The Mad Mask gulped. “That can’t be good.”
“It isn’t,” Kyle said grimly. “Bouring will become nothing more than a town full of statues. They won’t be dead, but it’ll be worse — they’ll be frozen in time, forever! We have to stop him!”
Jack was thunderstruck, speechless. Erasmus, of course, wasn’t. “How do you plan to do that?” Erasmus asked. “He has years to bury that time capsule. And we have no way of finding him. Besides, in our time, the time capsule was buried, which means we didn’t stop Lundergaard.”
Kyle rolled his eyes. “Don’t start with me about time paradoxes again. There’s no evidence —”
“Lundergaard himself said that time paradoxes could happen.”
“You’re gonna trust Lundergaard? About anything?”
“Kyle, think about everything that’s happened since we arrived in 1987. Has anything we’ve done changed the past? Or has it just reinforced it?”
Kyle grudgingly took a moment to think … and realized that Erasmus was right. Everything he’d done in 1987 had only confirmed his own present. In his own time, he’d never known Sheriff Monroe had a brother — boom, Sammy Monroe ends up going to military school, leaving Bouring because of Kyle’s actions. In his own time, his grandmother’s Christmas snow statue was chipped; what was the first thing Kyle had done upon walking into her house? He’d chipped the statue. The house on Thorul Court, the one that had never recovered from being burned — it had burned just hours ago thanks to Kyle’s presence in 1987. Everywhere he turned his mind, every memory he filtered through his massive intellect, screamed out one thing to him: He could not change the past.
“It’s too dangerous even to try,” he concluded.
“There could be a way around time paradoxes,” Jack said. “Lundergaard used to talk about it … I don’t remember the details,” he added, sheepish and ashamed.
“No, no. It doesn’t matter. Even if there’s a way around it … Even if the parallel universe theory is right and we stop Lundergaard here and now, that means there’s still a parallel universe out there where the people of Bouring are frozen in time. What about them?”
“True …”
The three of them sat there (well, Jack and Kyle sat — Erasmus loafed in a pocket) and pondered the problem. And then an idea exploded like fireworks in Kyle’s mind. “I’ve got it!”
“Got what?”
“We can’t stop Lundergaard in 1987, right?”
“Right,” both Jack and Erasmus agreed at the same time.
“That means we have to stop him in our time!”
“Well, duh, genius,” Erasmus said. “But we can’t get to our time!”
Kyle grinned. “We don’t have to….”
“We both need to go,” Mairi told Mike, even though he was once again being all superheroey and noble and telling her that it was too dangerous for her to go with him.
“I do not know if I can fly all the way back to the burial spot while carrying you,” Mike said. And if anyone else had said it, Mairi would have thought they were lying in order to protect her. But Mike didn’t seem capable of lying, and his face was open and naked with anguish as he spoke.
“You need to take me,” she insisted. “I won’t let you go alone. You’re hurt and your powers are going away. You’ll need me to watch your back.” Inspiration struck. “You were able to glide all the way here from the lighthouse without using a lot of your powers, right? Maybe if we went up on the roof and jumped from there, you could get some gliding in, too. Make it a little easier on you.”
Mike pondered, then nodded gravely. “Very well, Mairi. I will let you accost me.”
“Assist, you mean.”
“That’s not a bad word?”
“No.”
“Hmm. All right, then. Let’s go.”
With that, they opened the window and climbed out. Mike went first, digging his hands into the side of the house to form handholds for Mairi. She tried not to look down, but she couldn’t help it. For a moment, she felt dizzy and nauseated, but then she closed her eyes and forced herself to keep climbing. Soon, Mike was hauling her over the storm gutter and onto the roof.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
Was she? Heck, yeah!
He lifted Mairi and heaved her over his shoulder. It was disconcerting to hear him grunt as he did it, one more indication of how weak he’d become.
