Underworlds #2: When Monsters Escape Read online

  As we headed into the waves, my fingers moved instinctively to the second and fifth strings. My brain seemed to swim with the sound as time rolled more slowly. I wondered how long the uncomfortable feeling would go on, but I kept playing because it was working. The waves calmed around us, and the rowboat neared the island.

  The plant towering against the sky was a coal-burning facility that had shut down when a new hydroelectric power station was built a few towns over. This old place was perched on the very summit of the island. From there, a narrow flight of stairs wound down through the rocks to a short pier jutting into the sea.

  “Head for that pier!” Jon yelled out. “Everyone. One. Two. Come on!”

  While I played the lyre, my friends kept up the rhythm Jon set with his oar. Together we brought the boat in between the waves. Jon tucked it in under the pier and tied it to a rail.

  “Jon, you’re a regular Jason,” I said, referring to the Greek hero who commanded a famous ship.

  “Arrh!” he said, doing his best impression of Charon, the Underworld ferryman we’d met a few days before. “That’ll cost you one blue penny!”

  I instinctively checked my pocket. I had borrowed several pennies from Mags that morning, just in case we needed a ride from Charon later. The pennies were still there.

  “Let’s go,” said Sydney.

  Staring up the ladder, I dreaded what we’d find at the top. Fear iced my veins. But there was no time to waste. I hitched the lyre’s holster on my shoulder and, one by one, we climbed the stairway up through the rocks.

  BY THE TIME WE REACHED THE TOP OF THE STAIRS and saw the power plant up close, it was raining icy bullets. Twin smokestacks of black brick leaned over a hulk of broken windows and sunken walls. The whole place looked ghostly and dead.

  Until the black windows flared with red light.

  “They’re definitely busy with something,” Sydney said.

  We took shelter under an angled coal chute and heard sirens wailing in the distance. The town was still dark. The school was probably filling with people.

  I pushed that thought out of my head. “First things first,” I said. “We get inside.”

  “Okay,” Jon said slowly. “But how did they get inside?”

  “Right,” said Dana. “How are they vanishing and reappearing? There’s nothing in the myths about any magical abilities.”

  “Just your standard, violent one-eyed giants,” said Jon. “Somehow, that doesn’t cheer me up.”

  I suddenly remembered seeing the necklace on the hairy giant. “The giant who fell next to me had a weird stone hanging around his neck. It had marks carved all over it.”

  “Greek letters?” asked Sydney. “Like alpha and omega?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know Greek.”

  “Or was it a rune?” asked Dana. “Runes are stones that hold power, if you know the symbols and how to use them. Loki was called a Rune Master. Maybe he gave the Cyclopes magic rune stones to get them out of the Underworld. That could be how they escaped from school and vanished in the woods.”

  “I’m pulling up a bunch of stuff about runes now,” said Sydney, tapping away on the screen of her cell. “Owen, if you can remember what the design of the rune was, we could use that same magic to get the giants back to Hades.”

  It seemed like a long shot, but I liked the idea of something working in our favor. “That’s a better plan than mine,” I said.

  “I didn’t know you had a plan,” said Jon.

  “I don’t,” I said. “Come on.”

  Carefully but quickly, we darted along the outside wall of the plant until we found a large steel door. I may not have known very much about the lyre’s different powers, but I knew how to make it open doors. My friends popped in their earplugs, and I brushed the strings of the lyre until the door quivered like heat off a hot stove and popped open.

  The main room of the plant was a giant open box made of coal-blackened bricks. It rose eight stories from the floor to the ceiling, where a narrow gallery was accessible only by a rickety set of stairs on the far side of the room. Part of the ceiling had crumbled in, and rain was pouring down like a waterfall, flooding a sunken section of the floor.

  There was a narrow set of iron tracks around the perimeter of the room, leading deeper into the plant. The tracks had a small coal car sitting on them. Beside that, enormous machines made up of wheels and gears and pipes — generators, I guessed — seemed to have been ripped from their places and shoved to the sides of the room as if they were toys.

