Mutant Mantis Lunch Ladies

by Bruce Hale

  Tenacity snarled and took a step closer, and two fifth-grade girls at the table stood up beside her, glowering.

  “You haven’t heard the last of this.” I edged backward. “We’ll tell Principal Johnson about you.”

  “Go ahead,” said Tenacity. “She’ll probably cheer.”

  At that comment, my throat went tight. Mrs. Johnson was female—would she turn anti-boy too?

  Benny and I retreated at a slow amble so anyone watching would know we weren’t scared. Somehow I don’t think the girls at the nearest table got the message; they ushered us out with chickenlike bwak bwaks.

  “Okay, that was weird,” I said.

  “Girls are weird,” said Benny.

  We found a seat at one of the outside benches. “Not that kind of weird. Do you think the way they’re acting is connected with the lunch ladies?”

  Unwrapping his lunch, Benny said, “You mean, like they took Mrs. Robinson’s girl-power rant too seriously?”

  I bit into my peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. “Every single girl in the lunchroom? No, I think it’s more than that.”

  “Some kind of alien mind ray?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe the lunch ladies are putting something in the girls’ food to make them wacko. Maybe that’s why they’re giving us separate meals.”

  Benny stared dubiously at his collard-green wrap with hummus and veggies. “Well, they say you are what you eat.”

  “If that’s the case, you should be a block of tofu by now.” I smirked.

  “Trade you half?” he asked, holding up part of his wrap.

  I sighed and swapped him for my tortilla chips, because that’s what friends do.

  “But why would the lunch ladies be doing this?” I said. “And what could they be putting in the lunches to turn the girls so loco?”

  “Chili peppers? Bug juice?”

  We had no answers, so we concentrated on what we did have: food. In no time, we’d finished up our lunch (except for the collard-green wrap) and dumped our trash in the bin. By now, kids were leaving the cafeteria, and I spotted someone who might have some answers.

  “Let’s go ask Tina,” I said.

  Our classmate was pretty cool for a girl—heck, for anybody. She practiced karate moves, had a great collection of comic books, and was tough to scare. She’d stood beside us against the were-hyenas, and had become a real friend. As a certified girl, she was in an excellent position to help us now.

  Tina swaggered out the door with Gabi and a skinny red-haired girl I didn’t know on either side. All were cackling at some joke.

  “Hey, Tina,” I said. “Gabi.”

  Tina turned to the redhead. “Do you smell something?”

  “Smells like a massive influx of cooties.” Skinny Red sniffed.

  Pretending to spot us for the first time, Tina said, “Well, if it isn’t the two kings of boy cooties, Brackman and Rivera.”

  I frowned. This wasn’t like her at all.

  “We’ve got cooties?” said Benny. “Girls are the ones!”

  Before they could get into some kind of major fight, I jumped in. “Tina, could we talk to you? It’s important.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Oh, I’m sure.”

  “You don’t need to go with them,” said Skinny Red. “Boys are inferior.”

  I held up a hand to Benny before he could retort. “Please?” I said.

  Tina patted her friend’s arm. “Don’t worry, I can handle these two nerds without even breaking a sweat.” She sauntered away from the girls to join us on the side. “What?”

  “There’s something strange going on with the lunch ladies,” I said.

  “So?” She crossed her arms.

  Benny gave her a funny look. “Is this the same girl who couldn’t wait to solve the whole were-hyena mystery?”

  She snorted. “That was so last month.”

  “We think the lunch ladies are feeding you girls something weird to change you,” I said.

  Tina laughed. “What they’re feeding us is better food than you guys get. You’re jealous.”

  “You’re nuts,” said Benny.

  My gut twisted. Something was very wrong here.

  “And they’ve really opened my eyes on this whole girl-power thing,” Tina said. “The lunch ladies rock!”

  Heat rose through my chest like a chili-pepper burn. “They’re giant bugs in disguise, and they’re only using you for their evil purposes!”

  Overhearing this, Gabi and Skinny Red giggled.

  Tina examined me like I was something questionable she’d found on the sole of her shoe. “You are deeply whacked, Rivera. Mrs. McCoy was right—boys are jerks, losers, and a total waste of space.”

