peered back over the table barrier. “Got any ideas?” he asked.

  “One,” Simon said. “Follow my lead.”

  Virgil opened his mouth to ask for specifics, but before he could make a sound, Simon was on his feet and leaping over the table.

  Virgil shook his head. “Here we go,” he sighed.

  Simon had thrown up a powerful kinesthetic shield, reaching down into all of the pain he felt over the attack on Llewyn and Abby, all the anger he had toward the woman in the cloak for targeting the innocent of Templar, and all of his frustration, borne of his own helplessness, of the fact that he’d been powerless to stop any of it from happening. He forced all of those emotions into his magic, and the shield that formed in front of his hands was solid and thick and huge; it reached from the floor to at least a foot over his head; from side to side, it was about eight feet in length. It looked like a giant windshield, and when a bolt of the fiery-hot energy cracked out and slammed into the orange surface, the shield held strong, warding off the dark magic with a loud series of hissing, fizzing pops. “Let’s go!” Simon shouted.

  Virgil hopped over the table and ducked behind the safety of Simon’s shield. Moving together, they walked quickly across the room, skirting the lightning column in a wide arc. Beads of sweat began to appear on Simon’s forehead, evidence of the strength he was exerting as he tried to hold back the power of the evil magic. The bolt of energy followed them every step of the way, crackling with anger, desperate to break through the shield and run Simon through.

  They made their way slowly across the room; the closer they got to the teenagers, the more acutely the dark magic seemed to be able to feel their intent. The electricity grew angrier, more frantic, moving like a snake, testing different parts of the shield for weakness. Simon’s arms began to shake from the strain of holding the shield, and the sweat was tricking down his face now, soaking his shirt at the collar. His cheeks were red with exhaustion.

  “Walk in front of them!” Virgil cried out over the sound of the electricity bolts. “I’ll get them out!”

  Simon nodded. They reached the suspended teenagers—seven of them in all—and he continued to press onward. The edge of his shield passed between the lightning column and the first victim, a girl in a gray and red St. Médard High School hoodie. The shield severed the energy bolt, and the girl fell to the ground in a heap. The light evaporated from her eyes and fingertips.

  Virgil bent down to check her pulse. She was alive…and she was conscious, but just barely.

  He looked up at Simon. “Good,” he said encouragingly. “Keep going.”

  Simon was breathing heavily now. The energy bolt that had pierced the girl in the hoodie hadn’t disappeared when he’d blocked it from entering her chest. It was still firing, still searching for its victim, and now his shield was holding off two angry lightning bolts instead of one. The shield was shaking in response to the doubled onslaught, but it was holding for the time being. Without breaking his focus on the energy column in the center of the Squeezy Cheez, Simon called out, “Faster!”

  He took a three more quick steps, slicing his shield through the remaining six energy bolts in one smooth motion. Their connections to the pillar severed, and the other six teenagers fell to the ground, gasping for breath and scrabbling at the floor, trying desperately to orient themselves. As Virgil looked out over them from behind the protection of the orange shield, he noticed something strange about the seven of them: they all looked somehow…older. Wisps of gray streaked through their hair, and wrinkles pinched at the corners of their eyes. One of the boys had a small sprinkling of liver spots on the back of one of his hands; one of the girls had suffered a change to the skin on her cheeks…it had become thin, and looked like it was stretched so tightly that it might tear like paper.

  What in the world…? he thought.

  A low, guttural groan from Simon snapped Virgil back to the situation at hand. Simon was struggling; that much was painfully obvious. His shirt was soaked through, and he was now fending off not one, not two, but eight separate energy attacks from the lightning column. And the column itself seemed to realize what was happening. It was humming louder than ever now, buzzing angrily and sending even more fo
rce through the individual bolts that were still searching for their victims. Virgil noticed a hairline crack beginning to form in the surface of the shield.

  Simon wouldn’t be able to hold on much longer.

  “Move!” he hollered at the fallen teens. He reached down and pulled them all to their feet, one by one. They looked at him with dazed, searching eyes. He gathered them around him closely, and in as clear and impactful a voice as he could muster, he said, “We have to go. You have to move. You have to run. We have to go. Okay?”

  The members of the group nodded, their expressions clouded with confusion.

  “I’ll take it,” Virgil muttered. He tapped Simon on the shoulder. “Ready!” he shouted.

  Simon began to move back toward the front room, and toward the front door. Most of the high schoolers began to move with him, but a few lingered. If they didn’t keep up, Simon’s shield would go beyond the reach of the energy bolts, and the students from St. Médard would be run through once again. Virgil fell back and ushered them forward, urging them along with his arms and his voice, feeling suddenly like a cowboy trying to herd a clowder of drowsy cats. “Come on, come on, come on,” he hissed, gathering them up and moving them ahead.

  Despite their confusion and their weakened states, it didn’t take long for the teenagers to feel the full weight of the danger they were in. They shook themselves back to attention and huddled forward, moving across the Squeezy Cheez behind Simon’s slowly-deteriorating shield.

  “Come on!” Simon yelled out as the multitude of energy blasts continued to crackle against the orange barrier. The hairline split became four hairline splits, and those splits widened into substantial cracks. “We’re running out of time!”

  “Bank right!” Virgil instructed. Simon did as he was told, and he pivoted to his right, cutting a hard corner and planting himself directly between the lightning column and the front door. “Now!” Virgil screamed at the teenagers, helping them toward the door. “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!”