Ignatius MacFarland, page 6
“Yes!” It’s pretty embarrassing to admit but when I said this I was sort of about two seconds away from crying. Not that I’m the kind of kid who starts crying if anything bad happens. I’d had plenty of bad stuff happen to me over the years but very seldom did I cry about it. I mean, I wasn’t like Paul Fresco, the big tall kid who was a grade higher than me who was famous for crying whenever anything happened to him. He even started crying once just because somebody asked him why he always cried.
“How did you get here?” she asked.
“I told you, I don’t know. My friends and I made a rocket but the engine exploded when I went inside it and when I got out of it, everything was gone and I was wherever this place is.”
I was trying really hard to hold it together but my stupid nose was starting to run and so I had to do a big sniffle the second I finished what I said. Fortunately, she seemed to be thinking about something else and wasn’t really paying attention to me or my nose at that moment.
“Then it’s true,” was all she said, way more to herself than to me.
“What’s true?” I asked with another big embarrassing sniffle.
“That’s the same way I got here,” she said, looking at me like I was supposed to be all amazed.
“You built a rocket and it blew up?”
“No, dummy, I got here because of an explosion, too.”
“You did?” I asked, pretending to scratch my nose while actually intercepting a drip that was about to come out. “What kind of explosion?”
“I was mixing a bunch of chemicals that I wasn’t supposed to be mixing in my chemistry class and the whole thing exploded and when I woke up, I was lying on top of a hill next to this city.”
I was pretty surprised when she told me this, I have to admit, because it made me remember something. A year ago, there was this big story in our local paper about this weird girl from the high school who had blown herself up in science class. I didn’t know who she was, but the kids in my grade with older brothers and sisters said she was this really strange girl who was pretty smart but who never talked to anybody and who always dressed like she thought she was living in a vampire movie. A lot of people thought that she blew herself up on purpose because she only listened to really depressing music about death and dying. It always sounded a lot to me like the way Mr. Arthur had died. Or appeared to have died, since both his and Karen’s bodies were never found at the explosion sites.
“I read about you in the newspaper. Everybody thinks you blew yourself up on purpose,” I said, wondering if she was going to get mad.
She did.
“God, that’s so stupid! Figures all those mindless drones in that toilet of a town would think I would kill myself just because I wasn’t one of them. Yes, that’s me. The poor little suicidal freak.” She glared at me like I was the one who had started the rumor about her. Although I guess I was sort of guilty because when I had read about her, I just assumed that the story was true. Still . . .
“Hey, don’t get mad at me. I wasn’t the one who said you did it. I don’t even know you,” I said defensively. “If it makes you feel any better, everybody thinks that Mr. Arthur killed himself, too.”
“He did kill himself,” she said, giving me a look that showed she thought I was a moron. “Or he thought he did. Too bad he didn’t.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, a bit put off that she had just wished Mr. Arthur dead. “What’s going on? How did we all get here?”
“Don’t you get it?” she said with another you’re-an-idiot look. “We jumped frequencies.”
I was completely confused.
“Don’t stare at me like you just smelled dog poop,” she said. “Look. Each one of us was caught in an explosion. Each one of us ended up here. Our explosions knocked us into a parallel reality.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means we’re existing in the same space on the same planet as the one we knew back home, but we’re in a different frequency of it. Like when you press the button on a car stereo to change the station. The music is coming out of the same radio in the same car, but it’s completely different because it’s at a different frequency.”
I looked at her like I thought she was crazy but quickly realized that what she was saying sort of made sense. But it didn’t make it any easier to understand.
“How do you know this?” I asked, trying to use a nice tone of voice so that she wouldn’t yell at me again.
“I just know it, okay? Think about it. When you got out of your rocket, were you in the same place you were before the explosion? Were you surrounded by the same mountains and hills and stuff ?”
She was right. The dead field was still the dead field after the explosion and the mouse ears were still where they had been back home. Only the barn was gone. Although . . .
“Wait a minute. All the trees and plants and grass were different. So it wasn’t really the same place,” I said, feeling smart.
“No duh, genius,” she said sarcastically (as if you couldn’t tell). “That’s all the living stuff. The plants and everything evolved differently here than it did back where we’re from. But the hills and the mountains and the whole planet are the same. Like after I woke up from the explosion, I was on top of a hill. And it was the same hill that the high school is built on top of. It’s just that the school doesn’t exist in this reality. Thank God.”
