Double the Danger and Zero Zucchini

by Betsy Uhrig

  “Well, we know there aren’t any paths,” I said. “And plains are kind of plain, aren’t they?”

  “What about the surrounding area?” Nate asked.

  I had to think for a minute. Where was Gerald now? “Um, the Featureless Fens? And past them is the Static Swamp.”

  “Ha!” said Nate. “That’s a lot of alliteration.”

  Javier snickered. Marta and I looked at each other and shrugged.

  “But not much help in terms of battle strategy,” said Nate.

  Marta was putting out the Lego and Playmobil armies, organized by type. “What do we need for the enemy besides goblins and smoke lizards?” she asked me.

  I checked my written list. “Glowbeasts, darkriders, bogbears, and weirwolves,” I said.

  Nate whistled between his teeth in a way I’d been trying to do for years. “Werewolves? This isn’t your garden-variety battle, I take it?”

  “Not werewolves,” I said. “Weirwolves. They’re the wolves that guard the Warlock’s Weir.”

  “Gotcha,” said Nate. He looked over at the table, where Marta was arranging the legions in clumps, facing off on either side of the Ping-Pong net. He crossed his arms. He walked from one end of the table to the other.

  Finally, he spoke. “You need some commanders,” he said. “Armies don’t fight willy-nilly—they need direction.”

  Willy-nilly. That was going right into my Grampa file.

  Marta dug around in the Playmobil crate and came up with a handful of Santa Clauses from various Advent sets. “Will these do?”

  “As long as they stand out,” said Nate.

  The Santas, in bright red and about a head taller than most of the Lego orcs, monkeys, and other creatures we were using for Caroline’s troops, definitely stood out.

  “But they all look alike,” said Javier. “Shouldn’t they be different, so we can tell them apart when the fighting gets intense?”

  “The fighting is going to get intense?” said Nate, his eyebrows rising.

  “It’s an epic battle,” said Marta.

  “Can I just say that I am having a blast?” said Nate.

  77

  SO NOW WE HAD FOUR SANTAS, an elephant, a soccer coach, and a bus driver as commanders on the goblin side, and a giraffe, a gorilla, and a lifeguard on Gerald’s side. Gerald himself, Snarko, and the Daredevil were two Playmobil dads and an actual devil that must have been part of a Halloween set. It wasn’t perfect, and we did keep mixing up who was who among the commanders, but it was good enough.

  Nate removed the net from the table, then left for a moment and returned with a pool cue, which he used to push the legions around on the table until he was satisfied with their positions. “What have we got in terms of strategic goals?” he asked.

  “Well,” I said, “Gerald wants to get to the weir, and the goblins are trying to stop him, so they need to battle and it needs to be really exciting, and then Gerald has to win.”

  “That sounds simple enough,” said Nate. “What about strengths and weaknesses among the armies?”

  I started to say I had no idea. But then I thought about it for a moment. “The goblins are disorganized and tend to fight among themselves,” I offered.

  “And the lizards they ride have weak ankles,” said Javier.

  “The Daredevil has no weaknesses,” put in Marta.

  “Okay, that’s good to know,” said Nate. “And your hero? Gerald? Does he have any experience with commanding an army?”

  “Nope,” I said. “He’s an eleven-year-old kid.”

  “So only playground brawls,” said Nate. “Check.”

  “But he has gone through a bunch of trials recently,” I added. “So he’s gotten a lot smarter and better coordinated.”

  “Smarter than your average goblin?”

  “Yeah. The goblins aren’t very intelligent. But there are way more of them.”

  “I can see that,” said Nate, as Marta continued to add orcs to the goblin group on the table. “Gerald is outnumbered. Which means he needs to outthink his opponents.”

  That seemed more than obvious now that we had everyone set out on the Ping-Pong table in proportionate numbers (one Lego creature for ten or so of Caroline’s). Gerald was in big trouble—it didn’t take a military historian to see that.

  Nate stood back from the table. “Gerald has something else on his side, though, right?” he asked after a moment.

