by Chris McCoy
“The invitations are perfect,” said Persephone.
She waited.
“And so … are you?” said Scurvy.
Persephone smiled. Scurvy noticed a loose floorboard near the hearth. Could he dig his way out of here?
“Can you believe it?” she said. “After three hundred years we’re finally getting married!”
“I really can’t believe it,” said Scurvy. “But don’t ya think that maybe we should wait a wee bit longer? Have some time tah, uh, enjoy our engagement? Maybe take some time off, go on one of them luxury cruises instead of waging war against humankind.”
“Oh, Scurvy, you’re so silly,” said Persephone. “We’re both just two silly kids in love.”
Persephone patted Scurvy on his bottom and giggled.
“So what should we look at next?” said Persephone. “The silverware or the centerpiece arrangements?”
Scurvy looked around, sweating. The walls of the room didn’t seem too thick. Could he get enough space to work up a good head of steam? Could he then just crash through the wall and keep on running?
“Let’s go with tha centerpieces,” he said.
“FLORAL CENTERPIECES!” screeched Persephone.
With a staff of assistants carrying dozens of flower arrangements, the wedding planner breezed into the room, smiling hugely.
“It’s flower time for our blushing bridal rose!” said the planner.
“This is so much fun!” said Persephone. “Isn’t it, Scurby-Durby Bo-Burby?”
“Yes, Ploppy,” said Scurvy.
“Ploopsie,” said Persephone.
“Now, as you can see, this is a gorgeous variety of blooms,” said the planner. “Peonies, sweet peas, orange-tipped leucadendrons.”
Scurvy wondered if it would be possible to recontract the Greenies and melt into a puddle of sludge. Would it really be so bad?
XI
Promotion, promotion, promotion, thought Swamster to himself. Just get through this.
“Tell me, Swamster,” said Dwack. “Do you have some sort of plan for us, or are you going to just lead us around in circles?”
“There is a plan,” said Swamster.
Promotion, promotion, promotion.
They were standing in front of the room in which the robot had been torn apart. A small sign hung in the middle of the door:
WARNING
PROCESSING ROOM
IT WILL BE MESSY INSIDE
Two WATCHOUT! workers opened the door, and the Baz-look and Krumsplat pushed their prisoners through. CLANG! The door closed behind them.
“Well,” said Dwack. “This is rather unfortunate.” The processing room was filled with racks and pulleys and machines with sharp teeth. The floor was covered with puddles of sticky ooze, and hacksaws and ominous-looking instruments hung on the wall, all within reach of a dozen or so WATCHOUT! workers who awaited their next victims.
“Hello, everybody,” said Swamster to the WATCHOUT! workers. “This is Ted, and these are Dwack, Vango, and Dr. Narwhal. President Skeleton has asked that you process and recycle them, starting with the boy.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” said Ted. “I’m not even from Middlemost. You can’t recycle me.”
“You’re quite incorrect. I have orders from President Skeleton to recycle you into”—Swamster checked his notes—“place mats for the president’s wedding to Mr. Scurvy Gordon.”
“She’s marrying Scurvy?” said Ted.
“Ah, but alas, I’m afraid you’re not invited,” said the lead WATCHOUT! worker, removing her hood. “C’est la vie.”
It was Joelle-Michelle. The rest of the WATCHOUT! workers removed their suits.
They were all members of ACORN.
XII
As Carolina hit the ThereYouGo Gate, there came the brief sensation of being squeezed, and—SMACK—she landed on a catering table piled high with sandwiches.
Am I dead? she first thought. But then she breathed deeply and grabbed a very real-seeming peach that had rolled next to her. In the middle of the sky, high above where she lay sprawled, she could see what looked like a vent surrounded by construction scaffolding and ladders.
All at once, a bunch of weirdos rushed over and surrounded her. All of them were dressed in construction-work uniforms, and some appeared to be in the middle of eating lunch, holding half-eaten sandwiches.
“Well,” said Carolina, “I guess I’m in hell.”
“Nope. Just Middlemost,” said a short weirdo.
