In the Belly of the Beast
DEDICATION
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO
SEVEN WONDERS READERS AROUND THE WORLD.
YOU’RE ALL SELECTS TO ME.
CONTENTS
Dedication
Chapter One: First Day of the End of the World
Chapter Two: Dinner for Tweety
Chapter Three: Cowboy Cass
Chapter Four: Tinkers and Trailers
Chapter Five: All You Need Is Lohv
Chapter Six: Face-to-Face
Chapter Seven: Cyrus the Great
Chapter Eight: Resurrection
Chapter Nine: Karassarym
Chapter Ten: Happy Birthday
Chapter Eleven: Blood Oath
Chapter Twelve: Greed or Need
Chapter Thirteen: Orb Museum
Chapter Fourteen: Loud and Clear
Chapter Fifteen: A Different Set of Eyes
Chapter Sixteen: Through the Looking-Glass
Chapter Seventeen: Amazon Café
Chapter Eighteen: Devil Cat
Chapter Nineteen: The Back Door
Chapter Twenty: Herostratus and Vromaski Flambé
Chapter Twenty-One: The Zons
Chapter Twenty-Two: The Tip of a Knife
Chapter Twenty-Three: Eloise, Marco, and Chinggis
Chapter Twenty-Four: The Wrath of Cynthia
Chapter Twenty-Five: Loss Upon Loss
Chapter Twenty-Six: Playing with Fire Boy
Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Destroyer Destroyed
Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Think System
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Li’anu
Chapter Thirty: Seesaw
Chapter Thirty-One: Crazy Farouk
Chapter Thirty-Two: Out of the Oort Cloud
Chapter Thirty-Three: Rock Cyclone
Chapter Thirty-Four: To the Lighthouse
Chapter Thirty-Five: In the Belly of the Beast
Chapter Thirty-Six: A Lesson from Jonah
Chapter Thirty-Seven: I Am Nobody
Chapter Thirty-Eight: Fish Mob
Chapter Thirty-Nine: See Choice One
Chapter Forty: Where Death Is Life and Life Is Death
Chapter Forty-One: WWDD
Chapter Forty-Two: Once More Into the Rift
Chapter Forty-Three: The Riddle and the Sword
Chapter Forty-Four: No Mercy
Chapter Forty-Five: Karst Pool
Chapter Forty-Six: The Mother of Invention
Chapter Forty-Seven: Soldier Yields to Tailor
Chapter Forty-Eight: The End of the World
Chapter Forty-Nine: Back to Black
Chapter Fifty: Karai and the Death Part
Chapter Fifty-One: A Bone To Pick
Chapter Fifty-Two: Uhla’ar’s Revenge
Chapter Fifty-Three: The Circuit of Power
Chapter Fifty-Four: It Begins
Chapter Fifty-Five: The Flock
Map
Drow Lanif A
Back Ad
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
CHAPTER ONE
FIRST DAY OF THE END OF THE WORLD
YOU KNOW YOU’VE reached rock bottom when you’re standing on a beach, looking to the horizon, and you don’t notice you’re ankle-deep in dead fish.
If I’d been there ten minutes earlier, the water would be up to my shoulders. Now I was at the top of a wet, sloping plain. It was littered with rocks, ropes, bottles, crabs, fish, a massive but motionless shark, and the rotted hull of an old shipwreck.
Our tropical island had shot upward like an express elevator. Ten minutes ago, King Uhla’ar of Atlantis had opened a rift in time, which according to legend would make the great continent rise again. But I wasn’t really thinking about legends right then. Because when he jumped into that rift, he took Aly Black with him. One minute there, the next minute boom! Down and gone. Back into time. Back to Atlantis.
Losing Aly was like losing a part of myself.
So on the first day of the end of the world, I, Jack McKinley, felt like someone had reached down my throat and torn out my heart.
“Jack! Marco! Cass! Eloise!”
Mom.
I spun around at her voice. She was back on the sandy part of the beach, glancing over her shoulder. Behind us, a group of frightened Massa soldiers streamed out of the jungle. Marco Ramsay, Cass Williams, and his sister, Eloise, were standing at either side of me. And that was when I began to notice the fish. Because a really ugly one whipped my left ankle with its fin.
