Slice Of Cherry (15 page)

“Awesome.” Kit’s face lit up. “We’re learning ‘Beyond the Sea.’ It reminded me of you, how you always wanna sail away. Listen.”

Kit played it for her, singing the words jauntily. She had a nice voice when she wasn’t screeching at the top of her lungs.

“You think he kept his word and went home to his girl?” said Fancy as the last notes died away. “Or you think she’s still waiting for him?”

“If he did leave her, she probably moved on.” Kit replayed the song in a different key. “That’s what happens when people split. They get over it.”

“If you left, I wouldn’t get over it.”

“Sure you would. I’d write to you. Eventually. Ow!”

Fancy pinched her sister again for good measure. “That reminds me: Did you get the mail?”

The music came to a halt.

“Oops.” “Oops?” Fancy shot off the bench. “You can’t be forgetting like that, Kit,” she said, hurrying out to the front porch. When she came back inside holding a stack of letters, she was still grumbling. “Madda would freak if she knew about all this.”

“She wouldn’t,” said Kit. “It’s not like she doesn’t know people hate us.”

“But if she saw the
other
mail,” Fancy insisted. “If she knew people wanted us to kill for them—”

“Do they?” Kit looked at the mail in Fancy’s hands. “Has anyone written back asking for our services?”

Fancy sat on the bench, and together the sisters went through the mail, but it was the same old hateful tirades.

“I knew advertising would be a waste of time,” Kit said, dumping her share of the letters into Fancy’s lap.

“It’s only been a couple of weeks.”

“Only? It’s been forever since we killed that old man. And now that Franken’s gone, I don’t have anybody to cut on. Not
that that was particularly satisfying, but at least it was something. You know how when you stab people, it’s like plugging into them? You feel their hearts beating; you feel their blood flowing. You see their struggle for life, and in that moment they start to seem real and not like windup toys. I miss that. That realness. You know what we should do?”

“What?”

“Hunt.”

“Hunt what?”

“Whales, you stupid girl—what do you think? Bad guys! If people won’t ask for our help, let’s just volunteer it.”

“So now you think you can just spot ’em on the street, easy-peasy?”

“We’re predators, Fancy. Predators can always sniff out prey.” Kit shot up from the piano bench and grabbed Fancy, nearly making her spill the letters all over the floor. “Let’s go catch some bad guys!”

Fancy pulled away from Kit, wondering why her sister had to be so antsy about everything. “We can’t just
go
. We have to think this through.”

“What’s to think about? The great thing about having a killer instinct is that it negates the need to think.”

“We can’t just go club people on the street and drag ’em back to the cellar.”

“The cellar.” Some of Kit’s enthusiasm cooled a bit.

“Right.” “Right. We need to test whether the kinetoscope works outside the cellar. Otherwise, we can’t cover our tracks. Go wait for me in the backyard.”

A few moments later Fancy joined Kit in the kitchen garden with the kinetoscope. Without the stand, it was just big enough to be a pain to carry any great distance, but small enough to cart on Fancy’s bike or rest in her lap. Kit sat, absently picking snails off the tomato plants as Fancy cranked the kinetoscope . . . but nothing happened.

“See?” said Fancy. “Maybe it
does
only work in the cellar. There’s no way we can convince all the bad guys to come home with us.”

“Don’t give up just yet. You know how you can only see things inside small spaces: a puddle, or a cup—”

“Of course!” Fancy shot up, surveying the expanse of forested land. “There’s just too much space!”

The sisters hurried into the house and cranked the kinetoscope in the shuttered living room. The walls flickered slightly, but that was all.

“Well, this is the biggest room in the house,” Fancy said, looking at the high ceilings and the tall shuttered windows they supported.

They next tried their inner room, one of the smallest rooms in the house aside from the bathrooms. Fancy turned the crank once and then joined Kit’s laughter when the happy place immediately projected on the walls. She felt the kinetoscope vanishing in her hands, so she stopped cranking before the happy place could fully form around them, and the walls returned to normal.

“Well, that settles that.” Fancy flopped onto the bed.

“So we have to be somewhere small and enclosed or it won’t work. Which means that instead of people coming to our cellar, we’ll have to convince them to let us into their homes. So that we can slaughter them.”

“You’re good at talking to people,” Fancy said, surprised to hear the uncertainty in her normally confident sister’s voice.

