Please Don't Tell My Parents I Blew Up the Moon (16 page)

I shook my head. Stunned surprise was wearing away the nausea. “I’ve never seen her do this. She’s never attacked anything living, even when I was in danger. I was half convinced she was a pacifist.”

Another chunk of greyed out shell spilled off a wall. The poster it had been covering fluttered down. It had a sepia tone photo of a man with a flat top hat and ridiculously spiky waxed moustaches, surrounded by goats as tall as he was. Huge, carnival advertisement size letters raved ‘Red Panacea Clinic Is Proud To Welcome Dr. Hedley Butts To Our Practice. His Work With Goats Proves The Miracle Benefits Of The Color Red!’

Her voice slightly raspy, Claire said, “That explains a lot. Two of the sickest medical minds of the nineteenth century Mad-Science-Boom joined forces to make this horror house.”

I had to ask, even with the alarm ringing and the smell of burnt flesh everywhere. “Did they call him Dr. Butt Head?”

“No. His goats ate people. They took him seriously.”

Eesh. Ray filled in the other half of that for me. “These days, a villain as murderous as he was wouldn’t live long enough for Mourning Dove to find him, but back then…”

I nodded. I knew, but it was creepy to see the results. “No rules.”

Vera had run out of immediate targets. She floated back up to me, and with her little bitty hands pushed my wrist from side to side.

“What is it? What do you want?” Was she trying to aim Archimedes at something? She abandoned my wrist, and turned Archimedes’ head instead.

Maybe…? I closed my eyes, and tried to focus on what I saw through his.

“Criminy!” I squeaked, jumping back against Ray and Claire.

“Are you alright?” Ray asked immediately.

I nodded, waving him off with my free hand, then turned Archimedes’ head to look at him. “I’m fine. This place looks different through psychic cat symbiote eyes.”

Walls, rugs, posters, regular inanimate objects looked blankly red in Archimedes’ vision. I’d blown them off for that reason. Living things were a mass of color. Vera shone white like a star. The pervasive red goop was all kinds of blues and pinks and purples, with the colors flowing sluggishly along the vines. Ray and Claire were mostly green, with blue blobs inside that were probably important organs. A web of yellow lights filled both of them. In Claire, it seemed like her nervous system, because it really lit up her brain, and traveled through the rest of her in thinner lines. In Ray, it looked more like his blood stream, pulsing through his arms and legs, thickly webbed in his torso, and barely visible in his head.

Vera wanted me to see something, and it probably wasn’t Ray and Claire. I waved my arm slowly. I had to strain to focus, like making out details in my peripheral vision.

When I faced the far end of the lobby, what Vera wanted me to see took no strain at all. A glowing white hexagon, bigger than an adult, and a mass of yellow next to it. They showed up through the floor. Inanimate objects were so blankly red, I could see through them to the masses of infesting goo on the upper floor and down in the basement. A green spot above us just might have stood out as what Vera wanted, if the thing in the basement hadn’t been so brilliantly obvious.

I pointed across the room. The basement seemed to be only on that side of the building. “Down there. What is it?”

Vera didn’t answer, couldn’t answer. She floated down to that side of the waiting room, emitting more pink pulses. Through Archimedes’ eyes, those looked like white flashes, but in reverse, sucking into her. They visibly reduced the amount of blue in nearby goo masses.

Taking each step carefully, still not sure I could see clearly through Archimedes’ eyes, I followed. The white hexagon might be static, but that yellow thing in the basement writhed, and it had plenty of blue and pink and purple around it. Vera would need backup, and we had to be there with her.

One of the bulges we were about to pass had a webbing of yellow inside. “I think that―”

Vera spun around and heat rayed it. I jumped in surprise, my human eyes opening. The black charred thing that crawled out of the mass looked disgustingly like a human torso with goat heads on the ends of its arms. So, so gross. Vera kept broiling it until it collapsed into charcoal.

Then she swung around and began burning into the floor. The rug burst into flames, then went out as she cooked it down to dust. Her beam played around, tracing a wide square and melting slowly through the floor. It would take a few minutes, but she was determined. I had never seen her so determined.

“I’m sure a staircase would be easy to find,” I pointed out.

At the edge of my vision, Ray shook his head. “No way. We do not charge into the pre-prepared gauntlet of traps.”

