Jasper was locked in a gun battle with the mob. He fired his laser.
Lily hated gunplay. She didn’t think violence was a good idea. She always hoped it could be avoided through the use of false mustaches, clever ploys, logical conversation, and a few rolling boulders.
But Jasper was desperately blasting away at the enemy. Lily felt like she couldn’t just stand there and do nothing while he protected her. Especially because, as usual, his batteries weren’t going to last forever. She’d noticed his gun went through batteries kind of quickly. Pretty soon, his laser beam was going to get all dim and fizzly.
Bullets zinged past her. She closed her eyes, trembling.
Jasper fired. There was another curse word down the corridor, and Weasel Chops O’Reilly said, “He almost fried my kisser! You little punk! I’m gonna need that some day! For kissing!”
“I hope not, you scoundrel!” said Jasper. “I hope that no woman ever calls the number on the clammy little scraps of paper you doubtless force into their hands at hamburger rallies and 4-H fairs!”
Jasper did not have a very clear idea of where gangsters met their ladies. Weasel Chops O’Reilly usually met his classy dames down at the booze joints on the corner of Squat Street and Hard Luck or at prizefights between battling robots.
Meanwhile Lily didn’t know what to do.
“Lily,” said Jasper. “I’ll hold off the gangsters. You run down that hallway there to the dormitories! Tell the monks what’s happening! Ask them where I can find Bobby Spandrel!”
Lily nodded and ran down the hallway.
Jasper fired around the corner at the mobsters. His forehead had broken out into a sweat.
Lily ran as fast as she could to the door of the monks’ dormitories. “Hurry!” yelled Jasper behind her. “I can’t hold them for long!” Lily hurried. She threw the door open to find the monks all kneeling on the floor, serenely praying.
“Um,” she said, “um, excuse me.”
The monks looked up.
Lisa Buldene was sitting there, too, trying to work her cell phone. She looked up in astonishment. “It’s the girl from Dover! How did you get in?”
“Never mind, Ms. Buldene! We’ve got to get out!” To the monks, she said, “Jasper Dash—he was here years ago, you might remember him—anyway, Jasper Dash is holding the gangsters off!”
There were happy nods when they heard that Jasper Dash had returned.
“Jasper needs help finding Bobby Spandrel, the leader of the gang!”
This is normally the place in the story when the monks would all agree to help fight the mobsters, and everyone would cheer and rush out of the room and victory would follow immediately.
Unfortunately, these monks had taken a vow of complete nonviolence, so biffing gangsters in the schnozz was out of the question. Their martial arts training was not supposed to actually be used for fighting, but instead as a way of exercising the mind and combating the inner demons such as anger, desire for worldly goods, and procrastination. Not stooges with machine guns.
Oh, yeah, the machine guns. There was a lot of gunfire coming from the staircase now.
Lily felt very nervous.
But let’s change the scene.
Deep beneath the earth, Katie and Drgnan Pghlik raced through the catacombs. They lifted their knees high and scampered past tombs guarded by serpents. They slid down the banister of the crematorium.
Drgnan Pghlik threw open a bronze door.
They stepped into a huge cavern. It was lit by a weird, flickering blue light. Some daylight came from above. The cave had once been part of a volcano, and there was a hole that led straight up and out the top of the mountain.
But the eerie blue light came from below. There was a huge chasm in the middle of the floor, a fissure, a crack. It divided the room into two. And deep down there in the heart of the mountain was a blue glow: the sacred flames. Gases rose from the depths and wafted up into the rock chimney above.
Suspended above the chasm and the flame were five of the players from the Stare-Eyes team.
The boys hung from the ceiling. They sat cradled in chains, with their arms folded, their legs crossed, and their eyes open. The chain baskets dangled them over the pit so they could soak up the energies radiating from the mountain’s heart.
Their eyes glowed red, and their pupils were slits like snakes’.
They bathed in the light from the flame-pits of Delaware.