by M. D. Payne
I could see that the Director was truly concerned for his residents. He looked up the stairway. The Nurses had cleared all the monsters (and monster body parts) out and were starting the process of cleaning. One Nurse wept as he mopped the bloody hardwood floor.
“Bwaaarrrrggghh!” Gordon cried out from his chair. He sounded like he was drowning in his own spit. Shane, the Director, and I ran over to Ben, who was doing what he could to help. Gordon was drooling and shivering. Snot was pouring down his nose. He was turning green/brown.
“I don’t think he’s doing very well, guys,” Ben said with a look of horror.
“You don’t look well, either,” said the Director to Ben. “Did you get bit?”
“Nope, this is just how I normally look when participating in a sussuroblat battle,” Ben said.
“Ben is always sick,” Shane explained.
“I see,” said the Director.
“What about Gordon?” I asked. “What’s happening to him?”
The Director grabbed Gordon’s face and looked him in the eyes. Gordon shook and shivered. The Director didn’t seem to mind. He held Gordon’s face as green goop poured out of Gordon’s nostrils.
“This is the first time I’ve seen a sussuroblat bite a human, so I’m not sure how long it will take,” the Director finally said.
“How long what will take?!” Shane, Ben, and I said together.
“As with vampire bites and werewolf bites, a sussuroblat bite can change a human into a sussuroblat.”
“What?!” Ben said.
Shane and I looked stunned. Apparently Gordon heard the director, because he stopped shaking for a moment to start moaning and crying.
“There is very little research on the subject, because the chance a sussuroblat will bite a human is very low,” the Director continued. “But, from what I know, most likely Gordon will soon have a cockroach mouth, and will have an uncontrollable urge to eat garbage.”
“What can we do to stop it?” I asked.
“There is no chance for recovery,” the Director said. “There is nothing that can be done. The only thing that will reverse the effects of the bite is if every last sussuroblat is destroyed, and that is not going to happen anytime soon. I will keep him here at Raven Hill. You’ll have to think of some story to tell his parents. I’ve decided to let you all go—we would have not survived that attack without you—but I must keep Gordon here.”
Before we could argue, a Nurse came storming down the hall and into the lobby.
“More!” he said, breathless. “Soon!”
The Director ran over to the Nurse for more information.
“How many?” asked the Director.
“All of them,” gasped the Nurse, still out of breath.
In the leather chair, Gordon let out another moan. But this time his mouth was closed. It looked like his lips were sealing up!
“When?” asked the Director.
“Not sure,” the Nurse said. “Hour? Two?”
“Let’s get everyone up into the attic,” said the Director.
The Nurse just stood there.
“Quickly!” the Director yelled.
The Nurse gave a small salute and rushed out of the lobby. The Director turned back to us.
“I’m sorry, gentlemen, but it will soon be very dangerous for you to be here. I must insist you leave at once. Gordon is in good hands.”
“NO,” I said. I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving Gordon behind like this.
“What did you say?” asked the Director
“NO,” said Shane.
“NO,” said Ben. Although, he was so sick, it came out “Nuh.”
“We have no time for argument, gentlemen,” said the Director, clearly upset. “I need to get the entire retirement home up to the attic and secured, possibly in just one hour.”
“We’re not leaving Gordon,” I said. “Plus, we might be able to help you like we did before.”
The Director stared at me, trying to figure out whether to let us stay or kick us out.
Shane spoke up before the Director could give an answer. “You’re gonna have to drag us out of here if you want us gone. You got time for that?”
The Director was angry, but he knew he had no choice. “FINE,” he said, so loudly that the windows shook. “Go downstairs to the crypt to fetch the vampires. Grigore is scared of you now that he lost his dentures in front of you, so I’m hoping he’ll trust you enough to lead the other two up without the Nurses’ assistance. We’ve got too much to deal with on the ground floor and the second floor.”
“Thanks, Mr. Director,” croaked Ben.
