I ran, screaming, out from under it. The house thing ran too, continuing its tromp northward up University Avenue, careening every so often against one of the big bronze statues of old, dead white guys they had in the narrow paved strips that ran down the middle of the wide avenue. It even managed to crack one of the statues on its marble base. Horns were honking, brakes screeching. There were a ton of near misses and a few rear-enders. A squat brown UPS delivery van ran up onto the sidewalk and crashed into the cast-iron railings around the Osgoode law buildings. A lavender hippopotamus wearing a party hat shouldered its way out of the back of the van, rushed to the open driver’s side door, and gently tugged the groggy driver out onto the sidewalk by the back of his brown-uniformed collar. It knelt beside him. “Minh?” it said. “Minh? Talk to me!” Its party hat on an elastic string around its neck had shifted to the side of its head. The driver opened his eyes to see a talking hippopotamus in a tiny hat kneeling over him. He screamed and crab-walked backward.
There was an abandoned bicycle lying near me. I picked it up. It looked a little shorter than my leg length.
Minh peered at the hippopotamus and said, “Loopy-Lou? Is that you? How did you turn real?”
I got on the bike to follow the running house. I mean, what else did I have to do?
Behind me, I heard the hippopotamus say, “Well, who d’you think it is, dummy? You okay?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something small and black darting in my direction, but it ran behind a Dumpster before I could see it properly. Blasted volcano smog.
I caught up to the leggy house a couple minutes later. It was being herded by a couple of cop cars. Dunno whether “herded” is the right word, since the cars seemed to be doing more dodging out of the way of those huge feet than they were doing any chasing. Just as I rode up, the house did an alarmed hop out of the intersection of Dundas and University and hightailed it west. Two cop cars followed it. Out of a side street ahead of it shot a third cop car and two ambulances. The house was boxed in for now. It stopped its headlong run, began dithering around in circles, right in front of the 52 Division police station. A crowd had already gathered on the sidewalks and was halfway to a flash mob, seeing how many of them were punching away on cell phones, which would probably bring more people. Yay, text messaging. I got off the bike. Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned. “Ben!” I gave him a big hug. “How’d you know where to find me?”
“I didn’t. I was on the way to you in a cab when that thing showed up. You know I had to come see that.” He tried on a grin, but it looked fake.
“You okay? You don’t look so good.”
He didn’t answer me. He was looking over his shoulder.
“Ben?”
“No, I—” He turned back to face me. “What’d you say?”
I repeated the question. He shrugged.
“It’s just all this,” he said.
He gestured to where bystanders were pulling a screaming man out of the way. The house had just stepped on his foot. There was blood seeping through his shoe. I gulped. “Jesus.” I’d never seen someone in that much pain. Watching him was actually making me feel kinda sick to my stomach, because I knew I couldn’t help.
“It’s kinda getting to me,” said Ben. “You know?” He darted a glance to one side, wrenched his attention back to me.
“Yeah. I know.”
Something tumbled out of the underside of the house. Like a big, white ball or something. It crashed down onto one of the police cars, crushing it flat. People in the crowd shouted. Shit. I hoped nobody’d been in that car. Yesterday, I would have said that the crash had made the loudest sound in the world, but that was before the roar last night of Animikika bursting out of the lake.
The big white ball connected with the cop car and burst open. Huge pieces of hard, curved white material flew everywhere. I saw one piece slice across a part of the crowd, heard the screams. A bunch of us ducked as another piece crashed to the ground near us. It fragmented into splinters. Shrapnel flew. Some of it scraped across my cheek.
he ball cracked open, a wash of clear goo bloomed upward in a crown shape, like you see in those slo-mo videos of raindrops. It splashed down over all the cop cars, the cops, and the nearby gawkers, as far as the sidewalk on both sides of the street. It left a big globby bubble of rich yellow in its center, that stretched over the cop car, then collapsed with a wet plop.
Ben gasped. “Holy crap! It’s a giant egg! That house just laid an egg!”