“They look nasty,” Eloise said.
“They speak highly of you,” Cass replied.
Eloise looked at him, completely baffled. “Who, the Massa?”
“No, the fish,” Cass said. “Aren’t you talking about the—”
“I’m talking about those guys!” Eloise said, pointing to the frantic soldiers. “Do you hear Sister Nancy—I mean, Jack’s mom? She’s warning us to stay out of their way.”
From deep in the trees, I could hear the shrill screech of a poison-spitting vizzeet—followed by the guttural cry of a soldier in great pain. The Massa headquarters was on the other side of the jungle, and their soldiers and scientists were running here to see what had happened.
They’d felt the rumble, but they had no idea about the rift. And about the monsters who had escaped.
“Aw, man, what a trap,” said Marco. “Those critters? They’re like, woo-hoo, Greek dinner, free delivery!”
Some of the Massa were laying their bloodied pals on the sand. Others were running in confusion and panic down the muddy, fish-strewn beach toward us. Some were barfing in the reeds, nauseated by the violent motion of the earth. Mom was trying to calm them all down, tell them what had happened in the caldera. She wore a Massa-brown robelike uniform like something from a fashion catalog in 1643. The soldiers respected her, but they didn’t know she was (a) my mom and (b) a rebel spy. And Torquin, our beloved seven-foot bodyguard, was directly behind us, picking his nose, which he did when he was nervous.
“We watched Aly go, Jack,” Cass said. “What are we going to do?”
It was hard to think. There was another huge problem none of us wanted to talk about—Uhla’ar had taken the Loculus of Strength with him. If we didn’t find all seven of the magic Atlantean Loculi, our G7W gene would kill us on schedule by our fourteenth birthdays. So if even one Loculus was missing, we were toast.
The fish were distracting me now, and I pulled us all back onto more solid ground. As we moved, the Massa bellowed to each other, mostly in Greek. They were pushing and jostling, positioning themselves to ogle the shipwreck. Fifty or so yards down the muddy slope the ship’s remains rose out of the muck like a dinosaur skeleton. It canted to one side, its mast tilted and cracked. Seaweed hung from its crossbeams like long-forgotten laundry, and the wooden hull was lumped with barnacles. Weirdly, after more than a century underwater, the ship’s name was still visible on the hull.
The Enigma.
“Dudes, call me crazy,” Marco said, pushing a couple of the soldiers out of our way, “but you think the answer might be out there, in the ship?”
“You’re crazy,” Cass said.
Marco’s size-thirteen feet made slurping sounds in the mud as he stepped toward the ship. “Okay, stay with me now . . . That ship belonged to what’s his face, right? The guy who discovered the island in the eighteen hundreds. Marvin or Berman.”
“Herman Wenders,” Cass said.
“Right,” Marco said. “So I’m thinking, we go out there and explore the ruins. Wenders was supposed to be a genius, right? What if he left behind important stuff—you know, maps, notebooks, secrets? I mean, this
is the guy that discovered the rift, right? Maybe he knows how to get in and out of it without all the bad consequences.”
“We’ll be like pirates.” Eloise began striding toward the ship with an exaggerated limp. “Argggh! Yo-ho-ho, avast and ahoy! Batten the britches! Poop the decks!”
From the look on Cass’s face, he wished his long-lost sister were still lost.
Torquin’s gloomy expression melted, and he snorted bubbles through his freshly picked bulbous nose. That would be a disturbing sight under normal conditions, but it was worse now. These days he looked like the Hulk dipped into an acid bath. His face was still black with burn marks from a car explosion in Greece, and his once-red hair was just a few blackened clumps. “Ha. She said poop. Funny girl.”
“I say we go back to the rift and offer the king a trade,” Cass murmured. “We take Aly, he takes Eloise.”
Hearing that, Eloise picked up a dead eel and threw it at him. He giggled and ducked. Like typical sibs who’d been fighting all their lives. Which was strange because until recently Cass didn’t even know he had a sister. With their parents in jail and their lives scattered among foster families, it was like they needed to make up for lost time.