  Against one wall was a huge coal-burning furnace. Its big iron door stood open to the room, and a fire was blazing inside. Among the flames we saw street poles, a section of bleachers, the body of a car.

  “They threw all that stolen junk into the furnace,” whispered Jon.

  Not far away from the furnace sat a flat-topped pile of iron girders. They seemed welded together into a giant block.

  “I know what that is,” Sydney whispered. “Dad has one in shop class. An anvil. The Cyclopes would need a furnace and an anvil to make lightning bolts. This is really not good.”

  No, it wasn’t.

  But not everything was bad. Even though the room was big and open, the piles of equipment pushed aside to make room for the anvil created tunnels and shadows where we could hide if we needed to.

  And we needed to — fast.

  Something heavy scraped across the floor deep inside the plant, and we took cover behind a mess of busted machines.

  Scrape. Pause. Scrape. And something the size of a mountain moved into the room.

  In the light from the blazing furnace, we saw one of the giants clearly for the first time.

  If he was huge when we saw him outside school, he seemed to have grown. To call him a giant hardly seemed big enough. The guy was gargantuan. He was almost as tall as the eight-story room itself. He lumbered in slowly, every muscle in his massive arms and legs clenched and menacing.

  His head was the size of a hot-air balloon. Shaggy hair hung in tangled clumps to his shoulders, which were as wide as a house. Under a brow as big as a hedge stood one large, round, wet eye.

  “Gross …” Jon said, swallowing behind his hand. “I think I’m going to —”

  I knew how he felt.

  The white of the monster’s one huge eye was the color of eggnog. The brown pupil at the center pulsed, causing the eye to drool yellow liquid down his cheeks.

  A wave of nausea moved from my stomach up to my throat. I breathed deep and swallowed hard.

  From his massive shoulders to his knees, the Cyclops wore a kind of blacksmith’s apron that looked patched together from a whole herd of cattle.

  Dana crept up beside me, nudging me to look at the giant’s massive hand. In it, he held a hammer with a head the size of a garbage can.

  The floor thundered and now the hairless giant entered, casting his big eye on the anvil. “The Dark Master freed us for one thing only,” he bellowed in a voice like rolling thunder. “He needs it fast.”

  The hairy giant nodded. “The forge is hot. Let us begin,” he said in the same way.

  “They’re each wearing one of those necklaces,” I whispered, creeping as close as I dared.

  Together, the two giants took a big pair of tongs, dragged something out of the furnace, and dropped it on the anvil.

  FWA-A-A-ANG!

  A blinding crash of light flared from the anvil, blasting the room with heat. The giants laughed, then positioned themselves on either side of the anvil. Raising their hammers, they began to pound the hot metal. Doom! Doom! Doom! First one Cyclops hammered, then the other, over and over, until the metal on the anvil began to take shape.

  Putting down his hammer, the hairy giant reached for the tongs and tossed the hammered object into the huge pool of rainwater. SSSSS! The water exploded with steam, filling the room with a nasty-smelling cloud. Both Cyclopes coughed and tried to wave the steam away.

  As the bald giant thundered over another piece o
f metal at the anvil, the hairy one dragged the cooled piece out of the pool and drew a long file from his apron. With each stroke, the metal lost its crude shape. He ran the file over and over the metal, until it was as bright as silver and shone with brilliant light.

  Dana groaned softly. “And that’s how they make lightning bolts.”

  Piece after piece went from the forge to the anvil to the cooling pool. After Baldy hammered them, Hairy polished them, making the pieces so bright they were almost impossible to look at. Shielding my eyes, I glimpsed one piece shaped like a silver platter the size of a breakfast table. Another was a long tube bent at a right angle. One of the others looked like a large hand with blades running along the fingers.

  Jon tapped my shoulder. “I haven’t seen a lot of actual lightning bolts up close,” he whispered, “but none of that stuff looks like lightning.”

  The bald Cyclops removed one last piece from the pool and held it up. It was a large cone, made of bands of metal crisscrossing one another and twisting to a point at the top.

  I didn’t know what it was, but I knew what it looked like.

  A helmet.

