Crap Kingdom (23 page)

29

SOMETHING HAD GONE
very, very wrong.

Tom was staring at the ceiling. He seemed to do a lot of that everywhere he went. It was kind of his superpower. But this ceiling was glass, with multicolored gas swimming behind it. He was back in his body in the Ghelm kingdom and he knew that something had gone wrong.

He looked to his left. There were bloody animal footprints leading across the glass surface of the floor and out of the arched doorway. He had run afoul of an Elgg, it seemed. Maybe he’d played dead. And he was bleeding, and soon he might really be dead.

He was wearing the frayed clothing they had placed on him before he’d awoken in Crap Kingdom, jeans and an old black T-shirt, not entirely unlike what he might have worn on Earth. In place of a belt, a crude rope made of tied-together plastic shopping bags was strung through his belt loops. On his right hip, hanging off the rope, was another plastic shopping bag with something inside of it. It was small but extremely heavy. He reached inside and pulled out an old water bottle with its cap taped shut thoroughly with duct tape. Inside of the water bottle was what looked like a tiny self-contained galaxy. Its center burned brightly, throwing off little whorls of blinding light.
This must be the grenade J needed to build,
Tom thought. The Reverse Worldflow, the spell you couldn’t just cast, but actually had to hurl into the Vortex. If it was here in a plastic bag tied to his jeans, it meant the mission had gone only as far as J breaking into the Ghelm kingdom before he got Tom’s body mauled by an Elgg.

There was a significant chunk taken out of Tom’s shoulder and distinct claw marks in the black fabric of his shirt. The Elgg must have figured him for incapacitated and gone off to alert his master, which meant there wasn’t much time. And his shoulder didn’t hurt that much. Tom didn’t know if that was good or the worst thing imaginable. No, it couldn’t be the worst thing imaginable, the worst thing imaginable was that he was here, in his own body, and the mission had gone awry. He was the last person in any universe who should be doing this. The very last person.

Tom cleared blood from his eyes and looked around. He was in some sort of armament room. Suits of Vapornaut armor lined the walls. So this was where it would end, and some soul, be it J or some other anonymous placeholder soul thrilled to be freed from its luminous jellyfish form and given a place in a body in a world, would rattle on in Tom’s body for the rest of that body’s life. Him, the being that really was Tom Parking, would end here, on the floor, staring up at the ceiling, which was pretty much all he ever did.

Something thundered up from inside of his soul or his mind or his heart and spoke to him. And it didn’t tell him to be brave. He wasn’t suddenly clever or magical. He was still himself. He was not supposed to be in his body right now, but, by accident, he was himself, and now something was speaking from inside of him.

It said:
get up.

Be stupid, be weak, be confused, be scared, but GET UP.

He breathed in and exhaled. There was blood in his nose, too. That was fine. He’d had bloody noses all the time as a kid. This part, the bloody-nose part, life had prepared him for.

He tried to sit up. That part was hard, but only because he was out of shape. It would have been hard for him to do a sit-up even if he wasn’t bleeding to death. In his physical prime, halfway through freshman PE, he’d been able to do thirty sit-ups in a row with minimal complaint. He could squeeze out just one right now, couldn’t he? He did it.

As soon as he was upright, he started to feel the shoulder. The pain was impossible. He hissed and whimpered the way he’d seen an actor playing a Civil War soldier do in a movie they’d watched in history class. The soldier was about to get his leg amputated above the knee. That guy had had a belt to bite on. Tom didn’t. He only had a rope made of shopping bags, and he probably needed it to hold his pants up. He’d spent too much time in this world without pants already. Also, he needed it to hold the grenade. There wasn’t time to bite down on anything. It was time to stand up.

He had shoes on. That was exciting. They didn’t match, but they were both sneakers, and the one on his left foot was a left shoe and the one on the right foot was a right shoe. It was remarkable, really. It was a golden age of correct clothing in Crap Kingdom. He got his correctly-shoed feet underneath him.

