The Final Kingdom

by Michael Northrop

  Alex risked a quick look behind them. The undead were coming. With old bones and dry flesh, most of them were running none too fluidly, either. But there was one moving faster than the rest, fired forward from their ranks like a missile. Alex wrapped his arms around his mom and tried to haul her from the pavement.

  Suddenly, strong arms grabbed him. Alex prepared to be torn limb from limb — but it was Luke. He’d come back for them and was now lifting both his cousin and his aunt to their feet.

  “Let’s go!” he shouted. “Bauer power!”

  They stumbled up and forward. “Watch out,” said Alex. With his hands supporting his mom, he couldn’t grasp his scarab and could only nod at the lone mummy approaching ahead of the pack.

  “I got him,” said Luke.

  Alex looked at him skeptically. Maybe if I can get one hand on the scarab …

  “Get your mom to the van, man!” shouted Luke. “I said I got this.”

  As Alex turned and hustled his mom toward the minivan, he could already hear the bony slaps of the sprinting mummy’s feet against the pavement.

  Todtman and Ren were in the van now, the big side door wide open. “Come on, Mom,” he said. “Just a little farther.”

  Her reply was cut off by a hoarse cry from the onrushing mummy, and Alex turned his head back just as the sprinting corpse crashed into Luke. “No!” gasped Alex.

  Instead of avoiding the mummy’s grasp, Luke grasped it right back. As he did, he whipped his shoulders around and ducked down, using all of the ragged creature’s momentum to toss it over his hip. “Aiyah!” he shouted.

  Suddenly, the mummy’s dry old bones were bouncing across the cracked pavement — and Alex and his mom were arriving at the minivan. Alex heard the engine start up — coaxed to life by Todtman’s amulet — and saw Ren’s hands reach out from the side door to help his mom in. He looked back for Luke, who was bending down to pick up something shiny from the asphalt. Behind him, the first mummy was already climbing back to its feet — and ninety-nine more were rushing onto the lot.

  “Get over here!” shouted Alex.

  Luke palmed his shiny find and rushed for the door.

  Alex climbed in after his mom as the minivan began rolling. Luke leapt into the open door as the lumbering vehicle began a slow turn toward the road. Alex leaned back and did his best to catch his cousin as he thumped down inside.

  Ren slammed the door closed and Todtman stomped on the gas.

  He ran over two mummies who’d managed to get in front of them. The van rose up and down on its old shock absorbers to a sound track of sickening crunches. But a moment later, they were up to full speed and pulling away from the rest of the pack. Todtman wrestled the lumbering vehicle around a sharp turn and off the lot.

  Open road stretched out ahead, and the fields of the undead disappeared in the rearview mirror. Alex helped his mom settle into the bench seat in the back of the van.

  “Just need to rest a little,” she said.

  “I know,” he said. Her battered body needed to shut down to heal. Sick for almost his whole life, he knew all about that. He spied a dusty horseshoe-shaped travel pillow hooked around the armrest and handed it to her. She placed it between her injured ribs and the seat. Soon, her eyes fluttered closed and her ragged breathing calmed slightly.

  Alex wiped the first trace of a tear from his eye, exhaled, and returned to the first row of seats. He watched the road disappear under the minivan’s wheels. There were other cars on the road now, a freeway entrance up ahead. They were back in the real world.

  Next stop, “the seat of power,” he thought. Even though The Order members had managed to assume their Stone Warrior forms, the Spells could still end all this, could send the undead back to the afterlife and shut the doors for good. But he knew the mummies and Walkers weren’t the only ones who could be undone by the Spells …

  He shook his head hard, trying to clear the thought away. Then he turned to his cousin. “Thanks, man,” he said. “You really came through back there.”

  Even Ren chimed in. “Yeah, that was pretty cool of you,” she admitted. “That mummy was going like a thousand miles an hour.”

  Luke just shrugged. “Judo, yo,” he said. “It’s awesome cross-training.” His attention was on the shiny object swinging from a rusty chain in his hand.

