Jack James and the Tribe of the Teddy Bear (45 page)

SIXTY-ONE

A RUSHING NOISE FILLED the landscape. The sound of a thousand waterfalls. Jack realized the river was receding, once invisible pylons now jutting from the channel, barnacles and mussels exposed to the atmosphere.

He took Amelia’s hand. “We gotta go! We gotta go NOW!”

“No, wait,” she seemed more calm than she should have been. “Not yet. Stay here.”

“But…”

She gave him a look telling him to trust her. Somehow he did.

Large ships lowered in their moorings with the outgoing tide, their steel hulls hitting bottom and tilting on their keels in the mud. A swarm of cackling seagulls dove to snatch the now unprotected oysters and sea anemones along the draining estuaries. Then Jack saw a bolt of scarlet lightning in the distance, followed by an earthshattering thunderclap.

Takota stared at the retreating river.

“What’s going on?” asked Jack. No response. He tried again. “Takota? Do you know what’s happening?”

Takota answered, “Davos is up to something. I’m going to find out.”

“I’m going with you,” Ayita announced.

“So am I,” agreed Pud.

Takota disapproved. “No you’re not. You’re both staying here,” he watched the electrical storm gain strength. “It’s too dangerous. I’m doing this alone.”

He inhaled deep and pressed his chin to his chest.

“Takota, wait!” Ayita took his arm. He looked up and she took a quick, short breath, startled by his attention. Then she seemed to melt, throwing herself into his arms. “Before you go, I just have to tell you that, that I…”

“Oh, for Eteea’s sake,” Pud intruded. “What she’s so gracefully trying to say is she loves you!”

“We all do,” Enola gave Takota a nod. “Now go find out what that nasty Nagas is doing.”

Ayita sniffled, slow to release her grip. Takota gave her a tender smile and wiped a tear from the smooth, silky fur on her striped cheek.

“I’ll see you soon,” he told her. He cleared his throat and, one at a time, met each stare directed at him. “I’ll see you all, real soon.”

He breathed deep and in a wink was gone. Jack heard gasps.

“Duck Soup!” Ben placed his hand on Jack’s shoulders. “That critter can move!”

“Where?” Jack scanned the horizon.

Ben pointed downstream. “Over there!”

The darkening, stormy backdrop made it difficult to see, though finally Jack spotted Takota, standing on a steel girder and leaning into the wind at the tallest point of the bridge. A blinding flare nearly missed him. It was Davos. It had to be. The brilliant laser sped to sea, colliding with the sudden cluster of storm clouds which had gathered offshore.

Jack’s blood drained when he saw what Davos had conjured as it emerged from the cloudbank. His stomach fell and his knees weakened. The deafening silence from the crowd spoke more than any words. Nobody talked. Nobody moved. No one so much as stole a breath.

The tallest, most fearsome wave Jack had ever seen towered over the bridge. The sheer scale of the monstrosity seemed almost too big to comprehend. It dwarfed the long, manmade steel span, lifting and lifting, threatening to wash over the unsuspecting motorists. Something so massive, traveling so fast and bringing with it such a devastating force—strange how it seemed in slow motion.

“Tsunami!” a solitary cry set off a mad rush. People dashed for vehicles, tripping over each other, shoving and kicking and fighting to escape North Point. With cars still filtering in, a traffic jam sprouted, blooming into a complete mess. Nobody could move. They were trapped.

Chief Sillay hurried toward Ben and Jack, his hands clasped over something he obviously deemed precious. Jack worried it might have been a gun. Liz waved her hand in disgust.

“Now? You’re going to arrest him now?”

“No! No! I was wrong,” the chief opened his palms, revealing the O/A, its rainbow patina reflecting off the man’s silver badge. “Here. Use it, Ben. Use your machine. Save us,” he nodded and stepped away, giving the inventor space.

Jack pointed at the machine in Ben’s hands. “Dad! You’ve got to do something! Use the O/A!”

“I can’t!” Ben drooped. “I can’t get it to work properly. It’s, it’s too much power to handle.”

