The Paladin Prophecy

BATTLEFIELD CONDITIONS

The computers and monitors in the lab and observation room went down with a dying thump. Kujawa hammered on the keyboard of his control panel.

“Another power failure?” asked Dr. Geist.

“Apparently so,” said Kujawa.

“Is everything backed up? We can’t lose this data.”

Robbins spoke into the mic. “Will? Will, can you hear me?”

Will opened his eyes. Only a dim gray glow from the window on the far side of the room penetrated the depths of the machine.

His body was pinned above the knees. Will choked back the impulse to flail around. He flexed and extended his feet, gripped the edges of the sled and dragged himself toward the opening. The pad on the sled bunched up beneath him, making progress nearly impossible. Within seconds he was drenched with sweat.

He heard a door swing open behind him on the other side of the machine. Not the one to the control room. A door he hadn’t noticed before.

Will closed his eyes and called up that grid into his mind’s eye. It fanned open and a sensory image of the room appeared all around him. He found the door, leading to a back staircase. He saw a tall, stooped figure standing on the threshold, holding a long tube in its hands. He heard a vacuum seal being broken.

Lyle.

When that familiar nauseating odor reached him, it became much harder to hold on to anything like calm or sanity. A bright light exploded as Dave fired toward the front of the machine. Another beam shot across the room …

… toward long thin forms skittering across the floor with the sickening patter of a thousand feet. Dave retreated and kept firing, but there were too many, more than a dozen, and they were moving too fast. The things leaped onto the sled, bodies coiling with squishy plops around Will’s ankles. He felt vicious rows of serrated teeth all along the length of their moist bodies. Will kicked frantically with his limited range of motion but he couldn’t shake them off.

He opened his eyes as they crawled into the cramped cavity of the tube and saw them in the dim light, sliding over his thighs and hips, inching toward his upper body. They looked like three-foot-long flat worms crossed with millipedes, and they were heading for his face.

Will sensed Lyle’s image pulse in the darkness beyond the door, sickness, pain, and rage radiating from his malignant form. Will “saw” him draw up and fire a thudding hammer blow from his twisted mind, aimed straight at his. If it landed, Will knew he’d have no chance; by the time these crawlies choked him, they’d be strangling a senseless shell.

Time slowed to a moment of nuclear focus. Will closed his eyes and searched with his mind for the largest nearby object he could find: Just outside the big picture window, he “saw” what looked like a tall, bare tree. Will hooked into it and yanked it toward him with all he had. There was a bright flash and a tremendous explosion of breaking glass as air pressure in the room plummeted. Wind and frigid cold reached his legs.

“We’ve got to get him out of there,” said Robbins in the darkness of the control room. She felt her way to the door.

At the moment Robbins opened the door from the observation room, a blinding flash of electricity arced across the length of the lab. A dark mass flew out of the storm toward the picture window and crashed through the glass, shattering it. A blast of snow and howling wind knocked Robbins back against the wall. At first she couldn’t make sense of this incongruent object thrusting into the room. Then she recognized its shape.

It was a telephone pole.

The shock of the explosion broke Lyle’s concentration. His killshot dissolved before it reached Will. Lyle turned and scurried down the stairs, but his creatures crawled closer, four of them slithering over Will’s chest, closing in on his face. Screaming with super-human effort, Will gripped the sides of the sled and pushed a blank mind picture at the back of the tube behind him. With a wrenching crack, the sled’s armature gave way.

The sled shot out of the machine and hurtled across the room. Will rolled off toward the ground, slapping the worms away as he fell. He landed, turned, and saw Dave standing his ground, a still figure in whirling snow. It was snowing inside. Dave fanned the hammer of his gun, blasting the last of the worms. They exploded, clots of green acid splattering the sides of the MRI machine.

The lights came back on in the lab, ceiling fixtures swinging in the wind. A telephone pole jutted through the picture window, trailing torn cables like broken puppet strings. Dave was gone.

Will saw Lillian Robbins on the ground, near where the sled had hit the wall, staring at him. Power kicked back into the pole and electrified the loose black cables dangling around it. They arced and danced on the ground, thrashing in Robbins’s direction, inches from striking her.

Will scrambled to his feet. Without thinking, he created a mind picture that reached out and grabbed the lines like an unseen hand gripping a cluster of venomous snakes. Manipulating the picture, he coiled the sizzling lines back around the downed pole, where they landed and sparked against a transformer box before shorting out and dying.

