Destination Unknown by Katherine Applegate Page B

the specifics. And of course there’s the Tower of Babel, that’s obvious.”

    Jobs blinked. He was exceedingly tired and maybe stupid. “The what?”

    “The Tower of Babel. You know, Old Testament? Man builds a tower to reach up to heaven?”

    “Jobs is a heathen,” Mo’Steel explained. “If it isn’t from either a technical manual or a poetry book, my boy here don’t know it.”

    Olga Gonzalez said, “They’re cooking fish. See? Not in the tower, down in the village.”

    “The Tower of Babel?” Jobs repeated.

    “There has to be food, that’s the point,” Mo’Steel said.

    “Brueghel!” Violet Blake exclaimed suddenly.

    “A bagel?”

    “It’s a Brueghel. Fifteen hundred something. Sixteenth century, anyway,” Violet said. “Look at the detail.”

    “Can we eat the pigs and the fish?” Mo’Steel wondered.

    “Where are the others? Where is the main group?” Olga wondered. “I wonder if . . . oh, look. There they are.”

    Jobs followed the direction of her gaze. Perhaps half a mile away, a small, vulnerable-looking knot of people in shabby modern dress stood gaping down at the same scene from a different angle. They were closer to the river, just at the edge of the village.

    “This is an awful lot of trouble for our aliens to go to,” Jobs said. “I mean, did they do this with the whole planet? This all extends out to the horizon.” He glanced at Billy Weir. He had formed the suspicion, the hope maybe, that Billy Weir had some profound knowledge he simply couldn’t share with them. Certainly he possessed some sort of incredible power.

    Unless that had all been a dream. Jobs could no longer be sure. He was exhausted.

    “You slept for five-hundred years and you’re tired?” he muttered under his breath.

    “I guess we had better see if we can find food down there,” Olga said.

    Jobs had opened his mouth to agree when it happened.

    A beam of brilliant green light, no more than two inches in diameter, blazed from the village. It drew a line at an angle to the ground. It seemed to originate from the small, crenelated tower at the end of the bridge.

    “Laser,” Jobs said. He frowned.

    The tower blew apart.

    Bricks flew everywhere. The half-dozen peasants closest to the tower were thrown through the air, tumbling, landing in the river, on the roof of a house, smashing into walls.

    “What was that?” Violet cried.

    With a shocking concussion, far larger than the first, the village exploded upward.

    It was like a bomb going off. Buildings were flattened. Livestock was tossed carelessly, twirling.

    The concussion was a hot wind in their faces, an oven blast.

    “Look out!” Olga cried.

    Twenty feet behind where they stood, a second beam of green light shone straight up out of the ground.

    The first laser had been followed by two explosions.

    “Run!” Jobs yelled.

    They bolted, racing away from the beam, racing the only direction open: downhill toward the village.

    The first, smaller explosion caught them, ruffled their hair, and rang bells in their ears.

    The second explosion hit Jobs like a mule’s kick in the back.

    He flew forward, landed on his face, rolled in the sparse grass, rolled down the slope.

    Violet Blake landed almost on top of him.

    Jobs wiped dirt from his eyes and blinked. He was deaf to everything but a roaring sound in his ears. His head throbbed. He felt a sharp pain in his back.

    All at once a hurricane was blowing. Olga Gonzalez was just standing up and the wind picked her up like she was an empty paper cup. The wind rolled her across the ground, faster and faster toward the ruined village.

    Jobs snatched at grass, at rocks, roots, anything, but the wind had him, too. He was sliding backward, clawing, unable to hold on.

    The wind got beneath him, lifted him up. He somersaulted backward and for a moment was airborne, flying.

    He bellowed and flailed and slammed hard into a ruined brick wall down in the village.

    Couldn’t