The Vexed Generation, page 15
Brewster sat down. “This sucks.”
“Yeah,” Mattie said. “I noticed. I say we get out of here.”
Brewster said, “I thought about it, around the time he started explaining how the elf king’s high priest represents Kissinger, whoever that is. I don’t think it’d work, though. As soon as he sees us messing with our hats, he’ll know something’s up. He’d probably use magic to stop us before we can teleport out.”
“You know, I came pretty close to taking off about a half hour ago. I had teleportation back to the dirigible all programmed and everything, but I didn’t want to desert you.”
“Thanks for that.”
“Also, it wouldn’t have worked. Gilbert and Sid could follow us super easy if we did that,” Mattie said. “But what if we break our emergency pendants again?”
Tyler stopped typing and called out, “Hey, what are you two whispering about?”
“I’m just explaining the game to him. See, Brewster, you chase these rectangular guys around a maze made of nothing but right angles while you try to shoot each other with big, blocky bullets.”
Tyler nodded and went back to typing.
Mattie lowered her voice. “I say we count to three and snap the pendants in half. We’ll both disappear at the same time, and it should take us back home, just after the moment we left two days ago. We’ll be free, and we’ll have a head start.”
Brewster said, “I don’t know. It blows being stuck here, but they’re just trying to help us.”
“By keeping us from doing anything? That’s not helping us. That’s hindering us. It’s literally the opposite, and I’m using the word literally correctly.”
They lapsed into a sullen silence, the only sound in the house coming from the video game and Tyler’s keyboard. The moment of quiet lasted for nearly a full minute, broken by Roy materializing.
Tyler and Brewster both said hello.
“Time to change shifts, Tyler.” Roy walked over to the table and slumped down in one of the chairs as if teleporting had put a terrible strain on his lower back.
“One mo,” Tyler muttered, quickly tapping out the end of the sentence he’d been working on. He saved his work, then looked up at Roy and smiled. “There. Done. So, yeah, the kids have been great. No problems. Very well behaved.”
Brewster was the only person who saw Mattie grit her teeth.
Roy asked, “Where’s Hubert?”
Tyler said, “Outside, having a dip in the pool.”
Roy grimaced. “How much chlorine does Gary use to keep that water clean?”
Tyler stood up, closing his laptop. “Not enough. So, where should I go to search for Phillip?”
“I’d check with the other guys. I just got done scouring Atlantis.”
Tyler winced. “Oof. He’d have to be pretty desperate to try to hide out where his ex lives.”
“His exes, technically.”
Tyler laughed. “Yeah. True. That doesn’t make it better. Did you touch base with her—either of them?”
“No. I figured they’d either refuse to help find him or set out to destroy him. Neither of those sounded helpful.”
Mattie paused the game and turned around to listen to Tyler and Roy’s conversation, suddenly interested. Tyler and Roy smiled at Brewster and Mattie.
Tyler said, “Well, kids, I’ve got to go. Roy will be hanging out with you for a while. I’ll see you later, okay?”
Mattie and Brewster both said goodbye, and Tyler disappeared.
Roy said, “So, it sounds like you two and Tyler got along well.”
Brewster said, “Yeah. He’s nice.”
Roy squinted at Brewster. “That sentence sounded like it had a silent but clinging to its end.”
“No! No. Tyler’s cool.”
Roy kept squinting. Brewster tried to keep a straight face, then squirmed for a moment before finally laughing. “Okay, okay. He really is cool, but he just kept talking about elves and dwarves, and the Vietnam War.”
Roy laughed. “Ah, told you about his book, did he? Yeah. He’ll talk your leg off if you let him. I can only hope his books are more entertaining than the speeches he gives about them.”
“You haven’t read any of them?” Mattie asked.
“No. He writes fantasy, and I don’t go in for all that elf and goblin crap.”
“But you’re a wizard.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t have to read about it. I live it.”
Mattie and Brewster both smiled and gave themselves room to hope that the next two hours might be less boring than the previous two had been.
