by Stuart Gibbs
“Stop it!” Violet yelled at the Barksdales. “You’re being idiots!”
I heard more punches being thrown, a couple curses, and what might have been the sound of someone whacking their head on a toilet.
Tran had now turned around in the front seat to watch the video with me. “These guys ought to have their own reality TV show,” he said under his breath.
My phone buzzed as a text came in from my father. Normally, I might not have switched over to it, but I couldn’t see what was going on anyhow.
Heard from reptile guys. They just got back. Barksdales didn’t have any exotics on property. Even showed the whole house. Call me.
That confused me. The Barksdales obviously had a baby alligator, which I had just seen—and they seemed to have an anaconda as well, as they had promised the girls they’d show it to them. Maybe they could have hidden the alligator, as it was small, but it was hard to imagine how anyone could conceal a fifteen-foot snake in such a small house.
I couldn’t call Dad back, though, as I still needed the phone to follow what was happening. I switched back to the video call. Summer had now steadied the phone, although she was trying to hide the fact that she was still filming and was holding it by her side.
The Barksdales were really pounding on each other, writhing around in the bathroom, ignoring Violet’s pleas for them to stop. Jim shoved Tim’s head down onto the toilet bowl and slammed the toilet seat in his face. Then Tim sucker punched Jim below the belt and flipped him into the bathtub. There was a splash, and Jim screamed in pain. The camera shook a bit, and when it steadied once more, Jim was up on his feet again, although the baby alligator had sunk her teeth into his ear. While Jim wailed and whirled around, the poor little reptile clung on like a living earring.
“Get her off me!” Jim wailed. “Get her off!”
“Don’t hurt her!” Summer warned.
Footsteps boomed in the hallway and the camera shifted to show Pa Barksdale storming toward the bathroom, red-faced with anger. “What in high heaven is going on in here?” he demanded. “You two dingbats had better not be fighting again, or so help me, I’ll punch both your lights out!”
There was another, more final scream of pain. The camera shifted back toward the bathroom. Snappy was no longer latched on to Jim’s ear. She—and a small portion of Jim’s earlobe—were gone. Jim quickly clamped a wad of toilet paper over his ear to stanch the blood.
Pa Barksdale moved into the shot, blocking my view of everything. “What’s happening?”
“Nothing,” Tim or Jim said.
“That’s more like it,” Pa told them. “Now, your mother and I have to go see about a job. You dummies are already on thin ice after letting your stupid snake eat the cat. If we come back and find there’s been any more roughhousing, I’m flushing that darn gator down the toilet. Got it?”
“Yes sir,” Tim and Jim said meekly.
“Good.” Pa stormed back down the hall, clearing the shot again and allowing Summer to keep filming surreptitiously.
A few seconds later, through the car window, I saw the Barksdale parents emerge from the house and head for their pickup.
On the video, Tim turned to Jim and said, “You’re such a tool.”
“You’re the tool,” Jim retorted.
They might have started fighting again if Violet hadn’t said, “You’re both tools. And if either of you throws one more punch, Summer and I are leaving.”
The boys stopped arguing immediately.
“Now,” Violet said sternly, “where’s the anaconda?”
“It’s not here,” Tim said.
“What?” Summer asked. “You told us you had one!”
“We do,” Jim assured her. “But we had to move it.”
Outside the house, the Barksdale parents climbed into their truck and backed out of the driveway, coming very close to Summer’s car. I could see Pa Barksdale reflected in the side-view mirror, studying the car closely.
On the video, Summer asked, “Why did you move the snake?”
“ ’Cause these reptile guys from FunJungle came snooping around,” Tim explained. “That dork Teddy probably tipped them off that we had an anaconda.”
“We didn’t want to get in any trouble,” Jim continued. “So we hid our pets. We put the little gator in an ice chest, but the anaconda was too big for anywhere in the house.”
