Cold Cereal (The Cold Cereal Saga) (26 page)

Erno frowned and whispered, “He was taking it, too?”

There was even an unfinished verse in the margins, possibly the clue to some new game he’d been devising.

“Gary,” suggested a voice. Erno flinched. “Interethting reading?” added Harvey, who was leaning over his shoulder.

Erno rolled up the notes. “You can’t sleep, either?”

“I take little napth through the day. Are there uthually tho many people in the park at night?”

“What do you mean? What people?”

“I heard voiceth.”

Erno couldn’t hear anything. He swung his legs around and walked past Harvey to the tree house periscope. He pressed his eyes up to the eyepieces: two cold rings against his face. Outside, the night sky was bleeding light.

“Are those flares?” Erno whispered.

“Which way?” called Scott. He and Mick had found the tree before by accident, and things weren’t quite coming together this time.

“This way! This way!” answered the little man.

Above them, flares flickered and fell like slow stars. The air buzzed with the roar of ATVs. The roar grew louder, and Scott and Mick dived into a clump of ferns just before an ATV rider with a big helmet-mounted lamp thundered by in a blaze of light.

“This is too dangerous for you,” Scott hissed. “You should get in the backpack.”

“Nah. That’d just slow us down.”

They emerged and took off running again.

“What we need is one o’ them motor-bikes,” Mick said in a plainly hyphenated fashion.

“I’ve asked for something like that every year for three Christmases.”

“Good
luck
. I can’t even get Kris Kringle to pay back the twenty quid he owes me.”

Scott ran for another few beats. “You’re friends with
Santa Claus?
”

“
Former
friends. Next time he’s in jail he can find someone
else
to bail him out.”

The sound of another ATV grew closer. Mick grabbed Scott’s sleeve and brought him to a stop. “Hold up,” he said. “Christmas’s come early this year.”

When this second ATV rider rounded a copse of trees, he saw, in the pink of his helmet-mounted arc light, a squinting old man with a tiny head. He screeched to a halt and peered through the pink lenses of his big black goggles.

“You!” he barked as he dismounted. “Stay there! Keep those hands where I can see them!”

The normal-sized man with the tiny wrinkled head raised his arms. “These hands?” he asked.

The rider was all in black, with some kind of thick and undoubtedly bulletproof vest and an oily black gun slung over his shoulder. He reached back to touch this gun as if drawing some shallow sense of strength and security from it, which of course he was. He also had a small stone around his neck on a tether, a coldstone, and this was busily giving off purple sparks. But in the glare of his headlamp, the rider hadn’t noticed.

This old man was strangely built, like he hadn’t enough head but had entirely too much neck. “The park isn’t safe tonight,” the rider told him. “You should return to your home.”

“Mind turnin’ that off, lad?” the old man asked.

“Sorry,” said the rider, and he reached up to switch off the pink light of the helmet.

“Yeh have somethin’ in your eye,” the old man added.

“I … huh?”

The rider pulled the goggles up and over his helmet. And then he winced when he saw that, while the old man was still standing before him, his head had just now disappeared.

“Oh,” said the rider, and then Mick leaped off Scott’s shoulders and punched the man with his hard little walnut fists. The rider stumbled backward and sprawled over the fenders of his ATV.

The whole thing came off like a gag in a cartoon, albeit a cartoon with punching. Lots of punching.

“See,” said Mick to the rider, who was now unconscious and prostrate on the ground, “I says, ‘Yeh have somethin’ in your eye.’ An’ then you says, ‘What have I got in my eye?’An’ then I says, ‘My fist.’ Yeh did it wrong.”

“That was … kind of violent,” said Scott as he fixed his shirt and jacket.

“You shoulda seen me in the ol’ days,” Mick heaved as he sat down on the rider’s back. “Coulda tied his gun in a bow. Coulda dropped an anvil on him. Think yeh can drive his motor-bike? I can’t reach the handlebars.”

Erno shook Biggs awake, then Emily. She gave a tiny mewl and got to her feet.

“What’s going on?” she whispered with her palms over her eyes. Above them the small windows flickered with light. All around, distant shouts.

Biggs strode forward in his XXXL monogrammed pajamas (
B.B.
) and scooped Emily up to his shoulders. “Smoke,” he said.

It took Erno a few seconds before he could smell it too, and by then anyone could see it seeping in through cracks, around the edges of windows, or collecting like evil thoughts around the hundred holes left by Emily’s wild magic.

“Have to get out,” Biggs added.

Erno darted from the living room to the kitchen and back. “I can’t see Harvey,” he announced, then coughed. “He’s invisible again.”

Biggs scanned the tree house through the thickening haze. Emily was coughing now, too.

“MY CAR KEYS.” The big man held Emily close and bellowed as he turned.
“RABBIT-MAN, WHERE ARE MY CAR KEYS?
”

Scott and Mick jolted forward on the ATV. They lurched and rattled. The hand controls were really sensitive.

“Yeh drive like a spastic,” said Mick from the backpack.

“Maybe you should drive then,” Scott answered, his voice muffled by the big black helmet. “Oh right, you can’t because you’re the size of a football.”

They were silent for a moment as they hurtled toward some distant glow.

“’M bigger’n a football,” Mick muttered.

They bucked over roots and stones, and all the while that strange light in the distance shimmered and grew.

“Oh no,” Scott whispered. He had just begun to feel the heat of it. And then the trees parted, and Biggs’s oak was burning from the top down like a colossal torch. The tree house was engulfed and snapping angrily. The ashes of Biggs’s life rose in the blistering air.