  “Uh-oh.” Dana’s face was suddenly as pale and frightened as when she had disappeared to the Underworld. “They’re not making lightning bolts for Loki. They’re making armor!”

  “Yes, yes!” Sydney whispered, tapping on her cell. “I just saw something about Loki’s armor. According to legend, Loki was wounded by Odin, the chief Norse god. He was hurt so severely, he couldn’t be healed.”

  Dana nodded quickly. “My parents told me that. He was seriously hurt, but he couldn’t die. Though armor made by the Cyclopes would be … indestructible …”

  My brain sparked with a crazy idea. “If this armor is for Loki,” I whispered, “and we trapped the Cyclopes and wrecked the armor, it would solve two problems.”

  “Hold on, look at this,” whispered Sydney, pushing her phone in front of us. “It’s an alphabet of rune symbols. Owen, did you see any of these runes on the necklace?”

  I studied the strange carvings and pointed to one of them. “There were a couple on the stone. That was the biggest one.”

  “Thurisaz,” Dana whispered. “Of course. Owen, I should have remembered that when you first told us about the necklace. Thurisaz is Loki’s special rune. He uses it to control shape-shifting. The Cyclopes must have used it to get out of the Underworld, out of our school, and to vanish in the woods.”

  “Then we’ll use it on the giants to capture them,” Sydney said.

  “Okay,” whispered Jon. “But how will we get that close to them?”

  Before anyone could answer, the hairy Cyclops stood and stretched his mighty arms. “Done?”

  “Done.” The bald giant clanged his hammer suddenly on the empty anvil.

  And all at once, a passage in the far corner of the big room thundered with the sound of marching feet.

  Hundreds and hundreds of feet.

  “SOMEONE’S COMING!” I WHISPERED. “LOTS OF SOMEONES!”

  Syd covered her nose and mouth. “Oh! The smell —”

  The huge room filled with the stench of decay as an army of creatures entered the plant. I almost choked. They were large, bearded men, their eyes hollow and black. Their pale skin — what there was of it — was sagging off of steely white bones. Animal skins draped their shoulders, and bits and pieces of rusty gray armor covered their chests.

  They stomped and scraped and dragged themselves in, printing the floor with what looked like melting snow. There must have been a hundred of them.

  As if they weren’t scary enough, they carried big broadswords of rusty iron.

  “They’re … dead!” whispered Jon.

  “Draugs,” Dana muttered, her fingers flipping the pages of her book. “My parents told me legends about them. I never believed they really existed.”

  “Who — or what — are Draugs?” asked Sydney.

  “Draugs are ‘death walkers,’” Dana said. “Dead Viking warriors who come back, like ghosts. After they die, their souls live on in their old dead form. Draugs are strong. Angry. Evil. And they can’t really die.”

  “Perfect,” Jon groaned.

  “Look, another rune,” I said, squinting at the Draugs. “The head dead guy has one. They’re all under Loki’s power.”

  Behind the Draugs were several dead horses, also armored. The horses stopped at the pile of armor cooling on the floor. They pawed at the stones with their black hooves.

  “They’re here for the armor,” said Sydney. “But where are they going to take it?”

  I almost didn’t want to know.

  The Draugs didn’t speak a word to the Cyclopes, who merely stepped back to watch the dead men fill the coal car with silver armor. The Vikings then hitched the horses to the coal car. One Draug uttered a sharp word, and with a terrible shriek, the horses moved and the car began to roll along the tracks toward the passage.

  “Do you think the dead guys are taking the armor to Loki right now?” whispered Jon. “Is he that close to us? Oh, man. This is bad.”

  As we stood in the shadows, hiding from the Cyclopes and watching a bunch of dead Vikings take indestructible armor to an evil creep, my brain started whirring. It was telling me I was a coward if I didn’t do something. This was the same part of my brain that got me involved in every club and cause at school. It’s what made me go after Dana when she was in the Underworld.

  I turned to my friends. “Look, guys, we can’t walk away from this. We can’t not do something.”

  Jon narrowed his eyes at me. “What are you saying?”