“You may not be thanking me later, when you realize what you’ve gotten yourself into,” said the Director.
The Director walked over to where Gordon was drooling, snatched him up, and threw him over his shoulder like a bag of potatoes. He was really strong for such a scrawny, pale dude. Gordon groaned, and sniffed wads of brown/green snot onto the Director’s finely pressed suit. The Director saw us staring at him in disgust as slimy snot just rolled down his back.
“Believe me,” he said as he turned around. “I’ve seen much worse. Gordon will be safe upstairs with the rest of us. GO GET THE VAMPIRES.”
And then the Director ran up the stairs, leaving a trail of Gordon’s snot behind him.
“All right,” I said to the other two. “Let’s do this!”
We headed behind the stairs and toward the door to the crypt.
I swung the door open, and we stood there for a moment. Shane and Ben stood to my right, waiting. In front of me were dozens of steps spiraling down into darkness. A funky cool basementy smell blew up the stairs. It was that regular mold smell you get with basements, but mixed with something else. It was the kind of smell I had only smelled at the zoo.
Upstairs, the old monsters howled as the Nurses tried to force them all up to the attic. In the panic, furniture was being destroyed, glass was breaking, and the Nurses were suffering bite wounds. There was chaos above us, and who knew what down below.
I turned to Shane and Ben. Shane gave a nod toward the stairs—he was ready to go. Ben looked scared about the whole situation and stared off into space. Despite the fact that I was scared, too, Gordon was in trouble and we had to move fast. I needed all the help I could get!
“Hey! Ben!” I screamed over the noise. “Ben!”
“Huh!” Ben’s face snapped back to life. “Wha?”
“I really need you to help us, man!” I yelled.
Ben tried to pull himself together. “Okay. Yeah, all right, I’m ready for anything. LET’S DO THIS!!!” He didn’t look so convinced, but I didn’t have much time for any more pep talks. I had no idea how long it would be before the sussuroblat army made its way to Raven Hill, or if Gordon would be a part of it when they got here. We had to move!
We were about five steps down the stairs, and it was already as dark as midnight. We whipped out our cell phones to use them as flashlights.
Down we spiraled, for what seemed like forever. I was starting to get crazy dizzy. The farther down we went, the more it smelled like zoo. And when I say it smelled like zoo, I mean it smelled like the monkey cages hadn’t been cleaned for a week, and when they finally decided to clean them, they used year-old hippo water. Already, I could hear Ben gagging behind us. He was starting to slow down and I feared I’d soon have a barf hat on my head.
I turned around and whispered past Shane, “Just keep moving! Put your shirt over your nose!” Shane and I did the same thing.
The air was getting smellier but cooler. The coolness almost made the stench bearable. But the staircase just wouldn’t stop. I wondered what would be worse—an eternity of spiraling down a dark staircase wondering when a sussuroblat would bite me with its drooly mouth, or death by vampire. I was starting to think death by vampire might be the better choice.
Finally, we reached the very bottom. A moist layer of dirt and funk had piled up on the floor. I’m pretty sure it was a thousand y
ears of dust. We held up our cell phones to try to see ahead of us, but it was pitch-black. To the right, water was dripping into a puddle. To the left were a number of half broken, half opened coffins. The vampires had apparently gone through a number of beds before picking one with “the right feel.”
We all stopped, and even though these guys could barely gum us without their dentures, I was afraid to move forward.
“Grigore?” Shane called out tentatively. “Griiiiigooooore!?”
Ben, meanwhile, looked one tap away from a full-on vomitous explosion thanks to the spiraling stenchfest our bodies had just suffered.
“GRIIIIGORE?! Oh, GRIIIIIIIIGORE?” Shane’s voice didn’t echo much. The crypt must have been tiny.
“Come on, guys,” I said, snapping out of it. “Let’s go.”
So, we went. Away from the safety of the bottom of the stairs, deeper into the stank, cold, wet crypt. We held our cell phones as high as we could, and after about ten steps, we found what we were looking for.
