“Yeah, you won't be alive anymore up above,” Billy said. “Sorry.”
Flops stopped walking.
They continued on for a bit, and were all very quiet, until Victoria broke the silence.
“You could always stay here, Mr. Flops, so that you could be alive. I wouldn't be too sad,” the little girl said. But her voice was shaking.
Great, Billy thought. All he needed was for her to start crying again, but Mr. Flops handled the situation just fine.
“That's mighty nice of you, Vic, but I think I'd rather stay with you whether I'm alive or not.”
Victoria snatched the rabbit up in her arms for a big hug. “That's what I hoped you would say,” she said, tossing the bunny over her shoulder to carry him.
It wasn't much longer before they reached the open area, which contained the stairs that would bring them up into the Sprylock family mausoleum and home.
“Almost there,” Billy said as he looked down at the little girl. She could barely keep her eyes open. Flops had fallen asleep against Victoria's shoulder and was snoring loudly.
“What's the matter?” Billy asked.
“I'm tired,” she said, rubbing her eyes.
“Do you think you can make it up those stairs?” he asked, suspecting what her answer would be.
She shook her head no.
Billy sighed, about to ask the question that he was sure he'd regret.
“Do you want me to carry you?”
Victoria nodded happily, hopping onto his back. She wasn't heavy at all, the magic or whatever it was about Monstros City that increased his strength and agility still with him.
“All right, let's do this,” he said, and started up the winding staircase.
About halfway there, Billy realized that he should probably have a talk with the girl. That would be all he needed, to have her start to spout crazy stuff about being in the mausoleum and there being a monster city beneath it, and him being a superhero called Owlboy.
With his luck, somebody might just believe it.
“Hey, Victoria, before we get home, I want to talk to you about all this stuff,” he said, trudging up the stairs. He could feel the little girl getting heavier, and the muscles in his legs start to burn the farther he got from Monstros and the closer he got to the surface world.
“We should make it our own little secret, don't ya think?” he asked. “Just between me and you, what do you think of that?”
His question was met with a piggish snore. Victoria was fast asleep, clutching her stuffed bunny, which had returned to normal, lovingly to her face.
CHAPTER 12
The square of light above gradually loomed closer, and it was a good thing. Billy thought he might have a heart attack, lugging the little girl on his back. She weighed more than he thought she did, and he had to wonder what her parents had been feeding her.
Billy poked his head up from the stone coffin, climbing up and over the side to the dusty stone floor. He laid Victoria, who was still fast asleep, down on the ground and went to retrieve his backpack so that he could change out of his costume and into his normal clothes.
He shoved his Owlboy suit back into the pack and went to wake the little girl up.
“Hey, Victoria.” Billy couldn't resist wetting the end of his pinkie finger and sticking it inside her ear.
Wet willies were the ultimate way to be woken up.
Victoria's face went from calm and serene to absolutely disgusted.
“Gross!” she screamed, swatting Billy's hands away as she rubbed at her ear. “That's the nastiest thing ever, Billy Hooten!”
Billy couldn't help but laugh. “Sorry, couldn't resist.”
The little girl grabbed her stuffed bunny and threw it at him. “Better be careful or I'll be mad at you again,” she said.
Billy caught Mr. Flops and on reflex shoved the stuffed animal in his backpack.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, you'll hate me forever. We gotta get you home.”
Billy took this opportunity to try an experiment.
“Boy, it's sure weird that I found you in here fast asleep… bet you had some pretty crazy dreams.”
“I didn't fall asleep in here, stupid-head,” the charming child yelled. She brushed off the back of her jeans. “I went to Monstros City and used my Destructo Touch.”
She made a crazy sound, holding out her hands to touch him.
“Knock it off,” Billy said, swatting at one of her pigtails.
“And you rescued me from the Sassafras kids, who I thought were my new bestest friends but were using me to rob banks instead.”
Billy stood at the mausoleum door. “Sounds pretty crazy,” he said. “Are you sure you didn't dream all that?”
Victoria smiled at him. “Are you trying to trick me, Billy Hooten?”
“Heaven forbid,” he muttered, knowing that it was pointless to try to convince the little girl otherwise.
The two started on the path through the Pine Hill Cemetery, heading toward the wall that ran along the back of Billy's yard.
“So Monstros City and me being a superhero is going to be our superspecial secret, right?” he asked her.
She had picked up an acorn from the ground and was playing with it. “Why?”
He had to think fast. “Cause it will be just like in the comic books, where only really special people with special powers of their own know about the superhero and his secret hideout.” He held his breath, waiting for her answer.
Victoria walked alongside him quietly, playing with her acorn. “And you can't tell anybody about my Destructo Touch, right?” she asked.
“I promise,” he said. “We'll both have superspecial secrets.”
She nodded happily, eyes twinkling.
They reached the wall and he picked her up, positive that she had to weigh at least two hundred pounds, and helped her over into his yard.
“So are you going to come back in the garage and help me finish my Halloween costume?” he asked.
Victoria went to her Big Wheel, which was still parked in front of the garage door, and plopped down on it.
