2
When he opened his eyes again, the moon shone overhead amid a spray of stars.
He cursed himself for falling asleep. Such sloppiness could get them all killed.
Something had awakened him, but what? A sound? A movement? He didn’t know. But something, definitely.
He lay on his side facing Dagmar, who also lay on her side, but with her back to him. Her chest rose and fell with the slow, regular rhythm of her breathing. Rumbledum was still in her arms, but Adam could see only the top of his lavender head protruding above Dagmar’s shoulder.
Behind him he heard Maggie snoring—something she vehemently insisted she didn’t do, which meant he brought it up whenever possible—and Bob’s deep, regular breathing.
Judging by the faint flickers of light and the occasional pop and crack of wood, the fire still burned, but wouldn’t last much longer.
Everything looked and sounded all right. Perhaps his natural suspiciousness had overcome his reason. If so, he could live with that. Far better to be unnecessarily suspicious and breathing, than naive and dead.
His eyes had started to drift closed again when he saw a flash of movement.
It was Rumbledum. The little lavender head was moving, stretching upward to peer over Dagmar’s shoulder.
Before the bear’s button eyes became visible, Adam slitted his own eyes and hoped he looked as if he were still asleep. Through his intertwined eyelashes, he saw Rumbledum’s face rise above Dagmar’s shoulder like a misshapen lavender moon breaking the horizon. The bear stared at him with its glassy black eyes for so long that Adam wondered if it suspected he was awake. But then it craned its head to look over Adam’s body at Maggie and Bob and the others.
Adam waited, muscles tense, ready to spring into action should Rumbledum attempt to harm Dagmar or anyone else.
After nearly a full minute, Rumbledum relaxed back down. Adam himself started to relax, thinking that he had been mistaken, that the bear had simply been looking around to make sure his guests were sleeping peacefully.
What happened next happened very quickly.
With a sssschrip, Rumbledum’s stitched-on smile tore open, revealing two rows of needle-like teeth, and in one swift movement he plunged those teeth deep into Dagmar’s shoulder, sending up a spray of blood.
Before the drops of blood could land, Adam was on his feet. As he threw out a hand to grab Rumbledum, he spotted a brown blur flying toward him in his peripheral vision.
He turned just in time to see what it was, but too late to do anything about it.
It was Chimparee, sailing down toward Adam from a nearby branch. In his open mouth fangs like Rumbledum’s glittered in the moonlight. His arms were stretched out in front of him, and in the last millisecond before impact, razor-sharp talons popped out of its paws with a shnik.
Chimparee landed on Adam’s face with enough force to send him stumbling backward. Simultaneously Adam heard Dagmar scream off to his left, while to his right Bob said, “What? What’s—holy cow!”
Adam thudded to his back on the grass. Chimparee chittered and dug his talons deep into Adam’s cheeks and temples. Adam felt blood pouring down the sides of his face and plastering his hair to his head.
As he reached up to seize the monkey, more stuffed animals grabbed hold of his arms and sank their teeth into his hands and forearms.
Bellowing with anger and pain, Adam sat up and flung both arms forward as if he were hurling a boulder. Most of the stuffed animals on his arms flew off, and a moment later he heard the distant chish chish chish of objects hurtling through foliage.
One animal still held onto his right bicep, its teeth sunk so deep that Adam felt the pain way down in the center of the muscle.
For now, though, he ignored that one. The monkey on his face took priority because it could potentially cause greater damage, though so far it had only gouged furrows across his cheeks and brows. It hadn’t gone for his eyes or throat yet.
With his animal-free arm Adam reached up and closed his hand around the monkey’s head. Chimparee emitted an outraged squeal that was only a muffled trill through Adam’s fist. Adam squeezed, clenching his fist until the veins on his forearm looked like cables and blood gouted from the countless holes and gashes in his arm, but it had no effect on the monkey, whose head just squished beneath the pressure like a tiny pillow. There was no skull inside to crack, no brains to scramble.
Adam decided he hated magic.