I tried to take this all in but was feeling a bit overwhelmed. “What do you mean, that the living things evolved differently?”
“What grade are you in?” she asked with the same I-just-smelled-dog-poop look she had yelled at me for having on my face moments earlier.
“Seventh,” I said defensively.
“Don’t they teach you about evolution in science class?” Then she gave me a weird look. “You don’t go to some crazy private school, do you?”
“No, I go to the same junior high you went to. And I know about evolution.” I was suddenly kicking myself for all the alien drawings I had made while Mr. Andriasco was giving his lectures about evolution, as well as hoping that she wouldn’t ask me to explain it.
“Yeah?” she said as she arched her eyebrow at me. “Then what is it?”
Great.
“It’s . . . uh . . . it’s . . . um . . . uh . . .” Man, I should have paid more attention in class.
“You’re the reason that schools are losing funding, kid,” she said with a smirk. “Evolution means that everything develops from a really basic form. And since this is a different world, everything in it developed and evolved differently than in our world.”
“How’s that possible?”
“The only reason things look the way they do in our world is because of billions of tiny mutations that happen over millions of years. It’s all random and can come out differently every time. Some single cell creatures develop into multiple cell creatures. Then while they’re all multiplying and having kids, one or two of their kids have a different gene in their DNA that makes them stronger or more able to survive than the others. So those plants and creatures live while the other ones die and the stronger ones multiply again.
“Eventually, they or their kids or their kids’ kids have some kids who have a mutated gene that makes them stronger and more able to survive. So those become the new creatures and on and on for millions of years until suddenly everything looks either the way it does here or in that stupid town we used to live in.”
“What do you mean ‘used to’?” I said, probably sounding way more scared and whiny than I wanted to in front of her.
“I mean that if you know some way for us to get back there, I’d love to hear it. Because I can tell you from a year’s worth of experience that we are majorly trapped in this frequency.”
“Can’t we just make another explosion and get back?”
“You think I haven’t tried that? How do you think I got all of Arthur’s whack pack after me?”
“Whack pack? What’s Arthur’s whack pack?” I really hate when I don’t know stuff and so I end up saying “What?” and “Huh?” and “What are you talking about?” during a whole conversation. Usually I’ll just pretend that I know what people are referring to and then go home and check on the Internet to figure out what it was I was pretending to understand. But at this moment, I couldn’t understand anything Karen was talking about and I didn’t have any Internet to run home to because I didn’t have a home anymore.
“Trust me, kid,” she said with a serious look. “You’ll find out.”
And that was when the wall on the other side of the room exploded.
14
I AM OF ABSOLUTELY NO HELP AT ALL
Karen screamed and I screamed even louder as a cloud of dust blew all over us and rocks and all kinds of other junk rained down from the explosion. I had so much dust in my eyes that I couldn’t see what was going on at first.
But then I could. And suddenly I wished I couldn’t.
Through all the dust and smoke I saw really bright light pouring through the hole in the wall that the explosion had made. And through the hole I suddenly saw about five or six big creatures walk into the room. The first one through was one of the mole guys, which meant he was walking really slowly. But he wasn’t dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts like the ones at Artbucks had been. This one was wearing some kind of army uniform. And he looked really mean.
His body was bigger and bulkier than the Artbucks mole guys, and when he looked at Karen and me with his long pointy nose, I saw that his face had what seemed to be a really nasty expression on it. (Though it was hard to tell with the mole creatures, since their faces weren’t really like faces that you and I are used to seeing.) He was carrying a huge sword/ax weapon that immediately became even scarier to me than he was. He stopped when he saw Karen and me and said in a really deep and hard-to-understand voice, “I knew I smelled them!”
As the other creatures came into the room, all dressed in their army uniforms, I quickly realized that as big as the huge mole guy was, he was small compared to the rest of them. I recognized another creature as one of the huge five-armed purple babies. But this one looked like the meanest baby in the world. And since it was holding a huge spear with the most deadly-looking pitchfork thing on the end, you can see I’m not exaggerating when I say it was the nastiest-looking infant ever.
Next to the baby was one of the praying mantis creatures, like the one that had been making coffee at the Artbucks. But where that bug creature was skinny like a stick, this bug was as big as the huge hundred-year-old log that we had lying in our backyard. Instead of having twiggy arms, its arms were thick and spiky and each one was holding a big square knife blade that would flash a bright glint right into my eyes when any light hit its super sharp-looking edges.
