The Vexed Generation, page 26
Gwen said, “That is a bummer. It makes everything seem more grim. Kinda autumnal, like I should be drinking something flavored with pumpkin spice. But there are still live plants in the world, just none in London, where, I hate to break it to you, there weren’t that many live plants to begin with. And we can create all the produce the city needs with magic, so it’s not a real problem.”
“Yeah,” Magnus Galka yelled. “Then let’s try the next plague. Head lice!”
All of the wizards and the entire population of the city groaned in unison.
“Yeah!” Magnus Galka said. “That’s right, you’ve all got head lice! You’re gonna have to shave your heads, or use the tiny comb, which is a pain! And you’ve gotta burn all your hats! It’s gonna suck! People from all the other cities will know, and talk about you behind your backs!”
Martin said, “Gwen, my head itches.”
“Mine does, too, Martin. Mine does, too.”
Sergio said, “Hey, Gary, we should swap hats.”
“Why?” Gary asked.
“Because this is the one time in our lives we’ll be able to without worrying about catching lice.”
The entire populace looked up at Magnus Galka as he laughed with glee, shouting, “And your pillows! You’ll have to get rid of them, too! Ha! You’ll have to get used to new pillows, and you won’t sleep right for days!”
29.
Beside Magnus Galka, Magnus Rex looked down at the city, his mouth a straight line, eyes half open. Phillip flew up close to the giant faces, but on Magnus Rex’s opposite side, almost whispering in his ear, and completely out of Magnus Galka’s field of view.
“Hey, Magnus. How are you?”
“Me? I’m great.”
“You don’t look it. I mean, you’re gigantic, and made of clouds and light. You look amazing, but you don’t look like you feel amazing.”
Magnus Galka shouted, “And now that you’ve gotten to know your new scalp pets, we’ll move on to the next plague. I’ve been looking forward to this one. Zombies!”
From far below them, Tyler’s amplified voice said, “Oh my God! Do you have no imagination? Zombies? They’ve been done to death, literally, several times over. They’re so tired that most people are over being over them!”
“You shouldn’t let on that you’re so smart, Tyler,” Magnus Galka said, giggling. “The zombies will come for your brains first.”
Phillip scratched his head, then saw what he was doing, and silently cursed all head lice. “Magnus, you’re not happy with all of this, are you?”
Magnus Rex looked down at the city, glanced at Magnus Galka, then looked back at Phillip and shook his head.
“Yeah, I thought so. I’m betting that you like the idea of being in charge, but this isn’t the way you would have chosen to go about it.”
Magnus Galka bellowed, “Yes! Run! Run from the zombies, and scratch your heads while you do it, but be careful! You’ll want to watch out for the next plague. I promise none of you saw this one coming! Snipers!”
In the city below, gunshots rang out.
Martin said, “That’s pointless. We’re bulletproof.”
A shot rang out, and Martin shouted, “Ow!”
Magnus Galka laughed so hard he seemed to have trouble breathing.
Phillip said, “You know, Magnus, Martin’s my best friend. And we usually want the same things, but a lot of the time, he goes off half-cocked in the wrong direction. He does things I don’t think are right, but it’s hard to make him stop because we’re working toward the same goal. I’m betting you know how that feels.”
Magnus Rex smiled.
Phillip smiled back, scratching his head.
Far below them, Martin shouted, “Your snipers are useless, you know. We aren’t going to let them kill anybody. We can stop bullets.”
“Yes,” Magnus Galka said. “But can you stop piranhas? Yes! The next plague is an infestation of piranhas!”
“And what are they going to infest?” Tyler asked. “The river of rock?”
“It’s water now,” Magnus Galka blurted. “Water full of piranhas!”
“You know, piranhas don’t actually eat animals down to skeletons all at once.”
“Natural ones don’t. But I made these piranhas, so they do!”
Tyler said, “Well, hell. Bad news everyone. In addition to the zombies and the snipers, now you can’t go swimming.”
Magnus Rex asked, “Phillip, what do you do when Martin gets out of hand?”
