Fenzy (19 page)
David stood, hugging his arm to his chest. “What do we do?”
“Wait here?” Xander suggested, rising.
A man’s voice boomed at them: “Over here!”
Both boys ducked. “Who’s that?” David said.
“He’s speaking English,” Xander said. “Maybe it’s a search party.”
“Not for us. We just got here. Probably drug runners or wild animal poachers. If they find us, we’re dead.”
“You don’t know that,” Xander said.
Someone whistled, and the sound of people moving through the jungle grew louder.
“Do you want to hang around and find out?” David said, barely audible.
“Come on.” Staying low, Xander ran, moving away from the voice.
Twenty feet in, another voice cried out: “Ready! Ready!”
“We’re surrounded,” Xander said.
Through big billowing plants and the shadows they made, David saw rays of sunlight. He pointed and headed for them. They reached an area where the foliage became nothing more than fat green plants growing low to the ground—a glade. David squatted beside a tree, and Xander knelt beside him. Across the glade, the heavy forest started again.
“We should—“
“Shhh!” Xander said.
Off to the left, on the other side of the glade, a man stepped into the sunlight. He was dressed in camouflage army fatigues, with a utility belt of pouches and gear strapped around his waist. He carried a machine gun—an M-16 like the miniature version with which David used to arm his G.I. Joes. The guy was big and bald and looked like he ate nails for breakfast. Behind him, in the darkness of the forest, the silhouettes of more men moved around.
“Oh, crumb,” Xander said. “I bet we’re in Viet Nam.”
“That guy looks like a U.S. soldier,” David said.
“I don’t think it matters,” Xander said. “Those guys are in the jungle, and people are trying to kill them. They’ll shoot at anything.”
“I’d rather take my chances with them,” David said, scan-ning behind them, “than whatever we might run into on our own. Come on.” He stood and stepped away from the trees.
“David!” Xander said, quiet but firm. David felt him grab at his shirt. Then Xander rose up next to him.
David raised his arms and was about to yell, when the soldier started shooting—
screaming
and shooting, as though he were insane.
David yelled and covered his head with his arms.
The soldier threw down his M-16, stooped, and came up with a weapon that made the back of David’s neck tingle in fear. It was a massive Gatlin gun. A belt of bullets hung from it like the tail of a dragon. The soldier continued screaming and let loose with the Gatlin.
The jungle disintegrated. The weapon was so fierce, firing so many bullets so fast, it cut trees in half and sent leaves and branches flying into the air.
The soldier aimed left of the boys and began panning toward them. The ripping chaos that tore apart the forest like a hori-zontal tornado approached them. Covering their heads, David and Xander ran the other direction through the low plants.
Behind David, Xander yelled, “Stop! Stop! We’re Americans!”—over and over.
Other soldiers sprang from the trees to join the first. They started firing as well. One of their weapons made a sound like a cherry bomb in a metal trash can—
THUMP!
—and the forest behind the boys erupted in a fiery explosion.
A wave of heat washed over David. He realized he’d never make it to the trees on the far side of the glade. Even if he did, trees were no protection against the soldiers’ onslaught. He stopped and tossed up his arms. He closed his eyes and opened his mouth to beg for mercy, but all that came out was a long, anguished wail: “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!”
He heard a similar sound coming from Xander and real-ized his brother had frozen in place beside him.
He opened one eye. The soldiers were simply standing and staring. Their guns were lowered, but behind David, the for-est continued to disintegrate with the sound of thousands of firecrackers. David was completely baffled. The destruction must have come from somewhere else, not the soldiers. And if so, why were they just standing there?
Then a booming voice came roaring across the glade: “Cut! Cut! Cut!”
From this new spot in the glade, he could now see an open-ing in the forest that wasn’t part of the glade. Within this opening were a dozen or more people—and two cameras. Big movie-type cameras.
The firecrackers behind David stopped.
The booming voice said, “Who are those kids? What’s going on here?”
A half dozen people came running from the opening, through the glade, toward David and Xander.
David lowered his arms. He said, “Xander, what’s going on?”
When his brother didn’t answer, he turned to see him gap-ing at the soldiers.
“Xander?”
“That’s . . . that’s . . .”
One of the soldiers stepped forward and threw up his hand at them. He yelled, “Watt’r you dune dare? You ruin da take!”
Heavy accent. David recognized it and the man himself.
“Arnold Schwarzenegger,” Xander said, hushed by awe. He looked around at the jungle, at the crew around the cameras, the people running toward them. “David, we’re on a movie set.
Predator
! We’re on the set of the first
Predator
movie!”
S
ATURDAY
, 11:57
A. M
.
Ed and Toria had looked in each antechamber until he found one whose items appeared somewhat safe—though he knew you couldn’t judge the worlds by the items that led to them. He remembered when David and Xander had looked for a “safe” world for David to check out the first time. They had thought the absence of weapons—unless you counted a machete— meant it would be less dangerous than Xander’s gladiator experience. But the boy had been stalked by three hungry tigers and attacked by warriors—he had come back with an arrow-nick in his shoulder.
Still, Ed wasn’t about to teach Toria about looking through portals in a room full of guns, knives, grenades, or any other weapons. That would be too much like ignoring a
Beware of
Dog
sign. Entering a yard without such a sign didn’t mean a nasty animal
wasn’t
waiting for them, but it improved the odds against it.
So now they stood in an antechamber whose theme seemed to indicate that it opened onto a circus world: floppy shoes, which Ed wore; a red clown nose, hanging around his neck; a tube of white greasepaint, stuffed in his pocket.
