Cold Cereal (The Cold Cereal Saga) (33 page)

“Is … is that Mick?” she asked him. She was looking right at the elf. Or possibly she was looking right at the pasting of extinguisher foam on his head that, to her eyes, probably appeared to be floating two feet above the stage. The Freemen certainly seemed to see it, and they were now rushing toward both elf and finch. They tackled Mick at roughly the same time as Erno was pinned and Biggs crumpled under a dog-pile of black bodies.

There were only a handful of unoccupied Freemen now. Maybe these, like Scott and Emily, were the most timid,
the least athletic of those who hadn’t simply panicked and run at the first sign of trouble. But they looked confident now with only a pair of sixth graders to contend with. They looked pretty pleased with themselves, actually.

“Any ideas?” Scott whispered to Emily.

Emily gave it some thought. “Stay low, aim for the crotch,” she concluded.

Thank goodness we have a certified genius on our team
, thought Scott. Then he fished his arm around and unhooked one of the zipper pulls from his backpack. He held the thing aloft, his thumb twitching over its red button.

“Don’t come any closer,” he told the Freemen, “or I’ll do it.”

The men stopped dead. The one in front winced at Scott’s hand. “Do … do what?”

Activate my LED flashlight
, thought Scott. “Trust me, you don’t wanna find out,” he told them. “We’ve planted them on every floor of the temple.”

The Freemen hesitated. More than one of them took a halting step backward. The whole of the stage curtain was now engulfed and dripping blue fire, so for a moment all was quiet apart from crackling flame.

Fourteen more men were sitting on the prostrate Biggs, pinioning every foot of his arms, legs, and torso. The Freeman with the fire extinguisher approached his head,
evidently to crack it with the heavy canister. Erno struggled uselessly against two men. Onstage, Finchbriton spat foam and feeble sparks, and Mick was entirely surrounded.

“Everyone get away from my friends!” shouted Scott. “I don’t want to press this, but I’ll do it! We all agreed we’d rather die than get taken prisoner! We talked about it in the car.”

The man with the fire extinguisher paused. Everyone looked to someone else to make the call.

“It’s probably a Nintendo or some nonsense!” shouted an old man from the mezzanine. “He’s just a boy! Take him!”

This was all the motivation most of the Freemen needed. They began to advance again, cautiously.

“Scott?” said Emily.

“Yes.”

“Is that a flashlight?”

“Yes,” he answered, and pointed it at the Freemen like a light saber.

“Is it … bright?”

“Not really.”

The Freemen grinned easily now; aware that, at best, they were only in danger of being slightly illuminated. Having to squint. Maybe getting their sinuses checked.

“Get ready to run,” whispered Scott.

Then the rosette skylight shattered inward, and Scott looked up to see a dark figure sliding down from the rafters on a light and fluidly uncoiling rope, his black mantle unfurling like pure opera, like Batman. It was just the sort of entrance his father would make in a movie, and Scott’s heart stirred as Freemen were scattered by fear and falling glass. “Dad?” he said, not too loudly, but breathlessly, as the dark rescuer alighted and turned.

But it wasn’t his father.

It was Merle Lynn, C.P.A.

Much to everyone’s confusion.

All the Freemen who were not otherwise engaged rounded on Merle, expressions of baffled anger on their faces. This was not how these Initiation pageants went, normally. You could easily miss it, owing to the high ceilings and antique appointments of this theater, but the Freemen Temple was really a treetop clubhouse. It was a fort made of sofa cushions. It was any sort of stronghold dedicated to the promotion of US and the exclusion of THEM. And the 377
^th
level of membership was supposed to guarantee that on a night like this they would mingle only with servants and with Walnut Crescent types who had servants of their own. None of these frustrating inbetweeners. There were not supposed to be children here. There were not supposed to be rabble-rousers. Right now each Freeman should have been holding a glass, maybe his pipe, and speaking with a group of nearly identical men
who could really appreciate a funny story about his butler.

Instead they were forced now to subdue a sweatshirt-wearing and possibly crazy old man. And was that a Freeman robe he was wearing? “This,” a red-faced Freeman bellyached, “is a
private function
!”

Scott’s thoughts were a little more complimentary. He hadn’t seen Merle Lynn since their brief meeting three weeks ago, and he realized his memories of the man had not been true: he was not quite the hobo Scott remembered him to be. His square gray beard was tidy. His skullcap was neatly pinned to his thinning hair, which was not anywhere as flyaway as you’d expect, considering he’d just dropped sixty feet through a broken window. He wore the black cloak of a Freeman, which Scott found kind of alarming; but beneath the open robe was only a pair of dark brown corduroy pants and a sweatshirt from Coney Island. He looked to Scott like the sort of well-meaning bachelor uncle who would pull quarters from your ears and forget to close the bathroom door when he peed. But then he pulled a glossy white wand from his sleeve, and in an instant he looked like a wizard.

He lunged with the wand like it was a saber, framed by the raging blue fires and greasy smoke of the proscenium. As a gang of Freemen neared, he flicked his wand and they dropped like marionettes. Two more Freemen rushed him, but with another wave of the wand they pitched forward and slid headfirst across the floor, eyes shut.

It was getting hazy. The fire spread to the thick columns that flanked either side of the stage. Something on the painted globes was especially flammable, and each Earth blistered and flew apart like a flock of crows.

