by Sophie Bell
Iris gulped.
“I said PLUG IT!” she heard Develon bellow. “CHOP CHOP! Let’s get these $#&% turbines turning!”
With a shake of her natty purple dreads, Iris snapped out of her daze and started toward the center of the Bleau-Fryer again. The glow from the plasma pendant colored the beams as she crossed them. Her tinkling wings sent the faintest song into the slipstream.
A song not completely unlike the kind you might hear coming from an ice-cream truck.
Curiosity piqued and mouth watering, a MutAnt crawled up the side of the machine. On all sixes, it began to follow her.
• • •
From her cannonball plunge, Scarlet had arched out into a swan dive, then dropped-and-rolled into the tall grass bordering the construction pit. The powdery breeze off the Joan River tickled her nose, and she tucked her face into her shoulder to silence her sneeze. She wondered if Cheri was soaring over the sporous sludge at that very moment. She thought she glimpsed Iris on top of the Bleau-Fryer—identifiable by her swinging purple ropes of hair and fleeting winks of electric-violet wings. The gigantic ant creeping up behind her was much easier to spot. Impossible to miss, in fact. Scarlet nearly cried out a warning at the sight.
No! she warned herself sternly. No screaming allowed! Leave the screaming aloud to Jack’s nutjob mother.
Stomach-down in the grass, she quickly scoped out the scene. It was dotted with MutAnts, scuttling back and forth in their bilious grass skirts, consulting clipboards and brandishing screwdrivers, yawping into walkie-talkies and nipping away at ice-cream cones.
Ice-cream cones?
That seemed odd, even under the very odd circumstances. Then again, ants were known to love sugar.
Okay. Scarlet took a steadying breath. I’ve just got to fly over to the Bleau-Fryer and crush that superbug on Iris’s tail. NBD! Although she wasn’t so sure just how B a D it might be. Now that she had a better look at them, she could see that the MutAnts were three times her height. The way their hard black exoskeletons reflected the floodlights, they may as well have been wearing suits of armor. She could only hope they were as fragile as eggshells.
Guess I’m about to find out, Scarlet resolved. She got to her knees, thumped herself in the arm for courage, stifled a second sneeze, and bowed her head—fiddling with the click wheel on the control panel to increase the speed of her wings again. But before they were even open, she felt herself being lifted off the ground.
“Gesundheit,” a gurgly voice gluggled in her ear.
Sugarsticks! Scarlet cursed, squirming around to face her nightmare.
The catfish mutant gummed at the air with his trapdoor mouth, the gills on his neck expanding and contracting with each seaweedy gasp. From the gleam in his flat eyes, Scarlet guessed that he was smiling—or trying to. He couldn’t turn his fixed, fishy frown upside down. But his rubbery whiskers flared out at the sides of his face, imitating a grin.
“Oh, eww,” Scarlet retched. “Just . . . eww.”
Hanging there in midair, caught in the webbed grip of a mutant, Scarlet’s mind jetéd back over the events of the past few days. All the awkward encounters. All the tension. The stress of Opal’s return. The shock of learning Jack was Develon’s son. Of watching him blow up the Gazebra. And now a big bully catfish was mocking her. Slavering like she was his own little shrimp cocktail! All week long, every hop, skip, and plié of the way, Scarlet had managed to control her temper and behave herself.
Frankly, she was just about over it.
She wriggled and bucked, but her punches still fell short of the mutant, whiffing through the air. Catfish dangled her at arm’s length. As if I’m a bag of stinky garbage, Scarlet thought, furious and flailing. As if I’M the smelly old fish!
Suddenly the sticky whiskers drooped down from their fake smile. And started to coil forward. Just like in her bad dream. Poking and prodding toward her face. Toward, she was sure, her freckles.
“Augh!” Scarlet yelled, completely forgetting about her no-screaming rule. Frantically she fought to get free as the sucking tentacles, and the gaping fishface they belonged to, leered nearer.
Scarlet knew what she had to do. She soooo didn’t want to do it. But she liked her freckles too much to lose them to a mutant.
Grimacing in extreme ick-face, she reached out and grasped the moist barbels. They were even slimier and slipperier than she’d dreaded, like spaghetti coated in snot sauce, and she gagged at the way they felt in her grasp. But she didn’t let go. She twisted and she tugged. Hard.
