The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl: Squirrel Meets World

by Shannon Hale

  “I said,” Squirrel Girl shouted again, “isn’t that—?”

  The Micro-Manager stabbed his finger at his tablet, and the gnashmouth went silent.

  “I said,” she said, though not quite as loudly as last time, “isn’t that a band? Gnashmouth?”

  “No,” he said. “I researched it. The only other thing by that name is someone’s World of Battlecraft character.”

  “Are you sure?” Squirrel Girl said. “’Cause that sounds like a band name. If you had a band, what would you name it? I like Fuzzy Vengeance. Or the Murray Ditko Players. Or the Good, the Bad, and the Squirrelly. Or—”

  The Micro-Manager rolled his eyes. “You’re a bona fide freak, you know that, right?”

  “Yeah, you said all that before, and so did those dudes on TuberTV. That word—“freak”—it kind of pings around in your brain, makes it hard to think.”

  “If the shoe fits, buy a spare pair, freak girl,” he said.

  “But in all that chitter-chatter online and meany-time finger pointing,” she said, “I almost forgot one thing.”

  Squirrel Girl paused dramatically. The Micro-Manager pressed his lips together. She raised one eyebrow. He sighed.

  “WHAT?” the Micro-Manager finally asked, furious to be the first to break the silence.

  “That I’m awesome.”

  He frowned but quickly recovered with a spoken “MWA-HA-HA! You are absurd. Now! To the doom. You must save your furry friend before—”

  “Which furry friend?” Squirrel Girl asked.

  The Micro-Manager gestured to the metal claw hanging above the gnashmouth, which was now empty.

  “What?!” he sputtered.

  Tippy-Toe chittered from near her feet. Davey Porkpun stood beside her. His tail was bent a little funny, but otherwise looked okay. He waved at Squirrel Girl, and then at the Micro-Manager.

  The villain stomped his foot. “NO! MORE! DISTRACTIONS!”

  He stabbed at his tablet again. Four glass tubes lit up near the ceiling of the warehouse. They were like triple-size fluorescent lightbulb tubes, but they were hanging vertically, and inside each one was a tiny terrified squirrel. Sour Cream and the Chives. The squirrels were keeping themselves from falling with their own paws, but the inner surface was clearly slick. Squirrel Girl could see them slipping. They would not be able to hold on for long.

  “At the bottom of each of those tubes is an electrified mesh,” the Micro-Manager announced. “A bug zapper. A vermin roaster. They fall, they fry.”

  “Tippy!” Squirrel Girl shouted. There was no time to distract or trick the Micro-Manager now. They needed to get to the Chives and Sour Cream before they fell. “See if you can—”

  “By all means,” the villain interrupted her. “Use your little friends. And I will use mine.”

  Hundreds of tiny red lights lit up across the warehouse walls. Bladed rotors began to whirl, and one by one each flying robot detached itself from a wall. These weren’t the giant eyeballs from the dog-gassing thing. They looked more like regular four-rotor drones, except on the front of each they had a kind of metal antenna sparking electricity. And there were hundreds of them. They filled the air, hovering like an evil storm cloud between Squirrel Girl and the tube traps.

  “Let us see how flesh and fur fares against the metallic micro-bot menace of the Micro-Manager!” he shouted. “MWA! HA! HA! HA!”

  The micro-bot army began to descend. Squirrel Girl tightened her hood.

  “All right, furry friends,” she said. “Let’s go nuts.”

  Almost faster than human eyes could follow, she ran. Weaving in and out of the spaces between the micro-bots, squirrels would leap one by one into her hand, and one by one she would hurl them at a target.

  “Fuzzball Special!” she shouted.

  It was Fuzz Fountain Cortez that she threw first, and the squirrel tore right through the center of a micro-bot’s body without even looking back. Then Bear Bodkin and Kerchief Candyglow each hit their targets, using their momentum to smash the machines hard into the wall of the warehouse.

  Calendar Earl, Bubo Nic, and M. Scummerset Maugham scampered onto her hand, interlocking their legs and tails.

  “Triple-Play!” Squirrel Girl yelled, throwing the bundle of squirrels. As they flew, the three expanded, keeping their tails linked. Spinning where their tails held, they became a flying disk of claws and teeth. They tore straight through five micro-bots, only stopping when they hit the opposite wall, bouncing off separately to attack three different targets.

