The Monster War

by Alan Gratz

  “An army of monsters,” Clyde told him. “Led by a monster woman named Philomena Moffett. If you don’t send everybody home, she’ll kill ’em all.”

  Colbert looked around at the workers on the bandstand. “An army of monsters?” He laughed. “All right, young man. You and your little friends have had your fun. I don’t know where you got that steam man, but I suggest you get back in it and go back home to your parents right now.”

  Archie slumped. Of course no one was going to take them seriously. He and the others had fought so many Mangleborn and Manglespawn that there was no question it was all real, and the fact that they were kids had nothing to do with whether they were qualified to be Leaguers or not. But nobody else was going to see that. To everybody else they were just a bunch of kids talking nonsense.

  “Let me at him,” Hachi growled, but Archie held her back.

  “Your Honor,” Clyde tried again, but he never got to finish. A woman’s scream split the air, and a mob of fairgoers streamed out the doors of the Penny Arcade, chased by Manglespawn.

  “The League of Seven!” crowed an all-too-familiar voice, and they spun. Philomena Moffett stood atop the statue of Hiawatha, the octopus-like tentacles that writhed beneath her skirts wrapped around the Iroquois hero’s face.

  In her hands, she held the Dragon Lantern.

  Moffett laughed. “The League of Seven, together again for the first time!” Moffett said, her voice booming. Archie knew what she could do with that voice. If she wanted to, Moffett could bring every one of the exhibition’s buildings down with a scream.

  Winchester Colbert staggered back. “Who—? What—?”

  “Allow me to introduce the League of Seven to the league I created,” Moffett said. “The Shadow League!”

  There were more screams, and crowds streamed out of the Steam Exhibition, the Art Pavilion, the Clockwork Midway, the Raycannon Stand, and the Horticultural Hall, more Manglespawn at their heels. On the rooftops of the buildings appeared a succession of horrors: a walking junk pile; a hulking piece of living crystal; a man-sized locust; a thing that was more spider than man; a coiling, twisting mass of vines; and a blinding white blur of a man engulfed in purple flames.

  “These would be the monsters Moffett made at Alcatraz, I take it?” Fergus asked, lektricity already crackling around his clenched fists.

  Archie nodded. “She made them with the Dragon Lantern. They’re all criminals.”

  “They are infamous criminals,” Moffett told them. “The worst of the worst. Sakuruta, the Pawnee kidnapper, now a spider man. Honda Nobuharu, the Ametokai Strangler, now a suffocating kudzu vine that can’t be killed. Naalnish, the Navajo bank robber, now a human locust. Hector Villarreal, the serial killer from New Spain, a magnet so powerful all metal becomes a part of him. Leaning Oak, the Shikaakwa gangster, now made of solid, indestructible crystal. And William Tecumseh Sherman, the Yankee arsonist, whose body burns with never-ending flames. And me, of course. But you know what I can do.”

  “Yeah,” said Archie. “We know you, Philomena Moffett. And we’re going to stop you.”

  “Now see here!” Winchester Colbert warned Moffett.

  Moffett ignored him. “You cannot hope to stop us,” she told Archie. “Thanks to the Dragon Lantern, we seven have known pain and suffering in ways no one else has. And now we intend to visit that pain and suffering on the United Nations.”

  She was wrong, Archie thought. Each member of the League of Seven had suffered in some way too: alienation, loss, abandonment, blindness, loneliness, physical injury. And every day, every minute, Archie dealt with the guilt of being the cause of so much death. They were all broken, in a way. But it was the broken parts of them that made them stronger. That made them superheroes.

  “We’ve known plenty of pain and suffering,” Hachi told her.

  “Prepare to know more,” Moffett said. “Shadow League—attack!”

  Moffett’s monsters leaped off their rooftops into the crowds below or disappeared inside the buildings they stood on, and the screams began again.

  “We need a plan!” Clyde said. “Archie, you and Kitsune—” he began, but the other Leaguers were already running off in different directions. “Wait!” Clyde called. No one did. In moments, only he and Archie still stood on the bandstand.

  “I’ll take care of Moffett!” Archie told him. “You go after that big magnetic man!”

  “We should be working together!” Clyde said.