People were shouting for help from parts of the crowd. Others were screaming or moaning in pain. There were people lying on the ground. There was more blood. I saw a woman giving CPR to a guy lying on his back on the ground. He was big, but she’d somehow managed to straddle him so she could pump on his rib cage. A guy was on the ground next to them, holding his wadded-up scarf to the big guy’s neck. The big guy’s side was covered in blood. Dunno what good all that heart pumping would be, if all she was doing was pumping the blood out of a large hole in him. Something ran down into my eye. I blinked, and saw red. I put my hand to my forehead. It was bleeding from where the shrapnel had grazed me. Ben murmured, “Don’t be afraid,” almost like he wasn’t talking to me.
“Too late,” I said.
The two-legged house was still running in circles. Just like it was stepping on an empty pop can, it crushed the back end of another cop car with one of its splayed, scaly feet. There was a piece of shell the size of a sewer cover lying near my feet. I gave Ben the bike to hold. I bent and looked at the bit of shell. It was curved like a potato chip, sitting concave side up, like a bowl. It was more ivory than white. And translucent. Even the gloomy volcano light gave it a bit of a glow. Mom had some mother-of-pearl earrings that gleamed like that. I reached out and touched it. It rocked a little. It was warm and smooth. There was a little bit of the clear liquid left in it. I dipped a pinkie finger in. Yup, slippery. It was egg white, all right. I picked the piece of shell up. It was way lighter than I’d expected it to be. I turned it over. It took me a second to realize that the greenish-brown smear I saw there was probably house poop. “Euw.” I dropped it and wiped my hands off against my jeans.
The house-bird thing slipped in the egg white and slid, legs flailing, in our direction. People scattered out of the way. Ben said, “Come on!” Together, he and I dragged the bike over to the sidewalk. Some of the cops tried to make a human cordon around the house as it struggled to its feet, but most of them were too busy wiping egg white out of their eyes to be any use. So some of them pulled out guns.
“What’re they doing?” said a woman near me. “They’re going to hit innocent people!”
For the first time in my life, I heard the pop of real guns firing. Funny how harmless it sounds, like popguns.
Where were the bullets landing? I couldn’t see anyone being hit. Someone was firing fruit at the house, though. Must have been at rifle speed, too, ’cause I only saw blurs before produce began to splat, pulverized into mush, against the side of the house. I only knew what the splats were because the banana and grapefruit peels didn’t go mushy. The police were looking at their guns in amazement. One of the guns turned into a hanging lamp. The officer holding it dropped it.
Ambulances and fire trucks were beginning to arrive. There were wheeled stretchers everywhere. The house just stood there, covered in slime, its sides heaving. Under the racket of the crowd, the helicopters overhead, and the sirens, I could hear it making sad cheeping noises. “Poor thing,” I said. “It looks upset.”
Ben said, “We need to get out of here before the police start using sound cannons, or something. I don’t want my eardrums busted.”
“Okay, but look.” I pointed into the sky. Dodging a couple of copters, another giant egg was swooping down. Well, half an egg. Half an eggshell. And it wasn’t falling out of control; it was flying somehow. There was someone standing inside it, waving a big stick around. I think the person may have been yelling at the house, but I couldn’t hear
for sure over all the noise.
The big eggshell landed in the intersection, right in front of the house. More popgun noises, more fruit splattering, this time against the side of the eggshell, staining its ivory surface with smeared fruit mush. The person standing inside the eggshell was an old woman wearing a sack of a black dress. She had a red and yellow paisley scarf tied over her head and knotted under her chin, inna old-fashioned stylee. I mean, even my mom didn’t wear her scarves like that. The old lady was definitely carrying a big stick. Kinda like a baseball bat, only almost as tall as she was. She brandished it at the cops and yelled at them in a language I didn’t recognize. She was protecting the house! A policeman with a bullhorn ordered the old lady to step away from it. She looked around for the source of his voice, yelled something back at him. Whatever she was saying, it didn’t sound polite.
In her excitement, the woman dropped her stick. I don’t really know why I ran out into the intersection toward her. I guess because my parents always told me to help little old ladies. Behind me, I heard Ben yell my name, but I didn’t stop. I picked the old lady’s stick up. It was thick around and seriously heavy. Twice my length, too, but I managed to wrestle the end of it up until it touched the edge of her eggshell ride. “Here,” I said.
