by Chris McCoy
“Typhoid Ted! Tha scourge of tha abstract! That’s what they should call ya!” said Scurvy, and Ted realized that Scurvy was picturing him as he attacked the meat.
“Ho-HO!” said Scurvy, with a final lunge that slit the last remaining undamaged package of bacon in half.
The pirate placed his sword back in its sheath, and then stood quietly for a moment, shoulders heaving, trying to catch his breath. He got down on his knees and began gathering bits of bacon from the floor, shoving as much meat into his pockets as he possibly could, muttering “Oooh, that’s a good one” and “Nope, that’s turkey bacon” until the clop clop sound of approaching footsteps sent him shuffling for the back of the store, pieces of bacon dropping from his greatcoat the entire way.
With one push through the swinging gray doors, Scurvy Goonda was once again gone from Ted’s life.
The meat attendant came back from the bathroom just as the doors stopped moving. He stood stock-still in front of the aisle, taking in the scope of the carnage.
“Hlupák!” he said.
Had Ted spoken Czech, he would have realized that the meat guy was shouting “Idiot!”—though whether he was shouting it at himself or the meat marauder wasn’t altogether clear.
The Czech stomped away muttering under his breath—no doubt heading off to find the night manager—and Ted knew that he didn’t have much time if he was going to have a chance to talk to Scurvy. He crawled out from behind the deli cabinet and followed Scurvy’s exit path, pushing his way through the gray doors into the back of the store.
A trail of bacon morsels lined the ground where they had fallen from Scurvy’s pockets. The more Ted followed the meat, the sicker he felt about where the scraps might be leading him.
It can’t be, thought Ted.
At the end of the trail, he leaned over and picked a final glob of quivering pink bacon up from the floor.
Ted was standing in front of the Crusher.
“Scurvy?” said Ted.
He looked down into the guts of the Crusher, where sat twenty or so boxes, fully intact, just waiting for somebody to hit the switch and put them out of their misery. Because the machine wasn’t as full as usual, for the first time Ted was able to see just how deep the inside chamber really was. Taking in the Crusher’s awesome depth, he noticed something peculiar. The places that weren’t covered by cardboard seemed to be leaking a bizarre white light. The light looked almost like sunlight, but that didn’t make sense, considering it was past midnight and the storage room floor was made of cold cement.
In addition to the light, something else made Ted nervous: several boxes had been splattered with meat juice and bacon gloops, meaning that Scurvy Goonda had likely beeninside the Crusher—which was such an act of insanity that Ted could barely wrap his mind around the idea.
“All right, Scurvy,” said Ted. “Let’s go, olly-olly oxen free. Come on out! I know you’re angry at me, but I have a question I need to ask.”
Nothing.
“I don’t want to come down there!” said Ted, and he really didn’t.
He was beginning to think that Scurvy might be hiding in the back right corner of the chamber, where there seemed to be the greatest concentration of bacon gobbets, so he grabbed a mop leaning against a nearby wall, flipped it around, and began poking the boxes with its blunt end.
“C’mon, Scurvy! Come out!”
Ted’s mop-poking caused some of the boxes to slide over each other, and more strange light leaked up from the bottom. But still, he didn’t see any sign of Scurvy Goonda.
Then, from somewhere else in the storage room, he heard a voice.
“I THINK HE’S BACK HERE,” said Jed, who sounded like he was approaching from Ted’s left. But when Ted turned to run in the opposite direction, he saw movement and a flash of blue uniforms:
Cops!
Ted scanned the storeroom for a place to hide, but he didn’t have any decent choices. He couldn’t jump in a trash can because it was full, and the pallets of jumbo soda bottles were too tightly packed to squeeze behind. If he made a dash to hide behind one of the large boxes of diapers or paper towels, the cops were going to spot him and arrest him.
He only had one option.
“If you’re down there, Scurvy,” whispered Ted to himself, “I’m going to kill you.”