  All three of us thought he was going to go ahead and tell us what that was, but he didn’t, so we were forced to start guessing.

  “Time?” suggested Javier.

  “Money?” offered Marta, which made no sense. There’d been zero mention of money in the book.

  “Friends?” I put in.

  “Friends, yes,” said Nate. “But I assume the goblins and bugbears—”

  “Bogbears,” I corrected.

  “Bogbears have some buddies too. No, I’m talking about right. Gerald has right on his side, doesn’t he?”

  “He does,” I said. “Gerald is on the side of good.”

  “Then he can’t lose,” said Nate. “We just have to make sure of it.”

  78

  IT TOOK US ALL AFTERNOON SATURDAY and most of Sunday to get maybe three quarters of the way through the Battle of the Pathless Plains. Nate’s friends stopped by to see what we were up to and offer suggestions. Ellen’s ideas got pretty bloody. We had to keep reminding her about the bird’s-eye view. She insisted that limbs would be lopped off in fighting like this, and if you remember the battle chapters in Book 1, you will know that a few of her gory details did find their way in.

  At one point, Nate decided we needed army medics to remove the wounded. Marta pulled a bunch of doctors and nurses from the crates. “What do I do with them?” she asked.

  “Rosa would know,” said Henry, who was watching so closely that he was getting cookie crumbs on the legions. There’s a point in the finished film where his big pale face is visible, like a full moon looming hugely over the swamp-dweller brigades.

  “That’s right,” said Nate. “Rosa was an army nurse. Where has she been lately? I haven’t seen her for months. She used to be a regular for poker.”

  “Rosa is Javier’s aunt,” I said. “She comes here all the time, right?”

  Javier shrugged. “I thought she did,” he said.

  Marta had taken this opportunity to start loading doctors and nurses into ambulances and driving them onto the field of battle.

  “Wait, wait, wait,” I said. “There are no cars in this world!” I thought for a moment. “Maybe carts. Does Alvin have any carts in there? Wheelbarrows or something?”

  Marta heaved an annoyed sigh. “We have a soccer coach commanding the glowbeasts and we can’t use ambulances?” But she was chucking them back into the crate as she complained. She dug around for a while but didn’t find anything cartlike. Alvin wasn’t much of a collector of the farm sets.

  “Stretchers,” said Nate. “They can run in on foot with stretchers and pull out the injured.”

  Marta and Henry and I found some cardboard in the craft room and made a bunch of tiny stretchers.

  So now we had creature armies using real military strategy, and wounded, and even medics. “This is gonna be amazing!” Marta kept saying. “There’s no way Caroline isn’t going to love this.”

  Then Nate suddenly said, “Halt!”

  “What?” said Javier. “What’s wrong?”

  “We’ve got a problem,” said Nate.

  “What is it?”

  “Gerald is going to lose the battle,” said Nate. He walked slowly around the table, viewing the scene from all sides. “I can’t see any way around it. There’s no way he can win.”

  “But what about having right on his side?” Marta asked. “Isn’t that supposed to help?”

  Nate shook his head. “I’m afraid in this case, wrong has the upper hand.”

  79

  WE HAD STOPPED FILMING JUST BEFORE dinnertime Sunday, when most of us had to g
o home anyway. Javier, Marta, and I hurried over to the senior center after school Monday, hoping that Nate had figured out how Gerald could win the battle.

  He was standing by the Ping-Pong table when we got there, holding his pool cue by his side. There were also a bunch of Civil War books on a nearby folding chair.

  “Any progress?” I asked.

  “Gerald is outnumbered,” he said. “And now he’s pretty well surrounded too.”

  It was true. The goblins’ forces were spread out around Gerald’s much smaller group.

  “Can’t we just get some of those bad guys to back off?” said Marta. “This is fiction. We can do whatever we want, right?”

  “It needs to be realistic, though,” I said. “It needs to make sense.”