Roy said, “Yeah, I don’t need to hear about any gnomes or pixies. The Vietnam War though, that’s an interesting topic.”
Mattie’s and Brewster’s smiles faded.
“Yeah, for instance,” Roy continued, “Kennedy got us into the war, and LBJ and Nixon both kept us in it, but did you know that all three of them agreed that going into ’Nam was a terrible mistake and that there was no way to win?”
“No,” Brewster said. “I didn’t.”
“It’s true. In fact, it could be argued that the only reason we ever got into that war was because of a miscommunication in the Kennedy White House between the president and an ambassador.”
“Oh,” Brewster said.
“Yeah, then neither of the next two presidents pulled out because they didn’t want to be the first commander in chief to lose a war.”
Brewster glanced at Mattie, who was staring at him, her eyebrows raised.
Roy said, “See, it all started when the French colonized Vietnam. This is clear back in the 1800s.”
Brewster stuck his fingers down the neck of his shirt and made eye contact with Mattie. “Three. Two.”
Roy asked, “Why are you counting?”
Mattie dug her pendant out of the collar of her shirt. She and Brewster said, “One,” in unison, then snapped their pendants and disappeared.
* * *
Brewster and Mattie materialized, sitting on the floor of the living room of their own house back in Seattle. They scrambled to their feet and ran to the window just in time to see themselves driving away in their father’s car.
Brewster said, “Okay, we’re back where we started. Now what? We can’t stick around here. The federal agents could be back any second. That’s why we just left in such a hurry.”
“Yeah, well, things are different now, aren’t they?” Mattie twiddled her fingers in the specific pattern Gilbert and Sid had taught them. A black disk slid into existence twirling between her fingers and expanded into a full top hat. She held the top hat upside down and shook it once. Her black-and-white walking stick flew up out of the hat, into the air, where she caught it. She placed the hat on the back of her right hand and made it roll down her arm and across her shoulders. A silk cape appeared on her back as the hat passed. She caught the hat with her right hand and placed it on her head, smiling at Brewster.
“You forgot the gloves.”
Mattie lifted her hat and grabbed the white gloves that were sitting, folded, on her head.
“My point,” Mattie said, pulling on her white gloves, “is that last time the cops came, we were just normal kids. Now we have powers. We can defend ourselves.”
“You just want to throw the rabbit at someone.”
“Oh, like you don’t! Like you aren’t dying to throw the rabbit at someone!”
“Of course I want to throw the rabbit at someone, but I think it would be smarter to avoid having to.”
“Well obviously, but if we have to I’m not gonna hesitate.”
“So what do we do?”
Mattie said, “We go to Atlantis, and we find Phillip’s ex-girlfriend. One of them anyway. From the sound of it, he has a few there. Which . . . ick. We find one of them and ask her where to find him. The way Roy was talking, she’ll understand how evil he is.”
“But how do we get to Atlantis?” Brewster asked.
“We’ll teleport.”
Brewster took a deep breath. “I’ll rephrase my question. How do we go to Atlantis without knowing where or when it is?”
Mattie shrugged. “Beats me. We’ll figure it out.”
“That’s not good enough.”
“It has been so far. When this whole thing started out, we were just ordinary teenagers, Brewster. Now we’re superpowered time travelers, and we got that by going with the flow. I gotta believe that if we just keep our eyes open and our wits about us, something helpful will turn up.”
Brewster started to reply but stopped cold when Phillip appeared, his eyes darting around the room. When they settled on the twins, he cringed, surprised and terrified. He yelled, “Oh no!”
Mattie and Brewster both shouted, “You!”
Phillip did the world’s fastest double take at the sight of a young woman Mattie’s age wearing a top hat and satin cape with her T-shirt and jeans, then got over it and lunged forward, grabbing both Mattie and Brewster by their upper arms.
Brewster cried, “Let go!”
Mattie turned and bent at the waist, trying to twist free from his grip.
