by Paul Tobin
“You have found the dog’s head,” the terrier said. He moved back a couple of steps.
“Ah-HAH!” I yelled, pulling out the spray can of Knock Out Knockout Gas from Nate’s shirt, immediately spraying it for his face, but aiming it a bit hastily, so that I whooshed most of the gas in my eyes, my mouth, and my nose. Instantly, I became super-alert. I could smell the scent of the vanished water, the cologne that Nate sometimes wears (it’s called Essence of Eureka), and all of the pairs of soggy boxer shorts, and so many other things. I could actually taste the air, which had the flavor of electricity and wheat crackers. I could hear the rustle of Bosper’s fur and the echoing clicks of a robotic beetle dashing away down the hall. I could see the individual threads of fabric on Nate’s shirt, and even the countless tiny robots crawling between the threads, each of them far smaller than the head of a pin. I could see colors I’d never experienced, and even the currents of air in the hallway. I could hear the real Maculte several hallways away, separated by several walls. And, above everything else, I could smell the scent of tea. Hundreds of different flavors scattered all throughout the underwater headquarters, with their scents wafting through the halls.
“Weird,” I said, properly aiming the spray can, sending a cloud billowing around Nate’s face.
His eyes flew open.
“Delphine,” he said. His voice, to my hyperaware senses, felt warm. I can’t explain exactly how it felt warm, but it did. I leaned over and hugged him, hyper-aware of the feel of his shirt and even the tremble of his blush.
“Sorry about knocking you out all the time,” I said.
“It’s exciting!” he told me, sitting up. “It injects an unknown variable into the day, forcing me to recalculate at a moment’s notice.”
“Recalculation is joy!” Bosper said, bouncing up and down. That dog truly loves math. His brow suddenly furrowed and he stopped bouncing, and in a solemn voice he uttered, “The girl knocks out the best friend based on an escalating scale of rational Diophantine m-tuples.”
“Really?” Nate said. His eyes closed for a moment, then snapped open. He gasped and said, “You’re right! Good boy!” while patting Bosper. The terrier resumed his normal bouncing around. My hyper senses did nothing to help me understand the math being discussed (at least I think they were discussing math), but I could hear each individual pad of Bosper’s paws hitting the hallway floor, and the soft “g-glork” of his drool splattering to the floor.
“Catch me up-to-date,” Nate told me in his warm voice. “What happened since the first time you knocked me out?”
“The first time ever?” I asked.
“The first time down here,” Nate said, gesturing to the Red Death Tea Society headquarters, reducing the number of accidental knockouts to two, rather than . . . well . . . a lot more than two.
“Oh,” I said. “Let’s see. Severe flooding. Liz and my other friends are here now. There was a robot octopus, which I decided to call a ‘roboctopus.’ ”
“Clever,” Nate said.
“Right? Luckily, I was able to defeat it. Well, mostly Bosper did. Okay, it was entirely Bosper.” I gestured to the terrier.
“I did a good chewing!” Bosper said. He bounced and wiggled with delight.
“That’s about it,” I told Nate. “Other than how I accidentally sprayed some of that Knock Out Knockout Gas into my face, and now my senses are so acute that I can even hear the gas roiling in Bosper’s stomach.” I again gestured to Bosper, but this time he didn’t bounce and wiggle: he just stood still and puckered up, looking guilty.
“The dog is having some problems,” he whispered.
“What’s this gas do, anyway?” I asked Nate, holding up the spray can.
“It stimulates the senses, working on the same principles as my knockout gas, but while the knockout gas deadens the senses until you fall unconscious, this gas”—he tapped on the can—“heightens senses, activates them even if you’re unconscious, effectively waking you up. That is to say that it . . . knocks out being knocked out, which is why I called it Knock Out Knockout Gas.” He did the anticipatory smile of someone waiting to be told his joke is hilarious.
I just looked to him.
Nate’s smile faded a bit.
He looked to Bosper.
“Pfft,” Bosper said. Well, he didn’t actually say it, he just . . . made a noise. He was still having his tummy troubles.
It was at that moment that my phone beeped.
There was a text from Liz.
It said, Help?
My phone beeped again even as I was reading. It was a second message from Liz.
It said, Help!
“This way!” I told Nate, taking him by the hand and charging off down the hall.
“How do you know?” he asked.
“Because I can hear Liz!” My hyper senses were still in full effect, meaning that I could hear the pounding of my own heart, the thumping of my shoes against the hallway floor, and I could most definitely hear the buzz of Melville, my pet bee, several rooms away, attacking a squad of Red Death Tea Society assassins who were trying to reach Liz and the others, all while Liz was explaining in great detail (and at great volume) why everyone should quit shooting at her.
So we ran as fast as we could, and as directly as we could, because Nate scooped up one of the Red Death Tea Society disintegrator pistols that had been carried along with all the other debris in the now-vanished flood. He kept firing at walls, disintegrating them so that we could run through the gaping holes. Even as we ran, Nate was studying the ray gun, working on it, modifying it, murmuring about the shoddy workmanship.
