Scorched Earth

by Randall Pine

  “Maybe,” Virgil said doubtfully. He pictured the Skee-Ball ball that was sitting in his vault. “I don’t know if she can withstand electricity like that. She might burn to a crisp and not make any difference.”

  “I don’t know,” Simon said, mostly to himself. “But we have to do something.”

  He pulled the wheel to the right, and the Pontiac screeched across two lanes of traffic to hit the exit ramp toward West Templar High. They drove the rest of the way in silence, and when they pulled into the parking lot, Abby was there, waiting anxiously.

  “Look at that thing,” she said, approaching the car as they got out. She turned and pointed at the sky over the football field. “Just look.”

  The energy column looked even more menacing in person than it did on TV. And there was no doubt about it: there was a constant energy flow hitting the ground from the strangely-colored clouds up above. They could tell by streaks of blue and white light that flashed down the column, from top to bottom, and by the way the entire pillar sparked and crackled with kinetic power.

  They could see the players, too…most of them, anyway. The ones on the far side of the field were hidden by the sheer width of the lightning column, but the ones they could see were moving their fingers. The light that shone from them flashed and moved in every direction, putting Simon in mind of a night club he’d snuck into once with his sister, Laura.

  Of course, the football players’ hands could have been moving on their own from the jolts of energy shooting through their bodies. But Simon knew they were alive.

  He knew it because he could hear them screaming.

  Simon broke into a run, heading toward the field. “Simon!” Virgil cried after him, but Simon didn’t stop, so Virgil hurried to catch up.

  “Two points for bravery,” Abby sighed, “and negative ten for running headlong into their own deaths.”

  She shook her head, and then she ran after them.

  Chapter 5

  The scene was absolute chaos.

  There were reporters, police officers, firefighters, EMS teams, and bystanders all milling around the edges of the field, shouting and wailing and creating general confusion. The police were doing their best to hold the civilians back at a safe distance, but they had no idea what distance counted as “safe.” They had set up a sort-of perimeter with their cars, but it was an incomplete barricade, to say the least, and there was so much noise in the melee that the officers were overwhelmed trying to keep the peace.

  Because of all the hubbub, it was easy for Simon to slip through the perimeter.

  “Simon!” Virgil shouted, watching him dodge between a pair of misaligned police cars near the thirty-yard line. He didn’t hear a response, so he plowed through, too, blowing past the police officers and firefighters who were working hard to physically restrain a number of civilians.

  They ran out onto the field. Simon skidded to a stop at the hash marks near the edge of the field, and Virgil ran up behind him, huffing and puffing and putting his hands on his knees. “What do we do?” Simon asked.

  Still panting, Virgil looked up at the football players suspended above the ground by lightning bolts that were sticking out of their chests. “I don’t know,” he admitted.

  “Llewyn should be here!” Simon cried with frustration.

  But Virgil shook his head and put his hand on Simon’s shoulder. “You know he can’t be,” he said. “It would kill him.”

  Simon sullenly shrugged his friend’s hand off of his shoulder. “Yeah. I know.”

  The scene before them was exactly the same scene that they had seen on TV. That meant that the lightning tree, with all its murderous, electric branches, had been assaulting the players for at least half an hour now.

  “Why isn’t it leaving? What is it doing?” Simon asked desperately.

  “I have no idea,” Virgil admitted, “but I think it’s safe to say that whatever it is, it is not lightning.”

  They looked around at the other people who were gathered around the field—the parents, the officers, the firemen, the bystanders—and there was one person who actually stood out against the entire crowd. It was a man who appeared to be in his mid-forties, who stood in the end zone, just a few feet away from the biggest group of levitating boys. The man was wearing the West Templar High School colors of blue and green, and he held a clipboard in his hand.

  “Look at that,” Abby said, coming up behind Simon and pointing at the man who appeared to be the coach. “He’s standing five feet away from the players...why isn’t he impaled by lightning, too?”

