Eoin Colfer - Artemis Fowl and the Atlantis Complex

“Of course I can lift you,” snapped Butler, who might have been an Olympic weightlifter if he hadn’t been battling goblins in an underground laboratory when the last trials were on.

He sucked in a breath through his nose, tightened his core, and then with a burst of explosive power and a growl that would not have sounded out of place in a Tarzan movie, he thrust his baby sister straight up toward the twenty-foot-tall metal gantry supporting the screen and a pair of conical speakers.

There was no time to check if Juliet had made it, as the zombies had formed a body ramp, and the wrestling fans of Cancún were pouring onto the stage, all determined to kill Butler slowly and painfully.

Right now would have been a prudent time to have activated the jet pack he often wore underneath his jacket, but in the absence of a jet pack, and his jacket, Butler thought it might be an idea to increase the aggression of his defense, enough to buy himself and Juliet a few more seconds.

He stepped forward to meet the throng, using an adapted form of tai chi to tumble the front row back into the crowd, building a mountain of bodies the mesmerized fans would have to climb over. Which worked fine for about half a minute until half of the stage collapsed, allowing the unconscious bodies to roll off and form an effective ramp for the wrestling fans to climb. The injured fans seemed not to feel any pain and climbed instantly to their feet, often walking on twisted and swollen ankles.

The drones flowed onto the stage with only one desire in their hijacked minds.

Kill Crazy Bear.

It’s hopeless, thought Butler, for the first time in his life. Utterly hopeless.

He didn’t go down easy, but go down he did under the sheer weight of bodies flowing over him. His face was smooshed by back fat, and he felt teeth close around his ankle. Punches were thrown, but they were badly aimed and weak.

I am going to be crushed to death, Butler realized. Not beaten.

This realization didn’t make him feel any better. What did make him feel better was the fact that Juliet should be safe on the gantry.

Butler fell back, like Gulliver dragged down by the lilliputians. He could smell popcorn and beer, deodorant and sweat. His chest was pressed and tight, breath came hard. Someone wrestled with one of his boots for some reason, and suddenly he could not move. He was a prisoner under the sheer weight of bodies.

Artemis is alone. Juliet will know to take my place as his bodyguard.

Lack of oxygen turned the world black, and it was as much as Butler could do to shove his arm through the mass of bodies smothering him, and wiggle his fingers good-bye to his sister.

Someone bit his thumb.

Then he disappeared utterly, and the fairy on the screen laughed.

Juliet hooked two fingers of her left hand around the bottom lip of a gantry beam and pressed down so hard that she could almost feel her fingerprints. For ninety-nine percent of the world’s population, two fingers would simply not be enough to bear one’s own bodyweight. Most mere mortals would need a strong two-handed grip to keep them up for no more than a minute, and there is a large percentage of people who couldn’t hoist themselves aloft with anything short of a winch system and a couple of trained shire horses. But Juliet was a Butler and had been trained at Madame Ko’s Personal Protection Agency, where there had been an entire semester devoted to bodyweight vectors. In a pinch, Juliet could keep herself off the ground using only a single toe, so long as no passing mischief-maker decided to tickle her in the weak spot under her rib cage.

While it is one thing to hold oneself aloft, it is quite another to hoist oneself upward, but fortunately Madame Ko had put a few seminars into that too. That is not to say it was easy, and Juliet imagined her muscles screaming as she swung her other hand about for a better grip, then hauled herself on to the beam. On another day, she would have paused to allow her heart to slow down a little, but from the corner of her eye she saw her brother about to be engulfed by wrestling fans, and decided that this was not the day for leisurely recuperation.

Juliet popped to her feet and ran the length of the beam with the confidence of a gymnast. A good gymnast, that is, not one who slips painfully on the beam, which is exactly what happened to a mesmerized lighting technician who attempted to cut Juliet off before she could reach the screen.

Juliet winced. “Oooh. That looked sore, Arlene.” Arlene did not comment, unless turning purple and tumbling flailing into space can be counted as commentary.

Juliet knew that she shouldn’t have grinned when the technician’s fall was comically broken by a cluster of men lumbering toward her brother, but she couldn’t hold it in.

Her smile faded when she noticed the mass of bodies swarming along Butler’s frame, burying him. Another technician approached her, this one a little smarter than his predecessor; he straddled the beam with his ankles locked below him. As he inched forward, he banged a large spanner on the beam, raising concussive bongs and spark flurries.

Juliet timed the arc of his swing, then planted a foot on his head and stepped over him as though he were a rock in the middle of a stream. She did not bother to topple the man from his perch. By the time he turned around, it would be too late for him to stop her, but he should have a nice bruise on his forehead to wonder about when his senses returned.

The screen was ahead, bracketed by metal tubing, and the red eyes glared at her out of the black background, seeming to emanate pure hate.

Or maybe this guy was up late partying.

“Stop where you are, Juliet Butler!” said the voice, and to Juliet it seemed as though the tones were suddenly those of Christian Varley Penrose, her instructor at the Madame Ko Agency. The only person, besides her brother, whom she had ever considered her physical equal.

“Some students make me proud,” Christian would say in his BBC tones. “You just make me despair. What was that move?”

And Juliet would invariably answer. “It’s something I made up, master.”

“Made up? Made up? That is not good enough.”

Juliet would pout and think, It was good enough for Bruce Lee.

And now Christian Varley Penrose seemed to have a line directly into her brain.

“Stop where you are!” the voice told her. “And, having stopped, feel free to lose your balance and plummet to the earth below.”

The voice, Juliet felt, was taking hold of her determination and twisting it like a wet towel.

Don’t look. Don’t listen.

But she had looked and listened, if only for a second, and it was long enough for the insidious magic to snake a couple of tendrils into her brain. Her legs locked as though clamped with braces, and the paralysis spread upward.

“D’Arvit,” said Juliet, though she wasn’t quite sure why and, with her last spurt of self-control, pinwheeled her arms wildly, sending her entire body careening into the tubular frame supporting the screen and speakers.

The screen yielded elastically, and for a moment, the little bubble of Juliet’s mind that she still held on to believed that the screen would not break; then her elbow, which Butler had told her as a child was sharp enough to open a tin of field rations, punched through the material, sending a jagged rent running down its length.

The fairy’s red eyes rolled, and the last thing Juliet heard before her outstretched arm snagged the AV cables was an irritated snort, and then she was tumbling through a hole in the suddenly blank screen and falling toward the spasming mass of bodies below.

Juliet used the half-second before impact to curl herself into a ball.