“One . . . two . . . three,” Xander said, wiggling each anchor point. His voice was crisp as a soldier’s. He obviously liked Keal’s militaristic approach.
“Good,” Keal said. “Step back.”
Xander backed away from the portal, and Keal said. “David, step up.”
“I saw,” David said. “One, two, three.”
“Get up here.”
David stepped close to the portal, trying not to see the boil-ing ash rushing into the buildings to find the people hiding in them. He slipped his arm out of the sling and positioned himself the way Keal had showed Xander.
“How’s the arm?” Keal said.
“Feels good,” David lied.
Keal turned a doubtful eye on him, and David was afraid Keal would punch his arm to see for himself just how it felt. But all Keal did was nod. He gripped David’s shoulder and pulled him back away from the portal. He shut the door on Pompeii’s destruction.
“So we’ll split up?” Xander said.
“Here’s how it’s going to go,” Keal said. “As you go into each antechamber, call out what the theme is.”
“I can’t always tell,” David said.
“Guess,” Keal told him. “Or say what the items are. Then, before you open the door, say, ‘Opening door.’ While you’re at the portal, if you don’t see your mother, call out, ‘Nothing’— every fifteen seconds. Understand?”
The boys agreed.
“When you close the door, say, ‘Door closed.’ Loud enough for all of us to hear. All these things, every time. Right?”
“Right!” Xander snapped, grinning.
David’s “Right” was quieter. He understood Xander’s enthusiasm. Not only did he get his way, searching the portals alone, but he was doing it Dad’s way as well: with caution and thoughtfulness. It was the kind of thing all of them had envi-sioned since setting up the MCC. The goal had always been to rescue Mom without someone else disappearing or getting seriously hurt. That meant doing it like a military operation, but their knowledge of the military came from movies like Black Hawk Down and Saving Private Ryan. Not quite the same, regardless of what Xander said. Leave it to Keal, former Army Ranger, to bring their plan together.
Even so, something bothered David. If he’d learned anything about the house, it was that nothing here was pre-dictable. It seemed to know what you believed about it and then did things completely differently. Strategy and discipline were no match for chaos and confusion.
“Okay,” Keal said, slapping his hands together. “You boys take the doors on this side of the hall. I’ll take the other.” He checked his watch. “Fifty-two minutes.”
Xander dropped the coin, necklace, and mallet on the bench, and the three of them left the antechamber. Keal crossed the hall, opened the door, and stepped inside. He called, “Something to do with trees, a forest.”
“If it’s a jungle,” David said, “watch out for tigers . . . and warriors with bows and arrows.” A chill slid down his spin like a drop of ice water. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Keal!”
Xander stopped at the next door on David’s side of the hallway, and Keal came out of the antechamber. David said, “Other people can see the portals. It’s not like we have magic eyes or something. And we can see into the antechamber from the other side.”
“Yeah, but people don’t always notice,” Xander said. “When you thought you saw Mom in the World War II world, people were rushing by and not even noticing you. We see it because we’re looking for it, and know what it looks like.”
“I think it looks like heat vapors to them,” David said. “Or something they don’t notice unless they’re looking right at it.”
“Even if they can see it and us,” Xander said, “so what?”
Keal answered. “So, they can send things through—at us. Remember that spear that followed you through from the Viking world?”
“It ended up in the antechamber, stuck in the hallway door,” David said.
“Until it got sucked back,” Xander added. “And the spear-head melted to go under the door.”
“Point is,” Keal said. “We can get killed just looking into a portal, without going through it.”
“What are you saying?” Xander said, his voice rising into a whine. “We can’t even look? How are we supposed to find Mom? Looking is still a lot safer than going through.”
Keal rubbed his chin, thinking. He said, “Extra caution. Watch for people who see you. Shut the door if they do.”
“Got it,” Xander said.
Keal returned to the forest-themed antechamber. David frowned at Xander, who said, “It is dangerous, Dae. All of this is. But it’s either face it or forget Mom.”
