The Other Normals (30 page)

“PERRY, YOU DID IT!” ADA RUNS UP TO ME. “Are you okay?”

I drop the tentacle and move my jaw around and pat my Adam’s apple. “I feel a bit violated, but I’ll be all right.”

“Fool!” we hear outside. Ophisa turns his titanic body. The princess leaps off his neck to confront Tendrile in the parking lot. “Go back in there! Kill them all!”

“I can’t, mistress. Look what he did to me!”

She wraps a tentacle of her own around his stump to examine it. She seems genuinely concerned about his welfare. She speaks quietly to him—comfortingly—and then kisses him, hard, on the lips, pressing into his body while their tentacles commingle.

“Ew,” I say.

“No kidding,” Ada says. Mortin and Sam join us. We all watch, flabbergasted, as the princess walks Officer Tendrile across the parking lot toward the trees.

“Did you know?”

“We knew they were working together,” Mortin says. “We tracked Tendrile on the Boggolove cruise raft and found him
with Ophisa and the princess, outside Upekki. All the hequets who were missing from the town? They were feeding them—live—to the monster. But we didn’t know they were … lovers.”

Ophisa lumbers after the couple on his huge barbed legs.

“No!” the princess orders. “You, my pet!
You
must kill them! Find your way into that structure! Make them die … like food.”

“
Yessss
,” says Ophisa. As Tendrile and the princess disappear into the woods, he turns to charge.

“BACK UNDER THE TABLE!” SAM SUGGESTS, but before we can get there, Ophisa roars and spits a great glob of venomous fluid through the broken door. Mortin shoves Sam aside. Ada and I dive to the ground. The spittle hits one of the table legs. It bubbles and steams. The table collapses.

“Stay down!” Mortin says. Ophisa swings his tail through the door, obliterating it. Then he swings again through the maw of the building to send stacks of chairs flying; I interlock my hands over the back of my skull and hear a scream and a dense
whap.
I look up: a chair caught Sam in the mouth. He wipes his wrist against his lips and leaves a dark streak. He stares at me like this is my fault. I have to admit it is.

“Come and play with me, Mini Pecker!”
Ophisa calls.
“I can sssee what you want with your blue-haired friend. I will help you. I ssseee how you want her partsss....”

“Don’t listen to him, Ada! I don’t think about you that way!” How is he getting into my head?

He can see into the thoughts of anyone he turns his hundred-and-ten-eye gaze on.

Ophisa shoves his mouth through the door and unleashes a spray of fluid. It lands on my legs and eats through my jeans, burning my flesh where the dog-head bit me, eating ragged holes into my skin. I scream and flick the goop off and wipe my leg on the floor. I have small bloody craters on my calves. The pain is so huge that I laugh at it.

“Leave me, guys! Save yourselves!”

“Not a chance,” Ada says. She pulls me back toward the kitchen. Ophisa paces outside like he’s trying to figure out a way in. Even with the door destroyed, he’s too big, and carpet bombing us with phlegm will only get him so far.

“How do we kill that thing?” Sam asks. We huddle against the kitchen door. Outside, Ophisa stands still. We all watch for clues to his behavior. He swings his head—with a great mound of acidic goop on it—toward one of his front legs. He brushes his fangs against the leg where it meets his body. It sizzles and steams and snaps off. His body lurches forward, on five legs now instead of six.

“What’s he doing?”

Mortin gulps. “Figuring out a way in.”

He repeats the process with his second front leg, sizzling it into the parking lot. When it falls, though, and he lurches forward, he catches himself—
with a new front leg in place of his old one.
The new leg is segmented and barbed like the original, but only a few feet long.

“Regeneration? Are you
kidding
me?”

“He’s making smaller limbs,” Ada says. “With two-foot
limbs, he can crawl right in.”

“That’s not fair!”

“To the kitchen! Hurry!” Sam pushes open the swinging door, and we all tumble in and flip on the lights.