  Squirrels were everywhere. While the micro-bots outnumbered them at least five to one, it seemed like each squirrel was in two or three places at once. The flying robots would track one target, lose it, track another, and then bump into one another, tangling blades just like the evil robot parents’ hands had.

  In the midst of all the movement, something not moving at all drew Squirrel Girl’s attention. On the floor, a few feet away from the gnashmouth, a gray pink-ribboned squirrel lay, faintly twitching. A mass of micro-bots, sensing an easy target, gathered together in a dense mass of blades, closing the distance.

  “Oh no!” Squirrel Girl shouted. “Tippy!” As she bunched her muscles to leap toward her friend, Tippy-Toe suddenly rolled onto her feet and darted away. In that same instant, a dozen squirrels dropped from above, raining doom upon the micro-bots that had gathered together. They tore into the wires and gears, riding the micro-bots until just before they crashed into the floor, shattering into pieces.

  “My BSFFAEAE is a genius,” Squirrel Girl said.

  From the tubes hanging from the ceiling came a frightened squeak. One of the Chives was slipping. The baby squirrel was halfway down the tube. In seconds she would hit the mesh at the bottom and be electrocuted.

  Squirrel Girl tore through the micro-bots, ignoring the blades that ripped her hoodie and scratched her arms and hands. She ran to just below the tubes and leaped up, but the tubes were just too high. She fell back to the cement floor.

  “You’ll find the tubes are exactly six inches higher than the highest you’ve ever jumped,” the Micro-Manager’s voice sounded from speakers all around. “Get ready for roast squirrel!”

  The baby squirrel squeak was louder now, more desperate. Squirrel Girl rolled under an attacking micro-bot and ran to the wall of the warehouse. She dug her claws into the wall and climbed. Maybe she could climb all the way up, somehow move across the ceiling, and drop down over them. But it would take time, and just then two more baby squirrels lost their grip, beginning to slide.

  She had to jump, now.

  Higher than the highest you’ve ever jumped…

  “The highest I’ve ever jumped so far,” she whispered.

  It didn’t matter if she could leap that far. She simply had to.

  “So far!” she screamed as she pushed her legs against the wall and leaped, sailing right past each of the tubes. She scraped her sharp claws against the glass tubes as she passed, cutting through them.

  One by one, the bottom half of each glass tube dropped away, and one by one Sour Cream and the Chives dropped out of their prisons. They landed directly onto flying micro-bots, ready to exact their revenge with teeth bared.

  Dozens of micro-bots still buzzed in the air, and Squirrel Girl was bleeding from not a few scrapes and cuts. But she had leaped farther than ever before, and the kidnapped squirrels were safe. It felt to her like the trouble was almost over now.

  “I am a rock star!” she said. “I heroed all over your Super Villain boo-tay.”

  “I expected no less,” the Micro-Manager’s voice echoed from all around. “Now with the tedious trapped vermin out of the way, we can move to phase two.”

  “Phase two?” Squirrel Girl asked.

  CLANG! The Micro-Manager’s platform and the back wall of the warehouse began to lower, emitting a hiss and a screech. The wall, it turned out, was not a wall, but a floor-to-ceiling door. And behind the door were hundreds more flying robots. Only this time they were the bi
gger ones, the eyeball ones, all covered in spinning blades. It was enough to make Iron Man wet his iron pants a little.127

  “Chek kut,” said Tippy-Toe. It was the squirrel’s opinion that the new swarm was too much for their troops. They had rescued the captured squirrels, mission accomplished, and now it was time to scram!

  Squirrel Girl agreed. She pulled on the bolted warehouse door and the hinges slowly started to bend. It might take her a minute, but she thought she could—

  “Oh wait, did I forget to mention the surprise hostage?” said the Micro-Manager. One more spotlight turned on, pointing way up in the newly opened space.

  A hundred-foot pole. On top, a metal disk twenty feet in diameter. It reminded her of those “squirrel-proof” bird feeders, only times a hundred. A flying drone circled above, filming and projecting the image against a wall.