Phillip said, “You should have stayed in the basement!”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Mattie asked.
“Yes!” Phillip said, struggling to maintain his grip on the squirming teenagers. “Very much!”
Mattie shouted, “Let go of me!”
Before Phillip could respond, they all saw the hint of something: two shapes, vaguely like men, appearing in the room with them. They only had a fraction of a second to see whatever it was before Phillip, Mattie, and Brewster all teleported away.
17.
The twins appeared somewhere dark and loud.
The first impression they had was of a raging fire in the distance and a horrible cacophonous sound, like a tractor-trailer crash, or a building collapse. As their eyes adjusted and their brains made more sense of the data coming in, they quickly realized that the sound of the raging fire was actually the roar of an enthusiastic crowd, and the red light in the distance came from stage lighting. The cacophony resolved itself into energetic drumming and an overly active guitarist showing off his prowess on the pedal steel.
After a quick look around, Brewster and Mattie saw that they were standing in the aisle at the very top of the balcony of a theater, about two-thirds full of people. On the stage, the four men standing in front of a band all said “Giddyup.” Then one of them sang “Oom poppa oom poppa mow mow” in an improbably deep voice.
Mattie and Brewster both asked, “Where are we?”
Phillip looked down at the stage, then back to twins as if he couldn’t believe they had to ask. “An Oak Ridge Boys concert. Where are your parents?” he asked.
Brewster said, “What?”
Phillip shouted over another round of oom poppa mow mows, “I asked where your parents are!”
Mattie said, “We know! We heard! How can you ask us that after what you did to them?”
She began squirming, trying to wriggle free from Phillip’s grip.
He clamped down tighter on her forearm. “Please, stop that! Mathison, please. Oh no—”
The vague form of two people started to appear, but Mattie, Brewster, and Phillip all vanished before the two fully materialized.
* * *
The environment around Phillip and the twins remained dark and loud, but everything else changed. Being students at an American high school, Brewster and Mattie immediately recognized that they were underneath a set of gym bleachers. They stood, surrounded by thin metal supports and struts. From above they heard the sounds of a basketball game and saw slivers of light with small glimpses of legs and backs through the gaps between the aluminum slats.
Brewster shook his head. “What is going on?”
Phillip said, “It’s an emergency macro I wrote. If I identify someone as a threat, it automatically teleports me away from them to one of several places that nobody who knows me would ever think I’d go. Where are your parents? Are they okay? Will you please stop trying to get away from me?”
Mattie grabbed one of the bleachers’ supporting struts and tried with all of her strength to pull herself free of Phillip. “Our parents are still frozen, thanks to you,” she grunted, “but we’ve hidden them somewhere safe. And no, I won’t stop trying to get away!”
Brewster knew a good idea when he saw one, and followed his sister’s lead, grabbing a strut himself and pulling in the opposite direction from Mattie.
Phillip stood between them, holding both of their arms as best he could, grimacing and straining as if he were being pulled apart by wild stallions.
Mattie hooked her arm around the strut and used her free arm to strike Phillip about the rib cage with her cane.
“Please,” he said, “Stop that! I didn’t freeze your parents!”
“Then who did?” Brewster asked.
For just a moment, they saw the forms of two people begin to appear. Then Brewster, Mattie, and Phillip teleported away.
* * *
Phillip continued to pull on both of the twins as hard as he could, but Brewster and Mattie no longer had struts to pull on for leverage, so they both fell into him from opposite directions before all three spun and tumbled to the floor.
“Them,” Phillip said. “They froze your parents. Must have done it after I left.”
Mattie and Brewster both winced as their eyes adjusted to much brighter and more plentiful light. The hot air smelled of dust.
Brewster looked at Phillip, opening his mouth to speak, but blinked in surprise, pointed behind Phillip, and asked, “What the hell?”
