Off to Be the Wizard (29 page)

Chapter 26.

The wizards quickly discovered that having free access to all of the food, shelter, and money you could ever want, and the ability to teleport and fly, was not conducive to good cardiovascular health. They didn’t know for sure if disabling the shell had rendered them just as prone to injury as a non-wizard, but not one of them chose to stick around and find out. The wizards ran less than a hundred feet before most of them were winded. Also, due to the unevenness of the field through which they were running, most of them almost immediately pulled, wrenched, or twisted some part of their anatomy. Martin was among the most physically fit among them, but that was only because he had arrived most recently. The wizards were running for their lives, and were doing a terrible job of it.

Luckily, the Orcs weren’t doing much better. At Merlin’s order all five hundred of them advanced on the now-powerless wizards, but they moved clumsily, grumbling as they did. Clearly, the process of turning into Orcs was even more uncomfortable than Merlin had let on. This was good, because it meant the wizards had some chance of escape. It was bad in that it meant that if they were captured, the Orcs would be in the mood for revenge.

Martin noticed that he was pulling away from the pack, and fought his natural instinct to widen the gap. Instead, he took the opportunity to slow a bit and look behind him. The little band of wizards had a lead on the Orcs, but Martin knew it wouldn’t last. The wizards had accelerated well, but they couldn’t keep it up for long, and while the solid wall of Orcs was slow, he saw no reason to believe it would get any slower. Martin looked to the tree line, still hundreds of yards away. He didn’t think the wizards would make it. Several of them were already clutching at their sides. Even if they did reach the forest, there was no reason to think that the Orcs wouldn’t chase them into it. Really, the forest would most likely just split the wizards up and make them easier to capture.

Martin felt his imp box with his smartphone inside rattling around in his robe pocket and beating against his left hip as he ran. It was maddening. His robe, his hat, his staff, his phone. All of them had been so powerful just ten minutes ago, but now they were as useless as if the shell had never existed.

Hang on,
Martin thought.
My phone could do stuff before Phillip told me about the shell. That’s how I got here!
He risked turning around and running backwards for a moment.

“Hey, Phil,” he yelled. “He said he disabled the shell, right?”

Phillip was badly winded and losing speed. He spoke between huge gulps of air. “Yeah … so … what?”

“He didn’t say he disabled the file, just the shell.”

“Yeah … it’s really … hard to … cut someone … off from the … file. We … can … do it, … but it takes … a lot of doing! … You can’t rush it.”

Martin didn’t say anything; he just dug out the silver imp box and showed it to Phillip. Phillip looked puzzled for a moment, then started screaming, “DO IT! DO IT NOW! DO IT!”

Martin flipped the lid of the box open. The smartphone’s screen glowed invitingly. He pulled up the app and looked at the options. He could go back to his own time, and be arrested like a civilized person.
No thanks.
He could teleport himself away and watch from a distance as his friends got beaten to death.
Not much better.
That left one option. He pressed the hover button, and immediately bobbed two feet into the air. He heard a ragged cheer come up from the other wizards, but he was more concerned with the bone-jarring vibration he’d never bothered to fix. Also, with his feet no longer touching the ground, he was quickly losing speed. Phillip must have noticed this too, because he grabbed Martin’s sleeve and started pulling him through the air behind him.

“Okaay,” Martin said, sounding like a goat sitting on a paint shaker. “I provvved it wwworksss. I’mmm gonnna ssstop n-n-now.”

Phillip yelled, “Don’t you dare! I’ve got an idea!” He maneuvered Martin’s vibrating body so that he was skimming along two feet above the ground, head first and face down like Superman. Martin was wondering what Phillip had in mind when he felt Phillip jump into the air and land with his knee in the middle of Martin’s back. Martin let out a pained yell as Phillip started kicking the ground, propelling them forward, riding Martin like a scooter. Martin started to complain, but Phillip cut him off, saying, “P-p-pipe downnn. Youuu ooowe meee onnne!”

