Underworlds #2: When Monsters Escape (3 page)

“S
OMEONE’S COMING
!” I
WHISPERED
. “L
OTS OF SOMEONES
!”

Syd covered her nose and mouth. “Oh! The smell —”

The huge room filled with the stench of decay as an army of creatures entered the plant. I almost choked. They were large, bearded men, their eyes hollow and black. Their pale skin — what there was of it — was sagging off of steely white bones. Animal
skins draped their shoulders, and bits and pieces of rusty gray armor covered their chests.

They stomped and scraped and dragged themselves in, printing the floor with what looked like melting snow. There must have been a hundred of them.

As if they weren’t scary enough, they carried big broadswords of rusty iron.

“They’re … dead!” whispered Jon.

“Draugs,” Dana muttered, her fingers flipping the pages of her book. “My parents told me legends about them. I never believed they really existed.”

“Who — or
what
— are Draugs?” asked Sydney.

“Draugs are ‘death walkers,’” Dana said. “Dead Viking warriors who come back, like ghosts. After they die, their souls live on in their old dead form. Draugs are strong. Angry. Evil. And they can’t really die.”

“Perfect,” Jon groaned.

“Look, another rune,” I said, squinting at the Draugs. “The head dead guy has one. They’re all under Loki’s power.”

Behind the Draugs were several dead horses, also armored. The horses stopped at the pile of armor cooling on the floor. They pawed at the stones with their black hooves.

“They’re here for the armor,” said Sydney. “But where are they going to take it?”

I almost didn’t want to know.

The Draugs didn’t speak a word to the Cyclopes, who merely stepped back to watch the dead men fill the coal car with silver armor. The Vikings then hitched the horses to the coal car. One Draug uttered a sharp word, and with a terrible shriek, the horses moved and the car began to roll along the tracks toward the passage.

“Do you think the dead guys are taking the armor to Loki right now?” whispered Jon. “Is he that close to us? Oh, man. This is bad.”

As we stood in the shadows, hiding from the Cyclopes and watching a bunch of dead Vikings take indestructible armor to an evil creep, my brain started whirring. It was telling me I was a coward if I didn’t do something. This was the same part of my
brain that got me involved in every club and cause at school. It’s what made me go after Dana when she was in the Underworld.

I turned to my friends. “Look, guys, we can’t walk away from this. We can’t
not
do something.”

Jon narrowed his eyes at me. “What are you saying?”

“Exactly what you think I’m saying,” I said. “If we really are in the middle of a war, and it’s in our world, and we have a chance to do something about it, we have to try. No one else is here. It’s only us.”

“But we have to capture the Cyclopes for Dana to stay with us,” said Sydney, glancing at Dana. “We might miss our chance if we follow these stinky dead people.”

“We can do both,” said Dana, “with the runes.”

Jon turned to her. “Now what are
you
saying?”

“If we can steal the runes from the giants,” Dana said, “maybe we can find a way to shape-shift and follow the Draugs. The Cyclopes can’t get out of the power plant without the runes, so we don’t have to worry about that. Between Sydney’s cell phone and
my notes, we can probably find a way to make the runes work for us.”

Jon shook his head. As I watched the Draugs march out of the room, I wasn’t sure, either. Dana’s idea seemed awfully risky.

“The giants may be a little light in the brain department,” I said, “but look at them. How can we steal something from around their necks? They’re huge. We’re just a bunch of nobodies.”

Sydney drew in a short breath. “Great idea, Owen.” She tapped her forehead. “It’s all in Dana’s book. The famous story of Odysseus escaping the Cyclopes by blinding them and saying that Nobody did it.”

Jon winced. “Blinding them?”

“Odysseus did it for real,” Sydney said. “But we can do it with smoke. We push them back near that walkway, snatch the runes from around their necks, and follow the Draugs. But to make it all happen, Owen, we need a little musical accompaniment….”

After she explained it, I had to admit that Sydney’s idea was a good one.

Step One: Use the lyre to force smoke into the
Cyclopes’ eyes. Step Two: With the smoke as a shield, climb the stairs to the walkway near the ceiling. Step Three: Snatch the runes from around the necks of the giants (keeping them trapped in the power plant). Step Four: Use the runes to make us look like Draugs.

