by Carter Roy
CHAPTER 11
LEEROY JENKINS TO THE RESCUE
Beside me, Greta asked, “Do you have any weapons?”
“Do I look armed?” I said. “I left my sword in the duffel bag.”
“No need to get snippy,” Greta said. She looked around wildly. “We’re surrounded, Ronan.”
“Yeah,” I replied. “By friends.” And then I lifted my fists into the air and shouted, “LEEEROY JENKINNNNNS!”
My dad paused and looked behind him. “Evelyn?” he said, confused.
Greta asked, “Who’s Leeroy Jen—”
A tinny voice trilled from the Bluetooth necklace around my neck: “LEEE-ROY JEN-KINNNNNS!”
Around us, Times Square erupted in cries of “Leeroy Jenkins!”—only a few people at first, but then dozens, and finally hundreds, shouting out the name again and again, like some sort of weird geek war chant. In a few seconds, it had built into a roar that drowned out every other noise in the city.
Alarmed, my dad raised his hands and lunged.
But before he could close the distance, the space around him flooded with bodies—hundreds of people calling out “Lee-roy Jen-kins!” and pumping their fists in the air. The youngest looked to be about twelve, and the oldest were a bunch of leather-jacketed dudes in their fifties.
Suddenly we couldn’t see my dad at all.
“What’s going on?” Greta shouted.
“Tell you later!” I shouted back, holding the necklace up to my mouth. “Thanks, Gideon!”
“Been tracking you since you got out of that cab,” came his voice from the Bluetooth. “Awesome turnout, am I right?”
Dawkins’ voice cut in. “Ronan? Greta? An angry mob has taken over Times Square, and—”
“My friends!” I said. “Not a mob! Friends!”
“If you say so, Ronan,” Dawkins said. “We have secured Greta’s mum. We even have Grendel. Get out of there now.”
Greta pressed her face against the necklace on my chest. “Thank you, Jack!”
“Where to?” I yelled, gently pushing her away. “Where should we meet you?”
“Diz’s cab is in the breezeway of that theater.”
Gideon’s voice cut in. “Cops will break this up soon. Which way you want out?”
“East!” I shouted, and the word rippled across the crowd. “Lee-roy! Jen-kins! East! East! East! East!”
“Which direction is that?” Greta asked, trying to see over the heads of the people around us. “How are we supposed to be able to see—whoa!”
Suddenly hands grabbed us and lifted, raising us until we were bouncing above the crowd, bobbing on a sea of open palms.
For a moment I was terrified of falling … but then I realized these hands weren’t going to drop us; they were all sharing our weight equally. It was almost fun. I relaxed and fell backward, and dozens of palms caught and cradled my back, head, arms, and legs, then floated me above the mob, rhythmically chanting “Lee-roy! Jen-kins! Lee-roy! Jen-kins!”
“Ronaaaaaaaaan!” Greta screamed from over my right shoulder. “What’s happening?”
“We’re crowdsurfing!” I yelled. “Like at a concert! It’s wild, right?”
“No! It’s freaking me out!”
“Just let them carry you,” I said. “They’re friends.”
It took five minutes for the crowd to pass us all the way to the ragged edge of the mob, but then dozens of hands closed around our limbs and carefully lowered us until our feet were on the asphalt.
I turned to thank the people who’d ferried us away from my dad, but our rescuers had already turned their backs and rejoined the mob, still thrusting their fists in the air and shouting, “Lee-roy Jen-kins!”
“Who is Leeroy Jenkins?” Greta asked. “Should I know him?”
“It’s a gamer joke,” I told her. “Long, dumb story.”
But Greta wasn’t listening. Instead, she was craning her neck trying to see around the crowd. “Diz. Dawkins. My mom—where are they? He said east!”
“We got carried a little off course,” I said. “The theater with the breezeway is down that way. Come on!”
We slipped along the fringe of the crowd until we spotted Diz’s cab.
Or actually, the big flat screens attached to it.
They no longer showed advertisements for the Broadway musical M. Now they flashed a white-and-red warning to the crowd: BACK! AWAY!! NOW!!! Earsplitting whuuuups blared from beneath the hood.
