CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Swingin’
Fortunately, and unusually, the building had been almost empty. There were no lines of slaves and no guards waiting in groups off to the side. With nothing to do, Atlas’s two main henchmen had slipped out the back to eat a few lotus leaves. The explosion behind them so startled one that he turned too fast and butted heads with his comrade, knocking them both out cold. In fact, the only one in the building was Atlas himself.
With no one to prod him gently, he was startled awake and slightly confused, which always made him angry.
Seeing the far end of the building blown out, the roof caved in, and three young girls standing on top of the rubble amidst the whirling dust, his first instinct was to kick out or grab on to something hard and real.
He saw the section of column at his feet with a cluster of rope at one end, and raised his foot to stomp down on it with all the force he could muster.
Alcie screamed at the same time Pandy yelled, “You don’t want to do that!”
Atlas paused, his foot in midair.
“Uh, I don’t think you want to do that,” Pandy yelled again.
Atlas was unaccustomed to being spoken to in such a tone. He cocked his enormous head to one side and stared at Pandy.
“Yes I do,” he said at last. It was in that second that Pandy realized she was dealing with a gigantic baby.
“No, you really, really don’t,” Pandy said.
“I don’t?”
“No way.”
“Why not?”
Pandy got a little closer to her uncle. She noticed at once that his mutant nose hair, in only the few hours that she’d been in the village, had grown to a length of almost a meter and a half and was now very thick and riddled with rust red veins. She quickly took off her leather carrying pouch.
“Hold this,” she said quietly, handing it to Iole and climbing down off the rubble toward Atlas. “Uh, you don’t want to do that because . . . because . . . what you really want to do is . . . is . . . find out what just happened to your hut, home . . . place! I mean, just look around. What is all this? You don’t know, right?”
“Right!” Atlas said. “What happened?”
“Why don’t you put your foot down and I’ll tell you,” Pandy said, an idea percolating. She knew the hair with Laziness had to be pulled out at the root, and if she could just get close enough to his nose to grab hold . . .
Atlas lowered his leg, but his big toe bumped the column section slightly. That was all it took to shatter the hard clay. The section fell away, revealing Homer’s lower half. His toga was dirty and brown, but his legs were perfect.
“What’s this?” Atlas asked, bending to peer at Homer, still unconscious underneath the rope cocoon. “Is this the cause?”
“No,” said Pandy as she approached, watching Atlas’s nose hair drag on the ground as he bent his head. She began wiping her hands on her toga, drying them to get a good grip. “It was your . . . your . . . guards. They’re trying to take over!”
She was two meters from his face; still too far to jump for it.
“They’re trying to kill you!” Alcie cried from behind her.
Pandy took one more step and was within striking distance. She leapt forward, hands ready to clutch the thick, ugly hair, when Atlas suddenly rose to his feet to tower above her.
“They are? My guards are trying to kill me?” he yelled.
Pandy landed right on top of Homer’s stomach, which made Homer twitch and groan ever so slightly. She looked up at her uncle, thinking he hadn’t seemed so large when he was just sitting down, but now he was almost ten meters high.
And then, as Pandy stared in shock, he grew again. His legs stretched several more meters as did his arms, and his torso expanded in all directions. Even his head grew bigger. Only seconds later, Atlas was at his full height, bursting through the remaining roof and standing erect, almost eighteen meters tall, just arm’s distance from the bottom of the heavens.
“I see I need to smash some heads,” Atlas said. “Somebody’s going off the mountain!”
“Wait!” Pandy cried, picking herself up. “You don’t know which ones they are!”
“Doesn’t matter,” Atlas said, beginning to move. “First one I see goes off the mountain!”
With one step, Atlas strode over the broken heap of wall and out into the crowd. Thousands of people, none of whom had ever seen a Titan at full height, fled in every direction. Atlas grabbed the first two guards he came upon and began clomping toward the nearest ridge.
Pandy raced over the rubble, passing Alcie, who was heading toward Homer.
“I’ll stay with him, you and Iole go!”
