Meddling Kids

by Edgar Cantero

  “Copy, Al. There’s a clearing over there. We’ll meet you in—”

  The communication was cut exactly then.

  On the radio, it was just a spittle of static. But Nate and Kerri and Andy and Tim didn’t need the radio: they saw it happen in front of their eyes. They didn’t understand it; reason rejected it. But they saw it anyway.

  What they saw, altogether spanning no longer than three seconds, was something—a sequoia, an oil derrick, perhaps a colossal snake—darting out of the water, piercing the gunship’s sides, curling around it, and bringing it crashing down. In spite of common intuition, the fall was so violent that the helicopter just broke apart against the water. A spinning rotor snapped like a twig and the spark ignited a short-lived fire whose flames swam and choked over the sudden frantic waves while the rest of the helicopter was dragged to the bottom.

  It had long disappeared from sight before Andy and Kerri succeeded in boiling down all the impossible interpretations of the thing they’d just glimpsed into some sort of tentacle. And by then, Nate had almost convinced his own confounded brain that the disproportionate, insane, blatantly wrong-sized-for-earth leviathan that had just swatted a four-ton gunship like a fruit fly in front of his eyes was, most likely, one of Thtaggoa’s fingers.

  PART FIVE

  ANNIHILATION

  The hills began to rumble. A booming, vibrating, quadruple-bass murmur shook the continent under their feet and the bones in their bodies.

  Tim paced in circles, whining at the inconvenience of earth-crust displacement, begging for some comfort. Not that Kerri could give him any: her mind was stuck on the spot on the lake were she had last seen Captain Al, gone in a whiplash—the spot now disturbed by a new, ominously regular pattern of ripples expanding in every direction, to the farthest, tiniest confines of Sleepy Lake, announcing to the world that the dimension of whatever came next would be unprecedented.

  Suddenly the earth struck an impossibly low note. It was a single descending pound, so grave the kids felt it in their guts, not their ears, and it had Tim digging his nails into the mud, fur bristled up, and suddenly at some point in the middle of the lake, far from the devastated Deboën Isle, the water dropped.

  And then the vortex turned white. Like a massive cloud swimming up to the surface.

  Which was exactly what was happening, Kerri thought. A limnic eruption.

  The lake was boiling. Microscopic bubbles rose to surface from the black depth, covering the lake with froth, building on it, growing, spreading to the shore, and the fizzing tide began to crawl up, inches first, then feet, suddenly yards, and before the kids could even step back they found the ground flooded up to their ankles, except for Tim, who ran all the way to the trees to escape it, and from there he demanded the lake to go back.

  And it did. The waters quickly retreated, yielding half of their conquered territory, while the vortex in the middle only grew.

  And then everything stopped.

  And then there was the blast, an invisible explosion that knocked the kids from their feet and blew askew all the trees around the shore, all along the perimeter of the lake, for miles.

  And when Andy sat up and breathed, her body returned a single, positively unbelievable message: Breathe what?

  The eruption had swept away every molecule of useful air in a two-mile radius. And the fall had slammed the last lungful of oxygen out of her body.

  She suddenly understood that this mental connection was the first of about ten she’d be able to make before passing out.

  And that one just now was the second. A genuine waste.

  She checked her clothes. She’d been carrying a respirator around her neck all this time, or so she believed; she’d lost it amid the butchery. She turned to see Kerri and Nate, whom the blast had pushed farther behind. Kerri was clutching her neck. Nate just lay in a pool of lather, gasping like a goldfish.

  Tim, farther away, had already lost consciousness. At least.

  —

  She staggered up, only to fall back on her knees two steps closer to Kerri, trying not to think how much precious oxygen she’d just wasted to be next to her when she knew there was nothing she could possibly do to help. She couldn’t conjure air for her. She couldn’t speak. She could hardly move. Her vision fogged up, and her fingers twitched. Kerri registered that, her eyes surrendered to terror; worse, to the assimilation of terror. Hypercapnia, the girls lipped to each other. They were flying express through the symptoms. They’d be dead before they knew it.

