Oddity

by Sarah Cannon

  Then comes the stampede.

  Customers come running out of the store, still pushing their carts and hauling their bags. A clerk chases after a woman in a snug maxi dress, demanding she pay for her purchases. She rounds on him, jabbing his chest with her finger. I can hear her clear across the road.

  “I’m not going back in there. That place is infested! I’m going to call the health inspector!”

  Inside, there are shouts and crashes.

  “It’s about that time,” I say, setting my soda on the ground against the bodega wall and wiping my wet hand on my brown pants.

  Cayden and Raymond flank me, also wearing brown. Xerple’s bobbing around behind them. He refused to stay home.

  “If the bunny comes, I come!” he said, and honestly, I didn’t have time to argue.

  “Ready?” I say, and Cayden grins nervously. Raymond nods, his eyes never wavering from the front of Greeley’s.

  We head across the lot, casually dodging fleeing patrons as we go. I feel anything but calm, but we’ve got to act like we belong here. We weave our way between the cars and squeeze through the crush of freaked-out customers.

  It’s a zoo in here. A very specialized zoo, full of zombie rabbits. It was ridiculously simple, getting them to come. All I had to do was tell them one thing:

  Here there be marshmallows.

  They’re everywhere. Log rolling through the produce section on watermelons. Standing atop a pile of potato sacks, hurling portobello mushrooms like Frisbees. A cart sails past full of rabbits using brooms as oars, like some kind of rowing team. “Stroke!” yells one of them, standing up in the child seat in total violation of the diagrams. “Stroke! Stroke! Stroke!”

  I go straight to the customer service desk. A beleaguered blue-shirt whose name tag reads DEWEY is flipping through a tattered old phone book, muttering, “Animal control, animal control” under his breath. I recognize him right away as Greeley’s nephew, though he probably won’t know me.

  “Why didn’t you look us up on the Internet?” I ask.

  He doesn’t even glance my way. “I have a Splint plan,” he says, distracted. “My phone never gets a decent signal in here. And they chewed through the router cables.”

  Does he think I’m here to make a return, or what?

  “Someone down the street was saying you’ve got a zombie rabbit problem?” I ask, as if it’s not self-evident from the gleeful cackles and toppling displays of cans.

  Finally, he looks up. “Kid, if you don’t have Dale Roundtree in your back pocket, get out of here.”

  I shove my braids out of my face with one hand. “You don’t see the family resemblance?”

  “Your uniforms look the same,” he says. He’s going to go far in the family business, I can tell.

  “Yeah, that’s on purpose. I’m interning.” It sounds more official than volunteering.

  He looks over at Cayden and Raymond. I barely talked Cayden out of wearing shades. “And are your associates here interning, too?”

  I roll my eyes. “Obviously.”

  Dewey looks pointedly down at Xerple.

  “That’s our … trained herding animal.”

  “Look, kid,” says Dewey, then ducks as a stream of spray cheez flies at him from the direction of the checkout lanes. The cheez coils and loops on the counter, rising in an unsteady pyramid of fluorescent orange. “I don’t have time for you to get cute with me.” He rakes a hand through his thinning hair. “Oh no, they found the baking aisle.”

  I glance over my shoulder. About halfway between the front and back of the store, a mushroom cloud of flour is rising. I gotta feel a little bit proud of the zombie rabbits’ sheer destructive creativity. I return my attention to the pathetic, droopy clerk.

  “Look, mister big man, I guarantee you I have way more experience wrangling these critters than you. Unless you want to explain to the boss why you let a herd of zombie rabbits have free rein in this town’s finest grocery store, I suggest you let us handle things.”

  Greeley, of course, is in his weekly meeting with the PC. Nobody, but nobody, is going to interrupt that meeting unless Greeley’s is actually on fire. I get exactly the reaction I was looking for.

  “You’re gonna handle this? Kiddo, I’ll believe that when I see it.”

  I turn to the nearest zombie rabbit, who’s jumping frantically up and down on a grocery scanner like he’s playing Cayden’s Dance Dance Revolution game. The machine’s beeping out desperate Morse code. “Please remove the item and wait for an associate,” says the computer.