But the crowd was too thick. People were packed in on three sides, and there was nowhere for the cab to go.
There was just enough room for me and Greta to slip in through the back door.
We pulled the door shut again, Diz hit a button, and the locks snapped into place.
Greta and her mom embraced each other, and Grendel the cat sat licking its paws between them and me, ignored.
“That worked out rather well!” Dawkins said from the front seat. “Now if we could only find a way to clear this crowd out of our path.”
“I’ve got that,” I said. I held up the Bluetooth necklace and spoke into the mic. “Gideon? Our car is trapped at the Grand Duchess Theater! Can you get the crowd to open a path for us?”
Gideon unmuted his phone and all I could hear was the chanting of the ILZ flash mobbers. “I can try,” he yelled. Then we heard him shouting, “Everyone go west! West! West!”
The crowd picked up the instruction, braided it into the Leeroy Jenkins chant, and passed it along. “West! West! West!” The wall of people around the cab surged left, away from the theater, until the way in front of the cab was clear.
“Props to you, Ronan.” Diz goosed the gas and we began rolling south.
“Thanks,” I told her, and sagged back into the seat next to the cat. “Hi, Grendel,” I said, and held out my palm. He head-butted it, and I scrunched up the fur behind his neck until he purred so loudly I could hear it over the noise of the engine.
“I have no idea how you roped in hundreds of people to help us, Ronan,” Dawkins said, “and I don’t care: consider me impressed.”
“It’s all thanks to Gideon,” I said, scratching the cat’s ears. “He posted a call for help on ILZ and a couple dozen other gamer boards. Said we needed a flash mob in Times Square and gave the trigger phrase. I thought maybe a couple dozen people might show, but I guess the request went viral.”
“They saved us,” Greta said.
“We’re not out of the woods just yet,” Diz said, lightly tapping the horn.
Through the back window, I caught a glimpse of blurry shapes running after us. “We have company!” I shouted.
Three dark-suited figures leapt at the car—one landed on the roof, while the other two pulled at the doors. I recognized them: the bald Bend Sinister agent and his two partners, the dark-haired woman and the redhead.
“These three are annoyingly relentless,” Dawkins muttered.
There was a sound of wrenching metal and then the rooftop flat screen flew out in front of the cab like a Frisbee. It bounced across the cement, glass shards flying everywhere.
“Hey!” Diz cried. “That’s expensive hardware!”
Beside her, the redheaded woman drew back her arm and swung it hard at the driver’s side window. Her hand bounced off the glass without even cracking it.
“Bulletproof!” Diz said, grinning at the redhead.
So the woman threw herself across the hood, wrapped her fingers under it, and tried to pull it up.
“Okay,” Diz said. “That is quite enough.”
She stabbed one of her pink-lacquered fingernails at the silver buttons on the dash, and a loud electric hum started under the hood. As the hum grew in intensity, Diz warned, “Everyone, make sure you’re not touching any of the car’s metal parts.”
With a shower of sparks, the three Bend Sinister agents were flung away. The woman on the hood was thrown forward, the bald man backward, and the dark-haired woman bounced off the wall to our right. All three fell to the ground, rigid and twitchi
ng.
Beside me, Grendel suddenly stiffened. After a moment, he shivered and sat, looking around at all of us and blinking his big golden eyes.
“What did you just do?” Dawkins asked Diz.
“The chassis is wired to a high-voltage, high-ampere battery,” Diz said. “Transforms the entire body of the cab into one enormous Taser—for moments like this, when I need to shock someone in a hurry.”
“I’m afraid to ask what the third button does,” Dawkins said.
“And I’m afraid to tell you,” Diz replied.
The necklace around my neck buzzed, and Gideon’s voice came through. “The police are here, Ronan, so everyone’s taking off. Over and out!”
“Thanks, Gideon,” I said, but he’d already hung up.
The mob at last behind us, we were cruising easily down Broadway and away from Times Square.
“That guy tore off my advertising board!” Diz muttered.
“The Guard will reimburse you,” Dawkins said.
Diz looked sideways at him. “Ha.”
“What? We reimburse people … sometimes.”