Shane silently pointed ahead, and I squinted to see Grigore lying halfway out of his coffin. He snored loudly. I could hear snores from the other vampires deeper in the crypt. Clearly we had nothing to be afraid of. It looked like Grigore didn’t even have the time to get into his coffin before he passed out after his adventure today. His huge knobby feet stuck out of the end of the coffin, his toes taking in the cool crypt.
“Whoa. That’s disgusting!” Shane yelled into the dark. He pointed his light at Grigore’s feet.
Grigore’s toes were not only crusty with toe jam—several bats hung sleepily off of his feet. Below the bats and the toe-jammy toes was a pile of bat poop almost two feet high. I guessed this was the normal sleeping arrangement in the crypt. And, apparently, what I had taken to be moist dust before was in fact…
“GUA—GUAN—GUANO!” Ben blurted out. A small bit of drool left his lips and he gagged. The floor was covered in a millennium’s worth of bat dung.
“Oh no!” said Shane, stepping back.
At first I thought Shane was stepping away from Ben to avoid a chunky shower. But Shane was pointing under the coffin, and we saw a flash of wet, drooly mouths as soon as we pointed our cell phones down.
There were three sussuroblats crawling out from under Grigore’s bed!
Heading for the now-screaming Shane, they started to hiss and spit.
They rushed forward, but before they could attack…
BAAAAAAARRRRRRFFFFFFFFFF!!!!!
Ben blurted out the vilest volley of vomit ever known to man.
He covered the sussuroblats!
Their hissing turned into sizzling…
…and they quickly disintegrated before our eyes!
“Barf!” I cried out. “Their weakness is BARF!”
When we got up to the attic, the Director and Gordon were nowhere to be found. It was pure chaos up there—the old monsters were restless and scared. The Nurses were trying to calm them down, but were ending up with a lot of teeth marks on their beefy arms. I wondered why—with all of the biting—none of the Nurses had turned into vampires, zombies, or werewolves yet.
We handed the three stunned old vampires over to a Nurse, and then took a minute to brainstorm what we were going to tell the Director about Ben’s barf.
“We should just get to barfing!” said Shane. “And we should find out if the Nurses and the old monsters could work up some barf as well.”
“Do monsters barf?” asked Ben.
“Even if monsters barf, which I’m not sure they do, we’ll never have enough barf!” I yelled. “There’s only so much lunch everyone can lose. Not everyone’s as good at it as Ben, and his massive spew only killed three of the sussuroblats.”
“Good point,” said Shane. “How can we get people to barf even more?”
We stood listening to all of the monsters howl, growl, and moan. I tried hard to think of all the barfy things that had happened to me in my life. Suddenly, it hit me.
“WAIT!” I yelled so loud that one of the banshees nearby let out a scream. “Parmesan cheese!”
“What?” Shane asked.
“Oh, right!” Ben said. “How could I forget! The same acid found in barf is also found in Parmesan cheese! Buh…byuh…”
“Butyric acid!” said Shane.
“YES!” all three of us yelled.
“We just need a whole bunch of Parmesan cheese!” I said.
“But how?” asked Ben. “How are we going to get enough Parmesan cheese? We don’t have time to go door-to-door asking for Parmesan-cheese donations. And there’s no way we’d be able to buy enough of the stuff. I remember my mother saying that it’s superexpensive. I’ve got, like, five bucks and a few pennies.”
“Let’s see…,” Shane said as he stared off into the distance.
“We’ll have to ask the Director for money,” I said, and ran over to a Nurse to see where the Director was.
“Busy!” said the Nurse.
“But this is important!” I said. “If I get money from the Director, a few hundred dollars, we might be able to fight the sussuroblats.”
“No money at Raven Hill,” said the Nurse. “Barter system. Donations.”
“What about the kitchen?” I asked. “Do you guys have Parmesan cheese in the pantry?”
“One canister,” said the Nurse.
He held one hand five inches above the other to indicate that the canister was quite small.