  Archie put his arms around the base of the Hiawatha statue and pulled. Crack! The stone pedestal broke off, and Archie stepped back with the giant statue—and Moffett on top of it—in his hands.

  “I got this! Go!” Archie said.

  Clyde climbed in Buster as Archie swung the statue like a hammer. Wham! Grass and dirt went flying as Hiawatha slammed into the ground.

  “Great Chicksah!” Colbert said, falling back on the bandstand. “How did you—how did you do that?”

  “Just stay back,” Archie said. “I think I got her, but—”

  WOMWOMWOMWOMWOM! Moffett’s sonic scream knocked Archie head over heels into the broken pedestal, and he crashed through it in an explosion of dust and stone. When she ran out of breath he stood and hurled a chunk of debris at her before she could scream again. Moffett jumped behind the downed statue. Archie picked it up and held it over his head, meaning to smash her with it again.

  WOMWOMWOMWOMWOM! Moffett hit Archie with her scream and he dropped the statue. THOOM! It landed on top of him, driving him through the wooden floor of the stage and destroying half the bandstand. He pushed the statue off him and stood, expecting another blast from Moffett, but she was gone.

  “Where’d she go?” he asked Colbert.

  The Chickasaw chief sat shaking in the wreckage of the stage, staring at Archie like he was a nightmare come to life. Perhaps he was.

  “Where’d she go?” he asked again.

  Colbert shook his head slowly. He didn’t know. Archie looked around the fair and saw his friends battling Moffett’s Shadow League. They looked like they were doing about as well as he was. Gonzalo rode in circles around the burning man, but his raygun didn’t seem to be doing any damage to him. Hachi was caught up in the curling kudzu vines of the Ametokai Strangler. Clyde and Buster were trading body blows with Hector Villarreal, but the magnetic man kept getting bigger and bigger as they plowed through the exhibit halls. Fergus was shooting lightning at the spider man, who skittered away up the side of the Horticultural Hall. Outside the Clockwork Midway, Kitsune had the locust man hopping in circles to some illusion, but he kept catching fairgoers. There were still too many people around, even with the stampede for the exit.

  And no Moffett anywhere.

  Archie picked up the statue of Hiawatha to take with him as a club. If he couldn’t find Moffett, at least he could help one of the others. But the sun was going down. Soon they wouldn’t be able to see any of the Shadow Leaguers to fight, except of course for the one who glowed white-hot like the sun.

  “Gaslights!” Archie told the Chickasaw chief.

  Colbert stared blankly at the horror show his Centennial Exposition had become. Archie groaned. He’d forgotten how paralyzing it was for most people when they first saw the primeval horrors that lived just beyond their normal lives. Archie tossed aside the statue of Hiawatha and helped Winchester Colbert to his feet.

  “Listen to me,” Archie said. “I need you to turn on the gaslights. Can you do that? If you don’t we won’t be able to see to stop them. Chief!”

  Colbert shook himself. He wasn’t all there—he might never be all there again—but he was back enough to focus hazily on Archie.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes. The lights.” He staggered through the remains of the bandstand, looking for something. “Yes. The lights.”

  He found a metal box with a big-handled switch on top and righted it. “The lights,” he said.

  Archie frowned. What kind of gaslights had a switch like that to turn them on? And why was it on
the bandstand?

  Colbert threw the switch—ka-chung—and lights flickered on across the park. Streetlights. Interior lights. Lights on strings hung between the buildings. Lines of lights outlining the edges of every exhibition hall and pyramid. Not gaslights, Archie realized with horror.

  Lektric lights.

  Archie threw himself at the box and flipped the switch back. Nothing happened. Archie flipped it again and again, trying to kill the lektric lights, but they wouldn’t turn off.

  “No no no no no!” Archie said.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the wonder of our age,” Colbert said, giving the speech he’d been practicing to some imaginary crowd, “the lektric light.”

  “This is so clinker,” Archie said. He stood and backed away. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

  The ground shook. The lektric lights flickered. The pyramids crumbled.

  Beneath their feet, a Mangleborn was stirring.

  15

  Fergus was the first one back.

  “Shut it down!” he cried. “You’ve got to shut the blinking thing down!”

  “I tried!” Archie told him. He flipped the switch back and forth to show him. “See? It’s not working anymore!”

  Fergus tried the switch himself as the others ran up.