With that, Ted climbed into the Crusher’s central chamber, lowering himself into the heap of cardboard boxes as quietly as he could.
In one way, he felt like he was five years old again and swimming around inside one of those plastic ball pits at the Barnstable County Fair. But he also felt abject terror, because looking up, he could see the inner gears and teeth of the Crusher.
He dug down into the boxes until he thought he was entirely covered. There was more of the light down here than there was above, and he thought he could see where it was coming from—a rectangular sliding panel at the bottom of the bin that had somehow become dislodged, leaving a half-foot gap between the wall and the edge of the steel plate.
Voices filtered down to him from above:
“See anything?” said Jed.
“Nope,” said a deep voice, probably a cop. “Thought I heard something, but it might just have been you.”
“Whoever did it couldn’t have gone far. There are bits of bacon all over the place.”
Covered with cardboard as he was, Ted couldn’t see that Jed was looking down into the machine. Ted also couldn’t see that Jed, having realized that something strange might be going on inside the Crusher, had quickly formed a simple, wicked plan to flush Ted out of the machine.
“WELL, PLENTY OF CARDBOARD THAT NEEDS CRUSHING!” shouted Jed. “BETTER TAKE CARE OF IT!”
And with that, Jed threw the switch.
Ted felt the initial vibrations below his body before he heard the roar of the machine coming to life. He was shocked at how quickly everything happened after that. The bin began rattling furiously, followed by a hydraulic whoosh as the walls started moving in, pressing the cardboard boxes together.
Ted’s first instinct was to get out. The obvious way of doing so was to leave the way he’d come in—from above—but an enormous amount of crushing metal was quickly descending upon him from that direction. He could feel the power of the Crusher and all its parts, and he was afraid that if he tried to leap over the wall of the bin, the rapidly lowering metal press might cut him in half.
Which meant, essentially, that there was no way to escape.
Then the survival part of his brain made a decision for him. Instead of warning him to escape by going up, it ordered him to head down. He grabbed the loose panel that was letting in the light, and pulled with the full weight of his body.
To his surprise, the panel slid backward, revealing an empty space underneath the Crusher.
A trapdoor.
Ted slid through the opening feetfirst, barely managing to keep his head out of the way of the metal presses, and snapped the panel shut. Above him, he heard twenty boxes being twisted and smashed into a cardboard brick, followed by the silence of the gears grinding to a halt—making sure that what they had crushed stayed crushed—followed by the sound of the gears turning again, pulling the presses back into their resting positions.
When all of the Crusher’s various noises finally stopped, Ted was just barely able to make out the night manager’s muffled voice filtering down to him from above.
“Huh,” said Jed. “Thought there might be somebody down there.”
“And you turned it on?” said one of the cops.
“Well, I was wrong, wasn’t I?”
Ted waited until he heard no more voices before he finally allowed himself to exhale and look around—which was difficult, because it was so bright.
He appeared to be in a vent of some kind. The metal walls surrounding him were polished to an almost iridescent shine, which was causing the light to bounce crazily from wall to ceiling to wall, spilling over everything and stinging Ted’s eyes.
There was
only one way for Ted to go unless he wanted to head back and risk being captured by the cops—toward the end of the tunnel, which was where the light seemed to be coming from. He pressed down on the floor of the vent to make sure it was secure enough to hold his weight, and then he saw something curious: bits of bacon lined the floor of the vent, endlessly stretching out before him in the direction of the light.
“Scurv?” said Ted.
His voice echoed back to him boomingly: SCURV—SCURV—SCURV…
Ted started to crawl.
The vent was a few inches wider than his shoulders and a few inches taller than his head. If it was such a tight fit for him, it was likely terribly uncomfortable for Scurvy, who even in his weakened state had a thicker body than Ted. Every few feet, Ted passed another glob of bacon, some of which looked like it had been sitting out for weeks, covered in mold and reeking. Scurvy had apparently made quite a few trips back and forth to the supermarket. It was no wonder that Jed had lost his mind trying to solve the riddle of the bacon vandal.
