by Rob Vlock
I got out of the SUV and slipped into the same alley where I had first met Pumpkin. Luckily, the alley contained no giant animals at the moment.
I peeked around the corner and watched Alicia get out of the car with a bottle of drain cleaner we’d picked up at a convenience store on our way to Dr. Shallix’s office. She walked around the bumper, opened the gas tank, and gingerly poured the drain cleaner in. Then she bolted into the alley, hands over her ears.
“How do you even know Dr. Shallix is a Tick?” I asked as we crouched, waiting for something to happen.
“Sven, you told me he has a three-hundred-pound pet Chihuahua,” she snorted. “What do you think?”
“I guess you have a point,” I replied. “He was always a little . . . off. Plus, he was awfully interested in keeping what happened to my arm a secret. So you’re sure this is going to work?”
“Absolutely,” she replied. “I read about it on the Internet. Drain cleaner plus gasoline equals boom! Perfect diversion. Any second now.”
A whole bunch of seconds passed, but there was no boom.
Five minutes later, I dropped my hands from my ears and sighed. “This isn’t working.”
“You have a better idea?” she growled.
I thought for a moment. “Yeah, actually. Give me your phone.”
Clutching her phone, I slunk along the wall to the front door of Dr. Shallix’s office. His phone number was displayed in white letters right on the frosted glass door. I tapped the numbers into the phone and hurried back to the alley.
She looked at me. “What are you—”
“Shh!” I hissed.
Dr. Shallix’s voice echoed through the handset.
“Hello? Dr. Shallix?” I said, trying to make my voice sound as deep as I could. “This is Officer Carter—uh, Cartersonman from the Schenectady Police Department. We have an unlicensed, uh, dog here that we believe belongs to you. Goes by the name of Pumpkin. We’re going to need you to come down here right away to fill out some paperwork and claim her.”
In the silence that followed, tendrils of fear wriggled down the back of my neck. He wasn’t buying it.
Finally, he spoke. “Of course, Officer. I shall come as soon as I am able, yes?”
“Very good, sir,” I said. “We’ll see you shortly.”
Then I hung up the phone and handed it back to Alicia with a smug grin.
Alicia’s eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch. “Yeah, not bad. But not as cool as my plan.”
In a few seconds, Dr. Shallix emerged from the building. We peered around the corner and watched him lock the door and walk to his car.
Suddenly, he turned toward us. We dove back into the alley and pressed ourselves against the rough brick wall. Did he see us?
Alicia slid the Tick popper out of her backpack. We waited, expecting his big, bristly head to pop around the corner and discover us. But after a few seconds, the car door opened and closed. The engine started and Dr. Shallix drove off toward the police station.
We crept to the office door and pulled on it. It didn’t budge.
“Locked. Great plan, Einstein. How are we going to get in? ” she asked.
“Follow me,” I said confidently, leading Alicia back into the alley.
The Dumpster that Pumpkin had damaged was gone. A new one stood right below the window.
“There,” I said, pointing up at the window.
I took a step toward the Dumpster, when SMASH! Alicia hurled a chunk of concrete through the glass.
I turned on her. “Why did you do that?”
“That’s how we’re going to get in, isn’t it?”
I climbed onto the Dumpster and easily slid the unlocked window open. Glass fragments rained down around me.
“Oh,” Alicia said a little sheepishly. “I guess that works too.”
I led Alicia through the waiting room, past the tank full of fish, and down the hall to the door Dr. Shallix went through the other night.
“I got it,” Alicia said. She pulled a crowbar out of her backpack.
“Hold on,” I said as she started to put the crowbar to the door frame. “Is your answer to everything to break it or blow it up?”
She nodded thoughtfully. “Pretty much.” She placed the end of the crowbar between the door and the frame. She leaned into it, and with the sound of splintering wood, the door sprang open.
We stepped into a windowless, pitch-black room. “So, hey. I was thinking,” Alicia said as we searched for a light switch, “isn’t the police station only about four blocks from here?”