Finally, Nate dissolved a wall and we ran through it to find Liz, and Stine, and Wendy and Ventura, all of them backed up against a wall in a vast room filled with octopus robots like the one that had attacked me. Seriously, there were rows of them on the floor, and scores more of them on giant shelves anchored to the walls, and hundreds of them hanging from hooks, dangling like Christmas tree ornaments, except with tentacles and blades and acidic spray nozzles, which would make for a very bad Christmas.
Most of the robots were inert, lifeless, but about twenty of them were helping five members of the Red Death Tea Society back my friends against the wall. There were four women and one man, a huge seven-foot-tall man covered in tattoos. I could remember seeing him several times before, and I think Melville remembered him, too, because my bee was doing her very best to concentrate her stings on him, trying to land on his face and his hands, which were the only parts of him that were exposed.
“Hi, Delphine!” Liz yelled. She was waving at me.
“Hi, Liz!” I said, charging forward, noticing how the huge man had a remote control device in his hands and . . . as Melville stung him . . . the roboctopi jerked and twitched exactly the way he did, reacting as if they were being stung along with him.
“They’re synchronized to his brain waves,” Nate told me. “We have to make sure he doesn’t get a chance to switch the robots over to full auto, because then they would be dangerous.”
“They actually look dangerous right now,” I mentioned, because of all the weapons and the blades and the bursts of acid, none of these things being normally categorized as “friendly.”
It was very strange to watch the fight with my hyper senses, because everything was happening in slow motion. I could even see Melville buzzing around, the way she was easily dodging the swatting hands of the members of the Red Death Tea Society, always staying close to someone so that they couldn’t fire on her without hitting one of their friends. I could see the red welts where Melville’s aim had been true, where she’d stung someone, but her actions were increasingly frantic and I could hear the strain in her buzzing, because the assassins were learning to cover their faces and their hands and Melville couldn’t penetrate through their suits, meaning that she wasn’t very effective. Also, she didn’t dare stay in one place for too long, or else she’d get swatted. If anyone pointed a disintegrator pistol at Liz or t
he others, she would sting their hands and interrupt the shot, but she was growing exhausted, and my friends were trapped, and it was looking bad. Horribly bad.
“No!” I yelled as three members of the Red Death Tea Society raised their pistols at the same time, like a firing squad aiming at my friends. Even with my jetbelt, there was no way I was going to be able to reach them in time. Bosper was charging past me, much faster than I could run or fly, but even he wasn’t fast enough to do anything in time.
Melville was doing her best, of course. She stung one of the assassins, and the assassin’s hand jerked back, with the pistol flying from her grasp, but my bee wasn’t speedy enough to stop the other two.
We were going to be too late.
“No!” I yelled. “Liz!”
She was going to be shot.
Disintegrated.
“Only one thing to do,” Nate said, and he raised the disintegrator pistol he’d found, aimed it in a wide swath that included all five members of the Red Death Tea Society, and pulled the trigger.
It had to be done, I suppose.
It was either the members of the Red Death Tea Society, or it was my friends, and that was no decision at all.
Still, as the disintegrator ray washed over not only the attacking roboctopi, but the five human assassins as well, I felt a little bump in my heart, a big kick in my gut, and my eyes started to water.
“Gahh!” the tall man yelled in horror.
“Eeee!” one of the women screamed.
“Ahhh!” another of the women choked out.
And then, and then . . . I just couldn’t look.
Seriously, I just couldn’t look . . . because while we’d been running toward the fight, Nate had taken the opportunity to modify the disintegrator pistol, changing it so that it could no longer dissolve organic matter. This left the five members of the Red Death Tea Society completely unharmed.
But, you know . . . naked.
With all their clothes disintegrated.
“Oh no,” the tall man said, looking to Melville.
My bee was staring in wonder at the incredible bounty of exposed skin.
“Bzzz,” she said.
It did not take my hyper senses to detect the glee in her voice.
I would now like to describe the elated hugs that Liz and my other friends gave me, the looks of admiration they gave Nate now that they truly understood how smart he was, the round of high fives we all gave one another, and the immense difficulties of high-fiving a bee no matter how much she deserved it. I would like to describe the small piles of dust that had once been the disintegrator pistols that the Red Death Tea Society had been using, the slightly larger piles that had been their clothes, and the much larger piles that had been the attacking roboctopi. I would also like to describe the way we all laughed at how the members of the Red Death Tea Society, covered in welts, had run out of the room (Stine laughs like a duck being squeezed), and of course there was the further confirmation of how all the members of the Red Death Tea Society have tea leaves tattooed on their butts. I’d like to speak about how Ventura and Wendy and Stine had never heard Bosper talk before, so when he was jumping up and down and asking if anyone had brought any peanut butter (no one had thought to do so, which proves we’re no good in a crisis) their eyes were huge and twitching, and in fact we were all so focused on listening to Bosper that we almost missed it when Liz began to float into the air (she was still having her troubles), and I had to fly up with my jetbelt in order to pull Liz back down to the floor.
