The Revenge of the Werepenguin, page 29
VIKING
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First published in the United States of America by Viking,
an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2020.
Text copyright © 2020 by Allan Woodrow
Illustrations copyright © 2020 by Scott Brown
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Ebook ISBN 9780593114254
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To K. L.,
who believed in werepenguins before anyone else did.
—A.W.
For Berkeley Breathed.
Of the heads on my personal Mount Rushmore of influences,
Mr. Breathed’s looms largest . . .
—S.B.
CONTENTS
Prologue: Formerly Known as the St. Aves Zoo
1 My Life as a Penguin
2 Alive and Coughing
3 Annika Shares Her Story
4 The Wall
5 Teamwork, Teamwork
6 Gentoo
7 A Break in the Action
8 Gentoo and Her Story
9 A Farewell to Fins
10 Ransackers
11 You’ve Been Warned
12 Inside Annika’s Head
13 It’s All Downhill from Here
14 Gentoo and The Beautiful Seagull
15 The Sphevil of Sphen
16 Inside Pygo’s Head
17 Unwelcome Strangers
18 No Humans Allowed
19 Another Break in the Action
20 Gentoo and the Fish Taxes
21 Blackburn the Pirate
22 The Code of the Bandit
23 The Always-Full Sphen Moon
24 Those Glowing Eyes
25 A Penguin Is an Island
26 Give That Pirate a Hand
27 Hanging Around
28 Yet Another Break in the Action
29 The Brugarian Left-Hand Man
30 The Battle on the Pier
31 Out on the Deep Blue Sea
32 Into the Deep Blue Sea
33 Gentoo and the Warning
34 See Here
35 The Great Seer
36 Meanwhile, Down Below
37 Let’s Break the Action Again
38 Gentoo, the Fisher Girl
39 Shorty’s Egg
40 A Mother of a Battle
41 The Light
42 Gentoo and the Angry Soldiers
43 The Uncertain Seas
44 The Earl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
45 One Final Break in the Action
46 Unfortunately
47 The Cove
48 A Surprising Discovery
49 One Hundred Penguins
50 Gentoo and Her Army
51 An Expected Guest
52 The Earl’s Story
53 Welcome to the Family
54 Non-Burnt Fish Stick–Free Zone
55 The Yolk of Freedom
56 Clash of the Werepenguins
57 Attack of the Were-Gull
58 The Battle in the Palace
59 Oh, Boy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
60 Chosen for This
61 Gentoo and Her Hope
62 A Pirate’s Song
Epilogue: Near Midnight at the Place Formerly Known as the St. Aves Zoo
Prologue
Formerly Known as the St. Aves Zoo
A chill trickled down my back. My spine froze, my legs shivered, and my fingers felt like ten creaky icicles. I twisted the temperature knob in the shower and silently cursed my broken water heater. But while the water grew warmer, my brain still felt the harsh cold brought on by my memories of the boy and the penguins, a tale so filled with horror that I had barely slept since I had heard it months before.
Every night since had been the same: I would awaken at midnight screaming for Iggy, the stuffed iguana I’d hugged as a child. Then I would lie awake for hours, continuing to scream. The man who lived in the apartment above me would also lie awake for hours, or so he told the landlord before I was forced to move to a place with a thicker ceiling.
The worrying had aged me. Not only was my voice hoarse from screaming every night, but my hair had turned white, and my face had grown deep wrinkles. My fingers had grown deep wrinkles, too, but that was because I was taking a very long shower.
I knew what I had to do. First, I needed to turn off the water. Then, I needed to travel to the St. Aves Zoo and visit the penguin exhibit. I needed to find the penguin caretaker. I needed to hear what happened next in his long, dark story.
I soon found myself driving down the winding avenue that led to the St. Aves Zoo, armed with a briefcase filled with tissues. People tell me that, because of my severe animal allergies, I should never have started a job working with zoos. “Nonsense,” I tell them. “I am not allergic to all animals, only those with fur. Or legs.” In another life, I might have worked at an earthworm farm.
But that was neither here nor there. As I stepped out of my car, I sneezed and wiped my nose on my briefcase, before opening it to grab a tissue. It was already dusk; the trip had been a long one. I stared at a menagerie of idle trucks, cranes, and bulldozers.
Earlier in the day, these vehicles must have been loud and the action chaotic. Now all was still except for an angry ostrich hopping around the vast parking lot. Any workers who had been here before were gone, as were the walls of the zoo. The entrance sign lay on the ground along with broken wire fencing and crumpled gates. I stared down at that sign, now with a big crack down the middle:
WELCOME TO THE ST. AVES ZOO. HOME OF THE WORLD
FAMOUS ST. AVES PENGUINS.
“What’s going on? Where is everyone?” I asked a tall man scurrying across the lot. He wore a safari hat, a tan hunting jacket, and a long frown.