“Just being in here gives the monsters an advantage.” Claire sounded ragged and anxious, and criminy, I could not blame her.

Frankly, she’d just said the smartest thing anybody had said since we came in here. I called out, “Vera! Let’s get out of here. I bet we can do something about this place from a safe distance.”

She completely ignored me.

I took a deep breath. “We’re in this to the end, guys. We’re not abandoning her.”

“Seconded.” Nervous as she sounded, Claire’s response was emphatic.

“Unanimous,” Ray agreed.

Movement caught my attention. I closed my eyes and saw through Archimedes. The big yellow thing in the basement writhed violently.

The woman’s voice in the speakers announced, “The Red Panacea Clinic does not allow Conqueror technology on our property. Leave the building or be evicted.”

Oh, yeah. They knew we were coming, and what was coming.

With a squeal and a hiss and a lot of cracking, the square Vera had cut fell through into the room below.

I saw the hexagon with my human eyes. Grey stones covered in symbols formed a six-sided gate. On the other side lay a dark room with a cement floor and a lot of wooden beams. That room couldn’t be physically here, on the asteroid, and amid the sweet stink of burned monster, fresh air laden with dust stood out.

We were looking at a portal to Earth.

The monster next to the portal attacked. This thing wasn’t remotely human or goat. It looked like a pillbug with its back attached to the wall, all waving legs and armored plates, scarlet pulsing meat and chitin that blended into the stuff lining the basement.

Tentacles shot out to meet a pink ray that set them on fire. Legs unfolded, and unfolded some more, and unfolded even more, reaching right up through the hole in the ceiling to close over Vera. Her opponent was half pillbug, half octopus, and all butt ugly. I closed my eyes again, and Archimedes saw her burn through the mass of blue and yellow, while more and more poured up to seal her in.

“We have to help!”

“Don’t touch it!” Ray slapped his hands together, activating his gloves. The ball that grew between his spreading palms looked blazing yellow to Archimedes.

“The stairs!” Claire yelled.

Archimedes looked up. Things crawled and staggered down the big staircase in the center of the lobby. They were just awkward masses of blue and yellow and pink through cat eyes, and I did not want to know what they looked like with my own.

Ray fired his energy ball at the fastest moving monster in front. The ball knocked it back against the stairs, where it thrashed like a broken toy. Claire ran off to the side and grabbed a chair. She looked tiny and helpless, a little bouncing yellow figure. As Ray drew out another energy ball, she knocked the legs out from under the next monster coming down the stairs. It fell forward, but kept inchworming towards me and Ray.

It hadn’t turned to attack Claire, and I wasn’t going to give it a chance. Time for a real combat trial of my new weapon. I looked straight at the oncoming monster through Archimedes’ eyes, and yelled, “Stop!”

It did.

“Stop! Stop! Stop!”

One scrambling abomination went motionless. Another fell forward and draped over the railing. The last slid limply down the stairs.

Ray blasted the closest monster back onto the staircase, but he didn’t have to. None of them even tried to move again.

I turned to help Vera. Pointing Archimedes at the squirming yellow mass, I ordered, “Stop!”

The yellow rippled, but nothing happened.

“Stop! STOP! LET HER GO!” Yellow whirled, and the tentacles halted―for about half a second. Enough time for Vera to melt her way out of the mass of arms. But the monster resumed swatting at her, and dodging meant she couldn’t keep her beam focused long enough to do real damage.

The goat mutants had no will. They were just zombies. This thing was strong enough to resist my orders.

I had a fix for you, buddy. I pulled a cursed penny out of my pouch. It looked like a green flare through Archimedes’ eyes, my first solid evidence the pennies had real power. I threw the penny down into the yellow mass. Stuck to the wall, it couldn’t dodge. It didn’t even try to block.

The penny hit and stuck. Green flooded out into the yellow, creating whirlpools and shifting blobs. Whatever that meant, I knew I’d ruined its day somehow.

“Stop!” Archimedes yowled, magnifying the command.

All the tentacles fell to the floor.

Vera stopped dodging, and aimed her heat ray right in the middle of the yellow and green blob. I risked a peek with my human eyes to find out what was going on.

The pillbug had curled up, folding its legs into a shield. Smoke hissed up as Vera burned away at it, but this stuff was hard. As I watched, more legs burst out of the red mass surrounding the bug, and thickened the shield.