Harder than her mom did when she used to braid her hair.
Harder than the purple nurples Scarlet used to bestow on mean boys in the schoolyard.
Ultra Violet hard.
Yeah, ouch. Big time.
Scarlet squeezed her eyes shut, but she could still hear the whiskers ripping out at the roots with a sickening pop-pop-pop that made her retch again.
“Gleerck!” the mutant screeched in agony, releasing the superstrong supergirl at last. The force of her tugging sent Scarlet tumbling into the construction pit, plucked barbels still slithering in her fists.
“So gross,” Scarlet spluttered, flinging the tentacles aside and wiping her sticky palms on the tops of her jeans. As the dust cleared, she looked down. And realized that dirt now covered most of her no-longer-invisible self.
Then—“skritch-sznock-skreet”—she looked up. To a circle of beady-eyed ant heads. And realized that she was surrounded.
Antics
“OH. SWELL. NO,” SCARLET MUTTERED, GETTING TO her feet and dusting herself off, although doing so was beyond pointless now. Standing at her full height, she barely reached the top of the MutAnts’ swollen abdomens—which, she randomly recalled from science class, were topped by thoraxes. “And these two segments are connected by a narrow node—like a waist,” the drone of their teacher, Mr. Knimoy, came back to her.
That’ll work, Scarlet thought, as the exo-helmeted black heads with their scissoring pinchers bowed down toward her. It better!
Spreading her arms out in second position, she bounced down in a grand plié. Then she sprung up into sous-sus relevé, her luminous aubergine ponytail slapping a few of the MutAnts in their compound eyes. One leg raised in passé, she began to pirouette, faster and faster, drilling up dirt as she spun. With a jump from just her supporting leg, she whipped out the other and, holding it at a near-right angle, sliced a neat circle through the weak waist joints of the MutAnts. Kind of like a can opener. One by one the monsters snapped in half, splitting into skirts and shirts.
NBD after all! Relieved, Scarlet landed in petite changement, then high-stepped in pas de cheval over the thrashing torso of one of the fragmented MutAnts. Now, on to crushing the bug that’s chasing Iris. Once more she went to reboot her wings. But she soon noticed that they seemed to be damaged from her tumble, one of them bent backward like a broken arm.
She was concentrating on twisting the warped framework into alignment again when she felt eyes on her.
Thousands of them.
Thousands of compound eyes belonging to hundreds of mutant ants, swarming around her like she was the last piece of watermelon on the planet.
“But how . . .” Scarlet stammered, glancing over her shoulder to make sure the batch she’d kicked in half hadn’t regenerated. But no, that group was done for. The MutAnts now drooling over her were a brand-new crew. “But where . . .” she rasped, her throat dry with dust.
There were so many MutAnts, they seemed to be crawling right out of the ground. Wait—it hit her like a brain freeze—they ARE crawling right out of the ground! Before her vision was completely blocked by a sea of garish tropical shirts, she spied the giant insects marching one after another out of a crumbly anthill on the edge of the construction pit.
They must have a colony right under here! she realized, her skin breaking out in goose bumps. I m
ust be standing right on top of it!
Scarlet didn’t have time to be completely freaked, though. Because she had an army of mutant ants to slay. It was a BD. A VBD! A deadly big deal, she thought, gritting her teeth and clenching her fists. She’d been in some tight spots before. And she wouldn’t go down without a fight. But she didn’t have to be a math genius like Cheri to know that she was totes outnumbered.
“One . . .” Scarlet counted, executing a superpowered sissone tombée and cutting down the first ant in her path. “Two . . .” She toppled the second with a Charleston kick. “Three . . .” The third one succumbed to a good old-fashioned sucker punch.
She stopped counting at fifty. She didn’t stop fighting. But doubt and fear bickered like squabbling siblings in her mind, snipping away at her resolve as the scissoring jaws of so many—oh, so very many!—monster ants snipped above her. Cheri would be somewhere out over the harbor by now. Iris might be facing a MutAnt of her own atop the Bleau-Fryer. Candace would have flown off in search of the shifty mayor. How long could she go on alone? How would it end? Would she be overrun by the MutAnts? Would they carry her little lifeless body underground and present it as an offering to their queen?