Pandy and Iole sped into the crowd, now less dense, and chased after Atlas. Within only a minute they found they were almost upon him.
“That makes no sense,” Iole panted as she and Pandy dashed off to the side to parallel the Titan’s course. “He should be at the edge of the mountain by now!”
“No,” Pandy heaved, watching her uncle carefully, “look at him! He’s trying not to step on anybody!”
“Great Athena,” Iole said.
It was true. Atlas was almost tottering on his gargantuan legs, looking all around him, and taking teensy steps in an effort not to trample any workers. And he was apologizing to everyone.
“Sorry. Pardon me. Sorry. Have to kill some guards. Excuse me. Oooh, was that your baby? No? Baby’s okay? Good. Excuse me. Pardon me, please.”
Pandy and Iole stopped for a moment to watch the spectacle, doubled over in hysterics. Then, out of nowhere, Pandy grabbed Iole’s arm, a picture forming in her mind.
“Come on,” she cried, sprinting forward, “I have to get on top of the ridge before he does.”
She and Iole wove a tight course through the village, much of which was now fairly deserted, as most of the crowd was behind them and running the other way. The girls were unaware of the two old men doggedly following them. The closest ridge was in sight, empty of guards; they had all abandoned their posts at the first sign of trouble in the village. Pandy and Iole passed the last column and started up the slope. Cresting the ridge, Pandy almost sailed over the sheer drop on the other side, flailing her arms wildly as she teetered on the edge. Just as she was about to go over, Iole thrust out her arm and grabbed a handful of Pandy’s toga, yanking Pandy back and pulling herself up as well.
“Thank you,” Pandy said.
“My pleasure,” Iole replied. “Now, you probably don’t have a plan . . .”
“Shhhhh! Hang on,” Pandy said, silencing Iole and watching Atlas approach the ridge. He would land on the crest only fifteen meters away, just past a large cluster of boulders. Pandy turned to Iole.
“I have a plan.”
“Naturally.” Iole grinned.
Prometheus had to stop for a moment. Panting heavily, he leaned on an oven, now cooling with no one tending the dying fire. Hermes, on his spindly old-man legs, strode up right beside him, perfectly rested, not a white hair out of place.
“Did you have to make me feel old? Couldn’t you just have made me look old?” Prometheus gasped.
“Absolutely. But where’s the fun?”
“So . . . now we’ll save her, right?”
“No,” Hermes said.
“No? What do you mean, no?”
“I mean, my friend, if she gets killed, she gets killed. We’ll both know the Fates decreed it. To completely prevent her from being killed would have required interceding with the Fates. That means forms in triplicate, signatures, briberies, and playing footsie with Clotho, if you know what I’m saying, and I am just not up to that.”
“But you promised.”
“No such thing did I do.”
“Then why did you bring me, Hermes? You’re a joker, but you’re not cruel.”
“No, I’m not,” Hermes said, calmly watching Pandy almost fall off the side of the mountain in the distance. “I brought you because you got on your knees. You’d never
do that for anyone or anything unless your heart and soul were on the line. Since recapturing this particular evil has now become a family matter, I felt you should see the outcome for yourself; you need to know the facts of what’s going to happen with your daughter and your brother. That’s why I brought you.”
“I’m still gonna save her if she needs saving,” Prometheus said, ambling off toward the ridge with a glare at Hermes.
“You can try, my friend,” Hermes sighed to himself, walking slowly behind. “You can try,”
Pandy and Iole raced across the ridge and hid themselves behind two of the largest boulders just as Atlas started up the slope. He was moving faster now; no people to mind underfoot. Pandy poked her head up from her hiding place, knowing she would have to time her movements to the second.
In one stride, Atlas was halfway up the slope. As he took his next step, he bent forward to steady himself, bringing his head low to the ground, just below the crest. In that second, before he brought his other leg up, Pandy bolted from behind the rocks and shot herself forward and up, arms outstretched, aiming straight for the huge nose hair.
And in that second she realized that she was about to grab it with her bare hands. She’d already been infected by Jealousy and Vanity by mistakenly touching them. Why didn’t she think about Laziness!? What would this do to her? And how could she have been so stupid to forget the adamant net!