“What does it look like?” the man replied, his frown sinking deeper into his chin. He adjusted his monocle. “Everyone is gone for the day. They will finish demolishing the zoo tomorrow.”
“The St. Aves Zoo has closed? Why?”
“Why did the Hindenburg burn? Why did the Titanic sink? Why did the Great Chicago Fire take down a city?” he asked.
“Electrostatic discharge, an iceberg, and Mrs. O’Leary’s cow,” I answered.
“Exactly,” said the man. The angry ostrich dashed toward us on its thin gray legs and pecked him.
I thought about assisting the monocle-wearing man as he sprinted across the parking lot, trailed by that deranged bird. Being pecked by an angry ostrich is no laughing matter, or at least only sort of a laughing matter. But I had more pressing concerns. I hurried into the zoo, leaping over a stack of iron posts that had once been part of the front gate and racing down a winding cobblestone path.
I knew the route well, having walked through this zoo months earlier, and every night in my nightmares since. In those dreams I would sprint past Lion Lane and Alligator Alley, past Bison Boulevard and Hippo Highway and, finally, down Penguin Pass. At the end of the pass, among faux glaciers, wacky fish slides, and ceramic walrus statues, was the world’s greatest collection of penguins. But, in my dreams, I did not find a bounty of cute waddling birds. Instead, my nightmares were infected by an abnormally large creature with blood-red eyes, bushy eyebrows, twin horns, and a desire to eat me.
A werepenguin. A creature born to terrorize the night.
The penguin exhibit I found now at the St. Aves Zoo was not the one I had dreamed of, or remembered from my previous visit. The walrus statues were gone, as were the slides. The faux glaciers were broken apart so they looked more like giant faux ice cubes. There were no penguins.
The penguin caretaker, the man I had met during my last visit, stood next to a small maintenance shack, one of the few buildings left standing. He shook his head and gripped some of the strands of black hair on his mostly bald head. He was still short and round. He still wore, as he had when I last visited, a long black overcoat, a black scarf around his neck, and a white shirt, so that, if you squinted, he looked like a penguin.
As soon as I saw him I waved, then sneezed.
“Hello, friend,” he said. “It is good to see you again.” He smiled at me but could not completely hide his distress.
“What happened here?” I asked, sniffling and gripping my tissues tightly.
“A zeppelin crashed into us, all of the zoo’s money was lost at sea after a freak iceberg boating accident, and one of the cows burned down half the zoo.”
“So I heard. But what will become of you and your birds?”
The man sighed. “Your guess is as good as mine, my friend. My birds are zoo penguins. They are not used to foraging for food or battling sea lions. But I will do what I can to help them. In a way, they are my family.”
I had been commissioned by a large zoo, a new zoo, to find the best creatures in the world for its collection. That was what had brought me here previously. I had not succeeded in procuring the St. Aves penguins then, and had not yet found penguins of equal quality.
So perhaps my coming back here had been fate! I could give these penguins a home. I could provide the St. Aves chimpanzees a home, too, and the St. Aves llamas, elephants, hyenas, okapis—although I wasn’t sure what okapis were—and all the other animals. Each and every creature would have a new place to live.
Well, every creature except that mean-spirited ostrich in the parking lot, unless it took anger management classes.
No, even it!
“Where are the penguins now?” I asked.
“In a refrigerated storage facility near the boatyard. I will join them in the morning. But where we go from there, I do not know.”
“Perhaps I could be of service to you. Do you recall why I was here last? I can escort your penguins to my zoo.”
The man arched his eyebrows. It was an impressive arch, and I was jealous because I have never been able to create eyebrow arches with any skill. Still, I took his expression as a good sign.
But before I would give his penguins a home, I needed something first.
“I must hear the rest of your story,” I said to him. When he looked puzzled, I continued. “You told me of Bolt, and how he was adopted by an evil baron and turned into a werepenguin. But the story ended with him swimming off with his penguin colony, doomed to be a werepenguin forever.”
The man nodded. “I remember.” He briefly turned away and shook his head as if to say, How could I forget?
“I must know the rest,” I answered. “Tell me the entire story, and then I will take you, your penguins, and all the other St. Aves animals to my zoo.”
“Even the mean ostrich?” he asked, and I nodded. “Your offer is beyond generous, but I cannot accept. For it is a long, dreadful story. A story best left untold; a story I would rather forget than repeat. Ask anything else of me. But do not ask me to tell that.”
I folded my arms and stomped my foot, the latter of which was a mistake since my shoes had thin soles and I stepped on a sharp rock. “That is the price of admission. You must tell me what happened after Bolt fled Brugaria.”
“Please. Anything else.”
But my tightly folded arms showed that I would not budge from my request. I stared at him firmly and then sneezed, but dared not wipe my nose and break my stern gaze.
The man bowed his head. “I will tell you about the revenge of the werepenguin. But your hair looks whiter than I remember, and the rest of you seems more wrinkly. Let me ask you this: Have you had nightmares since you saw me last?”