Suddenly, Ted passed a fresh glob—Scurvy must have just been here.
“Hello?” said Ted.
HELLO—LO—LO said his echo.
He crawled and crawled, but the light at the end of the vent always seemed to be the same distance away. The light was clearly playing tricks on his eyes, so he decided to look only at the floor, which was littered with bacon gloops of various sizes and states of rottenness.
And so it was while he had his head down that he somehow reached the end of the vent—or at least what he presumed to be the end of the vent, because the light was suddenly so overpowering that he couldn’t see anything at all. He put his palms down one in front of the other and tried to crawl away from the brightness. And then he started to fall.
Ted felt his stomach leap into his throat and the wind whip through his hair, and he waited for the inevitable impact that would splatter him onto some kind of flat surface below.
But when he looked down, he saw that he was plummeting toward the bright white light. He looked left and then right and saw that the vent was now far wider than it had been in the supermarket. It was as if he had fallen into the world’s largest metal-plated well, a fissure so deep that no excavation equipment would ever be able to find him, and his cries for help would never be heard.
But the more Ted looked at the walls around him, the more he started to notice things about the metal vent. It wasn’t entirely unbroken—there were small tunnels shooting every which way. The tunnels didn’t look quite tall enough to stand up in.
Could I somehow grab on to one of these openings? thought Ted. No. I’d still be stuck miles beneath the ground with nowhere to go.
The white light was surging so fast that Ted felt almost relieved to be falling through this giant hole in the world. The wind against his face helped offset some of the hotness seething from the walls surrounding him.
Wait, what’s that? thought Ted. Below him, backlit by the white light, a shadow was shooting up toward him.
Ted flapped his arms to get its attention and yelled, “HEY!” as loud as he could, but his words just floated into the air above.
And then the shadow wasn’t just a shadow anymore. Ted began to make out hairy arms and legs, but even though the hairy thing was close, it didn’t see him until the last possible second. The hairy thing raised its arms and shouted, “WATCH OUT!” but it was too late: both Ted and the hairy thing were moving too fast to change course.
SMACK!
Ted collided with a white-faced saki monkey who was wearing a crisp blue pilot’s uniform.
“I SAID, ‘WATCH OUT!’” said the saki monkey.
The saki monkey was disappointed to see that the crash had ripped the sleeve of his uniform, but the monkey felt better when it saw Ted spiraling toward the middle of the Earth.
“IF I SEE YOU IN MIDDLEMOST,” yelled the monkey, “YOU’RE PAYING TO HAVE THIS RETAILORED!”
But the unconscious Ted didn’t respond.
XIX
The ThereYouGo Gate, located in the Earth’s core, is a principal topic in abstract companion legend. All abstract companions know that the gate is in the center of the world, and they all know that it zips them to Middlemost. These are the two central ideas of the popular campfire song “That Ol’ There-YouGo Gate to Middlemost”:
Oh, ThereYouGo Gate, take me away!
Back to that star where it’s pleasant all day!
My best friend has ditched me and I feel like a ghost!
Oh, welcome me back to my home, Middlemost!
In the last few weeks, countless ab-coms had this song in their heads as they streamed through the ThereYouGo Gate, even though many were returning simply for health reasons. Indeed, when the Greenies plague first hit, all the world’s ab-coms who hadn’t yet reported to Middlemost received an official dispatch from President Persephone Skeleton:
Attention All
ABSTRACT COMPANIONS!
Got green bumps?
Well, we warned you,
didn’t we?
We told you that the humans were planning
to exterminate ALL AB-COMS! But did you
listen? No! And now you’re
SICK! And BUMPY!
Come back to your beloved Middlemost
NOW!
We have discovered the antidote! We will
take care of you! If not properly treated, you
will DISAPPEAR PERMANENTLY
into a pool of green sludge!
