Ignatius MacFarland (9 page)

“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.

I grabbed the table, stood it up, and pushed it over to her.

“Hey!” I yelled. “Jump on top of that guy and run!”

And with that, Karen leaped up onto the table and, right as the rolling bug swung the wheel of blades at her and cut the table in half, Karen jumped into the air and landed on top of the rolling potato bug.

The bug swung its blade wheel up at Karen but she ducked and started running on top of it, making it roll faster. They were rolling right toward the giant baby and the praying mantis creature, who were getting up groggily off the floor. The potato bug yelled in its highest voice yet, “Get out of the way!”

They looked up just in time to see Karen jump off the potato bug as it rolled right into them like a ball hitting a couple of bowling pins. They all got thrown against the wall and fell unconscious onto the ground, the potato bug unrolling itself again, its legs twitching.

“All
right!
” I yelled in victory, and that was when I got grabbed from behind.

The giant mole guy pulled me against him with his left front flipper, the large claw digging into my shoulder. He then put the sword he was holding in his right flipper against my stomach, pulling it into me so hard that if he pulled just a little more it would have cut me in half. Which is what I think he was planning to do.

“Drop your weapon or I’ll turn your friend into two friends,” the mole guy said to Karen as she turned to see me. She had a look on her face that showed she was less worried about my well-being than she was mad that I was there in the first place.

“Dammit!” she yelled as she saw me about to get cut in half. “I
told
you you were going to get me in trouble, kid!”

I wanted to yell “My name’s Iggy, so stop calling me kid!” but, embarrassingly, I was too freaked out to say anything clever like that.

Karen kept holding the pole and the mole guy kept digging his claw harder into my shoulder and pressing his sword deeper into my stomach and I suddenly got the feeling that Karen was going to let me get killed. That was until, all of a sudden, she made an angry face and threw her pole down onto the ground as hard as she could.