“Middlemost?” said Carolina. “Is that like purgatory or something?”
The weirdos looked at each other.
“Not sure about that purgatory,” said a weirdo wearing a plaid suit, pointing to the hole in the sky. “We’re just here to close up that vent.”
“But that vent is how I got here, wherever here is,” said Carolina.
All she got in response were mumbles: Not our problem. Shouldn’t have fallen through the vent in the first place. Take it up with management.
“President Skeleton was the one who told us to close the vent,” said the plaid weirdo. “If you have a complaint, you need an appointment to talk to her.”
“Fine. I’ll make an appointment,” said Carolina. “Where does your president live anyway?”
“Ab-Com City, of course. We have a crew that’s supposed to head back there tonight. But we’re a little short-staffed, so we might not make it out of here on schedule.”
“Hey, I can swing a hammer,” said Carolina. “And my father taught me how to weld. Being pretty doesn’t mean I’m unskilled.”
“We weren’t even thinking that you were pretty.”
“Just give me a tool belt and let’s get to work.”
“But it’s sandwich time.”
“Then I’ll start, and you can catch up when you’re done. I really need to talk to this skeleton person.”
“She’s not really a person.”
“Whatever she is. We need to chat.”
The tallest weirdo pointed to the vent, and Carolina picked up a blowtorch.
“By the way, you haven’t seen a guy named Ted Merritt around, have you? Or a Czarina Tallow? A Russian empress?”
The weirdos shook their various heads.
Carolina started to climb the scaffolding. “Give me twenty minutes and I’ll have this hole closed.”
XIII
Joelle-Michelle’s original plan had indeed panned out—backward.
She hadn’t foreseen Fyrena and Scozzbottle simply knocking the new guys unconscious, loading them in their truck, and then taking off the way they’d come.
Once Joelle-Michelle and her fighters followed the truck to the processing factory, they subdued a pair of dozing guards, and from there, it was a simple matter of eluding factory employees and collecting WATCHOUT! suits. Joelle-Michelle had felt bad about having sent Ted off to be killed—she was relieved to see that he had merely been clobbered stupid.
When they gathered in the processing room to figure out what to do next—hoping to also convince some of the depressed individuals who were having themselves processed to join ACORN instead—all of a sudden the new recruits walked in, guided by a nervous Swamster, who kept saying how he never wanted to be out in the field in the first place.
“Boddah you?” Brother Dezo now said to the hog-tied Krumsplat and Bazlook. Brother Dezo was a Hawaiian musician who spoke pidgin English and served as Joelle-Michelle’s second-in-charge. Dezo carried a ukulele and had a voice like an angel.
“Bind and gag the Swamster,” said Joelle-Michelle. “We’ll take him with us.”
“Oh thank you, thank you,” said Swamster. “I really am a decent—”
“I could change my mind,” said Joelle-Michelle.
Swamster clammed up.
“As for the Bazlook and the Krumsplat—what do you think, Brother Dezo?”
“Dey probably come after us da moment we were gone,” said Brother Dezo. “Pop den?”
“Pop, s’il vous plaît,” sa
id Joelle-Michelle.
With that, Brother Dezo stepped forward and swung his ukulele two times: POP! POP!
The Bazlook and the Krumsplat exploded into puddles of purple muck. Brother Dezo deftly stepped out of the way to avoid the spray—he’d done this before.
“And that is that. Is everybody all right?” asked Joelle-Michelle crisply of her new recruits.
“I think we’re exceptional,” said Dwack.
“Ted,” said Joelle-Michelle. “I wanted to tell you that I saw you fight. You were brave.”
Ted’s heart leaped.
“Dr. Narwhal, are you well enough to carry Swamster?” said Joelle-Michelle.
“Indeed I am,” said Dr. Narwhal. “I’ll squeeze him nice and tight.”
“Mierveilleux! Onward!” Joelle-Michelle pirouetted, did a ballerina flutter kick, and started to march forward.