Merle was moving about the floor now, and even the Freemen who’d been detaining Biggs and Mick and Erno now released their charges and leaped into action, only to fall abruptly asleep the moment they fell within Merle’s sphere of influence. But there were too many, and they came too quickly. One Freeman managed to slip up behind Merle and hoist his arms up in a full nelson, and when Merle flicked his wand over his shoulder and put this particular man to sleep, the dead weight dragged both of them down. Merle might have been quickly disarmed had Scott not finally roused himself to action. He dashed between Merle and the final two Freemen, screaming a poorly planned battle cry that was almost “LOOK OUT!” and was almost “NOOOOOO!” but came out something like “Noot.” Then, following Emily’s advice, he aimed low and tackled one of the Freemen in the groin. The second tripped over the first, and Merle gained enough time to disentangle himself from his narcoleptic wrestling match and put the last of the Freemen to sleep.

Scott could feel all the adrenaline leave him now as if
it were rushing out his ears. He could almost have passed out himself. But Erno and Emily helped him up, and soon Mick and Finchbriton were at his side, too. Biggs snored loudly on the floor.

“Everyone okay?” asked Merle, and then he noticed Biggs. “Must’ve got him when I doped the guy sitting on his neck. Sorry.”

“We better go,” said Mick. “More’ll be comin’ soon.”

“More are probably already here,” Merle answered. He had no problem seeing and hearing Mick apparently. “Waitaminute,” he added, squinting through the haze. “You’re that leprechaun who owes me gold.”

“No,” said Scott. “He’s a clurichaun.”

“Clurichaun, my eye. This little lepre-conman covered a field with ribbons just so I wouldn’t be able to find his stash again. I spent two
days
digging up that field.”

Scott turned to Mick, and the elf sighed. “All right, so I’m a bleedin’ leprechaun.”

“What?” said Scott, a little hurt. “Why did you say—”

“Soon as yeh tell folks you’re a leprechaun it becomes all about the gold.” Mick sighed. “You might as well tell ’em you’re their fairy godfather.”

“Not that I’m exactly following this conversation,” said Emily, “but shouldn’t we…?”

“Right,” said Merle. “Archimedes,” he added, though this comment seemed to be directed mostly at his wristwatch.

Then there was a sound of flapping wings, and a barn owl descended through the broken skylight, circled the room, and landed on Merle’s shoulder.

“That’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,” said Erno.

“It isn’t a real owl.” Emily frowned. “Real owls don’t make noise when they fly.”

“Smart girl. C’mon.”

They dragged Biggs to one of the auditorium exits just as a smoking chunk of ceiling crashed down to the stage.

Merle looked up at the blue flames and dark smoke. “Is that dragonfire?” he asked.

“Sort of,” said Scott.

“And … just ’cause I wanna be sure—we all see the bird covered in frosting, right?”

“It’s fire extinguisher foam, and yes.”

“Awesome. Okay. Now we just have to find a safe way out. Preferably something near the southeast corner.”

“Why the southeast corner?”

“Because that’s where I left my car.”

“Back to the basement,” Emily suggested. “There’s a coal chute.”

So they dragged Biggs as elegantly as possible down three flights of stairs, and soon they were on level ground again.

“Do yeh think the big guy…,” Mick huffed, “would be insulted … if I suggested he wear a little sled on his back from now on?”

“How much longer will he be asleep?” asked Emily.

“’Bout another twenty minutes.”

At the end of the hall was a door marked
BOILER ROOM
, and as they pushed through, Finchbriton immediately began ruffling his feathers and chirping in short barks.

“This is where they kept him,” said Erno. “In that middle furnace.”

Mick ran over and gave it a kick.

“There’s the coal chute,” said Emily. It was a rusty and curving metal slide from the ceiling to the floor. And this is when she and everyone else suddenly remembered how much Biggs weighed. “I … I should have thought of the incline. It’ll be tough getting him up the incline.” You could see that Emily found her lack of foresight genuinely worrying.

“We’ll manage,” said Mick. “The bird an’ me are stronger’n we look.”

“You have a lot on your mind,” said Erno to Emily. He grabbed her hand and turned to the others. “Literally. She memorized half a filing cabinet upstairs.”

“Doing your
job
?” she whispered to Erno. But she didn’t pull her hand away.

They laid Biggs against a pile of coal and tramped up the chute. At the top they huddled together and peeked through the trapdoor to the outside. “Look at all of ’em,” Merle breathed. “You see my car?”

Circling the temple was a wide expanse of sidewalk and lampposts. Parked in the midst of all this was a white van surrounded by dozens of policemen in riot gear. Just now the first of three fire engines was pulling up.

“You have a white van,” said Scott. Just the sight of one got his heart racing.

“Yeah,” said Merle. “It’s a good way to blend in. Archimedes, start the car.”

The owl on Merle’s shoulder swiveled its head all the way around, and, outside, the van’s head and taillights winked on. All around, the cops jumped and turned their rifles toward the vehicle.

“Cooool,” said Erno.

“That’s nothin’. Wait for the good part.”

Merle touched his watch; and the van lurched forward, scattered a few police officers, and ran into a lamppost.

“Was that the good part?” asked Emily. “I wouldn’t want to miss it.”

“Okay, hold on, hold on.” Merle poked at his watch some more; and the van backed up abruptly, sent another cadre of policemen flying, and shot forward again and around the temple and out of sight. The cops rushed to their own cars or tore off after the van on foot.

“What now?” said Erno.

“Now I draw the cops away, circle the car around, and pick us up,” said Merle, squinting at the little screen on
his watch. “Let’s get the big guy up the chute; we don’t have long.”

“How fast is the van traveling?” asked Emily as they skidded back down.