I really would like to talk about these things, but there was the little problem of how all of the remaining robots, meaning the ones Nate hadn’t disintegrated . . . meaning the hundreds of lethal roboctopi that were arranged in immense rows on the floor, and the ones that covered the walls like big warts and the scores of them hanging from the ceiling on hooks . . . all began to shimmer and glow. Their tentacles began to writhe and their blades began to slash. Bursts of super-heated steam began to vent, hissing violently, as if the room was filled with giant snakes.
Then it got even worse.
The door to the room opened and Maculte and Luria Pevermore walked inside.
“Full auto,” Maculte told his robot army.
“Kill them all,” Luria said.
The robots on the floor rose up on their tentacles to tower above us.
The robots on the walls scurried down from their shelves, their knives plunging into the walls to anchor their descent.
The robots hanging from hooks simply reached up and slashed through the massive chains, easily severing several inches of metal. The roboctopi then dropped to the floor, joining the others, with the remnants of their chains dragging behind them as they advanced.
“Hmm,” Nate said. “I predicted this.”
“Then why come here?” Maculte called out from across the room. “If you knew you were doomed, why are you here?”
“Because it was the only way to stop you,” Nate said. “It’s worth the sacrifice.” Maculte’s eyes narrowed, not in hatred or spite or even with the evil that normally narrows his eyes. This time it was confusion. Despite his vast intelligence, he simply couldn’t comprehend how someone would sacrifice their own life in order to save others.
“Then why bring her?” Luria asked, sipping from a cup a tea, then pointing to me. “And . . . them?” she added, gesturing to our friends.
“I didn’t mean to,” Nate said. “I actually told Delphine not to come.”
“It’s true,” I said, adding a shrug. “I’m not very good at following directions.”
“Me either,” Liz said. “And, while I have the chance to speak up, I’d like to add that pie is better than cake.”
“What?” I shrieked. “It is not!” But our lifelong debate was interrupted by the roboctopi charging closer, closing a circle around us. All of their display monitors were now showing images of Maculte drinking his tea, exactly as he was doing in the doorway, with the same look of triumph, the same glint in his eye, the same drop of tea on his lips that he soon wiped away with a single finger, licking it clean, unwilling to miss a single drop of his tea, savoring both the taste of his drink and also his moment of revenge.
“I calculate your chances of survival at . . . zero,” he said.
“Agreed,” Nate said. There was a catch in his voice.
Maculte laughed, a gritty “sand in his throat” chortle, then he and Luria turned and walked out of the room, leaving us to fight an enormous army of unstoppable robots.
The door closed behind.
Zero?” I asked Nate. “As in . . . zero chance of survival?” It was hard to hear even my own voice through the clashing tentacles coming closer and closer. My hyper senses were fading, but even with my normal hearing the robots were overwhelming. There was the scrape of the knives against the floor, the hissing of the vents, the echo of Maculte’s laughter coming through the display monitors, and the shotgun-like clicking of their joints as the robot horde took tiny steps forward, small feints, as if playing with us in the manner of cats with terrified mice.
“Zero,” Nate agreed.
“Oh,” I said.
Here’s the thing. I’ve taken considerable math tests through the years. I actually enjoy them. Math is like a vast puzzle, and it’s fun when the numbers line up. And while it’s true that my numbers don’t always line up, it’s not because math is wrong, it’s because I’m wrong. When I answer a math problem incorrectly, it’s because I didn’t understand the equation. It’s not math’s fault. It’s mine. Math is never wrong.
Also, Nate is never wrong. This is because he understands all the equations. That’s his thing. If Nate said our chances of survival were zero . . . then . . .
Zero it was.
Here’s the other thing. An equation is only as good as the numbers you put into it. Two plus two is always four. That’s just basic math. If you want to come up with any other answer, if you desperately need to come up with any other answer, then what you have t
o do is change the input. Don’t add two plus two.
Change things.
“Unacceptable,” I told Nate. “And further, no way. Also, piffle. Let’s fight!”
“But the odds—” he said, just before the robots reached us, nabbing up Liz with a tentacle. Melville immediately began stinging the tentacle, but robots don’t care about that. Robots care about very few things, to be honest, except for those things they’re specifically programmed to care about . . . such as eliminating pests and being entirely wrong about Liz being a pest.
So I had to save her. But, how? I confess that I hadn’t thought to put any robot-fighting obstacles on my adventure training course. A clear failure on my part.
“What should I do?” I asked Nate, but he was busy running from robots, which was an excellent plan and in fact the plan I’d been ready to put into action before the door had closed and Liz had been grabbed by a killer robot. A tentacle slashed at Nate, the blade coming so close that it sliced away his jetbelt. It fell to the floor, spitting out sparks as the electronics short-circuited, smelling like my brother’s armpit (distinguishable from a range of twenty-three feet) and flailing like a tentacle, of which I had plenty of examples for comparison.
Nate dodged another robot, and then another, and then he dodged so many robots that he was lost in the crowd.
He was gone.
I had to save Liz all by myself.
Okay, I could do this. I remembered how Bosper had beaten the earlier robot, so all I needed to do was jump past a series of writhing tentacles to reach the top of the robot, and then wreck all the exposed wires. That was my new plan.
“Piffle!” I said, as my new plan went awry, because the first tentacle I encountered smacked me so hard that it totally flipped me up into the air.