  “No clue,” Simon said, his attention clearly on the football players. His mind was racing with possible solutions, but as soon as the ideas came, they were struck back down. He couldn’t seem to wrap his mind around a way to stop the lightning and free the players.

  If they even could be freed.

  Even if he found a way to stop the lightning, each of the bolts that ran the players through was at least a few inches in diameter. If the lightning stopped, the players would be left with gaping holes in their chests.

  But something was keeping them alive, so whatever the lightning was, maybe it would leave them intact.

  Maybe.

  “We have to try,” he murmured.

  “What?” Virgil asked, but Simon wasn’t paying attention. He had an idea.

  He closed his eyes and clapped. An orange light burst out from his hands at the impact, and then faded…but Simon moved his lips, whispering the words Llewyn had taught them, and when he pulled his hands apart, the light between his palms formed a thick, round platter. Like the shield Virgil had summoned to drive the Brimstone Spire through the demon Asag’s heart, the platter was inscribed with deep orange runes that glowed as if burning with their own fire. Simon gripped the platter like a Frisbee and took careful aim at the electrical pillar.

  “That’s not big enough to cut through the whole thing,” Virgil pointed out.

  “But maybe I can disrupt it,” Simon replied. He drew in a deep breath and held it. Then he hurled the disc, throwing it as hard as he could toward the column of lightning.

  It sailed toward the surging electric beam. Then, just before it struck, there was a low electrical rumble, a powering-down sound, and the lightning bolts drew themselves back to the beam, and the beam disappeared back up into the clouds, as if someone up in the sky had flipped a switch and cut the power. The football players fell back to the earth, their pads and helmets clattering, and the orange disc sailed through empty air, until it struck the announcer’s booth on the far side of the field and blew a giant hole right through the center of it.

  “You did it!” Virgil cried, incredulous.

  But Simon shook his head. “No,” he said, “I don’t think I did.”

  There was a moment of stunned silence from the assembled crowd. Then everyone sprang into action. The first responders ran onto the field, splitting up without anyone having to give the order so that each fallen football player had at least one paramedic and one police officer by his side. “They’re alive!” one of the officers shouted, sounding surprised. “Hey! Bring the stretchers—they’re alive!” A team of paramedics popped open the doors of the ambulances in the parking lot and pulled out the wheeled stretchers. They rushed across the bumpy terrain and onto the football field, and together, the responders began loading up the gurneys and wheeling the players back to the ambulances.

  Simon got a good look at one of the players as he was hurried by. The paramedics had pulled off his helmet, his jersey, and his shoulder pads so they could inspect his chest. Strangely, Simon saw, there was no hole in the boy’s sternum like he had expected. There was just a circular burn mark, like a crusted-over smudge of cinders and ash. And he was alive, Simon could tell that easily, because his chest was rising and falling with labored breath.

  He was alive, but he was changed.
<
br />   His skin had shrunken and tightened, and his muscle and fat had been melted away, so he looked like a skeleton with just the barest covering of flesh. Most of the hair on his head had fallen out, and what was left was wispy and gray. The skin around his fingernails had pulled away, giving his nails an unnaturally long look. And he was gray and ashen all over, from his scalp down to his toes.

  Simon took a step backward, startled at the sight of the teenage boy. Half an hour ago, he had been a strong, healthy athlete; now he was little more than a wasted, breathing mummy.

  More gurneys rolled by, loaded with more players. Each and every one of them looked the same.

  “What is this?” Simon asked, his blood chilling his veins like ice water. He felt something tug at his arm, and he looked down, feeling almost detached from his own body. It took him a second to register the fact that Virgil was pulling him away from the field.

  “Come on. The cops are starting to give us weird looks,” Virgil said, gently leading him away. “Let’s go see Llewyn.”

  “Yeah,” Abby agreed, taking Simon’s other arm. Together, they walked back to the parking lot. “Llewyn will know what it is.”

