Rivers of Fire (Atherton, Book 2) (13 page)

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"Stop that!" cried Dr. Kincaid, spitting and belching up water. "I'm fine. I only need a moment to recover."

There was a brief silence as everyone listened to the gurgling and grinding of Atherton coming to a halt.

"We almost lost you in there," said Vincent, still holding Lord Phineus so that his face was against the wall. "You must be more careful."

"Tell that to Atherton!" howled Dr. Kincaid. Seeing all eyes on him, he was a little bothered by the attention he'd drawn to himself. He rose to his feet.

"Turn him around. He must look at me!"

Lord Phineus did not comply easily. He did not want to look at Dr. Kincaid. When he finally did there was a moment of terror on his face, then recognition.

"Mead's Head!" he cried out. "How can it be you have Mead's Head?"

But Dr. Kincaid was in no mood to answer the questions of a lunatic. He looked Lord Phineus square in the eye and commanded him to move.

"To the yellow line!"

Edgar, along with everyone else, had no idea why Dr. Kincaid wanted to follow the yellow line or why he suddenly thought Lord Phineus would listen to him. So it came as a surprise when Lord Phineus seemed to noticeably deflate. He began mumbling about Mead's Head, yellow lines, and ladders. And then, to everyone's amazement, he obeyed the command.

"I'm going to need light," he said. There was a terrible, quiet anger in his voice. "If you expect me to go out there."

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Vincent held the only light they had among them, but he didn't want to give the light to Lord Phineus, for fear that he would stick the torch directly into the water and snuff it out. The man was crazy. He probably wanted them all to die.

Vincent held the light over the watery ground. There was still an inch or more of water covering everything he could see, but the yellow line heading out into the wide open of Mead's Hollow could be clearly discerned. He handed the torch to Sir William and had him stand nearby.

Lord Phineus did not hesitate when he saw the line. He began staggering toward it, with Vincent holding him tightly from behind. Everyone fell into step behind them, until all the light from the room was gone and only the one torch remained.

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*** CHAPTER 15 ONE VILLAGE REMAINS

The world outside was rapidly changing as Lord Phineus led a group of people through the underground realm of Mead's Hollow. It was midday, and the grove was bustling with activity. Everyone from the surrounding villages had come together amid the trees--three hundred from the Village of Sheep, about the same from the Village of Rabbits, and two hundred more from the Highlands. There were more than a thousand in total including those already living in the grove.

Everyone had either been given a task or guided into the safest places to hide. Some were working with the remaining animals, building pens and holding areas deep in the thickest part of the grove where their smell would hopefully remain contained. Many watched the perimeter of the grove, searching the landscape for anything that moved. Others were building

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things with parts of broken-down houses: makeshift shelters, spears or clubs, and ladders leading up into the largest trees.

One of the great advantages of coming to the grove was the trees that could be opened up and gutted. The orange insides mixed with a tiny bit of water was a quick and easy source of food, and it helped a great deal considering how little water and food they had been lucky enough to bring with them. They had been told not to kill and cook any of the animals. The smell would travel on the air even more than that of the live animals, and this would almost certainly attract Cleaners.

Gill, who almost always remained on a horse, traveled back and forth from the edge of the Highlands and around the grove. Throughout the morning Atherton shook violently, then settled, then shook again, and each time Gill returned to the edge of the Highlands to see how much farther it had fallen.

"How deep will it go?" he asked himself, gazing down into the shadowy land that had once been his home. He detected a scent with his long nose. There was something different in the air, very subtle but close. He made his way around the edge of the grove toward the Flatlands, feeling a little more nervous.

While everyone else was busy with the work of fortifying the grove, Maude, Horace, Wallace, and Isabel's father, Charles, sat together on the porch of Mr. Ratikan's house. It was the only part of the house that hadn't been torn to pieces by Atherton's violent changes. As they made plans, there had come an unexpected moment of silence in the group, and Charles sniffed the air.

"I can already smell the rabbits," he said. "They really do stink."