The rest of the creatures coming into the room were kinds I hadn’t seen before. One looked like a six-foot-tall hairy rolled-up potato bug with an arm sticking out one side and a tentacle with what I guess was its eyeball sticking out the other. It rolled through the hole in the wall and was holding this spinning weapon that looked like a wagon wheel with blades stuck all over it. Another creature was like a giant four-legged walking octopus with what looked like a fly’s eye for a head. Strapped onto the front of each of its feet was a block with sharp metal spikes sticking out.
When the giant octopus creature saw Karen and me (or is it Karen and I? — I can never remember), it lifted one of its blocks of spikes and pointed it right at us, like it was telling us it was going to kill us as soon as it was allowed to. A couple of other creatures were coming in behind these but before I could focus on them, Karen stood up and blocked my view.
“Get out of here, dirt-eater!” Karen yelled at the mole guy as she reached over with one hand and grabbed a long bamboo-looking pole that was leaning against the wall. Oh, great, I thought, that pole’s really gonna protect us against the knives and spikes and blades that just arrived in the room.
“You are under arrest for trying to destroy Lesterville,” the mole guy said in his deep, rumbling voice. When he did, all the other creatures growled or hummed or snorted or made some other weird sound that said they didn’t like Karen and that the chances were very good they weren’t going to like me, either.
“You’re as stupid as your president, you know that?” Karen said with a laugh. “Lesterville doesn’t need me to destroy it. All it’ll take is one good gust of wind.”
“Hey,” I whispered loudly to her, since I still didn’t know her name at that moment. “Don’t make them mad.”
“Too late,” said the mole guy. He then turned to the other creatures and signaled them to grab us. And suddenly all the creatures started moving forward, each holding up their weapons to show us that we were in big trouble.
This has been quite a day, I thought.
I looked at Karen to see if she was going to start crying or screaming but she had this weird look on her face. She didn’t look scared. She looked intense, like she was going to fight them.
“Get out the door, kid!” she yelled at me, never taking her eyes off the advancing creatures. I looked back at the little door she had shoved me through and dropped down to it. I pushed and it started to open but then quickly slammed back shut. I pushed again but something was pushing back from the outside.
“You’re dead, traitors!” was all I heard through the door. It was a weird, squealy voice, like somebody had taught a pig how to talk. Whoever or whatever the voice was coming from, it was now holding the door closed.
“They’re blocking the door!” I yelled to Karen as the creatures advanced on us. I had always imagined in all the action movies and science fiction films I had seen over the years that if I was ever in a dangerous situation, I’d be really cool and in control, like Indiana Jones or Luke Skywalker or the king from Lord of the Rings. But the fact that my voice just sounded like a five-year-old girl’s when she screams because she saw a spider made me realize that this was not about to be one of my prouder moments.
“Then grab something and help me fight these guys!” she yelled at me. And with that, she suddenly struck a pose like she thought she was in a kung fu movie, gave a war cry, and ran toward the creatures. She spun her pole over her head and then slammed it down on top of the giant octopus’s fly-eye. The octopus whistled in pain, then kicked one of its spike blocks forward. Karen quickly spun and smashed her pole down on the approaching leg. This drove the spikes into the ground as the giant octopus tripped and fell forward.
Before its head even hit the floor, Karen spun the pole around her back to change hands and whipped it down on the back of its fly-eye. The octopus whistled in pain so loudly that my eardrums crackled and then it fell in a twisted, unconscious heap.
Karen spun around and swung her pole like a baseball bat, right as the huge praying mantis was charging up behind her. Her pole swung directly into the four knife-wielding arms that were about to cut her up. The force of her blow spun the bug creature sideways and Karen quickly tossed her pole in the air and grabbed it in the middle. She then started spinning the pole from side to side with both hands, like the world’s deadliest baton twirler in a marching band. As the bug creature regained its balance and turned back to her, her spinning pole started knocking into all the square blades it was trying to hit her with. In a whirl of Karen’s twirling staff, the blades went flying everywhere as the other creatures (and I) ducked.