David nodded. “You’re right. I’m okay.”
Xander opened the door. Before he left, David said, “Xander . . . be careful.”
“You too.” A few seconds later, he was inside the small room, calling out, “Uh . . . an amusement park?”
David went to the next antechamber and went in. He looked at the items and let out a long breath. He yelled, “Knives and swords . . . a bloody shirt.”
CHAPTER
twenty-seven
FRIDAY, 5:08 P. M.
So far, David had seen a total of seven people in two worlds. The first four were a family enjoying a picnic in a grassy meadow. The mother wasn’t Mom, but the scene had made him miss her even more. A little girl had spotted him and pointed. He shut the door before the others turned.
Next, he had witnessed a duel. Two men stood back-to-back, flintlock pistols raised in front of them. Another man started counting, and the duelists walked away from each other. At ten they turned. One man fired immediately, a great plume of smoke coming from his weapon and drifting off. The other duelist took his time, aiming carefully, using both hands to steady the pistol. His target didn’t move, resigned to whatever happened. As David shut the door, a shot rang out.
Most of the portals opened onto pretty much nothing: an empty cobblestone street, a vast expanse of sand baking under a blinding sun, a beach, a woodsy area behind a log cabin.
He stepped into the hallway and saw Keal approaching another door. “You okay?” Keal said.
“Not seeing very many people,” David said.
“I got a few crowds,” Keal said.
“You do know what she looks like, don’t you?”
Keal grinned. “I’ve studied her pictures.”
David bet he had. He suspected Keal had been trained to identify faces. Keal had never said what he’d done in the Rangers, but David imagined him as a sniper. Those guys needed to recognize a target in a split second, probably by memorizing eye shape, nose type, jaw lines. Keal could prob-ably point out Mom in a crowd as quickly and surely as David could.
Keal raised his watch and called, “Eleven minutes!”
“Let’s get two more each!” Xander yelled.
Keal winked at David. “You heard the man.” He vanished into an antechamber.
David stopped at Xander’s open door. His brother was standing in front of the portal, hands and foot positioned as Keal had instructed. He had a stovepipe hat balanced on top of his shaggy hair, a white scarf draped over one shoulder.
“Nothing,” Xander yelled.
Listening for that word from Xander and Keal had become almost subconscious for David. He didn’t realize he was doing it, but between Opening door and Door closed, if one of them missed saying Nothing, David noticed. At first he’d thought it was stupid; now he saw that it was a great way to keep track of each other. If one of them accidentally went over, help was no more than fifteen or twenty seconds behind.
We may get this down after all, he thought. An organized rescue party. He liked that.
He went to the next door on the left and went in. He cringed at one of the items hanging on a hook: a shrunken head. Not much bigger than an apple, the face was perfectly preserved, if a bit distorted. Eyes closed. Pursed lips. Squashed nose. Long black hair came out of the scalp and looped
around the hook.
I hope that’s fake, he thought, but he knew better.
The other items were a stone knife, a coil of twine, a brace-let made of unidentifiable hairy objects, and a stained blanket. Leaning against the wall, rising up from the bench, was what appeared to be a long wooden drinking straw. So he could keep his hands free to brace himself, David chose the items he could shove into his pockets: knife, twine, and hairy bracelet, which felt the way it looked, prickly and a bit oily. He said, “Eeeww,” as Toria would say. Then: “Opening door!”
The portal swirled with greens and browns. A wet, woodsy fragrance drifted in, then the smell of burning wood. The swirling faded, first becoming mostly transparent, then disap-pearing altogether. The blurry landscape before him cleared, and he was looking through trees into a clearing. A half dozen men crouched around a raging fire. They were dressed in loincloths and necklaces with dangling sticklike things— Bones? David wondered. The bottom half of each man’s face was painted bright red. They seemed only to be talking to one another, but their appearance alone scared David spitless.