She took the bat from me like it weighed nothing at all. “I leave her for a second to go shopping, and she gets into trouble.” She swung her stick, cracked a cop over the head who was trying to climb into her eggshell. “Eggs, eggs,” she said. “That’s all my dacha Izbouchka gives me, is eggs. No pullets, just empty eggs. I ask you; how many of her eggs can one old woman eat? And the shells; thin as paper! That one she just laid should never have cracked. Her eggs used to be so sturdy.” To demonstrate, she rapped her knuckles against the side of her eggshell. “And then, there’s all the stress of, well, you know.” She jerked her head in the general direction of the police, the volcano. “The fright won’t be good for her laying, it won’t.”
“Do you know what’s going on?” I asked her. “Why is everything crazy?”
She used the end of her stick to ram some more cops off her eggshell. Another officer leapt for the windowsill that was one of her house’s eyelids. She swatted him away. “Crazy on the inside, crazy on the outside,” she said. She leaned out of her eggshell. She reached out to me. Her arm seemed to stretch longer than it should have been able to. She took my arm by the wrist. “Izbouchka needs bones to strengthen her eggshells. The bones of men are best. And women.” She held my arm up and considered it with the kind of look in her eye that Dad got when he was picking out lamb chops in the supermarket. “You look like a nice, big-boned girl.”
“Let go!” I tried to pull away from her, but her fingers held me in a barbed-wire grip. She smiled. Her teeth were too sharp, and all snaggly.
“Ah, dyevuchka; prikrasnaya mulatk,” she cooed, “budesh li tee fkusnaya? Karichnyevaya ee fkusnaya?”
She yanked my wrist close to her nose and sniffed my skin, like you smell a cantaloupe in the market to see whether it’s ripe. I saw the flare of her nostrils, the stiff black hairs peeking out from them, and I lost it. Using her grip on my wrist for leverage, I rammed the heel of my boot against the side of her eggshell chariot with all my strength, trying to break her hold. It didn’t work. “But if I truss you up and roast you in my oven,” she mused, “I’d have all the trouble of boiling your bones clean afterward. Can’t have any flesh on them, because it upsets my dacha’s delicate stomach, doesn’t it, Izbouchka?”
The house gave a chirrup of agreement. The old lady nodded and let go of my wrist. “I’ll find another way, then. But if I change my mind, dyevuchka, I can find you wherever you are.”
Her smile was terrifying. I didn’t wait to see what she would do next. I hightailed it back to the crowd, over by where Ben was standing. His lips were moving. When I reached him, he pulled me into a hug. “Jesus, Scotch, you okay?”
He could probably feel that I was trembling through and through, but I said, “Yeah.”
“Why’d you even go over there?”
“She dropped her stick. She’s an old lady. I wanted to help her.” At least it’d been something I could do to help.
“It’s a pestle, not a stick. And she wondered whether you would be tasty,” said a man standing near us. He looked about my dad’s age. He was wearing jeans and a heavy tweed jacket. He had a gash over one eye. When he spoke, the words came out in dialogue bubbles, like he was a cartoon character. They floated over his head long enough for you to read them, then popped and disappeared.
Ben made a face. “Tasty? Euw.”
I shoved his shoulder. “What, you think I wouldn’t be?” I tried not to think of what kind of rump roast I would have made.
“What language was that?” Ben asked the man.
“Russian.” His face was full of wonder. “You got away from her. You’re a lucky girl.” Then he blushed. “I think she’s kinda racist. She called you a mulatto.”
“Yeah, and she’s an old mother hen.”
The old lady said something that sounded like, “Dacha maya, idti syuda.” Her house shook the egg slime off itself like a dog shaking off water, spraying more cops with goo as it did so. It waddled over to the old lady. On either side of the house, a thick paned window flapped its shutters open. The shutters snapped out and out and out, extending until the wings of the house were fully unfurled. People screamed, cowered.
“Damn,” I muttered, “her dacha can do the wave.”
