Rick’s hair bristled on his head.
The WarCraft, he thought. It’s coming back.
27. RESCUE
FIRE FILLED MOLLY’S vision. She sat up fast, afraid. Where was she? The woods. Yes, she remembered. The night. The cold. Her whole body shuddered. Her very bones felt frozen.
But she was warmer than she’d been. The bonfire was blazing high and the heat was moving through her. Plus she was wearing a fleece she hadn’t been wearing before. She leaned toward the flames hungrily, letting the warmth wash over her, into her. It was wonderful, but . . .
But as her mind started to clear, a dark thought came to her: If she was sitting by the killers’ fire, then the killers must have found her, must have captured her. She tried to remember.
Now, though, a series of sounds made her stiffen. Crackling branches, crunching leaves. Footsteps. Coming closer. She stared in the direction of the noise, but the light of the flames blinded her and all she could see was darkness on the far side.
Then the man stepped into view, his weather-beaten features lit like a demon’s by the flames. Molly remembered: He was the one who had found her. Carried her from her hiding place. Her “knight in shining armor,” he’d said. A cruel, sneering joke from one of the men who were planning to torture and kill her . . .
The man—Victor One, he had called himself—was carrying a fresh load of sticks in his arms. He dumped them on top of the fire. The flames were already so high they swallowed the fresh wood easily, rising and snickering and smoking up into the black reaches of the forest sky.
The man looked across the fire at Molly. “You’re up. Good. How you feeling?”
She didn’t answer, wouldn’t answer, wouldn’t give the thug the satisfaction. She pulled her knees up high and hugged her legs to herself. She was beginning to feel warm. She was beginning to feel as if she might still be alive.
“Pretty old-fashioned stunt—fainting in my arms like that,” the man went on with a half smile. Molly tensed as he began to move around the fire toward her. “Like one of those ladies in the long dresses in old movies. I kind of enjoyed it, to tell the truth. I wish more women would faint in my arms like that. Practically never happens.”
He was standing over her now. She could feel the threat of his presence above her, the insinuating threat of his words. She did not know how she was going to get through this ordeal, but she didn’t suppose it mattered much in the long run, seeing as he was almost certainly going to kill her in the end.
“I mean, you know, I try to be a modern guy and all that,” said Victor One—and now he crouched down beside her, his elbows on his knees. He was playing with a small twig in his fingers. Molly cringed away from him, frowning with distaste. “But there’s something about an old-fashioned girl . . .,” he went on.
“Get away from me, you pig,” Molly snapped. “You disgust me, all of you.”
The crags on Victor One’s face deepened as his eyebrows drew together. “I’m gonna try not to take that remark personally,” he said. “But I think you may be mistaking me for some other pig.”
Molly looked away from him. She stared into the fire bitterly. “You’re all the same to me. You’re just another killer, like the rest.”
Crouched beside her, Victor One smiled into the flames. “Well, I am a killer, sure enough. A good one, too, trained by the United States government for the job. But I’m not like the rest, Molly. I’m your killer . . . Wait, that didn’t sound right. What I mean is: I’m a killer who’s on your side.”
It took a moment before the meaning of these words sank into Molly’s mind. Slowly, she raised her eyes from the fire. She glanced quickly at Victor One. His relaxed attitude. His half smile. Then, just as quickly, she looked around herself, all around, searching for the men who had hunted her here.
“The others,” she said, trying to think. “Where are all the other ones?”
“In all honesty, Mol, you probably don’t want to know the answer to that. Not in any detail, anyway.”
Molly felt her lips part as she began to understand. This time when she turned to Victor One, she was staring at him, gaping at him.
“You . . .? What did you . . .? You mean . . .? But . . . You couldn’t . . . There were five of them!”
Victor One shrugged modestly. “Actually, there were six, if you count the one I followed out of town. I took care of him back by the house. But really, it wasn’t as spectacular as all that. Oh, all right, it was pretty spectacular. But it was mostly a matter of waiting for them to leave the pack one by one. The first went off into the woods to go to the bathroom. The second went off to find him when the first didn’t come back. The next one wandered away from the group looking for you. The last one—well, you saw me take him just after he found you.”
As Molly remembered, as the picture of what had happened became clear, her mind was crowded with questions.
“That’s only four,” she said.
“Yeah, one of them got away—the pale snaky-looking one with the weird smile. He’s the leader, I’m betting.”
Molly nodded, dazed. “He is. Smiley McDeath, I call him.”
Victor One laughed. “That’s good. Smiley McDeath. He’s the smartest of the lot. He figured out what was happening pretty quick. I was hoping he’d come looking for me, you know. But he was too smart for that. I guess he figured he wasn’t sure what he was up against: one man or twenty. So he just ran for it.”
“Then he’ll get others. He’ll come back for us,” said Molly.
Victor One nodded. “He will, for sure. And we won’t be too hard to find with this fire going. Soon as you can walk, we better get out of here. Meanwhile, you’re going to need this.”
He reached into a pack that lay on the ground beside him—one of the packs abandoned by the killers, she thought. He brought out a couple of energy bars and a bottle of water.