  The calmer she got, the more out of control I felt. “You’re the jerk!” I cried.

  “Oh, please.” Tina glanced back at her posse and circled her index finger around her ear in the universal sign for he’s cracked. They snickered.

  But I couldn’t stop. “What’s wrong with you? You know there’s weird stuff out there—you’ve seen it. And I’m telling you the lunch ladies are not human.”

  “He’s right,” said Benny. “We’ve seen it for ourselves.”

  “Then you’re both looney tunes,” Tina sneered. She flapped the back of her hand at us in a brushing-off gesture and turned to go.

  I felt raw inside, like someone had scraped sixty-grit sandpaper over my innards. “What’s up with you?” I repeated. “I thought we were friends.”

  At this, Tina glanced back over her shoulder, wide-eyed. Was I finally getting through to her?

  “Haw, haw, haw!” She burst out in a belly laugh.

  Apparently not.

  As Tina rejoined her crew, Benny caught my shoulder and steered me away. “Ignore her. Like I said, Carlos—girls are weird.”

  But my eyes prickled and my stomach felt like a milk carton someone had stomped on. Not only were the mutant-insect lunch ladies threatening my school, they were taking away my friends.

  And that I would not stand for.

  My jaw clenched. These bugs were going down.

  AS SOON AS the Detention Queen, Ms. Pebblecreek, released us from our after-school punishment, Benny and I shot from the room like a loogie from a lip. Collecting our bikes, we made straight for the Monterrosa Natural History Museum and our town’s biggest expert on insects.

  At the end of Durfee Road squatted the museum, a low, wide building that smelled faintly of cheese. This time of day, only a handful of tourists wandered through its exhibits admiring the dioramas of sea animals, geological cross sections, and central Californian critters.

  A bored-looking young woman with purple-streaked hair and a shoulder tattoo of one of the X-Men sat at the front desk, texting away on her phone. She glanced up, mildly surprised that she had visitors.

  “Go on in,” said Purple Hair, popping her gum. “Kids under twelve are free.”

  “We’re not into dioramas,” said Benny, even though I knew he was.

  “We’re here to see Mr. Sincere,” I said.

  Purple Hair looked us up and down through her cool-girl glasses. “Aren’t you kinda young to be scientists?”

  “He’ll want to see us,” I said. “It’s about giant bugs.”

  “Imagine my excitement,” she said, all deadpan. “Second floor, room 202.” Making a vague gesture toward the elevator, Purple Hair resumed texting.

  “Wolverine is one of my favorite X-Men too,” I said, pointing at her tattoo.

  Her lip curled and she blew out a dismissive puff of air. “That’s not Wolverine, that’s Papa Smurf. Get a clue.”

  I apologized, although personally, I thought her tattoo artist could’ve used some art lessons.

  Room 202 lay halfway down a dingy hall of offices that smelled like burned coffee and moldy carpet. The door hung open, but we rapped on it anyway.

  “Mr. Sincere?” Benny called.

  The room was a mess. Worse than my bedroom.

  Stacks of scientific jo
urnals leaned against a battered, gunmetal-gray desk. Packed bookshelves filled one wall. The rest of the space was jammed with cameras, microscopes, butterfly nets, a display case bristling with more kinds of beetles than there were TV channels, and loads and loads of framed and mounted moths and spiders.

  I shuddered at the spiders. “Hello?”

  A tight salt-and-pepper Afro peeked up from behind the desk. A long tea-colored face followed it. “Eh, how’s that?” said the man.

  “Are you Mr. Sincere?” I asked.

  An enormous hazel eye blinked at us through one of those massive magnifying glasses scientists strap to their heads. A chill tickled the tops of my shoulders. What kind of man was this?

  “That’s Doctor Sincere,” he huffed. “I didn’t spend all that money on a PhD to be called mister.”

  “Doctor, we need your help,” I said.

  Dr. Sincere rose to his feet, blinking. His body was long and lanky with a potbelly, and draped in a tan jacket with lots of pockets, like hunters wear. He looked like a librarian on safari. The scientist dropped some small wriggly thing into a coffee can with his long tweezers.