At that very moment, Pa Barksdale put his truck in gear and punched the gas. His rear tires squealed on the ground, kicking up a spray of gravel that ricocheted off Summer’s car. He was obviously doing it on purpose, being a jerk for no good reason. Then the truck rocketed down the road.
“What the…?” Tran yelled.
I was worried that Tim and Jim would hear him over the phone, but they were too preoccupied by the girls.
“So where’d you hide the anaconda?” Violet asked.
“In the back seat of our parents’ truck,” Tim said proudly.
“Your parents just left in their truck!” Summer exclaimed.
Tim and Jim looked to each other with horror.
There were a pair of screams from the Barksdales’ truck. Screams of abject terror. Even though the truck was several dozen yards away from me, they were still loud enough to hear.
I was well aware that there was an innate, primal response most humans experienced upon coming across a snake. I had stumbled upon plenty of snakes in the wild, and even though I really liked them and knew that most of them were harmless to humans, I had inevitably felt a moment of fear and panic. On each of those occasions, I had screamed in surprise and possibly even sprung back a startling distance, fueled by an instantaneous spike of adrenaline.
So I could imagine that suddenly finding an enormous anaconda slithering around in a confined space with you was bound to be scary. Even if it was your own snake.
The truck swerved wildly, veered off the road, flattened the neighbor’s mailbox, and then smashed into an oak tree. The front end of the pristine vehicle crumpled like tinfoil, and the airbags deployed.
Thankfully, the Barksdales hadn’t been going too fast yet, but I was still worried they might have been hurt. I forgot all about hiding in the car and leaped out to see if they were okay.
I was focused on the truck, rather than anything else around me. So I hadn’t seen the other person coming alongside Summer’s car until I almost clocked them with the car door as I flung it open.
“Sorry,” I said, and then discovered I knew the person I had nearly run into.
It was the person who probably hated me more than anyone else on earth.
Vance Jessup.
11 THE SQUEEZE
The reason Vance Jessup hated me so much was that I had helped bust him for a crime. As a result, he had been sent to juvenile hall, and he blamed me for it—even though he was the one who had broken the law. He was supposed to go for six months, but I had just discovered—a bit too late—that he had been released a few weeks early for good behavior.
I would learn later that his old friends, the Barksdale twins, had invited him over to see their new pets as well, which explained what he was doing outside their house. But all that really mattered at the moment was that Vance had spent the last several months imagining how he would get his revenge if he saw me again—and now I had practically dropped into his lap.
Given that Vance was a meathead and a thug, the entire plan he had come up with for revenge was: “Hit Teddy really hard. A lot.”
I had the exact same reaction to seeing him that Ma and Pa Barksdale had to finding an anaconda in their truck. I screamed in terror.
“You!” Vance snarled. And then he tried to clobber me.
I ducked away and ran.
Tran was already out of the car too, having planned to check on the Barksdales. “Hey!” he yelled at Vance, and chased after us.
At the same time, Tim and Jim barged out onto their porch, having heard the crash. They were so worried about their parents—or possibly their snake—that they
didn’t even register surprise that I was there, not to mention being pursued by Vance. “Oh no!” they exclaimed, upon seeing the truck, and then ran toward it as well.
Summer and Violet expressed much more concern upon seeing Vance and me. They both stopped on the porch and gaped in surprise at what was going on. “Vance!” Summer yelled. “Leave him alone!”
Vance ignored her and kept right on after me.
I ran through the maze of abandoned appliances, trying to put any obstacle I could between Vance and myself. Unfortunately, there was lots of junk hidden in the weeds that made running more difficult than I had expected. I nearly tripped over an old blender, the remains of an ancient lawnmower, and the guts of a washing machine. The good news was that Vance was less agile than me and had trouble avoiding those things too. He stumbled over the lawnmower and went down hard, smashing headfirst into an eviscerated dishwasher.
Sadly, that barely slowed him down. If anything, it made him angrier. Vance was built like a bull, right down to the thick, impervious skull. He sprang back to his feet and howled with rage as he charged after me again.
