Escape from the Drooling Octopod!

by Robert West

  Little bumps began to appear on either side of those pink cherub heads, and their eyes started shifting up toward the top of their heads. All of a sudden, they looked more like Kermit the Frog than flying babies, except that these guys were definitely not as nice as Kermit.

  As their pudgy little faces twisted into evil smiles, the creatures marched toward the Star-Fighters, tossing pink, candy-flavored items into their mouths like they were cherry bombs.

  The Star-Fighters ducked and yelled for them to stop. The bombardment only got worse. MacIntyre finally stopped trying to say anything, since every time he opened his mouth, he’d get a mouthful of candy. That strategy was flawed, however, by the fact that when he didn’t open his mouth, his face and uniform would get another coat of gooey or sticky morsels.

  “Back to the ship!” the captain shouted as she ducked under a barrage of cauliflower. The little bumps on those cherub heads had now become full-fledged devil horns! They were goblins, not cherubs, and were tossing candy veggies like machine-gun fire at the fleeing Star-Fighters.

  5

  Mission Abort!

  The Star-Fighters were so stuffed that they were chugging more than running. They ducked to evade candy potatoes, celery, and artichokes. By the time they got to the ship, their uniforms were a sticky, candy-coated mess.

  Lieutenant Ives pelted one goblin with cans of sauer-kraut from their food rations after the goblin lobbed some candy squash at him.

  The captain, meanwhile, battled another goblin who was tossing candy lettuce and broccoli at her. She finally took a broom and swatted it out the door. “Hit the thrusters!” she cried when she finally secured the door.

  The little goblins, now numbering in the hundreds, continued to bombard the ship with sugary vegetables.

  “Hey, that stuff is eating through the hull!” yelled Ives.

  “Lieutenant, activate the stickeyon matter gummerupper — now!” the captain shouted.

  For once, they seemed to have the right weapon. Something like a shock wave bolted from the ship, and the goblins suddenly looked like they were wrapped in bubble gum.

  Meanwhile, Commander MacIntyre wiped the candy muck off his fingers and again punched the engines. They zoomed into the pink sky and sighed in relief as the pink planet shrank behind them into the black cosmos.

  Feeling very stuffed from the sugar attack, Ives tried to stifle a belch. It didn’t work. His burp created a world-class atmospheric disturbance. That was because not only Ives, but MacIntyre and Bruzelski as well, belched at the same time.

  They were lucky the ship didn’t blow up. As it was, the ship bounced back into the tree, the windows burst open, and most of Murphy Street was gassed with something that smelled like sour peppermint.

  Luckily, when their uniforms dissolved back to their everyday clothes, the candy muck dissolved with them. Beamer couldn’t imagine how he would explain being candy coated to his parents. He had a feeling it was going to take a while for the peppermint smell to fade, though.

  That night, Beamer couldn’t eat the pink Jell-O ring his mother made for dessert. She looked puzzled. After all, he’d always liked it before. The next morning, when his sister came into the breakfast room wearing not only her pink Nikes but also pink jeans, Beamer couldn’t handle it. He ran from the table and skidded into the bathroom. What happened next is up to your imagination. Hopefully you’re not reading this during dinner.

  Beamer was relieved when he was finally on his way to school, but he stopped halfway down the street.

  “What’s the matter?” Scilla asked, with Michael acting as her echo.

  “Well, there’s way too much pink in my life,” Beamer said, “and I’ve got a feeling it’s because of the girl in the Pink Palace.”

  That’s when Scilla noticed that they were standing in front of the girl’s house. “Oh, no, you don’t,” she said. “I got a glimpse of her in that picture. She’s a girl — a real girl who wears frilly dresses and probably primps, giggles, and talks about her hair all day.”

  “Come on, Scilla,” Beamer argued. “You’re as much of a girl as she is, whether you want to admit it or not, and if she needs help — ”

  “Not a chance. There are girls, and there are girls. That subspecies of Homo sapiens girlus has always given me a lot of trouble, so if you want to help her, you’ll have to do it without me.” With that she whirled around and stomped on down the street.