Clomp.
Suddenly she had the hair in both hands and was fifteen meters in the air, hanging on for dear life. Up close, the hair was even more disgusting than she’d imagined; it was rough all over with its own fuzzy gray hairs and had a stench like burned wood.
Atlas felt a tug on his precious hair and looked down to see Pandy swinging from side to side, like a pendulum, in front of his body. He let out a tremendous, ear-splitting roar and arched his back, flinging his arms out to both sides. He dropped both guards, unconscious, on the slope and began swiping furiously at Pandy. But his movements were clumsy, like those of an infant, and instead of grabbing for her, he was trying to knock her off the hair.
Pandy was not feeling Lazy in the slightest but had no time to wonder why. She was bouncing off the back of Atlas’s hands, whipping around to the sides of his neck and caroming off his chest. Suddenly her feet landed on his body and she took that moment to lift up and then give a mighty tug on the root of the hair. Atlas screamed and swung his torso from side to side. In one step he crested the ridge, his head scraping the bottom of the heavens, his cries echoing off the surrounding mountains. Pandy, who had frozen in a fear of heights on the rope ladder only a short time before, was now swinging free over the sheer drop off Jbel Toubkal, certain death thousands and thousands of meters below.
Prometheus was halfway up the slope when his stamina and strength finally gave out. He dropped like a stone to the ground and lay there, heaving, just as Hermes wandered up and sat beside him, and just as Pandy flew onto Atlas’s nose hair.
“Please,” he whispered to Hermes.
“No,” Hermes replied, looking at his dear friend with a small touch of sympathy.
“I . . . hate . . . you,” Prometheus said.
“You don’t.”
“I . . . do.”
“If I thought you meant it, I’d be hurt,” Hermes said, smiling. “You’re the one who wanted the old man disguise.”
“But . . .”
“Hush, pal,” Hermes said, looking at Atlas standing on the ridge and Pandy clinging to his nose hair, swinging high over the edge. “It’s time to watch your girl.”
Pandy swung free of Atlas’s hands and landed again on Atlas’s upper arm. Planting her feet and lifting, she tugged sideways. The hair didn’t budge, which, Pandy realized, was a very good thing, because if it had come loose, she would have fallen to her death off the mountain.
Atlas, seeing that his attempts to swat the girl away were doing no good, finally decided to grab at her. Pandy saw his arm stretch wide, his massive palm turn toward her, and knew she had two choices. Either hang on tight to the hair and let him grab her, so that when he yanked her, he’d yank out the hair, too. Or escape being killed by making herself untouchable. She had no desire to be crushed completely, and she knew she couldn’t focus the heat directly on his hands, he needed them to hold up the heavens, so she concentrated her power . . . on herself.
She had no idea if it would work, but she directed her power over fire inward and then sent it radiating outward to her skin. As Atlas’s hand bore down upon her, she focused everything she had solely on making her skin, and only her skin, hot . . . very hot. So hot that her sandals began to smoke and the bottom of her cloak caught fire. As the complete loss of sound hit her again, she looked at her arms: they were glowing with the radiance of the sun. Atlas’s hand closed around her for a moment (which extinguished her cloak), then he roared again and threw his hand back, a small blister on his palm. Pandy felt the nose hair begin to melt slightly where she touched it and reached higher for a better grip, focusing on cutting off the heat to her hands. Atlas whipped his body around as Pandy planted her feet on his chest and tugged again. The hair remained fixed in his nostril, but Pandy lost her footing and slammed into Atlas’s chest. She seared his skin, making it bubble, and caused Atlas to stumble forward. He completely lost his balance and tumbled forward in a sideways roll, which whipped Pandy into the ground, almost knocking her out.
Then Atlas slid the last few meters feetfirst, dragging Pandy behind him in the dirt.
He crashed into the closest column, which caused a chain reaction as sections burst apart, smashing into other columns close by. In less than a minute, seventeen columns crashed to the ground.