There were a lot of people here, dressed in black with black guns, casting black shadows.

“We’re too late,” Mick said. “Turn back. If they’re alive we can’t help ’em. Stop. Scott?”

Scott finally brought the ATV to a stop and turned it
haltingly in the opposite direction. “I don’t know where to go.”

“Just away,” said Mick. “We’ll think o’ somethin’.”

They had been fleeing for perhaps a minute when Scott felt something strike his helmet. For one thrilling moment he thought he was being shot at.

“Woah,” said Mick. “Stop a second. Someone’s throwin’ rocks.”

Scott slowed. “Someone’s throwing rocks, and you want to stop?”

“Behind us. Look! It’s Harvey.”

Scott stopped and looked. It
was
Harvey, or someone who looked like Harvey. So it was pretty safe to assume it was Harvey.

“They’re coming!” Harvey shouted. “Thayve me!”

“Where are the rest?” asked Mick as he leaped down from the backpack and the rabbit-man neared. “The big man an’ the kids?”

“I don’t know,” said Harvey, his ears twitching about. His trousers were sooty and his tie torn. “It wath all very confuthing. Caoth. There wathn’t anything I could do to help. They’re probably fine. We should go.”

Then, in one thrilling moment, they
were
being shot at. There was someone, a fair distance away but closing fast on another ATV, pistol blazing. As they stumbled over one another to mount up, Scott could just barely make
out a voice over the drone of the engine, a familiar voice shouting between gunshots.

“Hey, Scotty!”
Bang
. “Hold up, I want to ask you something!”
Bang bang
. The last shot cracked a stone just three feet away as Scott urged the ATV into motion again.

“That’s Haskoll, isn’t it?” asked Mick from the backpack.

“Who’th Hathkoll?” asked Harvey from the seat just behind Scott. If Scott could have comfortably answered, he would have first asked the pooka to hold on to something other than his neck.

Scott weaved in and out of the underbrush, slalomed through trees. Occasionally the report of Haskoll’s pistol and the destruction of some nearby piece of tree trunk informed them that he hadn’t run out of bullets yet.

An earpiece inside the helmet Scott was wearing crackled to life. “Heeyy, buddy. Just wanted to keep you apprised of the situation: up to now I’ve been missing on purpose, because Goodco wanted your friends alive. But I just got a kill order. To kill you. Doesn’t that sound all double-oh-seven? ‘Kill order.’ What a world.”

Scott turned a hard left and almost flipped the ATV.

“Jeez,” said Harvey. “Kid driveth like a thpathtic.”

“He knows.”

“See,” said Haskoll inside Scott’s helmet, “seems the bigwig just decided your pals are more trouble than they’re worth. And Goodco has never really had a problem with
killing children. But if you’ve ever read the side of one of their cereal boxes you know that already, amiright, Scotty?”

Two shots rang out, and Scott thought he could feel them pass closer. Or maybe he was just imagining it.

“Oh,” said Haskoll, “and FYI: I’m not going to run out of bullets. This is a magic gun. Seriously. Bigwig has a history of handing out magic weapons. Crazy, right? I call it ‘Glamdring.’
Blam!
”

Haskoll had actually said ‘
blam
,’ but he’d fired at the same time, and Scott felt a thud shudder up through the seat of his pants. Then there was another bang from the ATV itself, which presently shimmied and stalled, and struck a log Scott had been struggling to avoid. All three passengers were bucked over the handlebars and into a bed of ferns.

Their ATV was on fire, and blooming with thick, dark smoke. They disentangled themselves in a panic as they listened to the approaching buzz of Haskoll’s vehicle. So there was no surprise when they turned to find him just stopping, some thirty feet off, and aiming Glamdring in their direction. He was wearing jeans with flip-flops and a T-shirt with a picture of a unicorn wearing a hoodie.

This is the man who’s going to kill me
, Scott thought. It was an odd thought, as though he’d been expecting an entirely different sort of man to kill him.

“’Kay, just in case Scotty hasn’t filled you in,” said Haskoll, and he waggled his pistol. “Magic gun, kill order. Bigwig doesn’t care whether I bring you two in dead or alive, so you can make this all go more smoothly if you step away from Scotty and sit tight a minute.”

Meaning he’s just going to kill me
, thought Scott with a pukey sort of rage boiling up inside him. Later (and there would be a later) he would think about how he’d been furious not because he was going to die, but because there were people such as Haskoll in the world. That they could live and breathe and were permitted to walk around looking to the naked eye as if they were perfectly ordinary human beings.
There should be fancy goggles with coal-black lenses that would show you what this man really looked like
, Scott thought.

Haskoll was going about the one-handed business of producing a cigarette and lighting it with a shiny metal lighter. Mick was still standing close to Scott, though Harvey had stepped some distance away. His long ears were rigidly straight, and Scott thought he could hear the pooka muttering, “… Won’t go back, won’t never go back …”

They all shivered in the breeze.

“That’s sweet,” said Haskoll around the edge of his cigarette. “The leprechaun is standing by you, Scotty.”

“Clurichaun,” Mick mumbled automatically.

“Friends are so important,” Haskoll continued. “More important than the
air we breathe
. But can I say, and I’m just being honest, that as far as human shields go, the Mayor of Munchkinland there is neither human nor a shield—”

“GAAH! Jeez!” Scott snarled suddenly. Even Mick jumped. “Could you possibly just go ahead and kill me?! You’re not seriously so evil that you’re actually going to make me listen to you
talk
first, are you?”