by Leito, Chad
Ned stood up. He was still dripping blood, but he looked much better. Multipliers heal remarkably fast. “I think that I can walk now, if you want to go, boss,” he said.
“Wait,” Allen said. He looked around the room, and a chill went up Asa’s spine. “There is one more thing.” Allen stepped over Bruce’s carcass and took steps towards the desk. Asa had to use every ounce of willpower he had not to cry out—to scream in horror. Allen was four steps away, three steps, two steps—his black shoes that had been shined so well were speckled with Bruce’s blood.
Allen was now standing right in front of the desk. Asa looked up. He heard Allen’s fingers come to rest on the top of the wood. There was a scraping sound.
He’s going to tear the desk away from the wall.
But then, he was leaving. He began to walk back towards the exit. There was now something in his hand. “I want to take this notebook,” he told Rose and Ned. “I don’t know what good it will do, but there might be some things of interest to the Hive within.”
Then he walked out.
Rose followed, weaving to the right and left as she drunkenly exited the room.
Ned was the last one out. He was clutching his bullet wound, which was still dripping blood. He reached up, flicked the lights off, and then followed Allen and Rose out of the Lab.
32
The Multipliers’ Hideout
All was quiet and dark underneath the desk. Asa’s ears were buzzing. Jen was as still as a statue beside him.
Out in the foyer, there were odd, stretching shadows; the moon had come up while the Multipliers were in the classroom, and was shining blue-silver light into the windows. Asa could see Bruce, lying dead. But thank God the lights are off, he thought. Bruce’s corpse was reduced to a heap of shadows in the dim light.
Asa and Jen sat still for twenty seconds after Ned turned the light off. In that time, Asa wondered if they were actually gone, or just waiting in the foyer for them to come out. He wasn’t convinced that Allen didn’t suspect that someone else was hiding in the classroom.
Asa would have waited for hours before getting out of the desk, but shortly after the Multipliers left, Jen broke out into gasping, hysteric sobs. “Bruce,” she said. She shoved the desk away from the wall, and it collapsed to the floor.
“Jen!” Asa whispered. His eyes took in the foyer. If the Multipliers were anywhere close, they would have heard the noise. “Come back here! What are you doing?”
Jen wasn’t listening to him. He heard the bottom of her shoes sucking in puddles of blood and Salvaserum as she made her way across the classroom. She flicked on the lights and then got on her knees beside Bruce’s grotesque body. She cradled his head, and wept.
Asa covered his mouth and leaned his back against the wall. He was scared the Multipliers would return. He was revolted by Bruce’s figure, and wondered how Jen was able to cradle his skull without disgust. She had blood all over her shirt now, her hands, and her knees. Her face was inches away from Bruce’s, and her tears fell on his exposed tendons and muscles.
“My God, Bruce,” she wept. She bent down, and kissed a spot on his hair that wasn’t bloody. She closed Bruce’s eyes, sat his head gently down on the concrete, and stood up. “We need to go,” she said. She looked frazzled, and her eyes were red with tears.
“Go where?”
Jen sniffed and looked at Asa as though confused that he didn’t already know. “We’ve got to follow them.”
“The Multipliers?”
Jen nodded.
“That’s crazy.” Asa felt sick. He was so disturbed by what he had just seen the Multipliers do that he felt like he might never be normal again. The last thing that he wanted to do was follow them—to have more experiences with these Multipliers.
Jen scowled through tears, and pointed a finger at Asa. “You should come. You said that you wanted to learn more about these guys, and here is our chance. Ned is still dripping blood; we could follow them to their base; he’ll leave a trail. I don’t know about you, but I want to get back at these bastards for killing Bruce. I’m doing this, Palmer.” She turned on her heels and began to stride out the room.
Asa stood there for a moment, thinking of what to say. He stammered, and then called to her weakly. “Jen…” He didn’t have much time to think, though, and his brain wasn’t working as well as usual. He looked over at Bruce’s carcass—they were the only ones in the room—and shuddered. He heard his feet on the bloody floor, and felt himself turn off the lights as he moved into the foyer. He followed Jen, but it was strange—he felt distant from himself, numb.