The house gave a quick flap of its window-wings. They clacked like the tumbling of large bones. It took a flapping run—its first step crushed a streetcar stop into Lucite smithereens—then leapt into the air. The old lady led the way in her eggshell flying saucer. Airborne, the house tucked its bird legs up under itself and flew after its owner. A few of the cops shot fruit at them.
We watched the eggshell chariot and the flying house disappear into the distance.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said to Ben. Christ. Getting eaten by an old lady and her house wasn’t as scary to me as trying to help some poor guy who’d just had his foot crushed. What kind of loser was I?
“We’ll be right behind you,” Ben replied.
I looked at him. “We?”
He gave a weak laugh. “Royal we. Trying for some humor. Where do you wanna go?”
“Down to the Convention Centre.” I picked up the bike. “Come on. I’ll double you.”
“You’d better not drop me off onto the dirty road, girl.”
He was sounding a little more normal again. He straddled the back of the bike, put his hands on my shoulders. “Ready.”
Something black poked its nose out from behind a car that had wrapped itself around a lamppost. The something was about the size of a big dog, but the three paws that were in view looked almost like hands. As soon as it saw me looking, it shyly pulled its head back behind the car to where I couldn’t see it. I guess if a person could be turned into a cartoon today, they could be turned into anything. “Let’s hurry,” I said to Ben. The blemish on my body was spreading. I didn’t know how much time I had.
CHAPTER TEN
“Here you go,” said Ben, handing a couple of water bottles to a scared-looking man who’d been flooded out of his home last night.
“You can wash your hands at one of the sanitation stations over there.” He pointed to where the temporary green carousels of hand sanitizers had been set up.
“Thank you,” said the man.
“Don’t clean your face with that stuff, though,” Ben told him. “It’s murder on your skin.”
The man nodded and wandered dazedly over to where Ben had pointed, picking his way through the crowds of people trying to settle down until God knew when on the flimsy green cots that volunteers like us were setting up as quickly as we could.
The great hall of the Convention Centre was a sight. Hundreds of cots in straggly rows. People’s belongings piled next to the cots. Some people had tried to build teeter
ing privacy walls with the things they’d rescued from their homes. Every so often a pile of coats or something would topple to the floor. Volunteers kept asking them not to pile their stuff up like that, but there were always new people to tell. There were kids running everywhere. There were adults yelling at their kids who were running everywhere. Kids crying. Adults crying. People yelling at the volunteers. Volunteers yelling at the people. People yelling at each other. Did I mention the crying? People curled up on their cots, quietly or loudly sobbing. People on their cell phones, trying to locate people who had gone missing, or to let their friends and their relatives know they were okay. Volunteers trying to hand out sandwiches. Lines for the Johnny on the Spot portable toilets. The main Convention Centre toilets had all overflowed, and a couple of stalls had become tall, thin clock towers that played the Sesame Street theme song over and over. Out of sync. The floor was still wet in spots from the flooding last night. The whole place smelled of unhappy, and the hubbub was deafening.
Gloria used the sleeve of her green hoodie to wipe the sweat off her brow. “If I have to bend over again to pull one more bottled water out of this box, I think my back is just going to break in two!”
I grinned at her. “Good practice for the battle.”
I grabbed two of the bottles from the box underneath the folding cafeteria table we were working at, and handed them to the little boy waiting there. “Here you go.”
“Thank you.”
Maybe it was silly to be thinking about a dance competition now. But maybe the world would get back to normal soon. Maybe if we hung on to our memories of what it used to be just a few short hours ago, we could go back to that place. Not that I’d be taking part in the competition now. Not with my skin the way it was.
Glory stared blankly at me. “Battle?” Then her face cleared. “Oh! For a second, I had no idea what you were talking about. That seems like a lifetime ago.” She started to bend again.
“Here,” said Punum, “take one of mine.” Wheelchair or no wheelchair, it was like she’d come out of nowhere. Two of the volunteers, Bo Yih and Jim, were with her. Punum had a case of bottled water on her lap. She handed one of the bottles to Gloria.
The Chaos Page 12
