by Rob Vlock
“So, wait,” I said. “He’s . . .”
“Junkman Sam,” she said. “The guy on the news story. He basically invented the neural network that all Ticks have. If we can find him, he might be able to change your programming or take out your virus processing unit or whatever the heck you have.”
“Wait!” I snorted. “You’re telling me my life depends on a guy named Junkman Sam? Great! While we’re at it, why don’t we stop to see Hobo Bill to pick up a cure for cancer? Oh, I’m sure Poop Chute Larry could hook us up with a way to—”
I never saw the slap coming. Alicia’s open hand connected with my face hard enough to stop my words cold.
My left cheek burned and stung as if it had been attacked by a swarm of angry bees. “Ow! What? What’d I do?”
“You just don’t get it, do you?” she hissed, her eyes gleaming with tears. “You just don’t get it! I finally discover a reason why I may not have to kill you, and you treat it like some kind of joke?”
She slumped down and swiped the back of her hand across her eyes. It came away wet.
“I don’t want to kill you, Sven. Don’t you understand that? Just the thought of it . . .” A sob overwhelmed her.
A cold jolt rippled through my chest. What a jerk I was. I always assumed my fate meant nothing to Alicia. I was just another Tick. The enemy. A machine. Yet even though she’d had plenty of opportunities to kill me, here I was, in a fancy hotel, alive and still perfectly capable of sticking my foot in my mouth. And it was all because of her.
“Alicia, I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I just thought . . . well, I guess I didn’t think. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be a jerk.”
I didn’t see the next slap coming either.
“Hey! What was that for? I said I was sorry,” I cried, rubbing my right cheek.
“That was advance payment for next time,” she responded, back to her usual unflappable self. Her eyes shone bright and cold and tearless. “Now, are you ready to find Junkman Sam? Or should we just skip right to the end of the world?”
I swallowed and then smiled weakly. “I’ve always liked meeting new people.”
“We’re meeting new people?” Will said groggily, from his bed. He sat up and rubbed the gunk out of his eyes. “What’s going on?” he said. “I was having the best dream about soap.”
“Road trip,” Alicia told him. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER 34.0:
< value= [We Take the Barf Bus to Vomit Town] >
“WHERE ARE WE GOING?” WILL asked as we walked toward the bus station, the rosy light of the rising sun making his hair look even redder than usual—like a tangle of highly embarrassed earthworms had taken up residence on his head.
“Niagara Falls,” Alicia replied matter-of-factly.
Will lifted his eyebrows and looked sideways at her. “Okay, why?”
“To see a twenty-foot-high toilet,” I told him, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do when a bunch of deadly cyborgs were out to kill you and everybody else on the planet.
We walked the rest of the way to the bus station in silence.
Which gave me plenty of time to think about things I didn’t really want to think about. Like the fact that the rest of my life might be measured not in years, but in hours. That we had until midnight to find a way to stop me from killing the entire population of Earth. And that the only beings I had anything in common with were roast chickens and clown snakes and a psycho pediatrician.
Even if we managed to foil my mission to destroy humanity, that sobering fact wasn’t going to change. I would always be different from everyone else I knew. I’d be something else. Not really human. Not entirely machine.
Even with my best friend walking right next to me, I’d never felt so lonely in my whole life.
I looked up to find Alicia watching me, a look of concern as plain as day on her face. But her pity only made me feel worse.
I scowled back at her, and in an instant, her concern morphed into that standard Alicia Toth brand of guarded indifference.
• • •
We arrived at the bus station, a stark hardscape of cement floors and fluorescent-lit benches. “I hate to tell you this,” Will said, “but a bus to Niagara Falls is going to cost more than twelve dollars and fifty-eight cents.”
“Oh, yeah?” Alicia pointed to a kiosk at the end of the station. A big sign on the top of it read:
>>>—BULLET BUS—>
A SUBSIDIARY OF CHEEP-O-RIDE, INC.
