“I’m fine,” Deputy Copperseed said before she could lay a finger on his wrist. He was barely sitting up, drenched in reddened sweat. “I tried to lure them away, but they really liked your house. And then, while they were flying back, they got attached to my car too. Dragged me all the way from Main Street.”
Andy nodded, turned to signal to Kerri and the boys that the cop was all right, and then she glanced at his left leg. Operating the pedals with that broken kneecap must have been tricky, she thought.
Coincidentally, that was the last clear idea in her mind before her own legs began to ring and suddenly yielded. She fell on the asphalt, back against the car door, and an insane number of overdue injury reports from all over her body finally flooded the complaint department.
“Oh fuck,” she gasped, overwhelmed by fatigue.
Tim approached her, a sympathetic look in his own bloodied, ear-torn face. She lifted a bruised, blood-streamed hand and caressed his nose.
“Good job, soldier.”
“What are you doing sitting down there?” the policeman mocked her, peering through the window. “Get in. I’ll drive you and your friends to camp.”
“No. No thanks,” she pushed out between puffs. “We’ll just stay here.”
“Are you sure? The army will be here any minute,” he said. It might have been sarcasm, Andy thought; it was hard to tell with Dirty Harry types.
“It’s okay,” she murmured, gazing at the rest of the team standing near Kerri’s house. “We’ve got a bunker here.”
The others stood under the gentle drizzle and fresh morning sun, eyes still lost on the desolation road on the hillside.
NATE: You know what would be a brilliant twist now? If everything turned out to be just a guy in a mask.
Kerri laughed first; it was the kind of humor that ran in the family. Joey came to it a little later. About to surrender to her own fatigue, Kerri rounded on Nate and hugged him tightly.
“I am so proud of you,” she whispered. “Peter would be so proud of you.”
Nate said nothing. Instead, he looked past Kerri’s hair, at the jock standing by them. He leaned out a hand for him.
Joey inspected it first, smudged with human blood and alien blood and who knows what else, and checked that his own did not look much better, and they shook.
“We okay now?” Joey asked.
“We okay. Thank you, man.”
Joey gazed back at the scarred hillside. Beyond it, far away, black smoke billowed up.
“You think the lake is still there?” he wondered. “My father’s gonna kill me if something happened to the motorboat.”
“He’ll be fine when you show him what’s in the glove compartment,” Kerri commented.
—
The boat was not afloat, as a matter of fact: the tidal wave caused by the undergod rising had hurled it to the shore, actually into the woods, unmolested by everything that came later. The glove compartment was still locked, four gold ingots safe inside, guarded by the vigilant firs.
Across the waters, Debo?n Isle was now a pile of ruins, the trees there conspiring for the best way to bury the ton of bricks and mortar under their roots and pretend that the last two centuries had never happened.
A brave little bird was the first to descend to the isle and check the air quality for itself, only hours after the cataclysm. It was used to this dangerous task. It had worked as a mining canary for a whole day.
First, it perched atop one of the firs on the isle, rocked by the breeze, then fluttered farther down, chirping for animal life, to alight on a little mount of blue shingles. From there it hopped onto a jutting split beam, still warm from the recent fire the waves had extinguished, and then it skipped along the scattered bricks of what had been a chimney onto a leather boot, from which it could survey the eastern and southern shores. The water level was a little lower, although the scouting canary did not consider asking for an official calculation that might have stripped the lake of the title as the second deepest in the Americas.
Suddenly the leather watchtower collapsed under the canary’s feet, and the poor scared thing barely held itself in the air, heart skipping a beat out of 200 per minute, as it scurried out of the way of the awoken mammal jacking up from the grave, spraying stone and timber.
Tarantula fingers, burned down to their phalanxes, caressed the bricks around their burial site as she scanned the landscape, the black eye in the whole half of her face taking in the glorious cobalt-blue sky, a rainbow, a panicking yellow bird fluttering by in the immaculate morning quiet.
DUNIA: Shit. Did I miss it?!
Summer came early and yellow and mint-flavored. Nate grabbed a two-liter Diet Coke from the fridge while he skimmed through the Pennaquick Telegraph and observed that the accustomed reports on roadworks around Belden had finally bumped the Blyton Hills incident off the front page. An item dealing with the outraged defense statement from RH Corporation, entrenched on defending the safety of its lost chemical plant, had been moved to page four. Poor smeared ecovillains.
Nate paid for the newspaper and the groceries, jumped on his bicycle parked on the sidewalk, and headed home, with Tim scouting ahead and deviating from course every now and then to dissolve suspicious groups of pigeons. The detectives didn’t make it into the papers this time. Kerri and Deputy Copperseed agreed that it was better to wait for the authorities to string their own interpretation of the events. Once Kerri tipped the words “limnic eruption” to FEMA personnel, the official version clung to that rare but not unprecedented phenomenon and pointed at the frequent seismic activity in the area as the probable cause behind both the explosion in the abandoned chemical plant and the violent gas leak from Sleepy Lake, which in turn had poisoned the pilot of a rescue helicopter assisting the evacuation, crashing it against Debo?n Mansion. Scientific tests performed around the area confirmed its affinity with the incident in Cameroon, and the media agreed that the prompt evacuation of Blyton Hills had saved hundreds of lives.
As for public opinion in Blyton Hills, the proverbial hostility toward RH Corporation and Dunia Debo?n, who had mysteriously disappeared before the town evacuation, kept suspicions from attaching to the Blyton Summer Detective Club.