Top Elf

by Caleb Huett

  Kurt snorted. “That’s awesome.”

  “It’s not awesome!”

  “It’s all about perspective, bro.” Kurt reached into The Bag and said, “Laptop.” He pulled out a fancy new laptop and handed it to the teenager. “Farts are funny. There’s sound-editing software on this—auto-tune your toots into a song or something. And don’t take yourself so seriously.”

  The teenager took the laptop and stared at Kurt. “Uh, thanks. I guess you’re right.”

  “No prob.” Kurt winked and turned back to Celia. “We’re done here.”

  Near London there was a boy with a star-shaped scar on his forehead sitting on a street where every house looked just like every other house.

  “I wanted to get away from my evil aunt and uncle, so I wished for a letter from a magical school. Santa gave me this!” The boy showed us a very polite rejection letter from a nearby boarding school for sorcerers.

  “Oh, I went to that school! I was spelledictorian!” Gadzooks stepped off the sleigh. “I’m going to make some calls to be sure he gets there. Don’t worry, the birds will keep helping distribute presents. Stop that mean old man Krampus for me! Toodle-oo!”

  “Thank you!” the boy yelled as we lifted off.

  “Try not to get ex-SPELLed!” I yelled back, and giggled. The triplets flicked me in the head.

  In Seoul, a girl wished for a statue of herself in the city, and Ramp had created a giant marble version of her picking her nose. We shot the harpoon gun Sally had added to the sleigh into the statue and pulled it to the ground, where it crumbled safely onto a street we evacuated. I scooped up the rubble with The Bag.

  “I don’t know what you’re doing, but it’s working,” Bertrand said to us over our headsets. “More people are making wishes—but we still don’t have enough power to catch up.”

  Karl chimed in. “The public are starting to get it. Some people thought at first it was a carefully constructed prank, but too much is happening for that to still be believable. He’s doing more damage than you guys can fix right now, but he doesn’t represent Santa alone.”

  In Johannesburg, a kid wished for their family to “stop moving” because they had switched schools three times in two years. Ramp froze them in ice, and we left the triplets behind with blow-dryers to thaw them out.

  In Portland a three-year-old girl wished to be a firefighter when she grew up and suddenly found herself trying to drive a fire truck down the road in the middle of a huge fire that sprung up out of nowhere in the city. Buzz stayed behind with an arsenal of heavy-duty water guns he pulled from The Bag.

  When we arrived in Tokyo, we saw a bed rocketing into the sky. Celia slowed us down, and Crasher steered us to it. On top was a boy clinging for dear life to his pillow and screaming. He wouldn’t move to grab my hand, so Sally grabbed my leg and Kurt grabbed Sally’s leg and I jumped onto the bed. I held on tight to the boy and his pillow and Kurt dragged us back onto the sleigh.

  The bed continued up into the upper atmosphere, and I watched the four rockets on each leg sputter out as it got farther and farther away.

  “What did you wish for?” I asked, breathless.

  The screen translated his Japanese: “I wanted to go to space.”

  In Sydney, a girl wished to sing at the opera house one day and suddenly found herself with a gig that night and no plan on what to do. Kurt stayed behind to help her plan her set list.

  In Cairo, a boy had wished for new video games, and Ramp had turned all the video games he already had into only Pong.

  “He said, ‘Back in my day, this is the only video game we had, and we liked it!’ I just wanted to catch some monsters!!!”

  We gave him some new ones. Sally got him a laptop, too, and stayed behind to teach him how to make his own video games. I scooped up all the copies of Pong.

  In Miami, an adult woman had wished for less paperwork in her job so she could spend more time on vacation with her kids. Instead, her entire hotel room was full of stacks of paperwork.

  “I’ll take this one.” The boy with the beige sweater stepped off of our sleigh and into the woman’s hotel room. “I’m pretty good at this kind of stuff. Thanks for letting me come on your adventure for a little while, guys. It’s been great.” He pointed at me. “Special thanks to you for texting me that invite, best friend.”

  I had lots of questions, like: When did I invite him? When did he get here?? How would his name be in my phone when I don’t even know it???? How can we be best friends when I don’t even know who he is????????????