“I know, but . . . sometimes when you talk to people, it turns out they’re kinda interesting. Interesting people might be harder to kill than, you know, dullards.”

“If they’re bad enough, it won’t matter how interesting they
are.” She stood and balanced the kinetoscope on her hip. “Go get the old man’s ear. And a steak knife.”

“Why?”

“It’ll be safer in the happy place than here where Madda can find it.”

“And the knife?”

“For stabbing. Der.”

Kit ducked into the kitchen and came back minutes later with a steak knife and the jar holding the severed ear. “How many ears do you think this thing can hold?” Kit asked.

Fancy put the jar and the knife in her pocket. “Let’s find out, shall we?”

I
LAN RAN UP TO ME IN CLASS AND GAVE ME A BIG HUG.
I
TOLD HIM TO GET OFF ME BUT HE SHOWED ME A DRAWING OF US HUGGING AND SAID
I
HAD TO LET HIM.
I
TOLD HIM THAT WAS A FAKE DRAWING CUZ IN THE REAL ONE WE WERE KISSING, AND HE SAID, SO KISS ME THEN!
B
UT INSTEAD OF KISSING HIS LIPS,
I
BIT THEM. HARD.

The sisters had to bike around their upsquare neighborhood for two hours before they finally happened upon a villainous situation: Five boys, just a few years older than Kit, were beating up another boy in the parking lot of Wyverly Park, a few miles from their home.

The boys were transies, transients, which was how Porterenes thought of the outsiders who wandered into their town, because they almost never stayed long. Transies lacked Porterene fortitude and tended to end up fleeing town in terror or getting eaten by monsters in a relatively short amount of time. There were, of course, a few special individuals who moved into town and were able to tough it out.

These boys, however, were not special.

The sisters stopped at the edge of the parking lot and watched, but the boys, intent on their victim, didn’t notice them.

“You know how rare it is to get one of these freaks alone?” said one boy wearing smoky aviator glasses. He and the boy in the orange Longhorns T-shirt he was speaking to weren’t involved in the beating but were instead sitting in the shade on the hood of a red Escalade, drinking beer.

“I know,” said Longhorn. “Why’re you alone, freak?” he yelled. “Are you such a freak that even in a town full of freaks nobody wants anything to do with you?”

“Or did the
monsters
eat all your friends,” said the aviator boy, “and you’re the only survivor?” All the boys laughed at this.

“Why’re you wasting your aggression on him?” said Kit.

The boys jumped and turned to see the sisters behind them on the other side of their truck. The silence was so deep Fancy could hear the whack of a ball from the tennis court nearby.

“Why beat him up?” Kit continued, eyeing the scrawny, bleeding boy curled up in a handicapped parking space. He seemed even scrawnier compared to his attackers, who were fit, like they spent all day baling hay or something vigorous and outdoorsy like that. “There’s barely enough of him to
make it worth your while. If you really wanna take out your frustrations on someone, you should go find a crowd and have a good old-fashioned rumble!”

“Is that what we should do?” asked aviator boy.

Kit nodded. “There’s a party at the water tower teeming with huge, strapping guys who can take a much better beating than him. Me and my sister can show you where it is.”

The aviator boy looked her over. “I see all that black, so I know you gotta be from here. Why would you help us out?”

“Because I know that if y’all start any shit at the water tower,” Kit admitted cheerfully, “you will get toasted. And I wanna see it. Is that a good enough reason?”

The boys laughed and piled into the truck, leaving the scrawny boy motionless on the ground.

The car was large, but then so were the boys. Fancy had to climb into one guy’s lap in the backseat in order to fit, a boy wearing green Bermuda shorts, which Fancy resented. Only the Mortmaine wore green, and this bully was as far from a Mortmaine as a person could be and still be human.

“
They’re
gonna get toasted,” said the green-clad boy, squeezing Fancy too tightly. She wanted to smack at his wandering hands, but she had a death grip on the kinetoscope, peering
into the round screen and letting the view of the happy place settle her nerves. “And after we rumble with them, maybe we’ll rumble with the two of you.” More laughter.

“You hear that, Fancy?” Kit was crammed in between the aviator boy and Longhorn in the front seat. “We get to be the spoils of war. But that’s only if you losers win. What’re the odds of that happening, Fancy?”

Fancy was already turning the crank. “Zero percent.”