“Hold tight,” he told her, something he’d never had to say before. She thought she heard worry and maybe a little fear in his voice for the first time ever. Mairi grabbed the collar of his cape and gripped it with all her strength.
“Ready?”
“Ready.”
He raced forward as fast as he could … so much slower than he used to be able to. When they got to the edge of the roof, at the last possible instant, Mike leaped.
Mairi’s breath caught in her chest.
And they fell.
Wind whipped past Mairi and she was so shocked that she forgot to scream as the ground rushed up at them, huge and fatal.
Just when she thought they would smash into the ground and splatter into a million pieces, Mike groaned and they slowed. They weren’t flying — not really — but they were hovering about ten feet off the ground.
“Let me … catch my … breath …” Mike panted.
“Take your time.”
He nodded and gulped in air, then began to run, climbing a little bit as he did. Soon they were running two stories straight up, making a beeline for the site of the time capsule burial. On the streets below, she noticed clusters of zombies, shambling along toward the same place. As they ran overhead, the zombies took notice and moved more quickly, unerringly following them along the streets and alleyways of Bouring toward the burial site.
“Faster,” Mairi urged, feeling guilty for even saying it.
“I’ll try,” Mike said, making her feel even more guilty. And did — he tried and he succeeded, putting on a little more speed so that they could outpace the trailing zombies.
As they ran over and past Mairi’s neighborhood, she was seized by a sudden, crazy urge to ask Mighty Mike if they could go check on Sashimi. Just to make sure her cat was safe. She knew it was foolish. She knew the world was ending around her. For some reason, though, Sashimi was suddenly the most important thing in the world to her.
Maybe because it was something she felt she could control.
Stop being silly, she thought. You have something more important to do.
Namely: getting to the site of the time capsule burial. Mike had been right and wrong at the same time. Yes, they had already looked in one 1987, the 1987 time capsule. But there was a second 1987 — the plot of land where that time capsule was supposed to have been buried all those years ago. Mairi was willing to bet that something else had been buried there, something that would give them a clue as to the zombie plague rampaging through Bouring. Maybe even something that would stop the zombies.
She hoped. She hoped and hoped and hoped it was true. Because if not … well, if not, then maybe she and Mike should have just run out of Bouring and tried to get help from the government.
Too late to change her mind now. They were coming into view of the site, and …
And oh, wow.
It was like half the town of Bouring was there. A lot of people were collapsed on the ground, as she’d seen before, most of them piled around a single point. Walter Lundergaard. He stood on the dais near the open time capsule, his arms outstretched to the sky, his head thrown back. He did not move, but there was a menace about him nonetheless. Through his clothing, lines of glowing light pulsated, as though he wore some kind of circuitry there.
Bodies arrayed around him like flower petals that have fallen off a tree.
There were still some zombies, stumbling around, now touching one another. Mairi watched as each touched zombie crumpled to a heap. Occasionally, a moving one would break off from the pack, lurch toward Lundergaard, and then …
And t
hen a burst of light would explode from the zombie, washing over Lundergaard, and the zombie would join its motionless buddies in a heap on the ground.
What were they doing?
As they closed in, Mairi fumbled for her video camera in her pocket. She almost dropped it, but caught it at the last second and aimed it at Walter Lundergaard. His eerie, glowing form. His expression was almost satanic, his grin so evil that Mairi could barely abide looking at it … but she zoomed in anyway. Zoomed in on his insane face.
And then he spoke to her:
“Record what you like, girl. Soon, none of this will matter. Soon, I will be lord and master of all time and space!”
Okay. Right. Mairi didn’t know if she should laugh her head off or run screaming.
She didn’t have time to decide — that’s when the zombies noticed her and Mighty Mike. They looked up and they began to fidget, like cats pawing at mice behind clear glass. As the zombies following them along the streets poured into the area, the ground below Mairi became thick with sluggish moving forms, all of them now grasping upward.
“There’s the 1987 plot,” Mairi said, pointing. There weren’t too many zombies in that area. Not yet.