Asa would never have followed Jen if he had been in a better mental state. But he wasn’t. He could not compute how bad of a decision following her was.
As Asa came out of the Lab, he saw Jen running ahead of him in the moonlight. It was easy for Asa catch up, because he had received more strength mutations than Jen.
There was a light breeze in the air. Streetlights from Town twinkled off the gently shifting water of the Moat, which was to Asa’s back. After a few minutes of running, Asa realized that he and Jen were headed through the Arctic jungle to the backside of Fishie Mountain. He had never been there before.
The Multipliers were easy to follow. They were fast, but they couldn’t fly, and so they left footprints in the snow and the dirt. Even more noticeable was the trail of blood that followed behind them. Allen, Rose, and Ned were all bloody, and Ned was still bleeding.
Asa and Jen moved on foot through the darkest places in the jungle. The canopy was so thick that the moon only shone through in trickles the size of silver coins that littered the ground. They moved deeper, jumping over logs and ducking under hanging vines, but Asa’s mind was elsewhere.
He was thinking about what to do next. In his mind, he could see Allen sitting on top of Bruce. He could hear his rumbling voice as he said, “We have a mission that we will complete tomorrow night. The wheels are set in motion, and nothing will stop us now.”
Asa’s breath came out white in the cold.
So it’s true, he thought. They are planning on attacking the Academy tomorrow, just like Carmen the Multiplier Hunter had said. We have one more day of safety, and then tens of thousands of Multipliers are going to swarm over the Academy, killing and Multiplying every human they can.
There were two events planned for tomorrow—the Winggame Championship, and the dance. Asa looked up ahead and saw his date dodge a tree in the dark jungle—she was still covered in blood.
Asa saw advantages in the Multipliers attacking during the events tomorrow. In both instances, the majority of the Academy would be gathered in one place; an attack at either the championship or the dance would be devastating.
Asa longed for a way out of this situation. He understood Boom Boom’s point about the best decision being to stay at the Academy and fighting to the death, trying to inflict as much damage as possible on the Multipliers. But I don’t want to die, he thought. If he had his way, it would be the Multipliers who would perish.
He thought about the resources at his disposal, and wished that he commanded some kind of army that could drive through the jungle and take out the Multipliers. He wished that there were some kind of way he could get Robert King to understand the danger the Academy was in. He longed to stumble across a solution to the problem that he had had all along, but hadn’t yet noticed.
A similar thing had happened earlier in the semester.
He thought of how wonderful it had been when Teddy had figured out how to shoot the target with the spear gun in Flying Class. It had been a problem that bothered him for months, and yet the solution had been right above him all semester in the clock.
His face brightened slightly as he thought back to that time, and he instantly knew what he must do. He should go to Teddy and speak with him, right after he and Jen were through with spying on the Multipliers.
If you ever do get out of here, a voice in Asa’s head mocked. You barely got out of the classroom—and
you had planned on going there. You were hidden hours before the Multipliers arrived, and they still caught one of you. How can you expect to go onto their turf and get out alive? They could have spies out. Asa looked around and the voice continued in a husky whisper: there could be someone watching you right now.
Asa brushed the voice away and thought back to Teddy.
Teddy had advised that Asa change tones in Flying Class, and had figured out that the invisible barriers to the target were in sync with the clock. He was a genius. He had shown time after time that he was able to think of things that other people weren’t.
And I know right where to find him.
Asa was mildly concerned, however, that Teddy might give bad information. He knew that Teddy was his friend, but he was also a Multiplier. He considered how irrationally angry the Multipliers could become, and thought that he should proceed with caution; Multipliers can be dangerous.
