by Rebecca Daff
He held out one of his wings for her to see. She stepped closer. His rear lit the space enough so that she could see the wing was partially dissolved.
“It’ll get us all eventually,” he said. “We’ll slowly melt in here.”
The mosquito wailed a high-pitched cry, and Firefly shushed him.
She had to find a way to escape. She couldn’t stand this for very long. The dankness, the smell of decaying bugs, not to mention the mosquito’s incessant whining. She tried to ward off the panic, the idea that she wouldn’t get out of this, ever.
“What about that way?” she asked, pointing toward the opening of Toad One’s gullet.
Firefly let out a shocked laugh. “You serious? You’re dead if you go down there. I don’t know how much you know about animals, but that down there’s the end of the line.”
“But you said no one ever makes it out of here. Maybe that’s because they hadn’t tried everything they could.”
“Do whatever you want,” he said. “But if you go down there it’s your funeral.”
Chris took a couple of steps toward the toad’s throat. A noxious breeze bubbled up and she couldn’t help doubling over and retching onto Toad One’s tongue. She didn’t know if she could do this, but when she looked back there was nothing but blackness illuminated by a waning emergency light—the stuff of apocalyptic cinema. She was getting out.
Slowly, Chris inched her way closer to the opening, careful to sidestep her way around the vomit.
You can do this.
She took a deep breath then held her nose and jumped feet first down Toad One’s throat. She slid down it like she was competing for gold in the luge. By the time she skidded off the final hump and into the stomach, she was covered in a gooey slime.
Toad One’s belly was another huge cavern and glowworms had taken up residence there. They all looked to be asleep, nestled in their cubbyholes in the stomach’s walls, though it looked like the niches they had created for themselves had created quite a few ulcers for Toad One. Their blue lights revealed the purple walls, the network of veins that crisscrossed inside the membrane like a subway map. Chris had managed to land on the upper part of the stomach where it was dry, but the main part, the bowl, held a grotesque soup: green acid flecked with random bug bits. A leg here. A head there. The parts jutted out of the mixture and bobbled past her. She would have puked some more, but at that point it would’ve been useless dry-heaving.
It was so, so hot. The steam from the digestive juices wafted over her, dilating her pores, and her skin soaked it right up. If she didn’t get out of there she was going to be steamed to death.
There was no way she was getting back up the throat. Even if she did she would just end up back in the mouth to rot with a firefly and a self-pitying mosquito. That was not going to happen. But she couldn’t stay where she was either. Shielding her eyes from the glowworm’s light, she peered across the stomach’s lake. On its far side, she could just make out another passageway. She invoked the ghost of her freshman biology class and remembered that nothing good came after leaving the stomach. Regardless, she had to find a way to span the acid. She needed a boat, but how was she going to find a boat in this place?
It was hard watching the creatures that slid down into the stomach. The bugs were lighter than her so they flew further when they hit that last bump in the throat and into the stomach. They came sailing through the air like they were exiting a slide at a water park, but when they hit the acid instead of squealing in joy they shrieked in pain. Thankfully, it didn’t last long. The juices stripped them down in seconds. Then their disjointed bodies joined all the others to float until it was time to be flushed out.
It was only when a bigger bug shot out of Toad One’s throat that Chris could sense her luck had changed. A large, black horned beetle slid down the chute. He tried to fly back toward the esophagus, but a big acid bubble popped, catching his wing. He landed on his back and the acid started dissolving him just like all the others, his body drifting close enough to Chris that she could hear what remained of his wings sizzling. But unlike the others, it looked like it was going to take longer for the acid to eat through his body.
Chris shut from her mind the fact that were he still alive he probably could have talked to her, that he probably had a beetle family waiting for him back home, and jumped onto his stomach. If she was going to get out of there this was her chance. She steeled her own stomach against the dry heaves when she snapped off a couple of his legs and started rowing.
The legs started dissolving faster than she’d expected them to. They were getting shorter by the second. Worse still, the acid was scooping out the beetle’s back. Her makeshift craft was sinking.