As Molly’s fear receded, her hunger came back to her with a vengeance. Without a word, she snatched one of the bars from Victor One’s hand. She tore the wrapper off and bit the bar in half. Food. Bliss. Almost as good as the heat from the fire.
“Hungry a little?” said Victor One with another smile.
Molly tried to speak around the great gob of gunk that filled her mouth. It came out something like “Humpharumphayumph.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” said Victor One.
Molly swallowed. “Who are you?” she said.
“I told you. I’m called Victor One. That’s how they name us, a designating letter and a training rank: Alpha Nine, Bravo Four, Charlie Ten. Juliet Seven got the short end of the stick, if you ask me, but I never tease him about it since the guy’s built like a refrigerator and he’s big enough to drive me into the earth with a single blow. But the point is, I work security for a secret government agency.”
Molly’s mind was still moving slowly, but she thought she was beginning to understand. “Rick sent you. It was Rick, wasn’t it?” Even as she said it, the idea pleased her. However Rick might feel about her, he hadn’t abandoned her entirely.
Something flickered behind Victor One’s eyes. Molly wasn’t sure what it was. But he said slowly, almost reluctantly, “Rick, yes. Rick and his dad. I’m assigned to protect Rick’s dad, and he was worried no one else would come looking for you. It’s a long story.”
“You came alone,” she said. “No . . . police, no FBI.”
Victor One looked down at the ground. “Like I said, a long story. When you’re warm enough, and you’ve had some water, we better go.”
“Shouldn’t we call for help?”
“We can’t. The people we’re up against—the bad guys—they’re using new technology, state-of-the-art stuff—all very hush-hush. Even I don’t really know what they’re up to. But I ditched all my comms before I started after them. Otherwise, they might have tracked me, seen me coming a mile off.”
Molly went on tearing at her energy bar, washing the stuff down with long draughts of water. She was done with the first
bar in a minute and moved on to the second. She could not believe how good it felt to eat. She remembered all the times she had said—to her mother, to her friend—Let’s eat. I’m starving. She realized now that not only had she never been starving, she’d never even been hungry, not really, not like this.
She had a million questions she wanted to ask this Victor One guy. For instance: Where was Rick? And what did Rick say when he found out she had been kidnapped? And where were the police, too? Why hadn’t they come looking for her with helicopters and rifles and all that stuff? And who were these men who had kidnapped her, anyway. What did they want?
As she ate, she stole glances at Victor One where he crouched beside her, his craggy face lit by the flames. Now that she knew he wasn’t one of them, she had begun to kind of like him. He was so relaxed and easygoing with all this danger around them. It made her feel safe just to have him there.
“What are we going to do now?” she asked him.
“Well, soon as you can, we better start moving before your pal Smiley McDeath comes back with reinforcements. The question is: Where do we go?”
“Out of these woods, for a start,” said Molly.
“Right. But here’s the thing: there’s swamp all through here. There’s really only a narrow corridor of dry land—that’s one of the reasons they could track you so easily. Assuming the smiley guy has called in the troops, we can’t go back the way you came without being spotted.”
“So what do we do?”
“Well, there’s a road about two miles in the opposite direction. If you can make it that far, we might be able to get a lift back to my car.”
“I can make it,” said Molly.
Victor One gave her a full-fledged smile—and when he did that, Molly noticed, he was actually kind of cute. For a killer and all. “I kind of thought you’d say that. Ready?”
He stood up quickly and offered her his hand. She took it and he drew her up to her feet. She swallowed the last of her energy bar.
“I’m sorry I called you a pig,” she said.
He smiled again, his eyes crinkling at the edges. “I’ve been called worse—and usually by guys with machine guns. Let’s go.”
He picked up a pack and slung it over his shoulder. He brought out a small flashlight and trained its beam on the ground before them. With a final glance back at her, he headed off into the darkness. Molly followed.
It felt good to be moving. It felt good not to be so hungry. It felt good to be warm and have a fleece on. And it felt good to have her own personal killer out here in case Smiley McDeath returned with reinforcements. It made her feel safe—or safer, at least.
The two traveled in silence for a while. Victor One moved smoothly and steadily. He followed his flashlight beam and Molly followed him. Victor One said nothing and that was okay for a while. Soon, though, the questions rose up in Molly’s mind again.
“Why did these people kidnap me?” she asked.
Victor One glanced back at her but didn’t answer. He kept heading through the night, through the woods.
She pressed him: “Was it to get at Rick? It was, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah,” he said after a moment. “It was, pretty much.”
“Because he’s fighting them somehow,” said Molly. “Whoever they are.”
“That’s right.”
“And they thought they could make him stop by threatening me.”
“You got it all figured out, haven’t you?”
“But he couldn’t stop, could he? Because people’s lives are in danger.”
“That’s right.”
“And he knew I wouldn’t want him to stop.”
This time when he looked at her, she could see the look of admiration in the glow of the flashlight. “Maybe so. Probably.”
“So he sent you instead.”
“Right.”
“And how did you find me?”
“Your code. The JogHard app. Rick’s kid brother figured it out.”
“Little Raider?”
“I think he can name every app in the app store.”