“Never!” Scarlet cried, polkaing the next ant—approximately number eighty-three—to a pulp.
Another one immediately took its place.
With a yelp Scarlet tripped backward, recovering instantly in a breakdancer’s crossed-leg flare to twin-kick the ant in its mouth. But its jaw sunk into her boot and held on tighter than a dog with a bone.
Sugarsticks! she despaired, yanking back her foot with such force that she wrenched the ant’s head clean off. “Ugh!” she croaked, punting it aside like a soccer ball.
Another one immediately took its place.
If Scarlet had been a crybaby, she might have started boohooing somewhere around MutAnt number ninety-six. If not ninety-five MutAnts earlier. But Scarlet was not one for waterworks, not even under the most sob-worthy conditions. Scarlet was a warrior. She was growing exhausted. By now the scales of her broken wings were dulled with layers of dirt. Her band of red face paint was embedded with grit, her aubergine ponytail littered with the snapped-off antennae and torn mandibles of the many—oh, so very many!—MutAnts she’d dismembered. Surely she was doomed?
Doomed!
But she curved her back. Raised her arms high, the crystal discs of her damaged wings still jingling. And lifted one leg, preparing to crane-kick the ant directly in front of her, all the while knowing there’d be another one right behind it, when . . .
When suddenly the ants stopped advancing.
Oh, they were all still there. But they’d come to a halt. And ceased scratching at her with their hairy legs or nibbling at her with their jagged jaws.
They just stood there. Swaying ever so slightly.
“Scarlet!”
The voice sounded familiar, but she couldn’t place it. Not Jack’s. No, it was a girl’s voice. Not Iris’s or Cheri’s, either. Scarlet wavered, locked in her crane pose, terrified that the minute she looked away from the ants, they’d set upon her again.
“Scarlet!” The call reverberated through the construction pit. “Dance!”
“What?!” Scarlet squawked, her eyes fixed on MutAnt number 104 (approximately), not even sure whom she was talking to.
“Dance! Dance anything! Just do it!”
Maybe Scarlet was too wigged out and worn down to think straight. Maybe dancing seemed like the best way to spend her final moments before an army of ants devoured her. Maybe dancing was the most natural thing she knew how to do. So she did. Hesitantly at first. Abandoning her crane stance, she rocked her shoulders back and forth in a tentative dougie, mumbling the song lyrics under her breath. “Teach me, teach me how to . . .”
“Now dance, mutants!” the voice commanded.
As one, the army of MutAnts did the dougie.
“OMV!” Scarlet gasped at the sight, stopping in her tracks.
The MutAnts stopped, too.
“Keep going!” came the voice. And at last Scarlet recognized it.
“Opaline?” she murmured, dropping down into a modest twerk.
As one, the army of MutAnts twerked their bloated abdomens, the fringe of their hideous grass skirts rustling with their booty thrusts.
Scarlet switched to some mindless prancercising while she tried to get her head around what was happening. Watching the ant troop gallop along with her every move, she almost began to relax. The whole scene would have been incredibly cool—if it wasn’t so incredibly creepy.
A sputter of wind buffeted her swishing ponytail, blowing out some of the dead-ant detritus that had gotten caught in it. But this wasn’t the mild breeze off the river, the one that had made her sneeze. This gust had come from the opposite direction.
“Zowie.”
Scarlet jumped at the voice in her ear. (The MutAnts jerked right along with her.) She’d been so in the zone, leading what might very well have been the world’s largest flash dance—certainly the largest one ever performed by mutant ants—that she hadn’t noticed Opal skidding down into the construction pit to join her. Scarlet risked a quick sidelong glance. It was weird to see Opaline as the calm in the storm—instead of being the storm itself! She seemed a little lost, and yet not. Without wings, she reminded Scarlet of some clueless schoolgirl who had wandered into this midnight freak-showdown by mistake. Except that when you looked closer, you noticed she had a streak of neon orange painted across her face. And that wisps of white ran through the brown eyes it masked.
“Are you all right?” Scarlet wondered aloud—although it was hard to imagine how anything could rate as okay under the circumstances.