“That’s it?!” I screamed.
“Too expensive,” the Nurse said, and then started walking over to check on the elbow of the vampire that had fallen on the stairs earlier.
“Wait!” I yelled. “How long until the next sussuroblats arrive?”
“Sunset,” he said.
“How many?” I asked.
“Ninety or a hundred.”
As I walked back over to Ben and Shane, I knew what I had to do.
“I’m sorry, man,” Shane said, “but we got nothin’.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “We can use the money I was saving for my telescope.”
“What?!” both of my friends yelled at the same time.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Gordon’s way more important. If he hadn’t saved me, I would be the one turning into a cockroach. Now, we don’t have much time. Shane, find out when sunset is. Ben, you and I need to figure out where we’re going to find the most Parmesan for our buck.”
Fifteen minutes later, Ben, Shane, and I left my house with my five hundred and twenty dollars. Ben had come up with the genius idea to head to the local Italian restaurant, Mama Francesca’s, and see how much Parmesan cheese we could get for the amount of money we had. Shane was pulling his younger brother’s little red wagon behind him, and we all had our biggest backpacks, in the hope that we could fill everything up with cheese.
“We’ve got forty-five minutes left until sunset,” said Shane.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s just get as much as we can, and then we’ll figure out what to do with it. But start thinking.”
I wondered what could be done with the Parmesan, and I just couldn’t figure it out. Did we melt it and pour it over the side of the retirement home? Did we feed it to the ravens and have them poop on the roaches? It really did depend on how much we got, and how much time we had when we left the restaurant.
We walked up to Mama Francesca’s, which was packed for dinner. There was a huge line coming out of the front door.
“We should just go in the back,” Shane said. “There has to be a door into the kitchen. You know, for deliveries. Deliveries of huge wheels of Parmesan cheese.”
We started to walk around back.
“It comes in wheels?” asked Ben.
“I don’t care which way it comes,” I said, “I just want as much of it as possible.”
“Cross your fingers,” said Shane. “We could get booted out of the kitchen before we can even ask.”
Less than five minutes later, my five hundred and twenty dollars had bought us ad
mission to the walk-in refrigerator. We could walk out with as much Parmesan cheese as we could carry. Mama Francesca herself pointed over to an eight-foot-tall rack that was filled completely with Parmesan. Grated Parmesan. Chunks of Parmesan. Parmesan wheels. Our eyes bugged as we gazed upon what must have been the largest collection of Parmesan cheese in the universe.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s get as much as we can and get out of here!”
“Yeah, let’s get goin’,” said Ben. “It smells a little like…”
“BARF!” Shane and I said.
“Yep,” said Ben.
“Forty minutes!” yelled Shane.
Fifteen minutes later, Ben, Shane, and I headed up the road to Raven Hill Retirement Home. We were weighed down by our backpacks, which were completely full of cheese. We also had to move slowly so that the mountain of cheese on top of the red wagon didn’t crumble and spill over the sides.
“I don’t think I can make it,” wheezed Ben. “We should have called your mother, Chris!”
“We wouldn’t have had time for all the explaining,” I huffed.
“Carrying a hundred pounds of Parmesan cheese is a normal rite of passage for any middle-schooler,” said Shane. “I’m. Sure. She. Would. Have. Understood.”
Shane stopped, breathing heavy.
“Here, let me take the wagon,” I said to Shane. “It’s my turn.”
“Okay,” said Ben. “We’re almost there! How much time is left, Shane?”
“Twenty-five minutes!” Shane yelled.
“It’s going to take us five more minutes to get up the hill. What are we going to do in twenty minutes?” Ben asked.
“Well…,” I said.
“What?” asked Shane.
“Wait, I’m thinking!” I yelled back.
We crept up the side of the hill in silence for a minute, while I thought so hard that my brain hurt.
“I think the most important thing to do is to keep the roaches from coming inside the retirement home,” I finally said.
“Why?” asked Ben.