The Psychozone

by David Lubar

  Genna didn’t answer.

  “No need to sulk,” Linda said. She glanced at her friend. But Genna wasn’t there. “Hey, where’d she go?”

  “Must have gone for a drink,” Cheryl said. “Oops,” she added as she got hit.

  Linda turned her attention back to the game. It was funny—she didn’t remember Genna leaving. But she really couldn’t pay attention to anything besides the asteroids that were hurtling toward her ship—not if she wanted to stay alive. Another huge chunk of pitted rock sped toward her from the left, but she shot it just in time.

  “Darn,” Cheryl said. Her ship took a final hit. It turned into a fireball, then faded to nothing.

  Linda heard the thud of a joystick hitting the floor. “Hey, careful with that,” she said as she glanced over.

  Cheryl wasn’t there.

  “What’s going on?” Mimi said. “Where’d Cheryl go? She was right here.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That does it,” Mimi said, her voice rising in pitch. “I quit.” She put her joystick down and stepped back.

  Her ship, unguided, took a hit.

  “I’m not playing. That’s not me anymore.” Mimi was shouting now. She took another step back.

  Her ship got hit again. And again. It exploded.

  Linda risked a glance at her friend. Just as she looked, Mimi vanished from sight, turning a glowing amber like the ship and then fading into nothingness. Her ship was gone. She was gone.

  Linda reached one hand toward the power switch, then yanked it back in time to steer clear of two more asteroids. She wanted to turn the game off, but she was afraid.

  “Oh no!” She took a hit from an enemy ship. She fired back and blew it up before it could cause more damage.

  The game was getting harder. Linda tried to pay attention, but she could barely concentrate. The joystick shook in her hands, almost as if it wanted to squirm free. Her palms grew damp and her fingers began to ache.

  “No!”

  Another hit. One more and her ship would explode.

  A bead of sweat rolled down her forehead and into the corner of her eye. She rubbed her eye against her arm, not daring to take a hand from the joystick. Even this motion was too much. An asteroid clipped the side of her ship. The power bar slid into nothingness. The ship glowed bright red and began to expand.

  Linda’s thumb slid across the joystick. She felt herself fading. She hit the pause button.

  The game stopped.

  The word PAUSE flashed on the screen. Behind it, the ship had just begun to break apart. It was frozen for the moment, but its fate was obvious.

  She heard the front door open and close. “Linda,” her mom called. “Are you home?”

  It was in that instant, as she tried to answer, that Linda knew what she had done. The game was halted, locked in place. So was Linda.

  “Are you here?” her mom called.

  She heard footsteps moving from room to room. She heard calls. The steps never came up the attic stairs. Linda was frozen, unable to answer. Eventually, the calls stopped. In front of her, the game hung suspended, waiting for someone to press a button—waiting patiently and forever.

  SMUNKIES

  My little brother is such a jerk. But I guess that’s his role at the moment. Tommy’s only six, and it’s tough not to be a jerk at six. My friend Brian is a jerk, too. Brian’s my age, so he has no excuse.

  More than anything, Tommy is a jerk about those stupid catalogs of his. He’s always saving his allowance and ordering junk that anyone with half a brain would know was worthless. Most of the stuff he gets never works or doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do. The few things that actually worked broke right away.

  Tommy never learns. Every month or so, he’ll start haunting the front window, looking for the UPS truck, waiting for his order to come. The truck passes by all the time, but it usually doesn’t have anything for us. Still as soon as he sees the truck, Tommy will start to dance like a dog that has to pee.

  If Brian’s around, he’ll almost always say, “Hey, you’d better let your brother out in the yard before he messes the carpet.”

  Today, Brian was over. We’d been planning to put new valve-cover gaskets on Dad’s junker Plymouth. Dad had offered us ten bucks each to do the job, which was just fine as far as we were concerned. We’d get up to our elbows in grease and get paid for the pleasure. What could be better?

