Sven Carter & the Android Army

by Rob Vlock

  I felt lower than that stupid cockroach.

  Without thinking, I reached down, scooped the insect up, and raised it to my mouth.

  “Dude! Gross!” Will cried. “I’m gonna totally barf!”

  I stood there, mouth open, wriggling cockroach poised in front of my lips, as an idea popped into my head.

  * * *

  We watched from around the corner as Junkman Sam approached Eddie, got down on his hands and knees, and crawled under the man’s table.

  “Whoa! Hey!” Eddie cried, leaping up and knocking his chair over in the process. “What the heck, man! Get outta there!”

  Sam gave the man an apologetic look. “Oh, sorry. I don’t suppose you’ve seen a brown leather wallet, have you?”

  “What? There ain’t no wallet here. Get lost!”

  “But I’m pretty sure I dropped it somewhere around here,” Sam replied, peering up at the guy from under the plastic tabletop.

  Eddie squatted down next to Sam and gestured to the pavement under the table. “Use your eyes, man! There’s no wallet under there! Now get outta here!”

  Sam frowned at him. “You’re sure?”

  “Do you see a wallet?”

  Sam scratched his head. “No, I guess I’ll have to look elsewhere.”

  “Just get away from my table!” Eddie said.

  Sam backed out on his hands and knees, straightened, and smiled at the man. He bowed slightly and walked back to Alicia, Will, and me so we could watch the action unfold.

  Eddie righted his chair imperiously, plopped down onto it, and took a big gulp of coffee.

  Before he could swallow, his bloodshot eyes nearly jumped out of his skull. Coffee shot from his mouth and nose, speckling the surface of his plastic table. As he gagged and spluttered, a big, black cockroach crawled out of his mouth, paused briefly under his nose, scuttled across his cheek, and vanished into his greasy hair.

  It was the same cockroach I had dropped into his coffee while Sam was distracting him.

  Squawking and batting at his head, he finally pulled the roach out of his hair, took one look at it, turned a really impressive shade of green, doubled over, and barfed.

  While he was depositing the contents of his stomach all over the sidewalk, I walked up behind him and gingerly unclipped the security badge from his belt. He didn’t even seem to notice.

  I swiped his card through the card reader next to the gate. A soft metallic click let us know it was unlocked. I pulled it open and slipped inside, followed by my friends. By the time Eddie had stopped barfing, we had already swiped open another lock and pushed through a set of double glass doors to the interior of the building.

  We found ourselves inside a hallway that extended at least a hundred feet in front of us. Banks of fluorescent lights gave the place a sterile feel. Even autographed posters from some of the world’s biggest bands couldn’t breathe life into the dreary space.

  “Where do you think Dixon’s dressing room is?” I whispered.

  I got my answer in the form of a low rumble coming from the left. It sounded like a rusty buzz saw biting into a pile of human skulls.

  We peeked around the corner to see two small mountains placed side by side in front of a door that bore a sign reading DIXON WATTS.

  On closer inspection, I realized that they weren’t mountains. They were just two of the largest men I had ever seen. And the rumbling sound was a deep laugh spilling out from a mouth containing two jumbled rows of missing and broken teeth.

  Scars crisscrossed their faces and arms. Nearly every exposed inch of their skin, which looked as if it were about to split open under massively bulging muscles, was inked with elaborate tattoos. Even their shaved heads were adorned with swirls and symbols that wove in unsolvable knots around their skulls.

  My feet went numb. “Are they Ticks?”

  “Probably not,” Alicia said with a note of disappointment. “If they were, they wouldn’t have all those scars. Their repair systems would have healed them. Too bad. I so want to try out my flamethrower.”

  “Okay, so what do we do now?” Will breathed in a barely audible voice.

  As always, Alicia had a plan. “Follow my lead. And stay cool.”

  Sam and I immediately glanced at Will.

  “What?” Will insisted defensively. “I’m cool.”

  Alicia rounded the corner with a bold swagger. The rest of us shuffled along behind her with considerably less confidence.

  CHAPTER 10.0:

  < value= [You’re a Poo] >

  “HEY, GUYS!” ALICIA CALLED CHEERFULLY to the bodyguards. “We’re here.”

