The adults were ecstatic. Now that they had the “treasure,” it was as if all the problems of the world had been solved. They would hand it over to their kids, and then all of this would be over.
Boom! The barn was rocked by an explosion and filled with a blinding white light that rose from the ground and bloomed into an intense and dazzling mushroom. The adults cried out. George Sholes felt the rods being wrenched from his grasp.
“No!”
The light abated as swiftly as it had intruded. Now the adults were greeted with another sight: Loreli stood holding the crystal rods, feeling their power in her hand. She stared at them, succumbing to their magic, magnetic pull.
The adults knew they had Loreli and the other teen warriors vastly outnumbered. They began picking up what crude weapons they could find: rocks, chunks of wood, old rusty farm tools.
Rudy stepped forward and aimed the Vibroslammer at them. “You’d better stand back,” he said. “This thing hurts like—”
He choked on his words. Felton Possnack and Dan Winter had snuck up behind him and thrown a rope around his neck, and now they yanked him off his feet. Felton stepped on Rudy’s hand and he yelped in pain as Dan confiscated the weapon. Emily screamed and raced forward.
“Leave him alone!”
She pounded her fists into Felton’s chest. He relaxed his grip on Rudy, who fell to the floor. He was fuming, but now unarmed. Emily helped Rudy to his feet as Felton spoke.
“We’re grateful that you saved us, and we’re sorry to have to do this. But you have to understand. They’re our children. No matter what, we still love them. We can’t let you harm them.”
Natalie had dropped the Burn Pistol when Will was hit. She was staring at it now. She made a move toward it, but Frag’s mother, Mary, beat her to it. She held it at arm’s length and pointed it at Rudy. It was occurring to Rudy and Emily that they might be living out their last moments on Earth in the bowels of this decrepit old barn. What a place to die. Rudy took Emily’s hand. Loreli glared at the adults.
“You may think you’re doing the right thing, but you’re not,” she said. “We’re fighting the powers of darkness here! If you get your way, the whole world’s going to be doomed!”
The adults all heard her words but apparently could not bring themselves to believe them. They were shaking their heads, muttering among themselves.
Loreli was still holding the crystal rods and was doing her best to appear menacing. “We can’t allow you to hand these over,” she said
The adults spread out and took small careful steps in the dirt, moving closer and closer.
Will was still clinging to the deck, with Natalie a few feet away as the ship was pulled down into the black whirlpool. Malicious creatures swirled around them. He reached for Natalie—but she was swept overboard. He screamed his throat raw, but he made no sound.
Suddenly he was in a clearing in the woods. The skies above him were choked with pewter clouds. They cracked and rumbled. He felt the first drops of rain, salty on his tongue.
I must still be in the ocean, he thought.
He opened his eyes.
Natalie’s face was just inches from his. Her eyes were closed tight and she was weeping, her tears spilling down upon him. He saw the world with acute clarity. Not only were Natalie’s tears hitting his face, but rain was now falling down through one of the huge holes in the roof of the barn. The skies were really opening up, the rain coming down harder by the second. Will drew in a sharp breath and Natalie’s eyes opened wide. She gasped, too.
“Will . . .”
“Did you mean it? Do you—”
“I still love you, I love you, I love you!”
Her skin was flushing and prickled as he smiled and pulled her down, kissing her ear and whispering, “I never stopped believing that.”
It was true. Deep in his heart, he had always known that she loved him. He told himself to listen more closely to his heart from now on.
Satisfied, he glanced around the barn and assessed the situation. The adults, murder in their eyes, were surrounding Loreli. The crystal rods were in her hand. Rudy and Emily were weaponless.
It was, of course, up to him. He had to rise to the challenge or they’d all die like dogs, the demonteens would get the Power Rods, and the Dark Lord would win.
He rose on unsteady feet, reached around and touched the retrieval patch on the back of his neck. Mary Dressing’s hand shook as she aimed the Burn Pistol at him.
“Don’t try to stop us!” she shouted.
“I’m not going to try,” said Will.
Things happened very quickly. He tapped the Power Rod Retrieval Patch on the back of his neck, and his Power Rod came screaming down from the clouds, whooshed through the hole in the roof, and slapped into his waiting palm. He activated the dual laser blade function. He bent time and, moving as silently as a ghost, swept through the barn, disarming the muddy, befuddled, disoriented adults in seconds.
Mary Dressing stood blinking, staring at her hands where the Burn Pistol had been. Will stepped toward Loreli. She was still holding the crystal rods, their faint glimmering reflecting a golden light in her eyes. The adults’ threat diffused, Loreli was gazing at the rods.
“They’re so beautiful . . .,” she said.
“Give them to me,” said Will.