ASK ABOUT OUR $1 FARES
We made our way through the station and approached the kiosk. The Bullet Bus ticket agent was busy talking on his cell phone and completely ignored us. Alicia cleared her throat loudly. The agent gave her a dirty look, hung up his phone, and peered at us from behind a filthy, scratched-up Plexiglas ticket window.
“Yeah?” he said listlessly, barely bothering to lift his head.
“We’d like three one-dollar tickets to Niagara Falls, please,” Alicia said confidently.
The agent studied her under half-closed eyelids. “Yeah, we got some one-dollar tickets left. You gotta help out on the bus to get them, though.”
“Help out?” I asked. “You mean like work? What would we have to do?”
“Whatever the driver asks you to do. Hand out snacks and junk, I guess,” he replied in a monotone.
Alicia dug three one-dollar bills out of her backpack. “That’s fine. Three to Niagara Falls, please.”
“Hold on,” the man said. “You gotta be eighteen to ride without a parent. Are you guys eighteen?”
We all nodded.
“Oh, yeah? If you’re eighteen, when were you born?”
“Uh,” Alicia muttered, “um, we were born eighteen years ago.”
I elbowed her.
The agent eyed her suspiciously. We could practically see the little hamster wheel turning in his head as he mulled Alicia’s answer over. Finally, he shrugged and handed us three tickets.
“Bus don't leave ’til noon. Better make yourselves comfy.”
I looked around the station. The ancient bare wood benches that lined the walls looked about as welcoming as a row of guillotines. Make ourselves comfy? Yeah, right.
We spent the next several hours eating stale food out of the station’s sole vending machine and taking turns complaining about how much the cruel, unupholstered benches made our butts hurt.
When it was finally time to board the bus, we immediately wished we had decided to walk the three hundred miles to Niagara Falls. Our shoes clung to the sticky floors, and every seat was adorned with a patchwork of peeling silver duct tape. But worst of all? The smell. My nostrils burned with the reek of stale vomit. Of course, that didn’t stop me from ripping off a scrap of torn vinyl from one of the seats and popping it in my mouth. Yech!
A massively obese man didn’t so much sit in the driver’s seat as ooze over the edges of it. He took our tickets and looked us up and down. “Oh, goody. My flight attendants are here.” He laughed wheezily at his own joke, then thrust a stack of empty brown paper bags at us. “Hand these out to all the passengers.”
“What are they for?” I asked.
“You’ll know when you know,” the driver grunted.
We slowly walked the length of the bus, handing out bags to each of our fellow passengers. Most of them turned to us only briefly, before resuming staring numbly at the backs of the seats in front of them. When we were sure each rider had a bag, we took the only remaining seats all the way at the back of the bus.
We soon found out what the bags were for. The driver started the engine and pulled the bus onto the street. Thanks to a bad shock absorber, it bucked this way and that, like a boat being tossed on a rough sea.
The minute we hit the New York State Thruway, a little old lady in the third row began to barf. Her guttural retching set off a chain reaction among the passengers behind her, until row after row of travelers were heaving into their paper bags.
“What are you flight a
ttendants waiting for?” the driver bellowed. “Pick up the full ones and hand out more empty ones!”
We spent the entire seven-hour trip lugging bags of puke up and down the aisle, storing them in overhead compartments, under seats, wherever we could find space.
Well, that’s actually not entirely true. We didn’t spend the whole trip carrying bags of barf. We spent quite a bit of time filling our own bags as well.
CHAPTER 35.0:
< value= [We Hang Out at the Mall] >
WE TOTTERED OFF THE BUS early that evening in front of an old auto body shop. Niagara Falls wasn’t anything like I had imagined it. The street was webbed with cracks and lined with boarded-up shops that were practically crumbling from age and neglect. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked.
We took a moment to get our bearings.
I scratched my head. “Where do you think we’ll find Junkman Sam? Should we just go door to door looking for a twenty-foot-tall toilet?”
“Check this out, guys,” Will said. He pointed to something on a map of the town attached to the bus stop sign.