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"That's not rabbits--it's the horses," said Maude, feeling protective of the small and harmless animals she'd worked with for as long as she could remember.

"No, I believe it's the sheep," said Horace. "The sheep smell more than I'd expected."

Wallace was the first to smile, but then the others followed, recognizing that their petty argument was beside the point. "We couldn't leave them all behind," he said. "There have to be some for a fresh start, when we find our way out."

"We'll need to tell the others soon," said Horace. He was thinking of the many families in the grove, including his own son and wife whom he'd hardly seen since the trouble began. "We can't stay here forever."

Charles was the most concerned about their plans. His only child, Isabel, was missing, and he wanted to give her every chance of being found.

"We don't need to leave for a while yet," said Charles. "We could last a few days, maybe longer."

Maude had never had children and could only wonder what it would feel like if one of her own were missing in a land teaming with Cleaners. And yet she could not help telling the truth as she saw it, her lack of tactfulness on full display.

"We risk losing everyone if we stay on too long," she said. "Isabel could be anywhere."

This did not comfort Charles. He knew it was true, knew that she might already be dead, and he felt helpless. He glared at Maude, but she would not look at him.

"Gill's the best tracker among us, and he's searching for

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Isabel," said Horace. "If she's out there, that nose of his will find her."

"What if she's in one of the other villages?" pleaded Charles.

"She's not," said Maude. "We moved everyone out. She's just not there, Charles."

Charles paused a moment, not sure how to proceed. "Do you think"--he stood and rubbed his hands nervously on his legs--"do you think she could be down
there?"

No one answered, but there had long since been a feeling among the group that Isabel was very likely trapped in the Highlands and that she would never escape.

"Is there any way to get down inside?" he asked, his mind turning to desperate measures.

"The only way I know of would be Edgar," answered Maude. "He could do it, but he's missing just like Isabel. People in the grove say they saw him last night, but now he's gone again. Nobody knows where he went."

Charles stepped off the porch and began walking into the grove.

"Charles, we need you here--we have to ..." Maude started, but Wallace stopped her.

"Let him go," he said. There was an awkward silence and then Maude was distracted by something. She sniffed, staring off into the trees.

"What's that smell?" she asked.

Horace caught the same scent as Maude, the same troubling smell that Gill had barely been able to discern from outside the grove. Horace stood up, scratching his bald head.

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"Someone is cooking meat," said Maude. She'd cooked a thousand rabbits in her days and nights at the inn, and she knew the smell of meat on a fire.

Without waiting for a response, Maude bolted through the trees, darting this way and that for fifty yards or more until she came to the foot of a second-year tree where a woman and two children sat together. Horace came up behind Maude and the two stood there, nearly speechless.

"The children were hungry," said the woman at the fire. She held in her hand a stick, at the end of which was a whole rabbit, sizzling over the flames. "They haven't eaten anything but a wad of orange dough in two days."

"You stupid woman!" yelled Maude, appalled at the selfishness of this defiant act. "You've put us all in danger!"

"Maude," said Horace, his voice quiet and calm. "Let this woman feed her children. They deserve a moment's peace."

Maude was about to protest, but her eyes fell on the children and her voice caught in her throat. There were so few children on Atherton--not even a hundred--but how scared they must be! There was a girl and a boy, both very young. They were dirty and thin. And they were terrified.

"I'm sorry," said Maude. She began to tear up--but only a very little--then she turned and walked away.

"Put the fire out the moment you finish," said Horace. The woman nodded, smiling at her children, and Horace followed Maude through the trees.

***

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Most of the Cleaners on Atherton were already busy at their gruesome work in the Village of Rabbits or the Village of Sheep, chasing what they could catch and tearing apart with their monstrous teeth everything in their path as they scrambled over and under one another in search of food. These Cleaners were very focused on the task before them, and they would not be easily distracted.

But they were not the only Cleaners on Atherton. There were a few that always rose later than the rest, that often had their food brought to them, and these were the oldest and largest of them all.

