Oh. Wait. Not an arm. An armory.
“Are you going to shoot them?” she demanded. She thought of her parents. Of Kyle’s parents. Of her friends and teachers. Everyone she knew was in Bouring, and any one of them could be roaming the streets, looking to hurt someone, the way Mr. Rogers and Miss Schwartz had tried to hurt her. And the sheriff was thinking about the weapons stored at his office?
“You can’t kill them!” she pleaded. “They don’t know what they’re doing! It’s not their fault! Let Mighty Mike figure out a way to —”
Sheriff Monroe stopped walking and spun around to glare at Mairi, his eyes wide and angry, his jaw set. He jerked her arm once, as if to make sure he had her attention, but Mairi could focus on nothing but him.
“Listen, Mairi: I don’t know what’s going on here. No one knows what’s going on here. My job is to protect people, and right now you’re the only person I see who needs protecting, so I’m going to do whatever I can for you. And, yeah, if I can help those other poor folks, I’m gonna do that, too. But if it comes down to you or them, or me or them, well, I have to be prepared to do what has to be done. Do you understand?”
Mairi opened her mouth to answer, but the sheriff’s eyes went even wider and he said something that sounded like, “Uch!” and he collapsed right in front of her, his nerveless, strengthless fingers releasing her hand as he crumpled to the street in a heap.
Behind him, grinning and making a strange mewling sound, stood Melissa Masterton, Bouring Middle School’s guidance counselor. Or, as Kyle referred to her: the Great Nemesis. Ms. Masterton’s eyes were crazy as she glared at Mairi.
Worse yet: Her mouth was smeared red, her teeth stained scarlet….
Mairi couldn’t move; her heart skipped a beat, then skipped another one, she was so shocked. Had Ms. Masterton actually been biting —
And then — with relief — Mairi realized that it wasn’t blood. It was just Ms. Masterton’s usual garish red lipstick, smeared all over her face and teeth. Whew!
Ms. Masterton stared as though looking straight through Mairi, who was still rooted to the spot, too terrified even to run. For a moment that seemed to last an infinity, Mairi watched and waited for Ms. Masterton to attack her, her mind spinning, wondering how long the guidance counselor would make her wait before lunging….
Finally, Mairi’s muscles unlocked; she shook herself out of her shock-induced paralysis and ran. Ms. Masterton jerked and advanced on Mairi. Mairi fled back along Major Street. Ms. Masterton loped along after her, swinging her arms and making a terrifying, high-pitched keening sound, a desperate sort of noise that made Mairi think of the howl of starving babies, turned up to eleven. She ran as fast as she could — Ms. Masterton had longer legs, but Mairi was younger, smaller, faster.
And more desperate.
She ran down Major Street, her breath setting fire to her lungs, her legs protesting, her feet pounding the pavement. What was happening to the town? Why hadn’t it affected her? Or the sheriff? What about her parents? What about —
Oh, no!
Her thoughts flew away like frightened sparrows as she spied a throng of people advancing up Major Street, headed right toward her. There was no mistaking their loose-limbed, chaotic gaits — these were more strange zombies, now formed into a posse. They shoved and pushed one another out of the way, but did not seem to actually hurt one another, instead moving with terrifying intensity toward her.
Mairi skidded to a halt and checked over her shoulder. Ms. Masterton bounded down Major Street. Mairi did not want to imagine what would happen if Ms. Masterton caught her.
She forced herself to remain calm, not to panic. She needed a place to hide. Somewhere where she would be safe until Mighty Mike could rescue her.
But what if Mighty Mike has become one of them by now?
The thought was too horrible, the question too heartbreaking — Mairi forced it right out of her head, ejecting it like a weak and fragile baby tooth.
Instead, she gathered her wits about her and looked right, then left. A furniture store — BOURING FURNITURE — FOR YOUR EXCITING LIFESTYLE! — on one side, a bank on the other. The furniture store was more inviting, probably because it had a big window in front. A nice, big breakable window.