Molly’s mind kept returning to Rick, though. “What about Rick?” she asked. “What did he say about it all? Did he send me a message or anything?”
Victor One gave her a searching look. She wasn’t sure what he was thinking. What he said was, “He wanted to come himself. He really did. I had to talk him down. We need him somewhere else and . . . well, like I said, I have the training for this kind of thing.”
“But he wanted to come?” Molly couldn’t stop herself from asking.
“He did.”
She nodded, satisfied. Victor One gave a wry smile. Again, she couldn’t read what was on his mind, but she sensed her questions irked him. Which pleased Molly somehow. She didn’t put it into words exactly, but instinct told her Victor One was irked because she was asking about Rick, because he was jealous of Rick.
“Why don’t you have a gun?” she asked.
“What makes you think I don’t have a gun?”
“I didn’t hear any shots before when you were . . . dealing with those men.”
“Gunshots would have alerted them. And we might need the bullets later on.”
“Well, then why—”
“Let me ask you a question,” he interrupted her.
“All right,” said Molly. He was clearly getting even more irked, and she found herself smiling at this as they moved together through the darkness.
“How’d you get away from them?” he asked. “How’d you escape from that room?”
“I dug a nail up out of the floorboard and I hit one of the men in the neck with it.”
She was startled by the sound of Victor One’s deep booming laughter. “You did not!”
“I did so!”
He laughed again. “And here I thought you were just an old-fashioned—”
Suddenly his voice stopped. He stopped moving. The flashlight went off.
“What was that?” said Molly.
“Get low,” he said.
He crouched down and so did Molly.
They had broken out of the thicker trees now, she noticed. The sky above them was broad and strewn with stars. In the starlight, Molly could see that they had come into what must’ve been a swamp area. All around her there were open stretches of lowland. There were zigzagging ridges of thick foliage with the jagged trunk of a dead tree sticking up here and there.
Molly listened. In the winter cold there were none of the usual wetland sounds. No crickets or frogs. The silence seemed wide and deep. At first she couldn’t imagine what Victor One had heard, what had made him stop the way he did.
But then she heard it, too.
There was a low, steady thrumming whisper in the air above them. It was getting louder by the second. It wasn’t a woodland sound, not a natural sound. It was man-made, Molly was sure of it. In fact, after a moment, she thought it sounded familiar, even though she couldn’t quite figure out what it was.
Then she knew: it was a propeller.
She turned to Victor One in the darkness.
“Is that a plane?” she whispered.
“Ssh,” Victor One hissed at her.
The sound grew steadily louder, closer. Not a plane. Too small. Too low. She stared into the gleam of Victor One’s eyes. She thought: What? What is it?
He answered aloud as if he’d heard her. “It’s a drone,” he said quietly. “I’d know that sound anywhere.”
“A drone? You mean, like a little airplane? Like in wars?”
“Yeah, just like in—”
But before he could finish, a spotlight shot down out of the sky and pinned them where they crouched. Molly could just make out the miniature white aircraft behind the light.
Victor One grabbed Molly’s arm and stood up, pulling her to her feet.
“Run!” he shouted.
They were already moving when the drone opened fire.
28. BAD PIGGIES
THE GROUND JOLTED and trembled beneath
Rick’s feet. The lavender clouds continued to spread above him, darkening the Realm’s yellow sky. The air crackled with electricity. And above the growing roar of the approaching WarCraft, Rick heard the Boars calling to one another in deep, ragged snorting voices.
“Come on!”
“This way!”
“Hurry! Load ’em up!”
Peering through the high scarlet grass, Rick saw that the blimp-shaped supply rockets had rolled farther out of the launch doors. Their cargo bays were open and the Worker Boars were lifting metal canisters off their carts and pushing them inside. He knew the enormous WarCraft would appear on the horizon any minute. He had to work fast.
With the ground quaking beneath him, with the sky growing darker above him, with a sound like thunder filling the air, it took all of Rick’s will to turn his mind away from what was happening around him and focus his spirit entirely on himself, his own form. He reached down into that deep essential part of himself. He funneled his attention into a narrow corridor of focus. He held it on the shape of his hand, his arm, his torso. He willed his outline to change.
Slowly, in a weird dream-like shift, his body began to morph.
Only a few seconds later, the sky went night-black as the vast WarCraft of Kurodar rumbled up over the horizon. The tentacles of the octopus-like beast that surrounded the ship whipped out over the roiling sky. The beast’s huge head came into view, its repulsive and malevolent eyes scanning the scene below it. All around the walls of the Golden City, lightning began to flicker and flash. The blimps in their launch stations shuddered and lifted as the electric bolts shot over them. The Pilot Boars shouted at the Worker Boars to hurry, and the Worker Boars rushed to throw more canisters into the blimps’ bays.
And one of those Worker Boars was Rick himself.
Using all the power of his spirit, he had reshaped his avatar, ballooning his belly, covering his flesh with rough fur, forcing his face to stretch into a tusked snout. It was kind of nauseating when it happened, but he swallowed his sickness and kept at it. Once he was in Boar shape, he had slipped out of the high grass into the busy and chaotic scene.