by Mark Jeffrey
Casey looked doubtful. “Maybe we should just stay here in Starland. It could all just go back to normal again.”
“But what if it doesn’t?” Max said. “Do you want your mom to be like that forever?”
A shock of fear lit Casey’s gaze. She shook her head.
“Look, I don’t like this either. But I think we’ve got to go try.”
Casey still didn’t look convinced.
“There might not be anyone else who can,” Max said.
Max and Casey scoured the town for supplies. In a camping and sporting goods store called Bear Essentials, they found everything they needed: jeans, T-shirts, flannel shirts and socks, plus food: cashews, beef jerky, water, energy bars, and trail mix.
Soon, Max and Casey stood dressed and ready to go.
“I’m scared,” Casey said.
“We’ll just go one town at a time,” Max said.
“No,” Casey said. “I’m scared of whooshing.”
“Oh,” Max said with a half smile. “That’s okay. We’ll start out slow. One step at a time.”
And with that, they headed east out of Starland.
Chapter 6
The Duel in the Mist
Max and Casey whooshed along the California freeway. The clean, hot desert air was electric. Eclipse-bitten red sunlight sprayed the jagged rocks along the roadside with the colors of sawdust and rust. Shadows the size of continents stretched to the horizon.
After a day of traveling, Max and Casey came to a thick patch of palm trees set into a low valley. As they pushed forward, they found a town nestled neatly into the very center of this oasis.
Casey came to a stop.
“I’m thirsty,” she said.
Max nodded to a nearby 24-7 convenience store. “There’ll be something to drink in there,” he said.
They entered, and Max immediately winced. The fluorescent lighting of the store vibrated with a migraine shiver.
Off. On. Off. On.
“Huh,” Casey said upon seeing this. “So time isn’t really stopped, just really, really slow.”
Max nodded. “Maybe that’s why we can pull things into our time frame,” he suggested. “You know, open doors, wiggle objects loose, that sort of thing.”
“Could be,” Casey said. “Because time is already flowing. It’s just that if we touch something for long enough, time starts flowing faster.”
Max was working on heating up the register to leave some cash when he noticed that the clerk was wearing nothing but boxer shorts.
“Casey!” he hissed. “Come here. Come look at this.”
Casey gave a surprised giggle when she saw. “Why is he only wearing his underwear?”
“I don’t know,” Max answered.
“What does it mean?” Casey asked.
“It means that we’re not alone in the Pocket.”
Carefully, they checked out more of the town. At first, they didn’t find anything unusual. But then they encountered several bizarre things in a row.
First, they found a man with a foot-high pile of shaving cream on his head. Then there was a woman, wrapped head to toe in toilet paper, like a mummy.
After that there were three men painted completely green and wearing silly hats.
Then there were twenty people in an outdoor café all wearing Groucho Marx glasses-and-mustache disguises.
“Somebody thinks they’re pretty funny,” Casey said.
They also found a strange symbol spray painted on several buildings. It was a snake and the outline of a mermaid, facing each other, surrounded by a large red circle.
Then Max noticed the same symbol painted on the side of a bus.
“Look,” Max said to Casey. He pointed to the blacktop. There were drops of red paint. “This bus is moving right now, in real time. But the paint drops are right below it, so it must have been painted while the bus was in stopped time. And that only makes sense if someone else is in the Pocket with us.”
Just then, Casey caught movement out of the corner of her eye.
“Look!” she shouted, pointing.
Max whirled and caught just a sliver of a glimpse of . . . something. It darted between the buildings. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled.
There!
A sudden wash of motion rippled across a rooftop. Max turned, but again, he wasn’t fast enough to make it out.
What was that?
“We should get out of here,” Max said quietly.
“Yeah,” Casey said.
Casey had a panicked speed in her stride. “But don’t run,” Max whispered sternly. “We don’t want to look like we’re afraid.”
“I’m not running,” Casey snapped. She flicked him a glare of daggers.
“Well, you might as well be. Slow down!” Max replied.
In front of them a little boy appeared out of nowhere.
He looked like he was about eight years old and was wearing a little white rabbit Halloween costume. He looked glum, like he really didn’t want to be there.
Max and Casey just stared at him. The boy stared back.
“Hello . . . ,” Max said, approaching with a cautious smile. But as if on cue, the boy darted away, whooshing in a white blur of preternatural speed.
Max frowned.
An older boy abruptly appeared, standing behind Casey. He wore a motocross suit, and a bandanna and goggles sat upon his head. He crossed his arms over his chest in an aggressive posture and grinned.
Casey pointed over Max’s shoulder. “Max! Behind you!”
Max snapped his head around. There was a girl, also wearing a red motocross suit, bandanna, and goggles. A name patch identified her as Sasha. She appeared to be about Casey’s age. Her long black hair was braided tightly behind her head and she wore a vicious smile, waving a long dagger.
Max whispered to Casey. “Listen. We have to whoosh. And I mean fast, not like before on the freeway.” Two more figures appeared, also brandishing knives.
Casey shook her head.
“We don’t have a choice!”
The kids in motocross gear slowly pulled their goggles down.