Okay, maybe those last two steps were as hazy as the smoke, but we didn’t have time to overthink it. “Time for earplugs,” I whispered. “Here goes nothing —”

I plucked the lyre, tentatively at first, feeling that familiar rush of dizziness. Then I found the notes I needed.

I played them over and over until—
whoosh!
— thick smoke collected inside the forge and poured out the open door into the room. Slowing and then speeding up the melody, I made the smoke rise directly into the giants’ faces.

“Hey!” growled Baldy, as black haze billowed up at him like smoke from a barbeque.

The hairy Cyclops grunted. “What’s happening?”

Both of them began coughing and wheezing. Trying
desperately to get out of the smoke, they backed away from the furnace and moved toward the walkway.

Sydney grinned. “Perfect. Now for Step Two.”

While she and Dana searched the cell phone and the book for details about rune magic, Jon and I scrambled up the stairs as quickly as we could. I kept playing the lyre as I climbed, which wasn’t easy since my head was spinning and the old steps squealed and wobbled all the way up.

“Who’s there?” boomed the bald giant from inside the cloud of smoke.

“Nobody! I’m over here!” Dana yelled, drawing the giants back toward the walkway.

“Hah!” shouted the hairy Cyclops, grabbing at the air. “We’ll get you, Nobody!”

Jon and I made it to the top of the stairs and ran around the walkway as the two giants staggered back toward us. They — and their rune necklaces — were only a few feet away.

“Come on,” I whispered. “Come on. One more step …”

I still didn’t have a clear idea of how we would get
the runes from around the giants’ monster-size necks, but I didn’t have to.

“Cover me,” said Jon.

“Cover you?” I repeated.

Before I could stop him, Jon climbed over the walkway railing, leaped three feet across open air, and latched on to the hairy Cyclops’s neck.

The hairy giant lurched and grabbed at his throat frantically, trying to remove Jon’s hands. The bald Cyclops couldn’t see, but flailed away with his fists, striking the wall next to me. I dodged the bricks falling onto the walkway. Jon clung to the rune necklace and screamed at the top of his lungs. Sydney and Dana dived away from the crashing bricks. I nearly fell to my death.

Then it really got crazy.

W
HILE
I
HELD ON TO THE SHAKY WALKWAY, THE
shaggy giant clawed at his neck like he couldn’t breathe. Jon clung to the rune as if it was a life preserver. The bald Cyclops stumbled away from the walkway, his face still wrapped in smoke. Dana hurled bricks at his knees while Sydney shoveled hot coals onto his feet.

“Ahhh! No! I’ll get you!” he boomed.

“The name is Nobody!” Syd yelled back. “Don’t forget it!”

“Owen —” Jon screamed as he spun around and around the giant’s fat neck.

I slammed the lyre with my palm, and the hairy Cyclops bellowed in pain, arching back into the wall next to me. I grabbed the necklace with both hands and pulled.

SNAP!
The necklace broke, sending sparks of electricity everywhere, and Jon fell back into me. The hairy giant howled, “My stone! Nobody stole my stone!” He wheeled angrily toward the walkway.

Jon jumped to his feet. “What about the other rune? Don’t we need both?”

The bald Cyclops shielded his neck and backed away.

“We’ll have to make it work with one,” I said. “Now … run!”

Flang! Flang!
I tweaked out a solo as Jon and I raced down the squeaky stairs. “I hear Nobody!” the hairy giant yelled. “Stop, Nobody!”

But we were on the ground, running as fast as our legs could carry us.

“Into the passage,” said Dana. She sprinted into the darkness like an Olympic runner. After all, she had the most to lose if we failed. We rushed after her into a passage that was strangely cold. The floor was slippery, almost icy.

“This is weird,” said Dana, sliding to a stop. “Why is it so icy? It’s almost like …” She paused. “The Draugs came in with snowy boots. Did anyone see that?”

“I did,” I said.

“What about it?” Sydney asked.

Dana shook her head. “I don’t know yet. We’d better keep going or we’ll lose the Draugs.”

“This stone tingles,” said Jon, hurrying behind me with the rune stone at arm’s length. “And not in a good way. It feels weird.”

I thought about the odd sensation I felt when I played the lyre. Maybe that was the thing about magic — you paid a price for using it.

