Apart from the stink of rotting flesh and the fact that bits of flesh and bone fell away from my body and I was physically repulsive to everyone I met, I guess being a zombie was preferable to being one of Mortlake’s other undead citizens. At least it was the way Max told it.
“And then there are ghouls . . . don’t even get me started.”
He’d been talking for the better part of an hour as we lay in the half-dark of Mrs. Looker’s wrecked basement, both wriggling uncomfortably on a couple of old, soggy mattresses.
So many thoughts were jostling for position in my head, but Evil Clive’s voice continued to repeat the same ominous warning over and over again: Just make sure that you are always in control. But what did he mean? Could I actually lose possession of myself? Did he mean just the rogue arm or my entire body? My . . . soul? I shuddered at the thought. I really couldn’t bear thinking about it.
“And the ghasts . . . well, they’re just a pair of legs and half a chin, really. . . .”
Unbelievable. Max was still gabbing on. But not absolutely everything he’d said was entirely pointless . . . especially when it came to Jemini.
We’d been forbidden from leaving the house on Prospect Hill by Evil Clive, who’d decided that Jemini’s fate was a community issue.
Max didn’t agree, but nothing could have prepared me for the reason why. The astonishing fact he’d told me was still bouncing around inside my head, to the point where I couldn’t really focus my attention on any of the disgusting stuff he’d told me since.
“Jemini is your SISTER?” I repeated, interrupting some hideous and strangely boring fact about ghouls eating corpses. “B-but how can she be? When you first introduced me to her, you just said she was a vampire! Evil Clive’s second-in-command, you said!”
Max shrugged. “It’s true: she bosses everyone around when Clive’s busy . . . but she’s still my sister, and that’s why I’m not going to let anyone tell us we can’t go after Cheapteeth on our own . . . even if it is Evil Clive.”
“But I don’t understand! Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
Another shrug.
“It never came up. Besides . . . there’s a reason we don’t talk much about it. You know, painful memories and stuff.”
The horror of the situation didn’t dawn on me immediately, but—as I was lying in the dark, listening to the rain splashing through the floorboards above—the obvious truth suddenly hit me.
“Oh no—you were from the same family. That must have been awful . . . and not just for you: for your folks.”
Max didn’t say anything for a long time, and I wondered if I’d made him angry with such an obviously stupid statement.
“Jemini drowned in a lake when we were on a family holiday. It was icy, and we were being stupid. I tried to save her . . . but I . . . couldn’t.”
I let out a deep sigh, watching the stinky green mist that now passed for my breath as it hung in the air. To my surprise, it was my next question that seemed to cause Max the most distress.
“So did you die trying to save her?” I asked.
My werewolf friend sat up, sharp. His features were dark, and his eyes were filled with tears.
“Let’s talk about something else,” he muttered. “There’s no point dwelling on the past. It’s OVER.”
“I just want to try to understand . . . that’s all.”
Max put a hand to his face and didn’t move it. For a moment I thought he might collapse in a fit of anguish, but he started to speak again . . . and his voice was an empty pit of despair.
“Jemini died saving ME,” he said, trying to stop himself from shaking as the memory resurfaced. “I was a bad kid, and I fell in with the wrong crowd. I was doing stupid stuff to try to impress them. Then things got out of hand. One day, we were out to steal a bike, but then two of the older kids stole a car instead. I didn’t want to go with them, but I didn’t have the guts to stand up to them. Jemini tried to stop me. We had a bad accident, and they rolled the car into a lake. We all got out . . . but Jemini . . .”
“Didn’t.” I finished the sentence for Max but felt so sad looking at him that I didn’t know what to say or do.
I was about to apologize for bringing up such a painful subject when a noise from the floor above caused us both to jump.
“What was—”
Max coughed and dried his eyes.
“Mrs. Looker’s just gone to bed,” he muttered. “That’s our cue: we’re leaving.”
I watched as Max leapt to his feet and grabbed for the backpack he’d spent so much of the evening filling with assorted supplies.
“Now listen, Ed,” he muttered, sniffing the air as if some dusty cloud in the cellar could give him the latest news from all over town. “Mrs. Looker has put a field around the house to stop us from leaving, so we’re going to have to go via the sewer. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you how dangerous it’s likely to be. . . .”
I shook my head. Nothing except a total mind-wipe would ever remove those memories.
He mooched over to the middle of the room and dragged back one of the mattresses, revealing an old and half-crumbled wooden trapdoor.
“I also need to ask you a big favor,” he went on, wrenching up the wooden portal and splashing into the murky darkness.
I took one last glance around the basement and followed him down.
“Anything,” I said. “You can ask me for any—”
“I need that big gut you’ve got flopping over your trousers, there.”
We both looked down. At least Max had the decency to look slightly embarrassed.
I’d never been what you would call fat, but my ever-so-slightly fleshy stomach was still largely intact. It was hanging over my jeans a bit, but not much.
