The Vexed Generation, page 25
“I also said we’re keeping a few classics as an homage. But it was the second-to-last plague in the Bible, and we’re starting with it! It’s just our jumping-off point! Eh? That can’t be good, can it? Ha!”
The cloud cover grew thicker, bringing the ambient light level down from the dusky gray it had been to the full pitch-black of a moonless, starless night. The only illumination came from the persistent lightning bolt streaming into the castle, and Sid’s mammoth neon sign on the roof.
Magnus Galka let out an irritated grunt, and the lightning bolt disappeared. For a moment, the world went pitch-dark, until a fresh bolt of lightning shot down from the heavens, striking the neon sign, illuminating it briefly while destroying it.
Again, the world went dark and quiet, except for concerned murmuring from the people huddling in the city below.
A lone point of light appeared, a glow emanating from the head of Phillip’s staff, then from the ends of the other wizards’ staffs and wands. Even Gilbert’s and Sid’s white-tipped walking sticks began to glow.
Martin looked down. “I was about to suggest that we go down and help the citizens, but they seem to be getting along fine without us.”
Below them, the wizards could see flickering points of yellow light—torches and lanterns coming out of buildings where there presumably had been cooking fires, forges, or candles. As the torches and lanterns moved out among the crowd, the city began to look much as it did on an average evening.
“Your first plague seems to have fizzled, Magnus,” Phillip said. “You didn’t really think it through. I mean, you are menacing the populace with a problem they already face every night.”
“Yeah,” Magnus Galka said, “but this night will last for weeks!”
“If your—” Phillip stopped himself and winked theatrically. “Sorry, Magnus Rex’s reign lasts weeks. Just to be sure you know, I was winking when I said that. I don’t know if you could see, what with all this dark you’ve made.”
Magnus Galka spat, “Oh, you think you’re so smart.”
“Smart enough not to try to attack people with what is literally the first problem humanity ever defeated through technology. Our first invention took care of this!”
Gary said, “What, the wheel?”
“No, Gary, the wheel isn’t our first invention. Think about it. We’d have to invent the chisel to make the first wheel. No, our first invention was the cooking fire.”
“Not clubs?” Roy asked.
“Okay,” Phillip allowed. “Maybe our first invention was the club. I give you that.”
“Silence,” Magnus Galka shouted. “We’re gonna hit you with our second plague, and it won’t be anything you can defeat with torches! Behold, the second plague of Magnus: fire!”
A hundred-foot wall of flames erupted from the forests and grasslands, surrounding the city in a perfect ring, like the burner on an immense gas stove. Waves of heat radiated inward. Everything within the circle was bathed in an ominous orange glow.
The Thames, which even in this early age flowed through the heart of the city, began to slow. Not just the speed of its flow, but the roiling motion of the surface seemed to congeal, growing more viscous. A yellow-orange light appeared deep beneath the surface—all of the water had transformed into magma.
For a moment, the buildings and people lining the riverbanks were lit eerily from beneath, as if God himself had put a flashlight under the world’s chin, but the effect was shattered immediately when every wooden bridge, dock, or boat touching the river burst into flames.
The wizards shot downward toward the city, a swarm of black specks silhouetted in a sea of orange light.
Sid said, “Well, then, so much for darkness, I suppose.”
Magnus Galka shouted, “We’re done with darkness. You can’t let yourself get hung up on your previous work.”
Sid shrugged as he and Gilbert headed down to help the citizens as well.
28.
All along the path of the river, two dozen wizards flew back and forth, unleashing torrents of water from their staffs and wands. All of the structures immediately adjacent to the river were, of course, beyond help, but it didn’t take long for the wizards to contain the damage, keeping the fire from spreading beyond the riverbank and into the city proper.
Instead of just relying on magic, Eddie used his organizational skills to help the people of London form a bucket brigade, so they could play a part in their own rescue.