It was faded from the weather and a little tough to read behind its cloudy plastic holder, but if you leaned in and squinted, you could just make out the words world’s largest next to a little blue star on the map. It said something after world’s largest, but no matter how hard we looked, we couldn’t make it out.
“That has to be Flushosaurus Rex,” Alicia said confidently. “I mean, how many world’s largest things could there be in this town?”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “It’s Niagara Falls. How about world’s largest waterfall?”
“Actually, Niagara Falls isn’t even in the top ten largest,” Will pointed out. “It’s number eleven in terms of volume.”
When he noticed us looking at him, he added, “What? I have a thing about waterfalls. It’s kind of a hobby.”
Alicia stared at me until I said it: “Fine, it’s probably the toilet. Let’s go.”
Alicia took another look at the map and slid her phone out of her backpack. Once she had tapped the location into a GPS app, we set off in the direction of the blue star. We followed the little GPS voice—its cheerful tone oblivious to the fact that doomsday was just a few hours away—as it directed us down various streets, across a baseball field covered with knee-high weeds, and past a closed bowling alley.
Eventually, it announced that we were nearing our destination.
We emerged from an overgrown wooded path at the edge of an abandoned shopping mall parking lot. The wide stretch of asphalt looked like the splintered shell of a hard-boiled egg, with big slabs of pavement jutting up here and there. A whole fleet of rusty, forgotten shopping carts were strewn about at random. A sign that read niagara center mall hung at an angle off a pair of girders that jutted out from the ground. I half expected zombies to come shuffling out of the deteriorating building moaning, BRRRAAAIIINNNNS.
“So, where’s the potty?” I asked. “I kinda figured it would be hard to miss.”
It turns out the little blue star hadn’t marked the location of the world’s biggest toilet. Instead, Alicia’s GPS had brought us to something else entirely.
We looked around but couldn’t find a single giant toilet. We did find a sign next to the mall entrance, though. It read:
NIAGARA CENTER MALL
Home of the World’s Largest Ball of Dental Floss
Started in 1963 by Niagara Falls native and floss-o-maniac Franklin Goddard Watts, this national treasure is now nearly six feet in diameter and weighs just over six thousand pounds.
Please do not touch the ball of floss.
No smoking near the ball of floss.
Do not unravel the ball of floss.
Pets are not permitted on or near the ball of floss.
We hope you love our ball of floss as much as we do!
“Okay, so not a toilet,” Alicia sighed. “What now?”
“Can we go check out the floss?” Will asked.
“Dude,” I said, “it’s a ball of string.”
“No,” he corrected. “It’s the world’s largest ball of floss. When will we have the chance to see it again?”
“If it were up to me, never,” Alicia grumbled. “Besides, we’re not here to sightsee. We only have a few hours to find Junkman Sam.”
Will got a sort of sad-puppy-dog look in his eyes. “Just five minutes. . . .”
I looked at Alicia. She shrugged. “I guess we could use a few minutes to regroup and figure out where to look next.”
“Fine,” I sighed. “Let’s go see the string.”
Alicia crouched down next to the gate that guarded the mall doors and forced it open with her crowbar. Its rusted metal gave way easily.
We stepped inside, shards from a shattered glass door crunching beneath our feet.
Inside, it was dark. Alicia snapped on a flashlight. And then . . .
My heart almost stopped.
We were surrounded by zombies!
CHAPTER 36.0:
< value= [We Manage to Keep Our Brains] >
IN SPITE OF ALL THE horrible things we had faced over the last few days, I didn’t think I’d ever heard Alicia scream in pure terror.
That was exactly what she did when she saw the pale, bald, inhuman faces staring at us in the faint glow of the flashlight.
She freaked, leaping across the mall’s deserted vestibule to attack a row of the ghastly, waxen creatures with her crowbar, shrieking wildly, spinning, slashing, kicking. She swung the steel tool at a particularly scary-looking figure in a cheap-looking tuxedo, and the creature’s head exploded. Shards of plastic rained down upon us.