  “Moffett called her Shadow League away when the lights came on,” Clyde said through Buster’s speaking trumpet.

  The ground shook again as the Mangleborn beneath them stirred, strengthened by the surge of lektricity.

  “We have to get those lights turned off now,” said Hachi.

  Fergus cast the switchbox aside. “This dingus is just for the muckety-muck ceremony.” He turned to Winchester Colbert. “Where’s the generator?”

  “Powered by a…” The chief paused, trying to remember his speech. “Powered by a self-exciting, lektromagnetic dynamo built by the Chickasaw tribe’s very own inventor extraordinaire, Nashoba Farmer.”

  “Yes, that’s all fine and good,” Fergus said, “but where is it?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Señor X told them. “I was here the last time this one was put down. The lektricity might strengthen it, but it’s not getting up again.”

  The ground rumbled, knocking a pillar loose from one of the exhibition halls.

  “You sure about that?” Kitsune asked.

  “Yeah,” Señor X said. “Not unless somebody happened to arrange all these lektrified buildings mathematically using a Fibonacci sequence.”

  Hachi and Archie looked at each other, wide-eyed.

  “We’re in trouble,” said Hachi.

  The earth trembled again, and the Yankee Exhibition Hall exploded. Boom! When the dust cleared, they saw a giant webbed claw hooked on the ground. Boom! The Clockwork Midway exploded, and another webbed claw reached into the sky.

  “The buildings are situated in a Fibonacci spiral,” Martine said quietly. “I noted the arrangement as we arrived.”

  “Yeeeeeah,” Señor X said. “Then we’re in trouble.”

  “Crivens! This Nashoba Farmer guy who installed the lights must have been a madman!” Fergus said.

  “Isn’t everybody who messes with lektricity a madman?” Hachi shot back at him.

  “Well, now that you mention it…,” Fergus said.

  They all flinched as the step pyramids around the edges of the Centennial Exhibition crumbled. The ground beneath them began to rumble and rise, and Clyde scooped them all up in Buster’s hands and stepped back.

  The gigantic thing that pulled itself from under the earth had a greenish gray head like a crocodile, and was covered all over with bony spikes. Its teeth were jagged and sharp, and not confined to its mouth—every joint on its body had another mouth full of barbed teeth on it.

  “Mr. Rivets says he’s never seen this one before in any book,” Clyde told them. “Señor X?”

  “Its name is Cipactli,” he told them. “The Lemurian League took him down more than six millennia ago, but not before it ate Tezcatlipoca’s foot.”

  Archie remembered Tezcatlipoca from his vision—he was the Lemurian League’s shadow. The other-Archie.

  “Great,” said Archie.

  Clyde set them all on the ground. “So how do we beat him?” he asked.

  “We have to stretch him out. Pull him apart at the mouths,” Señor X said. “And don’t let him get to the water!”

  Cipactli had pulled itself up from the ground and was slithering off toward the Mississippi River, its scaly hind frog legs pushing it through the ruins of the Centennial Exhibition.

  “Archie!” Clyde cried.

  Archie grabbed the Mangleborn’s spiked crocodile tail as it swung by them and dug in his feet. Cipactli dragged him along, carving out a swishing, Archie-sized trench, until Archie’s feet caught the foundation of the wrecked Art Pavilion. Archie strained against the foundation, straightening his legs and digging his fingers into the Mangleborn’s tail until he’d stopped the thing in its tracks.

  “Hold on!” Clyde called. Buster picked up the fallen statue of Hiawatha and rammed it through Cipactli’s tail. The Mangleborn roared and thrashed, but it was pinned to the spot.

  Archie let go and ran for one of Cipactli’s frog legs. “Clyde! Grab the other side!” he yelled.

  The webbed, clawed frog leg was slimy and smelled like dead fish, but Archie found a place to hold on and pulled. So did Clyde. Cipactli flumped to the ground, but its front legs still clawed the ground and its main mouth bit into an empty concert hall. Most of the million or so fairgoers, thankfully, had long since run screaming into the night.

  “We need help!” Clyde called.

  “And where am I supposed to get a Mangleborn Stretcher-Outer?” Fergus asked.

  Hachi sprinted away like she had a plan. Hachi always had a plan. “You’re the maker,” she called over her shoulder. “Make one!”