  Chapter 6

  Llewyn frowned. “I have no idea what it is.”

  The kinesthetic mage had met them at the opening to his tent. His long, blue wool coat flapped in the autumn wind that came whipping through the concrete drainage channel. He had his long, gray hair pulled back and tied with a thin leather strap, and his empty right eye socket glowed brilliant blue, even in the bright light of day. They had breathlessly explained what they had seen at West Templar High, and he had listened patiently, but with obvious growing concern.

  “What do you mean you have no idea what it is? How is that possible?” Virgil cried. “You’re a Kindle mage of the Order of the Phoenix!”

  “I am a kinesthetic mage of the Seventh Order,” Llewyn responded testily. “And what you describe is beyond the realm of my knowledge.”

  “Virgil brings up a decent point,” Abby said gently. “Just how much of the magical world exists beyond the realm of your knowledge?”

  Llewyn set his mouth into a hard line. He didn’t much care for the questioning of his abilities. “I am one of the most powerful living sorcerers. My knowledge is vast. But magic is a deep well, as deep as the universe itself. Even the greatest mage has an understanding that amounts to a single planet in the gulf of infinite magic.”

  Virgil nudged Simon and whispered in his ear. “He’s saying there’s a lot he doesn’t know.”

  Simon pushed Virgil off and tried to get them back on track. “It was awful, Llewyn. I’d never seen anything like it. Those football players are only a few years younger than we are, and they looked…I don’t know…shriveled. Wasted away. But they were alive.”

  Llewyn nodded slowly. He pulled back the flap of the tent and ushered them inside. “Let’s see what we can learn.”

  He led them into his vast mansion and down the infinite hallway. They passed through half a dozen doors, zig-zagging through the labyrinth of walls before they arrived at their destination: a dark, cavernous room with a massive white screen on the front wall and overstuffed chairs situated in a stadium style, facing the screen.

  “Whoa! You have your own movie theatre?” Virgil said, bounding into the room and plopping down on one of the chairs. “Awesome!”

  “It’s not a theatre,” the wizard corrected him. “It’s a memory chamber.”

  Virgil shrugged. “Looks like a movie theatre,” he insisted.

  Llewyn motioned for Simon to follow him to the back of the room, where there stood something that looked like a stunted streetlamp in front of the wall. The base was greenish-gray iron, carved and sculpted with ornate scrollwork, and the lantern at the top was a small, empty clay dish protected by an octagonal glass box. The wizard held out one hand and said, “Fís,” and a soft white flame sprang to life in the center of his palm. With his other hand, he opened the front pane of glass, and he placed the flame onto the clay dish inside. The fire slid off of his hand like a pat of butter and burned happily on the earthenware bowl, even though there was no fuel to feed it or keep it alive. Then the wizard closed the pane of glass, and he lifted up his other hand. The iron pillar beneath the lantern rose with it, growing taller and taller until Llewyn closed his hand into a fist. The streetlamp came to a rest just at Simon’s eye level.

  “Stand here,” Llewyn instructed, moving Simon so that he stood directly in front of the lamp, with his back turned to the light and his eyes facing the movie screen.

  “Okay,” Simon said nervously, trying not to fidget. “What…am I doing?”

  Llewyn grunted. “You’re going to show me your memory.”

  He said a quick spell, and Simon’s spine stiffened. He felt the inside of his head fill with warmth, as if someone had turned on a space heater in his skull. The flame in the lantern behind him flared brighter, and its light shot into the back of Simon’s head and came out through his forehead, and then Simon understood.

  The flame was the projector light; his brain was the filmstrip.

  “Whoa!” Virgil shouted, sitting up straight in his seat. The image that the flame was projecting on the movie screen was a direct copy of what Simon was seeing through his own eyes. At that moment, the screen showed the backs of the chairs, the back of Virgil’s head, and the movie screen in the background.