Max grabbed Casey’s hand and whooshed.
The instant slap of time-slow air on their eyeballs blurred their vision. Both blinked furiously, barely able to see. Their jeans snapped in the violent wind.
Casey looked down at her feet in utter terror. She was moving so fast!
“That’s it!” Max yelled. “You’re doing it!”
She actually smiled for a second. “You’re right! I’m doing it!”
“Yes, you are!” Max cast a nervous glance backward. “Keep running!”
The other kids gave chase only a few feet behind. They laughed and hollered as they whooshed.
Several ran up the side of a building, zipping along its vertical plane. And several more bounded to the rooftop and back down again.
Max blinked in surprise. What the heck?
They were Pocket extreme athletes; skateboard punks who no longer needed a skateboard. This was parkour taken to a whole new level.
But how had they gotten so good at whooshing in only a few short days?
In fact, Max got the distinct impression that they were even holding back.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. More kids piled into the chase by the second. A blur of bandannas, motocross suits, and knives swelled rapidly behind them.
Max couldn’t keep his eyes open at this speed, so he could only see in blink-snapshots. No wonder they all wear goggles . . .
Casey managed to keep up—but just barely. Her gaze shone with terror.
On impulse, Max turned sharply. Casey yelped as she was yanked along, and struggled to correct her footing.
A red-haired kid behind them didn’t anticipate this. He went careening into a bunch of garbage cans. Max heard a snap! that sounded like a bone breaking.
But then Max saw what lay ahead.
His mind struggled to make sense of it.
It appeared to be about fifty telephone pole
s jammed into the street at odd angles. They had been uprooted, transplanted. The top of each pole was sharpened, making them look like a forest of giant pencils sticking up out of the ground.
“We have to jump over them!” Max yelled to Casey. There was no time to explain further. “Ready? NOW!!!”
Casey screamed and they both pushed off the ground with all their might and went sailing into the sky.
Max saw between his feet that there were skeletons on the ground, broken on the makeshift pikes. This obstacle was deadly. But how could bodies have become skeletons in only three Pocket-days?
Max and Casey continued to soar. They were already higher than most of the buildings. But now Max realized that in their panic, they had jumped too hard.
They were going higher than they should be . . .
The kids chasing them jumped also. But their jumps were shallower, more controlled. They laughed at Max and Casey, who had hugely overshot.
Finally, the duo started coming back down to earth. With initial relief, Max saw water below them. They were falling toward a pond.
But this was time-frozen water.
The memory of the time-frozen ocean back in Starland flashed in Max’s brain. It had looked like blue gelatin, but was likely hard as ice. And smashing into it at this speed would dash them to bits.
We’re going to die, Max thought.
Max and Casey braced themselves to hit the surface with a bone-rattling thud. But instead, they sloshed into the water.
It turned out that water in the Pocket was not perfectly solid. It was more like slush. As a result, it cushioned their fall.
But it did hurt. A lot.
Slow ripples spread out from where they had both hit the water. Max got to his feet first. He was slowly sinking into the slush.
Their pursuers appeared on one side of the pond.
“C’mon!” he shouted to Casey, wiggling his feet furiously to free them of the water-slush. Seeing this, Casey did the same thing.
Then, together, they whooshed across the pond.
But there were more kids waiting for them on the other side. They formed a gauntlet, a single corridor that Max and Casey had to run through. Any time they tried to deviate from the path, several kids would lunge toward them with daggers drawn.
They were being herded.
The duo rounded a corner and practically collided with a flock of white birds. There were hundreds of them, time-frozen in the middle of taking off.
Another obstacle.
Without thinking, Casey jumped into a kind of a high-speed sideways tumble and rolled up the side of the frozen flock. Max blinked in surprise and then followed her example.
The duo bounced off each bird like a pinball. Casey screamed. Max gritted his teeth.
Their pursuers appeared, hot on their trail. But it looked like they did not know about the flock, and in a panic, they tried to stop to avoid a direct hit. Desperately, they dug their feet in hard against the pavement and leaned back. Sparks shot out in an arc.
But they were simply whooshing too fast and they ended up tumbling into the middle of the flock anyway. They bounced around and finally came to a badly bruised stop.
To Max’s vague surprise, this produced peals of laughter from other kids watching.
Max shivered. This was a cruel crowd.
The next wave of pursuers seemed more experienced. They adjusted their speed and ran up the near side of the birds, stepping on each one like stones across a pond.
Hearts racing, Max and Casey ran across the top of the flock, now using the birds in the same way. Max was fine for the first few steps, but then missed and his foot plunged down into the space between the birds. His other ankle twisted—and he sucked air through his teeth at the sharp pain that resulted.
But he shook it off. Ignoring the stabbing in his ankle, he picked up speed and started down the other side of the flock. In a few more steps, both he and Casey were back on solid ground. Then, they both whooshed.
But again, there were kids ahead of them dictating their path.
We’re being herded again, Max thought. Now what?
There was a sudden cheer. Whatever was coming, it was close.
Then they saw it: a huge park, covered in a thick, loamy, time-frozen fog.
