Kid vs. Squid (6 page)

“We're not supposed to drink that, are we?” This summer had been unpleasant enough without me having to go vampire. But that's not what Shoal had in mind. She handed the bottle to Trudy, and Trudy pricked her finger with a deft jab of another pin and bled into the water.

It was my turn. I swabbed my finger and the pin, and then before giving myself too much time to think about it, stuck myself.

It hurt worse than I expected, and I thought Shoal and Trudy should know that, so as I bled into the water bottle, I described to them in precise detail how much it hurt. I have a good vocabulary, and at one point Trudy actually took down a few notes.

In truth, it wasn't the pain that kept my lips flapping. I was trying to cover up something else, a strange feeling that, by mingling my blood with theirs, I had bound myself even more to these two girls whom I hardly knew.

When I had a Band-Aid over my throbbing fingertip, Shoal took the bottle and shook it around, mixing the rose-colored water.

“Sea and blood,” she said, “the soup of life.” And then she whispered some other things that weren't in English. It sounded nothing like “hocus pocus” or “abracadabra,” but it did sound like magic, and as she continued to speak, the water lost its pink color. Within moments, it just looked like plain sea-water again. Shoal dumped the water out.

“There,” she said, giving the empty bottle back to Trudy. “It is done.”

And I did feel a little different, a little more like myself. The need to stand around hollering, “Everyone gets a prize!” was still there, but not as urgent.

“How about you, Trudy? Still obsessed with taffy?”

But Trudy didn't respond.

I looked over toward her. Or, rather, toward where she'd been standing.

She wasn't there anymore.

There was just her hand, desperately clutching, as she disappeared down the storm drain.

The steel bars that should have prevented anything larger than a milk carton from falling into the drain were bent back like pipe cleaners. Looking down into the concrete-lined channel, I spotted one of Trudy's sneakers lying in the muck like a dead animal. I scooted through the gap in the curb and dropped with a splash into muddy water. Shoal followed.

I picked up her shoe and we took off at a run through the stinky darkness. Twigs and leaves and fast-food wrappers and cigarette butts and pulpy rotted I-don't-know-what washed over our feet and ankles. The channel ended several blocks away at the beach, where the filthy water flowed past more bent steel bars and down a trough into the ocean.

I leaped through the remains of the grate with Shoal beside me and charged down the beach. At the surf line, Trudy was locked in combat with a fish. Or a fish-thing. Hunched over, it must have been at least fifteen feet tall, marching into the water on muscular green legs. A long dorsal fin ran down its spine, all the way to the end of its dragging tail. It held Trudy's backpack in one arm. In the other, it held Trudy. She kicked and beat at it with her fists, but the fish didn't even seem to notice.

Sprinting toward the water, I launched myself at the monster fish and caught it by the tail in a running tackle. The fish didn't care. Sharp spines on its tail scratched my flesh. Breakers crashed over my head. I wouldn't let go. But with a flick of its tail, I went tumbling, landing on my back in the shallower water. The fish turned to look at me. Its eyes were black and mindless. A mustache of tentacles as thick as baseball bats trailed in the water. It opened its gigantic mouth in a great gawp, then turned away and continued on, unperturbed.

“Hold on, Trudy!” I screamed, coughing saltwater.

Shoal darted by me in a flash. She took off like a cannonball and landed on the fish-thing's back, then proceeded to smack its head with a length of driftwood.

I had never seen anybody fight so viciously. Not even in the movies. Not even in a video game. Blood seeped from under the fish's scales, and its lips parted in a silent scream, its tentacles kicking up water as they thrashed in agonized fury.

Shoal's assault worked. The monster dropped both Trudy and the backpack and retreated toward the safety of deeper waters.

“To shore!” Shoal called, scooping up the backpack and hugging it to her chest while I helped drag Trudy onto land.

On the beach, with our wet hair glued to our heads, we all looked like sodden rag mops. But we were alive, and we'd kept Skalla's head out of enemy hands. The only sounds were our panting breaths and the strangely calm lapping waves.

“Come on,” I said. “Let's get some distance from the—”

Shoal's legs went out from under her, long tentacles wrapped around her ankles and dragging her across the sand. Several yards offshore, the fish stared at us with its dumb, glassy eyes.

Trudy and I each grabbed one of Shoal's arms, her hands still gripping the backpack.

“Let it go!” I screamed, my heels dragging across sand and rocks as the fish pulled her backward.

“No! It wants the head!”

“It'll take you
and
the head!”

Trudy released her hold of Shoal, but only to take a folding knife from her pocket and slash away at the tentacles. The fish moaned in a hornlike baritone but kept pulling Shoal away.

We were losing her. I dug into her wrists with my fingers, fearing her arms would pop from their sockets. But my grip gave first, and Shoal slid away. In a last, desperate effort, I dove to the ground, hoping to grab Shoal by her hair, her ears, her throat—anything to keep her away from the gawping fish. Landing face-first, I reached out, my nails scraping her arms. Two more tentacles whipped out and attached themselves to the back of her head.

“Take it,” Shoal said, shockingly calm. She tossed me the backpack. I caught it on reflex. Then, “Seek my father!” she called. “Neptune House! The summer palace! After midnight! He cannot help you before then! The curse… I am still alive! I am still—”

And she was still saying that when the fish lifted her into the air and deposited her in its bathtub mouth. It closed its rubbery lips, and Shoal was gone.

The fish sank below the surface.

Waves gently rolled ashore.

I ran back into the water, feeling beneath the
foam and gravel with my hands, looking across the waves for any sign of her. Every moment she was gone stretched into a new forever. I scanned the shoreline up and down, searching. When enough time had passed, I realized I wasn't looking for a fish or a drowning girl.

