Ignatius MacFarland (27 page)

CRACK! Karen kneed Herbert extremely hard right in the groin. He made a sound like a sea lion and doubled over in agony. I have to admit, even though he was a jerk, I sort of felt sorry for the guy at that moment.

“. . . I’m not your ‘dear,’ ” Karen said, finishing her sentence.

As Herbert rolled around on the ground trying to catch his breath through what had to have been major pain, the guards all tensed up on their weapons, which were now even closer to our faces.

“Oh, man, I should have warned you,” Mr. Arthur said as he bent down to help Herbert. “She did that same exact thing to me once.”

Mr. Arthur tried to help Herbert stand up but Herbert just pushed him away angrily, his face red with pain. “Aren’t you going to do anything, Arthur? Are you going to let her get away with this? What kind of a world are you running here, anyway? Look around! Look at your guards! You know what they see? They see an ineffective leader. They see a pushover. And unless you make an example out of this—” Herbert pointed at Karen like she was a monster. “—
Anti-Art,
then you can kiss any and all security goodbye. Because if no one’s afraid of you, then no one’s going to do what you tell them to do. Not your people, not your guards, not your army. No one!” Herbert then struggled shakily to his feet, still clearly feeling the pain of Karen’s knee. He grabbed Mr. Arthur by the collar, got in his face, and said quietly enough that he thought Karen and I couldn’t hear, “And if no one’s doing what you tell them to do, then I can’t get this gold out of here!”

Mr. Arthur stared at Herbert, looking both afraid and unsure what to do. He was clearly intimidated by this Herbert Golonski guy. Then he suddenly puffed himself up, trying to be tough again.

“You bet I’m going to do something.” Mr. Arthur turned to the guards. “Lock her up in the White House prison. Right now.”

Two of the gorilla guards grabbed Karen’s hands and held them behind her back. She tried to pull out of their grasp but they were just too strong.

CLICK-CLICK! Another guard behind Karen snapped a huge set of handcuffs tightly around her wrists. The two guards held her by her upper arms as she struggled to get away.

“Let go of me!” she yelled as she thrashed about. However, she quickly slowed her struggling because I could see the handcuffs were cutting into her wrists as she fought. Seeing Karen with her hands locked behind her back and being subdued by the guards made me suddenly feel really sad, like the time Gary’s mom had their cat — who used to scratch us and attack us like crazy — declawed. We thought we’d be happy to be safe from her sharp nails but the first time we saw her try to jump from the couch to hang on the drapes and she slid down and crashed to the floor, we all felt really bad. It was sort of like even though we were scared of her with claws, she had lost her dignity without them. And that’s something you never want to see happen to anybody, no matter how mean they can occasionally be.

Well, maybe except for Frank Gutenkunitz. I’ll have to get back to you on that one.

Herbert watched all this, then turned to Mr. Arthur again. Herbert had a really mean look on his face that showed he was getting mad at everybody.

“Get
rid
of her, Chester,” Herbert hissed in Mr. Arthur’s face. “She already escaped once from your ridiculous prison. She’s never going to be anything but trouble. This girl has been running around for a year trying to turn people against you. Be a man, Arthur! Be a leader! Take her down to the square, bring everybody out, tell them this is what happens if they disobey you or try to do anything against your leadership . . . and then cut off her head.”

Karen’s eyes went wide. Even though she had always been cool under pressure, the idea that someone might actually kill her seemed to throw her quite a bit. As it did me.
And
Mr. Arthur.

“K-kill her?” Mr. Arthur said, the words sticking in his throat like saltine crackers when you try to swallow a bunch of them without any water.

“Yes! What do you think you’re doing? Playing games? Leaders have to take charge and they have to do ruthless things in order to stay in power. Haven’t you ever read Machiavelli? You can’t make people follow you unless they’re afraid of you. And they can’t be afraid of you unless they really think you will do something terrible to them if they don’t do what you want them to do! So do it, Arthur! Execute her!”

Mr. Arthur stared at Herbert with a very serious look on his face. Then he looked at Karen, and then at me. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking but his face looked like he was really considering what Herbert had just said. It was a scary look, sort of like when Mr. Haleran, our English teacher who was a really nice guy and who never got mad at anybody, found out that lots of kids had stopped doing their homework because they said he was too much of a wimp to yell at them or give them a bad grade. He came into class after hearing that and was a completely different person, really intense and angry, like whatever had been nice inside him sort of died upon hearing the news that everybody was taking advantage of him. Unfortunately, Mr. Arthur looked like he was thinking it might be time to prove something to the world.

I knew that if Mr. Arthur decided to take Herbert’s advice and tell the guards to execute Karen, he wouldn’t be able to turn back, even if he wanted to. He was too worried about being president and keeping his little world going and he was too much under the spell of Herbert to say no to him once he had already said yes. And I knew that I didn’t have the skills or powers to do what people always did in these situations in the movies, where someone they know is standing on the gallows and is about to be hung and all of a sudden they come riding in on a horse and shoot the rope with a gun so that their friend just falls to the ground and is safe and then some army rides in and saves the day. I didn’t have an army and I didn’t have a gun and I couldn’t shoot it if I did. I didn’t have anything to save the day with. All I could think to do was to speak up.

“Mr. Arthur,” I said as he looked at me, almost startled to hear my voice, “you can’t do this. This isn’t why you became president, is it? To have slaves and an army and to make everybody afraid of you? That wasn’t who you were back in our school. I know. My friends’ brothers and sisters used to know you and they said you were a nice guy. And I always used to look at your picture and feel like I knew you, too. Like I had something in common with you. I know you never felt comfortable in our frequency. Neither did I.