  “‘Make one,’ she says,” Fergus muttered. “Like I can just throw together a Mangleborn Stretcher-Outer out of…” His eyes fell on the Exhibition’s giant Ferris wheel. “Well gag my hopper. Gonzalo, give a mate a lift?”

  Archie played tug-of-war with Clyde as the other Leaguers scattered. He hoped they had some idea how to pull the rest of the Mangleborn apart, and soon. The Archie-sized mouth on Cipactli’s ankle snapped at him hungrily, and the building-sized mouth on its head turned to join it. Chomp! Archie was just out of reach. Whoever got the front claws wouldn’t be so lucky.

  “Archie! Take one of the front claws!” Hachi said. She ran up behind him, her flying circus carrying a steel cable beside her. The end of the cable had a twisted piece of metal tied to it. Hachi’s clockwork toys flew right for the mouth on the monster’s ankle. It snapped up the metal anchor hungrily, swallowing the end of the steel cable with it.

  “Hook, line, and sinker,” Hachi said. “I’ve got this one!” she yelled as she ran off.

  Archie had no idea what she’d tied the other end to, but he trusted Hachi to know what she was doing.

  On the other side of Cipactli, Gonzalo rode up on Alamo and blasted a hole in the back of the mouth at the Mangleborn’s other ankle with Señor X. Cipactli roared and thrashed, knocking Archie to the ground as he tried to grab hold of one of its front claws. Before Archie was even on his feet again, Gonzalo was off his horse and hog-tying the other back leg through the hole he’d shot in it. “Me and Fergus got this one, amigo!” he told Clyde, and he hopped back on Alamo and spurred him away.

  “That’s the legs and tail,” Clyde called, taking up a position on the other front paw across from Archie. “But we still need the head! Where’s Martine?”

  POOM. A puff of smoke rose on the river, and Archie heard something whistling toward them in the night sky. THUNK! A giant harpoon buried itself in Cipactli’s head and drew tight.

  “Right on time,” Archie muttered. Cipactli’s claw was beating him into the ground like a steamhammer.

  Hachi’s steel cable went tight. Across the fairgrounds, Archie heard the music of the Ferris
wheel start to play, and the steel cable Gonzalo had put in went tight.

  “All right, everybody,” Clyde boomed. “PULL!”

  Archie punched the thrashing claw he held, and it went still for a moment. That was all he needed. He planted his heels in the Chickasaw dirt and pulled. Across from him, Buster’s exhaust pipe wagged and smoked as Clyde pulled with every ounce of pressure in the steam man’s boiler.

  “Make a wish!” Clyde called to Archie.

  CRACK! The front legs came off at the shoulders, breaking at the man-sized jaws there, and Archie and Clyde fell back into the grass. CRACK! The mouths at Cipactli’s hips split, and its flopping frog legs zipped away on steel cables. CRACK! The Mangleborn’s head and tail ripped off its body, tearing at the mouths on its neck and butt.

  Archie waited for the Mangleborn to start fighting again, but it was dead. No—not dead. Just pulled apart. That’s why the Lemurian League had buried it in different places under giant pyramids—so it couldn’t come back together again.

  “We did it,” Clyde said. Buster stood over the drawn and quartered Mangleborn, staring down at their handiwork. “We actually did it!”

  “Well of course we did,” Fergus said. He rode up with Gonzalo on the back of Alamo.

  Hachi came running from the other side. “Did it work?”

  “I felt The Kraken’s harpoon go slack,” Martine said, joining them. “There was a 63.9 percent probability that the harpoon had dislodged before removing the Deep One’s head.” She tilted her head and stared at Cipactli’s lifeless eyes. “This is improbable.”

  Fergus raised a finger. “But not impossible.”

  “How’d you do it?” Archie asked Fergus.

  “He used the Ferris wheel,” Gonzalo said. “It was genius.”

  “Had to tinker with it,” Fergus bragged. “Reinforce it a wee bit, and up the pounds per square inch we were getting out of the engine. But then I just ran that steel cable around it like a winch. After the ranger here attached the other end for me. What I want to know is how you did yours,” he asked Hachi.

  “Streetcar,” Hachi said. “They run right by the exhibition grounds.”