It was Lenny. He was shouting, but I could barely hear him. The connection was full of background noise, loud whooshing and splashing and growling that distorted through the earpiece. It sounded like he was calling from inside an active volcano. “Can you hear me?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Barely.”
“I’m in!”
“You’re...in?” I glanced up and saw that Zooey had stopped and turned around in the doorway and was gazing at me. I flicked my eyes down at her stomach. “You mean, like, in in?” I lowered my voice, cupping my hand over the phone. “What...what’s it like?”
“I’m not sure yet. It’s really dark, and something happened to my headlamp when I landed. I’m still trying to fix it.”
“Is that Lenny?” Zooey asked. “Where is he?”
I lowered the cell and covered the mouthpiece. “He’s, uh, nearby.”
“Can I talk to him?”
“You want to...?” I brought the phone back to my mouth. “Hey, Lenny, ah...Zooey wants to talk to you.”
“What? No, I can’t—not right now.”
“Why not?”
The background noise got louder, and the last thing I heard was a scream.
NINE: ZOOEY
I walked out of the science lab, my thoughts still tangled up between this afternoon’s performance and what Harlan had said about Lenny standing up for me back in the lab. I’d never seen Lenny get that angry before. The broken microscope had to fit into the equation somewhere, and his experiment—whatever it was—was probably a lot more important to him than protecting me from Mick Mason.
Suddenly something slammed into me from behind, hard enough to knock me off my feet.
“Ow!” I dropped my notebook and Diet Coke, my hands flying out to break my fall, and I turned around and looked up to see Mick Mason’s two best buddies, Keegan Hoke and Deke Chambers, grappling with each other against a bank of lockers. “Why don’t you two baboons watch where you’re going?”
“Sorry.” Keegan grinned. “Lover-boy here thinks it’s Valentine’s Day.”
“Yeah, right,” Deke said. “You’re the one who jumped me.”
“You wish.” Keegan took a step toward me, breathing hard. “Here’s your notebook or whatever.” He was still grinning, his wide face flushed with exertion, his T-shirt wrinkled around the collar where Deke had grabbed him. “And your soda. Since, you know, you dropped it.”
“Thanks,” I said, taking the bottle back. “You didn’t spit in it, did you?”
Keegan looked offended. “Like we’d do that.”
I opened the Diet Coke slowly in case it fizzed up everywhere, but it didn’t. Oddly, the soda suddenly felt a lot colder than before I dropped it, almost like it was a different bottle, but I didn’t give it much thought. I just wanted to get away from Deke and Keegan as quickly as possible.
The auditorium was on the way back to Mr. Early’s English class, and even though the first-period bell was about to ring, I couldn’t help sticking my head in there on the way by. Mr. Early knew how important Escape Claus was to me—he was the first person that I showed the play to last year—and over the past couple of weeks, he’d sometimes let me work on revisions in class, so I wasn’t worried about showing up a few minute late.
I pushed open the door to the auditorium and stuck my head inside, smelling the familiar combination of floor polish mixed with paint and plaster from the sets. There were about thirty sleepy-looking kids standing around inside in sneakers, shorts, and T-shirts, waiting for our PE teacher, Mr. Shoenwald, to come out of his office and start yelling at them to do pushups.
Trying not to draw attention to myself, I slipped around the edge of the gym and climbed the steps onto the stage, hoping for an idea about how I could fix Harlan’s big entrance. Rule #6: Inspiration comes when you least expect it.
The curtains were closed over the North Pole set that I’d spent the last three months building, and I ducked beneath them. Since the end of September, this place had become as familiar to me as my own house, and I knew every step of it, every sticky pulley and squeaky floorboard. All the Styrofoam peanuts had been carefully swept and bagged in preparation for our very first show.
That was when I heard them—voices murmuring quietly in the dark, on the other side of the set.
I stopped and cocked my head, listening. One of voices was Aria’s, and that was already weird, because she had never spoken quietly in her life. It sounded as if she was standing on the opposite side of the canvas backdrop, but with the stage’s acoustics, I could hear every word.