  The man who was laughing abruptly stopped. “Who’s here?”

  “Us,” Alicia replied. “Dix’s opening act.”

  The two men scratched their shaved heads in unison.

  The one on the right, who I noticed had the words LETHAL and WEAPON tattooed on the backs of his hands, was the first to respond. “Opening act? Mr. Watts didn’t say anything about an opening act,” he chirped in an improbably high voice.

  “Yeah,” rumbled the one on the left, who sported a black skull-and-crossbones tattoo on his neck. “Mr. Watts doesn’t need an opening act.”

  Alicia frowned at them. “Hold on! Are you telling me there’s a mix-up with our booking? We’re supposed to open for Dix tonight! We signed a contract!”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Lethal Weapon squeaked.

  “You don’t? Maybe we can just straighten it out with Dix, then?” She stepped forward. “If you’ll just let us by . . .”

  A hand the approximate size of Thor’s hammer stopped her.

  “Nobody sees Mr. Watts,” the owner of the hand thundered.

  Alicia shrugged. “Maybe you should take that up with our manager.”

  “Who’s your manager?”

  “Him.” Alicia pointed at Sam, who seemed to physically shrink as he looked up at the bodyguard.

  With a trembling hand, he waved. “Hi,” he muttered softly.

  “You don’t look much like a manager,” Lethal Weapon observed. “And they don’t look much like an opening act. What do they do, anyway?”

  Sam’s face was blank for several seconds. Finally, he uttered, “Comedy. They do . . . stand-up comedy.”

  “Oh, yeah?” growled Skull-and-Crossbones. “I like jokes. They’re funny. Go on. Tell us one.” He pointed right at me.

  I froze. I couldn’t think of a single joke. Or gag. Or pun. Or funny story. Heck, under the circumstances, I would have been lucky to remember my own name.

  Seconds ticked by. The men scowled at me. Thoughts swirled around in my head in a hopeless tangle.

  Will cleared his throat. “Knock, knock.”

  The men aimed their intimidating gaze toward him. “Who’s there?” they responded together.

  “Europe.”

  “Europe who?”

  “No, you’re a poo.”

  Oh, no! Of all the jokes that Will could have told, he had to choose that one? I mean, sure, at least he’d come up with one. But that joke was lame when Sam’s stupid jokebot told it to us yesterday. Now it was potentially fatal.

  The bodyguards blinked.

  “Get it?” Will coaxed. “Europe who? You’re a poo? It’s funny because I just called you . . . a . . . poop . . .”

  I think that was the moment Will realized he had insulted our soon-to-be murderers because he suddenly turned very, very pale.

  Skull-and-Crossbones began to tremble. His whole body shook with what I could only assume was homicidal rage.

  Until . . .

  He laughed. That same deep, bone-shattering laugh we had heard earlier.

  A few seconds later, Lethal Weapon joined in—although the clueless look in his eyes suggested he wasn’t exactly sure why.

  Once he had caught his breath, the deep-voiced man smiled at us. “That was funny. You guys are funny. I guess you really are comedians. Because comedians are funny.”

  “So we can see Dix now?
” Alicia asked.

  The man’s smile instantly disappeared. “Nobody sees Mr. Watts.”

  Alicia scowled, balling her fists and snapping into the taut combat stance I had seen her assume so many times over the past few days. No way she could even be thinking about taking these guys on!

  “Alicia . . . ,” I whispered.

  But it was no use. She was laser-focused on her adversaries, ready to spring. It would have been admirable if it hadn’t been so unbelievably stupid.

  “It’s okay, kids,” Sam said. “If we can’t see Mr. Watts, we can’t see Mr. Watts. Let’s go.”

  That managed to get through to Alicia. She rounded on Sam. “But . . . but we can’t just—”

  Sam put a hand on her shoulder, gave her a wink and uttered something in Russian. “Sledovat’ moyemu primeru.”

  The hint of a smile played across Alicia’s lips. “Okay, you’re right. We should go.”

  And just like that, she turned and strode away from the bodyguards.

  I set off after Alicia with one final look over my shoulder at Dix’s dressing room door. We had been so close!