  “Scillaaaaa!” Beamer called after her. He heaved a huge sigh and stumbled on toward school.

  For the next three days, Scilla angled her nose at two o’clock and walked to school by herself. Ghoulie set up dentist appointments and extra-credit P.E. assignments for himself. Since Ghoulie hated both dentists and P.E., Beamer figured he hated Beamer’s crazy idea even more. For that matter, the last thing on planet Earth that Beamer wanted to do was to ask some girl to come out and play. So, for the time being, all rescue operations connected to the color pink were strictly “no go.” It didn’t take long for things to change, though.

  Beamer was in the school cafeteria trying to decide if his meatball lunch would make a good weapon of mass destruction when Scilla and Ghoulie suddenly appeared across the table. Neither of them looked well. Their hair was all scraggly, and they had dark shadows around their eyes.

  “We’ve been cursed,” said Scilla.

  “Not cursed,” said Ghoulie, rolling his eyes, “just psycho-logically dissociated due to residual guilt-driven stimuli in the hippocampus.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Beamer, shaking his head in bewilderment.

  “Well the hippocampus is the region of the brain which — ”

  “We’ve been having pink dreams,” Scilla said, interrupting him. “Three straight nights of them. One thing’s for sure,” she added, “I hate anything pink and sweet so much now that I’ll probably be having fewer cavities for a while.”

  “Yeah,” said Ghoulie. “Those pudgy little pink cherubs we met on the planet have gotten into our heads.”

  “Cherubs . . . nothing!” said Scilla. “They were goblins, plain and simple. We’ve gotta do somethin’ about that girl before we all go crazy!”

  “What the heck are you talking about?” asked Ghoulie. “We don’t even know if there’s anything wrong with her! I’ll put my money on going back to the pink planet and blowing it up!”

  “Somehow, I don’t think blowing things up is what the Star-Fighters are all about,” Beamer said with a put-down grimace. Of course, he liked shooting up things as well as the next guy. In video games, you could be a hero or a bad guy with no pain and no guilt. You just had to keep from thinking about the fact that real shooting was all about pain and guilt without the advantage of extra lives.

  “Things happen to us for a reason,” Beamer insisted, “at least things connected with the tree ship. Remember when we almost crashed on the space platform?”

  “Yeah, so what?” Ghoulie answered.

  “Well, right after that we met Solomon Parker, whose whole life was a wreck, with broken inventions and abandoned projects everywhere around him.”

  “So you’re thinking all these pink attacks, dream-wise or otherwise, have something to do with that girl in the pink house,” Ghoulie grumbled, regretting the words as he said them.

  “You’re right, though,” Beamer said, looking at Ghoulie. “We’ve got no idea what’s goin’ on with this girl. I mean, is she locked in and made to scrub floors like Cinderella?”

  “For all we know,” Scilla chimed in, “she may be allergic to everything and has to live in a glass bubble.”

  “Or maybe exposure to the smog-infested atmosphere has changed her into a drooling, bloodsucking, pink octopus,” said Ghoulie, dipping into his taste for Saturday-night 1950s horror reruns.

  6

  First Contact

  Scilla was in a mood to spit nails. They’d watched the girl’s house for a week without seeing her come out once. They’d seen the lady with the pointed nose and a tall
, dark-haired man going and coming, but no girl. So Scilla had been elected to go to the girl’s front door and ask if she wanted to play.

  Holy tamole! thought Scilla. The fact that I’m a girl has nothing to do with why I’m the one who has to knock on the door of the pink castle. Beamer and Ghoulie are just like the cowardly lion when it comes to girls. Of course, they didn’t think of me as being a girl. That was sort of good and sort of not, although she wasn’t exactly sure why. The frilly girl will probably want to play hopscotch or dress-up or do something with paper dolls. She might even try to steal her mother’s makeup and give me lips the size of a billboard. This is crazy! They even talked me into wearing a dress! Talk about humiliation. If it weren’t for those stupid pink dreams — drat it all!

  Scilla huddled up tight next to the gate, hoping no one would see her in a dress. Beamer and Ghoulie were standing back a few feet, snickering. Scilla gave them a searing look and pushed the call button.