Do you want that? To be sludgy?
This is the FINAL NOTICE of the call to
arms! Your last day to report to Middlemost
is September 22-which is my birthday,
incidentally. Gifts are strongly
recommended! Come home and be cured!
Come home and join the fight!
TO ARMS!
Your terribly sophisticated leader,
PRESIDENT PERSEPHONE SKELETON
Hundreds of thousands of copies of these letters overflowed the very large trash cans outside the ThereYouGo Gate. But Ted didn’t see any of them. He was still unconscious.
Odd things flashed through his zonked mind as he plummeted through the ThereYouGo Gate and disappeared in a bright flash of static electricity:
How giraffes sleep less than an hour per night.
How it was impractical that humans only grew two sets of teeth in a lifetime, considering how easy it was to get cavities.
Why the Mona Lisa didn’t have any eyebrows.
And then—PHHZZT!
XX
SMACK!
Ted’s body broke a branch in a massive tree, causing leaves to spray in every direction and snapping him out of his daze just before he hit the ground with a dull thud.
For a long moment, he just lay on his back, looking up at the tree that interrupted his fall.
“What… the heck … was all… of that?” Ted asked the tree, but the tree didn’t respond, though it could have if it had wanted to.
High above the tree’s branches, he could see a small dark vent that appeared to hover in mid air, poking out of the sky like the end of a pipe. A crude catapult built of vines and wooden planks stood near the base of the tree. BACON—HO! had been carved into the side of the catapult. Ted looked back and forth between the vent in the sky and the catapult. Scurvy had often talked about using catapults in sea battles. Had he launched himself with this one?
Ted climbed to his feet and checked in with his body—bending his fingers, shaking out his legs, jogging in place—to make sure everything was in working order. He was definitely battered, but nothing felt broken.
Knowing that he was going to live at least a little while longer, he turned to survey this strange place. To his surprise, it looked a lot like the world he was used to, except that everything just seemed a bit different.
He was standing at the top of a hill. Beneath him was a meadow with wild grasses the color of seashells. In the distance he could see the outl
ine of a forest, but the trees seemed too tall to be located next to the low-lying meadow. Edging the forest was a thin strip of pinkish-bluish sand that might have been a desert. Everywhere Ted looked, one type of landscape abruptly stopped and a completely different one began. It was as if Ted were trapped in a terrarium meticulously constructed by ambitious children.
The sky was huge and blue and mottled with white clouds that looked the same as they did back home, but it seemed as though the atmosphere had somehow become confused and had allowed the night to stick around. There were stars everywhere, twinkling bright in the middle of the day and forming constellations that Ted had never seen before. These weren’t the same stars he had looked at all his life—or if they were, he definitely wasn’t seeing them from the same angle.
On the horizon, he could see what looked like thousands of spotlights, all pointed directly upward, blasting blindingly golden beams out into deep space.
“Hello?” he yelled. “Anybody out there?”
Whoosh! His words hadn’t even echoed, but as soon as they left his mouth it was like he’d hit a switch that completely electrified the meadow. Some things began racing through the field. He heard the whap whap whap of grass rapidly being knocked down, and the somethings sped off in the direction of the pinkish-bluish desert.
“Don’t be scared!” yelled Ted. “I’m just lost!”
Then a strange-looking man came floating toward him through the meadow.
“Um—hello there?” said Ted.
The man said nothing.
“I think I took a wrong turn,” Ted explained, but the man just kept coming. “I fell from that vent hanging in the sky.”
The thought crossed Ted’s mind that the man might be deaf, and he briefly considered trying to communicate with him via sign language, but the only sign he remembered from his second-grade class was the one for I love you. It seemed inappropriate to make such a sweeping romantic statement to a freaky stranger.
As the man drew closer, Ted noted that he was wearing a well-tailored three-button suit, like something a mortician might wear. His face was handsome and youthful, and his eyes were very, very dark.