Whales on Stilts! (12 page)

After Lily got off the phone with Jasper, she called Katie. “The whales are headed toward Decentville... where my grandmother lives... and from there, I bet they're marching to the state capital!”

“Where are you?” asked Katie.

“I'm on Highway 241, a mile or so away from the bay.”

“Okay. Should we meet at the Aero-Bistro for the next stage of the plan?”

“Sure thing. But quick!”

“I'll see you there!” Katie said, and hung up.

Just as she pressed the off button, Katie thought she heard something loud on the other end of the line. But there was no time to lose.
She ran out to the garage and pulled on her Rollerblades. She tapped and slithered down the driveway—then set off, elbows pumping, in the direction of the Aero-Bistro.

She passed abandoned school buses and mail trucks that sat by the edge of the road. Some of the whales had walked through the neighborhood, and their massive stilt prints had torn craters into the pavement.

Cars were smashed in the middle of the street. Katie shot up onto the sidewalk to avoid them. She was whizzing along at a good speed... when suddenly she got the feeling that something was watching her.

Keeping half an eye on the line of driveways in front of her, she looked up.

A coy whale was spying on her from behind a small shingled ranch-style garage.

She zipped past him—but saw him heave himself up to his full height.

He clomped one giant metallic foot down on the garage and began barreling toward her.

Katie's Rollerblades clattered on the road. She jumped over gratings. Her arms flew as she hurled herself forward as quickly as possible. She could hear the earth tremble as the whale pounded in hot pursuit.

He was one house away from her, kicking through a hedge.

She gasped in fear—and the lasers blasted at the pavement right in front of her.

Another blast—just to her right.

Now her left!

No time to lose,
she thought.

She grabbed onto the pole of a street sign-swung around the corner—

and now was flying down a side street...

Made it!

Only to see that every house there was on fire.

And the whale rumbled along behind her, forcing her toward the flames.

Things weren't going any better for Lily. The noise on the cell phone when Katie had hung up was another platoon of whales. Lily was perched on her bicycle seat, leg extended to steady herself while she talked.

Now she heard the terrifying thrashing and crack of trees torn from their roots. The forest floor sent up little clouds of dust as each massive footfall shook the ground.

She set off, pedaling as fast as she could. She could hear the stamping of the whales not too far behind her. She went up and down paths, through little clearings. She bobbed on past the interpretive signs for the town arboretum without even reading them.

It's too bad, because there were a lot of interesting facts on those signs, if only Lily had taken a few minutes to stop and pay attention. For example, the Red (or Norway) Pine can grow up to a hundred feet tall, and can be recognized not only by the hue of its bark but also by its needles, which grow in clusters of two. The pitch of the White Pine, in olden days, was used to treat rheumatism, scurvy, and gleet. This unassuming hole was once the entrance to a fox den; it is now abandoned. If you examine the forest floor to your left, you may see a massive smoking crater; this is the spoor of the
Balaena mysticetus,
or bowhead whale. Not often seen in temperate forests, the bowhead whale and related whales, such as the Northern Right Whale
(Eubalaena glacialis),
come ashore only rarely, when remote controlled for the purposes of world domination and to eat plankton out of the treetops. Quite docile in their native element, they are singularly aggressive when on land and can only be stopped by—

But who has time to read the signs? Lily cycled on. She hurtled through groves and clearings.

A giant whale foot smashed down right beside her. She hit a rock, skidded, and wobbled. Branches flew through the air.

She threw her bike down. The whale towered above her. It had not seen her. It lifted its long legs and paced forward.

Lily staggered on the ground and crouched behind an outcropping of rock. The whales were in a line, towering above the woods. Their eyes flashed. She crowded herself backward into the curve of the outcropping. She pulled her arms and legs as close to her as she could.

The dazzle from the sun on the whales' stilts swooped across the forest floor. Lily curled up small and held her breath.

The whales walked on, following the path of destruction left by their brethren.

The crunching of tree trunks faded into the distance.

Lily stood up. The yellow of torn trees lay splintered around her.