“You want this?” I said, nervously gripping a handful and squeezing it between my thumb and what was left of one forefinger.
“Yeah. It’s for the ghouls. The ones in the sewers are wild beyond belief—we need something to distract them. Er . . . sorry, dude.”
I looked down and gulped back a burp of disgust. Then I closed my eyes, grabbed a handful of my own flab, and tugged. It came away and hit the ground with a sickening plop . . . as my own voice echoed inside my head.
You better get used to this, Ed. If Evil Clive really is a zombie, you might as well let go of some fat now before it all just falls away. . . .
Max scooped up the fleshy slice. “That should be enough, buddy. Thanks.”
Ten minutes later, we were both proceeding at a decent pace through the sewer, Max stopping every few seconds to break off a piece of my gut and sling it along one of the many side tunnels.
“Keeps them hunting in all the wrong places,” he explained. “You’ve done us a great favor. Try not to keep thinking about it.”
Nice words . . . but they were easier said than done . . . especially since I could now see a small section of my own pelvis. Fortunately, a distant roar shifted my concentration.
“What the hell was that?” I spluttered, suddenly darting glances down every new junction as Max headed purposefully down the central passage. “Ghouls?”
Max shook his head, and I noticed that his arm hair had begun to bristle. We both increased our pace, but a second roar—still far off but definitely closer than the first—spurred Max into a healthy sprint.
I tried my best to keep up, but I had my work cut out. It was like trying to match speed with a guy on horseback.
“Let me guess,” I panted, as we booked it down several new tunnels. “There’s a big daddy ghoul that’s twice the size of all the others.”
Max laughed. “I wish. The thing that’s following us is called Mush, and it would make a ghoul daddy look like a baby hamster.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
I prayed to the gods that Max was lying, exaggerating, maybe even pulling my leg. But he wasn’t . . . and I know that because we ran into the thing known as Mush on the next bend.
To this day, I can scarcely describe it. . . .
EIGHTH MISTAKE:
When you see something terrible, something hideous, something so out of your comfort zone that your skin itches and your heart thumps out of your chest, it is not unusual for a strange state of heightened awareness to take over your body.
It happened to me, because Mush was quite literally an assault on the senses. I could see him, but I honestly had no idea what I was looking at; I could hear him, but the buzzing set my teeth on edge; I could smell him . . . and that nearly killed me all over again.
Mush took up the entire tunnel. There was no way around it, over it, or under it.
Mush was . . . a face.
A face.
It took up the entire sewer passage, as if a giant had been squeezed into a tube. I could see what pas-sed for a nose, mouth, and eyes, but these features all ran toge-ther like a poached egg. To top off the incredible view, the mouth suddenly split open, revealing black and yellow teeth the size of fence posts.
“Run,” Max growled, backing up quickly. “He’s going to spew! RUUUUUN!”
I turned on my heels, but not fast enough.
Mush opened his enormous mouth and vomited a billowing cloud of gas in our direction. It hurtled down the tunnel at an incredible speed, finally triggering the panic inside my stomach to spur me away.
I splashed back to the junction and stopped dead. Max was nowhere to be seen.
I wanted to call out to him, but the roar that erupted from behind me would have drowned out whatever I tried to shout. An intense buzzing filled my ears as the green cloud spilled from the mouth of the tunnel I’d just left.
I glanced both ways and opted for the tunnel on my right, hoping it might also have
been Max’s choice. I threw all my might into a determined sprint for the end but slipped on the slimy under path and fell face-first into the murky waters of the main sewer river.
Trying desperately not to breathe in any of the hideous lumps that floated in the filthy wash like crackers in a soup, I propelled myself back to the sidewalk, clambering onto the slippery path and almost sliding off again as I squinted to see along the tunnel I was trying to negotiate.
Then all at once I was embroiled in a complete nightmare.
Three wild ghouls appeared at the junction with the next tunnel, their eyes glowing red and their tiny mouths salivating with savage hunger. Each one was a pale but fleshy blob with wobbling, sack-like folds of skin, and they moved deceptively fast. Two were crawling along the passage walls at a heavy pace, while the third scurried across the roof of the tunnel.
I tried to retrace my steps . . . but there was Mush, its enormous face shadowed in another swath of swirling cloud.
The roar, this time, was deafening, a wild, primal boom of sound . . . but it only seemed to stop one of the ghouls from advancing. The other two had evidently decided that their hunger was more important than their safety and came scampering toward me even faster than before.
I did some quick, on-the-spot calculations in my head and came up with the following options.
One: Run forward, fight the ghouls, and most likely end up shredded into ribbons.
Two: Run backward, get eaten by Mush, partially digested, and then probably plopped out in some subterranean sewer pipe with anything else it might have recently eaten.
Three: Stay where I was, get shredded by the ghouls, and then eaten by Mush.
I was still trying to think of a fourth option when a tidal wave of puke exploded from the giant, pulsating head and swept down the tunnels like an angry sea, blasting into me with the unswerving force of a major hurricane.