“Good work, people,” Eddie shouted. “Hey, you! No, don’t fill your buckets from the river. It isn’t water anymore. It’s magma. No, that’s not an illusion. Get water from the well. Great! Now your bucket’s on fire! Put it down! No! Don’t pass it!”
Just as the wizards started to feel as if they were in full command of the situation, people in some of the higher windows and balconies began pointing away from the city and shouting.
Out at the flaming perimeter, within the wall of fire, Phillip could see the shadowy forms of great moving creatures—like people, only many times larger and with much longer, thicker arms, smaller legs, and a stooped-over gait where their arms carried much of the load. They stepped out of the wall, their bodies covered with loose, slow-moving orange flames. The creatures approached the outer edge of the city from all sides.
Phillip asked, “Are those . . . chimps?”
“That’s right!” Magnus Galka crowed. “Chimpanzees! Man’s closest relative, and one of the most surprisingly vicious predators in the animal kingdom. They go straight for the face and the genitals! And these chimps are gigantic and made of flaming rock!”
“So, are they a separate plague then?”
“No, they’re part of the fire plague. We thought it needed a little punching up.”
Phillip shouted, “Eddie, you’re in charge of keeping the magma from burning the city down. Take four or five guys to help you. Agreed?”
Eddie said, “Agreed,” and set about picking his team.
Phillip said, “Everyone else, use Martin’s giant macro to hold those things back! And you, uh, might want to protect your faces and genitals.”
Martin asked, “Do you really think the word might belonged in that sentence?”
The wizards flew out over the city in all directions, streaking past the outer protective wall, each one bursting into hundreds of glowing objects, the shape and color of which were a matter of personal preference. Martin chose silver boxes, like extremely expensive LEGO bricks. The glowing objects swirled around the wizards before reforming into oversized versions of the wizards that flew headlong into battle while the real wizards remained protected inside. When they landed, the giant wizards formed a defensive line of glowing behemoths standing between the giant firechimps and the city’s edge.
The firechimps lumbered toward the city in a contracting ring of flames. It only took a few steps before their shoulders began rubbing, so every other chimp slowed their pace, falling in behind the giant beside them. After a few more steps, they formed a two-chimps-deep ring of fire, and after a few more steps, they readjusted their pace again to form a three-deep ring.
The wizards pointed their immense glowing staffs and magic wands at the firechimps. Each unleashed an equally oversized torrent of water, driven at high enough pressure to cover the ever-shrinking gap between the two lines and hit the front row of firechimps full force. The firechimps tried to shield themselves with their arms, but the result was simply that their arms were extinguished before the rest of them. As the fire covering their bodies died away, the massive slabs of stone beneath were exposed and quickly crumbled away.
“Huh,” Martin said. “Okay, that seems effective. Putting the fires out makes the chimps fall apart, I guess.”
Gwen shook her head. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but then, we’re talking about giant flaming chimps. I don’t think making sense was foremost in the Magnuses’ minds.”
In short order, the front line of firechimps was reduced to screeching armless torsos stumbling forward on flaming legs. Then they dissolved away into smoldering rubble, which the second and third rows of firechimps climbed over before breaking into a run.
The wizards continued spraying water at the advancing line, and the firechimps took substantial damage, most of them falling into rubble at the wizards’ feet. The last line, however, reached the wizards unscathed and leaped over their fallen comrades to attack the wizards hand to hand.
Martin shot a focused stream of water at the approaching chimp, but it twisted in midair, pulling itself out of the path of the stream; then all Martin saw was a flaming hand coming straight for his face. He managed to jerk his glowing blue head out of the way in time to be grabbed by the shoulder. It wasn’t his real shoulder, of course—it was a glowing silver simulation of his shoulder, several times larger than the real thing, and as such, he felt no pain as the flaming claws sunk in. Still, the chimp shoved him with enough force to send him back to the ground. The stream of water coming from his staff shot straight up like a fountain jet in front of a casino, looking spectacular, but serving only as a distraction. He marveled for half a second at how pretty the droplets of water were, falling in what looked like slow motion, backlit by the flames surrounding him. Then he noticed the giant flaming claw coming down quickly toward his crotch.