The sections that hit Atlas’s body only glanced off, but the top section, with the slave in it, hit him in just the right soft spot in the middle of his forehead, dazing Atlas to the point that he just lay on the ground, very confused. Pandy stumbled over to her uncle, only somewhat aware of Iole racing down the slope toward her. She clambered onto Atlas’s torso, causing the Titan to moan in pain with her every move, and walked over his great barrel chest and thick neck until she was right below his chin. Taking the hair in her hands, Pandy said a short prayer to all the Olympians at once and pulled with all her might. She was unaware that the residual heat from her body was charging up through the hair to its root, causing the skin around it to expand; in fact, now that she was standing so close, Atlas’s entire face was turning beet red and his already massive pores were expanding with sweat.
She had used almost all the strength she had and was just starting to realize that it was not going to be enough when . . .
Pop.
The mutant hair flew out of Atlas’s nose like a rock out of a slingshot, sailed past Pandy’s face, whipped out of her hands, and stuck in the dirt almost five meters away.
Immediately, Pandy felt Atlas’s body go limp and saw his head roll to one side. Pandy leapt off Atlas’s chest as Iole ran up, the small wooden box already held tight in her hand.
“Ready?” Pandy asked.
“Ready,” Iole said.
The two girls dashed off to find the end of the hair.
“Well, Achilles’ tendon!” Iole said when they came upon the bulbous mass, now covered with dirt. “No wonder you had such a hard time getting Laziness out.”
“The hair itself isn’t Laziness,” Pandy said. “I grabbed it and . . . nothing. It’s concentrated—it’s all right at the end.”
“You forgot the net, you know,” Iole said.
“Thank you, Miss Obvious!”
The end of the hair was at least three times the thickness of the hair itself. It was, under the dirt, milky gray and looked like a large, filmy, slimy rope that had been wound around the end of a stick.
“Looks like the things my dad uses to clean out his ears, only bigger,” Pandy said.
“Oh, too much information!” Iole said.
“Whatever,” Pandy said. “Let’s just pull it off and get it in the box. Net, p
lease.”
Iole fished out the adamant net from Pandy’s pouch and handed it over. Then Iole slid Pandy’s hairpin out of the clasp on the wooden box and readied herself to open the lid when Pandy gave the order. Pandy wrapped her right hand in the net and moved toward the bulbous mass. Instantly, the sickening gray matter began pulsating, as if it had a heartbeat.
“Not expecting that,” Iole said.
“Fine, so it’s . . . alive,” Pandy said. “Fine.”
She was almost upon it when the slimy strand began to uncoil itself from around the hair.
“Gods!” Pandy cried, stepping back. “It’s a . . . it’s a . . . what is it?”
Suddenly, as one end fell to the ground, a large mouth opened up, revealing many rings of sharp gray teeth. Then, just as quickly, the mouth closed up again.
“Incredible!” Iole said, the wooden box dropping to one side. “It’s a parasite!”
“What?”
“Makes perfect sense!” Iole gasped. “Laziness was feeding off your uncle, sapping his strength and energy while it lived in his nose.”
“Too much information!” Pandy yelled.
The parasite, Laziness, was now fully uncoiled, stretching itself along the ground almost half a meter. At once, the sickly creature began slithering away in the dirt.
“Oh, no you don’t!” yelled Pandy, reaching out with the net, but the parasite was too quick and was slithering faster than she could move. Pandy and Iole took off at a run, but the parasite was easily outstripping them, and soon they were out of the area of crashed columns and heading back toward the middle of the village. Workers had begun to filter back from other parts of the village and Laziness was heading right for the middle of a crowd, which included Ismailil and Amri.
“Move, boys, move!” Pandy screamed. “Run!”
The entire crowd scattered again, but the parasite had locked in on Ismailil and was slithering fast, gaining on the little boy. Pandy knew she couldn’t zap it with heat; Laziness would vaporize and escape completely. Her only hope was to outrun it, but Laziness was still outmaneuvering Pandy and was now within striking distance of Ismailil, its back end whipping wildly, propelling itself forward.
Pandora Gets Lazy Page 16