In response to Adam’s attack, Chimparee dug its claws deeper into Adam’s face in an effort to anchor itself more firmly. By now Adam had lost enough chunks of skin not to be concerned about losing a few more, so he just wrenched the monkey off his face. With it came strips of flesh from his left cheek and right temple. Snarling, he hurled Chimparee as hard as he could toward the bonfire, which he hoped was still burning.
It was. There was a clatter of branches followed by the fwump of a nearly dead fire seizing upon a new fuel-source.
As Chimparee screeched and thrashed in the heart of the freshly revived bonfire, Adam swiped the blood from his eyes with his free arm, wincing as his sleeve tugged at the edge of a wound on his temple, and then looked down.
The animal on his arm was a green-and-black crocodile that had been introduced earlier as Crocodilly. It glared at Adam with its puffy white tassel eyes, the triangular red felt pupils glowing faintly in the firelight. Adam grabbed it by the tail and pulled it off his arm. The chunk of flesh in its mouth came off with it, and as Adam held out the crocodile at arm’s-length, he saw it swallow the chunk and heard a ghastly glk from its throat.
Sickened and enraged, he lobbed it at the bonfire. This time the pain in his arm threw off his aim and Crocadilly sailed over the fire and disappeared into a bush.
Adam looked around. Dagmar, still screaming, her shoulder drenched in blood, cowered behind Kukalukl, who was batting away any animal that got too close. Rumbledum lay dismembered on the grass near by. Even in pieces, the bear’s limbs wriggled and twisted with hideous life. Rumbledum hadn’t gone down without a fight, though; his claws were caked with blood and black fur, and the left side of Kukalukl’s mouth was a tattered, bloody mess. Maggie had gotten hold of an unburned log from the edge of the bonfire and was using it to beat back any animal that dared approach. Blood trickled from three parallel gashes on her left calf, and the back of her cloak had been reduced to shredded flaps, but otherwise she appeared untouched. She stood fast beside Granite, whose civilian clothes hung in strips from his uniform-clad stone body (and Adam noted with distant amusement that at some point he had taken the time to pull on his cowl). A crowd of animals scrabbled at Granite’s legs, their claws scritching against his stone body as they futilely tried to rip him apart. He calmly picked them up one by one and pitched them into the fire. Freud stalked about grabbing at any animal he came upon. Most of them evaded him with ease. The unlucky few who didn’t got their heads and limbs methodically plucked off with a speed and efficiency Adam found rather disturbing.
“This is terrible!” Freud called to Adam. “What shall we do?”
Before Adam could answer, a rustle overhead made him look up just in time to see Slobberjaw drop from a branch directly above him. This time Adam saw the approaching animal early enough to swat it out of the air before it landed on his head. A green blur sailed off toward the creek with a startled yelp.
But Slobberjaw wasn’t the only one: Over a dozen more animals were clambering out along the branches to get into position to drop on everyone.
“What shall we do, you ask?” Adam shouted. “Run! Everybody run!”
As the others raced off into the woods, Adam paused to help Dagmar onto Kukalukl’s back. Sobbing softly, eyes clenched shut, she wrapped her arms around the jaguar’s neck so tightly she nearly cut off the circulation to his head.
“Thank you,” Kukalukl said to Adam in a choked, raspy voice.
They sped after the others. Unsurprisingly, they caught up with Freud first. He was already a hundred yards behin
d Granite and Maggie and falling farther behind by the second.
“Perhaps I can carry you…” Adam said doubtfully.
“You needn’t bother,” Freud said. “Since I cannot be eaten, the animals will undoubtedly pass me by in favor of the rest of you. As they do so, however, I shall endeavor to kill or delay as many as I can. I shall catch up with you when I can.”
They hurried on and soon caught up with Granite and Maggie. Granite had had the presence of mind to snatch a burning branch from the bonfire before he exited the clearing, and now he held it high above his head, lighting the way through the dark woods. From behind them came yowls and snarls and the rustle of bushes as the animals pursued. A glance back showed Adam that the creatures were faster than their short legs and roly-poly bodies suggested. They were keeping a steady pace behind the group, and as he watched, they streamed around Freud, who managed to snatch and dismember only two of them before they were past him.