  “Is that what you picked up off the pavement?” asked Alex.

  “Yeah,” said Luke, still not taking his eyes off it. “It came flying out of that mummy’s wrapping when I hip-tossed him. Pretty cool, right?”

  Alex nodded. He knew that mummies were often buried with amulets and other charms tucked into their wrappings.

  This one was in the form of a cheetah, the world’s fastest animal.

  Ren watched Luke as he brushed the last crusty bits of sand and clay from the little bronze cat. No way it works for him, she thought. She trusted him more after seeing him put his life on the line to save Alex and his mom. But she still didn’t see him as Amulet Keeper material.

  “Put it on!” said Alex.

  Luke looked down at it. “What, like man jewelry?” he said. He glanced over at the spot where Alex’s scarab hung from its fine silver chain. “No offense.”

  “Whatever,” said Alex. “See if it does anything.”

  Luke stared at him.

  “Well?” said Alex.

  “You tell me,” Luke said. “I just tried to hypnotize you.”

  “Tell me to do something,” said Alex.

  “Flap your arms like a peacock.”

  Alex’s arms stayed by his sides. He looked down at them, one after the other, and said, “Nothing.”

  “Maybe it does something else,” offered Ren.

  Luke squinted at her, as if trying to read the last line of an eye chart. “Not unless you’re levitating,” he said.

  Ren looked down. There was no space between her and her seat, not even a spare centimeter. “Nope.”

  “Doesn’t work,” he said, sitting back. “I’ll tell you what, though.”

  “What?” said Alex.

  “I do feel pretty … ” He searched for the right word, giving Alex time to blurt out: “You feel pretty?”

  Luke jokingly shook his fist at him. “No, I feel pretty, like, stoked. I was pretty tired from all that … ” He waved his hand behind them. “That sitting in a cell and then the mummy stuff and everything. But as soon as I put it on, I felt totally pumped.”

  “Great,” said Ren. “Your amulet has the power of a large coffee.”

  Luke looked down at it. “Good enough for me,” he said. “Think I’ll call it coffee cat.”

  Ren sank back into her seat — and into her thoughts. The coffee cat line had reminded her of Pai, the creepy-cute mummy cat who had sacrificed herself to save Ren from an ancient Death Walker in a desert pit. Was she really gone for good? she wondered, remembering her little body, battered, bent, and limp. She humored herself with the thought that, if cats had nine lives, Pai had seven left.

  Her thoughts shifted to the mission ahead. This was a war now. They’d just seen the army, and its first target was New York. Home. She couldn’t let that happen. They had to find the Lost Spells. But even if they could, there was a problem. Alex’s mom had gone into hiding with the Spells to try to find a way to undo the magic that had saved his life without undoing him. The Death Walkers and their army had returned to this world, thanks to the Spells — but so had Alex. Sending them back risked sending him back, too. But they’d found his mom before she’d figured out a solution — and led The Order right to her.

  Now they were racing toward Cairo, where The Order held the Spells. Trying to recapture them, hoping to use them to save her parents, her city, her everything. Everything except her best friend.

  He could be racing toward his grave.

  Ren couldn’t see any good way to reconcile the two problems. The idea of two problems with two separate and mutually exclusive solutions made her so uncomfortable that she physically squirmed in
her torn vinyl seat. She’d faced hard tests before, ones where she had to scrap for partial credit — and extra credit — just to salvage a B+.

  But she’d never faced a test that seemed quite so unfair.

  The minivan bumped to a stop. Dr. Bauer groaned and shifted in her seat as Ren leaned forward to look out the windshield. Her heart started thumping as she saw a large wooden police barrier with armed men standing on either side. One of them stepped around toward Todtman’s window. The guard took one look at Todtman’s pale skin and spoke in English.

  “You have been stopped because your vehicle matches one we are looking for,” said the man.

  “Stopped under whose authority?” countered Todtman.

  The man smiled. “The Order’s, of course,” he said, his fingers drumming lightly on the barrel of his gun. “We are the only authority now.”

