Danny retreated a half step. He would have gone farther, but he’d run into one of the shelves. The metal was cold against his back, and the tubs of lard and margarine rubbed against his scales.
Big Eddy cleared the doorway. One of the lunch ladies pressed in behind him, holding a ladle aloft. It was Ms. Woggenthal. Her eyes were the color of tomato sauce and glowed in the dim light of the freezer.
Somewhere off to Danny’s left, Wendell moaned.
Just then there was a skritching noise from the shelf above him. Danny tore his gaze away from the bully and looked up.
A large gray rat looked down at him and fired off a tiny salute. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought it might be the same one that had led them through the tunnels.
Danny exhaled in sudden relief. Smoke poured out of his mouth. The rat looked surprised.
The Komodo dragon’s brow knitted in confusion. “Are you—”
Whatever he was about to say was drowned out in a sudden wave of squeaking.
The rats had finally arrived.
Furry gray bodies flowed down the hallway, swarming up the legs of the were-minions. Kids shrieked and slapped at the rats.
“Rats!?” yelled Ms. Woggenthal. “In my kitchen?!” She spun around. Her eyes were still rather red, but Danny suspected it had more to do with rage than the were-wurst. She waded through the horde of rats, using the ladle like a club.
“They’re everywhere!” someone screamed from down the hall. “Oh my God, they’re in the soup!”
Big Eddy frowned. He was not a particularly quick thinker, and things were coming at him entirely too fast. There were rats climbing up his arm and legs. He frowned down at them and slowly lifted a hand the size of a dinner plate.
The rat perched above Danny’s head launched itself through the air.
“Rat! Be careful!” cried Wendell. “Duck, Danny!”
The rat leaped over Danny to Big Eddy’s head. Big Eddy roared and slapped at the top of his skull, but the rat was too fast. It scurried around the Komodo dragon’s head, grabbing on to the tufts of hair that had sprouted from his scalp.
The last Danny and Wendell saw of Big Eddy, he was lumbering out of the freezer, flailing his arms and trying to escape. The rat was using his hair like reins. Big Eddy’s yells and the rat’s delighted squeaks faded into the distance.
Danny peered around the door frame. There was no one in the hallway, but Danny caught a brief glimpse of a shadow across the wall—the silhouette of a very large rat, and atop it, a lumpy irregular form, riding into battle.
The potato salad had come through. Danny and Wendell were alone in the freezer with the alpha wurst.
FOLLOW THE TRAIL
“Okay,” said Danny. “Okay.” He exhaled a cloud of smoke. Wendell coughed.
There was a rustling in the back of the freezer. The boys whipped around.
“Was that it? Was that the alpha?”
“You tell me,” Danny said.
Wendell scratched helplessly at his neck and shrugged.
Danny picked up his skewering fork and began creeping toward the back of the freezer. Wendell followed.
Everything looked normal and orderly. The lunch ladies ran a tight ship. Nothing screamed of the presence of a diabolical hot dog from Transylvania.
“There!” said Wendell. “On the floor!”
Red splotches had frozen to the freezer floor. Danny crouched and poked one.
“Oh noooo, it’s blood,” whimpered Wendell.
The trail of red led down the aisle and into the dark back corner of the freezer. It was easy to follow. The wurst hadn’t bothered to hide.
They peered around the edge of the shelves.
“Is it in there?” asked Wendell.
“I don’t know. . .” Danny crept closer. He reached out with the silver fork and lifted the edge of a piece of trash. “It must be in here somewh—”
A growl arose from inside the nest, a deep, bone-rattling sound. Wendell gulped.
Danny took a step back.
The pile of boxes and tub lids began to thrash, and then, slowly, a red back breached the surface.
The alpha wurst reared and looked at them.
Danny hadn’t expected it to be so big. He’d been thinking it was the size of a hot dog, maybe one of the big kielbasas from the grocery story, not a giant sausage bigger than he was.
It had teeth too. Big ones. Drool mixed with ketchup dripped from its jaws.
Danny held up his silver fork. It looked very small in his hands.
Still, it was silver.
The wurst hissed.
“Wendell,” said Danny, not taking his eyes off the meat-beast, “open my backpack and get more silverware. You’ll have to distract it so that I can skewer it.”
The wurst made a strange globbering noise. It took Danny a moment to realize that it was laughing.
“Wendell?”
“This is not a good time to lose your mind, Wendell!” Danny circled the wurst, moving away from his friend. It had been easy to snap the iguana out of it before, but with the alpha wurst right there . . .
“It’s in my head,” said Wendell dreamily. “It’s telling me to stop you . . . ”
“Don’t listen!” Danny tried to move in closer to the wurst, but Wendell was in the way.
Danny was pretty sure that he could take Wendell in a fight, but the iguana was his best friend, and he didn’t want to hurt him. Also, there was a good chance Danny’d get bitten, and who knew what would happen then?