“Okaaay! Whooo elssse hasss a p-p-pocket commmputerrr thaaat caan accesss the reeposssitorrry fiiile?” Phillip yelled. A disappointingly small number of voices answered. Martin couldn’t be sure, but he thought he heard three. Gwen and Jeff were two of them.

“Rrright,” Phillip said, “weee neeed aaaa divvverrrsion! Ideasss?”

An endless moment passed, then Jeff said, “You know what? I think I got somethin’! I gotta stop running to do this. Keep going, no matter what happens to me!”

Gary yelled, “Done!” All who knew him realized that this was what passed for an expression of concern from him.

Martin was still being used as a hoverboard. He hung his head down so that he could have an unobstructed but inverted view behind them. He saw that the wizards had opened a lead of about a hundred feet. He could also see that Jeff had stopped running, and turned to face the groaning, limping mass of Orcs. His head was bowed, and he was clearly operating some sort of electronic device, but Martin couldn’t see what it was. As the Orcs closed the gap, Jeff raised his eyes to meet them. They were about thirty feet away when he made the final key press.

Martin could hardly see the Orcs. His view was obstructed by a massive army of demons. They were ten feet tall with pinkish-red skin on their top halves. Their legs were brown fur, and ended in cloven hooves. Their snarling, animalistic faces were framed by large curled horns. Their fists glowed green with arcane energy. There were hundreds of them, standing between Jeff and the Orcs, lined up like hellish Rockettes. In the gaps between the demons’ arms and legs, Martin could see just enough to get a sense of the panic in the Orc ranks. One instant they were jogging toward the wizards, the next they were sprinting away. They continued to grumble, but much more emphatically.

It struck Martin as odd that the demons were facing the wizards, with their backs to the Orcs, but he was willing to accept that. The wizards did not need to be told to stop running. They stood in the tall grass a few hundred feet from the tree line, gasping for air and clutching their sides. Phillip lifted his knee from Martin’s back. Martin vibro-floated a few feet while he poked at his smartphone, then he dropped to the ground and lay there, grateful to be alive and stationary. After a moment he got up and joined the other wizards, who were watching Jeff’s demon army chase off the Orcs.

Martin watched the battle as he walked around the back of the clutch of wizards. Now that he was standing upright, the demons looked familiar. It helped that they still appeared to be facing Martin, even as they chased the Orcs back to Camelot. Martin wondered why they were running backwards, but then he realized that some of them were running sideways, and that they were all moving in an odd, herky-jerky manner. Martin smiled, then moved ten feet to his left, still watching the demons. They all rotated to face him no matter where he was, like animated cardboard cutouts of demons. Martin laughed, then yelled, “Jeff, Doom?”

“Yup!” Jeff replied. “They’re called
Barons of Hell
. They were level bosses from the first game. They showed up again in Doom II, I think. I don’t have all the frames imported or the sounds. I didn’t think I’d need ‘em yet.” Jeff turned to Gary. “I was gonna give you one as a pet for Christmas.”

One of the Magnuses from Norway said, “I will buy ten. Name your price.”

The demons didn’t run very fast, but neither did the Orcs. Jeff had time to enact a few more subroutines, enabling the demons to turn sideways, and to throw green fireballs, which seemed to enable the Orcs to run faster. A few Orcs were hit in the back by fireballs, and were too scared to even notice that the fireballs had no effect. The terrified Orcs crowded through a side portal in the city wall like five hundred Three Stooges, slamming a portcullis down behind them. “Can you make more of those?” Gwen asked.

“How many you want?”

“Enough to make sure the Orcs stay inside for a while.”

“Sure,” Jeff said. “The hard part was writin’ an emulator so the game’s code would run out here. Now that I’ve done that, I can make as many as we need. They’ll just wander around, attacking anything that moves.” Jeff hit a few buttons, did some thumb typing and suddenly the field was full of Barons of Hell, wandering about and throwing green fireballs at random. The only sound was the chirping of birds and the wind rustling the trees.

“Like I said, I haven’t imported the sound files yet,” Jeff explained.

