Cloak (YA Fantasy) (13 page)

“Very funny, Bambi.” Rizz eyed Manning in the rearview mirror, then looked at Will. “Hey, kid, you know how deer are supposed to be sweet and docile? Don’t believe it.”

As they drove on, Will felt like he was being tossed on a giant ocean of grass. The truck kept lifting and falling while bouncing erratically. The motion and the pungent smell of cheese were about to cause Will to lose what little lunch he’d eaten when the truck came to an abrupt hault. They were stopped at a T in the road under a rusted old stop sign full of shotgun holes.

Across the intersection, a faded green board read “Warm Springs” with an arrow to the left and “Dry Creek” with an arrow to the right. Straight ahead, a dirt track was blocked by a sagging barbed wire gate over a cattle guard. “No Trespassing” was hand-painted on a peeling piece of plywood that hung on the gate at a clumsy angle. Next to the fence, a cowboy was restringing strands of barbed wire while his horse grazed on sagebrush. The dairy truck idled for a long time. Strange, since no cars were visible for miles in any direction.

“Um, what are we waiting for?” Will asked, wondering if Rizz might be lost.

“That.” Rizz pointed at the hand-painted sign that had changed to read, “All Clear, Please Proceed.” The cowboy and the horse came to crisp attention. As the milk truck rolled up to the gate, the sign flashed, “Stop.” The cowboy approached the driver’s window and tipped his hat. “Identification, please.”

Everyone reached for their IDs. The cowboy pulled out an old Bic lighter and held it up to each passport license. Instead of a flame, the lighter produced a red laser that swept the card, then beeped and flashed a green light. The cowboy leaned through the window and matched IDs with faces. He looked human—leathery and tan with a sweat-stained hat pulled tight over his ears and a reddish mustache. Will wondered if he was another mosquito until the cowboy saw Kaya in the passenger seat and gave her a smile, showing off a mouth full of sharp, pointed teeth with protruding canines.

“Have a nice evening.” He tipped his hat again and nodded to the horse enchant, who pressed a wad of dried gum on the fence post, causing the gate to slide to one side. In front of them was a gnarled mud track that looked more rut than road. The hand-painted sign flickered, then read, “Proceed.”

“Hold on.” Rizz punched the gas. The truck bucked and launched dairy products into the air.

Will was thrown off his cheese seat and across the floor. The rest of the team sat perfectly balanced, swaying with the truck’s erratic motion.

“Interesting, isn’t it, Wilhelm?” Dr. Noctua helped Will up. “The road helps discourage curious Neps.”

“I bet it works.” Will grabbed a wall and stared at the muddy track that was becoming harder to see in the fading light.

“There’s a lot of this kind of camouflage around New Wik,” blurted Rizz. “You want to talk about hidden? I think Flores’s people must have designed the city.”

Agent Flores pursed his lips in his mirror. “I assure you that
my people
had nothing to do with the cheap parlor tricks used to conceal New Wik.
Es una traviesa.
If we’d been in charge, you wouldn’t even know it was there.”

Rizz shook his head. “Geez Flores, it was a joke. You know, ha ha?”

“Next time I suggest humor. I’ve heard it makes jokes funny,” Flores said with a dry sneer.

Rizz narrowed his eyes at the chameleon enchant.

“New Wik? Is that where we’re going?” asked Will.

“Not quite, kid. Our destination is a lot more secure, but I’m sure you’re gonna like it.” Rizz hit the gas, bouncing the milk truck around a bend in the road.

Will sat transfixed by the darkening landscape zooming past his round window. The plains looked broken. Fissures split the land and the entire earth was riddled with holes. Will pressed his face to the glass. Hundreds of rodents stood on their hind legs. Prairie dogs. He remembered the name from a travel guide to Yellowstone.

Will watched the alert little creatures standing at attention like a miniature army until a bright orange glow filled his vision. He’d seen plenty of sunsets from his window in the bubble, but never anything like what now consumed the horizon.

The sky looked like it was on fire. Violent oranges and reds changed into burning purple as the sun melted into the hills. After a few minutes of unbelievable beauty, the spectacle was over and nothing but a warm strip of pale yellow remained above the blackened horizon.