  “Hey!” I holler, with all the authority I can manage when I feel like laughing. “Get down from there.”

  He turns toward me, and I see that it’s the rabbit who wears the sugar sack. He grins.

  “Make me!”

  I reach behind my back and slide one of the nets I pilfered from Daddy’s supply closet out of its holder. These are older ones he got tired of fixing, and lack some of the curses and wards on his newer models. The red thread that binds the best ones is old and faded. But to the layperson, I figure they still look pretty good. I give this one a shake to make sure the net is loose and moving freely, and advance on good old Sugar. He faces me fully, thumping his hind foot threateningly on the scanner. The computer, totally confused, tries to argue with him in English, then Spanish, then surrenders and just buzzes instead. A low growl rises and falls in Sugar’s throat. He crooks his creepy little hands and crouches.

  “Maybe you should step back, kid. Kid? Shouldn’t you wait for your father?” calls Dewey from where he’s hiding behind the customer service counter.

  I crouch, too, glaring at Sugar just as tough as I can. “Bring it.”

  “WAAAAAHHHHHHH!” he screams, and leaps at me.

  “RAAAAAHHHHHHH!” I scream, holding my ground.

  “AAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!” shrieks the clerk from behind the counter.

  I step sideways, whip my net around, and bag Sugar, neat as neat. If Daddy could see, he’d about bust with pride.

  Sugar puts up a truly excellent struggle, snarling and chewing on the net and basically making himself so disagreeable that I wonder if zombie rabbits can get rabies.

  I swing the net around and present it for the clerk’s edification, dangling it over the edge of the counter. He whimpers and scrabbles back across the floor. How this guy got through school here in Oddity is beyond me.

  “You want me to let him go?” I ask in my most helpful voice.

  “Outside!” Dewey squeaks.

  I shrug. “Fine.”

  He pulls himself back upright, clinging to the counter for dear life, and tries to look like he’s had a spine this whole time. “I’ll lock the automatic doors. You put them out the side fire entrance, one at a time, and I’ll start getting the remaining customers out of the store.”

  Good. That’ll take him hours, especially if some of the customers are pinned down by rabbits, which is highly likely, since that’s how I planned it.

  “Okay. Hats.” Me, Raymond, and Cayden pull ball caps out of our pockets and jam them on our heads.

  “Hats?” asks Dewey, confused.

  “Keeps the vermin from grabbing our hair. We never go anywhere without them.” Which is nonsense, of course, but he’s obviously buying every word.

  Xerple takes off to add to the chaos. Cayden, Raymond, and I march away down separate aisles, impossible for the overhead security cameras to tell us apart in our identical brown uniforms and ball caps, leaving Dewey to do … whatever completely useless thing he’s about to do.

  I take Sugar over to the side entrance like I was told, and dump him outside the door. Of course, I hold it open long enough for him to sneak straight back in, but it’s all about the letter of the law, right? Which I dutifully followed. He races off, grabbing a pool noodle from an end display as he goes. A store employee appears from around the corner, and Sugar charges her, holding the noodle like a lance and screaming.

  As I pass through the frozen food aisle, I see rab
bits playing hockey with burritos. They’re also taking turns shutting one another in the freezer cases. Two of them are eating ice cream with their faces in the containers, and one of them is slo-mo miming at me as I go by.

  When I get to the back, I duck behind the meat counter. “Hey, careful with that!” I hiss at a zombie rabbit who’s using the industrial slicer to make an enormous mountain of shaved salami. He looks at me, and two of the butchers rush him, trying to retake the deli area. He jumps down from the metal table and whips their aprons up over their faces before they know what’s happening. One of them trips and goes down in a pile of bologna slices. The other goes face-first into the nearby lobster tank. The rabbit lands on top of his head, reaching in with a paring knife to slice the bands on as many lobster claws as he can. “Ha HA!” he cries in triumph, as unleashed crustaceans go after the butcher’s face and his hands where they’re gripping the side of the tank. His feet pedal frantically on the wet floor as he tries to pull himself out. The aquarium teeters, then goes over sideways, smashing beneath him. He wheezes and sucks in a huge breath before screaming as the lobsters swarm over him.