  A glass box perched on top of the metal disk. Inside, the sound silenced by the thick glass, sat a crying baby. Not a zucchini disguised as a baby. But a real, actual human baby with olive-tone skin and straight black hair and a dimpled chin, wearing his favorite fuzzy striped onesie.

  Dante Santino.128

  “No!” said Squirrel Girl.

  “Now, now, he came of his own free will,” said the Micro-Manager. “I sent a thief-bot to the park to snatch a few of your precious squirrels for bait, and this human crawled eagerly after them. And I thought, sure, why not? Because you know what Super Villains do? They escalate, that’s what they do. Ha-ha! There’s no going back after baby-napping! I am so completely a Super Villain now!”

  “Let the baby go!” Squirrel Girl shouted. She was trembling all over, with rage, with fear, her muscles bunched up tighter than tight. This was all her fault. Dante had chased after squirrels because she’d always had some around whenever she was babysitting.

  “Don’t get lazy!” the Micro-Manager said. “You’re the hero. Saving babies is your job, not mine.”

  “Apparently your job is being a giant jerk face!” Squirrel Girl yelled eloquently.

  The Micro-Manager frowned. “That was mean.”

  He lifted his arms into the air. “Phase! Two!” he shouted, and the second wave of micro-bots, like an impenetrable swarm of lethal eyeballs, surged straight at Squirrel Girl.

  ANA SOFÍA

  Mike’s house was surrounded with the yellow DO NOT CROSS police tape Ana Sofía had only ever seen on TV shows. The damage done in the Squirrel Girl vs. robot parents fight must’ve been bad enough to lure in the officers from the county. The smashed cars and broken trees were gone. The busted front window was boarded up. Surely Mike had been taken away by Child Protective Services.

  But still, Ana Sofía knocked on the front door. When no one answered, she turned the knob. It was unlocked.

  “Mike?” she called out. “Mike, are you here?”

  The house smelled stale and abandoned, like a box of crackers left open overnight. She ducked under the police tape and went inside.

  She was no forensics expert, but the slashes in the walls and furniture looked like they’d been made by the rotating blades of transforming robot parents.129 Her heart was slamming in her chest. Maybe that barstool there was actually a robot that would suddenly transform and attack an intruder. Or that beaded curtain might actually be tentacles that would reach out and—

  Mike wouldn’t do that, would he? He’d always been sorta nice to her. Well, not nice-nice. When he wasn’t ignoring her, he was complaining about something. Frankly, she agreed with all the horrible stuff he said about their town and other people. Or she had.

  And then there’d been that time when someone had stolen her lunch. She didn’t even say anything, just sat at their cafeteria table reading and not eating. But he’d left and come back twenty minutes later with a bag from a nearby market: a box of crackers and a block of cheese. He’d set it in front of her without a word.

  Heart pounding, she opened doors and peeked inside. Boring bedrooms. Boring bathroom. The garage was more interesting. No cars, just piles of random stuff: bike tires, cases of car stereos with the innards removed…Wait—all the stolen stuff that’d been disappearing from around the neighborhood the past couple of years. Had that been Mike all along? Scavenging parts for his robots?

  Ana Sofía found the door to the basement stairs. She grabbed the rails and slid on her hands all the way down. One big open room. Boring.130

  Now to find the secret Mike was hiding down here. Hopefully hiding. There had to be something helpful—pretty please with cheese on top—or she was wasting time while Squirrel Girl was engaged in a highly dangerous and possibly life-threatening battle.

  But there seemed to be nothing. What would Squirrel Girl do? What would Thor do?

  No, wait…what would Ana Sofía do? Something super-sleuthy, she decided.

  Ana Sofía sniffed the air for the dusty-sharp scent of electricity. She felt the wood-paneled walls for heat. She noticed a place on the green shag carpet that was slightly more worn. She investigated the wall panel, found a hidden latch, and pressed it. The panel swung inward.

  “YES!” Ana Sofía said aloud. “I found your secret!”

  The secret room was bedroom-size, windowless, chilly, and filled with humming servers. Against one wall, a large machine was whirring away.

  A 3-D printer! Only this was to a normal 3-D printer what a tank was to a bicycle.

  As she watched, it finished a creation: a palm-size micro-bot that turned on and flew up a tube, presumably going outside and away to join the battle against Squirrel Girl. The printer was already starting to build another micro-bot. Ana Sofía looked for a way to turn it off and found nothing. She heroically picked up a metal bar and gave it a few whacks. The machine didn’t even pause.