“Every night,” I admitted. “And I also take very long showers.”
“After hearing the rest of my tale, you may never fall asleep again.”
1.
My Life as a Penguin
It was a city of snow: the glaciers were its skyscrapers, the floating ice sheets its roads, and the thousands of penguins barking along the seashore its remarkably well-dressed, tuxedo-clad citizens.
Humboldt Wattle—people called him “Bolt” back when there were other people around to call him anything—was almost thirteen years old but not quite, and he was a penguin, but also not quite and certainly not at that very moment. He sat in the snow on top of a small hill, wearing only a pair of old sweatpants and a thin T-shirt. That outfit would be quite insufficient to keep anyone else comfortable on this frozen tundra, but Bolt was cozy. He couldn’t feel cold.
However, he could feel the thoughts of his penguin brothers and sisters waddling along the shore, although he was not one of them. Not truly. He would never lay an egg, or at least he hoped he wouldn’t. He would never molt. He would never dive, beak-first, into the near-freezing sea during the afternoon. Instead, he would only dive, beak-first, into the near-freezing sea at night, under a full moon. But those nights were the only times he didn’t feel like an outsider! For on those nights, Bolt would swim with his family, yowl with them, and play with them.
It was too bad that full moons were so few and far between. The rest of the time, Bolt was merely human, or at least mostly so. For Bolt still had penguin blood surging inside him, which meant he could talk with the penguins, and read their minds.
But there was something deep inside the birds, a barrier that was hard and round and slightly crusty, and no matter how much Bolt tried to penetrate that crust, he couldn’t quite do it. Before joining this colony, before even coming to Brugaria, Bolt had been an unwanted orphan. It seemed that, no matter what he did or how far he traveled, he would never truly feel like he belonged somewhere, at least not completely.
That was part of his curse: the curse of the werepenguin.
As Bolt sat on his snowy hill, he rubbed his fingers against a slim gold chain around his neck. That chain had once held a killer whale’s tooth, but the tooth had been lost when Bolt fought the Baron, the diabolical despot who had bitten Bolt and transformed him into a penguin monster. Bolt had won the battle, and now he sat here while the Baron’s remains sat inside the stomach of an orca.
After their fight, Bolt had led the penguins here, hundreds of miles away, and far from other people. Word of a young werepenguin who treated penguins not as his servants but as his family had spread far and wide. The tale had been told from the glubs of fish, the chirps of birds, and the legs of ice crickets. And so the penguin colony had grown.
Bolt stood up, stretched his legs, and waddled down the hill. His walk was part penguin and part human, just like the rest of him.
“Good afternoon,” barked a nearby penguin. Bolt couldn’t bark like a penguin, not in his human form, but he thought the words Good afternoon to you, and the penguin smiled, as best a penguin can, which is not much of a smile at all.
Penguins show their emotions through their eyes, mostly. Beaks are not very expressive.
As Bolt walked through the colony, nodding and smiling to his brothers and sisters, he heard a human shout. It took him a few seconds to realize he wasn’t imagining it. There it was again: a girl’s voice, calling out in the distance.
No, that was impossible. The colony was at least fifty miles from any human town.
“Bolt!”
Or maybe it was possible.
Bolt turned and there, in the distance, stood a girl, waving. A short penguin sat next to her.
Bolt ran toward the figures, his bird-blood-powered legs skimming across the ice with more traction than if he wore snow boots. He saw the girl with the waving hand, a girl who was about Bolt’s age with blonde hair held up with bobby pins, collapse, first to her knees. Then the rest of her buckled and flopped to the ground like a dead fish. The small penguin beside her gave a doglike howl.
Bolt squatted on the ice next to the fallen girl, his cold-impervious hands holding her nearly frozen fingers.
“Bolt, we found you,” said Annika, her voice a whisper, a small but desperate smile on her ashen face as she closed her eyes and lost consciousness.
2.
Alive and Coughing
Bolt lived in a small igloo, which he’d built with help from many penguins in the colony. Penguin wings can’t scoop snow well, but are excellent for patting down lumps and smoothing gaps.
The igloo had just one big round room and, since it was carved from snow and ice, lacked basic amenities such as heat or plumbing. Now that he had a visitor, Bolt wished he had done more decorating. A small ice table held a pink vase with some green wisps of seaweed that tried to pass themselves off as flowers. On the ground, in the corner, was a sleek stainless-steel toaster that might have made wonderful toast if there had been an electrical outlet. And if Bolt had bread.
The waves from the sea brought gifts like those on occasion. The clothes Bolt wore, for example, had been in a washed-ashore suitcase. The toaster and vase had floated to their beach in a small wooden crate.
Annika lay on Bolt’s snow bed. She wore black-and-white tattered lederhosen, the traditional penguin-like garb of the Brugarian Forest Bandits. Bolt had piled his two blankets atop her.