Mairi darted to that side of the street and found a chunk of pavement that still hadn’t been picked up since Ultitron’s attack. The streets of Bouring were littered with the stuff, even weeks later. She hurled the pavement at the window.
And it bounced off.
Oh, come on!
The crowd of zombies (Were they actually zombies? She didn’t know, but it was easier to think of them that way.) had spotted her now and rushed toward her. Ms. Masterton howled and picked up her pace. Maybe, Mairi thought, they would collide in the middle of the street and finish each other off.
Yeah, right. Because that’s how her luck was turning out today.
She picked up the chunk of pavement again, this time holding it over her head with both hands, and threw it as hard as she could at the window. The glass shivered and a long crack appeared, spiderwebbing out in all directions to form a haphazard pattern of fissures.
Even though her arms were tired, Mairi once again picked up the pavement chunk. She was too tired to throw it again, so this time she rammed it straight at the heart of the map of fissures in the glass. The glass obligingly shattered — at last! — and Mairi cried out in triumph, then gasped in pain. Her arm had caught on a jagged shard of glass, ripping her coat sleeve from the wrist to the elbow … and gashing her arm. Blood seeped out and stained the window.
She bit her lip hard against the pain and forced herself not to look at the blood again. The zombies were closer, almost on top of her, and Ms. Masterton was only steps away. And the opening in the window was too small to crawl through.
In desperation, Mairi tossed the piece of pavement as far across Major Street as she could, shouting, “Go fetch!” Despite herself, she laughed at the stupidity of it.
But it worked. The zombies seemed suddenly captivated by the movement of the pavement. They all — including Ms. Masterton — altered their course and made for the spot where the chunk had landed.
Mairi didn’t question her good fortune; she stripped off her coat and used it to protect her hands as she broke off larger pieces of window glass, then carefully slipped into Bouring Furniture.
The lights were off, but there was enough light coming from the streetlamps outside that she could make out the showroom. A check over her shoulder revealed that the zombies had already become bored with the chunk of pavement and were looking around. She stood completely still for a moment, then realized that she was standing right in the window — a sitting duck. She had to find a hiding place. Now.
As soon as she moved, the zombies — Ms. Masterton had joined the crowd — made a group sound that seemed to be a cousin to “Aha!” and converged on Bouring Furniture.
Mairi ducked behind a sofa and looked around. To her surprise, she spied a flight of stairs behind the counter and cash register. Of course. It was a two-story building, after all.
She darted from cover, running to the stairs. Behind her, she heard the window crack and groan as the zombies pounded a larger opening.
Up the stairs, she hit a landing, made a half turn, and ran up a second flight. She was in some sort of office-type area, dusty and messy, with some big chairs covered in plastic against a wall. It looked like it was used for spare storage, too.
An idea occurred to her. She got behind one of the big chairs and pushed with all her might. Her bloody, gashed arm shrieked in pain, but she forced herself to ignore it. A slashed-up arm was way better than whatever fate those zombies had in store for her.
Finally, she got the big chair moving, shoving it along the floor until it hit the edge of the top stair …
… and toppled down the stairs onto the landing, just in time to crash into Miss Hall, her history teacher. She made no sound, just fell backward and collided with the wall
.
Adrenaline pumping with both triumph and terror, Mairi shoved the other big chair down the stairs, too. It joined its twin. Zombies came up onto the landing and had to maneuver around both of them.
It wasn’t enough.
She ran to the desk; the wheeled desk chair went easily, knocking down a couple of zombies, entangling a couple more.
Now the desk.
It turned out to be easy, too, thank goodness. Someone had put those plastic furniture movers under each of its feet, and the whole thing glided across the floor with little effort. Which was just as well — Mairi’s right hand had gone slick with her own blood and she was having trouble keeping a grip on the desk.