Phillip shrugged. “You have to assert yourself. Sometimes our friends need guidance. Other times they need someone to shut them down fully. It’s not fun, but if you don’t act, things only get worse, and really, does a friend allow a friend to make a fool of himself?”
“Yes!” Magnus Galka nearly screamed. “The river’s full of piranhas! And the next plague is that the land will be covered with piranhas! Land piranhas!”
“What?” Tyler asked. “So they flop around like mudskippers?”
“No! They’ve got legs! An unending wave of piranhas with crab legs!”
As the people of London began seeing the onslaught of land piranhas, a wave of screams rose from the city, punctuated with intermittent sniper fire.
“Yeah,” Magnus Galka said. “Tell me that’s not a nightmare!”
Tyler said, “Okay, I must admit, that is a heck of a visual. I’m impressed with this one.”
“Thanks, Tyler,” Magnus Galka said. “That means a lot. And it’s not even the best part!”
Phillip paused his scratching long enough to shake his head at Magnus Rex. “At the end of the day, it’s up to you to decide how far down the wrong path you’re willing to let your friend go.”
Phillip and Magnus Rex looked at the city below. Most of the populace had hunkered down indoors. Only a few were left on the street, fleeing from the zombies and the land piranhas. The airspace above the city teemed with wizards, flying in every direction, many using time travel to make several passes across the city simultaneously, making twenty wizards feel like many more, putting bullet- and piranha-proof force fields around every civilian they could find. The groups huddled indoors would get one force field to cover them all. The stragglers running around outside got their own personal bubble of protection until they could join a group.
Gwen said, “I think that’s everyone.”
Martin said. “Yeah, I agree, but we should keep an eye out for anyone we missed. You hear that, Magnus? We’ve got a shield around everyone! Your zombies, your snipers, and your land piranhas can’t get them.”
A gunshot rang out.
Martin shouted, “Ow!”
“That’s right, Martin,” Magnus Galka said. “Keep your head out in the open. Maybe, if you’re lucky, our snipers will shoot your lice off. If you’re so certain that you’ve got every single person in the city protected, then you shouldn’t mind if I unleash the next plague.”
A dark cloud descended on the city, warping and transforming, parts of it growing darker and other parts lighter as the flapping shapes that comprised it changed direction and speed.
Magnus Galka shouted, “Brace yourselves for the sky piranhas!”
The flock descended on the city, attempting to swarm the wizards, who quickly created force fields of their own.
Tyler said, “Okay, you see, any respect I gave you for the piranhas with crab legs is shot now. Piranhas with bat wings? Way to jump the shark.”
Gary said, “Shut up, Tyler. You’ll give him ideas. He’s not above attacking us with jumping sharks.”
“You’re right, Phillip,” Magnus Rex said. “Magnus has made a mess of this. I need to step in.”
Phillip said, “Actually, we seem to have things pretty much under control, but throwing your support behind us would probably make him see the light.”
“No, Phillip.” The giant image of Magnus Rex’s face turned toward the rendering of Magnus Galka. “I have to take action. We’ve wasted enough time and effort.”
Magnus Galka whipped his head around to face Magnus Rex, moving so quickly that the clouds making up his image couldn’t keep up, causing his face to become a blurred smear for a second.
“What? What did you say? Phillip, what did you do?”
“I talked to your friend, helped him see the situation more clearly.”
“Yes,” Magnus Rex said. “That’s exactly what he did, and I think it’s time I took over, Magnus.”
Martin and Tyler laughed. Jeff let out a long appreciative whistle. Gwen said, “Nice.”
Magnus Galka’s eyes darted from Magnus Rex to Phillip, to the city and the wizards below. “Look,” he said, “Magnus. Don’t, uh, don’t do anything rash. You say Phillip talked to you. Cool.”
All at once, the zombies disappeared, the gunfire stopped, and all of the varieties of piranhas faded out of existence. The ice walls that still surrounded the city and the frost on the buildings melted quickly into water. All of the people let out a simultaneous groan of relief and stopped scratching their heads.