I was looking for a body.

We need to notify the authorities,” Trudy said, getting her phone out.

“You don't think it's too late?”

“The last thing Shoal said was she was still alive. If that fish was one of Skalla's creatures—and considering it was the size of all three of us put together and walked on two legs and, ack, tentacles, then I'm pretty sure it
was
one of the witch's pets—I don't think it wants her drowned. It wants her alive. For … I don't know what. So I'm going to assume we can still help Shoal.”

That made sense. I got out my own phone and punched numbers.

“Emergency 911 operator, state your emergency,” said a bored voice on the other end.

“A fish ate my friend!” I bellowed.

“Louie, I told you not to call here when you're drunk.” There was a click, and the line went dead.

I immediately hit redial.

“Emergency 911 operator,” the same voice said with a tired sigh. “State your emergency.”

“I'm not drunk! My friend got eaten by a fish!”

“That can happen when incompatible fish share an aquarium. It's not an emergency.”

“My friend isn't a fish, she's a girl, and a fish ate her and we need help, like boats and ships and divers and helicopters!”

“You said a girl,” the operator said. “You mean a girl fish? A female fish? Still not an emergency.”

“
She's not a fish!
”

Trudy placed a call of her own, to federal authorities up the coast in San Francisco.

“Operator, please listen carefully,” she said. “We are reporting an emergency. In the interest of getting the most appropriate assistance dispatched immediately, I will relay the situation as accurately as I can: a gigantic, amphibious fish with arms and legs has swallowed our friend. We need a full-scale rescue effort involving the fire department, the coast guard, and the navy, and we need it
now
.”

A pause, and then she hung up.

“What'd they say?”

“
Fffzzzt mwah mwah fffzzzt
,” Trudy reported.

We needed a landline, or somewhere with a better phone signal. Trudy said her place was nearby, so we made an exhausted sprint to her mom's bookstore.

The shop occupied the corner of a low-slung brick building on Main Street. Unlike the other shops around it, the bricks were scrubbed clean and the sidewalk out in front swept and tidy. Used books with crisp, bright covers were displayed in the window. The place looked pleasant and sunny. It totally didn't fit in Los Huesos.

“Hi, Mom, this is my friend Thatcher we're going to hang out upstairs don't bother about lunch see you later!” Trudy said even before the little bell on the front door stopped jiggling. I caught a blurry glimpse of a surprised woman in a sweater polishing the cash register, and then Trudy was dragging me upstairs to the apartment where she and her mom lived.

It was tiny compared to my house in Phoenix, but after a couple weeks of sharing tight quarters with Griswald, Sinbad, and the shrunken heads, it was nice to be somewhere that felt like a home. The overstuffed sofa and chairs looked worn but comfy, and none of the knickknacks gave me the heebie-jeebies.

Trudy dialed 911 on the landline, but things went the same way they had on the beach—just distorted fuzz. We weren't surprised.

“The phone company always says it's because the salt in the air eats through the cables,” Trudy said, putting the receiver back in its cradle. “But I bet it's the witch's influence. On to Plan B, then.”

“Which is?”

“Shoal told us to find her father.”

“Right. She said something about Neptune House. And the summer palace. Any idea what she was talking about?”

“Maybe there's something in one of the books downstairs—”

“Trudles!” Trudy's mom appeared at the top of the landing. “That's no way to introduce me to your new friend.”

I liked her right away. She reminded me of my kindergarten teacher, with a pair of glasses hanging around her neck on a string. Within seconds she'd swept me over to the kitchen table, sat me down, put a Coke and a plate of oatmeal cookies in front of me to give my stomach something to do while she made us lunch, and cheerfully assaulted me with questions. Did I like living in Los Huesos? What did my parents do for a living? Was I a fan of squirt guns? What was it like to spend my summer in a museum? Did I know what I wanted to do with my life? Is there a God, and if so, what is His or Her or Its plan for humanity?

“Mom, I'm going to show Thatcher the store while you finish fixing lunch.”

“Oh, splendid. Are you an avid reader, Thatcher?”

“Yes, he is, very avid,” Trudy said, hauling me downstairs.

“She's friendly,” I said once we were among shelves crammed tight with hundreds of books. “It's nice of her to make lunch.”

“She's thrilled I'm hanging out with a real-live human being, even if it's just you. I haven't made any friends since we moved. Mom feels guilty about it.”

Trudy was a little unusual, maybe, but not so bad that she shouldn't be able to make friends.

“Your folks are divorced?” We'd only known each other a day, but since we'd been through so much, I felt comfortable asking rude questions.

Trudy didn't seem to mind. “Yeah. Long time ago. Dad's a regional sales manager for a plumbing fixture company. Toilet parts.”

Interesting. I'd been sure her dad would be a cop or an FBI agent or a nosy reporter.

“So, what made you decide to become a superhero-detective?”

She started rooting through a cardboard box full of books on the floor. “I live in a town with hardly any kids and where most of the adults I encounter
are cursed carnies from Atlantis. You think I should be playing with Barbies?”

“Put it that way, and I guess being a superhero-detective makes a lot of sense. Does your mom know about all the crazy stuff that goes on here?”

“I tried to tell her once, but remember, until today, I didn't know much myself. Just that there were weird occurrences and strange people. Anyway, with her bookstore dream, Mom's in her own little world.”

I thought about my own parents, and how focused they were on their squirt guns, and I understood.

Trudy began sorting through another box. She picked up a skinny little hardcover book and flipped through pages of black-and-white photos. “What about you? What was your life like before you came to Los Huesos and got cursed?”