Chris paddled faster. The exit looked so far away. The beetle sizzled and popped, its wings sloughing off into the pool around her. Now there was only a thin layer of beetle carcass separating her from a roiling soup of death. A drop of acid landed on the toe of her shoe and Chris thought “screw it” before leaping for the passageway.
She tumbled through the dark yet again. Head over heels this time. Her toes were still intact, though they felt raw as if they had been scalded in hot water. She kept falling for a while, which was good. Chris was glad to be further away from the acid, but when she landed she would probably break her neck. It was a better way to die than the alternative.
When she finally landed, her fall was cushioned by a pudding-like substance. She didn’t have to see it to know what it was and her stomach heaved once again. This time there was little more than spittle and the taste of something metallic.
She knew she was in Toad One’s intestines, that there was a long way to go yet and she needed to keep moving, but her legs refused to cooperate. She couldn’t get past the idea of wading through it.
It’s poop, Chris, she told herself. Call it what it is. It’s poop.
She could feel it seeping into her shoes, squishing between her toes. It was under her dress, coating her skin. Instinctively, she tilted up her chin to keep it away from her face. Anywhere but the face.
Behind her, she could feel more of it accumulating. Toad One’s intestinal peristalsis was pushing it down the line. Chris concentrated on making her feet move. She focused on placing one foot in front of the other in a steady rhythm. If she concentrated on nothing but the movement of her feet, maybe she could keep from throwing up anymore, or worse, stalling out again.
* * *
It was a long, filthy trek through Toad One’s intestines, but Chris finally saw the literal light at the end of the tunnel. The pile behind her was growing and soon it pushed her through, plopping her back into the lake. Chris broke free from the poop and waited underwater until she was sure Toad One was gone. Only then did she dare to swim toward the shore. She could see light shimmering overhead and she pushed against the water’s resistance to reach it. Her fingers almost broke the surface but before they did she felt a tug on her shoe, the one the acid had eaten through.
She wasn’t caught on anything that she could see. Nevertheless, something was pulling her down, down into the water’s depths, away from light and air.
Her lungs burned. She searched for the source of the resistance but couldn’t find it. Finally, she noticed that Toad One’s stool was swirling around in the water, caught in the same trap she was: a whirlpool. Chris was swished in the same circular pattern until she was finally sucked straight down. The light above her receded. The possibility of escape disappeared. She squeezed her eyes shut as she descended into yet another black hole.
* * *
When Chris opened her eyes, she was encased in a drop of water hanging from a stalactite. Above her, she saw the bodies of thousands and thousands of bats. They hung suspended from the ceiling, seemingly asleep.
She was going to drown if she didn’t get out of the droplet of water. Or else she might get snatched up as soon as one of the bats woke, a tasty midnight snack.
Not knowing what else to do, Chris dove to the bottom and p
unched as hard as she could. She hit the bottom of the drop over and over, knowing if she didn’t do something it would all end right then, right there. The bubble shook but did little more. She put as much force as she could into her punches. It took dozens of them, but she could finally feel the drop’s downward progress. She wasn’t prepared for it when it finally shook loose, but she tucked herself into a little ball on the way down.
Chris fell into a pond-sized puddle on the floor. Not waiting for another vortex, she took a gargantuan breath and swam to solid ground. The bats above were still asleep. She crawled to a crack in the wall and hid in the crevice. Shivering and exhausted, she huddled there, hoping to go unnoticed when they finally flew out to hunt.
CHAPTER 25
The bats left while she slept. When she woke, it was to the sound of cawing and cackling. The stars outside the cave’s mouth had begun to dim, and Chris knew it wouldn’t be long until dawn. Now was the time to leave if she wanted to make it out before the bats came back.
