King of the Mutants (5 page)

I patted him on the back.

“Don’t worry,” I said, remembering what I overheard Grumbling’s say. “It’s got a left-hand tank shift, a right hand throttle, and a heel to go, toe to slow foot clutch. Oh, and a suicide clutch rig. Whatever that is.”

Freddie’s face turned ghostly white.

“Look, I’ll drive the chopper if you don’t think you can tame the beast—”

“No, no, I can do it,” he said adamantly. “It’s no biggie. I may be small, but I’m no wimp.”

“Never said you were. You can handle her,” I said, smirking ever so slightly. “Just get Snaggletooth in the sidecar and wait here, ready to go. I’ll be right back.”

I left Freddie to familiarize himself with Cherry Pie and walked into Grumbling’s trailer.

Inside, the place was a real dump and smelled like dirty underwear and sweat. I crinkled my nose, turned my head, and lo and behold—through the pile of empty beer cans, whiskey bottles, dirty ashtrays, and fast-food wrappings—there they hung on a hook, a set of keys with a rhinestone cherry key ring, just begging to be taken. I reached for them and almost had them within my grasp when a vicious voice startled me from behind. My earlier excitement faded into absolute horror.

“So there you are, you disgusting mutant. What do you think you’re doing?”

Shaking, I turned to face the satanic ringmaster of doom. Even the red, glowing tip of his perma-cigar personified evil.

“How dare you enter my trailer?” screamed Burt. “And how dare you treat Peaches with such disrespect!”

Burt undid the buckle latched around his fat waist, and off came his belt. With maniacal evil-clown glee, he folded the leather belt in half, and
SNAP
came the dreaded noise. He raised his hair-covered hand over his head, preparing to crack me across the face with the makeshift whip, and hissed, “It’s time to teach you a lesson you just might not live through.”

I braced myself for the blow. And then
CRASH!
I opened my eyes to find Freddie and Snaggletooth standing in Burt’s place. Freddie held a shattered whiskey bottle, and sported a mingled look of fear and accomplishment on his face.

Burt was down for the count.

And that’s example number one as to why Freddie Finch was one of the coolest guys on the planet. A good friend always has your back—even if it’s ribbed.

“Well, Freddie, I guess we’re even now. Didn’t know you had it in you.” I grabbed Cherry Pie’s keys off the hook. “Guess we should take off before he wakes up, huh?”

Oddly enough, Freddie started laughing again. He was weird like that, always bursting out into fits at the most inopportune times. “Yeah, right about now, that would be a really good idea.”

Freddie and I booked it out the back of Grumbling’s RV to steal our only beacon of hope. I threw him the keys. “She’s all yours, Rambo.”

HOW TO ESCAPE A GANG OF KILLER CLOWNS

Once we took our positions on the motorcycle, Freddie started up the engine. Or at least, Freddie tried to start up the engine. It took a couple of tries, or maybe fifty, but then she finally roared to life. The sound? It was better than listening to one of my favorite songs on my smashed up iPod. I found a couple of goggles in the sidecar, most likely because I was sitting on them and I handed a pair over to Freddie. He looked like a frog in them. Suppose I didn’t look much better.

I tucked my tail in between my legs to get more comfortable and nodded.

“What do these buttons do?” Freddie asked before we took off.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Press them.”

All of a sudden we were glowing red. Well, we weren’t, but the bike was. Grumbling had installed L.E.D. lights—pretty radical. However, one extremely un-cool feature was hard to ignore, a super-sized fry of a glitch. Burt had also pimped out this bike with a special under mount headlight. Imagine my horror when shining on the ground before us, like the signal from Batman, an evil clown head with a giant red nose lit up the pavement.

“Ugh, turn that light off, please—”

“Already done,” said Freddie. “I don’t think we want to draw that much attention to ourselves.”

Like people wouldn’t notice a glowing red bike with a messed up alligator kid, a three-legged dog, and skinny, chicken-haired Freddie? I snorted into my hand.

Freddie steered Cherry Pie forward, a worried frown spanning his big mouth. “I suppose I should take it slow…Whoa!” The bike jolted forward in one quick thrust.

Apparently, going slow wasn’t an option. We took off.

Sort of.

Instead of going straight, we swerved from side-to-side and almost crashed into a couple of tents. And because of our panicked screams, we hadn’t gone unnoticed either. The melody of Stars and Stripes Forever blared from under the Big Top. It was always played in emergencies to alert the workers that something was wrong, like when one of the animals got loose. But this time it wasn’t Bobo or the chimpanzee they wanted to capture.