He reached out a hand. Loreli hesitated. Will knew that she could, should she choose, use the crystals as a weapon against him. But she just took one last longing look at the crystals, then re-wrapped them in the black velvet and handed them to her brother. Powerless against Will and his Power Rod, the adults stood and watched in silence. Save for the sound of the falling rain, the barn was hushed. Jasper’s voice rang out.
“Your time is up! Surrender or die! Ten seconds!”
They all counted the seconds down in their minds. Mary Dressing looked at Will with pleading eyes.
“Please . . .,” she whimpered.
Silence. Then the barrage hit. Two boulders hit the barn broadside, knocking the door down, splintering it into a thousand pieces. More boulders rained down from above, smashing through the roof and thudding into the ground. A massive uprooted fir tree soared across the sky and rammed the corner of the barn, causing the entire structure to creak and groan as it began to list. Will and the others gazed up at the rafters. The barn could come down on them at any second.
Rudy shouted at Will, “Dude, you’ve got to stop them! You’ve got to kick their asses!”
“No!” said George.
“You gotta smoke ’em! It’s the only way!” said Rudy.
Will had envisioned a battle that would end in a river of blood. But maybe it didn’t have to go down that way. He remembered his mother’s words: When you let anger in, it crowds out everything else. It crowds out empathy, compassion, love. Usually when he fought he was so angry, so full of hate, that violence seemed like the only solution. He’d started out hating Jasper and the other demonteens, but he no longer did. Now he understood them. If there was a way to end this standoff without any more bloodshed, he had to try.
The raindrops had given him an idea, but he had to act fast.
More boulders and trees hit the barn. A huge boulder smashed into the barn’s floor, crashing through an old horizontal door that led to a root cellar. A rafter beam cracked in half and the huge slab of wood crashed to the floor, nearly killing Mary Dressing, who screamed. Will saw the entrance to the root cellar and shouted to Natalie and Emily, “Over there! Look! Get everyone into the cellar!”
With Rudy’s help, the twins set about herding the middle-agers into the root cellar as instructed. Since the roof was starting to cave in, the adults saw little choice but to cooperate. Will rolled sideways out of the way of a falling beam and grabbed Loreli’s arm.
“The cloud seeder. Is it still there?”
“Yes. I saw it on our way up the hill.”
“Will it still work?”
“It should.”
Will ran to one of his backpacks and pulled out the two vials he’d tucked there in case Natalie relapsed. He gave them to Loreli.
“The cure. Seed the clouds with it!”
Loreli understood immediately. Taking the vials, she zigzagged through the falling debris and out the back door. She dashed out of the barn and through the rain to the rise where Karl Mulligan’s silver lodide generator still stood. She fired the old machine up and added the amber liquid from the vials. The machine started chugging, belching smoke that rose swiftly into the dappled gray clouds.
Will was at the front door of the barn. The demonteens had spread out and were sending projectiles at them from various vantage points. He dodged an incoming boulder, then used the Broad-Beamed Shock Bombardier to fire off several blasts into the sky, which temporarily acted as a force field, knocking the various flying objects off course. Tree stumps and boulders and assorted bricks and scrap iron from the Halstrom farm came flying through the air. Will fired again and again, blasting them in the sky, blowing them asunder. But the Shock Bombardier finally ran out of loads, and the sky became Hell itself as the demonteens heightened their efforts. Will ducked back into the barn a millisecond before an old-growth fir tree came crashing down, crushing everything in its path.
Will was knocked off his feet. Loreli came running back in just as he was standing up, and together they dove through the root cellar door, Will dragging a backpack behind him. A few seconds later, half of the barn collapsed with a thunderous roar.
Outside, Jasper and the demonteens began a slow, steady march toward the ruins of the barn, their battering assault continuing. Will, Natalie, Emily, Loreli, Rudy, and the adults huddled in the root cellar, doors pulled tight, and awaited their fate. Will pulled a flashlight from his backpack and turned it on. He was met with a sea of faces, rife with raw fear.
Emily was huddled with Rudy. She was shaking. She pulled him close and whispered to him, “We’re gonna die down here . . .”
Rudy swallowed hard. Even though he’d just been thinking the same thing—his heart was beating so hard he thought he was going to pass out—he knew he needed to put on a brave face for Emily.
“We’ll be okay. It’s gonna be all right,” he said.
Somehow he’d gotten the valiant words out, and for that he was grateful. He held Emily tight, thinking, This might be a good time to kiss her. He’d read about how in England, during the blitzkrieg, people had huddled in the tunnels for hours during Hitler’s reign of horror, and, fearing death was imminent, total strangers embraced one another and shared passionate kisses.