One blade flew into the ceiling. Another blade stuck into the wall. Another blade flew right over my head and stuck in the little door behind me, practically giving me a haircut on its way there. Karen kept up her spinning pole attack on the mantis’s loglike body; the nonstop hits sounded like somebody was playing the drums on a telephone pole.
Crack! She hit one of the bug creature’s arms so hard that it broke off and went flying across the room, hitting the giant baby right in what I assumed was its face. (It’s hard to tell when something doesn’t have normal eyes.) The baby howled like a walrus and the bug screamed like an eagle, then cocked its only remaining blade back behind it in order to take a huge, head-cutting-off swing at Karen. Karen stopped spinning the pole and thrust it forward right into the center of the bug’s body. The praying mantis stumbled back across the room and right into the giant baby, knocking them both down onto the floor with a huge Ka-PLAM!
Just then I heard the potato-bug thing rolling toward Karen, its one arm spinning the blade-covered wagon wheel and extending it out like a propeller to shred her into coleslaw.
“Look out!” I yelled uselessly, since she had already seen it coming.
“Get in here and help me, kid!” she yelled as I looked around, scared out of my wits.
“How?” I yelled back.
“Grab something and start swinging!” was all she got out before she leaped in the air and just dodged the wheel of blades that the potato bug swung at her. As she was up in midair, she swung the pole down hard on top of the rolled-up creature. Thud! The pole just bounced off it as Karen fell back down onto the ground in a heap.
“Nice try!” The potato bug thing laughed in a surprisingly high voice, considering its enormous size.
It then turned and rolled forward like it was going to try to crush Karen under it but, at the last minute, Karen rolled sideways and smashed her pole right into the creature’s eye.
“Eeeeeeeeeeee!” the potato bug screamed as it rolled past Karen and into the wall with a thump that shook the whole room. And then it unrolled, revealing about a hundred disgusting, squirming legs all over its black underbelly. Karen then jumped up and hit a real kung fu stance as she waited for the unrolled creature to move again.
Who is this girl? I wondered.
The tentacle that held the potato bug’s eye turned and glared at Karen like it was really mad and then the bug curled itself back up into a ball and started rolling toward her again, its blade wheel spinning even faster than before. It started swinging the wheel back and forth so that it was like a huge swinging buzz saw. Karen looked nervous for the first time and I tried to think of what to do. I then looked over and saw a rickety-looking table lying on its side against the wall. Since my parents had just taken me to the circus a few weeks earlier and I had watched a bunch of tumblers doing lots of different stunts, I suddenly got an idea.
“How did you get here?” she asked.
“I told you, I don’t know. My friends and I made a rocket but the engine exploded when I went inside it and when I got out of it, everything was gone and I was wherever this place is.”
I was trying really hard to hold it together but my stupid nose was starting to run and so I had to do a big sniffle the second I finished what I said. Fortunately, she seemed to be thinking about something else and wasn’t really paying attention to me or my nose at that moment.
“Then it’s true,” was all she said, way more to herself than to me.
“What’s true?” I asked with another big embarrassing sniffle.
“That’s the same way I got here,” she said, looking at me like I was supposed to be all amazed.
“You built a rocket and it blew up?”
“No, dummy, I got here because of an explosion, too.”
“You did?” I asked, pretending to scratch my nose while actually intercepting a drip that was about to come out. “What kind of explosion?”
“I was mixing a bunch of chemicals that I wasn’t supposed to be mixing in my chemistry class and the whole thing exploded and when I woke up, I was lying on top of a hill next to this city.”
I was pretty surprised when she told me this, I have to admit, because it made me remember something. A year ago, there was this big story in our local paper about this weird girl from the high school who had blown herself up in science class. I didn’t know who she was, but the kids in my grade with older brothers and sisters said she was this really strange girl who was pretty smart but who never talked to anybody and who always dressed like she thought she was living in a vampire movie. A lot of people thought that she blew herself up on purpose because she only listened to really depressing music about death and dying. It always sounded a lot to me like the way Mr. Arthur had died. Or appeared to have died, since both his and Karen’s bodies were never found at the explosion sites.
“I read about you in the newspaper. Everybody thinks you blew yourself up on purpose,” I said, wondering if she was going to get mad.
She did.
“God, that’s so stupid! Figures all those mindless drones in that toilet of a town would think I would kill myself just because I wasn’t one of them. Yes, that’s me. The poor little suicidal freak.” She glared at me like I was the one who had started the rumor about her. Although I guess I was sort of guilty because when I had read about her, I just assumed that the story was true. Still . . .
