Max was standing above the hole, trying to figure out how they could get him out, when he was hit in the neck by something. Was it a rock? It felt like a rock. He looked down, and found that it was a snake, wrapped around a rock. The snake, noting that Max was the closest bitable thing, bit Max.
“Ah!” Max yelled.
Katherine looked at Max as if he’d just done something very impolite.
“Shhh,” she said. “You’ll hurt his feelings.”
The snake slithered off, dejected.
“That wasn’t nice,” Katherine said. “It’s not like it was a poison bite or anything.”
Max was suddenly very worried. “Poison?”
“Wait a minute, maybe it was poison,” she said, placing her chin in her hand. “I guess we’ll know in a few more seconds. She stared at Max, examining his eyes and mouth. Finally satisfied, she smiled.
“Not poison. You’d have been dead by now. Good job getting bitten by the right kind of snake.”
Thunk! Another rock, another actual rock, hit Max in the stomach, in the same spot as before. This time he wasn’t sure who had thrown it, but it made him angrier than he’d ever been.
“Get up the hill!” Max commanded.
He and Carol and Katherine limped and crawled to the top of the hill, taking shelter behind a large boulder covered in the red-embroidery-looking moss he’d seen on his way to the fire the first night.
Max collapsed against the rock. His leg was going numb. His stomach was raw and throbbing. He wanted revenge, and soon. Now the plan seemed inevitable, and needed to be enacted immediately. On a personal level there was the need for some retribution, and on a more practical level, his team needed to smash the enemy sufficiently so that they could have time to save Douglas from the plant that was eating his leg at the bottom of the hole.
“We really need to get those guys,” Max said. “I mean really kill ’em. Destroy ’em.”
They discussed ways to do this, to kill and destroy the enemy, for a few minutes, until Max realized that at the top of the hill his team had no ammunition at all.
“All we have are these giant boulders covered in moss,” Carol noted dejectedly.
“Yeah, and the river of lava flowing just under the surface,” lamented Katherine.
Without much effort, Max was able to concoct a notion, which entailed his team lifting the boulders, soaking them in lava, and then rolling them down the hill to crush the enemy. He proposed it to his troops.
“Wow, that would really kill them,” Carol said.
“It’ll destroy them, too,” Katherine added.
So they began.
Katherine ripped open a section of earth, revealing a slow river of lava. Max couldn’t believe it — lava no more than four inches below the surface. He wanted to know everything about its hows and whys but there was no time just then.
Carol lifted a boulder and lowered it into the molten stream. Spinning it, he managed to cover the boulder in lava, which set the moss aflame.
“Now what, King?” he asked, looking slightly uncomfortable holding the white-hot boulder.
“Roll it at them,” Max said.
And so Carol carried the lava-covered rock over to the edge of the hill, and tossed it in the direction of the Bad Guys. It rolled down the incline, gaining momentum as it went, knocking over trees, setting grass and bushes aflame, and letting loose countless rocks and gravel. By the time it approached the bottom, half the hill was on fire, and Judith and Ira and Alexander were screaming, because the flaming boulder, and the thousand or so smaller boulders and rocks it carried with it, were headed directly for them.
Max was torn at this point, because on the one hand, it was a pretty incredible sight. Seeing this kind of destruction unleashed, seeing a plan like this in action, and seeing it work so well — there was nothing in the world as good. On the other hand, it really looked like the Bad Guys would be crushed flat, and might actually be made dead, by the coming avalanche. He was suddenly very afraid.
“Hey,” he said to his team, “you think they’ll really get killed by that stuff?”
“Oh definitely,” Katherine said.
“I hope so!” Carol said.
“What?” Max was aghast.
“I thought that was the point,” Carol said, genuinely confused now.
As quickly as he could, Max explained that he didn’t mean that he actually wanted them killed.
Carol was watching the avalanche, grinning and nodding, but still seemed perplexed. “So when you said, ‘Let’s kill them!’ you meant, ‘Let’s beat them at this game by throwing dirt at them’?”
Max nodded.
“So we should prevent them from getting killed now?”
Max nodded.
“Okay,” Carol said. Then he stood there for a long moment. “But how?”
The boulder continued down the hill, gaining speed.
“I told you not to do that,” Katherine said.
“What?” Carol said. “You never said anything like that! You’re the biggest liar in the world, Katherine.”
“But you’re the violent one,” she said. “Too bad.”
At that moment, the flaming lava boulder, and the thousands of accompanying rocks and flaming bushes — and even a pair of buffalo, who had been thrown up the hill as ammunition and were running down now, fleeing the juggernaut — struck and mowed over the Bad Guys. There seemed to be no possibility at all they could have survived.
CHAPTER XXXIV
“I can’t feel it so well,” Douglas said, holding his half-chewed leg, which looked, after being gnawed on by some kind of carnivorous underground vine, a lot like a piece of black licorice. “Not that I’m complaining.”
It was later, dark, and they were all around a small fire. All of the beasts were trying as best they could to recover from the war, and were waiting sullenly to eat something Douglas had prepared — a victory dinner, he was calling it. Even though his leg had been partially devoured, he was in a bright mood, high on the compliment Max, the king, had paid his heretofore unnoticed arm.
Alexander stared at Max. “That was a dumb idea.”
“I’m still sort of hollow,” Ira moaned. “My eyeballs feel loose …”
“Quiet Ira,” Judith snapped. “Everyone’s eyeballs feel loose. I can barely feel my brain. Can anyone feel their brain?”
No one answered. No one could feel their brains.
Without a word, the Bull came to Max, took the crown from his head, and put it in the center of the fire. As before, Max didn’t want to question the tradition, though he really didn’t like seeing his crown there, under the flames.
Max’s head was a muddle. Maybe he hadn’t thought the war through. It had seemed like simple fun when he had first pictured it, with a glorious beginning, a difficult but valor-filled middle, and a victorious end. He hadn’t accounted for the fact that there might not be much of a resolution to the battle, and he hadn’t imagined what it would feel like when the war just sort of ended, without anyone admitting defeat and congratulating him for his bravery. Instead, Judith and Ira had been thrown off the cliff, and Katherine and Carol had gotten angrier at each other, and Alexander wasn’t talking to Ira, because somehow in his mind it was Ira’s fault that Alexander had gotten hit so many times with rocks. Meanwhile, the Bull was now sitting off to the side of the fire, dirt everywhere on him. He had walked straight through the battlefield all day, absorbing hundreds of blows, without ever ducking or running. Other than the scrapes and dust, though, his appearance hadn’t changed much. If anything, he seemed more alive, more likely to talk.