  But before we had taken half a dozen steps, Junkman Sam turned back to face the men. “But . . . as long as I’m here . . . can I ask you two a question?”

  The men looked at each other and gave Sam a nod.

  “Great. You see, I’ve been dying to get my first tattoo. But I just can’t decide what to get. And since you two look like experts, I thought you could offer some advice?”

  The bodyguards’ eyes lit up.

  “Tattoos are awesome!” squeaked Lethal Weapon.

  “Exactly,” Sam confirmed. “That’s why I want to make sure I get a really good one.”

  He pulled out a marker and rolled up his sleeve. With a few quick strokes, he sketched a heart on his forearm.

  “What do you think?”

  “That stinks!” exclaimed the low-pitched one, snatching Sam’s marker. “What you need is something like this.”

  He crossed out the heart and drew what was either meant to be a grinning skull with a bunch of snot dripping out of its nose hole or a deformed octopus.

  As I watched the bodyguards use Sam as their personal sketch pad, I felt a tap on my shoulder. Alicia held her finger to her lips and nodded toward Dix’s dressing room door.

  We crept down the corridor, opened the door, and slipped inside.

  What we found there was truly horrific.

  CHAPTER 11.0:

  < value= [I Want to Poke My Ears Out] >

  “BABE, YOU ARE MY SCRAMBLED eggs! I love you and your bacon legs!”

  Dixon Watts stood in front of a mirror in his dressing room, warming up his voice. Unfortunately, no amount of warm-up would make him sound like anything other than a tone-deaf bull elephant.

  I stuck my fingers in my ears, but it didn’t help. It was as if his voice tapped straight into my brain and scrambled it like a two-hundred-horsepower eggbeater.

  I glanced at Alicia and Will, who stared, starry-eyed, at Dix.

  “Do re mi fa—”

  The teen pop idol stopped short when he noticed us standing behind him. “Oh, hi. Just leave them over there.” He gestured toward a table at the side of the room and turned his attention back to his reflection.

  We stood there for a few seconds as the auditory torture continued. Finally, when he paused to comb his eyebrows, I pulled my fingers from my ears and spoke up.

  “Um . . . put what over where?”

  “The D&D’s,” he replied.

  I scratched my head. “What?”

  He spun around, his face looking a lot less handsome thanks to the angry scowl that spread across it. “The D&D’s! My manager always sends a list of my requirements ahead of time. It specified that I am to have in my dressing room, available for my consumption before every show, a bowl filled with two and a half pounds of blue D&D’s! And I don’t see any blue D&D’s in my dressing room!”

  “What are blue D&D’s?” I asked, shrinking away. He stood a whole head taller than me and his muscular arms strained at his tight black T-shirt. Jeez, why couldn’t I have been the good-looking, tall, muscular Tick rather than the weird Tick who ate garbage?

  Dix sighed and rolled his eyes. “As you should know, D&D’s are M&M’s that have had the Ms scrubbed off and have Ds painted on in their place. D for Dixon. Ms are stupid letters. And ‘blue’ means blue. I won’t eat any of those other colors. They stick to my vocal cords. Now do you have my D&D’s or what?”

  I looked at Alicia and Will for support, but they were too starstruck to do anything but grin.

  “Oh. Uh . . . no,” I answered. “We’re here about something else.”

  “Did you bring me a pet monkey?” Dix demanded.

  “Uh, no monkey. Sorry,” I told him.

  His mouth curved into an angry frown. “No monkey? Then why. Are. You. Here?”

  I blinked at him as I tried to figure out the best way to tell the world’s most popular musical artist that he was really a Tick. “Um, you see, we wanted to talk to you. About you.”

  He cocked his head at us for a moment, then forced himself to smile. “Oh, I see. You’re reporters here for an interview. Fine. Normally, my manager handles the press. But since she’s out, I guess I can talk to you. But next time I want a monkey.”

  Pet monkeys? D&D’s? Reporters? Seriously? How can someone who’s been a star for only a month be this out of touch with reality?

  I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Maybe you should sit down, Dix.”

  He scrunched up his neatly combed eyebrows. After a moment’s hesitation, he sat on a couch.