Martin managed to roll clear, cutting it tightly enough to feel the splash as the firechimp’s weight slammed down in the mud. As Martin scrambled to his feet, he pointed his water spray at the chimp, but it turned sideways and evaded the torrent as it again dove at Martin. Soon, they were locked in a vicious embrace, grappling with one another. Martin wondered if the ground was wet enough to extinguish the firechimp. Fighting hand to hand seemed like a losing proposition. The chimp had longer arms and was stronger than he was. Also, the heat radiating from its body and its stubby little legs flailing away at Martin’s crotch, as if the chimp thought his genitals were a treadmill, caused no small amount of consternation.
Martin heard someone yell his name. He turned to see a giant green representation of Gwen, standing with her feet planted wide and her immense magic wand held like a dagger in her right hand, shooting a stream of water off into the distance. The smoking ruins of a firechimp were falling in large chunks around her as another closed in. The firechimp tried to grab her by the throat, but she pivoted slightly, grabbed it by the arm, and pulled it close and held it in place so that she was looking down over the giant chimp’s flaming shoulder. She turned her wand on the chimp, extinguishing its head and torso immediately. As they crumbled, the still-flaming limbs fell to the ground and went out on their own.
“Martin,” she shouted. “You’ve gotta fight them like John Wick!”
Instead of trying to squirm out of the firechimp’s grasp, Martin pulled it closer so that it couldn’t get away from him. Then he bent his wrist to turn his water flow at the chimp’s face, which immediately crumbled in his hand.
Martin turned to Gary and shouted, “Fight them like John Wick, pass it on!”
Gary shoved one of the chimps away and managed to wing it in the arm before it ran at him again. Gary jumped to the side as the firechimp ran past and managed to shoot it in the back, destroying it as another grabbed him around the neck from behind.
“What are you talking about?” Gary croaked.
Martin hosed the firechimp, which collapsed off Gary’s back. “It’s a movie. We watched it with the kids. Probably a mistake, but oh well. It just means you get them in a headlock or some other wrestling hold, then shoot them.”
“But the whole point of shooting things is to kill them at a distance.”
“Yeah, but if you do that, these things dodge like Neo in The Matrix. Huh! Keanu Reeves solved the problem Keanu Reeves caused. Everybody underestimates that guy.”
In the distance, somebody shouted, “Incoming!”
Martin, Gary, and Gwen looked up to see what looked like a meteor shower, only the meteors were much too close to the ground to still be burning, and all of them were converging on the city. Many wizards pointed their staffs skyward and threw up the largest, strongest force fields they could, covering London in an invisible protective dome several layers deep. All but two of the flaming rocks hit the shield and shattered into millions of flaming bits.
The first two meteors in the pack had been close enough to end up inside the shield, and both hit the golden castle, punching holes in its gleaming golden roof, then exploding as they impacted with the intricate gold inlaid floor. The entire structure disappeared in a fireball that rose into the sky, and would have formed a classic mushroom cloud had it not hit the underside of the wizards’ force field. The fireball flattened into a roof of flame covering the city, then cooled into a thick black haze of smoke and soot, contained in a perfect dome over the city. Meanwhile, on the outside of the shield, the burning remains of the meteors fell like hailstones, then bounced and rolled down the shield’s outer slope, collecting in a ring of glowing hot debris around the city, well inside the still-present hundred-foot-tall wall of flames.
Phillip shouted, “The twins!”
Gwen said, “Eh, they’re fine.”
“What?!”
“We can’t treat our kids like Ming vases, Phillip. They need to skin their knees occasionally.”
“Gwen, the castle blew up around them!”
“They’re invulnerable, like us. Besides, they weren’t in the castle anymore.”
“But that’s where we left them,” Phillip said.
“Which is how we know they weren’t in there,” Martin said. “They snuck out and are hiding somewhere by now. One of the final signs that a child has matured into an adult is that they learn the ability to stay put.” Martin turned and shouted, “Isn’t that right, kids?”