“Sort of.” Opal attempted a smile. If she could have read the dancing Ultra Violet’s thoughts, she’d have had to agree: This scene was the apex of weird. She was standing in a construction pit side by side with Scarlet Jones, mind-controlling an army of mutants. “They listen to me, remember?”
“Right . . .” Scarlet switched to a bhangra routine, making all the MutAnts bustle like extremely uggo Bollywood extras, before asking, “But how do we get out of this?”
Opal thought for a moment. “Pied Piper style?” she suggested.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, the turbines are starting up—”
“I felt a gust!” Scarlet gasped again as it hit her. “Oh no, Iris! She’s on top of the Bleau-Fryer! Right above the vents! With a MutAnt chasing her!”
“So . . .” Opal’s silky brown strands lashed around as a second belch from the Bleau-Fryer blasted them. She stared at the shaking grass skirts and obnoxious tropical shirts of the monsters. “Let’s do the conga?”
“The conga . . .” Scarlet repeated.
With a shuffle-shuffle-shuffle-kick, she led off the line. Opaline fell in behind. The MutAnts followed. And they began snaking their way toward the Bleau-Fryer.
Sk8rs Gonna Sk8
NOT THAT THERE’S EVER REALLY A GOOD TIME TO TREK across a massive blow dryer in the middle of a construction pit surrounded by a colony of mutant ants, but the worst time to do it would probably be when the enormous industrial fans kicked in. Something to keep in mind, readers, in case “hike across massive blow dryer” is an extracurricular activity on your next camping trip or an item on your scoutmaster’s bucket list. You might want to *oopsie* “lose” the permission slip for that particular outing. Stay back at the base, chill, hoard the s’mores instead. Just a little friendly advice from the Ultra Violets. From Iris in particular, who at this very moment was making her way to the middle of an enormous metal pinwheel.
The first whir of the turbines took her by surprise and nearly knocked her off her feet. Flashing past the vents at her sides, the fan blades ground to life, slowly churning up to speed. It was as if a huge vacuum were sucking in the sky: The branches of the fluffu
la trees bordering the construction pit bent in toward the force, foliage and birds’ nests and beehives and lost kites all dragged down into the vortex. The pull felt so strong, for a moment Iris feared for the moon. Dropping down flat, she gripped the rough metal edges of the beam she’d been walking across. Secure on its strap, the plasma pendant pressed against her neck.
Sugarsticks! she thought. The center of the Bleau-Fryer was maybe ten more steps away, but with those fan blades rotating below her, drawing in everything in their radius, it may as well have been in a foreign country. She didn’t dare stand back up. To the swirling turbines, she was just another fluffula leaf. Iris liked smoothies—especially the triple berry ones at Tom’s Diner. She just wasn’t psyched to dive into a blender and become one herself.
Then, as abruptly as the fans had started up, they spluttered to a stop. “#&€$ing PLUG IT!” Iris could hear Develon Louder demanding.
In a yoga cobra pose, Iris chanced pushing herself up from the metal beam, just high enough to see what was happening.
From the back end of the Bleau-Fryer, the square compartment where the engine was housed, ran a stubby black plug connected to a thicker extension. In lurid BeauTek yellow, the second cord stood out against the green grass like a troll’s garden hose. Iris tracked the length of it with her eyes, all the way over to the sidewalk, where she could see Develon in her pristine black pantsuit, her hardhat bobbling atop her silver hair bun. Scuttling around her, a smattering of MutAnts struggled with their multiple arms to hoist the extension cord’s enormous plug and fit it into . . .
“Mister Mushee?” Iris mumbled. To get a better look, she stretched back a bit more, until she was kneeling on the beam. “The Mister Mushee ice-cream truck is BeauTek’s mobile power source?”
The yellow cord didn’t quite reach the Mister Mushee generator, a situation that was inspiring Develon to spew curse words in every language Iris had ever heard and many more she hadn’t. Each time the MutAnt crew tugged too hard, the cord came undone in the middle, and they had to scurry into the grass to reconnect it. But as soon as they arrived at the hookup point, the MutAnts seemed to get distracted by something. Their antennae snapped straight, they stood on two feet, and they began shuffle-shuffle-shuffle-kicking in the opposite direction, off toward the front of the Bleau-Fryer.