Ignatius MacFarland, page 12
“Yeah. Right now, I can let go of the rope and fall. I can enjoy not being yelled at by you for once. And I can tell you that we’d better think of some way to get back down onto the ground because we’re not gonna have any more trees to hide in soon.”
Before Karen could respond, Foo flew up and hovered next to us.
“No one will help me carry you guys away,” Foo said, sounding a bit too calm for my taste. “They’re all mad at you. And I’d need at least ten of us to carry your weight.” Then Foo looked up above us. “I can lower you both down to the ground but then you’d be right in the middle of the army.”
Foo pointed down at the thousands of creatures swarming around all the trees who were continuing to chop and blow up the tree trunks. It didn’t look like a good place for us to go.
“Hey, it’s either that or fall on top of them from up here and die,” said Karen, stating the very thing I knew but was afraid to admit. “Just get us off this rope.”
Foo gave us a worried look, then looked me in the eyes, reached out, and touched my face with her hand. Even though I was in a really dangerous situation at that moment, my heart sort of leaped in my chest again. Hey, when a pretty girl touches your face, it’s a really big deal, no matter what you happen to be doing at the moment.
Foo flew up to the walkway. We saw that she had tied the rope we were on to the rail that was next to another wooden elevator bowl. She pushed the lever and the bowl started to come slowly down next to us. When it stopped, Karen swung her feet up and got inside the bowl, then pulled the rope closer so that I could get into it.
BOOM! The tree shook and the bowl bounced. We looked down and saw a huge cloud of smoke where the explosion had just occurred. It had taken a pretty big chunk out of our tree, though not enough to make it fall over. But the explosion had made all the creatures run away from the bottom of it.
“Okay,” said Karen. “It’s now or never.” She looked up at Foo. “Drop us!”
Foo nodded and hit the lever.
SHOOM! The bowl dropped so fast that I thought my stomach was going to fly out of my mouth. We plummeted so rapidly that the tree next to us just looked like a blur, and then all of a sudden, the bowl jerked to a stop inside the cloud from the explosion. Karen and I slammed together as we both fell over from the impact. I waited for her to yell at me but her kung fu brain was already getting ready for our escape.
“All right,” she said through the smoke, which was making us both cough. “Follow me and don’t let anybody attack me from behind. Just grab something and start swinging it.”
Karen jumped out of the bowl and I watched through the smoke as she grabbed a big jagged shaft of wood that had been blown off of the tree. I jumped out after her and reached down for some kind of weapon. The first thing I grabbed was a really long, thin branch. I wanted to look for something stronger but Karen was already running out of the smoke and yelling, “Iggy! C’mon!”
I pulled my book bag off my back, figuring that it might be a better weapon than a long skinny stick, followed her out of the smoke, and immediately realized that we were in major trouble. We were completely surrounded by Mr. Arthur’s army. All of the tough mole guys and three-legged no-armed gorillas and purple babies and praying mantises and giant potato bugs and fly-headed octopuses stared at us with bloodthirsty looks. The gorilla guys all had giant swords that they would hold up to the side with one of their feet and then toss back and forth, always putting the feet that weren’t holding the sword back down on the ground so that they kind of looked like they were hopping as they brandished their weapons. But it wasn’t the kind of hopping that was funny. It was the kind of hopping that said we were about to get our heads chopped off.
They all started moving in on Karen and me. Karen held up her jagged piece of wood as I put my back against hers and wished that somehow I could just meld into her so that she could protect me and I wouldn’t have to try and fight off Mr. Arthur’s army with the book bag and crappy long twig I was holding. But I honestly didn’t see how even Karen could fight her way out of this one. I mean, I’d seen Bruce Lee movies where he beat up about twenty guys at one time but I don’t think even Bruce Lee could fight his way out of the middle of a thousand huge, armed creatures.
Man, at that moment I was sure hoping that Karen was a lot tougher than Bruce Lee.
24
. . . INTO THE FIRE
“Iggy,” Karen whispered over her shoulder at me. “Make your cell phone ring again.”
“I can’t,” I whispered back. “The battery’s dead.”
“Why’d you leave it on?!” she whispered back angrily.
“I didn’t!” I whispered back again, figuring that maybe lying would keep me from getting yelled at during this tense moment. “I have a bad battery.”
“You came to another frequency with a bad battery?”
“It’s not like I knew I was coming!”
“Well, we’re gonna be as dead as your battery in about two seconds,” she said as she looked at the creatures who were glaring at us and slowly moving in.
“Can’t you fight our way out of here?”
“Who the hell do you think I am?” she whispered incredulously. “Bruce Lee?”
Oh, man. We were so dead.
WHAP! Suddenly a big piece of netting dropped down on top of the group of gorilla guys who were standing in front of Karen. We looked up and saw Foo swooshing past. She looked down and gave me a smile and a nod that seemed to say, “There you go. Now you can fight your way out of there.”
The gorilla guys sort of freaked out the minute the net hit them. The front two threw their feet-hands up in the air to fight with the net and dropped their swords on the ground. Karen and I saw this and got the same idea.