Ted wedged himself somewhere in the middle of the pack, happy to be surrounded and protected by thick, heavily armed bodies. There was no ambush waiting on the other side of the door—only a line of depressed abstract companions waiting to end their lives.
“No need to have yourselves ripped apart!” said Joelle-Michelle. “There is a place for you in ACORN. Viens avec moi! Come with me!”
And that was all it took to convince these lost souls. Nobody disobeyed Joelle-Michelle, and the desperate ab-coms followed her and the rest of ACORN as they weaved their way through the processing factory. If they encountered a WATCHOUT! worker, they gave the worker the choice of joining ACORN or being popped. Most preferred to join—working in a processing factory was a terrible job anyway.
The group passed numerous exits as it made its way through the factory corridors. Joelle-Michelle seemed to be looking for something but nobody asked what. Finally, she motioned for one of the new WATCHOUT! recruits to come and talk to her.
The WATCHOUT! worker led everybody to a door secured by a scary-looking combination lock. The sign on the door read:
KEEP OUT!
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY!
EVEN IF YOU ARE AUTHORIZED,
YOU PROBABLY STILL SHOULDN’T
COME IN!
The WATCHOUT! worker punched in a code, and the door unlocked with a loud CLICK. Joelle-Michelle turned to her followers.
“This is it,” she whispered. “When we get inside, each of you need to do your part. The fate of ACORN depends on you!”
Joelle-Michelle pushed open the door and an alarm exploded like a thousand fire engines.
WHOOOOOOP! WHOOOOOP!
“Everybody, inside, NOW!” said Joelle-Michelle, hustling her battalion through the door. “Get inside and grab what you can!”
Running through the door with the rest of ACORN, Ted stole a glimpse at Joelle-Michelle. He would follow her anywhere.
“Stop staring at me, Ted,” snapped Joelle-Michelle.
Geez. She was incredible.
Part Four
Adeline’s third-grade teacher, Miss Hitchings, was wearing a beaded necklace. A tattoo of dolphins circled her wrist. Her unkempt hair was sun-bleached from the summer vacation she had taken to India. She carried around a backpack covered in patches from various countries. Her kids loved her.
And so had Adeline, until recently.
Debbie sat across from Miss Hitchings. It was the first time in days she had stopped crying. Her cheeks felt like they were covered in salt.
“Mrs. Merritt,” said Miss Hitchings, “thank you for coming in. I know this must be a difficult time.”
“People have been nice,” said Debbie, feeling the tears coming on again. “Organizing searches and putting up flyers and those kinds of things.”
“My book club searched the beaches last night. The whole community is with you.”
“Thank you.”
“I wanted you to come in because since Ted’s disappearance, Adeline hasn’t, well, she hasn’t talked.”
“You mean in class?”
“She doesn’t say a word even when I call on her. At recess, she sits by herself drawing pictures in the dirt. Her old friends don’t try to get her to play anymore. She hasn’t talked at all. She’s just… alone.”
Debbie nodded. She knew this.
“All day long, she draws in her notebook,” said Miss Hitchings. “And at the end of the day, she rips out the pictures and throws them away. I saved some.”
Miss Hitchings slid some crumpled sheets of white lined paper across the table—pictures of a little girl, clearly Adeline, standing with her older brother and a panda that had a tree growing out of its head. Words like quiet and bye were scribbled on some of the pages.
“She draws these same things at home,” said Debbie.
“Do you know what they mean?”
“Adeline’s imaginary friend disappeared when everybody else’s did,” said Debbie.
“It’s incredible,” said Miss Hitchings. “My kids tell me theirs are still gone.”
“Adeline got into a fight with Ted before he disappeared. She blamed him for her friend disappearing—I still don’t quite understand why—and then Ted was gone too. I think Adeline might believe that what she said caused Ted to vanish.”
“So she isn’t talking anymore—”
“Because she might be afraid of saying something else wrong.”
Miss Hitchings leaned back in her chair and exhaled.
“I did take her to a psychiatrist,” said Debbie.
“What did he suggest?”
“He prescribed her medication.”
“What did you do?”