“I don’t know if any of your students were ever mean to you, or if you had bullies when
you
were a student, but I know I sure did. I couldn’t stand them, how mean they could be to me just because they decided they didn’t like me or because I was too nice or too scared to fight back. I never knew why they acted that way but maybe they were trying to prove to me that they were in charge. But I didn’t want them to be in charge and the school didn’t need them to be in charge. And if they weren’t there, our school would have been a nicer place.”

Herbert rolled his eyes and sighed. “Arthur, will you shut this kid up and do it already?”

Before anybody could stop me, I kept talking, trying to make Mr. Arthur realize just how crazy everything had gotten.

“The people in this frequency,” I said as Mr. Arthur stared at me, “they all liked you when you first got here. They liked that you taught them a new language and that you were bringing them so many new things. I mean, sure, you probably should have told them that the stuff you were bringing wasn’t all stuff you had thought up yourself, but that might even have been okay if you had just given them a choice about whether they wanted to like it or not. But now . . . you’ve turned into a bully.

“You didn’t need to bring in the creatures from the other valley to keep the people of Lesterville in line. Nobody wanted to hurt you. You just needed to protect them from the bad guys. But now you’re becoming a bad guy. And the more you do to scare people, the more they’re going to hate you. They might act like they like you and they might be afraid to do anything against you for a while, but they’re not going to stay that way forever. And then you’ll just have to start killing more and more of them.

“Karen only wanted to stop you because she saw how unhappy people were becoming under you. She wanted to save them from their bully. But I just know that deep down, you don’t want to be a bully. You’ve never wanted to be a bully. You just wanted people to like you and like what you do. And they still can. Just, please, don’t kill Karen.”

I got so wrapped up in what I was saying that I have an embarrassing feeling that I was sort of getting all choked up by the time I got to the end of my speech. I looked over at Karen, who gave me a small, surprised smile, like she was actually impressed with something I had done for the first time ever.

Mr. Arthur stared at me, thinking, as an angry Herbert stepped up in front of him.

“Are we finished playing around now?” he said. “Finished with our little speeches? Because if you don’t do this, Chester, then I will.”

“But . . . I’m the president,” Mr. Arthur said weakly. “I’m in charge here.”

“You’re not in charge of anything,” Herbert said with a laugh. “You’ve just been the person who’s done everything I’ve told him to do. You’re my mouthpiece, and you’re a ridiculous one at that. So if you can’t even do the simple things I tell you to do, then why don’t you go back to your little workshop and play with all your toys and leave the running of important things to the adults.”

Mr. Arthur stared at Herbert, then looked at Karen and me.

Then, after a second . . .

CRACK!

Mr. Arthur kneed Herbert Golonski in the crotch harder than Karen had. Herbert made an even louder sea lion sound and fell over in pain.

“
I
am in charge here,” Mr. Arthur said angrily. “This is
my
city and
I
built it and
I
decide what happens here, not you. Got it?” He then turned to the guards as Herbert Golonski lay whimpering on the ground. “Let the girl go.”

I looked over at Karen, who seemed very surprised. Then she looked at Mr. Arthur with an impressed expression on her face. As I watched the guard behind Karen take the handcuffs off of Karen’s wrists, I noticed something out of the corner of my eye. I looked up at the sky and saw a very strange thing.

A big flaming cloud.

I started to wonder if maybe flaming clouds were just one more of the bizarre things in this frequency when I heard someone running and yelling behind us. We all turned to see a gorilla guard chugging up the hill toward us from the direction of downtown Lesterville.

“They’re coming!” he yelled in a panic as he galloped quickly on his three legs. “They say they’re going to burn down the city!”

“Who’s going to burn down the city?” called Mr. Arthur, looking thrown.

“The flappers!”

The guard pointed at the cloud, which upon closer look was indeed thousands of flying people all heading in a huge formation toward Lesterville, each one of them carrying a lit torch. We could hear the faint sound of someone in the flaming cloud yelling something down at the city but it was too distant to understand.

“Oh, my God . . .” said Mr. Arthur as his mouth dropped open and his eyes went wide. “Get the entire army to the city! NOW!”

And with that, all the guards took off running as fast as they could toward Lesterville as Mr. Arthur bolted past us like his pants were on fire.

The gorilla guards were making loud weird howling noises like sirens as they ran down the hill toward the city. Other army guys started running and rolling from the White House and swarming over hills and streaming out of hiding places. Karen looked down at Herbert, who was still too immobilized by the pain of his crushed testicles to be able to do anything. She turned to Peepup and Feep Feep.

“Keep an eye on him, you guys,” she said, pointing at Herbert. “Tie him up if you have to.” Then she looked at me and said, “Let’s go.”

She sprinted off after Mr. Arthur as I looked down at Herbert, who stared up at me with bloodshot eyes and an angry look on his face.

“You have no idea what you are messing with, kid,” he said in a scary tone. “No idea.”

Now feeling more weirded out by him than I had been before, I turned and ran off after Karen toward the strange city with the huge flaming cloud hovering over it.

35

THE FALL OF THE ARTHURIAN EMPIRE

“ATTENTION, CITIZENS OF LESTERVILLE. PLEASE EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY ANY AND ALL ARTHURIAN BUILDINGS. YOU WILL BE SAFE IN YOUR ORIGINAL DWELLINGS WHICH ARE MADE OUT OF NONFLAMMABLE MATERIALS. I REPEAT, PLEASE EVACUATE ALL NONORIGINAL, ARTHURIAN-MADE BUILDINGS IMMEDIATELY. WE CANNOT BE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR SAFETY IF YOU DO NOT EVACUATE.”