Still, Mairi knew what she had to do. Mike was weak — she could feel his muscles trembling with the effort of carrying her. He wouldn’t be able to hold off the zombies and dig out the 1987 plot before being overwhelmed by the horde.
“Put me down over there,” she said, pointing to a spot far from the 1987 area. “I’ll move around and distract them. Run as far as I can. I’ll give you time to dig out whatever’s down there.”
Mike said nothing, but moved in the direction she’d indicated. She kept filming, getting a good sweeping shot of some zombies headed for Lundergaard to “drop off” their supply of … whatever. She didn’t like the idea of becoming one of the zombies — it was inevitable that they would catch her eventually — but it was a sacrifice she was willing to make if it meant Mike could somehow stop them.
Tears rolled down her cheeks. She would never see her parents again. Or Sashimi. Or her friends from school.
Kyle.
That was all right, though. She focused on the video camera screen. She would film while running, she’d decided. So that someone else could see the video later and maybe learn from it. She had to do this. She had to —
Hey, wait! Why where there suddenly tree branches in her video screen? She looked up. What was Mike doing?
“What are you doing?” she demanded. “Put me down over there.”
While she’d been distracted, Mike had air-run over to a tall tree. Now he was lifting Mairi off his shoulder, planting her securely in some of the high branches.
“What are you doing?” she asked again. “Put me on the ground.”
“I’m sorry, Mairi,” he said with real regret. “It’s my job to protect Bouring and I failed at it. At least this way, I protected you.”
“Mike!” she shouted, and reached out for him, but he had already stepped back and she had to cling to the branches to keep from falling out of the tree and breaking her neck.
“Mike!” she screamed again as he ran off to the 1987 plot, and the army of zombies waiting there for him.
Kyle explained to Erasmus what he needed designed. Jack listened in. “That’s not a problem,” he said, catching on. “I can make something like that out of a spool of wire, a bowling ball, and some electrical tape.”
“Sorry, Jack, but this is going to have to work even if you’re not around. But I will need something else from you.” He explained quickly. Jack arched an eyebrow, then grinned in such a sinister way that Kyle was worried he might have to punch out the Mad Mask.
But the sinister intent behind the grin was clearly aimed at Walter Lundergaard, not Kyle. “I like it,” Jack said. “I like it a lot. And I can do it. I’ll need to rest a little first.” He told Kyle what he would need, and Kyle added it to his mental shopping list. There would be two gadgets built — one by Kyle and one by Jack. Kyle let Erasmus get started on some schematics as he sped down from the lighthouse, leaving Jack for the moment.
Bouring was awake now, in that 1987 way. Even in Kyle’s time, Bouring was a quiet place, but in 1987, it was even quieter. Still, there were people out and about, so Kyle couldn’t risk flying around. He would have to take the sidewalks and roads like everyone else.
He jogged to the other side of town, where he’d hidden the tools for Danny. Fortunately, his father hadn’t come to get them yet. He would need these.
Then he made his way back to Thorul Court. Lundergaard’s house fire had been put out and looked more like the way Kyle remembered it now. The area was roped off, but Kyle slipped under the ropes. The air in the house steamed. Kyle knew that even after a fire has been put out, a building can remain dangerously hot for a while. But he was indestructible. It didn’t matter.
As the epicenter of the explosion that had wrecked the house, the workshop was a disaster. Very little had survived the original explosion intact, and what had didn’t survive the ensuing fire. Kyle nearly wept at the sight of so many beautiful, beautiful computers, now reduced to useless slag.
Well, almost useless.
He couldn’t use any of the detritus to build his own supercomputer for the chronovessel, but he could scavenge the raw components to build something else. He was going to defeat Walter Lundergaard all those years in the future without ever touching the man. Or even seeing him again, for that matter.
