“Of course.” He slapped his forehead. “I should have seen this coming.”
Claudia’s inexplicable absence suddenly made sense, but he had only a moment to fear for her safety before self-preservation moved to the top of his agenda. The wooden grizzly dropped onto all fours and charged at him with alarming speed. A full-throated roar made clear its intentions, as if its documented body count were not unnerving enough. This was no cuddly teddy bear, like the one in the Roosevelt collection; it was pure animal fury.
Time for evasive action, Artie realized.
Yanking hard on the wheel, Artie spun the cart around. The narrow corridor made a U-turn difficult, and he accidentally knocked over a stack of wooden packing crates. The boxes made a huge racket as they avalanched to the floor. He hoped there was nothing particularly fragile and/or lethal inside the crates, but there was no time to check. Squealing tires laid down rubber as he peeled away from the bear, which chased after him with bloodthirsty fervor.
Artie shifted the flivver into high gear, pushing the battery-powered auto to its limits. He glanced back over his shoulder to see the grizzly gaining on him. The bear was trouble enough, but he couldn’t help wondering where the rest of the totem pole—the puma and the thunderbird—were lurking. His gaze darted from side to side, then turned upward, keeping an eye out for the bear’s savage accomplices. He had to assume they were on the prowl as well.
The more the merrier, he groused. Like I really have time for this!
The auto reached the end of a corridor. He took a tight left turn, trying to shake the bear, but the creature had his scent now and was not about to abandon the hunt. Keeping one hand on the wheel, Artie reached beneath his jacket for his Tesla, only to discover that he had left it in his office. He mentally chastised himself for not thinking to bring it along. Was lack of sleep to blame, or had he simply had what Claudia insisted on calling a senior moment?
“Hardly,” he grumbled. “It just slipped my mind.”
Regardless, he was going to have to improvise.
He mentally mapped out the area in his head. The canned food aisle was right around the corner and he accelerated through it, hoping that perhaps the various preternatural delicacies on display might distract the hungry grizzly . . . and maybe even give it a serious bellyache. The assorted tin cans, bottled preserves, and freeze-dried treats lined up on the shelves looked deceptively harmless and maybe even tempting, but most of these edible artifacts were more than enough to make the carved bear wish that it had never awoken from hibernation. Just wait, Artie thought, until the grizzly took a bite of those sardines from the Shackleton Expedition, or gulped down the original can of worms. . . .
Either foodstuff, or any number of their shelf mates, would have settled the bear’s hash nicely, but no such luck. Intent on devouring Artie, the grizzly thundered past the dangerous goodies without even giving the crammed shelves a sideways glance. Apparently, it had its timber heart set on human prey.
On the bright side, the bear’s voracious appetite gave Artie reason to hope that it hadn’t snacked on Claudia yet. Not that there was much meat on the teen to begin with. Especially split three ways.
Don’t even think like that, he scolded himself. Claudia had survived the Warehouse’s more temperamental side before. She could do it again. I haven’t wasted all this time babysitting just to let her get eaten by a peckish totem pole!
The pantry aisle came to an end. Artie racked his mind for another stratagem. There had to be a way out of this primeval predicament. The Warehouse held many hazards, but its spacious confines also hid the occasional much-needed miracle.
You just needed to know where to look.
Shrewd eyes scanned the shelves as he sped the flivver down another corridor. Familiar landmarks, like the zeppelin on the horizon, helped keep him oriented. His brain ran through the inventory, searching for something that would serve as a grizzly deterrent. What else was there in this vicinity?
Reagan’s jelly beans? Van Gogh’s ear? The seventy-six trombones?
None of those were going to do him any good right now, but what about . . .
“That’s it!”
The ideal solution was right up ahead. He just needed to get there before he became bear chow.
Unfortunately, the rampaging beast was practically breathing down his neck. If the flivver had possessed an exhaust pipe, which it didn’t, the grizzly would have been choking on the fumes. The artifact in question was still several yards away. Artie realized he wasn’t going to make it there unless he did something drastic.
And extremely uncomfortable.
I’m going to regret this tomorrow.
Shifting gears, he slammed the cart into reverse. The auto sped backward on a collision course with the bear. Flinching, Artie hurled himself from the driver’s seat. He hit the floor hard, rolling across the rough concrete. The hard hat protected his skull, but his glasses went flying. He could only hope they wouldn’t break.
Less than ten feet behind him, the flivver crashed into the bear. Its rear bumper crumpled against the grizzly’s burly forequarters. Unfazed by the impact, the bear swiped the auto with its paw, flipping the cart onto its side. The crunching of abused metal made Artie cringe; he hated seeing any artifact damaged. Repairing the antique vehicle was not going to be cheap. There went next month’s maintenance budget.