  “Mind the scorpions,” he said.

  “Scorpions?!”

  Benny and I shuffled back a couple of steps, eyeing the carpet around us. Something scuttled from behind a stack of magazines and along the front of the desk. We both jumped.

  “There’s one!” I cried.

  Surprisingly quick for an old guy, the scientist scooted around his desk and snagged the creature. I kept careful watch for others.

  “So,” said Dr. Sincere, “what did you want to see me about?”

  “Er, uh,” I said. Like I said, I’m good with words.

  “Our school has been taken over by bugs,” said Benny.

  “If you’ve got cockroaches, call the exterminator,” the scientist drawled, removing his magnifier headband. “That’s not my department.”

  “You don’t understand.” I took a deep breath. “These are huge bugs, tall as you.”

  “And they’re masquerading as our lunch ladies,” said Benny.

  At that, Dr. Sincere’s eyes widened and his face went chalky. He groped blindly for the back of his chair and sank into his seat. “No,” he breathed. “It’s not possible.”

  “What isn’t?” I asked.

  This set off a flurry of blinks, like his eyeballs were sending an SOS. “What—what kind of insects did you say?”

  “Tall, maybe six feet, and green,” I said.

  “With a triangular head and six legs,” said Benny.

  “And wings,” I said. “Really gross-looking wings.”

  The scientist’s face tightened. “Two sets of them?”

  “Yeah,” said Benny. “What kind of bug is it?”

  Staring blindly at a spot on the wall, Dr. Sincere dropped his tweezers on the desk. He muttered, “Oh, no, no, no,” over and over.

  “I’ve never heard of that type before,” Benny said.

  I stepped closer. “Just tell us what they are and how to get rid of them.”

  A scorpion scurried from almost under my feet. Yikes. I made a noise like a mouse choking on a jalapeño, and hopped backward. The arachnid climbed onto a camera not three feet away from Dr. Sincere.

  “There’s another one!” said Benny.

  But the scientist didn’t move. He just kept repeating himself, like a loop on a bad hip-hop track. Distracted, I glanced around his office for more critters on the loose. Benny took the tweezers, captured the scorpion, and dropped it into the coffee can.

  A close-up photo on the wall caught my eye. Stepping closer, I peered at the big green bug with the folded forelegs.

  “That’s it, that’s the one!” I said, reading the caption. “Mantis religiosa.”

  “Mantis?” said Benny. “Like praying mantis?”

  We turned to the scientist. “What’s going on here?” I said. “Why is that photo on your wall?”

  Dr. Sincere sank his face into his hands. “I’m an entomologist,” he mumbled. “I have oodles of insect photos.”

  Leaning on the man’s desk, Benny said, “Yeah, but this insect got huge and is roaming around our school dishing up weirdness. What gives?”

  A hazel eye peeked through a net of fingers. “I don’t want to talk about it,” said Dr. Sincere. “Go away.”

  “But we helped you catch the scorpions,” said Benny.

  “Leave me alone.”

  Anger bubbled up in me like some carbonated lava drink. “You know something!”

  “No,” he said.

  “You do! These creatures are bad news. They’re making kids disappear; they’re turning my friends into jerks.” I turned to Benny. “Not you, Benny.”

  “Of course not,” he said.

  I waved my pointer finger in the scientist’s face. “You better tell us what’s going on!”

  “I can’t, I can’t,” he moaned, covering his eyes again.

  Benny and I stared at each other, stumped. It’s kind of hard for a kid to force an unrelated grown-up to do anything. But then I remembered where we’d gotten the man’s name.

  “Abuelita,” I said.

  “You think she might…?” Benny asked.

  Fishing my cell phone from a pocket, I said, “Let’s find out.” I dialed her number and explained our problem.

  “Put him on,” said my abuela.

  “Someone wants to talk to you,” I told Dr. Sincere, practically shoving my phone into his face.

  Curiosity got the better of him, and he answered it with a wary “Hello?”

  I couldn’t make out what Abuelita said, but judging by the way the scientist’s face winced and flushed, it wasn’t exactly a song of praise.