  Kerri’s hair became an orange blur. Andy’s head dropped down on the mud. It was cold, but she didn’t care. She could have sworn her right arm was around Kerri’s waist last time she could see that far. She would die hugging her.

  That idea became almost tolerable.

  —

  A shape inside the orange blob in front of her split from the main cloud.

  Not completely orange.

  It had black racing stripes.

  The 1978 Chevrolet Vega Kammback station wagon, its rigged engine keenly chugging on pure bottled O2, honked gloriously like a choir of Rapture-announcing seraphim as Joey Krantz behind the wheel banged the windshield and shouted, “Andrea!”

  It was a good thing he didn’t say Andy. She might not have reacted to her name at that point. But someone who knew her preference insisting on calling her Andrea—that was the trigger she needed; there was a special reserve of energy in her body to deal with that. It was enough to pump some oxygen into her limbs and make her speed-crawl the ten feet separating her from the car, reach inside through the open driver’s door, and greedily inhale the biggest, loudest dose of cigarette-stained, dog-smelling, pine-deodorizer-blessed lifesaving air she would ever take.

  That one intake was enough to run back to the others, signal Joey to get the Weimaraner, drag both Nate and Kerri across the mud and stuff them on the backseat. Joey tossed Tim on top of them and closed the doors to preserve the oxygen inside. Half a station-wagonful of air was all they had left.

  Tim was, amazingly, the first to regain consciousness. Nate needed only to be shaken, but his restitution was much slower; he was hardly moving when Tim started barking madly into Kerri’s ear. She still wasn’t responding.

  Andy pinched her nose and blew air into her lungs, so angrily no observer would ever call it a kiss of life.

  ANDY: (Massaging her heart.) Kay, come on. Breathe.

  JOEY: Andrea…

  ANDY: (Still.) Kerri, don’t do this, baby, breathe! (Dives into her mouth, continues to massage.) Come on, baby, breathe. Breathe.

  JOEY: An, you gotta see this…

  ANDY: (Crying, bangs fists on her chest.) Motherfucker breathe!!

  Kerri bent up under the punch, eyes open, gasping deafeningly.

  ANDY: Yes! (Hugs her, smothered in bright orange hair charging up, every strand of every curl in high definition.) Yes!

  JOEY: Andrea, we’ve got a fucking problem!

  Andy turned toward the front seat to slap Joey in the head and froze halfway as she caught the landscape. Sleepy Lake had become a maelstrom. But the most remarkable thing was that that wasn’t even remarkable. The water mass had unleashed its own storm, but that was happening in the background, behind the line of creatures. At least three rows of them, walking side by side, all along the shoreline. Marching inland.

  And they didn’t seem to have any trouble breathing at all.

  “Move,” Andy cued, nudging Joey to the passenger seat. “Now.”

  “Where the fuck did those things come from?”

  “Hang on!”

  She clutched, shifted, refused to even make a guess at how much oxygen would be left in the Chevy’s rigged carburetor and how many seconds the engine had to live on that before they reached useful air again, and gunned the car backward toward the waterline, wheels spraying mud into orbit, knocking off at least ten wheezers by the sound of their useless skulls cracking open on the station wagon rear while the others joined in a bloodcurdling cry and
clung on to the bodywork, claws squealing on the glass, teeth snapping at the side mirror showing Andy’s frown as she changed to first and floored the gas, swerving south toward the road.

  That offered her the first full view of the eastern shoreline, plagued with an overlimbed gray swarm of wheezers. Only that had already ceased being remarkable too.

  The remarkable thing now was emerging from the vortex, a thing for which no one had words and Nate was only able to punctuate with “Holy Satan’s crotch.”

  The wheezers, jumping into the Chevy’s path and being bashed away like bowling pins, were kind enough to block the sight of what would have likely rendered the witnesses completely mad. As Andy sharply steered the station wagon to the left and bounced onto a path through the woods, she could afford only the corner of her eye to see it in the mirror, and all she could say was that a mountain, a slithering mountain, had risen from the lake. Nate and Kerri peeped through the back window and still didn’t see it fully. They caught some tentacles, or at least one freight-train-long swirling limb, lined with feelers like a giant centipede; and bright red lava flowing through a highway of veins; and Nate even counted five giant trees like baobabs waving on its top, each the rough size of a blue whale, though red in color, and before the woods blocked it out he caught one of them blossoming into a five-jawed mouth, suggesting the notion that all the giant trees were heads. But they didn’t really see it, the same way one can be in New York and not see New York. Because you can only see New York in satellite pictures.