Now that he was standing, the pain had gone beyond impossible to somewhere in the neighborhood of super impossible. He could actually hear blood coming from the wound. He was sure that wasn’t good. Right now, finally on his feet, Tom’s right hand was numb. His whole arm, in fact. It didn’t matter. He didn’t need his arm to walk. He walked through pools of his own vital fluids to the nearest suit of Vapornaut armor.

This part would be easy, he thought, because he remembered putting on armor back when he thought he was Doondredge’s right-hand man. This kind was a little more complicated, because it was designed for flight, but it was mostly the same concept. He kicked off his shoes and stepped into the spiked diamond boots. They locked on automatically once they sensed there were feet inside of them. The legs came next. He untied the plastic bag containing the grenade from his jeans and placed it gently on the floor, upright so it wouldn’t roll away, or get all bloody, or worse. The leg pieces also clicked on automatically once he had them in the general area of his legs. The codpiece—it was it a codpiece, wasn’t it?—went the same way, and Tom realized it was the most supported he’d ever felt in that area. Maybe codpieces were the real long-term solution to his underwear dilemma.

Then he put on the breastplate. It was cool to be able to do something like putting on magical armor so easily, like a blindfolded soldier assembling a rifle. He wished he had not had to join up with a brainwashing evil empire in order to gain the knowledge. Apparently he had to learn things the very, very hard way. The breastplate hugged his wound, and pain leveled him. If he hadn’t been propped up by the armor he would have fallen over. His brain wanted to pass out to save him from the hurt. He ordered it not to. He was very commanding. He rewarded his brain for not passing out by encasing it in a very cool-looking helmet he grabbed off the wall. His face was now the only exposed part of his body, and all the bits of armor seemed to realize they were in place and they emitted many more clicks and whirs and then there was the hiss of gas filling the cavity between his skin and the armor.

All at once, his shoulder didn’t hurt anymore. He felt universally great. He wondered if there were nano-machines in the gas, stitching up his wounds. He should have asked Doondredge, during his evil period.

Tom’s most common dream involved flying. In the dream, he was going about his business and suddenly, he remembered that he knew how to fly. He wondered why he’d forgotten and why he didn’t remember more often as he relaxed into himself and then lifted off the ground into effortless, thought-propelled flight, which would usually take him to the roof of some girl from school’s house, though not in a pervy way.

It was like that with the Vapornaut armor. He just relaxed and a hundred different points on the armor became tiny jet engines emitting little cones of fire.

He rose.

He willed the suit to take him forward through the arch, following the trail of bloody Elgg footprints into a large, empty hallway. It was night, and everyone was asleep, just the way Kyle and the king had planned it. The roaring of the Vortex was louder now. Tom followed the prints, and the roar grew and grew. He followed them to a dead end and looked up. There was an opening the size of a manhole cover. He floated up and through the hole, and found himself in the enormous, deafening chamber between the Vortex and the Executive Orb. His feet touched ground again. He looked toward the Orb and saw the Elgg who had nearly killed him.

It was almost all the way up the spiraling path, fighting the world-wind. He could still intercept it and buy himself some time. Tom stepped off the precipice. The fall would have done to him what the Elgg had tried to, if he had not been wearing a suit of auto-flying armor. The jets went into overdrive and Tom began to fly across the chasm between himself and the Elgg. About halfway across, he entered the jet stream blowing straight out of the Vortex, and the jets on his armor became almost unnecessary. He was catapulted toward his target. The Elgg turned its head. An expression crossed its face like it was thinking,
Didn’t I just fatally injure you?
They were kind of cute when they were confused, Tom thought.

It started bounding at double speed. Tom landed on the path in time to see it placing its paw up to the surface of the orb. Just like when Tchoobrayitch had done it, the print triggered a mechanism that started the Orb floating out from the wall.