“Grab the swords!” we both yelled at the exact same time. Normally if that happened, I’d yell something stupid like “Jinx!” or “Buy me a Coke!” because that’s what you’re supposed to yell if two people say the exact same thing at the exact same time. But clearly this wasn’t the right moment. Even a goofball like me knew that.
We both dived for the swords and grabbed them. They were super heavy and I sort of had to drag mine until my arm figured out just how much the thing weighed and got used to it. But Karen had hers up and was pointing its sharp tip at the creatures with a look on her face that said, “Okay, who wants their head cut off first?”
Making sure nobody was coming up behind us, I looked back and saw the wooden elevator bowl and suddenly got an idea. I didn’t know if it was a good idea but at that moment my options were a) have a sword fight with a thousand huge army guys from another frequency even though I had never had a sword fight before in my life or b) think of some other way out of this. And so my idea seemed like the way to go.
I ran over to the bowl and with a swing of the sword cut the ropes the bowl was hanging on. The bowl thumped onto the ground as I turned and called to Karen.
“Hey!” I yelled, pointing at the bowl. “Turtle tank!”
Karen gave me as weird a look as you probably are right now because neither of you would know what “turtle tank” is. But I did because of this really stupid game that Ivan, Gary, and I used to play. We’d take Ivan’s blue plastic swimming pool from when he was really little and two of us would turn it upside down and then get under it. Then we’d have to run with our legs all crouched so that we sort of looked like a big blue headless turtle. Whoever wasn’t under the pool had to try to stop us before we got to the opposite fence in Ivan’s backyard. It was a pretty dumb game and something we stopped playing after Ivan got a baseball bat without telling us and hit the pool so hard as we were running at him that he knocked one of Gary’s teeth out and made my ears ring for about three days. But we always found that it was sort of hard to stop whoever was under the pool from running past just because the thing was so big.
The wooden bowl was smaller than the pool but was higher and rounder and seemed like something Karen and I could use to get through the crowd, since it was hard enough to protect us from swinging swords and axes.
I grabbed the bowl and tipped it to show Karen what I was talking about. She seemed to understand and got a skeptical look.
“You’re joking, righ —?”
RIIPPPPP! The gorilla guys tore through the net and pulled it apart, now madder than they were before Foo dropped the net on them. They raised their remaining swords and started to charge at us.
“Let’s do it!” Karen yelled as she ran toward me.
We grabbed the bowl and flipped it over on top of us. I didn’t hunch over low enough and got clonked on the head really hard.
“Ow!” I yelled.
“Shut up and lift it with your shoulders!”
“Hey, don’t tell me how to do a turtle tank! It was my idea.”
“Then GO!”
We heaved the heavy wooden bowl up on our backs and started to run right at the gorilla guys. Immediately, we heard tons of swords hitting the bowl and felt them pushing against us as they tried to stop us. We could see their weird feet-hands poking under the bowl as they swarmed around us and then we saw some of the feet grab the sides of the bowl as they tried to lift it off us.
“Use your sword!” Karen yelled so that I could hear her over the deafening sound of swords hitting us. She then took her sword and swept it fast along the bottom edge of the bowl. SWIP! The sword neatly cut off the fingers of a foot-hand that was holding on. Blood spurted out of it as we heard a scream and the foot-hand quickly pulled away. I thought I was going to faint. I’ve never been good around blood or anything gross and I even passed out once when they showed a movie in our science class about how to do CPR. So seeing something get its fingers and/or toes cut off right in front of me was a bit more than my sensitive brain could handle. But, fortunately or unfortunately, when a thousand huge creatures are trying to kill you, there’s not a lot of time for fainting.
Karen and I started running even faster as she used her sword to stab at the feet of any creatures that came too close. I tried to do the same but since I was behind Karen, I was worried that I might end up stabbing her in the foot or cutting off her leg with my sword if I moved it from side to side too much. And so I just tried to stab down on the right side of the bowl as if I were skiing and the sword was one of my ski poles.
It was at this moment I realized we couldn’t see where the heck we were going. We were getting through the crowd pretty effectively but it was only a matter of time before we ran into a tree. Which is exactly what happened next.
THWACK!
Karen smacked into the front of the bowl and I smacked into her back, hitting so hard we clunked our heads together for the second time in twenty-four hours. We fell down and the bowl whumped onto the ground around us, creating a safety shell over our bodies. We then heard swords and axes start chopping at the bowl again as we both tried to recover from the collision.
“This is stupid,” Karen said, sounding like she was in major pain as we sat in the dark wooden igloo. “We can’t even see where we’re going. This is no way to fight.”
“It’s either this or get killed,” I said, hoping that Karen wasn’t about to do what I had a feeling she was about to do.
“Iggy, look. These guys are all terrible fighters because they never even held swords before Mr. Arthur put them up to it. So just start swinging that blade and look mean and scream a lot and you’ll scare the life out of most of them. And then follow me. I know a way out of this forest.”
“Wait a minute. What do you mean I’ll scare ‘most’ of them?”