  The invertebrate invasion is excellent cover as I crab-walk through the swinging doors into the dim interior of the stockroom.

  Chapter 17

  Schnoz

  I think of Greeley’s as a really big store but I never expected the back room to be this cavernous. Away in the distance on all sides of me stretch tall steel shelves filled with pallets of food, and other, less identifiable things. I can’t make out the actual back of the store. It’s like it’s bigger on the inside.

  I’m slow, low, and as silent as the grave, but thankfully I don’t see any employees back here. The rabbits have strict instructions to stay out unless there’s an emergency that needs my attention, in which case they’re supposed to send Snooks. I made him a lieutenant. He’s already lording it over everybody.

  As I continue to edge my way in and nothing moves, I cautiously rise to my feet. I’m waiting for some alarm to go off, but unless it’s silent, there’s not one. I guess they couldn’t leave it on all day, or every time someone came after a flat of disposable diapers they’d set it off.

  This place looks like your basic warehouse. It’s downright boring. I bet Pearl thought she was getting majorly cheated when they brought her and the other Sweepstakes winners back here.

  I thought I’d find some answers, but nothing looks like I expected. It’s well lit, too, which makes no sense. If I can see everything, so can the blue-shirts. They can’t all be in on the Sweepstakes, can they? That Dewey kid couldn’t keep a secret in a safe.

  I slide my way down long rows of tall steel shelves, scanning for anything that could be helpful, but all I see are groceries. Then I spot something interesting.… The floor slopes back here, until it’s practically a hill. On the back wall is a row of shiny steel doors. I’ve seen doors like that before, when we went on a field trip to Cryogenesis (Freeze This Moment Forever!). Those are cooling units.

  On one hand, it’s not a surprise that a grocery store needs cold storage in the back. On the other hand, it’s pretty inconvenient to put it so far away. On the surgically grafted third hand, maybe they’re not keeping groceries in there at all.

  I sidle down the sloping aisle as fast as I can go, keeping my eye out for blue-shirts, but they’re all too busy dealing with marauding rabbits. I swear, if I’d realized how useful those little boogers could be, I’d have been using them for months.

  Daddy has a jacket that goes with his uniform, with DALE embroidered on the pocket. The fake uniforms I cobbled together from the trades I made at Song’s all have short sleeves, which made perfect sense on a New Mexico afternoon, but I’m freezing by the time I pull the latch handle on the fourth unit. This one is a freezer, I discover. The air whooshes around the seal, and I haul the heavy silver door open.

  I can’t see the back of the freezer from the entryway, not because it’s deeper than the others, but because there are … things hanging from hooks in the ceiling. Huge, frozen things, wrapped in some kind of plastic casing. My nightmare brain kicks in, and for one panicky second I believe in my bones that I’ve found a bunch of Sweepstakes winners, frozen for safekeeping. I take a step inside, straining to read the packaging in the dim light that spills in through the open door.

  Beef. Ham. More beef.

  I relax. This must be the stuff the butchers cut up, before they cut it up.

  Then it occurs to me that there’s a zombie rabbit out there with SUGAR written across his pajamas. There’s such a thing as taking labeling too seriously.

  I pull my Oddity Bodkin from my pocket. Acting braver than I feel, I slice open the plastic wrapping on the biggest frozen hunk of meat I see. Even in the low light I detect the marbled red and white of frozen meat. I don’t know if I was expecting someone in blue jeans and a jacket, or what. Frozen meat is not actually reassuring, of course, except for the fact that no one could ever get a single piece this big from a human.

  Suddenly I realize that it’s getting darker in here. With a soft sound like a rubbery kiss, the freezer door seals behind me, and I’m alone in the dark in a maze of meat.

  I fumble toward the door, and in the blackness I run straight into the frozen cow I just opened, which turns out to be as hard as a brick wall. The fireworks that explode behind my eyes are gone too fast to be of any use. When it stops hurting a little, I reach a hand out in front of me, only to feel something cold and hard brush past.