  We were standing in the driveway when the brown truck came by. This time, it squealed to a stop right in front of the house. I looked over at the window and smiled. Tommy was about to go ballistic. He was hopping so hard I thought his head would snap away from his body. Then he disappeared from the window. An instant later, he was out the door and flying down the porch. He practically pulled the box from the driver’s hands, then rushed back into the house.

  “Your brother needs to calm down a bit,” Brian said. He pawed through the tool kit, until he found the socket wrench.

  “Hey, we were young once.” I sort of understood how Tommy felt.

  “Yeah, but we were never that goofy.”

  A few minutes later, Tommy came running out. “I need a jar for my smunkies,” he said.

  “Smunkies?” I usually understood him, but this time I didn’t have a clue.

  “Look.” He held up a small package.

  I read the label. SEA MONKEYS, it announced in large letters. On the back, there was a picture of these playful, happy creatures dancing around in a tank of water.

  “Tommy …” I wanted to tell him he’d probably just spent his money on some kind of tiny shrimp. I was pretty sure that’s all they were. But he looked so happy and eager, I didn’t have the heart to tell him the truth.

  “I need a jar,” he said.

  “There are plenty in the garage, right next to the rake,” I told him. “Just make sure you get a clean one. Don’t take one that smells like paint thinner or gasoline. Okay?” I’d hate to see his new pets going belly up—or whatever went up on them—right at the start.

  “Hey,” Brian walked around the car. “Whatcha got?”

  “Nothing.” Tommy put his hand behind his back.

  “Come on, let me see.”

  Tommy looked at me. I shrugged. What harm could Brian do?

  “Oh, wow,” Brian said when he’d taken the packet from Tommy. “How very, very cool.” He laughed and started to give the package back. At the last moment, he jerked his hand away. He did this a couple more times.

  I could tell Tommy was about to cry. “Come on, Brian, knock it off.”

  Brian didn’t say anything, but he held his hand still so Tommy could grab the packet. As soon as Tommy got it back, he went running off to the garage.

  A minute later, I heard him calling me. “There’s something wrong,” he said.

  I went in to see what the problem was.

  “It’s just sand.” He pointed to the jar he’d filled with water.

  “Those are eggs. They’ll hatch. You have to wait a little.”

  “Smunkies come from eggs?” He looked at me like I’d told him spaghetti grew on trees.

  “Yup. You have to wait for them to hatch.”

  “How long?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. A couple of days, maybe a week. I’m not sure.”

  “I bet we can speed it up.”

  The voice caught me by surprise. I hadn’t realized Brian had walked into the garage behind me.

  “You just have to know what to add.” He looked around. Suddenly, his face lit up. He grabbed a box of plant fertilizer. “This will help,” he said. Before I could stop him, he sprinkled some into the jar.

  “Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing.” He grabbed a second container and shook something else into Tommy’s jar. He was about to put in yet another powder when Tommy finally pulled the whole thing back, sloshing some of the water.

  “Stop it! You’ll kill them.” He snatched a lid from the shelf and put it on the jar. The way his lip was sticking out,
I knew his eyes were real close to turning into a pair of miniature waterfalls.

  “Tommy, why don’t you put that down and help us with the car?”

  “Really?” He looked at me, his face suddenly wiped free of all sorrow.

  “Sure.” I shifted my gaze over to Brian, letting him know that he was in big trouble if he said a word.

  So we went and changed Dad’s valve-cover gaskets and got all covered with grease and had a wonderful time.

  I guess I was wrong about the shrimp taking a while. They hatched during the night. Tommy came running into my room that morning to show me.

  “Look—my smunkies,” he said, holding up the jar. “Big smunkies.”

  “Yeah, they sure are big.” I watched the shrimp swimming around the jar. They were large enough that I could make out their legs and eyes.

  “Maybe I need a bigger jar,” Tommy said.

  “No, they won’t grow that much.”

  “They might,” he said. “Got a bigger jar?”

  “Let’s look.”