Provided he lived to worry about it.
He groped for his glasses but couldn’t find them. Lifting his head from the floor, he looked around. The shelves and their contents blurred myopically. Now he knew how Mr. Magoo felt, assuming that cartoon character had ever been pursued by a man-eating wooden grizzly bear.
Heavy paws pounded behind him. Artie didn’t waste time looking back to see how close the bear was. Ignoring his battered bones, he sprinted to the desired shelf and felt around for the artifact he was looking for. Without his glasses, he had to rely more on his memory than his vision, and he fumbled hastily with a ball of yarn, a pencil sharpener, a ceramic teapot, a set of Russian nesting dolls, and a vinyl LP in its original sleeve. None of which were precisely what he needed at the moment. He dug around at the back of the shelf.
“Stop hiding,” he muttered. “I know you’re around here somewhere.”
His fingers closed around a single dusty brick.
Right where it belonged . . . thank goodness!
Snatching the brick from the shelf, he turned to see the grizzly bearing down on him, no pun intended. Sap drooled from its slobbering jaws. Artie knew he would have only one try at this. It would have to count.
He hurled the brick at the bear.
It bounced harmlessly off the grizzly’s snout, landing directly in its path. Artie didn’t falter; he hadn’t expected to knock the bear out with the brick. He was staking his life on the artifact’s history, not its mass.
“Ich bin ein Berliner,” he whispered.
The impact activated the brick, which suddenly replicated itself with preternatural speed. One brick became two became four became sixteen, multiplying until they formed an impenetrable brick wall around the bear. Barbed wire sprouted atop the wall. Phantom searchlights strobed the bricks. The echoes of bygone sirens wailed briefly in the background. Graffiti, spray-painted across the bricks in German, hinted at the brick’s former location.
The Berlin Wall.
“Welcome to the Cold War,” Artie said. “No freedom for you.”
The trapped bear roared from the other side of the Wall. Wooden claws clawed impotently at the unyielding bricks. The beast threw its ponderous weight against the barrier, again and again.
Artie wasn’t worried. The Berlin Wall had stood for nearly thirty years. It would hold the frustrated grizzly until he had time to properly neutralize it. If only the rest of the totem pole was also accounted for.
“One down, two to go.”
Winded, he slumped against the shelf for a few moments before proceeding to search for his glasses. He stepped cautiously, dreading a sudden
crunch beneath the soles of his sneakers. A glint of light caught his eye, and he spotted the lenses lying on the floor outside the Wall. He bent over to retrieve them, then held them up to the light. He had lucked out: they were unbroken. He wiped the lenses with his sleeve prior to putting them back on. The Warehouse came back into focus.
“That’s better.”
At last, he could afford to worry about Claudia. The bear might be caged, but that still left the mountain lion and the thunderbird on the loose. He couldn’t relax until he knew Claudia was safe, no matter how much she got on his nerves sometimes.
He looked around, wondering which way to go.
The unmistakable roar of a lion, coming from somewhere to the east, answered that question.
“All right. I’m coming.”
He wished to God that he had remembered his Tesla gun.
CHAPTER
17
WAREHOUSE 13
So much for losing the totem.
Claudia had hoped to ditch the feral carving at the obelisk, but a vicious growl tore that bit of wishful thinking to shreds. She spun around to see the mountain lion bounding after her, at the far end of yet another interminable corridor. Racing paws propelled the beast with feline grace and power.
Wait a second, Claudia thought. Blinking in surprise, it took her a heartbeat to register that only the lion was in evidence. Where was the rest of the pole?
That mystery would have to wait until she wasn’t in immediate danger of being mauled. Running for her life, she started to wish that she had stayed inside the Niagara barrel. Now she needed another helpful artifact to save her skin. Her eyes scanned the shelves as she skedaddled past them as expeditiously as almost anyone being chased by a painted wooden puma would. Her arms churned at her sides. Her sneakers slapped against the pavement.
“C’mon, Warehouse, old pal. Don’t let me down!”
Random artifacts flickered past her peripheral vision. A pygmy blowpipe. An electron microscope. A complete set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, circa 1966. A bag of industrial-strength catnip would come in really handy right now, but the pet toy collection was way on the other side of the Warehouse, next to the aquarium section. Her odds of getting there before the lion brought her down like a wounded antelope were only slightly smaller than those of Mrs. Frederic letting her hair down and dancing the Macarena. In other words, zilch.
She would have to make do with whatever was immediately at hand.
So where exactly was she, anyway? What with jumping off a lighthouse, scampering atop a shelf, and taking a ride in a pickle barrel—not to mention fleeing madly from a homicidal totem pole—she had understandably lost her bearings. She struggled to place herself, while keeping one eye on the lion chasing after her.
