Scurvy Goonda (27 page)

Joelle-Michelle saw her best soldiers burst into purple. The tailor who repaired her tutu whenever it ripped fell to a blank-eyed poltergeist. The gardener who took care of her flowers had his hoe torn from his hands and used against him. She saw one of her mummies cut down and one of her magi explode. Rushed from all sides, she was kicking furiously with her pointe shoes. The purple mist hanging in the air around her blocked her view of the other side of the battlefield, where Brother Dezo’s brigade was hopefully doing better than her own.

A weight lifter grabbed her by the back of the neck and hurled her into the air. Hanging momentarily above the melee, Joelle-Michelle spotted the massive frame of Brother Dezo, who was swinging his ukulele in the middle of a pack of Presidential Guards. But Brother Dezo was overwhelmed, and as she plunged toward the ground, she saw a chessboard knight come up behind Brother Dezo, raise his sword, and—
POP!
—Brother Dezo burst in a purple cloud.

“Dezo!” yelled Joelle-Michelle. With Brother Dezo gone, the third battalion had lost its leader and was sure to be wiped out. In the distance she could see that the palace was surrounded—there was no way Ted’s small group of fighters was still alive.

All was lost.

The palace had been taken.

The platters of food and bottles of liquor meant for the wedding had been toppled and smashed, and the ground was slick and sloppy. Dozens of trays of bacon had been set around the courtyard, and Ted could feel cured meat squishing under his feet. The white bunting and taxidermied doves had toppled from the gazebo, and champagne bottles were being winged through the air, smashing against walls.

Out of the corner of his eye, Ted saw a railroad man enter the courtyard swinging an enormous sledgehammer, barreling straight for the trapped ACORN fighters.

“Watch out for the railroader!” yelled Ted. “His hammer is one of ours!”

But Ted couldn’t yell loud enough to make his voice heard above the sound of clanging metal, and he could see that the railroad man was charging toward Swamster, who was trying to bend his wrecked umbrella into a useable form. He reared back to strike.

“Swamster, watch out!” yelled Ted.

Swamster deftly leaped out of the way. The railroad man simply laughed and switched his attention to Dr. Narwhal.

“No!”
yelled Ted, charging the railroad man, who laughed as he whacked Ted’s badminton racket out of his hands. The
racket clanged away, and Ted was off balance when the man swung his hammer into his side.

BOOM!

The air rushed out of Ted’s lungs, and he crumpled to the ground. He braced himself, expecting to be finished off, but instead, from his horizontal position, he saw the railroad man stomping away.

Toward Scurvy.

Ted tried to lift himself off the ground. Lying in the purple puddle in front of him were a heap of bacon slabs and an empty fire extinguisher.

“Scur-sc—”

Ted saw the railroad man rear back to take a fatal swing at Scurvy, who had his back turned.

Ted grabbed the bacon.

And then he got one.
An idea
. Far faster than it had before, his birthmark became hot, changed colors, and then
SNAP!

His arm broke off at the elbow and shot forward, grabbing the sledgehammer just as it was about to come down on Scurvy and tearing it from the railroad man’s hand. The railroader looked backward to find out what had happened, which gave Eric sufficient time to crack him across the forehead with his bamboo pole.

POP!

“Thanks, Eric,” said Scurvy.

Eric took another bite of the handle of the bamboo pole, rewarding himself.

Scurvy looked at the disembodied hand holding the sledgehammer, but its presence didn’t seem to surprise him. He just nodded a quick thanks to Ted and went back to the battle.

As a second act, instead of returning directly to Ted with the hammer, the hand hovered over the discarded fire extinguisher that was lying in the puddle next to the bacon. It lowered itself until it was even with the extinguisher and—
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
—brought the hammer down upon the canister until it broke open. Droplets of VIDGA solution spilled out. Ted’s hand stuck its pointer finger into one of these globules.

The droplet quickly expanded into a round puddle of solution, enveloping the bacon. The bacon blend started to churn, lengthening into a liquid sheet that stretched straight up out of the palace, touching the sky.

The column then started to harden and solidify, and everybody on both sides of the fight raised their eyes to behold what was now towering above them.