STOVES. REFRIGERATORS. GIANT COOLERS running under cutting boards. The kitchen has been put away with great care. Pots and pans hang over electric ranges. Boxes that say
GOVERNMENT CHEESE
are stacked in the far corner, next to an industrial-sized canister of bleach. On one side of the room, a conveyor belt leads to a huge stainless steel dish-washing machine labeled
HOBART
.

“Why are we in here?” I ask.

“There!” Sam points to a magnetic strip above one of the stoves. A set of knives hangs from it, in a spectrum from the smallest paring knife to the largest meat cleaver.

“I’m okay,” Ada says, holding up her remaining knitting needle.

“Like that’ll do any good,” Mortin says. He takes a meat cleaver.

“It
might.
Leave me alone.”

“I call chef’s knife,” Sam says, grabbing a ten-inch blade. It works for him. I picture Peter Powers, fifteenth-level barbarian, swinging it in the snow.

“We’ll wait here”—I stand by the kitchen entrance—“and
get him as he comes in. What do we aim for, anyway?”

“Eyes. Try to destroy all the eyes you can. What are you using for a weapon?”

I pull off my backpack and fill it with knives—everything left on the magnetic strip. Steak knives, bread knives, barbecue forks … I’m turning my backpack into an instrument of death. “You came in the nick of time,” I tell Ada. “How’d you know we were in trouble?”

“Mortin felt you.”

“How?”

“In my heart,” Mortin says. “I felt my heart jump and I knew my correspondent was in danger.”

I blinked. “
I’m
your correspondent?”

“Perry. I was giving you credit! You didn’t figure it out?”

“Yeah,” Sam says, “I don’t even know how this all works and I figured that part out.”

“But, I—Mortin—you’re
old
!”

“Smoking pebbles makes you old. I’ve been coming here on my own time and doing it for years. I was born the same day as you.”

“But I asked you point-blank if you were my correspondent!”

“So?”

“You told me
no
! You
lied
!”

“Some people think that life is about lying all the time, and some think it’s about being truthful all the time, but really it’s a very mundane matter of knowing when to do which.”

“You lied and you had me paralyzed!”

“Would you two
shut up
?” Sam asks. “Two Perrys. What a nightmare.”

Of course, it makes sense. Mortin and Leidan correspond to me and Jake. Which reminds me: “What happened to Leidan?”

“Don’t worry about him,” Mortin says, but he himself looks worried. I wonder if Leidan started drinking again, and what that means for Jake’s drinking. Connections are coming into focus. Mortin had been covering up a black eye since I met him …
and I was hit in the eye by Ryu.
Mortin quit smoking pebbles …
and I quit playing Creatures & Caverns.

“I’m not really sure how to do this,” I say. “Pleased to meet you, correspondent.” I stick out my hand.

“You do it like this,” Mortin says. He hugs me and wraps his tail around my head. “Pleased to meet you too.”

I retake my position at the door.

“Why did your heart jump?” Ada asks quietly. “If Mortin’s jumped, yours must have.”

“I almost kissed Anna.”

“But you didn’t?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“C’mon.”

“C’mon what?”

“C’mon, you know.”

“Pretend I don’t. Tell me.
Humor
me.”

“I didn’t kiss her because I was thinking of you.”

Ada smiles. “No kidding. Were you thinking of me as a mystical creature from another world, or a cool girl who can cook fish?”

“Both,” I say. Then, without asking, like I’m supposed to, I lean in and kiss her. Ideally it would be a slow kiss, I know, with a romantic buildup, but Ada and I don’t have that kind of relationship—we tend to always be in mortal danger. So it’s a quick, scared, excited, flying leap of a kiss, my lips dashing to hers and pressing against them with nothing and everything to lose. I get her upper lip between my upper and lower lips and hold her like that, not opening my mouth, just feeling how soft she is, knowing that now, if I die, I’ll have a beautiful memory instead of a burning regret. I drink her in through my closed lips.

“Peregrine!” She pulls back, shocked, but she can’t hide her smile. “Listen!”

Tables and chairs crash outside. Clicking footsteps get louder on the linoleum.

“Boymeat! I sssmell your dessire, sssuckling!”