Will took a deep breath. The past twenty-four hours had been full of drama—exciting, but exhausting at the same time. Despite the clatter of the milk bottles, he closed his eyes and drifted off.

“There it is, Wilhelm.” Dr. Noctua, who had spent most of the journey napping and groggy, was bursting with energy as he shook Will out of his semi-consciousness. Outside Will’s window, the prairie had disappeared behind a haze of night. Will couldn’t see a thing. They were traveling without headlights, but Rizz was taking the corners just as fast as before.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” hooted Noctua, clicking his beak next to Will’s ear.

Even with the full moon, Will could only see lumpy, dark blue shapes against a background of darker blue. He strained to pull more detail out of the surroundings, but it was no use.

“I don’t see anything,” he mumbled.

There was silence. Dr. Noctua spoke. “Oh dear. I assumed you would have no trouble seeing through its protective Cloak.”

“No, I mean I can’t see anything. It’s dark. All I see is black.”

There was another beat of quiet. Then a snorting guffaw from Rizz filled the milk truck. “I guess you’re not the only one who’s learning something new, kid. Not one of us thought to ask you if you can see in the dark. Because you can see through cloak, I guess we all assumed that you can see at night. Oops.”

“Rizz, it’s not funny,” Kaya chastised. “Val, can you help Will with the…”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m getting them right now.” Agent Manning was next to Will’s elbow. “Here you go, Tuttle, try these.”

Something was pressed into Will’s hand—a pair of glasses. He opened them and slipped them on. Instantly, the world was so bright he had to squint. It was like someone had turned on a floodlight in the middle of the night, but the colors were much different. Everything glowed blue and green and purple—surreal, like an electric painting. Around him, the team shone with a warm, pinkish luminescence.

“Hey kid, welcome to the party,” said Rizz, his teeth shining in the rearview mirror. He wore a pair of glasses identical to Will’s. He tapped the lens. “Guess not all of us have Kaya’s night eyes. Frankly, I think she was just trying to pick on you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Kaya gave Rizz a sideways glare. “How are we supposed to know he can’t see if he doesn’t say anything?”

When Kaya looked at Will, his insides flipped. Her eyes glowed turquoise in the night vision.

Noctua pressed his beak close to Will’s face, looking into one lens then the other. “Why don’t you take a moment to get used to the luminary glasses. I’ve heard they can be quite disorienting at first.”

Will blinked and looked around. Manning was also wearing night glasses. Noctua, Kaya, and Flores didn’t need them. Owl, cat, and chameleon—it made sense.

Will looked outside. They were traveling on the edge of a high plateau.

The sweeping valley below was ringed with a wall of purple mountains. A dense black forest dominated the south, and a vast mirrored lake covered the north. But neither compared to the enormous pyramid of lights that towered between them. Will squinted and rubbed his eyes. Windows? It couldn’t be. “What is that?”

“That’s our destination, kid,” said Rizz from the driver’s seat. “St. Grimm’s Hospital, your new home away from home.”

13

St. Grimm’s

“A
nother hospital?” Will sagged in his seat. He had traveled all this way just to end up where he always ended up.

“I think you’ll find St. Grimm’s is no ordinary hospital.” Dr. Noctua pointed at the gleaming pyramid.

Will leaned close to the window. Thousands of glowing windows were embedded in the side of a craggy mountain. There was no building, just a towering peak with windows. He took off his night glasses to rub his eyes, but as he did the world disappeared into total blackness. He put his glasses back on. The glowing lights reappeared.

“The light in the windows is on a lower wavelength than you can see without your glasses,” the doctor said.

“But I can’t see the building either.”

“That’s because there isn’t one. Well, there is, but it looks like a mountain— enchant engineering at its best. Only the windows and doors need Cloak protection, everything else blends in. The entire hospital
is
the mountain.”

“The whole mountain?”

The stone peak came to a point like a gigantic anthill. Towers of rock surrounded the main mountain like castle turrets. Will craned his neck to see the highest windows. They had to be a hundred stories high.

Rizz approached the base of one of the towers at a reckless speed. Tree branches raked the windows and scrub brush grabbed at the tires. “Hold on,” he announced, pounding the gas as the Moo Valley truck pitched forward.