“Hey, don’t get mad at me. I wasn’t the one who said you did it. I don’t even know you,” I said defensively. “If it makes you feel any better, everybody thinks that Mr. Arthur killed himself, too.”
“He did kill himself,” she said, giving me a look that showed she thought I was a moron. “Or he thought he did. Too bad he didn’t.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, a bit put off that she had just wished Mr. Arthur dead. “What’s going on? How did we all get here?”
“Don’t you get it?” she said with another you’re-an-idiot look. “We jumped frequencies.”
I was completely confused.
“Don’t stare at me like you just smelled dog poop,” she said. “Look. Each one of us was caught in an explosion. Each one of us ended up here. Our explosions knocked us into a parallel reality.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means we’re existing in the same space on the same planet as the one we knew back home, but we’re in a different frequency of it. Like when you press the button on a car stereo to change the station. The music is coming out of the same radio in the same car, but it’s completely different because it’s at a different frequency.”
I looked at her like I thought she was crazy but quickly realized that what she was saying sort of made sense. But it didn’t make it any easier to understand.
“How do you know this?” I asked, trying to use a nice tone of voice so that she wouldn’t yell at me again.
“I just know it, okay? Think about it. When you got out of your rocket, were you in the same place you were before the explosion? Were you surrounded by the same mountains and hills and stuff ?”
She was right. The dead field was still the dead field after the explosion and the mouse ears were still where they had been back home. Only the barn was gone. Although . . .
“Wait a minute. All the trees and plants and grass were different. So it wasn’t really the same place,” I said, feeling smart.
“No duh, genius,” she said sarcastically (as if you couldn’t tell). “That’s all the living stuff. The plants and everything evolved differently here than it did back where we’re from. But the hills and the mountains and the whole planet are the same. Like after I woke up from the explosion, I was on top of a hill. And it was the same hill that the high school is built on top of. It’s just that the school doesn’t exist in this reality. Thank God.”
I tried to take this all in but was feeling a bit overwhelmed. “What do you mean, that the living things evolved differently?”
“What grade are you in?” she asked with the same I-just-smelled-dog-poop look she had yelled at me for having on my face moments earlier.
“Seventh,” I said defensively.
“Don’t they teach you about evolution in science class?” Then she gave me a weird look. “You don’t go to some crazy private school, do you?”
“No, I go to the same junior high you went to. And I know about evolution.” I was suddenly kicking myself for all the alien drawings I had made while Mr. Andriasco was giving his lectures about evolution, as well as hoping that she wouldn’t ask me to explain it.
“Yeah?” she said as she arched her eyebrow at me. “Then what is it?”
Great.
“It’s . . . uh . . . it’s . . . um . . . uh . . .” Man, I should have paid more attention in class.
“You’re the reason that schools are losing funding, kid,” she said with a smirk. “Evolution means that everything develops from a really basic form. And since this is a different world, everything in it developed and evolved differently than in our world.”
“How’s that possible?”
“The only reason things look the way they do in our world is because of billions of tiny mutations that happen over millions of years. It’s all random and can come out differently every time. Some single cell creatures develop into multiple cell creatures. Then while they’re all multiplying and having kids, one or two of their kids have a different gene in their DNA that makes them stronger or more able to survive than the others. So those plants and creatures live while the other ones die and the stronger ones multiply again.
“Eventually, they or their kids or their kids’ kids have some kids who have a mutated gene that makes them stronger and more able to survive. So those become the new creatures and on and on for millions of years until suddenly everything looks either the way it does here or in that stupid town we used to live in.”
“What do you mean ‘used to’?” I said, probably sounding way more scared and whiny than I wanted to in front of her.
“I mean that if you know some way for us to get back there, I’d love to hear it. Because I can tell you from a year’s worth of experience that we are majorly trapped in this frequency.”
“Can’t we just make another explosion and get back?”
“You think I haven’t tried that? How do you think I got all of Arthur’s whack pack after me?”
“Whack pack? What’s Arthur’s whack pack?” I really hate when I don’t know stuff and so I end up saying “What?” and “Huh?” and “What are you talking about?” during a whole conversation. Usually I’ll just pretend that I know what people are referring to and then go home and check on the Internet to figure out what it was I was pretending to understand. But at this moment, I couldn’t understand anything Karen was talking about and I didn’t have any Internet to run home to because I didn’t have a home anymore.