Leaning out of the crevice, she checked to make sure it was clear before she took off, full speed, running for the exit. It was a long way out of the cave. She was still small. But it was worth the risk. She ran as fast as she could, which wasn’t that fast, because even though the water had washed some of the toad’s “remnants” off of her, Chris’s dress was still caked in filth. All the mud and poop had dried into a hard crust. So as soon as she got out of the cave and into the shelter of a patch of grass she pulled her dress off, ditching it in the weeds. Then she was wearing nothing but her underclothes, which on Earth would have seemed like a full pajama set: white shirt and knee-length pants. Digs would have been scandalized. Still, even though they were just as crusty and dirty as her dress was, Chris was much more comfortable after being freed from all that dead weight.
The rough cawing that had woken her sounded again. She knew it was a bird, of course, and her first thought was that it was a raven. But then the bird screeched. There was something about it that felt familiar. Chris moved toward the sound. She had only taken a few steps when she heard Liza’s voice.
“Stop,” the oracle said, her voice as loud and deep as thunder.
Chris turned around and she was toe to toe with an enormous blue shoe. When she looked up, craning her neck, she could finally see Liza’s face. The kindness she had seen in it when they had left her cottage wasn’t there anymore. In its place was a scowl.
“You can see me?” Chris yelled up at her. “Help!”
Liza’s expression didn’t change. Maybe she hadn’t heard her. Chris waved her arms, jumping up and down while she screamed, “Hey! Down here! Help!”
“I can see and hear you,” Liza said dryly. “No need to shout.”
She bent down, her body looming over Chris. For a moment, Chris was seized by the sudden fear that she would make a tasty morsel for the oracle. The thought was enough to send Chris running, but Liza stopped her by placing her hand on the ground in front of her. If the oracle was going to eat her she would have just picked her up and been done with it. Now she was holding out her hand, palm up, for Chris to climb on. After considering her options, Chris finally scaled the side of Liza’s hand and then stood in the middle of her palm. Once she was settled, Liza lifted her until she was near her face. The force of her exhales threatened to knock Chris off, so she wrapped her arms around the oracle’s thumb.
“It’s time, Christina,” she said. The boom of her voice made Chris’s ears ring.
“Time for what?” Chris yelled.
Instead of answering, Liza leaned her head away and puckered her lips. As soon as Chris realized what she was about to do she covered her ears, trying to keep her eardrums intact. It did little to dampen Liza’s whistle, and when Chris uncovered her ears again she heard a high-pitched beeeeeeeep.
Something flew toward them, as big as a helicopter. It was too far away to see clearly but Chris could tell what it was by its erratic flight pattern: a bat. She pulled on Liza’s thumb, yelling at her, telling her that a bat was coming, but she paid no attention to the girl she was holding. The creature divebombed in and perched on an outstretched finger on Liza’s other hand.
“It’s time to find them,” she said. “To say good-bye.”
“What? What are you talking about?” Chris yelled. “Hey, you can do magic! Fix it! Make me big again!”
“Only you can do that,” she said. Then she curled the rest of her fingers inward, leaving Chris nowhere to run, clinging to her thumb. She brought her hand closer to the bat and Chris thought, She’s going to feed me to it! So this was how she was going to die. As bat food. But instead of feeding Chris to it, Liza bypassed the animal’s mouth and brought her to its ear. Chris tightened her grip on Liza’s thumb. Please, God, don’t let the flying rat touch me.
Seeing that Chris wasn’t going to let go, Liza simply scraped her off her thumb by rubbing it gently against the bat’s ear. Chris tumbled inside then quickly scrambled to the top of the ear canal, braving its fuzzy ridges to reach fresh air again. She grasped the edge of it, hoping to find the oracle’s hand was still close enough for her to jump back onto, but she’d disappeared.
She’s gone, Chris thought, wheezing. She left me inside a bat’s ear and just walked away. But if she left what is the bat sitting on?