  A few seconds later, somebody answered, “Hello, may I ahsk who is calling?” Scilla recognized the voice of the woman with the pointed nose.

  “My name is Scilla Bruzelski and I was wondering — ”

  “Yes, Ms. Bruzelski,” the voice interrupted her, “and what is yoah business?”

  “I just wanted to see if . . . uh . . . your little girl could come out and play?”

  “What?” the voice said as if Scilla had asked for the family jewels. “How did you know a little gahl lived heah?”

  “Well, I was here the other day when Beamer — that’s Beamer MacIntyre — dropped off some papers from school for her.”

  “Oh, yes, I see. Uh . . . she doesn’t play . . . uh . . . outside — ”

  “Then can I come inside and play with her?” Scilla asked, feeling like she was making the ultimate sacrifice.

  “Uh . . . no. She doesn’t play. I mean, she isn’t allowed to play with strangahs — with anyone.” The woman sounded a little rattled as she went on. “You see . . . uh . . . she’s . . . uh — I mean, she’s a special child and . . . uh . . . not allowed to play with anyone.”

  Good grief, Scilla thought, I’ve never heard so many “uh’s” coming from an adult before. This lady definitely has something to hide.

  “Thank you for yoah consahn ,” the voice continued, “but please don’t call again. She can’t, you see. She just can’t.” There was something funny about the way her voice sounded. It was almost like she was ready to cry.

  Scilla heard a click, and the speaker was silent. “Well, that’s that,” she said as she turned to Ghoulie and Beamer. She was so relieved she didn’t have to play with the girl, she almost felt like dancing the jig — except, of course, she didn’t know how to dance the jig.

  “Sounds an awful lot like what we heard when we tried to visit Solomon Parker,” said Beamer.

  “Yeah, sure does,” echoed Ghoulie.

  At that moment, the mail carrier walked by and started to slip a large bundle of mail into the mailbox. It didn’t fit in the box very well, and several envelopes and pieces of junk mail fell to the ground. Scilla picked them up and handed them back to the mail carrier. She got a “thank you” in return and something else — she’d seen the name Malcolm Franck on three of the envelopes.

  Ghoulie didn’t look all that amazed when he actually found something about a person named Malcolm Franck on the Internet. But then, outside of the CIA and the NSA, Ghoulie and his computer had the best chance of tracking anyone down.

  Scilla had never seen Ghoulie’s place, and she was wide-eyed when she finally did. His town house looked like something out of the Jetsons . There were glass walls that could be either see-through or not at the push of a button. Scilla didn’t see any robotic maids running about, but some-body or something spent a lot of time pumping Windex on all the glass. In fact, everything looked so shiny and clean, she was almost afraid to breathe on, let alone touch, anything. She wondered how real people could actually live here.

  But then Ghoulie took them up three floors in a cylindrical glass elevator to his room. Scilla’s eyes popped open even wider. Ghoulie’s room was about the size of an entire floor in her grandma’s house! It was divided into three different sections. One part was for music and TV and gave a whole new meaning to the idea of “home theater.” Another part was for jumping and climbing and bouncing around, complete with a trampoline, jungle gym, pogo stick, and a whole maze system to climb, crawl, slide, or jump through. Still another section was set off for electronics and radio-controlled cars, trains, planes, and boats. It wasn’t up there with Solomon Parker’s automated world, but then you could only get so much into a town house without scaring the neighbors.

  This is ridiculous. No kid should be allowed to have this much stuff ! It was un-American. It was disgusting: anything he wanted, Ghoulie’s parents got for him. In fact, there was a good chance they didn’t wait for him to ask. Of course, the reason they got him all this stuff was because they were rarely at home. Pretty good deal, you’d think — everything in the world to play with and no parents around to tell you what you couldn’t do all the time. She wondered if Ghoulie looked at it that way.

  When she finally made it up to his computer loft, Scilla saw computers of every size and shape, along with just about anything that could be attached to a computer, including some parts that only the Department of Defense might recognize.

