“I’m okay,” Andy said, sighing and swiping the blood off her eyes. “Go check on Copperseed.”
Kerri approached the Pennaquick County police vehicle to find the officer conscious as well, despite everything else. The air bag had spared his head. His leg didn’t look that good.
“Deputy?” Joey ventured.
Copperseed raised a hand, petitioning for a few seconds to pull himself together. He breathed a couple of times, glanced at his leg, stiffed up his upper lip, and then spoke. “Boy, I’m glad we evacked the town.”
“Me too,” Kerri panted. “We couldn’t stop the eruption; the cloud will hit us soon. We need to go.”
“Al and his friends…”
“We lost them.” She willed a long-due sob back down her throat with a hurried promise of real mourning later.
Joey pointed at the horizon behind them: “Uh…guys…”
Kerri looked over the cruiser. Over the fir-spiked hills, beyond a swarm of thousands of panicking birds fleeing away, a grayed-out, never-mapped hill had risen. An extraterrestrial karst; a tower wobbling in the wind; a parasitic polyp attached to the planet.
Tim, badly patched up and limping, burst into a desperate howl at the naked sky.
Copperseed intoned, “The undergod’s returned.”
Andy, in the Chevrolet, squinted at the front mirror.
JOEY: Guys?! What the fuck is that?!
Nate, eyes mutinying and refusing to look away, simply replied, “Apocalypse.”
Copperseed turned the key in the ignition. Wasted car parts clattered back to steadiness and the engine roared a groggy Yessir!
Andy popped out of the Chevy and raised the dislodged hood. The oxygen bottle she and Captain Al had attached to the carburetor earlier came off easily in her hand. She tossed it away and tried the ignition. There was plenty of air for the car to run now; it was a matter of determining how much car was left.
The discombobulated Chevy Vega revved once. Twice. At the third call, the engine resuscitated.
“I’m calling in the army,” Copperseed told Kerri. “You go south as far as you can get. And don’t stop. (Blocking an interruption.) Now.”
“Wait!” Andy had reversed to level with him. “Deputy, we’ve got a better chance to stop this if we stay.”
“We what?!” Joey yelled.
Andy ignored him. “Deputy, trust us.”
Copperseed seemed to disagree, but somehow stetted the suggestion. “You will need a distraction,” he said.
“No, Copperseed, you leave town! You hear me?”
Copperseed chuckled as he shifted into reverse and switched on the sirens. “Like I’m taking orders from a teenage detective club.”
And with that he U-turned the car and then floored the gas, speeding past any possible reply and back into town. The rest all squeezed themselves back into the station wagon and followed the patrol car ahead blaring toward the empty streets of Blyton Hills.
—
The police cruiser continued downtown, sirens hollering, while Andy steered the Chevy left and sped down the last stretch on Kerri’s street. The gardens were deserted. A little girl’s bicycle lay abandoned on the curb under the blank sky.
Blyton Hills was a ghost town.
The little house with the pink shutters stiffened up like an old hen at the amber Vega screeching onto the sidewalk, discharging a crowd of bleeding, mud-soaked misfits into the garden, all jumping over the gate and running indoors, not one of them bothering to wipe their feet on the doormat.
“Seal and block every door and window!” Andy commanded as she stormed into the living room. “We’re barricading in Kerri’s room!”
“Are you nuts?” Joey replied. “You expect to lock out that?”
“Them,” she corrected from upstairs already. “And they don’t know we’re here. Yet.”
Nate was following her to the second floor and Kerri was taking care of the ground floor. Tim took the penguin Andy had dropped and ran to secure it. Everybody but Joey had something to do.
“Andy, this is crazy! We have a better chance driving out of town!” he shouted, running upstairs and spotting the girls’ room at the end of the hallway. “Even if we weather out the cloud, you can’t hold back that…(Stops inside the empty room, then spots Andy carrying the mummy of a book, walking past him.)…that fucking mountain, for God’s sake—it will crush us!”
Andy rounded on him, nearly shoving him into the wall.
“Nothing bad ever reaches this room! You hear me?! Nothing!”
She turned to Nate, who had just stepped in, and threw the Necronomicon at him.
“You! Look for the way to put that thing back to sleep!”
“What?! No, wait, I can’t; I’m not a wizard!”
Andy stabbed him with her index finger, shouting at the top of her lungs: “If the town whore from ass-raping Salem put two and two together with the help of that book, so can you! Get rid of that monster! Now!”
Nate digested the line, refused to let it make an impact, and turned to Kerri as she walked in.
“I can’t do this.”
“Nate, I can’t even pronounce its name,” she said, grabbing his shoulders. “You’ve been preparing for this for thirteen years.”
Nate fell silent. His body took the pause to remind him how dangerously far behind in medication, food, and sleep he was, while his mind just wandered around Kerri’s room.
“Clear everything away,” he said. “We need a pentacle.”
Andy rolled up the carpet and instructed Kerri and Joey to push the furniture out of the way, while Nate went through the pencil jars on the girly desk and chose a red crayon to start tracing a wide circle on the floorboards. After that he offered another crayon to Kerri and showed her a grimoire page for reference.
“Draw this one here, facing that wall, then this one with the horns in that corner. Andy, I’ll need candles.”
“First drawer,” Kerri assisted as she started drawing a monogram.
“I know,” Andy said, going for the aromatic candles Kerri kept in her desk and a match in her pocket.
The whole thing took some three minutes to set up.
“We need a signature now, from all of us,” Nate panted, standing up. “Choose a point of the star each; use your blood!”
He needed only to squeeze one of the many fresh gashes across his arms to produce some drops of thick, bright blood on the floor; Kerri and Andy did the same.
Joey stood awkwardly over his own point of the star.
JOEY: Uh…I am not bleeding.
Andy jumped across the pentacle to punch his face, Kerri stopping her fist an inch from connecting.
KERRI: Ah ah ah! Hair will do, I think.
Andy drew back grumbling while Joey made a big deal of Kerri plucking a pinch of hair from behind his ear.
“That’s four,” Nate said. “We need five.”
“We don’t have five,” Andy objected.
“Dunia needed five to wake it up; we’ll need five to put it down!” Nate insisted.
Andy turned to Kerri. Kerri to Joey. Joey to Nate. Nate to Kerri. Kerri to Andy. Andy to Joey.
Then all four glanced down.
Tim, sitting on the last corner of the pentacle, dropped the plastic penguin over the red line and smiled broadly at them, thankful for the attention.