“Did you get it?” she whispered.
“It’s already taken care of,” a boy’s voice answered.
“You’re sure?”
“I promised I would, didn’t I?”
I took another step and peered through a hole in the canvas. It took a minute for my brain to process what my eyes were seeing. Aria was standing at the back of the stage, still wearing her coat. The boy in front of her was Mick Mason. He was wearing his usual beat-up old leather jacket with buckles hanging off it, holding something that I couldn’t see.
My thoughts spun back to earlier that morning. I had passed Mick in the hallway about twenty minutes earlier, on my way into the science lab, but what was he doing here in my home turf? He had his hand up by Aria’s face and was kind of running his fingers through her hair, and shockingly, she didn’t seem to mind. In fact, she seemed to be enjoying it.
I just stood there, frozen in total disbelief. Mick Mason and Aria Keen? Had the universe just flipped itself completely inside out?
If so, that wasn’t the only thing twisting upside down. As I stood here watching them, my stomach was getting that twitchy, fluttering feeling that felt a little like hunger but definitely wasn’t. Was it just opening-day jitters? Martha Gelhorn-Smith calls this the shpilkes, which is Yiddish for “nerves.” She says she always gets them before she starts a new production, and if they happen to her, then I guess it was okay for them to happen to me.
Meanwhile I kept standing there, watching Mick and Aria.
“You’re evil,” Aria said, and let out a little chuckle.
“Whatever,” Mick said, “it was your idea,” but he was smiling too, still touching her hair. He leaned toward her, and for one sickening second I thought they were going to kiss, which, in my current queasy condition, was something I definitely didn’t need to see. I took a step backwards, and my foot creaked against a loose floorboard.
“What was that?” Mick stopped and looked straight in my direction. “Who’s there?”
I jerked back from my side of the canvas backdrop. Aria turned and looked over too, and I could already hear Mick’s big boots thudding around the corner. There was no way that I was going to get out of there before they saw me.
“Zooey?” Aria said. “What are you doing here?”
“I was just checking the sets,” I said. “Oh, hey, Mick.” I thought I sounded pretty casual, but Mick didn’t look convinced. Even in the dim light from under the curtain, I could see him blushing hard, whole constellations of pimples rising over his face and neck like a heat rash.
“How long have you been spying on us?” he said.
“I wasn’t spying,” I said. “I just got here.” And just then, the sick feeling in my stomach got about three times worse, and I realized it wasn’t just opening-day jitters.
There was definitely something bad going on in my stomach.
Maybe it was something I ate.
TEN: LENNY
Depending on what Zooey’d had for breakfast, I calculated that I had five minutes tops before the gelatin capsule dissolved completely. After that, I’d be at the mercy of the digestive acids in her stomach.
It turned out that I was about four and a half minutes off.
The ride down had been a jolting, spinning nightmare. Back in the biology lab, Harlan had left the gelatin capsule open so that I could crawl inside before he dropped it in her Diet Coke. When she’d finally tipped back th
e bottle for a drink, I’d braced myself for impact, though I still wasn’t ready when the back of my head slammed into the sticky, vitamin-smelling gelatin coating that lined inside the capsule. Right away, the halogen headlamp cracked and blinked out. Thanks a lot, L.L.Bean.
Now I was down in total darkness, groping around for something to hold on to, and the world exploded with a deafening mixture of growls and splashing noises, followed by a steady hissing sound from outside, like somebody trying to fry an entire pack of bacon. That would be the acids eating through the gelatin. Somehow I managed to activate the hands-free phone I’d installed in the dive mask and initiate a shouted conversation with Harlan to let him know I’d gotten down in one piece, more or less. I could hardly hear him talking. Not surprising, since I already felt like I’d gone over Niagara Falls and landed in the middle of a category 5 hurricane. Everything was a lot warmer in here and more humid, and right away my goggles fogged up on my face.
“...Lenny?” Harlan’s voice crackled from the headpiece, and then it was gone.