  Then a wheezer jumped into frame, clinging to the back window like an incredibly grotesque parody of a suction-cup toy, and tried to smash the glass with its head.

  The Vega was doing eighty through a meandering, rippling path about six feet wide, and wheezers were raining from the trees, banging on the car, shrieking through the windows. Andy saw one in the mirror running behind them and taking a leap, and felt it landing on the roof.

  JOEY: What the fuck?!

  KERRI: It’s the carbon dioxide; this is their medium!

  ANDY: Bump ahead!

  The Vega flew off a slope, letting a fir branch swipe off the wheezer on the roof, and landed as gracefully as a buffalo on a quadbike. Another wheezer had clung to the side in the few confused seconds before regaining terminal velocity, shrieking into Kerri’s window.

  KERRI: Where are our guns?!

  ANDY: We lost them!

  JOEY: I carry one. (Draws a revolver, greeted with sudden silence.) I wasn’t sure if it was gonna help.

  ANDY: Well, it can’t hurt!

  A wheezer’s fist suddenly smashed in Joey’s window in a new demonstration of peak strength and perfect timing. Joey stopped the alien claw an inch from dissecting him alive, stuck the cannon out, and blasted the creature away.

  KERRI: Keep going south! We need fresh air!

  ANDY: I’ll take the shortcut!

  JOEY: That’s no shortcut—it’s a mountain bike trail!

  ANDY: Close enough!

  Andy bypassed a turn and swerved south, and the car was flung off the road and into the woods, losing the rear license plate and two yodeling wheezers on the first bump. She kept the gas floored all the way downhill, Attilaing every single bush and bramble and sapling not tough-looking enough to be worth dodging, and landed the station wagon back on track at the other side of the meander, wheels peeling off three geological strata as she steered it back in the right direction and fishtailed on, watching three wheezers stampeding down the same slope after them, landing on the road.

  She ran over the one ahead; Joey leaned out to gun down the one in the rear. The one in the middle stuck itself to the left side of the zigzagging car, punching through Nate’s window. Tim jumped over Nate to bite the slimy arm, making it lose its grip; the hand clung to the broken glass, the rest of the creature dragging along.

  “I need a gun!” Nate shouted.

  “I’m out of ammo!”

  Tim growled as a fourth unforeseen creature almost jumped through Joey’s window, too close for Joey to try to push it out. Andy shouted to use the door; Joey opened it, the creature tried to sneak a second or third arm through the opening, and then Joey pulled it closed again, and once again, and again, and again, until a vicious, slushy crunch and a bump signaled that most of the wheezer had fallen under the wheels.

  Nate grabbed the severed limb and used it to bat the wheezer on his side off the car. “Out!”

  On the third strike it fell tumbling on the road, splashing black blood over the whitened tarmac. The road was improving.

  JOEY: We’re clear! (Frantically seeking confirmation.) We’re clear! (To the others.) Jesus fuck, this is what you normally do?

  KERRI: Tim, stop it! It’s over! Tim! Quiet!

  TIM: (Keeps yapping and pinballing around the backseat.)

  ANDY: We’re fine! We’re fine, let’s try to reach…

  WHEEZER: (Leans in from the roof through the driver’s window, grabs Andy’s face, spreads its jaws attempting to swallow her whole skull.)

  SOMETHING ELSE: (Crashes against the same side of the car, splicing the wheezer in half.)

  —

  The Chevrolet Vega spun out twice before coming to a full stop, twenty yards from the police cruiser. The creature caught in between lay scattered all along that distance.

  Kerri was the first to exit the car and circle it to check on Andy. Blood ran down her head and neck, but she was conscious. Barely sane after the close-up into a wheezer’s mouth, but conscious.

  “Are you okay?” Kerri inquired. “Andy. Andy, look in my eyes. Are you okay?”