  “Whoa!” I say aloud, then mentally slap myself for making noise when I’m sneaking around.

  It’s just the cow, swinging on its hook because I ran into it. I hear it sklonk into something else in the dark. A ham, I guess. Great. This is like being in a room full of desk toys.

  My collision with the beef has got me as turned around as any of these things swinging on hooks. I can’t find the door, or any telltale strip of light that might tell me where it is.

  It is so, so cold in here.

  I stand still for a minute. No point ramming into everything. When I can’t hear the squeak of the hooks anymore, I strain my ears to see if I hear anything else. I hear an exhaust fan blowing softly. Where do they usually put exhaust fans in these things? At the back, I bet. I turn and head in the opposite direction. I feel in front of me as carefully as I can, but my fingers are going numb.

  I picked the wrong way. It’s taking much longer than it should to reach the door. At least, I think it is. Maybe I was already halfway in when the door shut. When I get to the wall, I’ll know, and I can go back the other way if I need to.

  And I do find the wall. Wow, I might actually have done this right. My fingers trail left, and graze the seam of what’s definitely a door. I can’t find a handle, though. It must be on the other side. I feel my way across the door, then stop, my hands just above shoulder height.

  Doors don’t usually have big, rounded bumps in them.

  Some of these are the size of my hand, some are smaller. I circle that area of the door with my hands, figuring out how many of them there are, framing them. Then I work my way back in, trying to understand what I’m feeling. There’s a long shape at the “top,” like an oval on its side. Then two indents below that, with round bulges inside them. Between those, there’s a sort of ridge, curving down into a bump, and below that—

  I jump backward, slamming into a frozen slab of meat, which swings on its hook and smacks me a second time for good measure. My back stings with impact and cold, but worse is the panic clawing around inside me like it got lost in there. I touched a mouth, complete with teeth. Which means the rest of the bumps make up a face. And now that I’ve realized what it is, I also know who it is.

  I was just nose-to-nose with a sculpture of Mr. Whanslaw.

  My skin crawls like I’m covered with spiders.

  I’m 100 percent positive I’d have noticed if the head … of the head of the PC was on the inside of the freezer door when I opened it. Which means this is a di
fferent door.

  I spin around, too freaked out to be careful, and flounder back across the freezer, running into things willy-nilly and setting them swinging. Reaching the right door, I claw for the release latch, desperate to at least get some light in here. I find and pull it.

  It doesn’t work.

  I fumble for a light switch all around the door. I can’t find one. I’m shivering all over, and being all alone and scared out of my wits is making it really hard to gauge my cold exposure. Raymond would be so disappointed in me.

  Just when I’m about to really lose it, I hear the outside handle clunk as someone pulls on it. The door swings open.

  There’s no one there.

  I stick my foot in the gap just in case as I cautiously peer around the edge of the door to see if my rescuer is friend or foe.

  It’s Snooks. As I spot him, he lets go of the handle, drops to the ground with a squish, and comes around to join me.

  “Why are you standing in there with all the beeves?” he asks me.

  “I’m sorry, the what?”

  “The beeves. The many hanging cows.”

  Where the heck are the zombie rabbits from? I shake my head. Then it occurs to me that the ruckus sounds a lot closer than it did before.

  “Snooks, why are you back here?”

  He blinks. “Oh. Yes. EMERGENCY!”

  Chapter 18

  Shiny

  I shut the freezer door as softly as I can and crouch next to Snooks, scanning the parts of the storage room I can see.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “I don’t know, but it’s wearing a name tag and very unpleasant!” says Snooks, which both does and doesn’t answer my question. “Is wearing a straw hat. We have all the marshmallows. Come now!”

  My heart clenches like a fist over the straw hat part. The loud noises in the distance sound like they’re being made by full-size people, so there’s no time to hide here being scared. There are emergency exits back in store land, so as much as I’d like to grab Raymond and Cayden, head into that freezer, and pry open the door to the secret tunnel I’m now sure exists, I’m going to have to run right at my pursuers. Maybe I’m in luck and they don’t actually know I’m back here.