He saw more of the long drinking straws. A man held one, resting it on the ground like a king with his scepter. Another was lashed to a different man’s back. David suspected they were weapons, maybe bows. That made him think that these people were primitive warriors. If they were half as fierce as they looked, he felt sorry for whoever met them in battle.
Remembering the signal, he said, “Nothing.” It came out barely a whisper. He didn’t think sounds penetrated the por-tal from the antechamber. Xander had spoken to him when he’d gone into the jungle world—his first time over—but his brother’s lips had moved without any words reaching David’s ears. But he didn’t exactly want to take a chance.
I’d rather get a berserker’s attention, David thought. Well . . . maybe.
He turned to yell over his shoulder. “N—“
“Door closed!” Xander yelled.
David tried again: “Nothing!”
He turned back to the portal and jumped at a blur of movement directly in front of him. A warrior had leaped into view from the side, wild-eyed and screaming.
CHAPTER
twenty-eight
FRIDAY, 5:12 P. M.
The warrior’s high-pitched voice reached David as if through a pillow. He glared at David as though at the most hideous thing he had ever seen. His red-painted jaw snapped shut, and opened again, drawing David’s eye to a mouthful of tiny, pointed teeth.
Before David could leap away and slam the door, a hand shot through the portal and grabbed his right wrist.
“Aaaaahhhhh!” David screeched. He yanked on his arm, but the warrior’s hand was like a vise. The man’s skin was brown and leathery. His fingernails were black and sharp.
David’s hand slipped off the wall and went into the portal, pulled in by the crazy man. The muscles in his legs strained to keep him in the antechamber. He squeezed his fingers around the edge of the door, but his broken arm throbbed and felt ready to pull apart, mid-forearm. He had no strength in that arm, and his fingers began slipping off the door.
“Heeeeelp!”
On the other side of the portal, the warrior held David’s wrist in both hands, tugging. He twisted his shoulders and bounced up and down to pull David through. Beyond the man, past the trees, the other warriors had sprung up, pointing and shifting their heads to figure out what was happening. They started for him.
“David!” Xander yelled behind him. David felt his broth-er’s arms wrap around his torso. Xander heaved back, pulling David with him. His hand returned to the antechamber, encircled by the cannibal’s hands.
The warrior tugged, reclaiming David’s hand and wrist. Xander’s arms slipped higher, over David’s chest. The tug-of-war over David’s upper body caused his leg to slip out from under him. It swung forward like a pendulum—right through the portal.
The warrior released his grip on his wrist and seized hold of his ankle.
David’s leg went farther into the other world, and he could no long keep his foot pressed against the wall. His foot swiv-eled, slipped off the wall and through the portal. The man grabbed that leg as well. Now he had both of David’s ankles in his hands.
Both boys fell, Xander to the floor, David on top of him. David went farther into the portal. He looked down over his body and saw that everything below his waist was in the war-rior’s world. His blue-jeaned legs appeared a few degrees out of alignment with the rest of his body, and a little blurry, as though they were under the surface of a clear lake.
Beyond his knees and feet, the man’s eyes rolled insanely. His teeth flashed as his mouth opened and closed, opened and closed, like a snapping dog’s.
“I can’t help you like this!” Xander yelled from under him. He shifted and pushed himself out from under David, keeping one arm over David’s chest. He got to his knees at David’s shoulder and grabbed David’s arm—right at the break.
David let out a howl of pain.
Xander shifted his grip to David’s bicep.
Something sailed over David’s face and made a thunking sound in the wall behind him. He looked through the por-tal to see the other warriors in the forest now. One raised a wooden straw. He put one end to his mouth and pointed the other end at the brothers.
A blowgun!
“Xander!” David screamed. “They’re shooting at us!”
“What?” Xander said and looked.
As if by magic, a knitting-needle-sized dart appeared in Xander’s chest—up high by his shoulder. He cried out, but he did not release his hold on David’s arm. He gaped at the thing protruding from his chest.
