The Power (The Magnificent 12 4)

The gole— er, Destroyer had to think about that for a minute. What was he doing? Well, he was being the Destroyer. He was scaring all the people out of town. “Chkaring peepill?”

He said it as a question. Somehow Camaro understood. (But then she always had understood him, hadn’t she? Even when no one else did.)

“Scaring people? That’s your answer? You’re scaring people? Why?”

The Destroyer’s thought process was not exactly swift. After all, he was the Destroyer, not the Jeopardy Contestant. He patted his chest with one massive fist. “I m er Geshtroer.”

“You’re the Destroyer?” Camaro rolled her eyes. “Why, because that dye-job redhead said so? Destroyer, please.”

The Destroyer was feeling anxious. He needed to destroy. He needed to scare people. It was who he was, after all. It’s what he was.

Camaro must have sensed this, for she said, “You need to destroy something? Is that it? Will you be happy if you have something to destroy? Well, there are people in all these houses. And we don’t want to hurt people, do we?”

The Destroyer had to think about that for a while. Camaro lost patience waiting for him, sighed, and said, “Look, I have something you can destroy that’s totally empty because it’s Saturday. And it may make some people unhappy, but it will make a whole lot of kids happy.”

This sounded okay to the Destroyer, who, frankly, was just weary from all the thinking. So he followed Camaro meekly, contenting himself with kicking over the occasional trash can as they made their way several blocks to a building that, quite honestly, was pretty old and run-down and should have been replaced long ago.

And that’s how Richard Gere Middle School39 came to be utterly destroyed as the children of Sedona watched and cheered.

Twenty-one

They made the Pale Queen’s forces pay a price. That they did. For a long, desperate mile, the Magnificent Eight plus Stefan fought.

Other forces joined the fight, but were helpless. The air force again bombed the column of evil, but with no effect. A second Coast Guard cutter arrived and shelled the column and also had no effect.

Two helicopters with San Francisco police SWAT teams showed up. The black-helmeted, heavily armed officers stood with the Magnificent Eight and fired steadily at the advancing horde. The bullets took a toll and, along with Charlie’s speargun, slowed the advance, but not by much, and the SWAT team was running low on ammunition.

The police officer in charge, Captain Molly O’Neill, identified Mack as the leader and said, “What can we do to stop those things?”

“You can’t,” Mack said.

“All right then, what can you do to stop them?”

“We need more time to get our strength back,” Mack said. “As you can see, we’ve made a hole we can shoot through, but we don’t have the power to kill the whole force field.”

“I’ve seen you online, kid: you can do plenty.”

“This is different,” Mack said. “She is fighting us. The Pale Queen. Her magic is in that barrier. Her determination is in all these evil creatures. We push, she pushes back.”

“You telling me all is lost?” Captain O’Neill demanded.

Mack shot a glance at his friends. They had taken turns firing the speargun. In between they had grabbed up rocks and thrown them. Stefan had become very good at grabbing spears in midair and throwing them back, sometimes hitting his target. Jarrah was beside him the whole time.

“We’re short four people,” Mack said. “With twelve, we have a chance. With eight, all we do is lose slowly instead of quickly.”

“So where are the other four?”

“Maybe in the city. Maybe not. Listen, you want to help? Put out the word through your forces, through TV, radio, everything, so that everyone in the city hears it. We’re looking for some twelve-year-olds who may have just popped into the city unexpectedly. They might be a bit lost and disoriented. Find them. Get them to . . .” Mack looked back at the city, now much closer than before since they had retreated. The causeway was very close to passing beneath the Golden Gate Bridge. “To the bridge.”

“The bridge?”

Mack locked eyes with Dietmar, who nodded.

“The bridge, Captain O’Neill. We’ll make our stand on the Golden Gate Bridge.”

The police officer nodded, squared her shoulders, and began speaking into her radio.

Xiao took Mack’s arm. “I must go.”