  Ren’s racing heart did a little backflip, but her mind was oddly clear. So the conquest wouldn’t start in New York, after all, she thought. She had been underground for too long. Up here, the conquest was well underway.

  “Out of the vehicle,” said the man, his voice rising, his machine gun pointed at Todtman’s face. “All of you,” he barked. “Get out!”

  Alex woke his mom. “We’re in trouble,” he said softly. “Again.”

  It seemed like a crime to pry her from the sleep she needed, but it was a crime committed at gunpoint. The gun barrel was inches from Todtman’s protruding, slightly frog-like eyes as he slowly opened his door. Still, Alex knew their mentor could slide his hand up to his amulet and scramble the gunman’s mind like two eggs at a whisk convention.

  The problem was the other three. One of them was coming around now to open the side door of the minivan, but the other two remained far apart on either side of the traffic barrier. Their machine guns were trained on the vehicle. Alex could take out one of them with a powerful lance of mystic wind, no problem. But by the time he could turn his amulet’s power on the second, the bullets would be flying, and his mom was defenseless.

  The odds of flooring it and busting through the barricade were no better. You can’t make a high-speed escape in a low-speed vehicle.

  Still, as they all reluctantly climbed out of the old beater, Alex’s mom carrying her threadbare travel pillow like a kid with a teddy bear, he tried to make eye contact with Todtman. Maybe they could coordinate: You get that one, I’ll get this one, and then we, um, duck?

  “Your amulets,” said the first guard, his gun barrel dipping from Todtman’s froggy face to his avian amulet. “Give them to me.”

  Alex blinked up into the baking Egyptian sun and groaned. His mind raced: It was now or never.

  PAKKA-PAKKA-PAK!

  The second guard rattled off three shots in the air, making Alex jump.

  He fought his racing pulse and slowly slid his hand up toward his scarab.

  “Lift them off only by the chains,” said the first guard. “Touch the amulets and you die.”

  So they knew all about the amulets and their power. Out of the corner of his eye, Alex saw one of the guards by the barricade talking low and fast into a cell phone. Alex was sure the man was reporting the capture to his bosses, and maybe asking if they should take them prisoner or just gun them down on the side of the road.

  “What a bummer,” said Luke, reaching up for his cheetah. “I just got this thing.”

  Alex looked over and saw his cousin’s hand brush the cheetah on the way up — and then he saw nothing but a swirl of sand and dust in the sunlight.

  SHOOOMP!

  All of a sudden, Luke was in front of Alex, grabbing the gun from the guard who’d fired the warning shots. Alex blinked in disbelief, and in the time it took his eyes to open and close — WHOOSH! — Luke was already next to the main guard, smacking him over the head with the butt of the other man’s gun. WHUMP!

  Before that one could even fall to the ground, Luke was somehow all the way over by the barricade, lowering his shoulder into the first guard there. THUDD! The man flew through the air and crashed gracelessly to the pavement.

  PAKKA-PAKKA-PAK!

  Oh no! The fourth guard was firing at Luke.

  But Luke was already gone. Seeing only open air, the guard ceased fire and looked around wildly. Alex saw Luke before the guard did. His cousin, now standing behind the man, tapped him casually on the shoulder. The man swung around — right into a punch that lifted him off his feet.

  As the man fell to the ground unconscious — SHOOOMP! — Luke was back by the others, standing next to the door of the minivan and shaking his hand in mild pain.

  “How —” stammered Alex. “How did you —”

  “Don’t know, exactly,” said Luke, “but as soon as I touched the amulet, I just felt, like, supercharged.”

  Alex watched as the first guard — the one Luke had only disarmed — ran off down the road. The other three were all in various states of beatdown.

  “The amulet must grant some sort of temporary physical augmentation,” mused Todtman.

  “The cheetah was a symbol of both strength and power in dynastic times,” added Alex’s mom.

  “That was AAAWWESOMME!” gushed Alex.

  Luke, still pale from his underground confinement, actually blushed as he looked down at his amulet. “Well, I kind of had an unfair advantage,” he admitted. Then he looked up and smiled. “I guess you could say I’m a cheata.”