  “Albert’s right,” said Nate. “The goblins can’t lose for no good reason. We’ve established that they aren’t terribly bright, but that doesn’t matter if you’ve got the numbers on your side. And they do. Even a bunch of idiots can win a battle if it’s a big enough bunch.”

  “Can’t you ask Caroline to get rid of some of the goblins’ legions earlier?” Javier said to me. “Couldn’t she change the numbers?”

  “I feel like that’s cheating,” I said. “We want to make it as hard as possible for Gerald to win. Otherwise, it’s not heroic.”

  “We’re definitely making it hard,” said Nate. “Our boy Gerald needs a miracle right about now. Something magical.”

  The three of us looked at Nate and then at one another. Apparently, we’d failed to mention that Gerald had magic available to him.

  “Um,” I said, “actually, Gerald’s grampa is magic. He’s a potion master.”

  “Well, why didn’t you say so?” said Nate. “Let’s get Gramps to mix up a big batch of sleeping potion. Send the enemy into dreamland for a while.”

  “We can’t do that,” I said. “Gerald’s grampa is being held prisoner by an evil warlock in a vortex inside the weir.”

  Nate shook his head. “I hate it when that happens.”

  80

  HENRY HAD WANDERED IN SOMETIME DURING our conversation. “If you’ve got a potion master and an evil warlock, you must have other magic people around as well,” he said. “Can’t you get help from someone else?”

  “Most of the other magical characters aren’t very friendly,” I said, thinking of the Glass Gremlin and the Violent Violets and all the others who’d given Gerald attitude and injuries on the way here.

  “What about the Absolute Authority?” said Javier.

  My heart sank when he suggested this, which was weird, because we were talking about characters in a book. They didn’t exist, and they had no right to be able to give someone a sinking feeling. But the Absolute Authority gave me one anyway.

  They were a shadowy group of elders who sort of ruled the world that Gerald had found himself in. They hadn’t shown up in person, but they’d been talked about by several characters during the trials, mostly in a way that indicated you really, really didn’t want to cheese them off. There’d been threats along the lines of “You’d better get off my lawn, kid, if you don’t want me to inform the Authority.”

  “But no one talks to the Absolute Authority directly,” said Marta. “You need a blackraven to do that.”

  She was right. Only a blackraven could even find the Authority, let alone get a message to them.

  “So that’s out,” I said. And I admit I was relieved not to have to involve the Authority. I like to keep a low profile around authorities, fictional and non-, but that’s another story.

  “What about the pigeon that Gerald saved with the healing salve?” said Javier. “He could find a blackraven.”

  “That’s right!” said Marta. “Vern owes Gerald a favor. His gang attacked Gerald and then left Vern when he broke his wing. If it weren’t for Gerald, Vern would have been a weirwolf’s dinner.”

  “Perfect!” said Nate, who had no idea what we were talking about. “Let’s send Vern the pigeon out with a message for a blackraven to take to the Absolute Authority.”

  Or maybe he did.

  “What should the message say?” asked Javier.

  “Help!” said Nate. “It should say ‘Help!’ ”

  81

  SO NOW WE HAD A GOOD idea of how Gerald could win the battle, but we needed information. We didn’t understand enough about the Absolute Authority to know how it would help or even if it could help. Only one person knew that stuff—or at least could make it up for us—and that was Caroline.

  “This is awkward,” said Javier. “We were supposed to have this awesome battle all laid out for her, and now…”

  “Now we need her to finish making it awesome,” I said.

  “Hey,” said Marta. “How many times have we gotten her out of a jam?”

  “A lot,” said Javier. “And Alex has the scars to prove it.”

  “And the permanent limp,” Marta added randomly.

  “I don’t have a permanent limp.”

  They were right (except for the thing about the limp). And we were almost there. But we needed Caroline to get us over the finish line.

  I sent Caroline a carefully worded text. Working on a possible battle scene, I wrote. In case you decide you want one after all. It’s going well, but G is outnumbered. Can he ask the Absolute Authority for help?

  It took about ten minutes for her to respond. I was so nervous about having interfered in her book this way that I was jogging the halls of the senior center. The others sat in the common room and ate cookies until my phone finally pinged.