  The background movie screen had the same projection, except smaller, and the background movie screen in that smaller projection had its own even smaller projection, and on and on until the image got so small, it became just a speck.

  The whole thing made Simon feel motion-sick.

  “Now, close your eyes and try to remember what you saw,” Llewyn instructed. “If I see the particulars, I might be able to piece together an idea of what we may be dealing with.”

  Simon closed his eyes, and the image on the screen went dark. He pictured the football field in his mind, and the same vision of it faded into view at the front of the room.

  “Wow,” Virgil said, sounding impressed. “We can actually see what he’s thinking.”

  The knowledge that three other people in the room were watching his thoughts made Simon feel self-conscious, and incredibly nervous. His face grew hot, and the tips of his ears burned red. What if he accidentally conjured up the wrong image? Memory was funny like that…one second, you’re remembering a sorcery-crime on a high school football field, the next second, you’re thinking about the girl you have a crush on, and then—

  “Ah-ha-ha!” Virgil burst out laughing. “It’s Abby! Aww, Simon’s thinking of Abby!”

  “I am not!” Simon hollered, trying to push the image of Abby from his mind. But the more he tried to ignore it, the more solid the image of her became. Specifically, it was the image of her touching his arm that first day they had met a couple of months before, when she had felt his sadness.

  Abby quietly cleared her throat, and Simon couldn’t tell if it was an embarrassed sound, or a sweet one, or an angry one. Probably an angry one. He couldn’t bear to open his eyes, to face her right now. Virgil was laughing his head off, and Llewyn was grunting with audible annoyance. He could only imagine how Abby might be feeling, but he couldn’t push the image of her away.

  So he did something drastic.

  He took the hand that was away from everyone else, out of their view, and placed the palm against the side of his leg. He pushed his magic into the hand, and it warmed against his jeans. Then he bit down hard and forced a jolt of electricity down his arm, and it popped out of his hand, shocking his leg. He whimpered with the pain of it, and his mind went red in reaction to the pain. The image of Abby was wiped off of the movie screen, and the electrical shock reminded Simon of the lightning column on the football field, so the image that was projected at the front of the room when the red mask melted away was once
again the scene at the high school.

  “Aw...no fun,” Virgil complained. He sank back down in his seat and crossed his arms.

  “Good,” Llewyn muttered. He walked around the chairs and moved closer to the front of the room to get a better look at the image on the screen. “Walk me through it.”

  In his memory, Simon saw the great column of energy and light, crackling with power and fury. He saw the individual bolts of lightning sticking out like tree branches, with the twitching, screaming football players skewered through their chests. He saw the confused and helpless looks of the first responders.

  “What happened next?” Llewyn asked.

  Simon pressed the play button in his mind. The scene rolled forward; Virgil, Abby, and Llewyn watched from Simon’s point of view as he formed the magical disc with the dark runes and hurled it toward the energy column. Then they saw the column and its branches fizzle out of existence, and they saw the purple-gold clouds in the sky close up, as if sealing off the power. The football players dropped to the ground like dead flies, and the paramedics rushed in.

  The fifty-yard line was marked with a huge, charred circle of scorched earth.

  “Show me the players,” Llewyn said, directing the memory movie. Simon flashed to the close-up memory of the first football player who had rolled by him on the gurney, with his withered skin and wispy hair.

  Llewyn studied the picture for a good three minutes, his alert green eye seeing much that the boys couldn’t see, or didn’t know how to see. Finally, he said, “Is there anything else?”

  “No,” Simon replied, opening his eyes. The memory image on the movie screen was replaced by his real-time vision again. “After that, we got into the cars and came straight here.”

  “Any idea what it might be?” Virgil asked.

  The sorcerer was lost in thought. “Not exactly,” he admitted. He whispered the word “Dorcha,” and the flame in the clay dish inside the lantern extinguished itself. Simon felt the magic leave his head, and the screen at the front of the room went mercifully dark.