Magnus Galka said, “Let’s all talk. Okay? He can explain things to me, too.”
“No,” Magnus Rex said. “The time for that has passed. Talking isn’t going to change anything now. You’re done. I’m taking charge. I am the chairman, not you. It’s time I acted like it.”
Phillip looked down at the city below and said, “I think you we can remove the force fields now.”
“No!” Magnus Galka shouted. “Phillip, don’t! You keep those shields up! I was trying to prevent—”
Magnus Rex growled, and his face twisted in exertion. Because they were only faces etched in the clouds, the others couldn’t see any of their actions below the neck, but Magnus Galka’s features contorted in alarm, then appeared to be shoved before finally going slack, with his eyes closed and his mouth hanging open, letting a round shaft of sunlight through.
Magnus Rex’s face turned back to face Phillip, the wizards, and the city below. “Sorry we wasted so much of everybody’s time. It was all Magnus’s fault. I mean, we agreed that I should be in charge, but this whole stupid plan of using the system you all put in place to take control so you’d have to admit my legitimate right to rule, that was all him.
“And his attack on this city,” Magnus Rex said, his face growing larger as he spoke, dwarfing Magnus Galka’s still unconscious form. “Camelot, London, whatever we were calling it. A complete disaster, wouldn’t you agree, Phillip?”
“Yes?” Phillip flew backward, dropping toward the ground as Magnus Rex’s mouth grew ever larger in front of him.
“Yes. Magnus thought you were going to love this. He thought that if we made the punishment spectacular enough, we could make people fear us without actually killing anyone. He thought everyone would see we were serious and get with the program. He even had me believing it. So stupid right? Phillip, I said, right?’”
“Yeah. Right.”
“But nobody was going to see that we were serious. Because we weren’t, or at least he wasn’t. He wanted to be treated like a badass, but still be a nice guy. It doesn’t work that way. If you want to be treated like a badass, your ass needs to be bad. If you want people to think you’re a killer, you have to kill. If you want people to tell stories about how you destroyed a city and killed everyone in it, you’ve got to destroy the city, kill the people, and do it in a way that’s interesting enough for people to want to talk about it, but simple enough for a child to understand.”
All at once, as if they’d always just been waiting for their cue, every brick, every beam, every cobblestone, stick, nail, or other object made of any material harder than burlap in the entire city rose up several yards into the air. It all hung there in space for a moment, the people of London looking up at it as all the city’s soft goods, all the thatching straw, fabric, paper, and rope that had been in their homes fell to the ground around them.
The floating material gathered together into clumps the size of cars, making loud cracking and crunching noises as they collided. The amorphous chunks of stone and wood spun in the air for a moment, then began slamming down in unison, like the fists of a toddler throwing a temper tantrum, beating out a steady rhythm that shook the ground and crushed whatever was beneath them.
The repeated impacts did as much damage to the pounding shapes as they did to the things being pounded. Each time the clumps rose from a strike, the individual pieces of wood, brick, and stone that made them up were smaller. Tiny pieces of rubble and dust fell, creating a thick cloud that hid the ground and anything on it from view. The pounding masses rose from the cloud like synchronized swimmers, paused a moment, then plunged downward again, mashing some of the particulate matter into the ground, but adding more to the air as they rose, damaged by their own attack. The clumps grew smaller and the pounding less severe with each beat. Soon, the thunderous shock waves diminished to a sound more like a large group of soldiers marching, and the clumps of stone shrunk to the size of softballs, then baseballs, then tennis balls, and finally marbles before they disappeared completely.
The cloud of stone dust hung in the air for a moment, and then all of the granules and particles making up the cloud fell to the ground at once, as if some unseen hand pushed them down.
When the air cleared, the wizards saw that what had been a city was now pulverized and covered with a uniform layer of finely ground stone, pressed so firmly into the ground as to, essentially, become a paved slab. The only features left on the barren plain of gray stone were thousands of people—the entire population of London. They had spent the entire onslaught cowering beneath magically generated force fields. Now they all stood, bewildered, on small islands of whatever floor or paving surface they had been standing on before the attack.