“Trust me, kid,” she said with a serious look. “You’ll find out.”
And that was when the wall on the other side of the room exploded.
14
I AM OF ABSOLUTELY NO HELP AT ALL
Karen screamed and I screamed even louder as a cloud of dust blew all over us and rocks and all kinds of other junk rained down from the explosion. I had so much dust in my eyes that I couldn’t see what was going on at first.
But then I could. And suddenly I wished I couldn’t.
Through all the dust and smoke I saw really bright light pouring through the hole in the wall that the explosion had made. And through the hole I suddenly saw about five or six big creatures walk into the room. The first one through was one of the mole guys, which meant he was walking really slowly. But he wasn’t dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts like the ones at Artbucks had been. This one was wearing some kind of army uniform. And he looked really mean.
His body was bigger and bulkier than the Artbucks mole guys, and when he looked at Karen and me with his long pointy nose, I saw that his face had what seemed to be a really nasty expression on it. (Though it was hard to tell with the mole creatures, since their faces weren’t really like faces that you and I are used to seeing.) He was carrying a huge sword/ax weapon that immediately became even scarier to me than he was. He stopped when he saw Karen and me and said in a really deep and hard-to-understand voice, “I knew I smelled them!”
As the other creatures came into the room, all dressed in their army uniforms, I quickly realized that as big as the huge mole guy was, he was small compared to the rest of them. I recognized another creature as one of the huge five-armed purple babies. But this one looked like the meanest baby in the world. And since it was holding a huge spear with the most deadly-looking pitchfork thing on the end, you can see I’m not exaggerating when I say it was the nastiest-looking infant ever.
Next to the baby was one of the praying mantis creatures, like the one that had been making coffee at the Artbucks. But where that bug creature was skinny like a stick, this bug was as big as the huge hundred-year-old log that we had lying in our backyard. Instead of having twiggy arms, its arms were thick and spiky and each one was holding a big square knife blade that would flash a bright glint right into my eyes when any light hit its super sharp-looking edges.
The rest of the creatures coming into the room were kinds I hadn’t seen before. One looked like a six-foot-tall hairy rolled-up potato bug with an arm sticking out one side and a tentacle with what I guess was its eyeball sticking out the other. It rolled through the hole in the wall and was holding this spinning weapon that looked like a wagon wheel with blades stuck all over it. Another creature was like a giant four-legged walking octopus with what looked like a fly’s eye for a head. Strapped onto the front of each of its feet was a block with sharp metal spikes sticking out.
When the giant octopus creature saw Karen and me (or is it Karen and I? — I can never remember), it lifted one of its blocks of spikes and pointed it right at us, like it was telling us it was going to kill us as soon as it was allowed to. A couple of other creatures were coming in behind these but before I could focus on them, Karen stood up and blocked my view.
“Get out of here, dirt-eater!” Karen yelled at the mole guy as she reached over with one hand and grabbed a long bamboo-looking pole that was leaning against the wall. Oh, great, I thought, that pole’s really gonna protect us against the knives and spikes and blades that just arrived in the room.
“You are under arrest for trying to destroy Lesterville,” the mole guy said in his deep, rumbling voice. When he did, all the other creatures growled or hummed or snorted or made some other weird sound that said they didn’t like Karen and that the chances were very good they weren’t going to like me, either.
“You’re as stupid as your president, you know that?” Karen said with a laugh. “Lesterville doesn’t need me to destroy it. All it’ll take is one good gust of wind.”
“Hey,” I whispered loudly to her, since I still didn’t know her name at that moment. “Don’t make them mad.”
“Too late,” said the mole guy. He then turned to the other creatures and signaled them to grab us. And suddenly all the creatures started moving forward, each holding up their weapons to show us that we were in big trouble.
This has been quite a day, I thought.
I looked at Karen to see if she was going to start crying or screaming but she had this weird look on her face. She didn’t look scared. She looked intense, like she was going to fight them.
“Get out the door, kid!” she yelled at me, never taking her eyes off the advancing creatures. I looked back at the little door she had shoved me through and dropped down to it. I pushed and it started to open but then quickly slammed back shut. I pushed again but something was pushing back from the outside.