“Clearly, Jimmy didn’t stick around to watch his Orcs dispatch us, or else he’d have retaliated by now,” David, the wizard from Russia, said as a demon punched him ineffectually in the back of the head.

“Agreed,” Phillip said, his back aglow in pixelated green fire from repeated fireball strikes. “We need to get back into the city.”

Martin looked at his smartphone, wedged into its decorative box. Two demons were standing on either side of him, silently struggling to kill each other through him as if he weren’t there. “I can transport myself in there, no problem, but I’ve never tried to take another person with me, let alone twenty.”

Gwen pulled out a smartphone as a demon walked through her, possibly attempting to kick her. Martin assumed from the phone’s shape and the logo that it was an iPhone 6. She squinted at the screen, saying, “I can transport anyone with this, but I don’t have a UI, just the raw file. I’ll have to do it one person at a time, and I’ll need the hard coordinates of the exact landing spot. Anybody have some safe coordinates inside the city memorized?”

After a conspicuous silence, Eddie looked at her phone, noticing the logo on the back. “Apple? They’re still in business?”

Jeff said, “You’re from the early nineties, aren’t you?” Jeff’s portable, from just a few years after Martin’s time, appeared to be two sheets of glass glued together into a rectangle. The back sheet of glass was opaque, the front held the display. Martin didn’t see a logo, which probably meant it wasn’t made by Apple.

One of the Germans had a Palm Treo that looked like it was designed by a committee of lowest bidders. Martin didn’t think it would be as much use as Gwen’s iPhone.

By this time, the wizards had formed into a loose huddle, and the demons had surrounded them, and were pelting their backs with a constant barrage of 16-bit fireballs, illuminating the wizards’ faces with an eerie green light.

“Okay,” Phillip said. “Martin, get in there and keep Jimmy occupied. I doubt he’ll ghost you, at least not right away. He’ll want to play with you, maybe turn you to his side. Try to get him talking. Whatever you do, try to do it in public. Jimmy wants people to think he’s a hero, so he won’t do anything too underhanded if people are watching. I know the coordinates to my shop by heart. Transporting a car one piece at a time takes a lot of trips. Jeff, Gwen, and Felix will send us all there one by one, and we can use my computer to figure out the coordinates and do a group transport to come help you.”

“Your computer is a Commodore 64. I don’t think the help will come very fast,” Martin said.

“Hey, don’t knock it. I could have a VIC-20.”

A mournful voice from the back of the pack said, “Hey! I love my VIC-20!”

Phillip continued, “You up for this?”

“Why not?” Martin answered. “What’s the worst that can happen?”

“He could kill you.”

“See, that’s noth … wait. What?”

“He could totally kill you,” Phillip reiterated. “There’s a spell that would take you out instantly. The only challenge for Jimmy would be remembering the right words.”

“Oh yeah,” Tyler said. “If you don’t use a spell that often, the words just go bye-bye.”

Gary said, “Yeah, but if it’s something as important as killing Martin, I’m sure Jimmy’d have the words written down.”

“Obviously,” Jeff agreed.

“Phillip, why didn’t you tell me there was a spell to kill people?” Martin sputtered.

“If you were me, and you were training you, would you tell you that you could easily kill you at will?”

Martin asked after a moment, “
You
, meaning
me
, or
you
meaning
you
?”

“Either way,” Phillip answered.

Martin asked, “Why am I doing this again?”

Gwen put her hand on Martin’s arm and looked him in the eye, calming him instantly. “Martin, when he finds out the Orcs failed to kill us, he’ll probably just do the job with the shell, and we won’t be able to defend ourselves. Someone’s gotta get in there and distract him until the rest of us can find our way in, and your phone’s the only device that can do it that quickly.”

Phillip said, “Just go in and get him out in public. Keep him occupied, and we’ll be there as fast as we can.”

Martin opened the imp box and pressed the glowing screen of his phone a few times. His eyes darted to Gwen’s just in time to see her look away. He looked at Phillip and said “I love this plan! I’m excited to be a part of it. Let’s do it!”