“Think you’re so smart, huh?” Kyle asked no one in particular. “You don’t know who you’re messing with, Lundergaard. Erasmus, how’s that schematic coming along?”
“It’s ready for you.”
Kyle nodded and wiped some sweat from his upper lip. He had everything he needed spread out on the floor before him. “Walk me through it.”
With Erasmus’s instructions, Kyle began assembling … the LuBKiG!
“It stands for ‘Lundergaard Butt-Kicking Gadget,’” he informed Erasmus.
“Whatever,” said Erasmus. “Make sure you don’t build the central core out of aluminum — it’ll catalyze the reaction early and blow up in your face.”
Oops. “Okay, done. Thanks.”
The LuBKiG was simple. And the best part of it was that it used Lundergaard’s own information from his personal hard drive to ruin his plan.
If Lundergaard could put something in the time capsule that made a plasma burst to turn people into powered zombies, then Kyle could use the same data to build something that did the opposite — a gadget that would reverse the process, sucking the powers out of everyone who had them. Theoretically, once that happened, all of the stored-up temporal energy in the zombies would be released and go back where it came from.
The one problem, of course, was that Kyle couldn’t be in the twenty-first century to use the gadget. But he realized that that didn’t matter, and Lundergaard, in a way, had given him the answer. Or maybe Kyle had said it before: Everyone in the world is time traveling into the future. One second at a time.
Walter Lundergaard’s time capsule was traveling into the future, waiting for someone to dig it up.
Kyle would do the same with the LuBKiG. Bury it and let someone in his own time dig it up and use it against the zombies. Just to make sure it would activate, he cobbled together a crude timing device and a heat-sensor. When the LuBKiG was touched by anyone on the right date — the date of the zombie plague — it would automatically activate, reversing the process begun by Lundergaard’s gadget.
“But how can you be sure someone will dig it up?” Erasmus asked.
“Already thought of that,” Kyle told him, putting the finishing touches on the LuBKiG. “It’s all taken care of. That’s where Jack comes in.”
He held the LuBKiG before him and grinned proudly. “Now we’ll go re-hide the tools for Danny and then wait until night.”
“I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“Don’t I always?”
“You rea
lly don’t want me to answer that question, do you?”
“Probably not.”
Night fell in 1987 for the third time for Kyle. He flew back to the time capsule burial site and was relieved to find that no one had yet filled in the hole for this year’s time capsule.
“This is gonna get dirty,” Kyle said under his breath, and dove into the hole.
It went down a little more than six feet. Kyle dug down another two with his bare hands and placed the LuBKiG there, then covered it up with a foot of dirt. In a day or so, he knew, the deputies would give up their search for the time capsule Lundergaard had stolen. Nineteen eighty-seven’s burial would be called off and the hole would be filled in.
“Now to leave a clue,” Kyle said, and flew back to the lighthouse.
“Why the lighthouse?” Erasmus asked. “No one goes here. Not in 1987, not in our own time. It’s a crazy place to leave a clue.”
“It’s the best place,” Kyle said, touching down near Jack, who was staring up at the stars. “I know it’s the one thing in Bouring that will be exactly the same until our time. It stood abandoned like this until Mairi’s mom started up the museum. And she cleaned it up and did basic maintenance, but she also wanted the lighthouse to be as close to its original construction and features as possible, so she only made one serious change. A computer, to run the lantern.”
“That computer is still decades in the future. It can’t help us now. We can’t leave a message on it.”
Kyle grinned. “No. But we know it will be here. The location of the lighthouse won’t change between now and our time.” He gazed up at the sky. At the stars. And at the things that weren’t stars at all. Planets. Comets.
Satellites.
“Can you do it, Jack? Can you do what I asked?” He handed over a pile of electronic junk.
The Mad Mask nodded slowly, looking at the components in his hands. “It only needs to work once, right?”
“Yes.”
“It’ll tax my powers,” Jack said soberly. “But I can do it.”
“Do what?” Erasmus demanded.