One of the fallen tentacles rose. “Stop!” I yelled again. It fell, but twitched. My penny’s curse was weakening.

“Surrender! Stop fighting! Just die!” I screamed at it. Archimedes wailed. The thing wriggled at my first command, its plated legs fluttered at the second, and at the third spread apart.

Vera’s beam hit unguarded red goo, which went up in flames, burning into charcoal in a second. The legs fell limp.

Vera wasn’t satisfied. She kept burning away.

I looked around. Ray crouched next to me, fists clenched. Claire held half a broken chair, watching the―okay, I did not want to look at the things on the stairs. That they mostly wore clothing made it worse.

The alarm cut off. Vera stopped burning. She’d melted a blackened crater right into the stone wall. Only drifting, nauseatingly sweet smoke moved.

A man’s voice announced over the speakers, “Visitors, please see patient Juliet in room 103.”

I looked around. Still, nothing moved. I closed my eyes and looked around again, this time with Archimedes. The pink and purple had stopped flowing through the gooey blue columns. The things lying on the stairs had halfway faded to the same red as the stairs beneath them. The only yellow left pulsed inside my friends.

Back to my own eyes. Vera floated unhurriedly to the stairs. Instead of blasting the bodies there, she flashed pink, over and over. They began turning grey and crumbling at the edges, but it was not a process I wanted to watch.

I pointed down through the hole at the gate, and I could hear my own voice shake. “We can’t leave Earth connected to this place. It might spread.”

Ray’s voice didn’t crack often, but boy did it squeak now. “It’s been connected for a hundred years.” Raising both hands, he added, “That was not an argument.”

Claire walked over to us, and looked down into the pit. The girl who’d been most frightened at first now seemed just fine. “Looks like mad science to me. Hit the self-destruct button.”

“Ha ha ha,” I fake laughed. I couldn’t manage much sarcasm. I knew from experience that when you are in a mad science frenzy, self-destruct buttons just happen. How could I make this one happen?

It was just like building a gate backwards, but much, much simpler. The picture my superpower provided was pathetically simple.

I pointed Archimedes at the red tentacles hooking into the edge of the gate. “Shut off.” The view of Earth winked out. “Collapse.” The heavy stones the gate had been made of rolled away from each other and into the air.

I felt really weird. Dizzy, like I was on the worst roller coaster. Which way was up? Which way was down?

My feet didn’t touch the floor. I looked around and saw Claire and Ray floating up towards the ceiling.

“Well, that’s where our gravity came from. And probably our oxygen,” guessed Ray.

I could get the hang of this vertigo, but I didn’t want to. “It’s dead. We’re getting out of here.”

The man on the PA broke in. “Please don’t leave Juliet.”

What?

I looked at Ray. I looked at Claire. I looked at Ray again. “There
can’t
be a survivor.” he said.

Claire frowned. “Could it be a trap? Are you sure this red gunk is dead?”

I closed my regular eyes, and waved Archimedes slowly around. “Yes. I’m sure.” Nothing moved. Most of the pink and purple had faded, and even some of the blue. The only thing that stood out…

…was that green spot on the upper floor.

I opened my eyes and shook my head. I couldn’t believe it. “There’s a survivor.”

Ray and Claire gaped, but after a few seconds, Ray lowered his head. “Lead on.”

I smiled despite myself. Ray wasn’t the kind of guy who would even take the risk of leaving someone in this grisly horror house. Then I giggled, because nodding had sent his hat floating off his head, and he had to grab it and stuff it in his jacket.

“Vera, could you push us to the stairs?” I asked.

As quietly and peacefully as she’d always been before we got here, she hovered over and did just that. Gripping the railings of the staircase, we pulled ourselves up to the second floor. Ray climbed past me when we reached the top, taking the handle of the door and bracing himself against the wall to pull it open.

There was a lot of red hard shelled gunk up here. It covered most of the walls. The hallway had a line of little rooms that looked like doctor’s office exam rooms, which I supposed they were. This place was a medical clinic, if a nightmare medical clinic.

We came in at 114. There went 113, then 112. We climbed down the hall, or up the hall, or along the hall. There was no down anymore, just pushing from doorway to doorway. We all had gloves, so at least we didn’t have to touch this gruesome stuff with bare skin.