  We went to the cellar, where we keep all the really good junk, and searched around. I finally found an old jar that must have been left over from when Mom had decided she could save a lot of money by buying really big bunches of everything. She’d gotten this gigantic vat of mayonnaise. It took up almost a whole shelf in the fridge. I think it went bad before we’d had a chance to use up even half of it. I was glad, too. For a while, we seemed to be living on tuna salad, chicken salad, potato salad, and anything else that needed mayonnaise.

  “Perfect, isn’t it?” I asked Tommy when we’d found the jar.

  “Yeah.”

  I carried it upstairs. We filled it with water from the bathtub faucet. Then I lugged it to his room and we poured in the smunkies.

  I pretty much forgot all about them after that. Every couple of days, Tommy might mention them. “Smunkies are growing,” he’d say, or, “I’m feeding my smunkies lots of food.”

  Then he asked me for a bigger jar. That wouldn’t have been so bad, except he did it when Brian was over.

  “Whatcha want a jar for?” Brian asked.

  I shook my head, trying to signal Tommy, but he didn’t see me. “Smunkies,” he said. “My smunkies are real big now.”

  “Smunkies?” Brian asked, grinning like a true idiot. “Let’s see them. Can we see them? Please? I’d love to get a look at some honest-to-goodness giant smunkies.” He winked at me.

  I had a feeling this was not going to turn out well. Tommy ran up to his room. I guess he was so proud and excited, he was eager to show his treasure to anyone. Brian followed right behind, chanting “Smunkies, let’s see those smunkies.”

  “Come on, Brian,” I said. “Don’t mess with anything.”

  He turned back toward me. “Hey, relax. I just want to see these smunkies.” Then he laughed.

  “Don’t ruin anything, okay?” I asked.

  “Hey, you can trust me,” he said.

  We went into Tommy’s room. The jar was on the floor next to his bed. Looking from the top, you couldn’t really see anything. Tommy flopped to his knees and pointed to the side of the container. Brian and I joined him.

  My jaw dropped. Inside, so crammed they almost couldn’t move, were Tommy’s smunkies. But these were not little specks—these were huge! Some of them were half as big as my fist!

  “Cool,” Brian said. “Check them out.” He unscrewed the lid of the jar and reached in.

  An instant later, he screamed and pulled his hand back. He was always being such a jerk; I figured he’d do something like that.

  “It’s got me!” he screamed. He waved his hand and danced around the room like he was in pain.

  “Yeah, sure,” I said, not impressed. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  I started to walk from the room. Brian was still screaming. Then he started smashing his hand against the wall. “Hey, stop it, you’ll break something,” I said.

  That’s when I noticed the red blotches splattered over the paint on the wall. That’s also when I started to get scared. Before I could do anything, Brian stumbled into the jar and knocked it over and the rest of the smunkies got loose.

  Whatever they were, they moved fast.

  In a second, they were all over Brian. I did what I could to help him. I grabbed one and tried to pull it off, but it was like grabbing a rock. The thing was hard, and sharp.

  “Smunkies …” Tommy said, standing and watching Brian smash himself into the wall.

  I grabbed Tommy and ran from the room, slamming the door behind me in my panic. I took him downstairs. Over our heads, there were a couple more crashes, then silence.

  “Stay here,” I said to Tommy. I really didn’t want to go back, but I had to see if I could help Brian. He was a total jerk, but he was my friend. I went up the stairs, feeling like I was walking on explosives, ready to turn and flee at the slightest sound. I half expected a wave of smunkies to come rushing down the steps, leaping at me and dragging me to the floor.

  I made it upstairs.

  Tommy’s bedroom door was still closed. There was no sound, at first. When I got closer, I heard whimpering and groaning.

  “Brian?” I called. I knocked on the door. It was such a stupid thing to do that I almost laughed at myself. I opened the door.

  Brian was lying on the rug. He looked pretty chewed up, like someone who’d decided to use sandpaper for a washcloth. But he was alive. “You okay?” I asked.

  “I’ve been better,” he said. He slowly rose to his knees.

  “Where are they?” I asked.

  He jerked his hand over toward the wall. There was a jagged hole right above the baseboard. I knelt down and peeked inside, expecting to get a smunkie in my face. The hole went through to the bathroom. There was a wet, pink trail—maybe bits of smunkie slime, maybe bits of Brian. But I could see where it led.