Oops. I hadn’t thought of that.
“We have to hurry,” I whispered.
“You think? Wow, that fancy computer brain of yours sure is smart,” she replied.
I shot her a look that said her sarcasm wasn’t appreciated. Of course, she couldn’t see it in the dark.
I found a switch and flipped it. The room suddenly flooded with bright light. It was much larger than I’d expected. Big, metallic machines lined the walls, glinting beneath the cold fluorescent tubes. It looked more like some kind of super-high-tech laboratory than a pediatrician’s office.
Alicia grinned. “Bingo.”
She walked around, inspecting various pieces of equipment, occasionally pausing to run her fingers over a set of controls.
When she came to a massive machine with what looked like two sliding doors on the front, she stopped. The contraption stood about eight or nine feet high and probably twice as wide. In between the two doors were a cluster of impossibly complex-looking controls. Mostly touch screens with a few dials and buttons thrown in for good measure.
“Here it is.” Alicia smiled.
I raised my eyebrows. “Here what is?”
She looked at me and smirked. “Your momma.”
“Ha-ha,” I replied sarcastically.
She cocked her head. “Who’s joking? It’s a replicator. Basically a big copy machine. It’s what Ticks use to reproduce. I figured if Shallix made himself a big pet dog, he’d probably have one. It’s a pretty cool piece of gear, actually. You can assemble a new Tick from design plans or make copies of existing Ticks or, well, just about anything that’s alive. Humans, animals, whatever. It’s what made you. Now get in.”
“You’re going to copy me?” I asked in alarm, suddenly feeling like her plan was even worse than I had suspected. “I guess this is the part of your plan you forgot to tell me.”
“Forgot. Chose not to. Whatever. We need a copy of you to send home so your parents won’t raise the alarm. I didn’t want you to chicken out. ”
I didn’t like where this was going. “Why would I chicken out?”
She shrugged.
“But wait. Are you sure this is a good—”
“Just shut up and get in the machine,” she said, sliding her fingers across a couple of touch screens.
The door on the left slid open. But I couldn’t get in. Because it was already occupied.
CHAPTER 20.0:
< value= [Will and a Half] >
“WILL!” I YELLED, RECOGNIZING THE tall, skinny form inside the machine.
His entire body, apart from his head, was tied up with a bunch of white bandages. I almost laughed, since it reminded me of the time he dressed as a mummy for Halloween a few years back using real bandages. Halfway through the night, he had to pee, but he hadn’t left any way to get his costume off. In the end . . . well, let’s just say it’s a good thing that bandages are absorbent.
The look in Will’s eye, however, immediately smothered any impulse I had to laugh.
“Help me! Get me out of here!” he cried.
I stepped over to untie him, but Alicia pushed me aside. She had her Tick popper pointed at Will’s chest.
“What are you doing?” I exclaimed. “It’s Will!”
“We don’t know that,” she said coldly. “We’ve already dealt with one Tick that looked like him.”
“Alicia, put down the gun!” I yelled. “Help me untie him!”
>
“Not until we see what’s behind door number two,” she insisted.
With a few swipes of a touch pad, she made the second door slide open, revealing a huge glass cylinder filled with a bloodred liquid. The liquid started draining out of the cylinder. As soon as the last of the liquid was gone, the glass slid down into the floor.
And there, standing in the machine was . . . something. It looked kind of like . . . well, I couldn’t tell what it looked kind of like, since I had never seen anything that looked like it. From the waist down, it was . . . Will. I could tell because of the skinny, freckly legs and huge feet. But from the waist up, it was just a small square metal box—a central processor—sticking up in the air on the end of a silver cable.
“What is that?” Will and I said together.
“An incomplete copy,” Alicia told us. “Shallix must have started it just before we called him. Mom and Dad told me they saw something like this wandering around the woods once. If something interrupts the replication process, this is what you get.”