Carefully, she picked up her bike. She looked from side to side, then climbed back on the seat and started off again. She rolled down a hillside. She wasn't far from the Aero-Bistro—fine dining in a luxurious, stratospheric atmosphere. She picked up her pace, pedaling furiously. She shot up embankments and whizzed around corners.

Which brings us back to Katie, who had just turned around a corner, only to be confronted by a street entirely filled with burning houses.

On the street in front of Katie, houses were ablaze in a line. Black smoke churned into the sky. On either side of the road, flames slapped at the hedges.

The whale was gaining on her.

She could not go back.

She did the only thing she could: She skated even faster toward the burning block. The heat was unbearable. Everything was weirdly lit by the flames. She was getting closer to the houses.

The whale raised one leg high to stomp on her. She felt the whistle of air as its iron and titanium foot fell right behind her. The street rocked, and Katie almost lost her balance.

She knocked her skate on the road and sped up.

The whale raised his foot again—

And Katie shot between the burning shrubs, her arms outstretched for balance.

The flames licked toward her fingertips, but she was not singed.

The whale, on the other hand, could go no further. She heard him bellow as the heat scalded him, heard him cough as the smoke pouring upward into the sky engulfed him.

She grabbed another street sign and swiveled again. She was on another block now—a non-burning block.

She looked quickly behind her. Over the roofs of the houses, through the smoke, she could see the whale tottering and gagging.

I hope Lily's plan works,
thought Katie.

She rattled across some train tracks.

Soon, the Aero-Bistro hung before her, sparkling in the morning light. She sped toward
it down a hill. Rocks and trees blurred past her. Then Katie saw Lily.

She rolled toward the Aero-Bistro from one direction, Lily from the other.

Katie gave her friend a high five as they met, which was a good thing, since Lily just managed to grab Katie's wrist before she skated off the edge of the gorge.

They ran for the robot-operated Sky Dinghy that would take them up on deck.

There was no time to lose.

Meanwhile, Jasper had got his undersea equipment together and had drifted up to the sliding screen door in the bottom of Larry's yacht.

Jasper's undersea gear consisted of a striped bathing costume, a sea captain's hat, a wicked-looking harpoon gun, and the Oxysphere, a giant wobbly bubble-suit that encased him entirely. He had to really warp the Oxysphere to get it through the yacht's doorway. Once he fit it through, he bobbed up above the level of the water.

Jasper emerged in a pool inside the yacht. Carefully he climbed out of the pool. Falling back in a few times. Because it is not easy to climb when encased in a giant wobbly bubble. It really isn't.

Here, for example, is British adventurer Lesley Gorbuckle-Smythe in the third volume of his autobiography,
Between a Rock and Hard Place: The Travels, Memoirs, and Derring-do of Lesley Gorbuckle-Smythe:
“Beastly tiring, it was, ascending Mount Everest. After the third day the Sherpa who was leading me took me aside. He suggested that perhaps I should continue the ascent without the ten-foot-wide latex bubble. Well, I told the little blighter that an Englishman's latex bubble was his castle, his kingdom, his motte and his bailey, and that...” etc., etc., etc.

The above quotation gave Jasper enough time to get out of the water finally and stand beside the pool. He was crouched and ready for anything. He brandished his harpoon gun. He crept to the door and cranked it open.

There were bunks, with sleeping guards on them, lining the walls. Jasper rolled through very quietly. There was only a very little shrieking, squealing noise as the Marvelous Non-Osmotic
Hypo-Allergenic Oxysphere squeezed between the bunks.

Jasper opened the next door and prepared to roll through.

It was a control room. Larry sat there at a big computer console, pushing buttons. Giant screens showed a whale's-eye-view of the countryside.

Perfect.

Jasper declared bravely, “The game is up, you cad! Resist, and you'll find a harpoon buried deep in your blubbery parts!”

Larry turned to face him. Larry no longer had on the grain sack. His head was blue and bumpy, with small mammalian eyes and a sneering mouth full of baleen. It was, in other words, a face that looked like