“Nah, I'm bored with boy stuff,” she said, and started to pedal down the driveway. “Think I'm gonna go play with my dollies.”
And just like that she was on her way, the sound of the plastic bike's wheels fading off in the distance.
Billy looked at his watch and felt like he'd been punched in the stomach by Randy Kulkowski. The Halloween party for school was only hours away, and he still didn't have a costume.
Or do I? Billy thought, remembering the package his mother had left him.
He couldn't get inside the garage fast enough.
The shipping sticker on the top of the box said it was from someplace called The Masqueraders Ball in Bug-squirt, Michigan—wherever the heck that was.
It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that his mother had ordered him a costume. Billy stood over the box, feeling the prickly sensation of nervous perspiration breaking out on his back and neck. One part of him wanted to rip the package open to reveal what was inside, while another just wanted to back away really slowly.
But time was running out. With the contest only hours away, Billy really didn't have much of a choice. It was either wrack his brains to the point of them exploding and running out his ears to come up with a costume, and then making it, or opening up the box and seeing what his mother had gotten for him.
How bad can it be? he thought with a nervous chuckle, sliding his fingers beneath the brown packing paper and ripping it from the box.
Here it was, the moment of truth. Billy stuck his fingernail through the packing tape that sealed the box closed and tore it open.
As long as it's not a monkey in a tutu, he thought with a nervous laugh as he reached into the box. Who knows, maybe it'll be something really cool, he mused, trying to think of something his mother might've stumbled across somewhere that she'd thought would be appropriate for winning the contest.
But no matter how hard
he tried, his brain remained blank, which made the level of anticipation and dread he was currently facing all the worse.
He took a deep breath and pulled the wrapped package from inside the box in a flurry of Styrofoam packing.
At first he had no idea what he was looking at. The costume was white, but it also had black spots. He turned the package over in his hands and still couldn't figure out what it was supposed to be.
He reached down into the box, through the layer of packing peanuts, and found what he was looking for.
The receipt. His eyes darted across the paper until he found the name of the costume. Crazy Cow. With Real Working Udders!
“A cow!” he screamed, tossing the costume back in the box. “She expects me to win the hundred-dollar gift certificate as a stupid cow!”
Billy was on the verge of losing it. As far as he could remember, a cow—or any other farm animal costume— had never won the Connery Elementary School Costume Extravaganza.
“Deep breaths, Hooten,” he said, feeling himself becoming a bit light-headed. This was awful, terrible even. What was he going to do?
He thought about running around in a circle and screaming like a nut, but knew that wouldn't do him much good.
It was sort of funny: here he was, a superhero who had done battle with Slovakian Rot-toothed Hopping Monkey Demons, Sludge Sloggers and bank-robbing squids, and not having the right costume for a Halloween contest was going to kick his butt.
When he looked at it that way, it all kinda seemed stupid.
But he still really wanted to win that gift certificate.
Coming to the slow realization that things weren't looking too good for him, Billy picked up the cow costume with real working udders and tore open the packaging.
He held the black and white outfit before him, disturbed by the rubber udders that stuck out from the costume's front. “There's no way I could wear this,” he said with disgust.
But then he remembered his mother, and how proud of herself she had looked when she'd brought the package into the garage. She really believed that she had gotten him something special.
Billy didn't want to hurt her feelings, but there was no way he was going to show up at the Costume Extravaganza dressed in this unless…
He could feel the beginning of an idea forming inside his head. Billy looked around the garage at the various odds and ends that he had found in people's trash over the years and used on his various secret projects: rubber tubing, bubble wrap, an old-fashioned hair dryer, electric curlers. It was a veritable treasure trove of stuff that he always believed would come in handy someday.
And perhaps today was that day.
He looked at the cow suit again, his imagination in overdrive. He wouldn't even dream of being just a cow for Halloween, but what if he took it to another level. What if this wasn't a normal cow?
The cogs were spinning inside his brain.
What if this was a cow exposed to massive amounts of cosmic radiation that had leaked from the propulsion reactors of a crashed spacecraft? he wondered.
Billy felt a wicked smile spread across his face as he looked at the cow costume in a whole new light.
He had a lot of work to do.
Victoria should have been asleep hours ago.
When she had first come home, she had been certain that she was going to get in trouble for being away for so long, but found that her mommy and daddy hadn't seemed to notice that she'd been gone.
At first she thought it was all kinda confusing, and even asked her mom, who was sitting at the kitchen table reading one of her magazines, if she had missed her. Her mommy had looked up for a second, smiled, patted her on the head like she always did when she didn't want to be bothered and told her to go play.
Maybe I wasn't gone that long, Victoria thought as she headed to the basement to see if Daddy had missed her more than Mommy.
Daddy was watching one of his football games and didn't even look at her when she came down the stairs. She doubted that he would have even talked to her if she hadn't stood in front of his giganticle television and spread her arms so she blocked the screen.
He noticed her then, and told her to go upstairs to bother Mommy.