  But I just said, “Yeah, totally. Thanks for coming? We’ll come back and get you later.”

  I was also pleasantly surprised with Florida. It wasn’t nearly as bad as I had imagined.

  “Hey, guys?” Bertrand sounded freaked out over our headsets. “Something crazy is going on at the White House.”

  “What’s the White House?” I asked. “Like an igloo?”

  Andrea looked at me like I was crazy. “Are you serious? That’s where the president of the United States lives!”

  “Is a president like … a king?” I asked.

  Celia nodded. “Yeah, I think it’s like a king.”

  Andrea pointed as the sleigh slowed to a stop above a rose garden. “That’s the White House.”

  “It’s just a big white house.”

  She threw her arms in the air, exasperated. “Exactly!”

  At least two hundred kids were in the gated yard in front of the White House, handcuffed and surrounded by policemen.

  “They all wished to live in the White House,” Bertrand told us, “so Krampus just dropped them off. Now they’re all arrested for breaking in.”

  “Let me handle this.” Andrea cracked her neck and her knuckles. “I can talk anyone out of anything.”

  “Thanks, Andrea.” I smiled at her.

  She smiled back, said, “Go get the old guy,” and left Celia and I alone on the sleigh.

  “How’re we doing on power?” Celia asked while steering us away. “We haven’t even been going fast enough to see Krampus.”

  Bertrand took a second to respond. “I still don’t think we’re going to be able to break past light speed. You’ve got a lot of power, and Karl is doing a good job getting more people to make wishes—”

  “Stop CHASING ME!” A terrifying growl came up from behind us. Before I could even turn around to see what it was, something slammed into our sleigh and disappeared in a puff of sparks. A second later, something slammed into us from the other side. The sleigh teetered over the ocean, and a little alarm beeped on the console.

  “It’s Krampus!” Celia yelled. “He’s dropping in and out of light speed to attack us.”

  I pulled out the only weapon I had to defend myself with—the firework gun Buzz gave us to help study. I shot the next time we were hit, but the firework sailed lazily out over the water and exploded.

  I’M SO IMPRESSED! the firework said sarcastically.

  We got bumped again, and I fired again. SORRY, DUDE!

  Frustrated, I fired a shot off to the side when nothing was happening. Instead of flying out over the water, it bounced on a bubble—the force field protecting Ramp’s terrifying black-and-red sleigh. For just a brief second, I could see him, and something was very, very wrong: His horns had grown huge and curved backward, adding several feet to his height, which had also grown considerably. His body had grown hairy and huge, and his feet ended in hooves as big as my face. On top of it all was still an awkwardly overstuffed Santa suit, with the hat skewered by one of the horns.

  And then he was gone again.

  “The force field!” Celia turned to me and grinned. “The way I built the sleigh. When the force field is on, the engine can’t run. Each individual hit will only stop him for a second, but if you can pelt him with lots of stuff at once, he won’t be able to speed up at all.”

  The next time we saw him, though, he was charging us directly from the front.

  “PULL UP!” I yelled. “PULL A
LL THE WAY UP, OH MY GOSH!”

  Crasher veered up and the other reindeer followed. I turned The Bag upside down and yelled, “THE FOUNTAINHEADS!” A bunch of copies of The Fountainhead tumbled down onto Ramp’s sleigh, activated his force field, and then tumbled down into the ocean. “STATUE RUBBLE!” A ridiculous amount of marble came pouring out of The Bag, buying us even more time.

  “What do we do now?” I asked while I poured the rubble, and Celia kept pace with the momentum Krampus was still moving with.

  “I don’t know!” Celia yelled over the splashing rocks. “I didn’t really expect us to get to this point!”

  Even in all the craziness, my head kept going back to one question: Why was Ramp doing this?

  I needed to know the answer. And I knew what I had to do.

  “I’ll see you in a little bit, I hope!” I yelled. And then I yelled, “PONGS!” and leapt off our sleigh while several copies of Pong kept Ramp’s force field going. I ka-thunked onto the bubble and started sliding off, but the sleigh must not register people as weapons because it popped and I was able to grab hold of one of Ramp’s horns before his sleigh sped back up to break light speed.