Tom was running toward it. It turned and barked a plume of purple electric fire at him. The Vapornaut armor deflected it, but Tom held up his hands up to block his still-exposed face, and when he brought them down again, he saw that the Elgg had skittered up to the top of the Orb. Tom took a jet-assisted leap, and just as he was closing in on the beast, it spread its wings and dropped down, disappearing, leaving only the glassy, unbroken Orb top for Tom to land on.

On the one hand, this was very bad. It meant Tom had a limited amount of time before the Elgg roused the king and whoever else, and the plan was completely ruined.

On the other hand, he had seen a new expression in the Elgg’s eyes: fear. No one had ever been afraid of him before. Not even animals. He’d walk by squirrels on the way to school that wouldn’t dart out of his path the way they did when other people walked by, even if those other people were four years old. There wasn’t time to enjoy how cool and intimidating he felt, though. He had to go do the job.

He leapt into the wind and found that flying toward the Vortex was much, much harder than flying in the opposite direction. He held his hand up again to keep his eyelids from being blown off. All he had to do was fly far enough into the giant rock-encircled hole and drop the grenade.

Where was the grenade?

It was in his left hand. He’d picked it up without even thinking about it. He just assumed he would have forgotten it. It seemed like a Tom thing to do. But he’d grabbed it without anybody reminding him to, without even reminding himself. It was like there was a more competent person inhabiting him, but he also got to stay inside of his body and see everything through his own eyes.

The straps of the plastic bag containing the grenade began to stretch as the wind blew it backward. Tom was afraid they’d break and he’d end up reversing the Worldflow of the chasm floor instead of the Vortex like he was supposed to, so he unwrapped it as he flew. There was nowhere to put the empty bag. His armor didn’t have pockets. He let it go. It flew right up into his face, temporarily blinding and suffocating him, held there by the wind. He ripped it away. He held the bag out as far as he could and let it flutter away. It flew back toward the Orb opening on the far side. He felt bad about littering in a world that wasn’t his own, but then again, he was in a particularly evil part of that world. They probably littered all the time. This was a just and righteous littering.

The rim of the Vortex drew close. He couldn’t tell if the armor had somehow enhanced his hearing or if the howling wind was truly the loudest noise he’d ever heard. He entered the cave. He didn’t know how deep you had to go before you reached the point where one world became another one. It was even darker than it had been in the void. He wanted to just throw the grenade, but he was pretty certain that if he did, the wind would blow it backward, and he would be like a klutzy character in an old silent movie throwing a baseball and having it land behind him. But he also didn’t want to be over the line that separated worlds when the thing went off. He wondered if it would actually “go off,” if it would explode, or what. He hoped he could observe it without getting pulverized by the cross-world super-wind.

He held the bottle out in front of him and crawled forward, through the air. The jets on his armor were working so hard he looked like the grand finale of a fireworks show that never ended. The ultra-dark got darker somehow.

Then the bottle wasn’t in his hand anymore. But he hadn’t dropped it. It had been pulled away. He could suddenly feel the incredible wind on the fingers of the hand that had been holding it. He held the hand up to his face. In the light of his armor’s jet flames, he could see that the fingertips of the armor had been snatched off along with the bottle, by the portal. He was lucky: he still had his actual fingertips.

He was wasting precious milliseconds being concerned about his fingers. He turned himself around. The wind buffeted him forward toward the Vortex’s mouth, and then it didn’t anymore. The wind died. Compared to the unreal sound of the wind, the hundreds of jets on his armor sounded like the lightest spring breeze.

Then it started up again, twice as hard, in the opposite direction. On the one hand, that was good: it meant the grenade had worked. On the other hand, it was bad, because the jets immediately kicked in full blast to compensate, yet Tom was still barely crawling forward against the Vortex’s suction. He crested the mouth. Something was flying at him. It hit him in the face, spreading and sticking and flapping. It covered his face. He reached up and pulled it away: it was that stupid bag. His littering had come back to haunt him. He let it go and looked up just in time to see something much bigger coming at him full-speed: the Orb.