She kicked at it halfheartedly. “Without the upper half, it’s pretty much harmless.”
Half Will took a few steps forward, bumped into the examination table in the center of the room, and fell over.
Alicia put the Tick popper away and helped me unwrap the real Will. It was like a really bizarre Christmas Day where Santa gave out goofy, skinny kids instead of toys. Still, I was pretty relieved to have my best friend back.
As we unwound the bandages, I turned to Alicia. “How did you know he’d be here?”
She looked at the floor for a moment before answering. “I didn’t. I just came here to find a replicator. Honestly, I was kind of hoping you’d forget about Will so we could focus on, you know, stopping the day of reckoning.”
“You seriously would have just left him?” I gasped. “How could you do that? How can you not care?”
“I didn’t come here to save him. I came here to stop the Ticks. We only have two days, remember?”
“You know what? If everyone were like you, maybe the human race wouldn’t be worth saving!”
She glared at me. “Oh, is that what you want? You’re sounding more and more like the Tick you are!”
I fumed at her silently.
“Um, guys?” Will said in a daze. “What’s going on?”
We filled him in. He looked a little sick when we got to the part about Fake Will’s head exploding like a piñata full of raw meat. I thought it was a good analogy, anyway.
When we finished the story, Will nodded gravely.
“That . . . that . . . sort of explains a lot, actually,” he said.
For his part, Will didn’t have much to add. The night after my arm fell off, he woke up in the back of Dr. Shallix’s car. He was brought here, tied up with gauze when he tried to escape, and stuffed into the replicator without any explanation. Other than bathroom and meal breaks, he’d spent most of the last two days in the machine.
I clapped his shoulder. “Seriously, bro, it’s good to see you. I thought you were de—”
Alicia interrupted me by clearing her throat loudly.
“Yeah, before you guys start planning some kind of bro party or whatever, maybe we can, you know, focus. Shallix will be back any minute now.”
And, with that, she shoved me into the replicator.
CHAPTER 21.0:
< value= [I Meet the Worst Thing Ever] >
THE DOOR SLID CLOSED WITH a whoosh, and the machine began to hum. A deep blue light filled the little compartment, and my whole body felt like it was vibrating. Not like riding over a bumpy road or anything, but like every cell in my body was doing its own little dance. I could even feel my hair buzzing.
After a few minutes, the vibrating stopped and the blue light faded away. The door opened to reveal Alicia and Will staring at me expectantly.
“That felt weird,” I said.
Will nodded. “I know, right?”
Alicia glanced at a display on the machine and shifted her weight from one foot to another, furrowing her brow. “I hope we have enough time.”
I glanced at Half Will lying on the floor. “What if I . . . it comes out like that?”
“It won’t,” Alicia said. “I think it won’t, anyway. Copying a Tick shouldn’t take as long as copying a human. Not as much data conversion or something. We learned about it in science last year. The programming might not be perfect, though.”
I raised my eyebrows. “What does that mean?”
“Well, the body will be finished, but it may not act exactly like you. Programming the processor and neural network takes time. That’s why Will’s copy wasn’t perfect. It was rushed.”
“Wait,” I objected. “Don’t we need perfect?”
Alicia sighed. “Hey, if you want to hang out here until Shallix drives the four blocks back from the police station, be my guest. But I’d prefer to continue living, thanks. So . . .”
She pushed a button on the replicator.
As the liquid drained out, I had a moment of panic. What if the copy came out . . . without clothes? Alicia would see me naked! Even if technically it wasn’t me, it was still kinda my private parts we were talking about.
I quickly covered Alicia’s eyes with my hands. “Don’t look!”
Big mistake.
I found myself flying through the air as her combat training kicked in. I landed hard on my back on the floor.
“Sorry,” she shrugged. “Reflex.”
Just then, the glass cylinder slid down. I looked up from the ground, expecting to see myself standing there butt naked.