It was me.

Freddie white-knuckled the ape hanger handlebars. Just as we were about to turn onto the main road, a dozen midgets ran out of the cookhouse. Most of Grumbling’s midgets—even the women—sported buzz-cuts, black pants, a black t-shirt, steel-tipped boots, and the same nasty grimace on their dirt-encrusted faces. I didn’t know who was who half the time.

Put it this way, these guys were nothing like the munchkins from
The Wizard of Oz.

I’ve never heard such foul language—outside the cookhouse, that was. To make matters even nastier, they threw fish burgers at us. Fish burgers! A giant, stinky burger slapped the side of my face, oozing onto my lap.

One of the midgets ran after us with a blowtorch. Regardless of his firepower, he couldn’t catch us. We rocketed off into the distance.

As we careened down the street, I looked over my shoulder at the faded Grumbling’s entrance sign. I gulped, hoping that I’d never see it again. A hailstorm of emotions crashed down upon me. My body trembled so badly it rattled the sidecar. You name it, I felt it. Fear. Excitement. Dread. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so I turned my head away from Freddie, bit down on my bottom lip, and tried to keep my feelings in check.

I was leaving the only life I’d ever known.

After what seemed to be an eternity, Freddie seemed comfortable on Cherry Pie—or at least that’s what the smile stretched across his face said. Besides hitting a couple of potholes and nearly crashing head-on into a pickup truck, things seemed to be going pretty well. I breathed out a big sigh of relief and stroked Snaggletooth on the head.

Maybe we’d traveled a mile or two, maybe more, I didn’t know for sure. But we couldn’t keep driving without some kind of strategy. Because of the electrical jolts my tail felt, all I knew is that we had to get to New Orleans. Figuring we were safe and far enough away from the circus to put some kind of plan together, I tugged on Freddie’s shirt until he pulled over.

Big mistake.

While Freddie and I tried to figure out where we were, what I assumed to be just another big car sped toward us. But it wasn’t any old truck. The green glow of the H2’s under-carriage gave it away.

“Freddie, kill the lights,” I screamed, hoping it wasn’t too late.

Our bike went black.

We took off our goggles and hid in the shadows along the side of the road. Sweat poured down our faces and the salty sting of my perspiration burned my eyes. My body odor had a whole new scent of ferociousness. Fear. Even Snaggletooth knew something was up and he howled at the full moon above. I put my hand over his mouth to silence him. Not that it would have mattered.

Ever felt like you wanted to do something, but you didn’t have the courage to do it? You know, like you were paralyzed, and you couldn’t move because you were so scared? Well, that was exactly what I was going through. And Freddie, he had this twisted look on his face like someone had sucker-punched him in the stomach—with a sledgehammer.

The Hummer sped by us going at least a hundred miles an hour. Small pebbles shot out from under the tires, ricocheting everywhere. The Hummer spun out on the gravel road about fifty yards away from us and stopped.

The high beams of the truck were aimed straight at us.

We’d been spotted.

Yorgi’s voice crackled from a loud speaker. “You make this easy, Gator, or does Yorgi do this the hard way?”

Snaggletooth cowered on the floor of the sidecar, his body shaking.

I shuddered too. I don’t know what I ever did to bother Yorgi, but he hated my guts from the get-go. Every time I ran into him, he’d point to his glass eye with his index and forefinger, glaring, and then direct them back at me as if he was waiting for me to make a mistake so he could pummel me into a pile of mush. And now the opportunity had presented itself to him—served on a silver platter.

“I think we should get out of here,” said Freddie, overstating the obvious. “That way looks good.” He pointed to a fork in the road just behind us.

“Better than that way.” I glanced back at the clown-filled truck, momentarily hypnotized by a red light from the cabin. Caesar had actually worn his flashing red nose. What a loser. And then I noticed something even more peculiar. “Freddie, you aren’t wearing your glasses?” I questioned. “Don’t you need them to see?”

“Oh, those things? I just wear them so I look older.”

I jumped in the sidecar. “You’re cooler without them. Less of a nerd.”

“Well,” said Freddie with a twisted smile. “This cool kid is ready to bolt.”

Freddie nodded with newfound confidence, hopped on Cherry’s black leather seat, and we took off—full throttle—pedal to the metal. Looking extra gutsy, Freddie switched on the NOS, and, well, we flew.