  I went out through the hall to the bathroom to make sure. The trail led into the tub. Then the trail led to the drain. They were down there, somewhere. I could imagine them, all those smunkies, resting after a nice lunch of Brian bites, doing smunkie things, maybe talking smunkie talk and planning smunkie plans.

  “Smunkies gone?”

  I turned toward the door. It was Tommy. He looked so sad.

  “They’ll be back,” I said.

  That cheered him up. But it didn’t do much good for me. Not when I thought about all those smunkies out there in the pipes all around the house.

  “Back in the jar?” Tommy asked.

  I looked at the tub and the sink and the toilet. I looked at the walls. “No,” I told Tommy. “I’m afraid not. I think it’s our turn in the jar.”

  PRETTY POLLY

  “This is so cool,” Karen said. She couldn’t believe what her father had done. “It sure is,” her dad said. His silly grin showed that he didn’t really believe his own actions, either.

  “Where’d you find it?” she asked.

  “That old pet shop in town. I couldn’t get over the price. These things usually cost a couple hundred dollars. The owner let me have everything for fifty dollars. Imagine that—just fifty bucks.”

  Karen’s mother walked into the room. She didn’t say anything for a minute or two. Finally, she asked, “What about Whiskers?”

  “The cat will get used to it,” Karen’s dad said. “And Karen and I will take care of it. You won’t have to do a thing. Right, Karen?”

  “Right.” Karen looked at the spectacular bird her father had brought home. She was pretty sure it was an African gray parrot. “Does it talk?”

  “The man said it did,” her father told her.

  The parrot looked at Karen, cocking his head to the side and staring at her with one eye. Then, as if to answer her, he said, “I’m a good boy. I’m a good boy.”

  Karen laughed and clapped her hands. She thought it was truly cool to have a talking bird in the house. A soft and furry creature brushed against her leg. She looked down at Whiskers. “Don’t worry, kitty-
kit, I still love you.”

  “Mrrreww,” Whiskers answered.

  Karen picked up the cat and said, “Look, this is your new friend.” For an instant, Whiskers stared at the parrot. Then he hissed, leaped from her grip, and ran out of the room. Karen shrugged and turned to her dad. “The bird needs a name.”

  “Why don’t you do it?” her dad suggested.

  Karen thought for a moment. All the obvious choices came to mind. She didn’t want to call the bird “Polly” or “Crackers” or “Pirate.” Then she had an idea. “What about ‘Safari’?”

  Her dad nodded. “I like it.”

  “I’m a pretty bird,” Safari said.

  “Yes, you are,” Karen agreed.

  That night, as she lay in bed, Karen heard a strange noise. She sat up and listened to a scratching coming from downstairs. She went to the living room. The sound, soft and insistent, drifted from Safari’s covered cage. Karen lifted the blanket.

  Safari clung to the door of the cage, biting at the latch with his beak. He stopped. He turned his head and looked at Karen. Then he lifted his left claw until it pointed straight at her.

  “Kill you,” the bird said.

  Karen gasped and stepped back. The edge of the blanket dropped from her fingers, falling over the cage and hiding the bird. She turned and fled to her room. Minutes later, as she sat huddled in bed, she convinced herself she had been mistaken. The bird couldn’t have said those awful words.

  In the morning, Karen went right to the cage. She lifted the cover. “Pretty parrot,” Safari squawked. “I’m a good boy. I’m pretty.”

  “Yes, you are,” Karen said, feeling the tension drain from her body.

  That night she heard the sound again. She rose from her bed and walked—as if in a dream—to the living room, drawn there by the soft skritch of a hard beak probing and testing a metal latch.

  As she had done the night before, Karen lifted the blanket. Moonlight from the window fell onto the cage, making it seem larger than anything else in the room. Safari opened his beak, releasing his grip on the bars. “Kill you soon,” the bird said.

  Something brushed Karen. She jumped, and a scream came halfway out her throat.