Billy: Messenger of Powers (32 page)

“Don’t worry,” murmured Vester. “As long as we’re all holding hands, I can extend my protection to all of you. For a little while, at least.”

Billy asked what “a little while” meant, but his words were not heard by the others, because at that moment Vester jumped, pulling Billy, Tempus, and Ivy with him in a human daisy chain, and Billy’s words were lost far above them.

Down they plunged, down to the abyss of fire that had already nearly claimed Billy for its own today.

And here I go, jumping in on purpose this time, thought Billy.

He closed his eyes involuntarily. Vester had assured him it would be all right, and Billy believed his friend intellectually, but it was hard for his
body
to believe it wasn’t about to be burned to a crisp. Billy felt his muscles clench involuntarily, and he bit his lip. He almost jerked his hand out of Vester’s in mid-flight, but realized at the same instant how disastrous that would be, so instead he held the young fireman’s hand even harder.

Billy and his friends hit, not with a splash, but with a thick wet burble. This, Billy had been told, was to be expected: after all, they were not jumping into a swimming pool, they were jumping into lava. But he was still surprised when he sank slowly into the lava, as though he was in quicksand, or had somehow fallen into the world’s biggest pudding cup. It was hot, but not as hot as it should have been, more like standing under the sun on a summer day.

The four friends, still holding tightly to one another, slowly sank below the lava. And Billy, being shortest, was the first to go under.

As the gooey stuff hit his chin, he looked at Vester with sudden panic. “Do I hold my breath?” he asked. He didn’t want to be a mummy. Or did you become a
burnt
mummy if you didn’t hold your breath while traveling by fire—Cresting, as Vester had called it?

Vester smiled. “You can if you want to, but it’s not a requirement.”

“So I won’t become a—blurble,” said Billy. He said “blurble” because before he could finish his sentence, he sunk below the surface of the lava.

Afterward, if Billy had had to describe what happened to him, the best he could have done would be to say that he kept
hearing
the color red, and kept
seeing
what marshmallows smelled like when being toasted in a campfire. His insides turned out and his outsides turned in. He felt as though he was suddenly everywhere and nowhere at once, just as he imagined an enormous fire would feel: so huge it could devour a forest, yet at the same time so ghostly it couldn’t be touched.

Billy felt himself become thin, thinner, thinner. So thin that soon he was only a single chain of atoms long enough to wrap around the world twice. But at the same time he was still aware of who he was, and that Vester was holding his hand.

The red sound grew louder, and suddenly Billy could see a blue pinpoint of light. The blue light grew, then multiplied into several lights, then those several blue lights became even more. They looked somehow familiar to Billy. But before he could figure out what they were, he suddenly found himself standing on solid ground again.

He was in a dark place. What little light there was came from the machine behind him. Billy could hear it whispering its ever-present drone in the background. It was a gas heater. The blue lights that Billy had seen were the brightly burning gas jets that heated the air that would warm the huge building they were in.

Vester, Ivy, and Tempus were there, too.

“Wow,” said Ivy. “I’d forgotten what that was like.”

Vester grinned at her, then smiled even wider at Billy. “How’d you like Cresting?” he asked.

“Great,” said Billy. “It was perfect.” And he meant it. Only the ride atop the Unicorn had even come close to what he’d just felt.

“Well,” said Tempus, “I would hold off on calling it perfect until you have ridden the Winds. Cresting magma and then being thinned out like taffy and delivered through a gas jet is not my idea of ‘perfect,’ and that’s a fact.”

“Everyone likes different things,” said Ivy, obviously trying to forestall another argument between the Red Power and the Gray.

Billy looked around. He didn’t recognize where they were. He looked at Vester. “I thought you said you could get us there,” he said.

“I did,” replied the fireman. He stepped to a nearby door and opened it. “But I had to take us through a fire source, and the best one was in the gas jets in the heater in the main heating and air conditioning room.”

Billy followed him through the door and quickly saw that Vester had been as good as his word. They were exactly where Billy thought they needed to go.

They were at Preston Hills High School.

He looked up and down the halls. No one was visible.

“Follow me,” he hissed, and ran as fast as he could down the hall.

“Why are we here?” asked Ivy.

“I think this is what Mrs. Russet meant,” said Billy, huffing with the effort of his run. “She said to go where I’m empty when I should be full. When all this started, when Mrs. Russet first took me to Powers Island, it was from here. It was right after lunch. I didn’t eat much. Someone knocked over my lunch tray.” He deliberately didn’t mention that
he
had been the one to knock over the tray in a crazy attempt to call attention to the bullying Cameron Black had been involved in. That wasn’t something he wanted to get into with these people who had somehow been deluded into thinking he was worth spending time with.

“So we’re going to the cafeteria?” asked Ivy.

“Do they have those delicious ice cream sandwiches?” asked Tempus. “Or maybe even,” he managed to lick his lips as he ran, “some yummy Salisbury steak?”

“No,” said Billy.

“No Salisbury steak?” moaned Tempus.

“They have Salisbury steak here some days,” Billy reassured his friend. “But we’re not going to the cafeteria.”