“Somebody’d better do something, and quick!” Pud shouted. “Or this whole place’ll be underwater!”

Ayita kept her concentration on the bridge. Bright, raging bursts assaulted the darkened sky. Takota and Davos were locked in battle.

“I’m going to help him!”

“Ayita! Wait!” Amelia grasped her arm. “Don’t you see it?”

“What?” Ayita shook her head. “See what?”

She clutched her eagle feather.

“Jack, listen to me. I’ve seen this before,” she took his hands. “Jack. It’s you!”

He scowled in confusion. “What do you mean it’s me?”

“
You
are supposed to operate the O/A, not your dad. It was made for
you
, Jack!”

A chill slinked through Jack’s skin. His butterflies surged with a vengeance. He turned to the roaring tidal wave. It crashed inland, nearing the bridge, nearing Takota and Davos.

He twisted to face Amelia, then his dad. “But it, it doesn’t work. Right, Dad? You said you can’t get it to work!”

Ben placed the device in his son’s hand. “
You’ll
get it to work.”

Beneath the O/A’s vibrant, lavender exoskeleton, endless geometric shapes circled and twisted upon themselves, creating the strangest, most wonderful figures. Some of them Jack recognized—the normal ones, like the spheres and cubes, even the tesseracts and toruses. Most, though, seemed alien, extra-dimensional, existing in a dream.

He trembled. Placing his palm over the interface, he felt his consciousness fuse with the mysterious device. The two of them, boy and machine, became one—one mind, one will.

Then the idea of oneness took on a whole new meaning when he peeked left, noticing someone who seemed an awful lot like himself. He flinched and the parallel Jack flinched. He leaned, searched past his duplicate, and saw a long line of other Jacks stretching to the horizon. They leaned and looked. Jack waved. They waved.

From the side, one of them slammed into him. Instead of pain, though, it was a rush of energy, as if his double had stepped into his body and gave him added strength. He felt like he’d just gained a hundred pounds of pure muscle.

Another duplicate melded into him, then another and another, over and over until it became a blur. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of his dimensional copies crashed into him, each bringing that much more ability, that much more strength.

Ben came alight when the merging was complete. “DUCK SOUP! It worked! Didn’t it, Jack?”

Jack didn’t respond. He felt so omnipotent, he thought if he talked, the power of his voice would shatter eardrums and crumble buildings.

Ben examined the O/A in Jack’s hand. “It did! It worked! Jack, you’ve done it! You’re running the machine on its highest setting! You’ve achieved maximum omnidimensional energy absorption! Son, how does it feel?”

Without thinking, he answered. “GOOOOOOOD!” the force from his lungs rumbled the concrete compound. People covered their ears, even dozens of yards away.

Not Ben. He pointed at the tidal wave crashing toward the bridge. “Go, Son! GO!”

Jack considered the Tsunami, the traffic on the bridge, Takota and Davos engaged in battle among the steel girders. The urge to rush to Takota’s aid was overwhelming, yet he knew what he had to do. He pictured himself helping those motorists and whisked away, high above the water, racing at a force that should have snapped his spine in two. He felt fine, though. Better than fine. Better than ever. The power. The energy. Then he realized.

“Hey! I’m flying!”

He skimmed above the water, speeding along the length of the metal structure, past dozens of vehicles on the suspended two-lane highway.

The vast ocean swell reached Willow Bridge. Steel beams buckled and cables snapped, whipping the pavement, cracking windshields, slashing tires. The entire platform supporting the road shifted. A wall of whitewater pushed against it, determined to swallow it whole.

He imagined diving to each car, truck, motorcycle and semi-trailer on the bridge, and hauling every single person from danger. Immediately he felt a strange tingle. His thought became reality and numerous Jack James duplicates divided from his body. An army of them swept onto the vehicles, while he himself sped to a Honda and took the driver by her hand. A woman in her forties, she was surprised, terrified, and then relieved to see him. With their rescued drivers and passengers, Jack and his dimensional copies hovered over the scene, watching while the tsunami reduced the bridge to pieces.