But she managed to struggle it across the room and push it down the stairs. It bounced and crashed down the steps, tilting at a crazy angle, jamming in the stairway.
Her little blockade would only hold for so long, but at least she had a minute to catch her breath. She looked around the office/storage area. There was a filing cabinet and two bookcases, but they looked too heavy to move. Still, she would have to figure out a way — the zombies would work around the desk and chairs eventually. But those bookcases would really jam them up….
Just then, she spied something through the office’s lone window: a ladder.
She raced to the window. It was dirty and dusty, but she could make out a wrought-iron balcony and ladder. A fire escape!
With the sounds of zombies pressing against the furniture filling her ears, she heaved open the window and hauled herself through.
The street below was filling with zombies, still pouring into the store. She couldn’t go down … but as long as she didn’t hit the lever to release the ladder, they couldn’t come up, either. So that was good.
There was a second ladder, though, bolted to the wall, that went up to the roof. Mairi always hated it in movies and TV shows when people ran away to the roof. What could you do on the roof? What was so great and safe about the roof?
Well, right about now, what was so great and safe about the roof was that there were no zombies there. If she could get up there and figure out a way to block the ladder … or even take it down …
She’d be safe until Mighty Mike could come.
If he came.
What if this … plague affected him, too? As best Mairi could tell, there wasn’t anything in the world that could really, truly hurt Mighty Mike. The dirt monster and Ultitron had stymied him and stunned him, but he’d recovered quickly. This, though, this was like a disease. Or radiation. Or something else. Something invisible.
Whatever was affecting the people of Bouring, it was something that Mike couldn’t punch or fly around. And maybe that meant it could hurt him.
The thought of a zombie Mighty Mike …
Just then, a sound from behind snapped her attention back to the present. The zombies were shoving at the furniture blocking the stairs.
Mairi scrambled up the ladder to the roof. It was colder up here and she shoved her hands into her pockets, then scanned for something — anything — that could help her: a ladder to another part of the building, a door, something she could use to signal for help.
Nothing. The roof was just flat, with a two-foot brick parapet running around it. The hulk of an air-conditioning unit squatted in one corner, but she didn’t think that would be much help. She was alone. She was trapped.
From below, she could hear the zombies in the stairwell.
Mairi looked up: Mighty Mike was flying overhead!
“Help!” she shouted, waving her arms. “Help!”
And then she realized that the flying figure didn’t have a cape. Or a costume. It looked like someone in jeans and a T-shirt, carrying … Was that a motorbike?
If it wasn’t Mighty Mike, then the only other person who could fly was …
Mairi swallowed hard. The sounds of furniture moving and breaking from below increased. What did she have to lose? Maybe the Blue Freak would have pity on her. It was better than being attacked by zombies.
“Help!” she screamed again, jumping and waving her arms as if her life depended on it. And maybe it did.
“HELP!!!”
Kyle zipped over the town, his earbuds firmly in place. Erasmus was feeding him a never-ending stream of information; he couldn’t hear anything but the AI’s voice in his ears, and he had the wind blowing at him. He was flying high enough that no one could make out his face, so he’d left the Mad Mask’s mask back at home. Besides, that thing was dark and smelly and it made his voice all weird and echo-y. How on earth had the Mad Mask been able to wear it all that time?
“Okay, all the calibrations make sense,” Kyle told Erasmus. They had adjusted the chronovessel’s settings back home. Once they arrived at the proper location, they would make the final tweaks, and then that would be that.
“You have to make sure that the antimatter production disks don’t generate too many positrons or —”
“I know,” Kyle said. “I know.” He was messing with serious forces of nature in the chronovessel. Dark energy. Antimatter. Zero-point energy. Concentrated neutrino plasma. All of it running through his dad’s old motorbike. Yeesh.
He looked down as he flew overhead and saw a crowd of people clustered in Major Street, milling about. “That’s weird,” he mumbled, almost to himself, but of course Erasmus heard everything. “They seem to cluster around things that move. Whenever the wind makes one of the traffic signals move, they lunge at it.”