“Okay,” he told Toria, who stood on the bench beside the closed portal door. “First, you have to brace yourself like this.” He showed her the way Keal had instructed the boys to put their hands and feet. “The most important thing is to keep your eyes open for anyone on the other side who sees you. If you even think that
maybe
they do, slam the door fast. Understand?”
“Slam the door fast,” she repeated. “But even if they can’t see us, we can see them, right? So we can look for Mom?”
“Right,” he said. “You never know where the portal will be. It could be up high, looking down, or level with everything. Sometimes there’s nothing to see, just landscape. Usually it drifts around, so you can see the world from different angles. Sometimes it’s blurry, and other times clear as a TV show.”
“Why is it always different?”
“I don’t know.” He thought about it, about all the ways each portal was different. “Maybe it’s like the weather . . . a lot of things deciding how it’s going to be at any given time.”
Toria nodded as though she understood, but he wasn’t sure she did. Heck, he wasn’t sure
he
did.
“Step back a little,” he said as he turned the knob and pulled the door open. Daylight flooded in, the odor of car exhaust. Colors swirled, then came together into recognizable forms: a car parked at the curb of a busy city street. They were looking at its front bumper, as though from the gutter twenty feet in front of it. An expanse of sidewalk stretched from the car to a glass-fronted building with a revolving door. People walked past, heading away from Ed and Toria. Others walked toward them.
“I can see them!” Toria said. Then, quieter: “But even if Mom’s in that world, we’re not going to see her—a whole city of people?”
Ed nodded. “That’s what I thought when I did this as a kid, looking for your nana: like throwing a dart at a map and hit-ting the very place she was. But my father explained that there’s a connection between the portals and the time traveler. They’re sort of drawn to each other. I know that’s confusing . . .”
“I get it,” she said. “It’s like the portal is looking for her too, and knows more about where she is than we do.”
“You got your mother’s smarts,” he said.
A muffled sound came through the portal, like a baby cry-ing:
waaa-waaa-waaa-waaa
, but too consistent to be human. A glass door beside the revolving door opened, and two clowns stumbled out onto the sidewalk. They held pistols and were firing back into the building. The glass door shattered. Pedestrians scattered. A clown fell, losing a cloth bag, which opened, spilling dollar bills onto the sidewalk, into the wind. The car door opened, and the clowns jumped in. The car leaped forward, heading directly into the portal.
Ed swung the door closed. As he did, two dollar bills flut-tered in on a breeze that smelled like the burning rubber of tires. He spun and slammed his back against the door, expect-ing the car to come crashing through. When it didn’t, he let out a breath.
Toria stared at him with eyes so big they looked like cue balls dotted with blue paint.
“See?” he said. “You never know.”
“They were robbing a bank!” she said. “
Clowns
!”
“I never did like clowns.” He sat on the bench to catch his breath. “Too creepy.”
She jumped down and pulled the big floppy shoes off his feet. She set them on the bench and sat beside him. “Hope Mom wasn’t anywhere near
that
,” she said.
“Maybe she was one of the clowns,” Ed said.
Toria gasped, and he grinned at her. She punched him in the arm and said, “That’s not very nice to say. Mom would
never
!”
A wind blew in under the door, and the cue-ball eyes returned to her face.
He pulled her close. “That’s normal,” he said. “Remember? Watch . . . “ He pointed at the dollar bills on the floor. They flipped into the air, swirled around the room, and whipped away under the door with the wind.
“
Coooool
,” Toria said. She sniffed. “Even that bad smell’s gone.”
He pulled the rubber nose over his head, reached up behind him, and hung it from a hook. He was digging for the tube of greasepaint when she hopped up.
She spun and bounced up and down. “Let’s do another one!”
The first of the movie people reached them, a squat man with a flaming red face and bulging eyes. “What have you done?” he screamed. “My pyrotechnics! My jungle destruction! It’ll take days to set it up again! What have you done?” He stumbled into the jungle behind them, picking up branches and wires.
Two men with fire extinguishers rushed past and began spraying foam at the many little fires burning within the path of destruction.
A man holding a clipboard stomped up and grabbed David’s shoulder hard enough to almost knock him off his feet.
Xander knocked the man’s hand away. “Hey!” Xander said. “Don’t touch!”
The guy turned on Xander. “Who are you?” he growled. “Where’d you come from?” He spotted the hammer and snatched it out of Xander’s hand. “Are you with one of the
set crew
?” He spun around and held up the hammer. “Who do these kids belong to?” he yelled.
Xander reached up and grabbed it back.
“Gimme that!” the man said.
Xander put it behind his back.
The man jabbed a finger at Xander’s face. “I
am
going to find out who you belong to! And when I do, they’re not going to find a job wiping a go-fer’s nose.”
David laughed.
“You think that’s funny?” the man said. “Wait’ll I—“
A woman in her twenties, dressed for a safari, came up behind him. She touched his shoulder. “It’s all right, Mark,” she said. “I’ll take care of this.”
“All right? Do you have any idea—?”
She turned him away from the boys and gave him a little push toward the cameras. “Go,” she said.
He stormed off, casting evil glances back at the boys.
David smiled at Xander. “Wipe a gopher’s nose?”
“That’s a guy who gets things for people,” Xander said. “Go for this, go for that. Go-fer. He meant whoever we belong to won’t even get the worst job there is in the movie business.”
“Good luck with that,” David said. He was so relieved not to be cut in half by crazed soldiers, he didn’t care how mad everyone was at them.
The woman flashed them a smiled and raised her eyebrows. She was pretty, David thought, and he liked that she was actu-ally smiling.