Asa and Jen crested a grassy hill and were now on the backside of Fishie Mountain. He had forgotten how incredibly high up the Academy rested in between the mountains. Silver clouds loomed in the distant over frozen marshes, and he could see for miles over the moonlit landscape. It was beautiful. Asa still didn’t know exactly where in the world he was. The only true indication of the Academy’s whereabouts he had was the temperature—they were either very far North or very far South.
As Asa looked out on the land, he wondered how Stan was doing—if he and Janice had been able to successfully leave the Academy or if they had died in some way. He wondered where they would go, if they did make it. What is beyond the long plains on all sides of the mountains? What language do the nearest people speak? How far away is the Academy from the closest human civilization?
There is no time to think of this now, Asa thought. I have to concentrate at what’s at hand.
As they ran, Asa wondered what they would find if they were able to successfully follow the Multipliers. Where are Ned, Rose, and Allen returning to? Have they taken over a group of abandoned buildings on the backside of Fishie Mountain? How are they staying hidden? Asa found it hard to imagine thousands and thousands of Multipliers hiding on Academy grounds.
But they must be doing it.
The blood on the ground was becoming more and more sparse as they began to move down the decline on the rocky slope. Every few yards, there were red droplets, but the volume had lessened significantly since they left the Lab. This was predictable; Multipliers heal quickly.
Asa followed Jen. Out of the two of them, he knew that she was the keenest; she had a knack for noticing things that others didn’t. For instance, earlier in the semester, she had found out how to infiltrate Robert King’s office by first noticing the door to the raccoon’s living quarters, and then by realizing that they must clean his office.
They continued down the mountain, and the experience reminded Asa of following Jen through a maze of raccoon dwellings, and over an enormous aquarium to Robert King’s office. He felt very similar to how he had that day, except now he was much more nervous.
They passed a waterfall far on their left, and then began to backtrack and pace over towards the sound of rushing water. Asa could no longer see the blood or footprints, but he trusted Jen. They climbed lower and lower, and Asa wondered how close they were to the Multipliers’ lair. The earth grew rocky, and they were close enough to the waterfall now for the humidity to have increased. They came to the shoreline of a river. They were twenty yards downstream from the waterfall, which was wide, but only fell five stories.
“The trail ends here,” Jen turned and whispered to Asa. He could tell by how quietly she spoke that she believed they were close.
She crouched behind a large boulder and Asa followed her lead, not being sure what she saw. Crickets chirped away in the freezing air; Asa knew that the crickets had to be mutated to thrive in such an environment.
“What are we doing?” Asa whispered.
Jen didn’t answer, but reached her hand up and put it over Asa’s mouth to tell him to hush. Her eyes were wide, and she peaked around the boulder. Asa did the same.
A harsh, high-pitched noise broke out in the air. Asa looked around to find the source, and then saw Joney—one of the Multipliers he had seen killing Davids at the beginning of the semester. He was standing on the same shoreline as Asa and Jen. He wore boxer shorts and a flannel—no pants—and flip-flops. He was dripping wet, as though he had just swum out of the river. The high-pitched noise was coming from his pursed lips; he was whistling.
In one hand, he held a bottle that sloshed with coppery liquid. He picked it up to his mouth, spilled some over his shirt, and then drank heavily.
Do all the Multipliers from the Hive use alcohol and drugs? Asa wondered.
He and Jen stayed silent as Joney chugged down half the bottle, turned, and threw it with amazing velocity into the arctic jungle. It went so far that Asa never heard it crash.
Jen turned to Asa and smiled, as though to say, I told you this trip would be worthwhile; we found their hideout.
Asa didn’t return the smile. He wasn’t sure that celebrating would be appropriate until they got out of there alive.
Jen pulled herself close to Asa and whispered softly into his ear: “He came out of the waterfall.”
At first, Asa didn’t know what to make of this. He looked blankly at Jen, and then she pointed. Asa moved his body so that he once again could view the sheet of thick, falling water, and saw something he hadn’t seen before.
Lights on the other side of the falling water.
Asa couldn’t exactly make out what kind of lights they were; they could have been from a fire, or a light bulb, but he could see lights. “There must be a cavern on the other side of the waterfall,” he whispered.