Almost immediately the view inside the kinetoscope appeared outside, creeping along the interior of the truck until the world beyond the windows was hidden from view.

“Dude?” The boy sitting farthest from Fancy in the back-seat had a tattoo of a girl on his arm and was pointing at the pink flamingo staring at him through the window. “Are you seeing this?”

The only answer was a collective gasp as the window, along with the entire truck, disappeared. They hit the headless statue platform on their butts, flamingos scurrying from the commotion. The aviator boy scrambled to his knees, gawking at the ring of statues as if he thought they might come alive and crush him underfoot. “This isn’t possible,” he whispered, and then looked to Kit for confirmation.

“Sure it is.” She leaned toward him like a black mamba ready to strike. “Anything is possible here, even that rumble you wanted to have. Remember?” She snapped open her switchblade. “So okay. Here we go!” Kit removed the aviator boy’s sunglasses and jammed her switchblade into his left eye. As the aviator boy fell over dead, Kit put on his shades and chuckled.

“Look at me!” she yelled to Fancy. “I’m a pilot!”

But Fancy was busy with her own boy. The kinetoscope had vanished, leaving Fancy’s hands free to grab the steak knife she had hidden in the deep pocket of her shorts. She used it to stab the boy with the green shorts in the chest. She had to try a couple of times because the knife kept glancing off his ribs. The third time was the charm, however, and before he managed to knock her off his lap, she sank the blade into his heart. She had a hell of a time trying to pull the knife free, though. Stupid ribs.

The bullies had wanted a rumble, but now that they’d gotten their wish, they were almost completely paralyzed. That’s why transies were so easy to kill—they wasted so much time gaping and questioning every little thing, they didn’t notice important things like the fact that they were being slaughtered.

Longhorn, for instance, had scooted past Kit and was shaking
the aviator boy’s shoulder, completely ignoring the hole Kit had put in the boy’s head by way of his eye. “John?
John?
” He gaped at Kit. “What did you do to him, bitch?”

“I stabbed him!” she exclaimed, flicking eye and brain matter from her switchblade. “God! Why am I always having to explain that to people?” She slashed her knife at Longhorn, but he jerked back and up, so instead of slashing his throat, she only nicked his chest.

Longhorn took off, leaping from the platform down to the garden. His flight broke the others’ paralysis, and the remaining two boys also scrambled away. The sisters took off after them—Kit went after Longhorn, and Fancy, after she finally got her knife free, went after the boy who had sat in the middle with her in the backseat. She chased him across the greenscape, past quacking flamingos and topiaries shaped like butterflies. Her boy was as swift as an antelope, and Fancy knew she’d never be able to catch up. If only she had a way to block his path—

Two men, huge and burly and dressed in white like orderlies at an insane asylum, stepped out of the hedges. Their coveralls roared like an angry sea as they darted forward and caught the antelope boy by the arms, one on either side. The
antelope boy was huge, but between the two men in white, he looked like a gnat.

Fancy, startled by their sudden appearance, had frozen, but they didn’t do anything or even speak. They simply hauled the boy back toward her and then stood, as though awaiting instruction.

Fancy looked around for Kit and saw her riding Longhorn’s back like a rodeo clown, stabbing him in the neck and shoulders and screaming, “Yee-haw!” while he tried in vain to buck her off.

The men in white seemed harmless, though, so Fancy stabbed the antelope boy since they were thoughtfully holding him still for her. But his ribs
also
deflected the knife. Stabbing people in the heart was much more difficult than she’d ever imagined it would be. And the antelope boy wouldn’t stop screaming. In a fit of pique, Fancy stabbed him in the throat just to stop the noise, but when she pulled out the knife, blood sprayed everywhere.

Fancy skipped back to avoid the mess and landed on her butt in the grass. She glared at the boy, who was making a horrible gargling racket. She knuckled blood out of her eyes and screamed, “Can’t somebody shut him up?”

One of the men released antelope boy and snapped his neck. The silence was luscious.

Fancy regarded the men thoughtfully as they let the boy drop to the ground and stood at attention. They wanted
her
attention. “Thank you,” she said generously. “Breaking their necks is much neater than stabbing them. And then getting blood in your ears.” She got to her feet, tilting her head to the side and waggling her earlobe. “Amazing, all the orifices that blood can seep into.”