It was simply the biggest slice of bacon ever created. Flavored by VIDGA.

“The mother slab,” said Scurvy in awe.

On the battlefield, Joelle-Michelle looked up at the massive slice of bacon teetering back and forth, and at the army soldiers running out of the Presidential Palace. She needed to get her troops out of the
way fast
, and she shouted to the ACORN fighters who were still alive: “RETREAT!”

The few hundred survivors ran.

Persephone’s army didn’t receive any such instructions from their leader, who was busy using soda water to try and get the stains out of her bridal gown. She had seen that her forces were dominating ACORN, so she’d decided to let her generals finish things up, and trotted off to the vent to get herself in position for the attack on Earth.

“GET OUT, STAIN!” she said. “GET OUT!”

The towering slice of bacon wobbled forward and backward, as if it were almost
waiting
for the remaining ACORN fighters to get out of the way. Once they were, Ted’s arm floated up to the top of the slab and gave it a little push.

The slice toppled forward like a falling tree, straight down on top of the battlefield.

CRACK!

All at once, the piece of bacon fell on top of President Skeleton’s entire army, creating one enormous, synchronized
POP!

Followed by silence.

Thousands of gallons of purple liquid leaked out from underneath the fallen tower of bacon.

“Lousy wedding,” was all Persephone had time to say as the slice of bacon crashed on top of her, permanently—and for all time—staining her dress.

Ted’s forearm reattached itself to his elbow, cooled down, and returned to its natural color.

In the courtyard, Carolina sat in a white wedding chair, catching her breath. Dwack and Dr. Narwhal rested against the stage, where the band had never played, while Czarina Tallow folded some of the napkins that had been mussed by the fight.

Everybody in Ted’s battalion had survived.

“Ya got me hungry,” said Scurvy, staring at the bacon slab stretching out in front of the palace.

“You
cannot
eat that,” said Ted, rubbing his forearm.

“All right. I’ll make do with me un-wedding cake,” said Scurvy, heading toward the multitiered confection. He took out his dagger, lopped the heads off the bride and groom figures perched atop the cake, and cut everybody a piece. Anything that was left, he took for himself.

“A legendary slice of pork belly, that was,” said Scurvy, chewing cake. “Seems we got tha same kinda thoughts running through our heads.”

“We do,” said Ted, licking some frosting off his fingers.

Scurvy pointed to the slab of bacon with his fork.

“But
that,”
said Scurvy. “That’s impressive.”

“The scale of that piece of bacon is far beyond anything I
was ever able to do,” said Declan. “If you could learn to control your abilities, you could run the world.”

“I just want to make it through high school,” said Ted.

Declan laughed. He looked down at his plate.

“I haven’t had cake since your seventh birthday,” said Declan.

Ted didn’t get the chance to reply. Joelle-Michelle ran around the bacon slab and into the courtyard with her remaining troops, who looked exhausted. She threw her arms around Ted.

“Je t’adore!”
said Joelle-Michelle.
“Tu es magnifique!”

If Ted had spoken French, he would have known this meant “I adore you! You are amazing!” But he got the point anyway.

Carolina put her hand on Joelle-Michelle’s face before she was tempted to do any more kissing.

“Dégagez!”
said Carolina, which meant “Back off!”

“That’s my homecoming date.”

Joelle-Michelle looked up.

“I’m in AP French,” said Carolina.

Then came a sound that made everybody flinch and Dr. Narwhal drop his cake.

POP!

But it was only Vango behind the bar.

“Plenty of champagne back here,” said Vango, pouring himself a glass. “Let’s get weird!”

“Un verre, s’il vous plaît,”
said Joelle-Michelle, asking for a glass.

“I’ll take a full bottle,” said Scurvy.

Champagne flutes were handed around, and at Scurvy’s insistence, Ted took one too. Scurvy raised his bottle.

“I propose a toast!” he said. “Tah Ted, our hero, who fer tha first time in his life is tha most popular guy in a room!” Ted laughed.

“Cheers!” he said, and everybody took a sip. It had been a long, long day.