  Before she could take a good breath, Ghoulie was already online and searching sites with language so technical, Scilla had a better chance of reading Sanskrit. They found the name Malcolm Franck on the website for a major chemical company. He was identified as a scientist who had developed a new kind of insecticide. There was only so much a seventh-grade brain could process, no matter how smart it was, but they knew the word genetics. Apparently, Franck had genetically engineered his insecticide to target certain insects without harming other insects, animals, plants, or human beings. The company billed it as being quite a breakthrough — up there with the invention of the electric lightbulb.

  Dr. Franck’s discovery had made him mucho rich, but it had come at a price. His wife had worked for the same company but had been killed in a toxic chemical spill four years ago.

  “There’s nothing here about their daughter, though,” said Ghoulie.

  Since the lady on the call speaker had mentioned that she was “special,” Scilla suggested he try hitting hospitals and clinics to look for records about her. He found no records at all!

  “It’s beginning to sound more and more like Solomon Parker all over again,” grumbled Beamer.

  “Could be,” Scilla said, “but the lady doesn’t sound like Mrs. Drummond.”

  “You can’t tell from her voice,” said Beamer. “Some people have a special voice to talk with visitors and another one for every day. Remember how greasy-sweet Cinderella’s stepmother sounded at the ball?”

  “That’s a fairy tale, MacIntyre,” Ghoulie said with a wry grin.

  “Oh, she’s hiding something, though” said Scilla. “I’m sure of that.”

  7

  Invasion

  It was D-day, or Pink Day . . . whatever. They were going to invade the Pink Palace! The Star-Fighters had waited until the lady with the pointed nose was out of the house and the father was still at work. All systems were go! They were going to use pretty much the same procedure that had gotten them to Solomon Parker. Hopefully, the Pink Palace wouldn’t have as big a yard or be guarded by robots that looked like giant daddy longlegs.

  Of course, they couldn’t climb all the backyard fences and walls between Beamer’s house and the Pink Palace, and they couldn’t just drop into her backyard with parachutes. That left the old “me Tarzan, you Jane” transportation system — through the trees. There wouldn’t be any swinging, though. They had discovered secret passages through the trees. You see, somebody or something had broken or trimmed back tree branches to form archways through which people could walk. These arched tunnels went from tree to tree all over the neighborhood. I
t wasn’t as if Murphy Street didn’t have enough mysteries. This one, though, was really weird. Secret passages were supposed to be in old houses and underground, not in the treetops.

  “Have you checked to see if one of these passages goes through our tree?” asked Ghoulie.

  Beamer’s face stretched into a sheepish expression. “Come to think of it, I guess I haven’t.”

  “Holy tamole!” said Scilla. “Do we even know if one happens to cross over her yard?”

  “We’ll just have to take our chances,” said Beamer. “If it doesn’t, we may have to make a little detour to get there. Come on,” he said. “Let’s start lookin’ in our tree. Spread out. Remember these things aren’t all that easy to spot unless you happen into them.”

  The tree was filled with the sound of swishing and creaking branches as they each took a different route up through the branches. Then it happened like magic. One moment Scilla was removing a twig that had snapped into her face, and the next she ducked down and around to see the passage rotate into view, front and center. It was like she’d suddenly switched from a 2-D to a 3-D world. “Whoa!” she said. “Hey, y’all, I found it!” she shouted to the others.

  The first time they were in one of these tree tunnels, it had been winter. Now, with leaves starting to pop out all along the way, it looked like the passage had green wallpaper. Magical and fanciful is how Scilla thought of it, like something out of a fairy tale. “There it is,” she said when Beamer and Ghoulie joined her. “Not exactly straight and true, but mostly running along the same direction as Murphy Street.”

  “Which means it will probably cross the backyard of the girl’s house,” said Beamer.

  Scilla had the sense they were walking in one of those hedge mazes. With the sunlight shooting between the leaves, it was very bright, almost like walking in the sky. That’s not to say it wasn’t scary. After all, the branches below their feet weren’t all that close together. Every once in a while, she lost her footing and fell through. There were plenty of hand-holds, though, so she always caught herself — at the cost of a few scrapes and scratches. Scilla planned to wear long sleeves next time — maybe even a jean jacket.