I gulped, then cried out, then spat. I was determined not to swallow any of the rancid vomit.
“Arghghghghggh!”
The stink of fish guts and puke was completely engulfing. I was turned over and over in the water like a fish caught in a swirling whirlpool.
I tried to swim away, but fate had it in for me . . . and I was dashed against the side of the tunnel.
I smacked my head hard on the sidewalk just as the monster attacked.
The world became a mass of blurred ima-ges I knew I’d rather not see. As the first ghoul was bitten in half and the sewer wall sprayed with a shower of fresh blood, I began to lose consciousness.
My last thought before Mush devoured the remaining ghouls and the horrible green waters of the river closed over my head was I wonder what happened to Max.
Then I was carried away on the tide of vomit, and everything went dark.
Waking up in a nice warm bed is lovely. Waking up on a wet bed in a cold room is not so lovely but still—in the scheme of things—kinda okay.
Waking up in a stinking, filthy sewer is neither lovely nor kinda okay, and waking up at the bottom of the sewer river needs a whole new definition . . . because, sadly, VOMITIZATION isn’t yet recognized as a proper word.
It should be.
The world was a gloomy emerald color, and this was because I’d sunk to the bottom of a green river in a waterway pumped with green chemicals. I felt like a really sick little fish in a pond next to a nuclear power plant.
To make matters worse, something long and thin floated past me . . . and there were corn kernels in it.
I’ve never moved so fast in my life.
I practically grew gills to swim out of that river.
When I surfaced, there was no sign of the ghouls or Mush, and—thankfully—a distant roar signaled that the latter was now some way off.
“Max!” I called in a frantic sort of half-whisper. “Max! Can you hear me?”
Nothing. I was angry and frustrated. I still couldn’t believe the ragged little fur ball had blown me off in order to save his own shaggy hide.
I stomped off down the west tunnel, keeping to the walkway and trying to mutter under my breath. I decided to turn left at every new junction, which seemed like a great idea until I passed the same rotting fish carcass twice.
Alternating lefts and rights worked much better . . . especially when I rounded a bend to find Max halfway up a ladder.
“About time!” he said upon catching sight of me. “Quick! Help me with this manhole cover!”
I glared up at him.
“I wouldn’t help you pick your own nose, you flea-bitten mutt! You left me here alone!”
Max grinned, flashing his elongated teeth as he returned his attention to the cover.
“I told you to run! I can’t babysit you through everything, you know.”
“Babysit me?”
“Yeah . . . besides, Mush would probably have spat you out anyway. You smell almost as bad as he does, and even eaters have some taste.”
He burst out laughing as I snatched hold of the lower rungs and began to climb.
“I’d hurry up if I were you, Ed. Judging by that last roar, he’s on his way back.”
“Then maybe we should keep the noise down—”
Max ignored me and started to hammer on the manhole cover above.
“We must be on the outskirts by now!” he said, between strikes. “C’mon, QUICK!”
The cover finally gave way, and Max rolled out into the moonlight. I hurtled after him, and together we managed to haul the great disk back into its slot. Then a rumble beneath us shook the ground, and Max and I tripped as we tried to get to our feet.
“What is that thing?” I managed, clinging to the ground while the thundering chaos continued beneath me. The noise was worse than a subway train at rush h
our.
Max blew out a puff of cold night air. “Mush used to be an eater,” he said.
“Like Tom?”
“Yeah, in the beginning . . . but he got trapped in the sewer and grew long instead of out. Now he’s just this massive length of flesh, like a giant snake with a big human face.”
“Big isn’t the word.” I shuddered. “Did you see that gas he threw up?”
“That wasn’t gas!” Max laughed. “That was a swarm of tiny flies. They live in his teeth, clinging to the bits of corpses that stick to the gums.”
I felt sick.
Physically sick.
The full moon was keeping a watchful eye over the nocturnal landscape of Mortlake. It bathed the edge of the forest in a pale wash of evening light.
“We’ll keep to the woods,” Max suggested, already heading off toward the first line of trees. “Less chance of a bad encounter in there. . . .”
We entered the woods and I noticed with some relief that Max immediately found the best trail. He must have known this place like the back of his hand: he didn’t even need to hit the ground for a sniff.
“This way. It’s pretty much a straight route from the north side of the wood to Midden Field. Don’t you remember?”
I nodded vaguely, but the truth was I didn’t remember much from my old life . . . and I was forgetting more and more every day. It started with little things, like the layout of the town and a few street names I couldn’t quite recall, then progressed to faces from my past and random memories that didn’t seem clear in my head. It was frightening, and the older stuff was disappearing fast, as if my memory was one long escalator being chewed up from the bottom. I wondered how long it would be before I forgot my favorite times at school, or even—and this I couldn’t bear thinking about—the faces of my parents.
I could feel the sadness swallowing me up, and even though I tried everything not to dwell on it, my mind raced away.
Undead Ed and the Demon Freakshow Page 4