Jen nodded, and then put up her finger to hush him.
So this is where they are hiding, Asa thought. He wondered if this was the Multiplier’s only lair, or if they had many. He guessed that they would all want to stay in one place, but was having a hard time imagining the cave behind the waterfall being big enough to hold a few thousand Multipliers.
Joney was now leaving the bank and walking into the jungle.
“Let’s leave while we can,” Jen whispered. Asa had no problem with that; they had seen where the Multipliers were hiding out, and so he saw no need to stay one second longer.
They crouched low as they moved through the woods. They were forty yards in when Asa heard Rose’s slurred voice yell out in their direction.
“HEY!”
Asa and Jen crouched where they were, directly between two bushes. There was no point in running; Multipliers were too fast. Asa hoped that Rose was still drunk, and even if she had seen them, she would forget about them.
This hope was short lived. Asa heard Rose’s footsteps approaching them. There was another pair of footsteps too, coming from the opposite end. Asa saw through the leaves that it was Joney.
But neither Rose nor Joney was looking at the bushes. They were looking at each other.
“How ya doin’, Rosey. ‘is good to see yuh. I heard that the students weren’t in the classroom like ya thought. Real bummer, it is.”
Rose nodded. She was smoking another cigarette, and passed it over to Joney, who took a drag. Rose was still covered in blood, but wasn’t wet, like Joney. “It was a real, real downer if you ask me.” Her face lit up. “But we did get to kill one of the students. I ripped his throat out with me teeth. You should’ve been there, Joney.”
Joney nodded, exhaled and passed back the cigarette. “Good for you! I’ve been telling Allen that you needed to see some action. I think it heartens you—there’s somethin’ to be said for self control, but there’s also somethin’ to be said for sinkin’ your teeth into a human e’ry once in a while, right?”
Rose was smiling back at Joney. Asa wondered if they were romantically involved. “Right.” She took a drag. “So, did you hear back from the little one on the radio? Ned thinks he’s legit…I don’t know. I just do
n’t know if I can trust him. There’s the whole blood thing…. I don’t know.”
“No,” Joney said. “Little bugger didn’t check in tonight. But you know that he doesn’t want to blow his cover.” Joney looked around, as though to see if anyone was listening. He didn’t see either Jen or Asa. “Come out here with me, Rosey. Let’s go a little deeper into the jungle. I want to have a chat.”
“I’d love to.”
Asa and Jen watched them walk. They stayed still a long time before moving out of the bush’s cover. It was Asa this time who encouraged them to move.
33
Deception
An hour later, Asa and Jen had retraced their steps and gone back to the Academy-side of the mountain.
The steaming water lapped up against the shore. Asa crouched beside the Moat. He dipped his cupped hands in the water and splashed it over his face. He gasped, but that was what he wanted. He desired to feel something. After being so terrified for so long, he felt numb and apathetic.
He knew that Teddy was locked up, and that he could not get out of his jail cell, but still, Asa wanted to be mentally sharp before going and speaking with him.
He looked up at the moon and couldn’t believe that earlier in the day, Stan had come to visit him and told him about Allen’s planned attack. To Asa, that felt like years ago. He dipped his hands in the Moat, and splashed more water on his face.
He was alone. He and Jen had moved back through the jungle together, and then she had turned and told him that she was going to bed. Asa looked at her bloody suit, hands, and thighs, and asked if she should clean up before going to the female Fishie dormitory.
“It’ll be fine,” she said. “I’ll fly in through the tower. It’ll be dark enough that no one will notice. If someone does notice, I’ll tell them that I was out hunting.”
She smiled, and met Asa’s eyes with a peculiar look. She was exhausted, and Asa had sympathy for her. But there was something else in that look. Admiration, maybe? There was something unwavering in her eyes; there was a certain feeling that he got when he glanced down at her slightly opened mouth. Asa believed that she wanted him to kiss her then, before they left.