“You’re dead, traitors!” was all I heard through the door. It was a weird, squealy voice, like somebody had taught a pig how to talk. Whoever or whatever the voice was coming from, it was now holding the door closed.
“They’re blocking the door!” I yelled to Karen as the creatures advanced on us. I had always imagined in all the action movies and science fiction films I had seen over the years that if I was ever in a dangerous situation, I’d be really cool and in control, like Indiana Jones or Luke Skywalker or the king from Lord of the Rings. But the fact that my voice just sounded like a five-year-old girl’s when she screams because she saw a spider made me realize that this was not about to be one of my prouder moments.
“Then grab something and help me fight these guys!” she yelled at me. And with that, she suddenly struck a pose like she thought she was in a kung fu movie, gave a war cry, and ran toward the creatures. She spun her pole over her head and then slammed it down on top of the giant octopus’s fly-eye. The octopus whistled in pain, then kicked one of its spike blocks forward. Karen quickly spun and smashed her pole down on the approaching leg. This drove the spikes into the ground as the giant octopus tripped and fell forward.
Before its head even hit the floor, Karen spun the pole around her back to change hands and whipped it down on the back of its fly-eye. The octopus whistled in pain so loudly that my eardrums crackled and then it fell in a twisted, unconscious heap.
Karen spun around and swung her pole like a baseball bat, right as the huge praying mantis was charging up behind her. Her pole swung directly into the four knife-wielding arms that were about to cut her up. The force of her blow spun the bug creature sideways and Karen quickly tossed her pole in the air and grabbed it in the middle. She then started spinning the pole from side to side with both hands, like the world’s deadliest baton twirler in a marching band. As the bug creature regained its balance and turned back to her, her spinning pole started knocking into all the square blades it was trying to hit her with. In a whirl of Karen’s twirling staff, the blades went flying everywhere as the other creatures (and I) ducked.
One blade flew into the ceiling. Another blade stuck into the wall. Another blade flew right over my head and stuck in the little door behind me, practically giving me a haircut on its way there. Karen kept up her spinning pole attack on the mantis’s loglike body; the nonstop hits sounded like somebody was playing the drums on a telephone pole.
Crack! She hit one of the bug creature’s arms so hard that it broke off and went flying across the room, hitting the giant baby right in what I assumed was its face. (It’s hard to tell when something doesn’t have normal eyes.) The baby howled like a walrus and the bug screamed like an eagle, then cocked its only remaining blade back behind it in order to take a huge, head-cutting-off swing at Karen. Karen stopped spinning the pole and thrust it forward right into the center of the bug’s body. The praying mantis stumbled back across the room and right into the giant baby, knocking them both down onto the floor with a huge Ka-PLAM!
Just then I heard the potato-bug thing rolling toward Karen, its one arm spinning the blade-covered wagon wheel and extending it out like a propeller to shred her into coleslaw.
“Look out!” I yelled uselessly, since she had already seen it coming.
“Get in here and help me, kid!” she yelled as I looked around, scared out of my wits.
“How?” I yelled back.
“Grab something and start swinging!” was all she got out before she leaped in the air and just dodged the wheel of blades that the potato bug swung at her. As she was up in midair, she swung the pole down hard on top of the rolled-up creature. Thud! The pole just bounced off it as Karen fell back down onto the ground in a heap.
“Nice try!” The potato bug thing laughed in a surprisingly high voice, considering its enormous size.
It then turned and rolled forward like it was going to try to crush Karen under it but, at the last minute, Karen rolled sideways and smashed her pole right into the creature’s eye.
“Eeeeeeeeeeee!” the potato bug screamed as it rolled past Karen and into the wall with a thump that shook the whole room. And then it unrolled, revealing about a hundred disgusting, squirming legs all over its black underbelly. Karen then jumped up and hit a real kung fu stance as she waited for the unrolled creature to move again.
Who is this girl? I wondered.
The tentacle that held the potato bug’s eye turned and glared at Karen like it was really mad and then the bug curled itself back up into a ball and started rolling toward her again, its blade wheel spinning even faster than before. It started swinging the wheel back and forth so that it was like a huge swinging buzz saw. Karen looked nervous for the first time and I tried to think of what to do. I then looked over and saw a rickety-looking table lying on its side against the wall. Since my parents had just taken me to the circus a few weeks earlier and I had watched a bunch of tumblers doing lots of different stunts, I suddenly got an idea.