“So I try to be serious,” Marco said with exasperation, “and this is what I get.”
“They’re blowing off steam,” I said. “Trying to be normal.”
I couldn’t blame them. If old Herman Wenders hadn’t come to this godforsaken island in the first place, maybe the Karai followers would never have organized the institute. And then no one would have discovered the Atlantean G7W gene that made a superpower out of your biggest talent, but killed you at fourteen. And I would be a normal thirteen-year-old kid in Indiana, worrying about math and sometimes being whomped by Barry Reese. True, I’d be about to drop dead, but at least I’d be blissfully ignorant about that. And I wouldn’t have wasted all these past weeks looking for seven Loculi to cure us—which we now knew we would never find. And Aly would still be here.
But he had, and they did, and it was, and I’m not, and we did, and she isn’t. So in four months I would be an ex-Jack, the G7W Kid with No Talent.
I wondered if I’d have a chance to say good-bye to my dad. Was he still in the airport in Greece, where we’d left him? Would I ever be able to contact him?
“Earth to Jack?” Cass said.
I looked around into the mass of confusion. “Okay, if we do nothing, we’re dead,” I said. “The Massa are up in a twist about the earthquake and the ship. That won’t last forever. They’re going to turn on us. Marco, visiting the ship is a cool idea. But I say we try to get Aly now.”
“Us and what army?” Cass said, looking back toward the jungle.
Marco puffed out his chest. “Who needs an army when you have Marco the Magnificent?”
“Did you see that . . . thing that was stuck in the rift?” Cass said. “It was huge. And . . . and . . . green. And magnificenter than you!”
“You mean the thing that I stabbed, thank you very much?” Marco said.
“Yeah, but what about all those disgusting creatures who escaped? Listen. Just listen!” Cass turned toward the jungle, which echoed with the hooting and cackling of panicked animals. “You see what’s been happening to the Massa. There are vizzeets and griffins and vromaskis in there—hundreds of them!”
Marco nodded thoughtfully. “Well, yeah, even human physical perfection has its limits.”
“That’s the most modest thing I’ve ever heard you say,” Cass said.
“So we’ll use the Loculus of Invisibility and the Loculus of Flight. Just pass ’em by. They won’t even know we’re—” Marco cut himself off in midsentence. “Uh, one of you guys did take the backpack, didn’t you?”
Cass shook his head. I shook my head. My heart was dropping like a freight elevator.
“Nope,” Torquin added.
“And the shards of the Loculus of Healing?” Marco continued.
“Everything happened so fast—” I said.
Marco put his palm over his face. “Man. I thought I was supposed to be the dumb one! Guess I’ll dust off three seats in the doofus corner.”
“Five,” Torquin said, counting on his sausage-sized fingers. “I mean, four.”
A deep rumbling noise cut the conversation short. For a moment I saw two Casses. The ground shook, as if a silent subway train were passing underneath. I bent my knees instinctively. I could hear a distant crawwwwwk—the Enigma creaking as it shifted with the earth’s movement.
Cass held on to Marco. I held on to Torquin. My body lurched left, right, up, down, as if the world itself had slipped on its axis. Every other noise—seagulls, the distant crashing of the surf—stopped.
Then, as quickly as the movement began, it ended.
In the silence, I could hear Brother Dimitrios’s voice cry, “Earthquake!”
“Duh,” Torquin said.
Cass groaned. “Ohhhh, I feel motion sick. The world is about to end and I am going to die in a pile of my own puke.”
“Swallow three raw eggs,” Torquin said. “Very good for nausea.”
“This is just the beginning,” Cass moaned. “It’s like Aly said. If the rift opened, Atlantis would rise, and the continental plates would shift. Then, wham. Tidal waves, earthquakes. New York and LA go underwater. Massive fires sweep the land . . . dust clouds block the sun.”
“Cass, we can’t panic,” I said.
“Don’t be a denier, Jack!” Cass said. “This is exactly what happened in the time of the dinosaurs—and you know what became of them.”
Marco wiped sweat from his brow. “I don’t think we have a choice. Jack’s right. Face down those critters! Into the rift!”