The distant, disembodied voices of the twins said, “Yeah,” in unison, and without enthusiasm.
The wizards removed the shield. A thick black cloud slowly lifted into the sky.
High above them, the faces of the Magnuses looked down, sunlight from above the cloud cover streaming in through their open eyes, nostrils, and Magnus Galka’s toothy grin.
“Now that the second plague of Magnus has softened you up,” Magnus Galka said, “we move on to the third plague, one even more hostile to life than fire. Quake in fear, one and all, at the third plague of Magnus! The plague of extreme, bitter cold!”
A frigid wind that instantly seemed to cut through the flesh and chill the bones of everyone it hit blew straight down on the city, then rolled outward in all directions. The roofs turned white instantly. All of the buildings that were on fire blew out, leaving behind charred remains covered with a layer of glistening frost, which itself thickened and hardened into a lumpy coating of crystal-clear ice.
The wave of cold blew out past the edge of the city, instantly cooling the ring of meteor debris gathered at the former boundary of the force field. The frost expanded, beyond the zone where the wizards were still grappling with the firechimps. The spray of water coming from the wizards’ staffs and wands became cascading showers of ice crystals, which would have also been effective for dousing the flames of the firechimps, had they still been burning. As the cold reached them, the firechimps extinguished and crumbled into dust, leaving most of the wizards standing alone in a fighting stance, their immense feet stuck in the frozen mud. A few had been pressing their weight down on a firechimp, and at least two had been held aloft by a chimp before the wind hit. All of these wizards fell to the frozen ground in a cloud of crumbled firechimp ash.
The hundred-foot wall of fire at the perimeter of the battleground sputtered and flickered out of existence like the flame of a birthday candle. An equally tall wall of ice grew in its place.
Martin looked up at the faces of the Magnuses etched in the clouds and asked, “Are all of your plagues going to pretty much undo the plague before it? I mean, first it was dark, then there was fire, now ice. What’s next? A rain of rock salt?”
Magnus Galka said, “No, I promise, that’s the last of the plagues that contrast with each other. The idea was to leave you confused and demoralized.”
“Well, you failed.”
“Did we? You’re standing ankle-deep in mud, whining and asking questions. That seems like being confused and demoralized to me. Whether you admit I’m right or not doesn’t matter. You’ve got seven plagues left, and from now on they stack.”
“And what’s this supposed to be?” Tyler shouted, hovering over the Thames, which had been a flowing river of magma, but now flowed even more slowly, and had turned a dull bluish gray.
Magnus Galka said, “I think it’s obvious. During the fire plague, the river was burning hot lava. Now that we’re in the ice plague it’s—”
“Do not,” Tyler interrupted, “say ice-cold lava! How many times do I have to have this conversation? I’ve told Gary. I’ve told Martin. I told Gary again. Twice. Now I’m telling you, cold lava is rock! Just rock! That’s all! Hot lava is melted rock. Cold lava is solid rock. The entire crust of the world is cold lava! It doesn’t freeze anything it touches, and it certainly doesn’t flow like that!”
Tyler flew down, just above the surface of the river, and knocked on the crust with his staff. He examined the head of the staff and saw it was covered with fresh ice. “I mean, a river of flowing gravel pulverizing anything in its path would be one thing, but this is just dumb! It betrays a complete lack of understanding of the science behind volcanoes.”
“Fine!” Magnus Galka shouted. “Okay! You don’t like the ice plague, we can just move on!” His eyes lowered as if he were reading an unseen computer monitor. “And I’ll tell you what, we’ll give you a couple more from the Bible, just to please you purists! Here, the plants are all dead! How do you like that?”
Martin looked down at the ground, and what grass hadn’t been burned, stomped into the mud, or covered with an opaque layer of frost turned brown and dropped limply to the earth. All of the trees in London dropped their foliage in one great clump, leaving behind bare trunks and branches.