“Are we really safe now?” Mrs. Sustermann asked, leaning against Greta. She looked exhausted.
“It appears so,” Dawkins said. “I am sorry, Mrs. Sustermann, for the mishap on the subway, but I am very relieved to have you back with your daughter.”
Next to me, the cat stretched and shivered, then pivoted its head around on its neck.
“For a while there, I thought we were goners,” Greta said. “Escaping was almost too easy.”
Grendel let out a long meow, then started hiccupping a series of screechy yips.
“What’s wrong with Grendel?” Greta said, reaching over to pet him. “You okay, kitty?”
The cat quieted, then opened its jaws wide. “Haaaaaa,” it said. “Ha. Ha! HA.” Its voice slid up and down the scale like it was trying out a new instrument. “Got away too easy? Whatever gave you that idea? Ha! Ha!”
CHAPTER 12
THE CAT’S IN THE BAG
“Grendel?” Greta said, leaning away.
The cat turned to her, bared its fangs, and made a mwah-mwah-mwah! sound halfway between a meow and a laugh. Then it crouched down and aimed itself at the back of Diz’s head.
“Oh no you don’t,” I said, grabbing it by the scruff of its neck as it launched off the seat.
It snarled as I hoisted it up in the middle of the cab. “I will exact my revenge beginning with you, Evelyn Truelove!”
“Sure,” I said, tightening my grip as it swiped at me with its claws.
“Your father cannot protect you now!” the cat said in its yowling singsong. “Not after I deliver all of you to Evangeline Birk!”
“He wouldn’t help me, anyway,” I said, trading a look with Dawkins.
“Birk will name me the new Head!” screamed the cat.
“Oh my gosh, it’s you,” Dawkins said, his eyebrows rising. “The mysterious Hand who is too ashamed to show himself!”
So that’s why the cat had gone all stiff and weird: the Hand had moved his consciousness into it.
The cat slitted its eyes. “I am not ashamed, soon-to-be-dead Blood Guard! I am stealth personified.”
“Don’t you mean ‘catified’?” Dawkins asked.
“I can be anywhere! You cannot see me coming, because I am all around you.”
“Yes, we’ve heard—you are legion and blah blah,” Dawkins said, reaching forward and snapping the cat’s jaws shut with his hand. “You really shouldn’t talk so much. Spoils the effect.”
The cat growled.
“So is this your particular gift from the Bend Sinister? You get to occupy mindless Bend drones and the occasional small-brained mammal? What a paltry talent.”
He let go of the cat’s jaw and it snarled, “Shut up! When Birk gets her hands on you—”
“She’s going to have to find us first,” Dawkins said. With his other hand, he unbuckled the cat collar and passed it to Greta. “Please throw that out the window. Diz, we need something in which to …”
“Under your seat,” she said.
Dawkins pulled out a pink nylon gym bag, unzipped it, and held it open. “Ronan, just bung that little beast in here.”
I held the cat inside the bag while Dawkins zipped it, releasing its neck at the last moment. The bag seemed to explode, the cat ricocheting around inside, looking for a way out and yowling.
Diz pulled over, and Dawkins marched the bag to the trunk, flung it in, and slammed it shut.
He got back in and smoothed his hair. “I’m sorry about your pet, Mrs. Sustermann,” he told her. “But we couldn’t have that beast see where we’re headed.”
I could still hear the cat howling and yammering in the trunk, but it was muffled enough now to be bearable.
Mrs. Sustermann stared over her shoulder out the back window. “That’s all right. Whatever that was, it wasn’t Grendel.” She turned to Greta. “Honey, what is going on?”
“I’ll tell you everything soon, Mom,” Greta said. “I promise.”
“Hello?” Sammy said via the Bluetooth necklace. “Remember me?”
“Hey, Sammy,” I said. “Thanks for the help back there.”
“No problem. I’m just glad you guys are headed back here. This place gives me the serious creeps.”
“We’re going to that moldy old subway station again?” Greta groaned.
“No,” Dawkins said. “That’s hardly secure. We’re going back to the original plan: Agatha’s penthouse at the Montana. We’ll hide away in ridiculous comfort and await the rest of the Guard. And if the cat misbehaves, we’ll feed it to the four Dobermans of the apocalypse.”