“Well, maybe they have movement-based vision, like frogs?”
Kyle paused for a moment, hovering over the town. “I don’t think so. Something else seems to be at work here.”
“Could it —”
“Can you read back a transcript of the police band? Start with the first sign of something wrong and go until it went dead.”
“I can do better than that.”
Kyle expected a dry recitation in Erasmus’s slightly robotic voice, but instead the AI played back a recording in perfect digital sound. At first there was just mild panic:
“Received word 2213 at time capsule burial. Sheriff on scene.”
“Reporting in, uh, Deputy Travers. On scene at the — What the heck is —”
But then things got more and more panicked….
“They’re moving too fast! I can’t even —”
“— did they come from? Who the —”
At one point: the sound of flesh on flesh. Knuckles against jaw. Someone being hit. Hard.
And then someone else.
A babble of voices. Panic, mounting. And then something Kyle had never heard before, something he never imagined: the sound of an adult, a grown-up, screaming in absolute terror.
Kyle swallowed, hard. Eventually, the recording went to dead static. Erasmus let the static play for long seconds before terminating the sound.
“This is bad,” Kyle said.
“You should do something.”
Kyle hesitated, then shook his head. “No. Not now. I can fix everything in the past. Whatever happened, it happened when they dug up the time capsule. I can intercept it in the past.”
“It doesn’t work that way!” Erasmus protested. “We’ve talked about this! You can observe the past, but you can’t change it.”
“I disagree.” Kyle flew away, to the football field behind Bouring Middle School. That was where the plasma storm had touched down, where he had gained his superpowers, where Mighty Mike had landed on Earth. This was where they would be able to rewatch recent history … and record it.
“Time is like a river,” Kyle said as he landed near the spot where the plasma storm had intersected the ground. It was easy to locate — the dirt was still disturbed from where the ASE had risen up and nearly killed Mairi. “You can dam up a river, redirect it, and it’s still a river.”
“Time is not like a river,” Erasmus said. “Time is a function of particle physics and superstrings. If you try to change anything, at best you’ll create a parallel timeline. This is
our universe.”
He displayed a line on his screen:
“If you make a change in the past — let’s say at Point A — you’ll cause the universe to split at that point.”
“And then you’ll end up with two universes, one with the change you made and one without it.”
“Fine. Then I’ll live in the one where I made the change.”
“It doesn’t work that way! There’s already a Kyle in that universe, only he never traveled in time because he didn’t need to. Because you made it so that he had no reason to.”
Kyle set the motorbike on the ground and did a last-minute check of its systems. “You worry too much, Erasmus. This is all going to work out,” he promised.
“Going back to record Mighty Mike’s arrival is one thing. That’s just observing something. No impact other than some photons and neutrinos out of place. But trying to stop the time capsule disaster, too — that’s too much. You’ll go from observing the timestream to interfering with it and who knows what —”
“Look, we’re going to come back to the present one second after we left. So if it turns out I can’t fix things in the past, we’ll be back in no time at all and I can save the town then. Okay?”
Erasmus seemed to think that over. “All right. But you should know that I think you forgot to lock the basement door when we left the house.”
Kyle rolled his eyes. Erasmus always had to drive the knife in just a little bit. “You’re right. I did. Mea culpa. You are so much smarter than me, Erasmus.” Kyle served it up with a thick, heaping helping of sarcasm.
Erasmus ignored the sarcasm. “You should set up the chronovessel over in the cornfield.”
That was true. The motorbike no longer actually moved or ran — it was just a shell for the time travel machinery — which is why Kyle had flown here to the spot he wanted to record. But if he time traveled right here, he would pop into the past in front of his past self and Mighty Mike. Not a good idea.
So he hauled his equipment into the cornfield near the football field. The corn was harvested or dead now, but there were still enough stalks to provide some cover.