Wendell took a clumsy swing at him. Danny leaned back to avoid it.
It occurred to Danny that pummeling Wendell might not be that bad after all.
No, no. Best friend. Possessed by wurst. Doesn’t mean what he says.
“What would your mother think?” the dragon tried. “You know you can’t get into a good college if you’re controlled by a giant hot dog.”
Bizarrely, this actually seemed to stop Wendell. The iguana halted in his tracks, frowning. Danny inched sideways, closer to the wurst, which was swaying overhead like a giant cobra.
His chest ached. His throat burned. Smoke was leaking out his nostrils and making his eyes water.
Think hot thoughts, his dad was always saying. Focus your chi. Invoke the energy of fire, his greatgrandfather had told him, during the bit with the ninjas.
He could do this. He could breathe fire. Probably.
If he could just get close enough . . .
“It’s saying it can get me a scholarship,” said Wendell slowly.
“Oh come ON,” said Danny, and hauled off and smacked Wendell’s glasses off his face.
It was all the opening Danny needed. He spun toward the startled alpha wurst, took a breath so deep that his ribs nearly cracked, and breathed fire.
The dying wurst bucked wildly, sending Danny rolling to the freezer floor. There was smoke everywhere. It smelled like the world’s biggest wienie roast. The wurst keened, the fork still sticking out of its skin, then began to shrink. The overstretched sausage casing deflated like a balloon. Soon there was nothing left but a puddle of smoking ketchup and the gleaming silver fork.
Wendell found his glasses and put them back on his nose. There was a crack in one lens, but his eyes were no longer red. “Is that—did it—?”
“I think it’s roasted,” said Danny, standing up and feeling for bruises. He was going to be black and blue tomorrow. “How are you?”
Wendell frowned. “I don’t itch anymore. And”—he ran his hands over his scales—“look!”
“It worked.” Danny sighed with relief, adding more smoke to the already smoggy freezer.
“I breathed fire,” he said to Wendell.
“You did,” said Wendell.
“We should probably get out of here.” He picked up the fork and stashed it in his pack.
“Yeah.”
“I’m starving all of a sudden.”
“Me too.”
“I don’t think I want hot dogs.”
“Smells good, though,” said Danny.
“Oh, yeah.”
Arms draped over each other’s shoulders, they limped toward the freezer door.
SUSPENSION
Danny couldn’t have been happier. Even the two solid weeks of detention he’d gotten for starting a food fight couldn’t dampen his spirits. The alpha wurst was dead, Wendell was hairless again, and all the other kids had recovered from their bites.
Best of all, the school had closed for five whole days while the health inspector tried to get to the bottom of the rat invasion. Life just did not get better than that.
They relaxed in Wendell’s room. Mister Fins swam cheerful circles in his bowl. It was a perfect day.
“I hope Ms. Woggenthal doesn’t get in trouble,” said Wendell gloomily. “She was pretty nice.”
Danny rolled his eyes. In the middle of a spectacularly sunny day, you could always rely on Wendell to find a cloud. Usually with cloud-rabies or something.
“Any more luck breathing fire?”
Danny shrugged. “Sort of. It seems to help if it’s really cold. I tried sticking my head in the freezer this morning, and I melted a bag of frozen peas.”
“You think Big Eddy will stop stealing your lunch now?”
“I dunno.” Danny propped his snout on his hand. “All the minions seem to have forgotten what happened.”
“I remember,” said Wendell, shuddering. “I’m really sorry that I tried to—”
Danny waved a hand. “Yeah, but you didn’t do anything, really. It’s fine.”
Wendell tapped moodily on Mister Fins’s bowl.
“So what do you want to do today?” asked Danny, making an effort to change the subject.
Wendell groaned. “I dunno. Mom’s worried that I’m going to forget my education while school’s closed, and I’ll never catch up, and won’t get into a good college and be doomed to a life of destitution on the streets.”
“No ...”
“There’s pigeons and fish and stuff! And somebody spray-painted this huge mural on the bottom of the bridge, so you can only see if you stand under it. It’s really neat!”
“In Birchbark Park? Really?” Wendell pushed his glasses up on his snout.
“Plus there’s a storm drain there. We might even see our buddy the rat!”
“What are we waiting for?” asked Wendell.
His mother’s voice drifted up. “Wendell, honey? Don’t forget to review your periodic table . . . ”
Danny and Wendell exchanged glances.
It was a spectacular day. Sure, two weeks of detention would be bad, but not until the school reopened, and that was five days away. Anything could happen in five days.
Anything at all.
1 Wendell’s sheets had a map of the world, with Antarctica on the pillow
2 The Young Reptiles’ Christian Association, where Danny had spent many summers learning to swim and being yelled at for running next to the pool.
Curse of the Were-wiener Page 5