He thought about taking the victims to dry land, far above the flood plain, and did that precisely. He and his doubles soared to the highest hilltop outside of town, where Willow Column stood watch over the entire river valley.

He placed the woman on her feet in the parking lot at the base of the tower. The other Jacks did the same with their survivors. Then, in one rapid movement, all of his duplicates once again merged with him, bringing another barrage of pure energy, both physical and mental.

The rescued motorists stood motionless, one more stunned than the next. A man began to clap and the rest joined him, giving Jack a standing ovation and a round of cheers.

No time for accolades. The last he saw, his fearless protector had Davos locked in a raging battle high atop the bridge’s steel framework. Then the tidal wave hit, and Jack lost track of Takota altogether.

If that didn’t have him quaking with worry, the sight of a mountain of water rushing toward Willow did.

All of the sudden, he wanted to be with his mother, so he imagined himself next to her. That very instant, he was back at North Point, standing by her side.

Liz did a double take when she saw him. She overflowed with tears, wrapping him in a loving cuddle. He returned the embrace, delicately, making sure not to crush her accidently with his newfound strength.

“Mom, I can’t do it,” his stomach felt on the verge of rupturing. Never had the butterflies been so furious. “Takota’s gone. I just can’t…”

“Jack, you have to,” Liz said through tears. “We’ll all be killed.”

“Son!” Ben pulled him from his mother. “There’s no time! You’d better do something about that tsunami! Quick!”

“But I can’t! Don’t you get it? Takota’s gone!”

“Jack,” Amelia tugged him in a half circle to face her. He gazed into her hopelessly light brown eyes, and had to hold his breath when she pressed her soft lips against his. He surrendered to her, allowing himself to feel every nuance in her smooth touch. When she inched away and severed the kiss, he continued to stand there, staring into space.

“Finish this, Jack,” his butterflies disintegrated with her words. “You can do it.”

Filled with renewed confidence, he looked toward the Columbia bar where the bridge once stood. The monstrous wave dominated all scenery, growing larger the closer it came, pulling along a fleet of ill-fated trawlers, small aluminum boats, buoys, and large chunks of steel girders.

He stood firm, the O/A reeling and humming while tiny, static electric bolts of purple crackled along its smooth, shiny surface. He quivered, every one of his muscles tense. With his free hand he pointed at the tsunami, contorting his fingers. His eyelids flickered at the pummeling spray, his arms and legs shook under the strain of his own thoughts.

In his mind, he zoomed in, superseding the limitations of human sight, deep into the recesses of the very molecules that made up the water, traveling into the atoms, discovering the protons and the neutrons spinning like tiny solar systems. With an imaginary scalpel, he sliced through the covalent bonds, splitting the hydrogen from the oxygen. He needed only one firm cut to separate all of the countless molecules which made up the tsunami. The entire operation took a fraction of a second, vaporizing the deadly threat with one abrupt, gigantic
POOF!

The beach rumbled. Dozens of fishing vessels and hunks of wreckage and other flotsam crashed into the river. His extreme close-up vision pulled out and he saw an iridescent haze, all the colors of the rainbow swirling, dancing, refracting while tiny droplets cascaded and kissed his cheeks. He blinked at the mist. A thick bank of fog surrounded him, shrouding his view. He sensed the Gravitomiton turning off, with it the energy of the multiverse departing from his body. Suddenly his muscles were mush.

He collapsed.

“He did it!” Ben’s exclamation skipped along the low cloud layer. “Jack! Where are you, my boy?”

Through the haze, Ben appeared, grinning ear to ear. He ran to Jack and lifted him into a hug. Amelia emerged from the fog, behind her Ayita and Pud. His mom and sister followed. They seemed weary and soggy, but excited.

“Yay, Jack!” Lily clapped nonstop. Pud smiled and mimicked her.

“That was uncanny, Jack!” Amelia hugged him after his dad put him down. “I knew you could do it!”

“But how, Jack? How’d you do it?” Liz lifted her hand to capture some of the drifting sprinkles.

“Simple, really,” he said. “I thought about water’s molecular makeup.”