“Xander!” David said. He felt his brother’s grip loosen.
“I . . . don’t feel . . . so good.” Xander fell forward, on top of David’s arm. But he was still moving. His hand found David’s chin and pushed. He was continuing his fight, trying to keep the man from taking David.
Two more warriors rushed up to the portal. Their arms came into the antechamber, grabbing for Xander. One of them got a grip on his hair and pulled. Xander slid toward the other world.
“No . . . !” David yelled.
A big foot stomped down next to him. Keal leaned over Xander, held the barrel of a pistol inches from the arm holding Xander’s hair, and fired. The sound sent clattering bells through David’s brain. And that was all right, for it had freed his brother. Keal pulled him into the middle of the antechamber.
The man holding David’s leg pulled. He went through— stopping only when he snagged his arm against the doorjamb. Everything below his chest was in the other world. The portal itself messed with his insides. His stomach rolled, seeming to tighten and loosen, fast as a hummingbird’s heart. He gagged, feeling the contents of his stomach start to come up.
A shocking, blinding flash of pain kept him from puking. He raised his head. The man was biting his leg. It dawned on him: these weren’t just warriors, they were cannibals.
Keal lowered his knee into David’s chest, pinning him down and blocking his view. He pointed the pistol.
“Keal, no!” David said, pushing the words through clenched teeth. He wanted Keal to shoot, but at the same time he didn’t want that. David had intruded into the cannibal’s world; as bad as the situation was, somehow it didn’t seem fair to just kill them.
The gun roared again, and David thrashed his legs. Pain still shot up from the bite wound, but he was free! Keal grabbed his waistband, rose, and half pulled, half tossed David back into the antechamber.
The gun spoke again: Bam!
Then Keal backed away from the portal and slammed the door.
CHAPTER
twenty-nine
FRIDAY, 5:15 P. M.
David sat up and grabbed his leg. Blood had seeped through his jeans in two semicircles on either side of his shinbone. Little bite holes showed themselves like tiny mouths, opening and closing as he moved. Somehow worse—grosser—was the slime between and around the bite marks. Saliva.
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Cannibals, he thought, sure he was right. He hoped he didn’t get an infection. Who knew what kind of diseases those—
Then he remembered, and turned to find Xander.
His brother was lying on his stomach, his legs and arms barely moving. He was gasping for breath.
“Xander!” David yelled. “Keal, Xander’s hurt, hurt bad!”
Keal knelt beside Xander and rolled him over. “Xander?” he said. He shook his shoulders.
Xander tried to lift his head. It clunked back to the floor. “Can’t . . . breathe . . . “
“The dart!” David said, pointing. It had collapsed flat against Xander’s chest by his fall to the floor.
Keal plucked it out and examined the tip. David could see blood, but it didn’t seem to have gone in very far.
“Is it poison?” David asked.
Keal nodded. “Probably curare.” He leaned over Xander and placed his palms low on his chest. He pushed down, relaxed, pushed again. Air rushed out of Xander’s mouth with each push.
“Better?” Keal asked.
Xander wheezed. “Y-yeah.” He gasped.
Keal continued pushing, relaxing, pushing.
David scooted along the floor to his brother’s side. “Is it his heart?” he said.
“His lungs,” Keal answered. “Or actually, the muscles that work the lungs. Curare is a fast-acting poison. It relaxes the muscles to the point that you can’t breathe. If we don’t get an antidote in him fast . . . “ He closed his mouth and appeared to concentrate on working Xander’s lungs for him.
“What?” David said. “What will happen if he doesn’t get the antidote? Keal!”
“He’ll suffocate,” Keal said. “All right? He’ll suffocate.”
Xander gasped. His face rolled toward David. His lids were droopy, but David saw the fear in his eyes.
David reached out and squeezed his hand. “You’ll be okay, Xander. We’ll take care of you. Right, Keal? We can get him to the hospital in time. Tell me we can!”