Leaving the downstairs playroom, Victoria had come to the conclusion that her daddy hadn't missed her either, and that Billy might've been right that lots of time might have gone by in that funny Monstros place, but not as much had gone by here.
It was all very crazy, and for a second she wished she knew how to tell time so that she could see how crazy it really was, but became distracted when Mom had called to her, asking if she wanted a juice box and some animal crackers.
She would have preferred some more poltergeist potion and fried lizard lips, but didn't think her mom had bought any the last time she was shopping at Big Frank's Shop & Save. Victoria had made a mental note to find the lizard lips section the next time she went shopping with her.
Fried lizard lips are awesome!
She spent the rest of the day staying out of Daddy's hair and making some Halloween decorations that she and her mom hung on the front and back doors. Before she knew it, suppertime had come and gone and it was time for her to go to bed.
Victoria didn't think the day would ever come to an end. It felt as though it had lasted twenty-gazillion hours.
Not having any problems with bedtime, she'd gone up to her room, washed up and changed into her Barbie pajamas. It didn't take more than a couple seconds to realize that she really wasn't very tired, and she decided that it might be cool to have a tea party with her dollies.
She'd been tea-partying for a bit when she started to feel her eyes getting heavy, and she knew it wouldn't be long before she fell asleep.
“Guess we're gonna hafta wrap this up, girls,” she told her dolls. “I'm gettin' a little sleepy.”
And it was then that she noticed the sound of a car door shutting outside. Victoria got up from the party and went to the window, looking down into Billy's driveway. She'd arrived in time to see Mr. Hooten getting in the car, with Billy right behind him. He was holding a great big box under his arm, and she figured it was his Halloween costume.
Watching the car drive away, she wondered what Billy had decided to be. She hoped that her suggestion of a fairy princess was the one he'd gone with.
Billy would be an awesome-looking fairy princess.
Unable to fight back a mighty yawn, Victoria decided it was time to go to sleep and left the window to climb into her bed. She was just about to squirm beneath the covers when it hit her.
“Where are you, Mr. Flops?” she asked, scrambling down from her bed to look around her room. “This isn't one bit funny,” she said, looking through her toy box and then her closet for the bunny rabbit.
But she couldn't find him, and she was just about to start crying when she remembered the last time she had seen him.
He hadn't been alive anymore, and she had thrown him at Billy after he had given her a wet willie. She remembered Billy putting him inside his backpack, and the last place she had seen Billy's backpack was in his garage.
Victoria quickly got out of her pajamas, putting on her bright pink sweatsuit, a gift from her grandma Wiggins, and her sneakers.
She knew her mommy and daddy wouldn't let her go outside this late, so she had to be extra-sneaky. What was it that Billy called her when she came outside without her parents knowing? She tried to remember, silently coming down the stairs from her room.
Ninja Girl, that was it.
Daddy was still in the basement—she could hear him cheering for his favorite team—and Mommy was sitting in the living room looking through more of her magazines and having some of her special grape juice.
One of these days, Victoria thought, she would like to have some of that special grape juice. Mommy really seemed to love it.
Without anybody noticing, she went out the kitchen door and into the backyard. The spotlights in the yard went on automatically, and she crossed over into Billy's
driveway on her way to the garage.
But then she heard voices—familiar ones—and ducked down behind some trash barrels, peaking out carefully so she wouldn't be seen.
“Help me, you imbecile!” Sireena Sassafras said to her brother, who had already come over from the cemetery and was standing in Billy's yard. Sireena was on top of the wall, her giant pocketbook slung over her shoulder. Sigmund leaned a really big-looking gun against the wall, and put out his hands.
“Jump down and I'll catch you,” he said to her.
“You'd like that, wouldn't you,” Victoria heard Sireena say. “For me to trust you completely with my safety. But of course I have no choice: I either trust you, or miss out on our hunt for Owlboy.”
Hunt for Owlboy? That doesn't sound very nice, Victoria thought.
“Catch me!” Sireena said, jumping down into her brother's waiting arms. But Sigmund stumbled backward, and the two fell onto the grass in a squealing pile.
They sounded like the piggies at the farm she and her parents had visited a few weeks ago, and she clamped a hand over her mouth so they wouldn't hear her laughing.
Finally they picked themselves up from the ground.
“How did I know you'd disappoint me again?” Sireena said, brushing leaves and grass from her big behind.
Sigmund stomped away from his sister to get his gun. “I won't disappoint where it counts the most,” he said.
Sireena went to the wall and pulled her own really big gun down from where she had left it. “Something tells me you'll fail at that as well,” she said.
“I'll make you eat those words,” he snarled at her, and the monster walked away from his sister standing in the center of the yard. Victoria wasn't sure what he was doing, but he looked like he was sniffing the air. And as he sniffed, he moved his big fat head slowly around.
“There!” he said, suddenly stopping. “I have his stink.”
Sireena came to stand beside him, her big monster eyes looking huge in the darkness.
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“Positive,” Sigmund answered with a creepy smile. “Let's go get him.”
And the two monsters ran off, staying close to the shadows as they headed in the direction of Billy's school.
The Girl with the Destructo Touch Page 11