Magnus Rex looked down from the clouds. “Aw, you didn’t lower the force fields? Who’s keeping them up?”
The wizards, all hovering in the air above the barren, gray, plain of the former city, looked up at him and either shrugged, shook their heads, or looked around to give the impression that they were searching for whomever it was.
Magnus Rex sucked on his teeth. “I don’t actually care who’s making the force fields. Lower them. Now.”
The wizards stopped pretending to look for the culprit, but the shields remained up.
Magnus Rex said, “I am your chairman. Now do as I say, and lower the force fields.”
The wizards did nothing.
Magnus Rex said, “Phillip, tell them to lower the force fields.”
Phillip laughed. “Why do you think they’d listen to me? You’re the chairman.”
The wizards all laughed.
Phillip laughed with them for a brief moment, then turned and said, “Okay, gang, that’s enough. We don’t need to rub it in.”
The wizards regained their composure.
Magnus Rex, on the other hand, looked as if his gigantic cloudy head might explode.
“Phillip,” he whispered, though at the level his voice was magnified, everyone could still hear him. “Surely you can see why I need these people dead. I don’t want to kill them, but I’ve drawn a line here. They have to die to demonstrate what happens to anyone who defies me.”
“But Magnus, you’ve already succeeded.”
“Really?”
“Yes! The fact that they’re all still alive, and that the wizards, your subjects, ostensibly, are laughing at you demonstrates with crystal-clear accuracy exactly what consequences await anyone who defies you.”
“Look! I won that election fair and square, and I deserve just as much respect—”
“One second, please. Hold that thought. I have a call.” Phillip held up his left hand and stared at it.
Magnus Rex said, “You’re putting me off to answer a call?”
“No,” Phillip said. “To make one. Komuniki kun Jeff.”
A floating image of Jeff’s head appeared in Phillip’s hand.
“Hey, Phillip.”
“Hello, Jeff.”
“Roy and I almost have a fix on where the Magnuses really are. Should only take another twenty minutes or so, we think.”
“Glad to hear it. When you do come up with a location, please come back to this moment in time. Okay?”
The image of Jeff’s head in Phillip’s hand disappeared, and Jeff and Roy both materialized, floating in the air beside Phillip.
Jeff said, “Sure thing, Phillip.”
Magnus Rex asked, “You sent them to track us down? When did you do that?”
“I didn’t send them to do it. I just knew them well enough to be certain they would. As soon as the other Magnus made that comment about our weapons only working when we know where the people we want to attack actually are, it was kinda inevitable that Jeff and Roy would go try to figure out your location. So, where are the Magnuses hiding, guys?”
Jeff looked Phillip in the eye, said, “We don’t know,” then bugged his eyes out and looked over Phillip’s left shoulder.
Phillip said, “What? You don’t know? You traveled back in time to tell us that you haven’t found them yet?”
“Not that we haven’t found them yet. That we can’t find them at all. We’ve looked at their place in Norway and everywhere else we can think of. We have no idea”—Jeff bugged his eyes out and glanced deliberately over Phillip’s shoulder—“where they are hiding.”
“Well, I’m disappointed.”
Jeff narrowed his eyes at Phillip. “Yeah, so am I.”
Roy let out a string of painful-sounding violent coughs. When they were done, he rasped, “Gonna go get a lozenge. Be right back,” and disappeared.
The instant he vanished, all of the assembled wizards heard Roy’s disembodied voice ringing in their ears. “I guess I’m going to have to dust off the old battle comm macro to get our point across without Magnus hearing us. We did find the Magnuses. They’re here. They’re hiding in a store-bought duck blind in the middle of a field about half a mile from here, at Phillip’s seven o’clock.”
The wizards all turned to look over Phillip’s left shoulder.
Roy shouted, “Don’t look!”
The wizards all looked up at the sky or down at the ground.