Because what Alicia was trying to beat the life out of wasn’t a zombie at all—it was a mannequin.
We had stumbled into the men’s clothing section of an old department store.
There were no zombies. Only a legion of harmless plastic people. Sure, in the gloomy, abandoned mall, blanketed with a thick layer of dust and cobwebs, they were creepy as heck. But they probably wouldn’t be eating anyone’s brains.
“Stop!” I yelled over the crunch of plastic limbs.
“Aaaaahhhhh!” she screamed, her voice dripping with fear and rage. “Zombies! Run!”
I picked a severed mannequin head up off the floor and held it out for her to see. “Look, no zombies. Calm down.”
Her crowbar was a silver blur in the dim light. Whack! It connected with the head, batting it out of my hand and across the room. It hit the concrete floor, ricocheted off an old sales counter, and came to rest at Will’s feet. He looked down, let out a feeble squeak, and collapsed to the ground in a faint.
I stepped in front of Alicia, my arms raised. “It’s okay! Stop!”
There was no light of recognition in her eyes—only a kind of animal fear. She was operating purely on instinct, incapable of distinguishing me from a plastic clothes model. She raised the crowbar over her head and brought it down with a scream of fury. I dove to the right. Sparks leapt off the concrete where the tool struck with a loud metallic clank. She brought the bar back up and stood over me, panting, staring at me with wild, panicked eyes.
“Alicia,” I pleaded. “It’s me, Sven. Put down the crowbar. Please.”
A strangled sob escaped her lips, and she let the crowbar clank to the floor. Slumping down on a bench against the wall, she exhaled, a long, shaky breath that seemed to take with it her energy. She tilted her head back against the wall and stared up at the water-stained ceiling tiles.
Years ago, bored kids probably sat right where Alicia was now. Maybe they counted those very ceiling tiles as they waited impatiently for their parents to finish trying on clothes.
The thought of my mom, who had dragged me along on countless boring errands as well, sitting hundreds of miles away at a dinner table with a lousy Tick replica of me, practically knocked my feet out from under me.
I sat down heavily next to Alicia. “I wish I was home.”
“I wish I had
a home,” she said, burying her face in her hands.
Suddenly, the room didn’t feel creepy anymore. Just depressing.
I put my hand on her shoulder. This time she didn’t smack it away. I could feel her body shake with silent, convulsive sobs.
“My whole life,” she choked out between labored gasps, “I’ve been taught that Ticks are less than human. That they’re the enemy. That every single one of them would kill me just as soon as look at me. You’re not supposed to get attached to them. You’re not supposed to care about them. And here you are, the one Synthetic that can wipe out every human on the planet . . . and you happen to be the closest thing I even have to a friend.” She laughed humorlessly. “How pathetic am I? It’s like my life has become some cheesy made-for-TV movie.”
“We’re friends?” I muttered aloud, taken aback hearing that term uttered by the girl who had recently compared me to a toaster. “I . . . I . . .” I searched my head for words to offer her. None of them were right. “Alicia, I don’t know what to say. I’m . . . I’m sorry.”
“I’m the one who should be sorry. I said some pretty awful things about you before. I shouldn’t have done that. You’re not just a machine. I feel like garbage for the way I treated you.” She sighed heavily. “I don’t even deserve to have a friend like you. I’m such a tupitsa.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Tupi-what?”
“Tupitsa. It means loser. Outcast. Bonehead. That’s what everyone back home thought about me. The whole school. Probably even my parents—even though they never said it.”
I didn’t understand why she was suddenly so down on herself. She seemed like the coolest, most confident kid I’d ever met. I told her that.
“Yeah, that was the one good thing about coming to this country,” she replied. “Nobody knew me. I could reinvent myself. But back home, everyone hated me. That’s why I always kept to myself. I figured I could keep people from finding out what a tupitsa I was. Didn’t matter. I tried to act all superbad, and here I am, scared of a bunch of plastic mannequins. I’m still just a big loser.”