Kids on the rooftops jockeyed to get the best view. Some shone laser pointers through the mist, waving them around. Others tossed green glow sticks and threw Frisbees.
Max and Casey hit the outer edge. It was like running smack into a moist, cottony blanket. They could taste the syrupy water vapor.
But now they were utterly blinded. Mist hid the world in white.
Except for behind them, that was. There, Max saw that they had left a tunnel in the fog as they passed.
WHAM!
Without warning, Max’s shoulder caught the edge of a tree. He cried out in pain.
The collision spun him hard and he went twisting and careening into the mist, away from Casey, utterly disoriented. He couldn’t see her anymore.
“Max!” Casey shouted. She already sounded far away.
“I’m over—” he started to say, but cut himself off: Two kids had just come flying through the mist tunnel he’d created. They stopped and looked around suspiciously.
“Casey! Run!” Max shouted, realizing too late that he was giving away his position.
“There he is!” one of the kids yelled. “Get him!”
Max turned and whooshed.
Everything was white, white, and more white.
There were two bobbing emerald lights ahead of him. Kids with glow sticks? The glow sticks stopped . . . and turned around.
Max was caught in the middle.
And then, Max felt a monstrous blow to his jaw. He went flying up into the air. It lifted him completely out of the mist, eddies of fog trailing behind.
That was not a tree.
Then he dropped, backside first. The mist was blown away from him as he fell onto his back with a dull thud. He lay in a cloud crater, stunned, eyes swimming with spangled lights.
The kids on the rooftops hooted, laughed, and clapped.
Through the mist-crater wall came the kid he’d sent into the garbage cans. His gaze was wet with revenge. This kid had just socked him in the jaw.
And in a flash, Max understood: Everything was amplified in the Pocket, not just running. Punching, kicking, any physical movement was enhanced.
It was like they all had superpowers.
In fact, that explained the telephone poles driven into the ground. The motocross kids had done that!
But despite these powers, they were still flesh and bone. They could still get hurt. They were not invulnerable.
The red-haired kid lunged at Max. Max rolled out of the way, but inspired by his new understanding, he pushed off the ground. He flew up several feet and let a kick fly. Peals of laughter rang out from the rooftops: Nobody had expected that.
Several other kids emerged from swirling curtains of mist. But they didn’t attack. They wanted to see how this fight would turn out.
The red-haired kid returned, now red faced as well. Max was on his feet. They squared off, circling each other.
“Lost your girlfriend, didn’t you?” the kid sneered.
“She’s not my girlfriend,” Max snapped hotly.
“Sure she isn’t. Ugly little snotface. We’re taking care of her real good right now. Thought you should know.”
A strangely familiar rage filled Max. For some reason, he thought of Petunia.
His fingernails dug into his palms. Both hands became tight fists. He lunged wildly at the red-haired kid.
This was exactly what the kid was trying to provoke, but Max realized his mistake too late. The kid sidestepped the attack with Pocket-speed. He spun and cracked Max in the back with a bony elbow.
Max went down in a spike of pain.
The kid pounced, threw Max into a headlock, and shoved his face into the dirt.
“This is for the garbage cans,” th
e kid growled. Max gasped for breath. He was suffocating. Max bucked and squirmed.
But the kid held on tight.
Max tasted dirt. He heard peals of laughter all around.
Just before he blacked out, he thought: Maybe we should have stayed in Starland after all.
Chapter 7
Serpents and Mermaids
Slowly, Max regained consciousness.
The orange lick and crackle of a bonfire swam into his vision.
He was in an outdoor arena of some kind. When he tried to move, he discovered that he was in handcuffs.
With a start, he noticed that Casey was cuffed next to him.
“Max,” she whispered.
Max struggled to focus. His skull thrummed with stabs of pain.
“Hey,” he groaned. “I’m awake.”
“How are you feeling?” Casey asked, concerned.
At first Max was surprised by the question. He wasn’t used to anyone asking him how he felt. “I’ll live,” Max replied. Quickly, he changed the subject. “What’d I miss?”
Casey nodded toward the bonfire. “Those jerky kids who chased us are all down there. After you left me, they caught me and brought me here.” There was a slight twinge of accusation in her voice.
“I didn’t mean to leave you,” Max replied. “I got turned around. Then I got knocked out. Seriously. There was nothing I could do.”
“Well. Don’t leave me again,” Casey said quietly.
This time, Max only nodded.
Fear of being alone was something he understood.
Shadows and stars still flitted across Max’s vision, but he forced himself to look around.
There was a huge congregation of kids, maybe four hundred or so. They were all ages, although none looked older than sixteen. Some were wearing the same kind of motocross gear Max had seen earlier. Others wore jeans and leather jackets. Some of the younger kids wore Halloween costumes.
The seats had been torn out of the orchestra floor seating nearest the stage. In their place, a huge bonfire roared. Max noted that it was fed by books, desks, and chairs.
Some kids threw beach balls around. Some roasted marshmallows and meat. Others simply stood around in little circles, laughing.
A small group of girls leaned over one of the entryways to the arena. They sprinkled glitter, which fell lazily and eventually stopped altogether, forming a suspended, twinkling mist. As kids walked through it, the girls giggled.