But what I saw was far worse.
Yes, my copy was naked.
That was bad. But instead of having a butt where people were supposed to have butts, my copy had a second face.
My face.
That was so much worse.
“How’s it goin’?” the face attached to my copy’s head said to us as Fake Me stepped out of the replicator.
“What’s up, my peeps?” said Butt Face.
Head Face tried to turn around to look at Butt Face, but only managed to spin Fake Me around and around in a circle.
“How’s it goin’?” Head Face kept saying to Butt Face.
“What’s up, my peeps?” Butt Face kept replying to Head Face.
I stared at myself in horror. This was like some kind of nightmare.
“What did you do?” I cried to Alicia. “This is horrible! That’s never going to pass as me! My parents will know it’s not me in about two seconds! You wanna know how? Because they know I don’t have a face where my butt should be!”
“They’ll probably like this one better,” she said with a smirk.
I looked to Will for support, but he was too busy howling with laughter. “I just . . . I just want to know,” he gasped as he struggled to catch his breath, “how he . . . how he poops!”
“Look,” Alicia said, trying as hard as she could to keep a straight face. “Once we dress him, nobody will know he has a face for a butt.”
“Oh, really?” I asked skeptically. “So what are we going to dress him in?”
CHAPTER 22.0:
< value= [Knock, Knock. Who’s There? Death.] >
A FEW MINUTES LATER, I came out of an exam room wearing one of Dr. Shallix’s suits that we’d found hanging in a closet. It was itchy and smelled like old dude, plus it was so big on me that it looked like someone had zapped me with a shrink ray.
Fake Me, on the other hand, stood there comfortably dressed in my clothes.
Well, almost comfortably, anyway. Butt Face wasn’t all that happy with the arrangement. His muffled voice erupted from beneath my jeans. “Hey, my peeps! I can’t see. Pull down our pants!”
Head Face seemed to control the arms, so, thankfully, the pants stayed up.
Once Will had a chance to flick the lights on and off forty-seven times, the four of us left the secret lab, made our way down the hallway, and walked into the waiting room. Will stopped short
as we started for the window.
“What’s up with them?” he said, pointing at the fish tank.
When we came in, the fish had been swimming around like normal fish. But now they were all pressed up against the side of the tank, staring at us with their fishy, unblinking little eyeballs. Not swimming or eating or doing any of the things you usually see fish doing. Just staring.
“This is bad,” Alicia whispered.
“What’s the big deal?” I asked. “They’re fish.”
“Not quite. They’re what we call watchers. Synthetics that are basically just living closed-circuit security cameras. Usually the Ticks make them look like small animals. Birds, a lot of the time. Anyway, it means Shallix probably knows we’re—”
A knock at the office door interrupted her. Through the frosted glass, we couldn’t see what it was. But we could see its silhouette. Whatever it was, it was big. Like, fe-fi-fo-fum big.
“Um, we probably shouldn’t answer the door, right?” Will whispered.
Before we had a chance to tell him how stupid that question was, the entrance to the office burst open with an explosion of shattered glass.
“Get back!” Alicia yelled.
She pulled out the Tick popper, but before she could use it, the single largest man I had ever seen walked in through the ruined door and swatted the weapon out of her hand. It hit the wall, ricocheted off, tumbled through the air, and fell with a splash into the fish tank.
Calling him a man, though, might have been a bit of a stretch. He looked more like a giant person-shaped sack of skin stuffed with softballs. His muscles bulged out all over the place, straining at the fabric of a suit that, I noticed, looked nearly identical to the one I wore. He was maybe seven feet tall and, like, a million pounds—all of it muscle. His arms looked about fifty percent longer than they should have been. They literally dragged on the floor when he walked.
The weirdest thing about him, though? The overall impression he gave was like an overgrown, deformed, seriously ripped version of Dr. Shallix. The same coarse white hair and shallow, unblinking eyes. Like a giant Mega-Shallix.