OPHISA’S FAST, BUT NOT FAST ENOUGH. As soon as his head appears in the doorway—as big as my chest and dripping eye venom—we all attack. I swing my backpack at him; Sam stabs him; Ada jabs her needle at his neck; Mortin hacks him with his meat cleaver.

Fail!

Sam’s knife tears into Ophisa’s mouth and rips off a hunk of flesh, but then promptly dissolves. Ada’s knitting needle can’t break his scaly neck hide. Mortin’s cleaver slices off a crop of eyes, but then Mortin drops it. My backpack turns out to be the best choice—it doesn’t do much as a weapon, but it acts as a buffer during Ophisa’s counterattack, when he knocks into us, trying to smear acid on us with his fangs the way he did his own legs. The bag sizzles on the floor as we’re thrown across the room—inside its eaten-away main pocket, the cover of the
Other Normal Edition
disintegrates. Ada lands on one of the stoves; Sam hits a fridge; Mortin hits the wall under the empty magnetic knife strip. I find myself next to the
HOBART
machine. I see a red switch underneath the conveyor belt and press it. I may not play Creatures & Caverns anymore, but that
book was awesome, and I am pissed. Maybe the machine will confuse the monster.

An electronic roar starts up. The
HOBART
is as long as the room, full of jets of water and chunking metal. The conveyor belt leading to it starts rolling; inside, rows of brushes go after plates that aren’t there.

“He’s coming!” Mortin yells.

Beside the doorway, to either side of Ophisa’s swaying neck, cracks spread and paint chips flutter to the ground. He’s pressing his massive body against the walls, pushing his way into the kitchen.

“Hello, meatymeats!”

With a terrific crash of wood and plaster, he busts in. Dust rains over him. He works his fangs around one another. Steam from the
HOBART
starts to obscure him, but not before he spots the clump of eyeballs that Mortin lopped off him. He bends down and eats them.

We’re trapped.

OPHISA’S LEGS ARE ONE FOURTH THE size they were outside, but his body is still huge. He dominates the room like a giant scorpion. He has his pick of us. He turns to Sam and disdainfully spits a small sizzle at his shoulder.
“I sssupposse I’ll try the darkmeat first.”

“Sam!”

Ophisa raises one of his front legs. The plating on it is fresh and pink, unlike the rest of his body, which the kitchen light reveals to be freckled, swampy green. He jabs down—and sticks Sam in the thigh.

“Aaaaagh!”
Sam grabs his leg. Ophisa digs in, pumping fluid through a translucent vein and into Sam’s body. Sam’s thigh swells. Just today, in nature studies, we learned that many arthropods paralyze their prey with neurotoxins before eating them alive.

“Somebody, distract him!”

“Hey!” Ada jumps on a stove, dancing between the burners. She waves her arms above her head. “Hey, ugly!” Ophisa turns from Sam and pulls his leg out of Sam’s. Sam slumps over, eyes open and unblinking.

“Would you like to be violated by my fangsss, wench?”

I look at Ada.

“I don’t know what he’s talking about. I don’t want that at all—”

Ophisa dives toward her. She vaults over his festoon of eyes and lands with her feet pointed like daggers into the top of his head. She screams as acid touches her toes, but Ophisa gets it worse. His face hits the stove—and Ada has turned it on.

Four electric burners crackle at once. A dozen eyes blow off Ophisa’s head, spraying pungent white fluid on the walls and ceiling. A pupil lands next to me—a flat iridescent disc. Ada rolls into a corner and moans as she wipes her feet off with a rag that subsequently steams up and disintegrates.

“Mortin! Knives!” I hook my finger into my backpack and slide it across the floor to him. Inside, the book shielded a bunch of knives from getting eaten by acid. I suddenly have an idea. “Throw these in
HOBART
!”

“What?”

“The dishwasher!”

He pours the knives into the rumbling, clanking machine. I climb onto the conveyor belt. The acid pits in my legs make it so I can hardly stand. The room is getting hot and smells like death. I only have one chance.