After several minutes of steady sprinting, even Adam with his superhuman strength and endurance could feel his energy ebbing away. They would have to find a way to either evade or destroy the animals very soon; otherwise they would just collapse from exhaustion and the animals would swarm over them like ants on spilled sugar.
“Hey, I think there’s a building up ahead,” said Granite.
“What?” Adam squinted through the trees, and yes, there was indeed a large straight-edged shape in a clearing about two hundred feet ahead.
“I sense something unusual about it,” said Kukalukl.
“Like what?” said Adam.
“Magic, I believe. Strong magic.”
More damn magic. Unfortunately, they had no other options left.
“We must get inside and try to hold them off from in there,” said Adam.
He had only a quick glimpse of the building’s exterior as they dashed across the short stretch of clearing between the woods and the building’s gaping doorway, but it was enough to show that maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all. Judging by the glass shards fanning out across the clearing from the building’s facade, the windows had blown outward with great force. The door had been torn from its hinges and lay partly buried in the dirt. Next to it lay a moldy, nearly illegible cardboard sign that read “Closed.” A much larger sign, this one made of wood, stretched across the top of the shop’s front. Though streaked and stained and peeling, the painted blue letters were still readable, and they read, “Suzie’s Stuffed Animal Emporium.”
“Wonderful,” muttered Adam.
Once inside, Granite raised the torch and shone it around.
Hundreds of stuffed animals gazed at them from every direction. Maggie yelped. Dagmar screamed. Adam drew in a sharp hiss of breath, sure that this was the end…at least until Granite picked up one of the animals—a smiling cat, its pink fur flecked with dirt—and bounced it up and down on his palm.
“No, see?” said Granite. “They’re not like the others. They’re not alive. They’re inanimate.”
Everyone relaxed a little, except Dagmar, whose screams at least became mercifully muffled as she buried her face in Kukalukl’s fur.
“It’s okay,” said Kukalukl in a surprisingly soft voice. He started purring, a deep rumbling sound quite different than that produced by domestic cats. Dagmar’s screams dwindled to gasping sobs.
Granite suddenly turned and frowned into the dark depths of the store.
“What’s wrong?” Maggie asked.
“I hear something,” Granite said. He raised his torch and strode forward to have a look. “It sounds like—”
He froze, gaping in shock and horror at what the torchlight had revealed.
“What is it?” said Adam. He hurried over to join Granite, the others following close behind. As he drew closer, he heard it too: a susurration barely audible over the snap and crackle of the torch.
Then he saw things moving in the torchlight, and for a second he thought that there were more animated stuffed animals in here after all. But no. At least not animated in the same fashion.
The stuffed animals in this part of the store writhed on the floor like maggots, their limbs tracing aimless trails in the dirt. The shelves that had once held them were empty except for a few where the smaller animals couldn’t make it over the shelves’ raised rims and so could only twist about in their shallow metal prisons like worms in jars.
“Oh, this is…” Maggie turned away, her hand over her mouth. The soft, incessant rustle as the animals mindlessly squirmed about on the floor made her stomach turn over.
Beyond this section were empty shelves and an empty floor. Here, then, was where the animals of Happyvale had originated.
And in the center of this empty section, like the bull’s-eye at the center of the rings of a dartboard, was the cause of the animals’ unnatural animation.
A black stone obelisk stood in the middle of the floor, the rubble heaped around its base indicating it had risen up from below. The stone was of a type no one present could identify, and the very air around it seemed unusually dim, as if light lost its illuminatory power near the obelisk. Letters in some strange language had been carved onto each of the obelisk’s four sides. Adam found the shapes of the letters repellent in some inexplicable way, and he discovered he couldn’t look at them for too long without feeling dizzy.
“What is this?” said Granite. He held a hand out toward it. “Can you feel it? It’s radiating…something.”
“Magic,” said Kukalukl. Dagmar had finally gotten down off his back and now sat shivering and pale just inside the area free of stuffed animals. Maggie knelt beside her with one arm wrapped around her shoulders.
Kukalukl stepped up to the obelisk, studied the writing, sniffed it.
“As I thought,” he said with a derisive snort. “This is Ng’l’xula, one of the languages of the ‘Great’ Old Ones.”
“Meaning what, exactly?” asked Adam.
“Meaning that this must be what they call a T’mazimet. Which means one of the Old Ones is contained within it. Which is infinitely annoying. I hate dealing with those disgusting bastards. The stench alone is appalling. They never bathe, you know. Do you have any idea what eons-old slime smells like?”
“So the Old One is what made all those stuffed animals come alive?” said Granite.
“The Old One’s magic, to be precise. The Old One himself is probably slumbering and has no real awareness of any of this.”
“Well, then, that ain’t a problem.” Granite made a fist and cocked his arm back.
“No, you fool!” Kukualukl cried, and leaped in front of Granite’s hurtling fist. It slammed into his ribs with a sound like someone stepping on a sack full of sticks.
“Ow,” he said as he thudded to the floor. “That’ll take a few hours to heal.”
“They’re here!” cried Maggie.
The others looked around. Crowded against the gaping holes where the door and windows used to be were the animals of Happyvale. Their dark glassy eyes glimmered crimson in the torchlight.
In the center of the doorway stood Slobberjaw, Rumbledum’s severed head held in his paws. Grass-stains streaked the teddy bear’s face, and a blob of stuffing dangled like a pendulum from his neck-stump.
“Hello, my lovely guests,” said Rumbledum, his voice as chipper as when Adam and the others had first arrived in Happyvale. “I think you’re cornered!”
The other animals cheered and waved their arms.
“Cornered, cornered,” they cried in merry, sing-song voices.
“Now we shall have a beautiful slaughter!”
The animals cheered louder than ever. “Slaughter! Slaughter! Yay!”
“Stall them,” Kukalukl hissed at Adam and Maggie. “Stall them for as long as you can. If they attack, protect Dagmar. Hold her over your heads if you have to. If you let them injure her, I shall take incalculable pleasure in flaying both of you alive and then playing with your bones. Are we clear?”
“Yes,” Maggie said.
<
br /> “There is no need for threats,” Adam said.
Kukalukl ignored him. “Go.”
Adam and Maggie stepped forward to meet the animals.
“What about me?” Granite asked Kukalukl.
“I’ll need your help.”
“Sorry I hit you. I take it smashing that thing won’t help.”
“Indeed not. The Old One in question—and if I’m reading the writing on the obelisk correctly, it’s name is Oghkhnarakh’gh, not that it matters—the Old One isn’t inside the pillar, but is confined by it. It’s hard to explain to a being of such limited intellect and perception as yourself, but imagine the pillar as a sort of plug blocking access to or from the infra-dimensional space in which the Old One is slumbering. Destroying the pillar would be like removing the plug, allowing the Old One to pour into this world like a flood. As it is, it’s entering in only a trickle at the moment, just enough to corrupt and animate the stuffed animals closest to the obelisk, which leads me to surmise that when the pillar rose up through the floor during the Cataclysm, part of the writing on the stone was damaged.”
“So if we can find and fix the damaged writing…”
“It will cut off that trickle of magic which is animating the animals, yes. So help me look for any cracks or chips in the obelisk.”
Meanwhile, Adam and Maggie had stridden halfway to the front of the store, then stopped and fixed what they hoped were convincingly forbidding glares on the stuffed animals peering in through the door and windows.
“You may not enter this building,” said Adam.
Rumbledum tittered. “Oh, but we may. It is you who are the interlopers here. This is our birthplace.”
With the bear’s head held out in front of him like a king’s crown on a silken pillow, Slobberjaw stepped through the doorway.
“You are trapped,” said Rumbledum.
The other animals giggled and chanted, “Trapped trapped trapped.” They began climbing in through the windows and forming a line at the front of the store.
Something bumped Adam’s boot. He looked down. It was one of the twitching, semi-alive stuffed animals, a teddy bear with long silver hair. He bent down, grabbed it, and held it up for the other animals to see.
“Stop now, or we shall start destroying your fellows here.”
Rumbledum pshawed. “The half-born are of little concern to us. They are feeble, useless things.”
Adam gripped either end of the bear and pulled it apart. Stuffing flew in every direction and the half-born bear emitted a short squeak.
Despite Rumbledum’s claims, the fully animated animals drew back a little, as if offended.
“That wasn’t nice,” said Rumbledum in a low, unhappy voice. “Not nice at all.”
“They’re bad, duh-huh,” agreed Slobberjaw. “Bad.”
With Slobberjaw (and Rumbledum’s head) in the lead, the animals trooped forward, teeth and talons gleaming in the torchlight.
Granite glanced back, saw the animals approaching, and said, “They’re coming. We’ve gotta hurry this up.”
“Yes,” said Kukalukl, “I know. But I’m not seeing any damage to the obelisk at all. It’s…ah. There it is.”
He nosed a spot on the obelisk. At first Granite didn’t see anything there except those weird letters, but as he bent forward and brought the torch in closer for a better look, he saw an oval chip in the stone that had eradicated a single letter of the ancient writing.
“That’s it?” he said. “Just that one little spot?”
“So it seems. Now shut up; I need to figure out what the missing letter is.”
He scanned the writing, then huffed in annoyance.
“Why did they have to construct a language with so many damn cases? Let me see…I think this section is using the ablative…”
Fearing the worst, Granite glanced over his shoulder. Adam and Maggie were slowly backing away from the advancing stuffed animals, a colorful sea of fuzz and fabric that filled the front third of the store from wall to wall. And still more animals were climbing in through the windows. He hadn’t realized there were so many of them. Then again, he saw several he didn’t recognize, so perhaps some of them had been away from Happyvale for some reason earlier in the day.
“Ah,” said Kukalukl. “I think I’ve got it.”
“You think?” said Granite.
“I’m mostly certain; let’s put it that way. This is one of the most complicated languages in existence. It has seventy cases and twelve genders (though two of them are imaginary) and it often uses adverbs as nouns. At any rate, I’m hoping that your stone finger is strong enough to incise lines in the obelisk.”
“It should be.” He held up his right index finger. “Tell me what to do.”
“Make a vertical line through the spot that’s been chipped away.”
“You’re kidding. All of this happened because of one line?”
“Yes. Are you going to do it, or shall we stand here and get eaten by children’s toys?”
“All right, all right.”
He jabbed his finger as hard as he could into the top of the chipped-off area. He was half afraid that he would cause even more damage to the obelisk, maybe send a huge chunk flying out. Instead, his finger sank right in. There was a little crumbling around the edges of the hole his finger made, but it was too localized to damage any of the writing. Whatever the obelisk was made of, its physical properties were unlike those of any stone Granite was familiar with. It was somehow soft like butter and hard like steel at the same time. Which was impossible, except…
Well, except that apparently it wasn’t.
Far more troubling than that, though, was that while his finger had been strong enough to penetrate the stone, the magic leaking from the stone was also penetrating him: Cold numbness quickly spread up his finger, across his hand, past his wrist. He knew somehow that allowing the numbness to spread over too much of his body would be a very bad thing.
And yet part of him felt an irrational urge to find out what would happen if he let it overwhelm him. It would be so easy. All he would have to do was stand here with his finger in the obelisk. And afterward…well, it didn’t matter. It would be just like going to sleep. It would be like when he was a kid all huddled underneath the covers on a cold winter’s night, curled up in the warm womb-like blackness without a care in the world. It would be so nice, so cozy…
Adam and Maggie had backed up as far as the section of empty shelves when the stuffed animals finally noticed Granite and Kukalukl next to the obelisk.
“What are they doing?” said Rumbledum, his voice shrill with alarm. “They can’t do that! Stop them! Charge!”
Snarling, growling, yowling, yapping, the animals surged forward. Adam squeezed his hands into fists bigger than most of the animals, while Maggie pulled out her dagger, both of them ready to fight and, if need be, die.
Through the veils falling across his mind like black cobwebs, Granite heard Rumbledum shout something. The only word he could make out was, “Charge!” It wasn’t important. Happyvale was long in the past. Or was it the future? It didn’t matter. All that did was the present, an endless black ocean, silent, blissful…
“Hey, look!” That was Kukalukl’s voice. “Isn’t that Lightray and the Contortionist over there?”
The veils broke apart in a flash. Granite looked around, blinking like someone jolted out of a dream.
“What? Where?”
“In my ass! Now pull your fucking finger down right fucking now!”
Suddenly it all came back to him. The animals. The obelisk. Granite hoped it wasn’t already too late. Rumbledum’s voice had sounded close. The darn bear must be almost in the middle of the store. To make matters worse, during his brief trip to la-la land, the numbness had spread well past his elbow.
Lips pressed together in a thin white line, he pulled his finger straight down, cutting a furrow through the chipped-off area. A few tiny fragments of black stone broke off around his finger and clicked to t
he floor, but none of the writing was damaged and that was what mattered. He yanked his finger out just as the numbness reached his shoulder. While he had been making the line, the black stone had started oozing shut behind his finger in a slow, smooth fashion that reminded him for some reason of Jell-O. But the moment he pulled his finger out, it set.
The charging army of stuffed bears and cats and lizards and birds was only moments away from slamming into Adam and Maggie when the faint crack of stone sounded toward the rear of the store. The animals immediately stopped in their tracks and went rigid as if they were being electrocuted, their backs arched, their arms extended at their sides. Even the half-born animals stopped squirming and stiffened like planks of woods.
And from all of them arose a horrible keening that made everyone cover their ears. It sounded like a million seagulls crying out, their shrill voices combining into one skull-skewering “eeeeeeeeee.” Then it abruptly ceased, and the animals collapsed to the floor.
Adam bent down and inspected the nearest animals. No claws. No fangs. They were just toys again.
“I guess we did it,” said Granite, joining Adam and Maggie. He kept shaking his arm as if trying to wake it up.
“Are you hurt?” asked Maggie, making no effort to mask her concern.
“Nah. It’s just that I had to stick my finger in the obelisk like that little Dutch boy plugging the dike. And let me tell you, that thing’s cold inside. But it’s wearing off now. Slowly.”
Kukalukl ignored all this and headed straight for Dagmar.
“How are you?” he asked.
She didn’t answer at first, just sat there shivering, her knees drawn up to her chest, her arms wrapped around her legs, her eyes fixed on some distant point beyond the opposite wall. Sweat glistened on her pale, clammy face. Nearly half her shirt was soaked with blood from the wound in her shoulder.
“I wanna go home,” she finally said in a tiny voice.
Without responding, Kukalukl turned away and padded over to the others, who were watching with concern.
“She’s in shock, and she’s lost a lot of blood. We need to clean and mend her wound immediately.”
“Agreed,” said Adam. “The first aid kit is back with the mules…”
“If the mules are even still there,” said Granite. “The stuffed animals might have eaten them.”
“But they would not eat the medicine. And right now, that is far more important than two mules.”
They retraced their path to the clearing where they had been so rudely awakened less than an hour earlier. Kukalukl carried Dagmar on his back since she was too weak to walk. At about the halfway point, they met up with Freud, still trotting implacably along. He was overjoyed that they had defeated the stuffed animals, though regretful he hadn’t been able to do more to help. “We must all learn to work within our preprogrammed limits, I suppose,” he concluded stoically.
When they got to the clearing, they discovered that Granite had been right: The mules had been reduced to well-gnawed bones.
The contents of their packs were strewn about the clearing. Though most items were undamaged, several articles of clothing had been torn up, one of the boxes of cereal emptied into a bush, and a strip of salt pork unwrapped and bitten into. The bitten off portion lay nearby in a chewed-up, spat-out wad. Like Kukalukl, the stuffed animals had preferred their meat raw and bloody.
The medicine bag had been opened, then set aside, its contents thankfully of no interest to the animals. While the others repacked their supplies, Maggie treated Dagmar’s wound. The chunk of flesh Rumbledum had torn out of her shoulder was too large to be sutured up, so Maggie cleaned it out with alcohol, which produced squawks of pain from Dagmar, then slathered on some antibiotic ointment and covered it with a bandage.
“As it heals, it will itch fiercely, but try not to scratch it. I will help you re-dress the wound every morning if you like. If it looks as if an infection is setting in, we shall give you some Cipro.”
Dagmar didn’t answer. She just sat on the grass, staring off into space.
“Are you hungry?” asked Maggie.
For a moment Dagmar continued staring at nothing. But then she gave an almost imperceptible shake of her head.
“Thirsty?”
Dagmar nodded.
“Yes, please,” she said in a hoarse, weak voice.
Maggie handed her one of the water bottles, and Dagmar gulped down half of it in one go despite Maggie’s exasperated calls for her to drink more slowly.
As she handed the bottle back to Maggie, Dagmar gasped and clutched her belly. Her throat bulged as the she struggled to keep the water down. It was a struggle she couldn’t win. She turned her head to the side and a stream of soupy liquid shot from her mouth.
“I told you not to drink so fast,” Maggie said. She stroked Dagmar’s shuddering back as the girl retched up the last few drops. “You should wait a little while before having any more.”
“Is she okay?” asked Bob, who had taken off his cowl and put on a fresh shirt and jeans.
“I believe so.”
“Good. Um…” He licked his lips and scratched the back of his head, suddenly looking as uneasy as a schoolboy asking a girl to a dance. “Do you, uh, do you need any help dressing your own wound?”
She looked down at the gashes on her calf. In all the excitement, she had forgotten about them. Now that her attention had returned to them, however, she did feel a slight throb of pain. Nothing major, though. They weren’t even bleeding anymore. All she needed to do was swab them with alcohol and slap on a bandage. And yet in her mind, she imagined Bob kneeling before her and taking her bare calf in his large, strong hands. Her face reddened. Thank goodness it was too dark for him to see it.
“No, thank you,” she said. “It is not necessary.”
“Ah. That’s, uh, that’s good.” He sounded a little disappointed.
Adam joined them. “We should try to get some sleep,” he said. He glanced at Dagmar. “Not here, though. We should move upstream. Out of Happyvale.”
“Good idea,” said Bob. “And I was thinking: With the mules gone, there’s no way we can carry all our supplies. But since Freud says we’re only about three days away from the Marauders’ base, it would make the most sense to take only whatever we’ll need for, say, a week, and leave the rest hidden away here in a safe place.”
“Where would be safe enough?” asked Maggie as she set to work cleaning Adam’s numerous wounds. His superhuman biology ensured that they would heal within a few days, but there was still a slight risk of infection.
“I was thinking the stuffed animal store.”
At the mention of the place, Dagmar drew her legs up to her chest and buried her head between her knees.
With a guilty grimace, Bob knelt beside her to comfort her, but she drew away from him as if he were radioactive.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m a friend, remember?”
“Pih,” Dagmar spat, as if the very idea that anyone could be a friend was too ludicrous for words.
Bob stood up and looked at Adam and Maggie. Adam shrugged. Maggie shook her head at Bob as if to say “leave it alone for now.”
“Hiding the supplies in the store sounds like a good idea,” Adam said in a low voice. “We should act quickly, though, so we can get at least a few hours of sleep tonight.”
Leaving a week’s worth of provisions in their packs, Adam, Bob, and Maggie hid the rest in a cabinet under the counter in the store. Adam placed a rock the size of a car’s engine against the cabinet door to ensure the more common varieties of wildlife couldn’t get inside. The less common varieties, on the other hand, might be a problem, but that would be true no matter where they put the provisions.
After that, they rejoined Kukalukl, Dagmar, and Freud, and the group made their way north along the creek until they were well clear of Happyvale. Dagmar once again rode on Kukalukl’s back; he seemed to be the only one she trusted enough to touch her.
They mad
e camp in a meadow next to the creek. Aside from Freud and Kukalukl, none of them got to sleep for a long, long time. They lay awake, in pain, in worriment, in reflection, listening to the wind in the trees and Freud’s constant faint hum and Kukalukl’s deep, even breathing, until the night was nearly gone.
Chapter 6
Boko Zafendo