  In the back corner, Ana Sofía found a computer station. “Here we go,” she said. She connected her laptop and began to type, trying to hack her way through security. It took her a few minutes, but she slid in and found a file with the operating code for the drones.

  A previously dark monitor lit up with flashing text:

  INTRUDER BREACH. 60 SECONDS TO SELF-DESTRUCT.

  “Dirty Fuzzmuppets,” Ana Sofía muttered. The code was complicated and dense. Ana Sofía was certain she could make sense of it if—

  45 SECONDS TO SELF-DESTRUCT.

  Her heart was pounding so hard the motion of it distorted her vision. She noticed in a parallel database table all the data the Micro-Manager had collected on Squirrel Girl and the squirrels. Physical limits, top speeds, personality profiles. Holding her breath because she was so nervous it actually hurt to breathe, Ana Sofía merged the squirrel personality data with the data that drove the drones’ AI subroutines.

  10 SECONDS—

  She ran up the stairs and out the front door so fast she might’ve had temporary squirrel powers. The police tape tangled around her ankles and she fell face-first onto the front lawn. Behind her, she felt a low BOOM and seconds later, the bright yellow of fire eating the house from the inside out.

  She saw neighbors come outside to look, cell phones in hand to dial the fire department. So Ana Sofía ran down the block to a pocket park and collapsed behind a tree, breathing hard.

  Something was wrong, though she couldn’t place it at first. Why was everything so still?

  Aha. There were no squirrels. Anywhere. The neighborhood was empty of little fuzzy-tailed shadows twitching about acorns and justice.

  All the squirrels had abandoned the neighborhood, and even now perhaps were locked in mortal combat with micro-bots in a warehouse by the river. Along with Squirrel Girl.

  It wasn’t till she reached for her cell phone that Ana Sofía realized how badly she was shaking. But she took a deep breath and bravely sent out a group text.131

  ANA SOFÍA

  Squirrel scouts! I know those online videos made SG look like a villain but it’s lies. She is a hero, a super hero even. I believe that and don’t care what anybody else thinks. Right now she’s fighting the real villain. He cal
ls himself the micromanager and he’s the source of most of the thefts in our town. Just one guy being crummy turned this into a crummy place. One person can be powerful for good or evil. U r powerful too. What will you do? He wants to destroy SG bc she stands in his way. I won’t let him! If any of u are still squirrel scouts meet me at the old Fly By Knight warehouse by the river and 14 St. It’s time to defend the weak the frightened and the interesting. It’s time to be brave and silly. It’s time to prove ourselves SQUIRREL SCOUTS!

  SQUIRREL GIRL

  They were losing.

  Most of the squirrels were still on their feet, but they were hurt. They were tired. Squirrel Girl couldn’t even get near the giant pole and Dante. The micro-bots were everywhere.

  Tippy-Toe was on Squirrel Girl’s shoulder.

  “Chk-chukka!” she chittered.

  “Yes,” Squirrel Girl said, kicking a drone out of the air. “More help would be nice. But I lost all my human helpers.”

  “Chk-tik chuk,” Tippy-Toe said. She leaped onto a passing drone, tore out some wires, and leaped back onto Squirrel Girl’s shoulder.

  “Where?” Squirrel Girl asked. Tippy-Toe nodded in the direction of the door they had come in, and she saw a handful of squirrels gnawing a hole in the corrugated steel of the door. The hole was big enough now that a squirrel could get through.

  “Good, get everyone else out of here,” Squirrel Girl said. “I don’t want any more of you getting hurt. I can finish this by myself.”

  She believed it when she said it. If she had enough time and enough space, she was convinced she could smash every drone in the building before she died. Not having the squirrels around to worry about, not having to be concerned with their safety, might make things easier. In a way. Her dying seemed inevitable. But her victory did, too. She had to save Dante. Any other outcome was simply incomprehensible.

  A twitching drone flew near her. She punched through the blades, grabbed it, bit it in half, and threw the pieces to the ground.

  “Good.” The Micro-Manager’s voice echoed through the speakers in each drone. “Give in to your anger.”