Tran was also having trouble getting through the yard. I heard him cry out in pain as he bashed his toes on an ancient toaster oven that was lurking in the weeds.
Meanwhile, down the road, the Barksdale parents emerged from their truck, unharmed but furious. Tim and Jim stopped running toward them and started running away in fear. Their parents set after them in the same way that Vance was after me.
“You morons wrecked our truck!” Pa Barksdale yelled.
“It was an accident!” Tim yelled back.
“I’m gonna kill both of you!” Ma warned.
Back at the house, Violet tried to intervene on my behalf. “Vance!” she said sternly. “If you lay so much as a finger on Teddy, I will never even look at you again!”
Vance paused for a moment, as surprised to see Violet there as she was to see him, but then resumed chasing me. “He put me in juvey!” he yelled as a defense.
“You put yourself in juvey!” Violet informed him, but Vance didn’t listen.
The minor distraction had given me at least a little time to formulate a plan, though. The Barksdales had a clothesline, which made sense, seeing as their dryer was disemboweled in the front yard. It was a jury-rigged length of rope sagging between two trees. As Vance came for me again, I yanked hard on it, snapping it taut in his path. Vance literally clotheslined himself, catching himself right in the face, and went crashing down on his back.
Once again, this barely slowed him down.
“Stop trying to hurt him!” Summer yelled to me. “You’re only making him angrier!”
“What else am I supposed to do?” I yelled back in desperation. “Let him catch me?”
I stumbled over a jettisoned toilet and decided to abandon the yard before I impaled myself on something. I shoved the tower of bullet-pocked microwaves into Vance’s path, hoping it might slow him, and then ran down the road in the direction of the Barksdales’ pickup.
The microwaves didn’t slow Vance much.
Summer and Violet leaped off the porch and ran after us. Summer screamed to Tran, who was hopping around on one foot, clutching his wounded toes. “Don’t just sit there! Do something!”
“Like what?” Tran shouted back.
“Get the car and run him over!” Summer suggested. “Maybe that will stop him!”
Ahead of me, the Barksdale parents were still chasing their sons around. Ma Barksdale was so angry that, unable to catch Tim, she simply yanked off one of her boots and flung it at him, catching him in the back of the head with such force that she knocked him down.
Despite the bonks to his head, Vance was still gaining on me. He was much bigger and stronger than me and motivated by revenge. I could hear the thudding of his feet on the road behind me and hear the heaving of his breath. It was like being chased by a rhinoceros. Except that rhinos are generally good-natured.
I ran toward the Barksdales’ pickup, giving it everything I had, thinking that maybe, if I could get there fast enough, I could lock myself inside. Yes, I’d be trapped in a truck with an anaconda, but even that seemed safer than being out in the open with Vance. Unfortunately, I didn’t make it. I was three feet from the truck when Vance caught the neck of my T-shirt and yanked backward, nearly strangling me and pulling me off my feet at once.
I tensed my body, fearing that I was in for a world of pain, but to my surprise, Vance didn’t throttle me. Instead, he made a startled gasp.
I risked a look back at him. His face was white as the fur of a polar bear and his eyes were as big and wide as a bush baby’s.
I then looked where he was looking—at the pickup.
The front left end of the truck was crushed against the oak tree. The hood had folded so that it was peaked in the middle. Steam billowed from the engine, while a faint smell of gunpowder from the airbags still hung in the air.
In his haste to throttle his sons, Pa Barksdale had left the driver’s side door wide open. Julius Squeezer was now slithering out of the truck. About four feet of the snake had emerged so far. Upon seeing us, it had stopped moving forward and now looked our way, its forked tongue flickering.
Even though I had known the snake was going to be big, I was still astonished by the size of it.