“Language,” Phillip said, but he also twisted around and looked. Behind a long chain of threadbare velvet ropes slung from peeling brass-plated stanchions, an ancient, open-topped Mercedes Benz sat on cracked tires. A beat-up old mannequin stood in the back seat, wearing a Nazi uniform, a toothbrush mustache hand-painted above its upper lip.
A hand-lettered sign said, “This Mercedes Benz staff car was,” then, in much smaller letters, continued, “possibly,” before concluding in huge, bright red letters, “used by Hitler!”
Brewster and Mattie looked around the room. Rusted farm implements, their wooden handles half rotted away, covered one entire wall, all labeled and displayed like prized artifacts. Along another wall, a hideously malformed wax dummy of a torturer wielding a metal poker, its tip painted bright red, loomed above an equally ill-proportioned wax replica of a young woman in a peasant blouse, strapped to a wooden table. A glass-topped display case dominated the center of the room, along with a garishly colored, hand-painted sign that read “What is ENIGMY?”
Phillip said, “This is a roadside tourist trap in Wyoming. Ghastly, isn’t it? They have the nerve to call it a museum.” He used his free right hand to lift himself to a crouch, in the process realizing that his right hand was only free because he’d let go of Mattie as they fell.
Mattie noticed as well, and immediately scrambled away from him in a sort of panicked crab walk, then sprang to her feet. Phillip lunged for her, his right arm extended to its limit, his hand grabbing at thin air. With his left he kept hold of Brewster, who hadn’t managed to quite get his feet under him, and stumbled along behind Phillip in an attempt to regain his balance.
Mattie swung at Phillip’s hand with her cane, walking backward, feeling her way with her left hand extended out behind her. She managed to keep Phillip just out of grabbing range, but she stumbled over velvet ropes and her cape, then ran backward into the side of the ancient Mercedes. She stepped up on the running board and clambered over the side, into the seating compartment.
Phillip said, “Look, get down from there. You’ll knock Hitler over.”
“You get back!” she shouted. She held up her cane like a batter waiting for a pitch. “Let go of my brother and tell us what’s going on!”
“I’m happy to explain! I want to explain! But I have to hold on to you both while I do it.”
Brewster finally managed to get his feet beneath him and started pulling away from Phillip as hard as he could. He grabbed at Phillip’s fingers, trying to pry them off his arm. “Why? Why not just let go and tell us?”
The forms of two people began to take shape. Phillip and Brewster disappeared. Mattie remained, standing in the antique car next to the Hitler mannequin. She watched as two men appeared. Both wore wizard hats and robes decorated with bits of black fur and plates of metal armor. Their hats had curved horns sprouting from their sides, like cartoon Viking helmets.
One of the men was smaller in every dimension, but well proportioned, with a handsome face despite the fact that his eyes were about an inch too close together. His eye distance affected his nose, which affected his mouth and cheeks, and in the end, the overall impression was that of a good-looking man whose face had been sharpened. He caught a brief glimpse of the forms of Phillip and Brewster as they teleported away and shouted, “Crap! Phillip took off again!”
The second man was physically unremarkable: larger than his friend, but not by much; out of shape, but not horrendously so; and gawky, but no so gawky as for it to become interesting at all. He had keen eyes, a ruddy, flushed complexion, and an excited grin on his face. He held a smartphone only a few inches from his face as if lessening the distance between himself and the screen would get the information it displayed into his brain faster.
“Yes, but he shan’t evade us for long. I swear he shan’t! We willll catch him. We willll catch the hell out of him! And then . . .”
The larger man’s impassioned speech lost steam when he saw his friend staring at him, unimpressed.
“Yeah, okay,” the larger man said. “Just give me one sec to see where he went, and I’ll plot the jump.”
Mattie, still standing in the back seat of the Mercedes Benz, looked down at the men and asked, “Who’re you?”
Both men jumped, then the smaller man replied, “Who’re you?”
Mattie asked, “What do you want with Phillip?”
“What do you want with Phillip?”
“I won’t answer any of your questions until you answer one of mine!”