Robbins rose to her knees. Geist and Kujawa rushed into the lab and helped her to her feet. All three of them looked at Will. He was shivering in just his running shoes and shorts, thick snow swirling around him. Fried electrodes dropped off his torso like burned buttons.

“Are you … all right?” Robbins asked.

“I think so,” said Will. “What happened?”

“The power went out and that pole came … through the window,” said Geist.

“Freak gust of wind,” said Kujawa.

“Had to be,” said Geist, out of breath. “Macroburst, or a wind shear …”

“Some kind of electrical explosion,” said Kujawa.

They looked at him, and Will thought, briefly, about telling them, Well, when I’m about to die, apparently I can move things with my mind. He turned and saw the rest of the lab, much of it ravaged and smoking from the acidic explosions, including big sections of the MRI machine’s shell.

Then he remembered Dave’s warning about their confidentiality agreement.

“Rotten luck with the machines today, Doc,” said Will.

Kujawa nodded, speechless. No one spoke. Wind whipped around the room, and as his adrenaline subsided, the cold hit Will like an anvil. Kujawa hustled him into an empty ward and wrapped him in blankets while he checked his vitals. Will showed no serious ill effects and warmed quickly, although he felt weak and dizzy. But he knew the reason for that, and he wasn’t about to tell them about it.

A crowd gathered outside when the fire department showed up. Will heard them calling for a construction crane to remove the pole from the third floor. Will had just finished dressing when Lillian Robbins came back into the ward.

“I’ve paged your roommates,” said Robbins. “You can leave with them when they get here.”

“Okay,” said Will, tying his boots.

“Your parents are scheduled to arrive at four,” said Robbins, “but the storm’s diverted them north to Madison. Mr. McBride will drive them down in time for dinner. I’ve made a reservation in the faculty dining room. Mr. Rourke will join us as well.”

“I’d like to bring Brooke,” said Will. “If that’s all right.”

Robbins scrutinized him. “That would be fine.”

Will saw a look on Robbins’s face that he’d noticed before. Studying him, quizzical, deep in thought.

“Anything show up on the brain test?” asked Will. “I mean, before the whole lab blew up?”

“I’m not a neurologist. The doctors should go over this with you.”

Will felt a cold rush up his spine. “So you did see something.”

She studied him again. “Were you talking to yourself, Will?”

“Talking? Absolutely,” said Will. “Could you hear me?”

“Not clearly enough to know what you were saying.”

“You were right,” said Will. “That tube put the zap on my head, so I just kept blabbing, ‘You’re fine; you’re okay; don’t think about where you are.’ ”

“Were any voices … talking back to you?” she asked.

Will waited a beat before responding. “Did you hear any?”

“I didn’t hear anything.” She frowned and held his eyes. “We saw profound levels of activity in an area of your brain often identified with visual, aural, and sometimes even olfactory hallucinations.”

“So you heard me yakking nonstop,” said Will, trying to defuse her inquiry with a joke, “and thought I was helping a leprechaun look for his Lucky Charms.”

Robbins’s patience frayed. “Will, we have real cause for concern because you’ve been under such extraordinary stress. I’m told you’ve also had conflicts with some other students—”

Hearing that, Will realized how he could tell part of the story in a way she might be able to understand and respond to. “And I’m the new kid, so they think I’ll keep my mouth shut. I should just be happy to be here, right? Well, I won’t keep quiet about it any longer.”

“About what?”

Careful how you frame this.

“There’s a group of students here,” said Will. “Seniors. They belong to a kind of club, or secret society, and they goof it up with rituals and masks that make the whole thing seem harmless. They’re called the Knights of Charlemagne.”

He thought by her reaction that she might have heard the name before.

“But it’s not harmless,” said Will. “It’s a cover for abusing younger kids. New kids or weaker kids or ones who don’t fit in, and this goes way beyond bullying. They single these kids out and terrorize them.”

“If this is true,” asked Robbins, “why haven’t I heard about it before?”

“Because they’re smart about who they target,” said Will. “Because they shut them up with threats. The kids they go after are petrified. And I know for a fact one of them was Ronnie Murso. They might even have something to do with his disappearance.”

That lit an angry fire in Robbins’s eyes, but she worked to keep a handle on it. “I’ll take this straight to the headmaster. Do you have any names of the people responsible?”

“Lyle Ogilvy,” said Will.

“Anyone else?”

“Not that I’m sure about. But you can definitely start with him.”

Robbins kept quiet, calculating. “Do your roommates know about this?”

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