The smell of cooking rabbit drifted ever so silently over the trees and out of the grove, toward the Flatlands. And there the smell caught in the wet nose of a very large Cleaner that was chewing on a dry and dusty bone. This was an angry Cleaner, for it had grown accustomed to having food brought to it by the weaker among them, and in the feeding frenzy it had been forgotten.

The Cleaner reared its head and half of its body a full six feet in the air, pulling a row of suction cups off the ground and pulsing them sickeningly in the air. When it dropped back down its full twelve feet of length made the sound of breaking bones as it lurched forward on its mission. Seven more frightfully large Cleaners formed a line behind the first, and the group began charging for the smell of cooked meat in the grove.

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*** CHAPTER 16 MULCIBER

"What's that you're doing?" asked Vincent. Sir William was chomping his teeth together loudly. Samuel and Isabel had joined in as Lord Phineus led the way deeper into the unknown realm of Mead's Hollow.

"It keeps the Crat away," said Samuel.

"He's right," said Sir William, beaming at his boy. "It's a little trick I discovered by accident down here on one of my early journeys to change the flow of water. Lord Phineus and I were surrounded by a pack of the Crat and I was beating them away with a club. For some reason I started snapping my teeth at them. I guess it was involuntary--a sort of fear gripped me and made me act like a cornered animal. But the interesting thing was, the moment I made that sound, they ran away."

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Vincent glanced back at Dr. Kincaid and could tell the two were thinking the same thing.

"It must be an innate fear of Cleaners," said Dr. Kincaid. "The Crat didn't last long in the Flatlands."

"Tell me about the Cleaners," said Sir William. He had heard only bits and pieces of the news of these coming monsters and he was curious about them. He began clapping his teeth together again as Vincent provided a brief explanation of what a Cleaner was, what it ate, and how it behaved.

"And there are about a thousand of them upstairs," Edgar added. "On their way to destroy the grove and the other villages."

"That's terrible!" said Sir William, between clapping teeth. "Can they be stopped?"

Dr. Kincaid glanced back at Sir William. It was cold underground in Mead's Hollow, and Dr. Kincaid was shivering, his clothes heavy with wetness. "There's only one person who can answer that question."

"Who?" asked Sir William, but he got no reply. Vincent had seen something and was directing everyone's attention to it.

"There it is!" he said. At the same time Lord Phineus wavered off the yellow line, away from where Vincent pointed.

"Where do you think you're going?" asked Vincent, tightening his grip on Lord Phineus.

"You can't make me open that thing," he said. A new darkness had entered his voice. The force of his personality had returned, as if it had only been sleeping and gaining strength. "Return me to the House of Power," he demanded.

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Vincent kicked the legs out from under Lord Phineus and put a knee in his back, holding him against the wet stone surface of the floor. "I'm afraid you're going to have to do as you're told." He lifted Lord Phineus by the back of his robe and dragged him forward, kicking and screaming, until the yellow line ended about ten feet farther into the darkness.

What everyone saw on the ground at the end of their path was a large, solid yellow circle the width of a man's outstretched arms that contained eight dials with letters on them. The dials were glowing as if there were a light somewhere beneath them, shining up into Mead's Hollow. Edgar went directly to the circle and felt all around it, touching the dials and finding that they snapped from letter to letter. Though they were made of a clear substance, he could only see half of each one, because the other half was hidden beneath the ground. As he clicked one of the dials, new letters appeared and others disappeared beneath the yellow circle.

"What is this thing?" asked Edgar, looking directly at Dr. Kincaid.

Dr. Kincaid didn't answer at first. He watched as Isabel and Samuel crouched around the circle and spun the dials back and forth.

"I'm too old to climb out of the Highlands, Edgar," said Dr. Kincaid. "I think it may be too big a task even for you." He smiled at the children, and his teeth chattered slightly from the dampness. "So we must find another way back to the Flatlands."

"Wait," said Samuel. "Is this a door? A way out?"