It wasn’t sitting. It was flying. They were high above the cave entrance, so high in fact that she could see far into the distance. There was the beach where she had landed that very first day on Kellet. There were the candelabra trees flickering out one by one as the sun rose over the ocean. Polaris, in all its terrifying majesty, seemed so small below her. Then she and the bat were fluttering over Laetus. The Barren Stretch was a landscape of black bubble wrap, the glass-leaved tree a figurine to be placed on a fireplace mantle. Then they were over the burned husk of The Middles, Narento and Erah’s charred home. They darted over the southern castle, except it was busier than when she had left. People filled the courtyard. Grass was already growing where there was once only dry earth.
They sailed over the glasslands, and she spotted Micah’s tiny figure, still asleep on the mirrored hill.
“Micah! I’m up here!” she yelled down to him, knowing he couldn’t hear her.
But the bat could.
The sound of Chris’s voice threw the bat off course. They veered sharply to the right. The bat tilted and she tilted with it. For a moment, she had forgotten where she was, that she was inside a bat high in the air. She readjusted her grip, holding on, just knowing she was going to plummet to her death. Chris closed her eyes. Not happening. Not happening. Her foot slipped on some of the bat’s earwax. Startled, she opened her eyes again and she was out in the open air, falling, right over Toad Island. Even from high above it she could hear the same cawing she had heard outside the cave. She didn’t want to watch, didn’t want to see the ground getting closer and closer until there was no space between them.
Chris didn’t realize she had been screaming until she hit the first leaf and it knocked the wind out of her. Her body crashed against the foliage and she rebounded off of it onto the next. She kept repeating the action over and over, bouncing off one leaf only to land on another. The topmost shoots were broad and green, but as Chris fell they began to wilt. By the time she finally slid off one of the lower leaves to land on the next they were all brown and crispy.
She laid there, breathing hard, wondering how she had survived. There was no doubt that she had internal injuries that were sure to finish the job. Slowly, without moving around too much, she ran her hands over her limbs to check for broken bones. After she was sure there weren’t any, she sat upright and made a quick overall assessment, pressing her belly, checking for discoloration or distention like they did on TV. It was crazy, but it was looking like she was going to get out of this with little more than some serious bruising.
It was still early enough that it was hard to see much in the shade of the tree’s leaves. Fortunately, some fireflies rested on the branch she occ
upied, their soft glow penetrating the deep shadows. It helped. From the looks of things, they were all asleep.
It was a long way to the ground—a long, long way. Off in the distance Chris could hear Toad One and Toad Two’s croaks, their early morning chatter about what to do that day. Maybe they were planning who they were going to shrink and eat next.
Something rustled the leaves overhead. Chris huddled into a ball, hoping to make herself small enough that whatever it was wouldn’t notice her. Maybe it’s the bat coming to pick me up again. No way am I getting back in there. If Liza was going to try to put Chris back in a bat ear or nose or eyeball Chris was going to fight with everything she had.
A vulture’s bald blue head emerged from the wilted foliage. It fixed Chris with an appraising eye and a dove-like coo issued from deep in its throat. She didn’t dare move. It might have mistaken her for its first meal of the day. Then Chris remembered that vultures were carrion eaters.
The bird closed the gap between them, its long talons piercing the bark. Chris instinctively curled up tighter. She didn’t want to be skewered. The vulture stopped nearby, cooed again, then said, “There’s nothing to be afraid of here,” in a screechy voice.
Chris shouldn’t have been surprised that it talked, but she was. Even so, she carefully unfurled and stood, making sure that her movements were slow and deliberate. The leaf trembled under her, shaken by a slight breeze. “Would you mind giving me a ride to the ground then?” she asked. If she could just get to the ground there was a chance that she could find a way to return to her normal size.
“We don’t fly,” it said in a tone that suggested she’d said something utterly ludicrous.
“We?”
It bobbed its head. Chris took a look around and saw all the sets of eyes that watched her from the spaces between the leaves. There must have been dozens of them.
“Why don’t you fly?” she asked, trying not to let her voice waver.
“It’s too confusing,” he said. “The sky is above us but below us as well. It’s become too difficult to tell which way is up, so instead of flying and risking crashing into the ground, we stay here. It’s very comfortable.”