Sydney edged forward in the icy passage and
stopped at a turn. “There they are,” she whispered. We joined her in time to see the distant caravan of dead men, horses, and silver armor up ahead. “Just before my cell lost its signal, I found something out,” she said. “It’s not good. Everything I’ve seen about runic shape-changing magic says that you need a piece of the thing you want to change into.”

“You mean something from a Draug?” said Dana, eyeing the forms ahead of us.

We all looked at one another, then at the disgusting dead men, then at one another again. No one moved.

“Seriously?” I muttered. “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”

Without thinking a whole lot, I sped quietly down the icy passage. I crept up behind the last dead Viking. The stench was almost overpowering. Holding my breath, I reached out … and the Draug stopped and turned.

I flattened myself to the freezing cold ground just in time. The Viking swiveled his head back up the passage and peered into the gloom. That was my
chance. I plucked a single thread from a rag dangling from his rotten boot. After what seemed like an eternity, the Draug turned back and caught up with the other dead guys. I stayed motionless on the ground for a minute before I slunk back to my friends. “Something like this?” I said, holding up the thread and finally letting out my breath.

“Exactly like that,” said Sydney. Then she grinned. “By the way, you’re elected to do all the gross stuff from now on.”

I didn’t laugh. I also didn’t like the idea of transforming into a Draug. But there wasn’t time to think it through. Between Syd’s dying cell phone and Dana’s scribbled notes, we came up with a few words that might make it happen. We all grabbed hold of the Draug thread and chanted strange runic names over and over. The rune stone turned from stony gray to silver.

And our appearance began to change.

We grew larger, wider, our faces oozed facial hair — even the girls’ — and our clothes turned gray and frayed. In moments, we resembled the dead Viking
warriors, all bones and rotten skin, from our dented helmets to our rag-booted feet. We didn’t feel dead. We just looked like it.

“How do I look?” asked Jon.

“Pretty dead to me,” I said. “How about me?”

“If you weren’t my best friend, I’d be scared,” he said.

Dana gave a wry grin. “Then let’s mingle with the dead guys.”

We moved as fast as we could to the end of the passage, and into the next one and the next, frantically trying to come up with a plan. The best we could do was based on something Dana found in her notes. Loki’s armor might be indestructible only if all of it was there. So we just had to snatch a piece of the armor and take off before anyone noticed. Somehow.

How hard could that be?

I knew we would find out really soon.

My brain was screaming in my skull by the time we got to the end of the Draug force. Holding our breaths, we tried, slowly and casually, to make our way up through the ranks toward the coal car. But
we couldn’t get close enough. The troop of dead men crowded around the car, so we had to keep marching deeper and farther into the passages.

I can’t say how long we were trudging along, but it must have been miles. Finally the passage opened up, and we were suddenly outside, on a vast stretch of snow and ice.

I didn’t like it. Home seemed a thousand miles away. Maybe it was.

“Where
are
we?” Sydney whispered.

In the distance was a range of snow-streaked black mountains. Behind them I could see the flattened cone of a gigantic volcano.

“I don’t know,” Dana said softly, narrowing her eyes. “But it doesn’t look Greek. It looks very … Norse.”

My heart stuck in my throat. No way. No. A
second
Underworld?

A giant snowstorm whirled in the distance. The spinning snow roared like a jet engine, but as if it were nothing, the Draugs walked straight into the storm. So did the horses drawing the coal car.

And so did we.

The air was black and rushing inside the storm, but we didn’t blow away, and it didn’t last long. Beyond the spinning snow was a clearing in a stand of tall trees. It was shadowed and cold, but calm. The eye of the snowstorm.

In front of us stood a cluster of tree trunks that came to a point overhead. It was pitch-black beneath the arch, almost like we were looking into a cave. At its mouth stood a cauldron, boiling with dark blue liquid.

This wasn’t good.

The horses and Draugs stopped in the clearing. A moment or two later, a voice came from the darkness under the arch of trees.

The dead horses stopped pawing the icy ground.

Everything hushed.

“Have the giants-s-s done my bidding?” the voice hissed.

The Draugs next to us bowed. We did, too.

“And the armor is-s-s ready?”

It was Loki’s voice, no doubt about it.

“Then bring it,” Loki said. “Bring it to me … now!”