  Am in the area, she texted. Will come by asap.

  Uh-oh. I had no idea if she was coming to help or to chew me out for making a battle that she clearly didn’t want. Plus, she was going to head to my house, where I wasn’t.

  Am at the senior center, I wrote. Meet me here? She couldn’t yell at me in front of a bunch of seniors, I figured. And if she went at me, I knew Ellen at least would have my back.

  On my way was the reply.

  I met her on the front steps.

  “Do you volunteer here?” she asked as we went inside.

  “Not really,” I said. “Remember when I was doing research for the Grampa flashbacks?”

  She nodded.

  “I started hanging out here then. The cookies are really good.”

  “That’s enough of a reason for me,” she said. “So, um, what’s all this about a battle?”

  82

  I COULDN’T READ CAROLINE AT ALL. She was wearing a suit, since she’d come from work, which didn’t help. I was used to casual Caroline, not business Caroline. She didn’t seem angry, but then again, I’d never seen her really angry. Maybe she was a quiet fumer like my dad, instead of a red-faced yeller like her sister.

  I took a moment to gather my thoughts, but they were sprinting toward the horizon like Marcello on the loose. “Well,” I blurted, “I just thought maybe the whole peace chapter was kind of, um, slowing things down, and that maybe an actual battle would be more exciting. You know? The chapter before made it seem like there was going to be one, and then… You don’t have to do it, of course….”

  Caroline rummaged in her purse for no reason I could see except to avoid eye contact. She pulled out an ancient stick of gum, studied it, and dropped it back inside.

  I bounced on my toes, getting ready to break into a run.

  Finally, she put her hand on my shoulder and pressed down. I stopped bouncing. “It’s okay,” she said. “I asked you to tell me when the book is boring, and you’re telling me. I appreciate that. I was planning to put in a battle, but I got squeamish. I hate violence, and I don’t know anything about military stuff. I guess I wimped out.”

  I held perfectly still to avoid nodding in agreement. “So, you might want a battle after all?” I asked casually.

  “I might. If it’s not too gory. I’m willing to entertain the possibility, at least.” She smiled. I smiled back. “You’ve never steered me wrong before,” she said. “But none
of this explains what we’re doing at the senior center.”

  “Follow me.”

  “Oh my” was all Caroline could manage as she took in the sight of the creature-covered table, and Marta and Javier, and Nate with his pool cue and Ellen with her crochet project and Henry being Henry. Then: “What is all this?”

  “This is the Battle of the Pathless Plains,” said Marta proudly.

  Caroline walked over to the table. She put her purse down on it, scattering a herd of darkriders. She reached for a lock of hair and started twirling it as she studied the layout. “And you guys—you all—set this up?” she asked finally.

  “Yup. And Javier’s filming it,” said Marta.

  “To get a bird’s-eye view of the whole battle,” Javier put in, “figure out the strategy.”

  Caroline’s finger was trapped in her hair at this point. She had to tug to get it out. She looked at me. Was she blown away by all our work? Convinced once and for all that an epic battle was essential to the book?

  That wasn’t the impression I was getting at all.

  Then she said, “Alex, can I speak to you privately for a moment?”

  83

  IF ANYONE EVER ASKS TO SPEAK to you privately, be aware that they aren’t requesting privacy so all their praise won’t embarrass you in front of others. That’s almost definitely not the reason.

  We were in the hall outside the Ping-Pong room. Caroline had shut the door behind us. She was pacing in tight circles like a wonky windup toy, her heels clicking on the linoleum floor. I was beginning to think that I might be seeing what she looked like angry.

  She stopped clicking around and stood facing me. “So, I really appreciate all the work you’ve put in on the book. You know that, right?” she began. “And this battle is incredible, it really is. I am blown away.”

  I nodded. “But…,” I offered. Because I knew there was one.

  She gave me a pained smile. “But—I wasn’t aware that your friends were involved. It took me by surprise, seeing all those people in there.”