“Then where?” asked Vester.

Before Billy could answer, he stopped running as suddenly as if he’d slammed headfirst into a concrete wall. Just around the corner, he could see Harold Crane and Sarah Brookham, Cameron’s assistants in the Torture Brigade. It wasn’t that Billy was afraid they were going to stick him in a locker—he thought that was highly unlikely, given his present company. But they
would
see who he was with.

Billy glanced at his friends. Vester looked more or less normal. But Tempus, ablaze in the full-blown vomitous glory of his moving Hawaiian shirt and his pink too-short shorts, was sure to draw attention. Not to mention the young/old Ivy, with her wreathe of writhing plant life serving as her primary clothing. And it wasn’t even that they were going to draw attention. But Billy had enough trouble in his life without having it get around that he was part of some strange carnival sideshow.

He backpedaled and motioned for the others to follow him, hoping that he could find an alternate route around the two bullies. Then his stomach lurched as he heard Harold’s voice.

“Hey, nimwad.” Billy wasn’t facing him, but he knew that Harold was addressing him. Slowly, Billy turned back. Sure enough, Harold and Sarah were both looking at him and his friends. Both appeared on the verge of hysterical laughter; the two Torture Brigaders had clearly determined in an instant that these were grown-ups of a sort that they could get away with treating like they treated other kids: meanly.

“Finally running away to join the circus, eh?” asked Harold.

“Yeah,” said Sarah. “Finally running away, huh?”

“I can see it now, Bumbling Billy and…uh….” Harold’s voice drifted off. The bully clearly couldn’t think of a good insult. This was no surprise, since Cameron had always been the brains of the group. And Sarah made Harold look like a NASA scientist in comparison. In fact, Billy was pretty sure that if the two pooled their brain cells, they would have almost mind power to win a tic-tac-toe match against a carrot. Almost.

Having thought of no way to finish his insult, Harold just sneered at Billy’s friends. “So doofuses of a feather flock with each other, huh?”

“Yeah,” said Sarah. Her jaws were, as always, engaged in an intense battle with a stick of chewing gum.

Billy didn’t know how to get around this situation. But matters were taken out of his hands by Tempus, who stepped forward and stuck out his hand. “Friends of Billy’s, I presume,” he said with a smile.

Billy’s eyes rolled in their sockets. Wonderful. As he had suspected, there was always a little farther down to go in the social pit that he was constantly digging for himself.

Harold looked at Tempus’s hand like it was a crab’s claw covered in snot. Then he laughed. “Dooooofuses!” he said in a sing-song voice. Sarah laughed too, her beady little eyes perspiring with the effort of keeping up with Harold’s comparatively witty banter.

“Doofus?” asked Tempus. “I must have been on Powers Island too long this time,” he murmured. He looked at Billy. “Is doofus a good thing?”

“No,” muttered Billy. “It’s not.”

Vester was gritting his teeth. The fireman started to move forward, but before he could, Tempus held out a hand and stopped him. “No, my friend, I think I can deal with this.” He looked back at Harold. “I take it, since there are no other students in the hall, that class is now in session.”

Harold took a moment to process that. “Yeah,” he said. “What about it?”

“Well, why aren’t you in class?” asked Tempus.

“Hah!” Sarah Brookham said. She almost lost her gum in the explosion of breath that passed for her laughter.

“I see,” replied Tempus gravely, as though she had just quoted a lengthy scene from one of Shakespeare’s more difficult plays. “I used to know some people like you two,” he said. “Didn’t like to learn, didn’t want other people to be happy. No brains at all, just like you two.”

“Hey!” said both Harold and Sarah at once. “Who says we got no brains?” continued Harold.

“Well, perhaps you do,” conceded Tempus. “But you don’t deserve them. So you know what I’m going to do?” He leaned in close to Harold and Sarah, and suddenly a strong wind whipped through the hall. “Since you don’t deserve your brains, I think I’m going to blow your brains
out
.”

And with that, he clapped his hands. A miniature storm erupted right over Harold and Sarah, complete with thunderclouds and rain. A fierce wind flung the two delinquents into the nearest wall, where they were pinned there by the mini-hurricane Tempus had conjured up, while Billy and his friends stood dry and happy only five feet away.

Within seconds, Harold and Sarah were wetter than any student they had ever dunked in a toilet. Both of them were crying, pleading,
begging
Tempus to stop whatever it was he was doing.

Billy thought it was, quite possibly, the most wonderfully delicious thing he had ever experienced in his entire life.

Tempus just smiled. He clapped his hands again, and the rain clouds disappeared. Now, a stinging Arctic wind blew against the two bullies. Billy could see them grow cold and blue, their clothing drying instantly in the gale winds. Billy thought he could see tiny icicles form in the bullies’ clothes, and a few small ones hanging out of Harold’s nose.

Another clap of Tempus’s hands, and the wind stopped. Billy had a moment to notice—and relish—the fact that Tempus’s wind had somehow dried Harold and Sarah completely, with one exception: both of them had large wet spots on their legs that made it look an awful lot like they had just wet their pants.