  “Yes,” he said. “Uh-huh. Well, I—no…no, I haven’t forgotten. But the—”

  His blinks started up again, faster this time, and Dr. Sincere stared down at his desktop. Benny caught my eye and mimed cracking a whip. I smothered a smile. Abuelita may have been sweet to us, but make no mistake: she was a force to be reckoned with.

  “Well…if—if you insist.” The scientist now looked like a truant in the principal’s office. I almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

  “I will, Margarita,” he said. “All right. You too.”

  “Well?” said Benny.

  Handing me back my phone, Dr. Sincere said, “Your grandmother can be very persuasive.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” I said. “Now tell the truth. What’s up with those giant bugs? What do they want? Where do they come from?”

  Smoothing the front of his wrinkled safari jacket, the scientist said, “They’re an experiment gone very, very wrong. And it’s all my fault.”

  BENNY AND I shoved the junk off of a couple of office chairs and sat down to listen to Dr. Sincere’s tale. By the time he was halfway through, I felt glad we were sitting.

  “Back during the Cold War, our country sought every advantage against the Russians,” he said. “We even worked on a Star Wars program to blast their missiles out of the sky.”

  Benny’s mouth fell open. “Wow, you mean we’ve got our own Death Star?”

  “Eh, not exactly,” said Dr. Sincere. “At any rate, I worked on Project Hive at Vandebunt Army Base outside of town. We were trying to harness the power of insects, to use them to defend our country.”

  “What, like an attack force of fire ants?” I asked, skeptical.

  Benny smirked. “I prefer the stinkbug bomb squad.”

  Waving his hand as if to erase our comments, the scientist said, “We explored all those ideas and more. But each had limitations. For one thing, the insects wouldn’t obey commands; they had minds of their own.”

  “Sounds like my sister,” I said.

  Dr. Sincere sighed, combing his fingers through his thinning hair. “The wasps were so bad-tempered, they attacked their handlers. The cockroaches ate everything but wouldn’t fight. And all the assassin bugs wanted to do was kill each other.”

  Ben
ny fidgeted. “So, the program didn’t work?”

  “At first,” said the scientist, his gaze sliding away from ours.

  “And then?” I prodded.

  “Then,” he said, “I hit on the idea of combining human DNA with that of insects.”

  I nudged Benny. “Sounds like a comic book.”

  Pulling at his collar, Dr. Sincere said, “Yes, well, the DNA wasn’t terribly compatible. Most of the human-insect combinations died quickly—our scorpion man lasted the longest, poor fella.”

  Benny nudged me back. “Scorpion Man? Now that definitely sounds like a comic book.”

  That reminded me. I glanced around the floor for more of those little creepy-crawlies. Luckily, none showed.

  “But you’re talking about the failures,” I said. “What happened with the mantises?”

  “And shouldn’t that be ‘mantii’?” said Benny. “Or ‘manteese’?”

  With a seasick smile, the bug expert rose from his chair and paced away from us. “You don’t understand. There was so much pressure to succeed, we took some dreadful risks.” Dr. Sincere turned to face us, bringing his palms together at his lips, almost as if he was praying.

  “And something went wrong,” I guessed.

  He sagged. “I was reckless. I thought if we dosed some of the hybrids with radiation, they might mutate.”

  I met Benny’s gaze. “Mutants,” we breathed.

  Dr. Sincere’s lips pressed together. “We were desperate for results, so I blasted the mantid hybrids with massive amounts of radiation. We hoped it would accelerate changes. But we had no idea what would happen.”

  “Well, duh,” said Benny. “Anyone who’s read a comic book knows that. Radioactive mutants are unpredictable.”

  I nodded solemnly. “That’s a fact.”

  Jamming his hands into his pockets, the scientist stared out the window as if watching a movie of his past. “They grew at an astounding rate,” he said. “First to the size of a house cat, then of a goat. By the time the base was shut down, the mantids were as tall as you.”

  “But these things at our school are much more than just big bugs,” I said, shifting in my seat to watch him. “They’re actually imitating our lunch ladies.”

  Mr. Sincere grimaced, and the blinking resumed. “Some, er, chameleon DNA was added to the mix. Soon we found these…mutant mantises could take on the appearance of any creature they inhabited.”