“You’ll do no such thing!” Greta snapped. “Grendel is probably still in there.”
“Just kidding,” Dawkins said. “Once we rid the cat of his Bend Sinister hitchhiker, Grendel will be back to his old self.”
We’d been heading south toward downtown, but after a series of sharp turns, we were soon heading north up Madison Avenue. “We’ll cut through Central Park and have you there in a jiffy,” Diz said.
“You guys are leaving me here?” Sammy said. “That is stone cold.”
“Just for a tiny bit longer,” Diz promised. “I’ll be coming for you right after I drop them off.”
Except for the cat in the trunk, we were silent while Diz drove.
Then Dawkins said, “Mrs. Sustermann, can you tell us about the place you were held? Did you see the people who’d abducted you? How many were there?”
Greta’s mom gave us a quick rundown of her abduction on the subway. She’d been blindfolded and then loaded onto a van.
“You could see it was a van?” Dawkins asked her.
“Not until about an hour later, when they stopped and took off the blindfold,” she said. “We were in this enormous room.”
“Enormous as in stadium sized?” Dawkins asked.
“No, enormous as in tall—like fifty feet high,” Mrs. Sustermann said. “The place was made from old brick. What I could see of it, anyway. There were wooden crates stacked like Jenga towers everywhere you looked. And carts full of electronic equipment.”
“Such as what?” Dawkins asked.
“I’m not really a techie,” Mrs. Sustermann said, shrugging, “so I couldn’t tell you what I was looking at. I did recognize a defibrillator on a crash cart, though. That was strange.”
About ten minutes after arriving, she explained, my dad came in through a pair of metal doors, complaining that someone he’d been expecting to meet wasn’t there, but that it was just as well, since he wanted to make sure to deliver the right package.
“What was he talking about?” Mrs. Sustermann asked Dawkins. “What package?”
“It’s something called the Damascene ’Scope.” Greta winced and fiddled with her hands. “The explanation is complicated. But I swear that Dad will tell you everything.”
“Greta is right, as usual,” Dawkins said, facing forward so Greta couldn
’t see his face.
“Mr. Truelove is a— He’s a bad person, Mom,” Greta said.
Mrs. Sustermann laughed. “Oh, I’ve known that since he moved into the neighborhood.” To me, she added, “Sorry, Ronan, but I never liked your father.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I don’t like him, either.”
Mrs. Sustermann reached out and squeezed my shoulder, then continued. “After that, he went on what he called ‘an errand.’ He left behind two men he said would kill me if I didn’t behave.”
“An errand,” Dawkins mused.
At some point we’d taken Eighty-Fifth Street through Central Park. Now, as I watched, Diz turned the cab onto Central Park West.
“Whatever it was, it took him a couple hours. When he got back, his thugs zipped me back into the bag, loaded me into that van, and the next thing I knew, I was in Times Square and you two were cutting me out of it.” She smiled at Diz in the rearview mirror. “Thank you, by the way.”
Greta whispered, “I’m so sorry you had to go through all that, Mom.”
“It’s okay!” her mom said. “Most interesting thing to happen to me in months. And it was all worthwhile, because at the end of it, I got to be with you.”
They said more to each other, and I tried not to eavesdrop, but it was hard not to hear, sitting next to them as I was. I should have been happy for them, but all I felt was sad. Greta didn’t know it yet, but her family was ruined. Greta’s dad was going to have to tell Mrs. Sustermann the truth about Greta—the truth that Greta didn’t know and could never be allowed to know, that she was one of thirty-six Pure souls in the world, and that an entire organization of people dreamed of killing her.
And because of that, Mrs. Sustermann would never be able to look at her daughter again without worrying, would never again trust that Greta was safe in the world. All Greta wanted from life was to have her family together, and she had the bad luck to be born a Pure.
It’s not right.
“What’s not right?” Greta asked.
“Huh?” I said, startled.
“You mumbled ‘It’s not right.’ What are you talking about?”
I must have spoken my thought out loud. “Um, that my dad … He tried to break up your family. I feel bad about that.”