I had seen the anaconda at FunJungle plenty of times. That one was longer than Julius, but it was always coiled up at the back of its exhibit, so I had never seen its unspooled body. Now Julius had slithered over the front seats of the truck to the open door, so his massive length and girth were on full display. He was as thick and wide as a palm tree, although there was a watermelon-size lump in his midsection which I recognized as the current location of Griselda. The snake was definitely beautiful, with a bright yellow body mottled with dark patches, although its dark, beady eyes, set in the great wedge of its head, were unsettling. As was the flickering tongue.
The real reason snakes flick their tongues is to help them smell. Most snakes have crummy eyesight and poor hearing, but their sense of smell is excellent, in part due to something called the Jacobson’s organ, which is located in the roofs of their mouths. Snakes collect odors from minuscule moisture particles on their tongues, then stick the forked ends into the Jacobson’s organ, which transfers the images to the brain. Even though I knew all this, it still looked freaky. A shiver went down my spine.
Julius didn’t scare me nearly as much as he scared Vance, though. Tim and Jim apparently hadn’t told him what their new pet was, and Vance looked terrified by the sight of it. He released his grip on my shirt and slowly shifted his weight to make sure that I was between him and the snake.
“Wh-wh-wh-what is that?” he whispered.
My own fear was quickly replaced with elation. I knew Julius wouldn’t be too dangerous. He wasn’t quite big enough to try to eat me, and besides, he had already consumed Griselda that morning, meaning he probably wouldn’t be hungry again for another few days. However, there was no need for me to share any of that with Vance.
“That’s a Mongolian death adder,” I whispered back, doing my best to sound equally terrified. “The biggest one I’ve ever seen. It escaped from FunJungle last week.”
“Is-is-is-is it dangerous?” Vance stammered.
“Extremely,” I said. “It has the most powerful venom of any snake on earth. If it so much as touches you with that tongue, you’ll drop dead. This one has already killed six people and nine dogs since it escaped.”
Vance gave a little whimper.
I heard the distinct sound of water trickling onto the ground behind me. “Did you just wet yourself?” I asked.
“No!” Vance said, a little too quickly, shifting back into full-on jerk mode.
“Shhhh!” I told him. “They’re drawn to loud noises—and the smell of urine.”
Vance whimpered again. “What do we do?” he asked.
“The Mongolian death adder is extremely fast,” I warned with mock sincerity. “
Hopefully, we can move faster. Are you ready to run?”
“Definitely,” Vance said.
“All right. On the count of three. One… two…”
Vance ran before three. Which I had been expecting. Like most bullies, Vance was a coward at heart. If the snake had truly been dangerous, he would have been leaving me to get attacked. Now he fled back the way he had come as fast as his feet would carry him.
“It’s coming for you, Vance!” I screamed after him. “Run!!!!!”
The girls took my lead. “It’s right behind you!” Summer yelled.
“Whatever you do, don’t look back!” Violet added.
Vance was quite fast normally, and now he had fear propelling him as well. He shot down the street like an Olympic sprinter and kept on going until we couldn’t see him anymore.
Tran came hobbling along, laughing at Vance’s flight. “What scared that guy so much?” he asked.
“Only a snake,” I said.
“He was that scared by a snake?” Tran laughed even harder—until he noticed Julius. I got the sense Tran had no idea that a snake could possibly get that big. He stopped laughing, made a tiny gasp of terror—and passed out right in the street.
“Thanks for all your help,” I told him.
Julius flicked his tongue a few more times, then began to slither out of the truck again.
I realized that I had to stop him from going any farther. Snakes were notoriously hard to track down. A year before, a black mamba had escaped at World of Reptiles and had never been seen again, despite the mobilization of the entire reptile squad. True, Julius was much bigger, but we were right on the edge of the forest, where there was a lot of room for him to hide, and a snake that size could wreak havoc on the local wildlife. Plus, for all I knew, Julius Squeezer might have really been a Juliet—and pregnant. Which could have led to a whole crop of anacondas loose in the woods.
Summer and Violet arrived at the truck and saw Julius for the first time. Both were as unsettled as I was by the sight of the snake.