  “Exactly what you think I’m saying,” I said. “If we really are in the middle of a war, and it’s in our world, and we have a chance to do something about it, we have to try. No one else is here. It’s only us.”

  “But we have to capture the Cyclopes for Dana to stay with us,” said Sydney, glancing at Dana. “We might miss our chance if we follow these stinky dead people.”

  “We can do both,” said Dana, “with the runes.”

  Jon turned to her. “Now what are you saying?”

  “If we can steal the runes from the giants,” Dana said, “maybe we can find a way to shape-shift and follow the Draugs. The Cyclopes can’t get out of the power plant without the runes, so we don’t have to worry about that. Between Sydney’s cell phone and my notes, we can probably find a way to make the runes work for us.”

  Jon shook his head. As I watched the Draugs march out of the room, I wasn’t sure, either. Dana’s idea seemed awfully risky.

  “The giants may be a little light in the brain department,” I said, “but look at them. How can we steal something from around their necks? They’re huge. We’re just a bunch of nobodies.”

  Sydney drew in a short breath. “Great idea, Owen.” She tapped her forehead. “It’s all in Dana’s book. The famous story of Odysseus escaping the Cyclopes by blinding them and saying that Nobody did it.”

  Jon winced. “Blinding them?”

  “Odysseus did it for real,” Sydney said. “But we can do it with smoke. We push them back near that walkway, snatch the runes from around their necks, and follow the Draugs. But to make it all happen, Owen, we need a little musical accompaniment….”

  After she explained it, I had to admit that Sydney’s idea was a good one.

  Step One: Use the lyre to force smoke into the Cyclopes’ eyes. Step Two: With the smoke as a shield, climb the stairs to the walkway near the ceiling. Step Three: Snatch the runes from around the necks of the giants (keeping them trapped in the power plant). Step Four: Use the runes to make us look like Draugs.

  Okay, maybe those last two steps were as hazy as the smoke, but we didn’t have time to overthink it. “Time for earplugs,” I whispered. “Here goes nothing —”

  I plucked the lyre, tentatively at first, feeling that familiar rush of dizziness. Then I found the notes I needed.

  I played them over and over until— whoosh! — thick smoke collected i
nside the forge and poured out the open door into the room. Slowing and then speeding up the melody, I made the smoke rise directly into the giants’ faces.

  “Hey!” growled Baldy, as black haze billowed up at him like smoke from a barbeque.

  The hairy Cyclops grunted. “What’s happening?”

  Both of them began coughing and wheezing. Trying desperately to get out of the smoke, they backed away from the furnace and moved toward the walkway.

  Sydney grinned. “Perfect. Now for Step Two.”

  While she and Dana searched the cell phone and the book for details about rune magic, Jon and I scrambled up the stairs as quickly as we could. I kept playing the lyre as I climbed, which wasn’t easy since my head was spinning and the old steps squealed and wobbled all the way up.

  “Who’s there?” boomed the bald giant from inside the cloud of smoke.

  “Nobody! I’m over here!” Dana yelled, drawing the giants back toward the walkway.

  “Hah!” shouted the hairy Cyclops, grabbing at the air. “We’ll get you, Nobody!”

  Jon and I made it to the top of the stairs and ran around the walkway as the two giants staggered back toward us. They — and their rune necklaces — were only a few feet away.

  “Come on,” I whispered. “Come on. One more step …”

  I still didn’t have a clear idea of how we would get the runes from around the giants’ monster-size necks, but I didn’t have to.

  “Cover me,” said Jon.

  “Cover you?” I repeated.

  Before I could stop him, Jon climbed over the walkway railing, leaped three feet across open air, and latched on to the hairy Cyclops’s neck.

  The hairy giant lurched and grabbed at his throat frantically, trying to remove Jon’s hands. The bald Cyclops couldn’t see, but flailed away with his fists, striking the wall next to me. I dodged the bricks falling onto the walkway. Jon clung to the rune necklace and screamed at the top of his lungs. Sydney and Dana dived away from the crashing bricks. I nearly fell to my death.