Note to self: when trying to escape evil clowns on a supersonic chopper in Florida in the summer, keep my mouth closed. We were covered in bug guts.

I turned to check behind us, and there it was edging closer and closer—the Hummer. Yorgi turned on his Ukrainian rap music, the bass thumping louder and louder. Not only did I feel the pulsating music and the thrust of the engine rattling my bones, the heat of Yorgi’s hate seared into the back of my head.

Then there was darkness.

Silence.

We’d escaped them.

Or so I prayed.

But killer clowns could be quite deceptive.

The rumble from our own ride was so earsplitting I didn’t realize Yorgi had turned off the lights and music and cruised right along beside us. Until I looked to my right. Yorgi’s glass eye gave his position away, reflecting in a flash of lightning.

Thunder rumbled.

This wasn’t going to be good.

Splatter. A drop of chubby rain fell onto my head, then another, then another. The smell of dirt permeated the air, reminding me nothing would please Yorgi more than digging a hole and burying me in it. I flinched with every thunderclap.

Yorgi’s throaty voice boomed from his loud speaker. “Tonight you die, swamp creature!”

A spike from Yorgi’s killer rims scraped against the sidecar and sent sparks flying everywhere, like fireworks. All I could hear was the sound of crunching metal, thunder, and the deafening roar of our engines. Remember how I’d laughed before? Well, I wasn’t laughing anymore. It didn’t matter that I rode on Cherry Pie. It didn’t matter that Freddie was with me. They wanted me dead and they weren’t going to stop until they achieved their goal.

Freddie tried his best to make the bike go as fast as it could go. His knuckles turned glow-in-the-dark white from his death-grip on the handlebars. Snaggletooth scampered into my duffle bag on the floor and trembled. His wet, black nose stuck out of the bag. I sunk lower into the sidecar, my hand placed over my heart.

We hydroplaned on the wet road. Freddie had lost control of Cherry Pie.

Which gave me an idea.

Sucking in my fear, I stood up in the sidecar. Wind whipped my body and mud splattered everywhere, making everything super-slippery. Before I plummeted to my death, I grabbed the chrome handlebars and pulled them as far to the left as they could go. The bike spun out of control, and at one point, I swear, the sidecar was off the ground. We whirled round and round and round like that Crazy Zipper ride—the
ONLY
ride that rates a ten out of ten for fun, the probability of a fatal accident, and puke-factor. Finally, we stopped spinning and the bike skidded across the road. The bike teetered, tottered, and almost tipped over. Plunk! Cherry Pie screeched to a halt.

“Holy crap, Mav!” Freddie screamed. “Why’d you do that? You could have killed us, you freak!”

I shrugged. “I knew they’d lose control too. Would you rather have been tortured by a gang of clowns?” I pointed down the road through the pouring rain to the overturned Hummer. It was totaled.

Sure, we may have been a little banged up, but we were still alive. Smashed up and trashed from the rain, my prized guitar wasn’t so lucky. With mixed emotions, I threw my only keepsake of Grumbling’s into the bushes, and then I punched Freddie lightly on the arm. “Oh, and for your information, the PC term for us freaks is human marvel.”

“Whatever. This is insane. I didn’t sign up for this.”

“Yeah, we have to lose those clowns,” I agreed, watching Yorgi’s menacing form squeeze through the driver’s side window of the Hummer. He fell to the ground and slowly slithered in our direction. “They’re like that nightmarish psychopath in that Halloween movie. They’ll just keep coming after us.”

“Mav, we’ve, um, got to blow this pop stand. Now,” said Freddie. He pointed a shaky finger into the distance.

Yorgi was gaining his strength back quickly—now crawling toward us on his hands and knees like a deranged bionic baby. “Yorgi is going to hang your dead carcass on my wall and throw Larry’s knives at you…” he bellowed.

That did not sound like a good time to me. We had to get out of there before he recovered from the crash completely. I didn’t have to tell Freddie twice. He twisted the throttle and we zoomed down the road. Rain crashed down hard on our skulls as we shot off into the night, leaving the killer clowns in their jumbled wreck.

After about two hours of driving without any sense of direction, the gravel road opened up and the lights of a highway greeted us. Great relief washed over me when the sign to a very familiar indulgence caught my eye. Freddie licked his lips. Snaggletooth lifted up his head and sniffed the air. I smiled and nodded my head. We were all starved and I really had to go to the bathroom. Plus, we needed to figure out where we were and how in the world we were going to get to New Orleans.