  They stayed off the main roads after that. Ren was in the front seat, helping navigate with a crumpled old map, and Luke was conked out in back. As impressive as the cheetah amulet had been, it seemed to take a physical toll on him. After a few more miles, they pulled into a gas station convenience store to get food, gas, and a better map.

  When Alex climbed back into the backseat to bring his mom aspirin and water, he was surprised to find her awake again. “You should be resting,” he said.

  “Not right now,” she said, patting the seat next to her. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

  “What?” said Alex. “Is it your side? Should we try to find a hospital?”

  She shook her head and answered softly. “It’s your father,” she said as the old van pulled back out onto the road and headed into the dusk. “You deserve to know.”

  As Todtman switched on the headlights, Ren puzzled out the new map, and Luke ate half their food, Alex sat absolutely still and listened to the story of how he came to be.

  “We met in Alexandria,” she said. “We were both young and both in love: with each other, and with archaeology.”

  Alex tried to picture the monster he’d met as a young student with a head full of pyramids and hieroglyphs. As a grad student in love.

  “We were both so passionate about our work,” his mother continued. Amir, your father … He was obsessed with finding the Lost Spells even then. I searched with him — and when you were born, you came, too. But the search took us to dark places, searching every secret and forbidden site we could find. These were cursed places no child should have been. I didn’t realize until it was too late the toll it was taking — on you, on your health.”

  Alex couldn’t believe it: an entire childhood of pain. Sickness the doctors could never fix. He looked up at his mom, but she was staring straight ahead now, into the past. “That’s when you left him?” he said, hoping — almost needing — to hear her say yes.

  She shook her head. “That’s when I tried,” she said. “But he had discovered something else. The mask. Its power fueled his obsession, turned it into something more like madness. He used the mask’s power to control me, to keep me close. It wasn’t until I discovered something of equal power that I could break free.”

  “The scarab,” said Alex, touching the amulet.

  His mom nodded. “The scarab. But by then the damage had been done … Honey, I am so sorry. More sorry than you will ever know.”

  But she was wrong. He knew exactly. He looked up at her, and this time he caught a glimpse of her blue-gray eyes. For the first time,
he truly understood the depth behind them. She’d had a life before him, one with triumphs and mistakes of her own. She hadn’t understood the damage those dark places were doing to him, but she’d paid the price as much as he had. She’d worried and fretted over him every single day since. She’d cared for and eventually saved him — at great cost to her, at great cost to everyone.

  My mom didn’t know the danger, he thought, but my dad didn’t care. He couldn’t find the words to say any of this to his mom. Instead, he leaned across the seat and wrapped his arms around her as she wrapped hers around him.

  After hours of driving, a low glow lit the horizon: city lights caught in a suffocating net of heavy smog.

  Cairo.

  “Mom, look,” he whispered. But she was resting again, her eyes closed, her breathing shallow — and this was no longer the Cairo she had told him about. When he was a kid, she’d made the crazy traffic, wild outside bazaars, and winding side alleys sound like a loud vibrant adventure. No more. This was a haunted city now, the death-shrouded capital of a country in crisis.

  He felt the fear building inside him as they reached the edge of the city and drove toward. The Order’s headquarters on the other side of the capital. Alex stared out at the dark streets as the unflappable German drove steadily onward. Alex could already see an open fire burning a few blocks away, flickering flames illuminating a plume of rising smoke. Most of the streetlights were burned out or broken. Todtman slowed down to steer around a car abandoned in the middle of the road. As soon as they cleared it, a pack of stray dogs met them on the other side, barking fiercely. Todtman stepped on the gas, and the mangy mongrels began to chase them, an interchangeable mass of matted fur and snapping teeth.

  They lost the dogs and passed the fire, but soon the four-lane road narrowed. Stacked sandbags funneled them into a single lane at the center. Todtman slowed the minivan again, and they all eyed the checkpoint nervously. But there were no armed men this time. No men at all.