I started to answer, and out of nowhere, sizzling pain hit my arm like a splash of hot grease, burning right through the wetsuit. I screamed and shot both hands out instinctively in front of me, scrambling up through the darkness along what felt like a slippery, uneven wall.
That was when my headlamp came back on.
For a second I just stood there, unable to speak, think, or even breathe. I was perched along the edge of a rippled cliff above a dark ocean of Diet Coke, fizzing and sloshing around. Down below, chunks of partially digested breakfast cereal—it looked like Lucky Charms, blue stars and green clovers—were floating around in the soda like debris from a colorful Irish shipwreck. My first thought was Wow, Zooey Andrews eats an even unhealthier breakfast than I do.
Turning back, I looked up along the slippery walls rising up around me on all sides. I don’t know what I was expecting, but from here the inside of Zooey’s stomach looked like a teenage girl’s bedroom, thirty different shades of pink coming at me from every imaginable direction while I fought to get my equilibrium. Somewhere down below, the very last of the gelatin capsule was dissolving like a leaky rowboat, sinking beneath artificially sweetened waves.
“You there,” a voice growled from up above, close enough that I almost lost my balance, “where’s your pass?”
“Wait,” I said. “You can talk?”
“Of course we can talk.”
I tilted back my head and stared up along the stomach wall, trying to take in the torrent of activity above. Colonies of giant gray and yellow rod-shaped bacteria were squirming in every direction, but one of them—a long, semitransparent jelly-bean-looking thing with a flagellum whipping back and forth—wasn’t going anywhere, just staring at me with a pair of enormous blank, sightless eyes. It looked annoyed just to see me here.
“I was just...” My own voice sounded small and hollow, lost inside the giant space. “I just landed here.”
The thing whacked me with its whip-tail. “That’s not an answer. You’re not authorized to be here. Where’s your digestive pass?”
“I don’t have one.”
The whip-tail lashed out again wildly, missing me completely, and I realized the bacteria couldn’t really see me at all. What I’d thought were its eyes were probably just partially extruded organelles.
I stared at the thing and tried to classify it based on what I remembered from microanatomy, but without the proper lab equipment, it was impossible to confirm a valid identification. Dr. Snyder always said that for as long as we’ve been studying the normal flora of the human gut, scientists actually don’t know much about it. It’s a whole microscopic cityscape of unclassified bugs down here, a lot of which help keep things in balance, but the best known—E. coli and H. pylori—are the nasty ones that get out of control and cause real troubles. The rest of them, like the bacteria in front of me now, worked like a digestive sanitation department, maintaining order and pH balance, twenty-four hours a day.
“What’s your classification?” it demanded.
“Um,” I said, “six?”
“That’s not an answer!”
“I’m...ah...” My brain skipped ahead, plucking an answer out of thin air. “Lactobacillus acidophilus?”
“Probiotic?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Great,” the bacteria muttered. “We’re not back on yogurt again, are we? I didn’t hear anything about that from upstairs.”
“No, sir,” I said. “I’m just a supplement. I came down in a tablet with the Diet Coke, and—”
“All right, acidophilus, I didn’t ask for your life story. Finish your business and get back to work.”
“Yes, sir.”
The bacteria was about to turn away, trying to force its way through the mobs of organisms slithering around the walls of the stomach, when it suddenly stopped. In fact, I realized that the entire colony of bacteria had stopped moving for an instant, and then I saw them ripple together in one simultaneous wave, as if a current of heightened awareness was passing over them all at once.
When it turned back toward me, its voice sounded different, darker, more threatening.
“Hold it.”
I should’ve run, or at least made a jump for it. Not that I knew which direction to turn, or could’ve gone anywhere quickly with the flippers still on my feet. And if I slipped and fell back into the Diet Coke and digestive juices below, Zooey’s enzymes would eat through my neoprene suit and the guanosine layer underneath it before I even got a chance to scream.