But it was too late. Karen flipped the bowl off us and let out the loudest battle yell I’d ever heard in my life. I looked up and saw we were surrounded by a ton of army creatures and that they were all suddenly just standing there staring at us in complete shock. And then Karen lifted the sword over her head, yelled again, and charged right into the middle of them. The creatures all scattered as if she were carrying a bomb that was about to go off, and I watched her disappear through the dense crowd. Then they all turned and looked back at me.
Oh, man.
I took a deep breath, jumped up, yelled as loud as I could, then lifted my sword and ran straight at them.
Nobody moved.
Two of the gorilla guys stuck out their feet-hands and grabbed my arms. A praying mantis guy reached out and snatched the sword out of my hand. Then the gorilla guys spun me around and pulled me against them, taking their swords and putting the sharp edges up against my neck.
Apparently these guys were not in the “scare the life out of most of them” category.
The creatures facing me all smiled and looked like they were going to eat me for breakfast. They held up their weapons and I suddenly knew what a Thanksgiving turkey must feel like when it’s lying on the chopping block. I looked up and saw Foo hovering high above, staring down at me with a helpless look on her face.
The crowd of creatures parted and the huge mole guy who had tried to capture us back in Karen’s hideout pushed through them. Seeing his fancy uniform up against those of the other creatures, I could tell that he was the head of the army. He stared at me with an angry look, then made what I assumed was a smile for mole people, since it was sort of hard to tell exactly what part of his weird round mouth were the sides that are supposed to go up to form a smile.
“Mr. Arthur wants to see you,” said the mole guy’s deep rumbling voice. “And I sure wouldn’t want to be you right now.”
That made two of us.
25
SLAPPING THE PRESIDENT FIVE
As I marched along like a prisoner in the middle of Mr. Arthur’s army and felt the various swords and weapons poking against the book bag on my back, I could still hear the explosions and chopping behind us as the creatures continued to cut down the flying people’s treetop city. I had thought they would stop once they found Karen and me, but for some reason they were dead set on destroying the flying people’s home. It made me wonder all the more about how insane and evil Mr. Arthur must have become in his time away from our frequency.
Was he this loony and heartless back when he was a teacher in our school? Did these feelings lurk inside him as he taught his classes, like some kind of flu germ you catch that doesn’t show its symptoms for a few days? Or did the journey from our frequency to this one make him crazy? Did he start out normal, feeling the same feelings I did when I first arrived, and then slowly the craziness took him over and he lost his mind? Or had he always been a bad guy who was just looking for a good place to be bad? I had no idea but I had a feeling I was about to find out.
The army marched me through the middle of Lesterville like I was the grand marshal in a parade. The only difference was that normally people like the grand marshal in a parade. For me, all the creatures came out and lined the streets of the fake Times Square and booed and hissed and made all the sounds that their various species made to show their disapproval of something or someone. In this case, me.
Now, as you know, I had never been very popular back in my frequency but I had never been booed before. I had seen criminals on TV doing what the news called “the perp walk” (perp being short for perpetrator) and people had booed them, but those were guys who had killed people and done all sorts of horrible things. I was just some kid who got thrown into a different world and apparently befriended somebody the creatures here really didn’t like. It seemed like an overreaction, if you ask me. Of course, since there were so many army guys with me, maybe the creatures felt they had to boo to keep from getting arrested themselves. Who could tell?
We marched past the theater where Hamlet was playing and I realized I was now heading into a part of the city I had never seen before. It looked pretty much as fake and crummy as the rest of the city looked, with the addition of a huge statue of Mr. Arthur in the middle of a park that was filled with rickety swing sets that little mole kids were trying to swing on but kept falling off because they don’t really have butts.
I knew the statue was of Mr. Arthur because everything in this place was about Mr. Arthur. But I have to say, it was a pretty terrible statue. It sort of looked more like a mannequin in a department store and the face seemed like something I might draw if somebody made me draw a picture of Mr. Arthur using only my left hand. And since I’m right-handed, you can only imagine what that would look like. But as weird as that statue was, it wasn’t until we rounded the corner that I saw something that really threw me for a loop.
The White House.
There it was, sitting at the end of a really big lawn surrounded by a huge fence that looked like the fence around the real White House but that was way taller and scarier. It was the kind of fence you would never try to climb over because you knew you’d get impaled on the spikes at the top or caught by guards before you were even halfway up it.
There were tons of guards from all the different creature species dressed in poorly fitting suits positioned along the fence, and I had to figure Mr. Arthur was hoping the suits would make them look like secret service men. Unfortunately for him, they just looked more like when people have a pet parade and dress their dogs and cats up in human clothes and costumes. The creatures he had chosen were mean-looking, but their clothes sort of made you want to burst out laughing and say, “Awwww, isn’t that cute?”
We came up to a guardhouse at the front gate. The mole guy commander and the two gorilla guards walked me up to a giant purple baby who was dressed in an enormous dark suit with a tie that was way too short.
“Got the new Anti-Art,” said the mole guy in his deep rumble. “President Arthur wanted him brought in as soon as we caught him.”
“Good work,” said the purple baby in a weird voice that I can only describe as something the world’s biggest munchkin might have. He then did a big salute. RIIIPPPP! The armpit of his suit split open. “Oh, man,” was all he said as he looked at the hole he had just made and stared at his armpit like he was going to cry.