Several miles behind the Presidential Palace ran a sapphire-colored river that was off-limits to the general population. For the thousands of years Middlemost had been around, the river’s current had been so violent that if you only stepped
one toe
into it—
WHOOSH!
—you would be whizzed gurgling and sloshing straight to the river’s end, whereupon you would be crushed by horrible rapids.

Attempts had been made to build a bridge over the river, but so many workers were swept away that eventually the project managers figured it wasn’t worth it. The scouts who catapulted over the river to see what was on the other side never came back, and soon enough, ab-coms simply forced themselves to stop thinking about what was over there. Nobody knew that the scouts never came back because as soon as they crossed the river, a birthmarked arm grabbed them and whisked them into oblivion.

When the arm had completed its task, it floated back to the top of an enormous mountain on which there was a pleasant-looking brick house built in the Northern European Berlage style. The house was large and had the best views in all of Middle most. And only one occupant.

Lloyd Munch was a small, peculiar-looking man who had been forced—for various reasons—to leave his town in Denmark
years before. He had come to Middlemost via a vent he’d found inside an IKEA superstore. Here in Middlemost, he discovered that the birthmarked arm that had gotten him into so much trouble on Earth was quite useful, and he used it to build his house away from everything and everybody.

And he had done so well in this place. He had found a capable leader in Persephone Skeleton and organized her campaign. He had developed the Greenies to draw abstract companions back to Middlemost, and he had mapped out all sorts of plans to crush Earth once they had returned. He had so many imaginative ideas to try out on the people there who had driven him away.

He didn’t do the things they said he did. Or at least he didn’t do most of them.

But now Persephone’s army—
his
army—was no more, and he could see through his telescope that the small ACORN group that had defeated the army was eating cake and drinking champagne. It was all terribly irritating. He had helped pick out the cake—a vanilla chiffon masterpiece—and Persephone had promised to send him a piece following the ceremony. But now it appeared that he wouldn’t be getting his slice, which put him in a foul mood.

Lloyd was tempted to destroy the palace immediately, along with everybody inside it, but he had seen the way the boy had destroyed Persephone’s army—clearly, the boy had a powerful imagination, perhaps as powerful as Lloyd’s. Might they be related?

Let them eat their cake
, thought Lloyd. He had been beaten, but only for the moment.

Lloyd walked inside his home. In the spot where there
should have been a fireplace, he had installed a metal vent—the only privately owned vent in Middlemost. He squeezed his body into the vent and started to crawl.

It was time to get out of Middlemost for a while and go somewhere interesting. He’d kill the boy and all the rest of them.

Soon.

Ted, Carolina, Declan, Czarina Tallow, Scurvy, and Eric the Planda stood next to the vent that would take them back home.

Joelle-Michelle, Swamster, Dwack, Dr. Narwhal, and Vango stood on the grass in what a few hours before had been a battlefield.

“Are you sure you don’t want to come back with us?” said Ted to Dwack.

“I’m afraid there’s too much to be done in Middlemost for us to go back,” said Dwack. “Our place is here.”

“We need to get the factories going again,” said Dr. Narwhal. “It’s been a long time since kids have had their ordersss filled, and some kids need replacementsss.”

Ted hugged his friends.

Screams filled the dressing room at Macy’s.

Ted had known that the vent led to the enormous department store, but not that it went directly to the women’s changing rooms. A lady trying on a bathing suit didn’t appreciate it when Declan crawled out of the vent in her dressing room, followed by a pair of teenagers.

Declan knew that any explanation he offered for why he and Ted and Carolina were squeezing out of dressing room vents was going to sound like a lie, so he just told Ted and Carolina, “Run!”

They went crashing through the department store, upending racks of designer dresses and men’s coats as they raced away from security guards. They bombed down the third-floor escalators, down another flight through a floor that seemed to be made entirely of denim, and then across the overpowering cosmetics section. Scurvy, Czarina, and Eric ran to keep up, though they weren’t in jeopardy—after all, the security cameras only captured
three
individuals running through the store, not six.

Finally, Declan, Ted, and Carolina barreled out onto Thirty-fourth Street and hopped in the back of a cab while Scurvy, Czarina, and Eric crammed into the front seat.