“We’re getting reports of unknown, newly arrived viral activity in this sector,” the bacteria said, leaning in. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
“No,” I said, “I—”
“Don’t move.”
They lunged at me. Jerking back on instinct, I felt the pink stomach wall against my back, and at the same second something grabbed my shoulders and yanked me backwards with a slippery pop. Warm, moist tissue pressed in from all sides, suffocating me, and I barely managed to get the mouthpiece and diving regulator into my mouth in time to suck in a breath of oxygen. I couldn’t tell if I was being pulled backwards, upward, sideways, or down, but for the moment it didn’t seem to matter. All I knew was that I was moving, fast.
“Stay close, bro,” a new voice said. “It’s gonna get sticky.”
I tried to pull back but couldn’t get any traction. Out of nowhere, mucous epithelium cells were jostling and shoving past me like elbows and shoulders and overstuffed backpacks—being down here was already more like navigating the hallway between classes than I’d ever expected—and I still couldn’t see whatever it was that had rescued me from the bacteria. Rising up in the background I heard a huge roar, like a massive waterfall getting louder by the second.
“Hold on tight,” the voice shouted.
“Wait a second—what are you doing?” I craned my neck and got a quick glimpse of something blue and star-shaped that had glued itself to my shoulders. “Where are we—”
WHOOOSH! Up ahead, a deafening roar of turbulence overtook my words and thoughts at the same time. I had a fraction of a second to process what was about to happen as the thing attached to my wetsuit yanked me forward toward a gushing torrent of dark arterial red.
Then we hit it.
Assuming a resting pulse of seventy-two beats per minute, the average velocity of blood in the human circulatory system is approximately ninety-six cubic centimeters per second. That doesn’t sound too bad until you factor in my relative size, which was something like a thousandth of a centimeter—small enough that everything around me was just a wild blur blasting past so fast that I couldn’t process any of it.
“Whooo!” the thing on my back shrieked, and I couldn’t tell if it was screaming or laughing hysterically as we spiraled around in crazy seasick circles, bumping and thumping off the vessel walls, flying around the twists and turns and shooting through the straightaways at roughly the speed of light. “This
is it, baby! Iliac bifurcation! Feel the rush!”
I was screaming too—and I knew why. I was convinced that I was going to die right here in the bloodstream of the girl I’d been in love with since third grade.
If I didn’t drown in her corpuscles, I’d be knocked senseless against the interior of her arteries. The scuba regulator fell from my mouth and I hoped—prayed—that the modifications that I’d made to the diving mask, to draw oxygen directly from Zooey’s hemoglobin, would work the way I’d planned. Otherwise this was going to be a very short trip.
I sucked in a breath and felt my head spinning as freshly decocted oxygen siphoned through my system, pushing back the noose of blackness that had started tightening around the corners of my vision. Delayed panic jerked up in my throat and I was suddenly sure that I was going to burst into hysterical tears. The thing behind me must have noticed, because it sounded worried.
“Okay, okay,” it said, “hey, it’s all right, dude. Calm down, huh?”
I looked around and realized we had slowed down, eddying in slower circles and coming to a stop so that my thoughts could catch up with me.
“You all right, man? You aren’t gonna, like, spew proteins or anything, are you?”
I looked at the thing that had come loose from my back and was now floating in front of me. It was a starshaped, semiamorphous blob with hundreds of tiny receptors studding its limbs, rippling gently in the capillary tidewaters.
“You...” I managed. “You’re an astrovirus?”
“Hey, bro, watch the labels,” the thing snapped, then paused. “I mean, okay, technically you’re right.” It hesitated. “What are you?”
“Lactobacillus—”
“Aw, come off it,” the thing said, waving one tendril dismissively. “You’re a virus like me. Takes one to know one, right?” One of the tendrils reached out and brushed against the sleeve of my wetsuit, taking in the whole package—mask, flippers, O2 tank—in one move. “Haven’t seen you around before, though. You some kind of new mutation?”
Lenny Cyrus, School Virus (9780547893167) Page 5