  Nate and Joey, the latter toting his revolver, were already limping for the police cruiser. No one had come out of it.

  “Gonna need help here!” Nate called.

  “I’m okay,” Andy said, sighing and swiping the blood off her eyes. “Go check on Copperseed.”

  Kerri approached the Pennaquick County police vehicle to find the officer conscious as well, despite everything else. The air bag had spared his head. His leg didn’t look that good.

  “Deputy?” Joey ventured.

  Copperseed raised a hand, petitioning for a few seconds to pull himself together. He breathed a couple of times, glanced at his leg, stiffed up his upper lip, and then spoke. “Boy, I’m glad we evacked the town.”

  “Me too,” Kerri panted. “We couldn’t stop the eruption; the cloud will hit us soon. We need to go.”

  “Al and his friends…”

  “We lost them.” She willed a long-due sob back down her throat with a hurried promise of real mourning later.

  Joey pointed at the horizon behind them: “Uh…guys…”

  Kerri looked over the cruiser. Over the fir-spiked hills, beyond a swarm of thousands of panicking birds fleeing away, a grayed-out, never-mapped hill had risen. An extraterrestrial karst; a tower wobbling in the wind; a parasitic polyp attached to the planet.

  Tim, badly patched up and limping, burst into a desperate howl at the naked sky.

  Copperseed intoned, “The undergod’s returned.”

  Andy, in the Chevrolet, squinted at the front mirror.

  JOEY: Guys?! What the fuck is that?!

  Nate, eyes mutinying and refusing to look away, simply replied, “Apocalypse.”

  Copperseed turned the key in the ignition. Wasted car parts clattered back to steadiness and the engine roared a groggy Yessir!

  Andy popped out of the Chevy and raised the dislodged hood. The oxygen bottle she and Captain Al had attached to the carburetor earlier came off easily in her hand. She tossed it away and tried the ignition. There was plenty of air for the car to run now; it was a matter of determining how much car was left.

  The discombobulated Chevy Vega revved once. Twice. At the third call, the engine resuscitated.

  “I’m calling in the army,” Copperseed told Kerri. “You go south as far as you can get. And don’t stop. (Blocking an interruption.) Now.”

  “Wait!” Andy had reversed to level with him. “Depu
ty, we’ve got a better chance to stop this if we stay.”

  “We what?!” Joey yelled.

  Andy ignored him. “Deputy, trust us.”

  Copperseed seemed to disagree, but somehow stetted the suggestion. “You will need a distraction,” he said.

  “No, Copperseed, you leave town! You hear me?”

  Copperseed chuckled as he shifted into reverse and switched on the sirens. “Like I’m taking orders from a teenage detective club.”

  And with that he U-turned the car and then floored the gas, speeding past any possible reply and back into town. The rest all squeezed themselves back into the station wagon and followed the patrol car ahead blaring toward the empty streets of Blyton Hills.

  —

  The police cruiser continued downtown, sirens hollering, while Andy steered the Chevy left and sped down the last stretch on Kerri’s street. The gardens were deserted. A little girl’s bicycle lay abandoned on the curb under the blank sky.

  Blyton Hills was a ghost town.

  The little house with the pink shutters stiffened up like an old hen at the amber Vega screeching onto the sidewalk, discharging a crowd of bleeding, mud-soaked misfits into the garden, all jumping over the gate and running indoors, not one of them bothering to wipe their feet on the doormat.

  “Seal and block every door and window!” Andy commanded as she stormed into the living room. “We’re barricading in Kerri’s room!”

  “Are you nuts?” Joey replied. “You expect to lock out that?”

  “Them,” she corrected from upstairs already. “And they don’t know we’re here. Yet.”

  Nate was following her to the second floor and Kerri was taking care of the ground floor. Tim took the penguin Andy had dropped and ran to secure it. Everybody but Joey had something to do.

  “Andy, this is crazy! We have a better chance driving out of town!” he shouted, running upstairs and spotting the girls’ room at the end of the hallway. “Even if we weather out the cloud, you can’t hold back that…(Stops inside the empty room, then spots Andy carrying the mummy of a book, walking past him.)…that fucking mountain, for God’s sake—it will crush us!”