Will looked out the windshield just in time to see the road disappear into a gaping cave that hadn’t been there moments earlier. The truck was airborne before gravity intervened. All four tires landed at once on the cave’s downward sloping road. Stalagmites lined the floor. Rizz had to weave through them like pylons on an obstacle course. The truck banked high up the wall, nearly clipping one of the stalactites clinging to the ceiling.

The tunnel narrowed. It was a dead end. Rizz jerked the wheel to the right, then to the left. The truck whipped around and squeezed through a hidden gap in the stone.

There was light ahead.

Will stared up at an enormous, lit cavern.

A feathery hand rested on his shoulder. “Welcome to St. Grimm’s, Wilhelm.”

It reminded Will of the vast chamber at the heart of Grand Central Station, only this space was a hundred times larger. Rows of odd-looking pick-ups, horse trailers, and other bizarre forms of rural transportation were parked in neat lines among the stalagmites. Ahead of them, ten-story pillars were carved from a wall of red stone. The milk truck stopped in front of a thirty-foot oak door pressed into the solid rock. Will stepped out. He gaped up at the bus-sized stalactites high overhead and the pillars as wide as a house.

On the far side of the cavern, a hay truck flashed ambulance lights and squealed into the brightly lit emergency bay. A mob of white coats flowed toward the truck and opened the doors that were disguised as hay bales. From the fake hay, a stretcher the size of a station wagon was removed while its occupant mooed in pain. Someone barked orders. The mass of enchant doctors and nurses hauled the stretcher inside.

“Looks like Labor and Delivery will have their hands full tonight,” mused Dr. Noctua, cleaning his spectacles on his sleeve. “Come, Wilhelm. Let’s get you inside.” The doctor led Will by the elbow toward the massive doors. An ornate scroll was carved above the entrance. Etched into it were the words, “Saint Grimm’s Hospital, Unity is the Truest Cure.”

“Dr. Noctua! Oh, thank goodness you’re back. I really must speak to you about the orderly staff and their practical jokes. This time they filled my office with rolls of toilet paper just because I gave them all double shifts.”

The pinched voice belonged to a short, incredibly fat man who had just emerged from the door. He limped to Dr. Noctua’s side, whining like a tattling child. The bulbous enchant was so caught up in simpering that he didn’t notice Will.

“Dr. Thaddeus Bump. I’d like you to meet Wilhelm Tuttle. Dr. Bump is the Hospital’s Chief Administrator. Mr. Tuttle will be my personal guest, Thaddeus.”

Will remembered to hold his hand out for the obligatory tap. It was then that he noticed that Dr. Bump had four arms.

A beetle?

One of Dr. Bump’s arms hung limp at his side. His small head was misshapen. A prosthetic mask covered half of his pitted face and a bad comb-over of chunky black hair with a green shimmer attempted to hide his scarred, dented skull. His tiny, watery eyes were set far apart and sunken, twitching nervously from face to face. The beetle enchant had a hole for a nose and a crooked slit on his chin for a mouth. Two stubby antennae sprouted between his strands of hair and swiveled like worms toward Will’s face.

“Oh, yes. Welcome, Mr. Tuttle.” Dr. Bump sniffed and looked at Will as though he had something gross hanging from his face. He twitched his antenna and squinted. “Welcome indeed. Any friend of Dr. Noctua’s is a friend of mine.”

Dr. Bump wore a pinstriped suit and gold watches on two of his stumpy wrists. His cologne was overpowering, probably to cover his pungent breath. “Come right this way, Mr. Tuttle. Arrangements for your stay have already been made. I imagine you’d like some rest.” Dr. Bump placed a hard hand on Will’s back and pushed him toward the gigantic doors.

With a low groan, the door swung open.

The colossal lobby would have shamed the most elegant hotels in Manhattan. The wide circular floor was smooth marble with raised veins of red stone crisscrossing through it like the roots of an enormous, petrified tree. Fifty-foot columns surrounded the hall. The walls and columns were covered in exotic foliage and climbing ivy, giving the spacious chamber an ancient, tropical feel. Atop each column was a different type of enchant statue. A tiger, a reptile, an insect, an eagle, a rabbit, a fish, and a ram all faced a statue of two men wearing suits with small round collars. In one man’s hand was a book with several more under his foot. The other man brandished a quill pen and a sheath of paper. Beneath the statue, a wide marble plaque read: