4
“Miss Frankenstein, you should probably wake up now.”
Maggie shot awake and nearly shrieked when she saw what appeared to be a swamp monster looming over her. Its smooth gray skin dripped with slime and mud, its eyes burned a baleful orange, and it reeked of the noxious ooze.
But what kind of monster would call her “Miss Frankenstein”? And why did its voice sound so familiar?
Then she noticed that the orange eyes were too perfectly circular to be natural, and she realized that what she had thought was skin was actually metal.
“Freud?” said Maggie. “What happened? Where have you been?”
“When the Annihilator attacked, I was knocked into that foul stew of chemicals. It is, I can assure you, much deeper than it appears. The walls where I fell in were too sheer and too soft for me to climb out, so I started walking north, hoping to find a spot that permitted egress. The going was quite slow, for the pool is floored with thick sludge, and before I had gone more than fifty feet, I sensed items being dumped into the pool near the spot where I had fallen in. I decided to head back to investigate, and it is a good thing I did, for among those objects—which included one of the Marauders, I am happy to add—were Kukalukl’s body and head, as well as dozens of chunks of rock that I identified as pieces of Mr. Granite. The latter was clearly beyond my ability to help. As for the former, though doubtful that his healing factor could repair such traumatic injuries, I had to concede that it was nevertheless possible, so I grabbed the body with one hand and the head with the other, and began my journey anew, albeit much more slowly this time, for I had Kukalukl’s dead weight slowing me down and forcing my servos to their limit.
“At any rate, after three tedious hours, I finally found a place where the west bank formed a slope instead of a sheer cliff, and there I plodded back into the air once more. I laid Kukalukl’s body in the shelter of some bushes where I hoped the Marauders would not find him, and took special care to place his head- and neck-stumps together to facilitate healing, if healing is even possible in a case like this.
“After that I returned to the clearing in hopes of learning what had happened. On the edge of it I found you.”
Maggie looked up at the sky, only now realizing that the sun was in the midst of setting, and the woods were growing dim.
“Oh, this is terrible,” she said. “I must have been asleep for over two hours…”
“You probably needed the rest.”
“No, you do not understand. The Marauders have taken Adam and Dagmar hostage. We must rescue them as soon as possible. I have no idea what will happen, or when, but when I…interrogated one of the Marauders earlier he said that their leader had plans for them—plans of a decidedly wicked nature, no doubt. We have to find a way inside. We have to find a way to save them.”
“I agree. But how?”
“I do not know.” She stood up and looked around. The hoverboard and Klaus’s body still lay in the middle of the clearing. “First help me dispose of this body. Currently our greatest advantage is that the Marauders do not know that we are coming—indeed, I doubt if they even know you exist—but that advantage will vanish should they return and find the body.”
After she and Freud dumped the body into the ooze, she picked up the board and looked at it. Theoretically, they could get on the hoverboard and fly in, but even if they ascended to a great height, they might be spotted flying toward the complex. Besides, she wasn’t sure if the board could handle their combined weight, or if she could handle being up so high with nothing but a thin piece of metal between her and a messy death on the ground below.
Her gaze settled on the pipe that jutted from the side of the slope. It no doubt led deep inside the complex, and while it was wide enough for them to crawl through with room to spare, it was slick with the acidic green ooze, which would eat the flesh off her hands before she had gone a hundred feet.
“Come on,” she said. “We need to finish reconnoitering the base. Perhaps we will find some other way inside.”
They entered the woods just north of the dirt path the Marauders had used, and headed west. After half a mile, the dirt path bent south toward another gate, next to which stood another guardhouse.
“Can you see if anyone is in there?” she asked Freud.
He scrutinized the distant guardhouse. “I see two men. One wears a tuxedo suit, a top hat, a cape, and a domino mask. The other has painted his face in the manner of a skull and wears a black outfit with a tight-fitting hood. They are watching the woods quite closely. No doubt they have been ordered to be on the lookout for us and their missing comrades.”
They retreated farther into the woods and passed the guardhouse. When they felt it was safe, they approached the fence again.
During the next half hour, as the sun sank and night spread across the woods, Maggie began to despair of ever finding a way inside. But then she saw something protruding from a cluster of bushes on the slope leading up to the fence. The darkness made it hard to be sure, but…
“Freud, is that what I think it is?” she said, pointing at the object.
Freud looked at it, his eyes like small orange moons in the deepening darkness.
“It is a pipe exactly like the one we encountered earlier.”
She strode forward, examined the ground below the pipe, and then peered into the dark bore. “No, not exactly like it. This one does not appear to have been used in years. Indeed, it is clean and dry and free of the burning chemicals that polluted the other one.” She smiled. “I think we’ve found our way in.”
Chapter 10
Yoyodyne (Inside)