“I can help you,” came Charlene’s voice.
She was standing—wounded shoulder and all—behind the three pirates and the CTD. She held Maybeck’s length of pipe in her one good arm. She looked mad. Real mad.
She swung the pipe like Albert Pujols taking batting practice. One, two, three, she connected with the backs of the pirates’ legs and took them down. The CTD turned around.
Charlene hit him a good one. The dummy stumbled, tried to balance, and ended up behind the crate.
“Push!” Finn shouted.
The boys spun around and heaved against the huge crate, Philby pushing with his hand. The crate tipped, but rocked back upright.
“Again!”
The crate rocked.
Charlene struck the dummy a second time, keeping him in the shadow of the crate.
The boys pushed again in unison. The crate tipped, teetered, and went over. The CTD didn’t have time to get out of the way and was crushed by the falling crate.
The wood shattered and the box broke open.
A horrid thing lay there, his leathery black skin like the fingers of a gorilla. Reddish-brown hair grew from him as fuzz. His face was a horror, half bull, half bat—and the ugly half of both. Two scarred black horns bent from his skull above hairy, pinned-back bat ears. The crate had seemed big enough, but now in the flesh this thing appeared twice as large. Enormous. Maybe twelve feet tall and as wide around as a refrigerator. His shoulders too wide to fit through a double doorway, arms as thick as Burmese pythons.
His eyes squinted and opened. There was nothing inside but bottomless darkness: Chernabog.
Someone screamed.
It was Philby.
* * *
They fled from that place as a group. Ran so fast that, had anything or anyone been attempting to follow, it would never have caught up. They ran down companionways and through doors, up stairs and along decks. They found their way to their staterooms and locked the doors and hid under the covers without a peep.
Only Charlene did not make it to her room. She was spotted by a uniformed officer who called out “Stop!” Being a polite girl, and one brought up to obey and respect authority, she did just that. The woman kindly showed her to the ship’s hospital, where they treated and closed her wound with butterfly bandages, accepting her explanation that she’d had a freak accident involving a broken drinking glass and a bathroom’s wet tile floor.
None of them had any intention of sleeping knowing that the beast was somewhere belowdecks.
Discovering Chernabog out of the crate, the Overtakers would feel pressure to speed up whatever plan they had. At the top of that agenda was certain to be the elimination of the Keepers before they could ruin their plans. That meant an all-out war. Tonight.
That necessitated the Keepers go on the offensive.
A few minutes past two a.m., Philby hid their three Wave Phones in a potted plant behind the lobby’s grand piano, a hiding place chosen for its accessibility. He then rode an elevator to the Radio Studio, where the key card allowed him and Storey Ming to enter. He instructed her on how to work a manual return.
“I’ve got it,” she said, after he’d been over it a third time. “I don’t mean to sound rude, but it’s pretty simple.”
“Don’t tell the others,” Philby said. “They think of it more as rocket science.” He grinned. “And remember: if you don’t enter that code correctly, if you aren’t here when we need you, we remain stuck. You understand that?”
“Trapped. Yes. I understand.” She hesitated. “You could have asked one of the others—one of the five of you. Why me?”
“Charlene needs sleep. Maybeck is valuable to us on this side for now. We know what we’re doing.”
“Maybeck stays here to make sure I do my job,” she said.
Philby didn’t answer her directly. “Being a hologram is fine. But having Maybeck on this side increases our chances of success. Statistically, it’s a matter of—”
“Shut up,” Storey said. “They may listen to your garbage, but I don’t have to.”
Philby looked made of stone. He said softly, “We can contact him when we need him.”
“Uh-huh. Fine.”
Storey waited a full hour, allowing time for Philby, Willa, and Finn to sneak out to one of the empty staterooms and get to sleep.
At exactly three, she typed in the first string of code and pushed the ENTER key. The screen filled with scrolling computer code. Storey read back her notes, matching the identifiers with what she saw on-screen.
If she understood it correctly, Finn and Willa had crossed over; Philby had not. She knew what to do in this event—Philby had explained everything to her like some kind of schoolteacher. Wait fifteen minutes and rekey the missing identifier. Failure to cross over usually meant the person in question had not fallen asleep in time. Sometimes there was Wi-Fi interference or Internet problems.