  “Get off! Get off of there!” Ramp growled. “Ouch!”

  I was trying to pull my body in closer to the sleigh but kept accidentally kicking Ramp in the face in the process.

  “Sorry!” I yelled. “I’m so sorry! I don’t mean to—I can’t seem to keep my body from floating, and—”

  “Shut up!” Ramp raised up the Kringle, and the magic snow expanded from it and wrapped around me. I saw pure white, and then I was tied with rope to the back of Ramp’s sleigh.

  Instead of disappearing like it had in Santa’s workshop, though, the snow … glitched? The snowflakes twitched and jumped in the air, like they couldn’t settle on where they were supposed to be. A few of them touched Ramp, and he winced as his horns grew taller and his fur grew coarser. His tongue lolled out at least six inches past his lips.

  “I can’t believe thith,” he lisped around his tongue. “Thith thould have been THO THIMPLE. But you and Thelia had to go and RUIN IT, HUH?”

  “I didn’t know it was going to be this beautiful.” All around was a sea of color—every color I’d ever seen and some I hadn’t. It flowed and shifted around itself like someone was mixing paint very slowly. “How can you be mad when you get to see this?”

  “Thut up.” He was staring intently at his center console. When I leaned over all the way to one side in my ropes, I could see little snippets of text scrolling quickly up the screen.

  Wishes, I thought. He’s picking which wishes to ruin.

  “It’s not working, you know.” I tried to quietly wiggle my hand back into my suit to look for something in the pockets I could use to escape. “People know you’re not Santa. They’re still making wishes.”

  “You can’t fickth everything. And you can’t chathe me forever.”

  “You can’t do this forever.”

  “Yeth, I can.”

  What a strange thing to say. “How old are you, Ramp? I know you’re not sixteen.”

  “I don’t know,” he mumbled. “I thtopped counting thenturieth ago.”

  “Centuries?!”

  Ramp didn’t answer. He dropped out of light speed in front of a window. Inside, a girl with very short brown hair and a flowery blue dress was tapping her foot impatiently.

  “Are you the evil Santa?” she asked.

  “I’m more of a chaotic neutral.”

  “Well, I’ve been waiting all day for you to show up.”

  What? I narrowed my eyes at the girl.

  “I won’t waste your time: I know a lot of lame nerds with a lot of dumb wishes. I can give you a list, and you can go goof ’em up. It’ll be really funny.”

  Now Ramp narrowed his eyes. “Give me the litht.”

  “Seriously?” I squirmed in the ropes, loosening them just a little. I slipped my arm up my sleeve and dug around in my pockets.

  “Quiet, Ollie.” Ramp took the list from the girl and glanced over it. He raised the Quantum Kringle, which glowed and poured snow into the girl’s room. When the snow returned to the globe—after the strange glitchy wiggling—her room was completely bare.

  “What?! What did you do?” the girl screamed. “Where’s all my stuff?”

  “I thplit it between the people on thith litht.” Ramp threw the list down at her feet. “You better hope they’re kind enough to give it back.” He twisted the Kringle, and we shot back into the tunnel of color.

  “That was pretty cool of you,” I said. My hand finally found something—the ice-cream scoop. My dad had said it was indestructible and sharp. Maybe it would cut through the ropes. I started wiggling my hand out. “Standing up to that bully.”

  “I told her: I’m not evil. Evil ith for the young.”

  “You’re acting pretty evil.”

  “You don’t even know what real evil lookth like.”

  “I’m looking at a scary goat monster flying around the world ruining children’s wishes.”

  Ramp let out a low, rumbly growl. “It’th complicated.”

  “I can handle it. I’m twelve now.”

  A loud screech ripped through the air and I clutched my ears. Ramp whipped around and I got a look at his bright red eyes with scary horizontal pupils.

  “What? How?” he gasped.

  “How what?” I wriggled against the ropes but couldn’t turn all the way around. I finally slipped my arm back through my sleeve and started slowly sawing on the rope with the ice-cream scoop.

  “I’m coming, Ollie!” Celia’s voice. They did it. She made it past light speed!