A large jade Buddha rang a bell, as did fragments of a crystal chandelier from the Paris Opera House. It seemed to her that she had been this way not too long ago, like maybe in the last few weeks. What had she been doing around here? Putting something away?
A metaphorical lightbulb ignited above her head. All at once it hit her, along with a possible way to declaw the psycho pussycat. She knew exactly which artifact she needed.
The trick was going to be getting to it before the lion got to her.
Was there any way to get the creature to back off for a few minutes? She briefly considered going on the offensive. After much wheedling on Claudia’s part, Myka had been trying to teach the younger woman some nifty martial arts moves, albeit with mixed results. Claudia flirted with trying to discourage the lion with a spinning roundhouse kick or an openhanded strike to the snout, but quickly decided against it. She was no black belt. Odds were, she’d just end up breaking a toe, which really would put her in the position of an injured gazelle.
Not where she wanted to end up.
Forget the kung fu moves. She needed to get out ahead of the lion, Warehouse-style. Her darting gaze fell upon a cratered gray rock held down by overlapping strips of Velcro. Plucked from the Sea of Tranquillity by Apollo 11 decades before she was born, the moon rock was on permanent loan from NASA, due to certain extraordinary qualities it had manifested upon splashing down to Earth. Qualities that just might keep her out of the lion’s claws for a few minutes more.
“Come to Momma, you beautiful chunk of lunar lava!”
She yanked the rock free from its Velcro restraints. Gripping it in her fist, she instantly experienced its effect. Gravity slackened its pull on her by roughly five-sixths, leaving her oddly light-headed and only about eighteen pounds. Her soles lifted slightly, so that she felt like she was walking on air. Her mouth tasted like Tang.
And just in time.
The lion pounced. Claudia jumped—and went bounding into the air as though her sneakers were made of Flubber. The hard concrete floor turned into a trampoline, at least as far as she was concerned, and she leaped away from the startled lion like a redheaded grasshopper.
“One small step for me, one giant step for geek-kind!”
As thrilling as these microgravity maneuvers were, she knew she couldn’t hang on to the moon rock too long. Artie had briefed her on its dangers when she had first started working here. Unless she let go of it soon, she would quickly achieve escape velocity and wind up the first woman on the moon, minus a space suit. Explosive decompression would make being torn apart by a timber lion seem neat and tidy by comparison.
In short, the moon rock was just a temporary fix, but hopefully it would keep her out of the lion’s reach long enough to get to the artifact that might actually save her bacon. If she remembered right, that particular item was only a lunar hop, skip, and jump away. She made like an astronaut down the hall, with the snarling lion in hot pursuit.
It growled unhappily every time Claudia jumped away from its claws.
The designated shelf came into view. As it happened, the artifact was on one of the upper shelves, making it harder to get at. A pile of wooden crates spilled into the hall, waiting to be unpacked. A large medieval tapestry hung like a curtain over a neighboring stretch of shelves. Bouncing up and down, she tried to catch a glimpse of the artifact, but it was hard to focus while taking her very first moon walk. Was that it there? She couldn’t tell, what with all the jumping around. It had better be, she thought. Or I may have to choose between being eaten or going into orbit.
Neither prospect was particularly appealing.
Rather than trying to grab the artifact in mid-bound, she leaped to the top of the piled boxes, which wobbled scarily beneath her. “Please tell me somebody stacked these things carefully.” The markings on the crates provided little indication of their contents, but the top box felt surprisingly hot to her feet, almost like there was a miniature volcano inside it. A scorching gust of overheated air shot up through a crack in the crate. The blast rustled her hair and lifted the corners of her jacket. Bizarrely, it smelled like pineapples.
A roar revealed that the lion was still hot on her trail. Determined to sink its chiseled fangs into its prey, the beast started scrambling up the boxes after her. Just her luck, it had to be a mountain lion and thus quite adept at climbing. It was going to reach the top in no time at all.
Her feet began to lift off from the crates, losing contact with the solid wood. She grabbed a shelf to keep from floating all the way up to the ceiling. Realizing that the moon rock was getting too strong, she hurled it away from her before she could say good-bye to gravity altogether. The lunar fragment ricocheted off a gilded Egyptian sarcophagus before drifting up toward the ceiling like a lost helium balloon. Recovering it was going to be a bitch. . . .
She dropped back onto the crate, suddenly feeling a whole lot heavier than she had just instants before. The stack teetered precipitously, but that was the least of her worries right now. The lion was only a few crates beneath her, nearly nipping at her heels. A furious claw slashed at her ankle. She yanked it back just in time, nearly tumbling off the crate. White knuckles clung to the shelf for dear life. What was it with her and dangerou
s heights today?