Approaching what was left of the barn, Jasper raised a hand, signaling for the onslaught to cease. A few more timbers collapsed, creating a cacophonous noise as they hit the ground. The demonteens stood and stared at the wreckage. Nothing moved.
“Come out now and give us what we want!” shouted Jasper.
Still no movement came from the barn. Jasper reached out with his hands as though performing a magic trick. His body trembled as his eyes bored into the battered barn door, which was lying on its side. Then suddenly the door sailed up into the air and whirled away, flipped telepathically by Jasper. The other demonteens took their cue and began lifting and hurling the debris away until there was nothing left of the barn but its foundation. They saw no bodies, and the crystal rods weren’t there, either. Jasper took a careful step forward and stared hard at the cellar door. In a few seconds, it banged open upward, ripped off its hinges, and it, too, was pitched away, flying through the air like a Frisbee.
“Come on out now,” said Jasper.
The demonteens once again held hands, this time focusing their powers upon the opening to the root cellar. And then Will Hunter began to rise up, trapped in the invisible web of their power. He had his backpack on, the greatly sought-after crystal rods wrapped back up and tucked inside it.
“You have no idea what you’re doing!” he shouted.
“I know exactly what I’m doing,” said Jasper.
Will was still holding his Power Rod, and he activated the fireball function. He managed to fire off two blasts at the demonteens, who ducked and dove and scattered as the fireballs struck the ground near them, exploding. But they quickly regrouped and redoubled their efforts. With tremendous force, they concentrated on the Power Rod. Will could feel that it was going to be wrenched from his grasp, and he knew he couldn’t risk his prized weapon falling into the hands of the demonteens. So he flung the Power Rod upward with all his might. It flew into the sky, rising higher and higher until it disappeared into the clouds.
The Power Rod was safe, but Will was in big trouble. He locked eyes with Jasper. The next thing he knew, he was flying across the meadow. He slammed into the trunk of a towering fir and then slid to the ground, his neck and shoulder raking against the rough bark. He felt like his back had cracked in half. He couldn’t feel his arms or legs.
A shadow fell across him. He looked up. A massive boulder was hovering above him. The thing was absolutely huge, as big—and no doubt twice as heavy—as a garbage truck. When it landed on him, it would crush him to death for sure. Will’s brain was buzzing from having slammed into the tree. His thoughts were jumbled. What move did he have? He couldn’t think of a single one.
Just then, the falling rain suddenly became a hammering downpour. The demonteens shielded their eyes, gazing skyward at the roiling clouds.
One second . . . two seconds . . . three seconds. Then it happened. Absorbing the cure through their skin, Jasper and the other demonteens collapsed like slack-stringed marionettes. With all the strength he had left, Will rolled to his left, barely avoiding being crushed by the falling boulder. He looked over at the demonteens. Their bodies were jerking spasmodically as they writhed in agony, just as Rudy and Natalie had when they’d been injected with the cure.
Will stared up into the sky. Even though it was bubbling with thick black clouds, he was so glad to be alive he felt like the sun was shining. He gradually regained the feeling in his arms and legs and struggled to stand, holding his back. He gazed across the meadow. The demonteens’s spasms had subsided and they were now stone still. For a moment Will thought the cure might have killed them, but then he saw their chests begin rising and falling rhythmically. They were breathing now and asleep.
Will reached into the backpack, took out the velvet, and unwrapped it enough to see that he still had possession of the two crystal rods. He put them back in the pack and walked across the field until he was standing directly above Jasper.
He pulled a Flareblade from his combat vest, knelt down, and held it to Jasper’s throat. When Jasper’s eyes blinked open, with no trace of demon black, Will knew that the cloud-seeding gambit had worked. But he had to be sure, so he pressed his fingers into Jasper’s temples to read his eyes. They remained clear.
“What happened?” said Jasper.
“I just saved your sorry ass, that’s what happened,” said Will.
Natalie, Emily, Loreli, and Rudy climb up out of the root cellar. George Sholes, Mary Dressing, and the other White Island adults came spilling up after them. They wasted no time rushing to their offspring. It was a baptism, a rebirth of sorts, as every one of the demonteens had been cured by the healing rain. Many tears were shed as parents and children embraced.
Watching the touching scene, Will decided it was time to get the hell out of there. The teens were confused and awash in a river of guilt over what they’d done. But Will had no time for explanations or recriminations, or to accept heartfelt thanks. It was time to go.
The five of them climbed back into the Wagoneer and took off without so much as an adios. After all, what was there to say? They’d gotten what they came for, and saved the possessed teens besides. It was time to move on to the next phase of their adventure, time to go back to the mainland, back to the mansion.
It was time to vanquish the Dark Lord and save the world.