Whenever Marco moved, he moved fast. In a microsecond he was dragging a protesting Cass back up the beach toward the jungle. I followed behind.
A scream greeted us as we got to the tree line. It was loud and human, maybe twenty yards deep into the jungle. It rose to a horrific, pained bellow, then stopped abruptly. I squinted into the trees, dreading what I might see. But even in the brightness of the afternoon sun, the thick treetops cast shadows, making the jungle nearly pitch-dark.
“Wh-wh-who do you think that is?” Cass asked.
“Was, from the sound of it,” Marco said.
“S-see what I mean?” Cass said, backing away. “Someone just died in there. We could be next. I am staying out here in the light. I’ll take goons in robes over human-eating beasts any day.”
An acrid stench of rotten flesh wafted out of the jungle, and Cass gagged.
“Whoa. Beans for lunch, Torquin?” Marco said, waving his arms.
“No. A Twinkie,” Torquin replied.
I was focusing on a dark shadow in the jungle behind Cass. “Guys . . .” I squeaked. “Look.”
Marco’s eyes fixed on the black shape. His body tensed. “Cass,” he said softly. “Do. Not. Move.”
Cass spun around. With a sound that was halfway between an animal roar and the grinding of metal, a hose-beaked vromaski emerged from the jungle shadows. It launched its boar-like body toward Cass. It flexed its claws and its nose tube folded backward, revealing three sets of razor teeth.
CHAPTER TWO
DINNER FOR TWEETY
IN MOVIES AND books, it always seemed dumb to me when a character shouts “No-o-o-o!” to an attacking wild animal. As if the animal understands English. As if it’ll stop in midattack and say, “Pardon me, you’d prefer not to be torn apart limb from limb? All right then, I’ll go away, so sorry.”
So what did I say when the vromaski was about to sink its teeth into Cass?
“No-o-o!”
Here’s the weird thing. The beast seemed to freeze for a nanosecond in midair. Its eyes flickered toward me, but I felt no fear. Everything seemed to stop and I had this crazy feeling I could reach into its brain and make it change course.
Then I blinked, and Marco threw me to the ground out of harm’s way.
I rolled away to the left,
then scrambled to my feet. That crazy frozen moment had flown out of my head, and I looked around frantically. Where was Cass? I dreaded what I would see. I didn’t expect that it would be Marco with his right hand wrapped around the vromaski’s left tusk. The creature was spitting and squealing, its legs flailing in the air.
Marco’s left hand pinched his own nose shut. “Whew, take a bath, Bruno,” he said. Planting his feet firmly, Marco flung the vromaski away from Cass. In a spray of its own saliva, the beast rocketed over the tree canopy, disappearing into darkness. I waited for the thud it would make as it hit the ground. But that didn’t happen.
Instead, the beast’s growls became helpless squeals, high overhead. It was stuck in the branches.
“That was emosewa. . . .” squeaked Cass. “Thanks.”
Torquin nodded. “What he said.”
Grimacing, Marco wiped his hand on the trunk of a nearby tree. “Anybody have a Handi Wipe? Let’s get on with this before Porky comes back for revenge.”
Cass struggled to his feet. “So . . . wait. We’re just going to move on, like this didn’t happen? Just march into the woods like four walking snack bars?”
“Hey, I protected you once, didn’t I?” Marco said, putting his arm around Cass.
I had to admit, I admired Marco’s bravery. But I was having doubts about his sanity.
“Stay with me, you two,” he said. “Think about Aly.”
I already was. In my mind I could still hear her screams, see her struggling. She was tough and fearless and smart. But against Uhla’ar she didn’t stand a chance. Especially if he had the Loculus of Strength.
We couldn’t just abandon Aly. If she was still alive, somewhere in the past, we had to get her.
I glanced toward Cass. He looked tiny and vulnerable under Marco’s arm. “What about my sister?” he said.
Eloise. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her still striding toward the ship. “Going back will be a risk,” I said. “They don’t seem to be noticing her.”
“She’s nine,” Marco added. “She was the best of all the trainees, and the Massa respected her. They’ll take care of her. Hey, if we can rescue Aly, it’ll be a piece of cake rescuing Eloise when we come back.”