“I told him we’d no longer be needing his services.”
II
WHOOOOOOP! WHOOOOOP!
The alarm was deafening, and ACORN’s longer-eared soldiers howled in pain. Ted clasped his hands against the sides of his head and tried to concentrate on moving forward into the AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY room.
As soon as Ted passed through the door, he forgot about the noise.
“Yow-za,” said Ted.
The room was split straight down the middle, divided into two distinct operations. The right side of the room was dominated by a conveyor belt carrying small glass bottles. A tank filled with an iridescent silver liquid was suspended above the belt. The belt would stop and start as nozzles squirted the silver liquid into the bottles, which then traveled to the end of the belt and fell neatly into cardboard crates. These crates were stamped with huge letters that left no doubt what was inside:
Greenies Antidote
Time to Feel Good!
The cure.
Though he knew how important the antidote was, Ted was more interested in another conveyor belt. The one that was carrying Ab-Com Patches.
“Oh man,” said Ted.
Thoughts started to come together in Ted’s head.
If this place—a processing factory controlled by President Skeleton—was where the Ab-Com Patches were being manufactured, it meant that whatever was in the patches was also being controlled by President Skeleton.
It was after Ted started using the patches that all the ab-coms in the world got sick.
And if President Skeleton and Scurvy were now getting married, it probably meant that President Skeleton knew that Scurvy had been living on Cape Cod. She wanted him back in Middlemost, and there would have been no better way to get him to return than by giving Ted the patch directly and making Scurvy sick.
The patches were contaminated with the Greenies, which made all the ab-coms in the world ill, said Ted to himself. Persephone Skeleton planted the disease.
“Ted!” yelled Joelle-Michelle above the sound of the alarm. “Grab as many of the boxes of the antidote as you can! We need to get out!”
All around Ted, ACORN soldiers were fighting through the blaring alarm and grabbing for the boxes of antidote. But then came a whole other kind of yowling noise: the sound of Presidential Guards storming into the room, all horns and claws and bad intentions.
“Put down the boxes!” yelled Joelle-Michelle. “The g
uards are coming! To arms!”
The ACORN soldiers might have been a motley crew, but they had been well trained by Joelle-Michelle. As soon as she shouted, the soldiers whipped around and charged the oncoming Presidential Guards. The guards and ACORN came together in a tremendous clatter of bones and swords and steel and flesh and anything else that could be smashed together. But ACORN had a secret weapon that the Presidential Guards didn’t.
POP-POP-POP!
With each cut from a butter knife or blow from an ACORN boomerang or spatula or field hockey stick, Presidential Guards exploded into clouds of muck that turned the air purple and splattered the ACORN soldiers, who kept slicing through the detonations and the backup guards slipping and tumbling into the room. ACORN had done this before.
Strangely enough, Ted Merritt wasn’t paying attention to any of it.
“Ted, grab your badminton racket!” said Joelle-Michelle, who was kicking her way through the exploding Presidential Guards—the outsides of her pointe shoes were painted in the VIDGA solution. “We need you, now!”
But Ted was transfixed by the spot where the Ab-Com Patches were sitting on the belt that rolled a vat filled with the “medical” powder that was stuffed inside them. Ted’s eyes climbed to a glass cylinder that was connected to the vat by a series of pipes and capillaries, but it was what was inside that cylinder that made Ted walk toward it.
“Eric?” said Ted.
Ted had never seen Eric the Planda before, but from Adeline’s descriptions and her pictures, he was certain this was Adeline’s friend. The planda was sitting inside the cylinder with his arms wrapped around his knees. His eyes were half shut, like he was having a difficult time staying awake.
Much of the planda’s fur had fallen out, and the bonsai tree growing out of his head was dead. From head to toe, he was covered in green bumps. It seemed the sick creature was being used to contaminate the powder that was then being packed into the Ab-Com Patches.
“Eric! Hey, Eric!”
The planda’s eyelids fluttered.
“It’s you, Eric, isn’t it?” said Ted.
The planda rotated his head toward Ted.