“I’m last,” Charlene told him, when only the two of them remained. “I’ll take the rope out so they won’t even know we were here.”
“How can you do that?” Finn asked.
“Same as in climbing. I’ll loop the rope over a bar up top. We’ll climb on a double rope and then pulling it out is a matter of just tugging one end of it.”
“But no funny business,” Finn said.
“None,” she said.
A moment later they were all in the shrubs at the base of the pavilion. Willa helped Charlene coil the rope.
Then, from their left, a thick shape emerged, worming across the grass—Gigabyte. Finn tried his own sign language. He held up six fingers and then motioned toward the thick vegetation twenty yards across the open grass. Philby nodded to signal that he had understood. Maybeck pointed back at Finn and shrugged as if to say, What about you?
Finn thumbed his own chest and then pointed at the fat gray python, its tongue slurping into the air, searching for a scent. Finn banged his fists together.
At that instant, Gigabyte turned toward the Kingdom Keepers.
“Now!” Finn said.
25
FROM THE MOMENT FINN took off running, he was afraid. He hated snakes. Any kind of snake gave him the weebies. A python as thick around as a basketball and nearly twenty feet long was the stuff of his worst nightmares—he’d never even had a dream that bad. Somewhere inside him he understood how stupid he’d been to offer to play the decoy. Somewhere in him he understood how fast a snake that big could travel across level ground and how if there were any small piece of him not fully crossed-over when the snake caught up to him—for Gigabyte would catch up to him no matter how fast he ran—that he would be caught, crushed, and consumed. But he ran straight at the snake, as fast as his legs would carry him.
At first, Gigabyte didn’t see him, concentrating on the group of six others. The snake moved over the grass in an almost lazy motion, as if filled with such confidence that catching the kids was never in question, that instead it was only a matter of when, and how many, and what to do with them once they were caught. Such confidence terrified Finn; it was the confidence of a predator, a killer.
Despite his proximity to the disgustingly large reptile, the beast didn’t turn in his direction. “Hey!” Finn shouted, trying to win his attention.
The huge head pivoted toward Finn, one yellow eye taking him in, but the giant tube of his body kept sliding ahead, aimed now at a precise point directly ahead of Charlene, who had just overtaken Philby in the footrace to reach the jungle’s edge.
It took Finn a second to realize what was happening: the snake wasn’t interested in having one kid for dinner when the opportunity for six remained only a few yards in front of him.
“Scatter!” Finn shouted. With that, he briefly closed his eyes and summoned the locomotive’s light in the darkness—the pinprick of purity that would allow him to fully cross over to all-clear. Shutting his eyes also had the advantage of eliminating the snake from his view, and thereby removing it from his thoughts and from an imagination that could easily picture him as an appetizer ahead of the main meal Gigabyte would make of the others. Not only did Finn think he was about to die, he thought he was also about to fail in his campaign to save his friends.
Finn opened his eyes to find himself within a few yards of the thing. Gigabyte, responding to the distraction, suddenly straightened out from the winding S that had been propelling him forward and bent into a giant C, with Finn at the center.
Out of the corner of his eye Finn saw the snake’s tail recoil and come at him with blinding speed—like the tip of a cracked whip. Gigabyte had no interest in biting Finn, despite the open mouth and tickling tongue. He intended to knock Finn off his feet, wrap himself around the boy, choke the life out of him, and swallow him whole.
The snake’s tail flew through Finn’s legs, making no contact. Gigabyte, having expected to hit the boy, rolled off-balance. The snake recovered quickly and took aim at Finn once more as Finn’s arms began to tingle and his physical sensations returned. He’d managed to hold the all-clear for a few precious seconds, but having a snake’s tail whip through his projection proved more than Finn could bear. Every piece of him was sparking and prickling—he was substance again, half hologram, half human, the same as the others. The human aspect of his DHI would prove crushable—if Gigabyte got hold of him, Finn was going down.
The snake folded in half, reminding Finn of a jackknifing semitruck. Finn jumped over the body like a hurdler but caught his trailing foot and tumbled to the ground. The snake reversed course, jerking into a mirror image of itself—more of a V than a C, with Finn at the center; from Finn’s right swung the huge head; from his left the pointed tail. The serpent was closing around Finn, who retained enough presence of mind to skid to a stop before those snapping jaws got hold of him. He’d seen a video in science class of a reticulated python catching and crushing a wharf rat; the snake had struck with lightning speed and snagged its prey in its mouth; it then ate the wiggling rat as it quickly coiled tightly into a death knot that hid all but the rat’s desperately quivering tail, which soon went still.