  “Okay,” I continued. “I’m not exactly sure how to tell you this, so I’m just going to tell you. You’re a—”

  I was interrupted by the dressing room door bursting open. An old lady shuffled into the room, her silver hair tied into a tight bun, her neatly pressed red pantsuit hanging loosely off her narrow shoulders. She carried a bowl of blue candy.

  Dix leapt up. “Oh! Hi, Roz! You have the D&D’s! Awesome! You’re the best manager ever!”

  The lady smiled at him, her jumbled teeth as gray as tombstones. “I will always take care of you, Dixon.” She scuffed across the room and placed the bowl on the table. “And who are your . . . friends?”

  Dix grinned. “They’re reporters!” he enthused.

  “Are they?” Roz replied flatly, slowly turning to take Alicia, Will, and me in with her wet, milky eyes. She pursed her lips. “Funny how I wasn’t informed of any reporters coming today.”

  There was something about this woman that made me uneasy. My stomach felt hollow—the same kind of sensation I’d get just after Brandon Marks did something to humiliate me in front of the whole school. I swallowed down the lump of panic that was forming in my throat.

  The arrival of the creepy manager was enough to snap Alicia and Will out of their Dix-induced stupor.

  Alicia took a few seconds to shake the fog out of her head before speaking. “Yeah, we’re not reporters. We’re here about the day of reckoning. Srok rasplaty. And we’re going to stop it.”

  At the sound of the Russian words, the woman flinched. But she immediately recovered and smiled mildly at us. “Dix, be a sweetie and step into the bathroom for a few minutes. I’d like to have a word with these charming young people.”

  “But I don’t need to go to the bathroom,” Dix informed her.

  Roz fixed him with her gaze.

  Dix seemed to shrink. “Okay, I guess I do need to go to the bathroom,” he muttered, slinking into the bathroom and shutting the door.

  “He’s a sweet boy. And such a talent,” Roz said. “I try to shield him from things that might upset him.”

  “Like the fact he’s a Tick?” I shot back. “Like the fact he’s part of a plot to destroy the entire human race?”

  Roz looked at me thoughtfully. “Well, yes. Also bloodshed. The poor dear has such a weak stomach. He hates it when things get . . . mess
y.”

  Alicia scoffed at her. “You’re threatening us? Please. We’ve taken out tougher Ticks than you, old lady!”

  “Seriously?” Will whispered to Alicia. “Do you have to antagonize her?”

  Instead of responding, the woman just kept smiling with those crooked, gray teeth, her milky eyes boring into us.

  A shudder coursed through me as I realized she didn’t blink. Just like Dr. Shallix!

  The old lady slipped off her jacket and carefully hung it over the back of a chair. She turned back to face us in a crisp white blouse.

  Alicia hoisted the backpack off her shoulders without taking her eyes off the woman. Her hand dipped inside and reemerged holding the flamethrower.

  That’s when things got, well . . . disturbing.

  The old woman’s pristine white shirt began throbbing. Dozens of little . . . things poked at her shirt from the inside. It almost looked like fingers were jabbing at the garment.

  Thirty long, thin tentacles exploded from under the woman’s shirt. Each was about ten feet long and tipped with a gross yellow fingernail, which gave them the overall appearance of fingers that had been stretched out to an absurd length. Only, fingers weren’t usually covered by suckers that looked like they belonged on an octopus.

  Will leapt back toward the dressing room door faster than I’d ever seen him move before. He wrenched at the knob.

  But before he was able to open the door more than a few inches, one of the woman’s appendages shot out in a flesh-colored blur and slammed it shut.

  “No, no, my sweet children,” she cooed gently. “You cannot leave now. I haven’t had a chance to kill you yet.”

  CHAPTER 12.0:

  < value= [Octogranny Doesn’t Eat Fire] >

  THE ROOM WAS ALIVE WITH tentacles. They flailed and whipped around the old lady, their fingernails hungrily seeking human flesh.

  “So you know about srok rasplaty,” Roz said. “Very clever, children. But there’s nothing you can do to stop it. Once I dispose of your bodies, Dixon will go onstage as planned. The whole world will be listening. All his earlier songs were merely softening up the humans’ weak brains. Tonight, when they hear the debut of his latest masterpiece, they will be completely under his influence!”