  Ramp slammed on the brakes, dropping us out of light speed somewhere with lots of trees. He nudged his reindeer—their skin was black and something was strange, but I couldn’t see very well from the sleigh floor—and rotated the sleigh. He took off in another direction, and we were back in the tunnel.

  “Why are we staying in light speed so long?” I asked, still sawing at the rope. “Can’t you go around the world like seven times in a second?”

  “I’m trying to throw her off my trail.”

  Another screeching noise as Celia broke into the light-speed tunnel, this time right next to us.

  “Ollie, come on! Let’s go!”

  Crasher and the others were all wearing their goggles, visibly uncomfortable with the speed. Most reindeer trained for years to be in the Big Nine—it must have been really difficult the first time.

  One of the ropes snapped, and I kept sawing at the other two. Ramp dropped out of light speed, but Celia mirrored him and appeared right beside us in time to catch up before Ramp shot us away at a different angle.

  “I’m trying!” Another rope broke. One more.

  Ramp bumped Celia with the side of his sleigh, and she dropped out of sight for just a second before appearing back beside us.

  “Go away!” Ramp yelled. “Leave me alone!”

  I snapped the final rope. I stood up and started moving toward Celia’s sleigh, but Ramp pulled out his bundle of sticks and aimed it at her face.

  Poof. A yellow powder popped out of berries at the end of the sticks and surrounded Celia’s face—but she held her breath. She slammed into Ramp’s sleigh this time, and we wobbled uncertainly.

  “How ith Celia tracking me?” Ramp grabbed me by my collar with one hand and lifted me off the ground. “Tell me or I’ll throw you off the thleigh.”

  “Your sleigh!” I said, because I really, really didn’t want to die. “She built it, remember? It has a GPS that can track you anywhere on Earth.”

  “I thee.” He jerked the sleigh sharply upward, and Celia disappeared from view. “Then we’ll go thomewhere thee can’t track us.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  Ramp kept his focus on his computer and the steering. He didn’t answer.

  “Where can’t she track us?”

  He still didn’t answer, so I sat back down on the sleigh
and sighed. Jumping off would be incredibly dangerous, even if I knew where we were. Which I didn’t. And what trip could take whole minutes at light speed?

  Something like ten minutes later, the sleigh landed gently on dusty red ground speckled with white. Ramp immediately jumped out of the sleigh and took several big jumps toward a small wooden hut in the distance, kicking up a cloud of red dust as he went.

  I stepped out of the sleigh and looked around—on all sides and as far up as I could see, white swirly snow mixed with red dust. I caught some snow in the air, but it didn’t melt—it was fake snow, like in snow globes, but bigger. I could make out the patterns in individual snowflakes. It spun and whirled in a predictable pattern, too—the snow would come close to the ground in a wide circle, then zoom into the middle, shoot to the top, and expand back out into the circle.

  The edge of the circle was nearby, the opposite way from Ramp, and I walked over to inspect it. I found a glass wall gently sloping up and back toward the center, where the snow met. A snow globe. Sort of. It was like the top half of a snow globe had been stuck onto the ground.

  When I got back to the sleigh, I inspected Ramp’s reindeer. All of them had black fur, coarser than it should be. Their antlers were sharper than normal, curved in angry ways, and there were so many of them—because each reindeer had three heads. I leapt backward when I realized, and the closest one just stared at me.

  He didn’t have nine, I thought, so he made nine.

  “Do you … uh, do y’all know where we are?”

  They didn’t say anything. Didn’t even really acknowledge me except to stare. None of them moved.

  “Uh, okay. Good talk.” I backed away from the three-headed reindeer slowly, but they didn’t move an inch. Eventually I turned around and walked through the red dust toward the same hut Ramp was now standing on top of.

  His hooves were perched right on the very pointiest part of the roof, and he held himself with such perfect balance that he looked much lighter than he should have. (He still looked terrifying. He was definitely a crazy monster, but he was a crazy monster who wasn’t moving in a scary way.) He cradled the Quantum Kringle in one arm, and it glowed with a soft blue light. There was a rusty metal ladder against the back of the hut, so I climbed up it and sat down on the roof next to him.