Scurvy Goonda (7 page)

“What kind of friend is Flappybappy?”

“Flappybappy is … a manatee.”

“A manatee.”

“One of those elephant things that swim in rivers in Florida. I think he saw something about them on the Discovery Channel, and he’s had one ever since.”

“But this manatee walks on land.”

“That’s right. And he always carries doughnuts.”

“Were there any indications that … Flappybappy might go missing?”

“Well, my son said that he had recently broken out in these bumps, but I don’t really know what that means.”

Ted felt his sister looking at him. “I didn’t have anything to do with this, Adeline,” he said.

“EVERYBODY in the whole WORLD lost their friends! And they were all SICK with the same green spots that Scurvy got when YOU started using the patches!”

“I’m sure that there were some that had green bumps before I started using the patches.”

“There
weren’t,”
said Adeline. “I can
see
everybody’s abstract companions!
You
got Scurvy sick with the bumps, and then Eric caught the disease from Scurvy, and Eric passed it on, and pretty soon
all
of the ab-coms in the whole
world
got sick and it is ALL YOUR FAULT.”

“Have you ever read
The Crucible
?” said Ted. He knew that Adeline, being seven years old, had not. “It’s a play about witch trials, and in it, one girl starts saying that certain people are witches, and soon enough
all
of her friends are accusing people of being witches. Hysteria is contagious.”

“But this is happening ALL OVER THE WORLD.”

“Radio, Internet, television—kids are just hearing about it and saying they’re missing friends too, to get out of school.”

“ERIC THE PLANDA IS GONE AND I’M NOT TRYING TO MISS SCHOOL,” said Adeline, hitting the couch with both fists. “IT WAS YOU! YOU GOT THE AB-COMS SICK AND TAKEN AWAY! YOU’RE NOT EVEN MY
BROTHER
ANYMORE! YOU’RE JUST NORMAL AND MEAN!”

Adeline grabbed her schoolbooks and stomped away, and Ted got a terrible feeling in his stomach. What
was
he doing? A month ago, he and Scurvy Goonda were spending every single day together—sleeping in the same bed, even—and now he had somehow become exactly like the people who told him that Scurvy was just the product of something misfiring in his head. But this—hundreds of millions of kids being orphaned by their friends on the same day—this was something
real. He was a jerk for refusing to admit it. If this was becoming a normal kid, no thanks.

Ted grabbed his backpack and darted out the front door. He found Adeline at the end of the street, waiting for her school bus with a couple of other second graders, one of whom looked extremely sad.

“What?” said Adeline, seeing him coming.

“You’re right,” said Ted. “I’m acting toward you the way people act toward me. I’m sorry.”

“Okay, Ted. So, now what?”

“I’ll try and do something about this. If Scurvy thought that I could stop this from happening in some way—I’ll talk to him.”

“Scurvy is GONE, Ted.”

“Well, maybe not.”

The school bus pulled up and the two other seven-year-olds got on. Ted had stood with Adeline many times before to make sure she was safe, and he’d never heard the bus so quiet. She climbed onto the first step and then turned around.

“You PROMISE you’re going to do something?” she said.

“I promise to try.”

“Try
doesn’t count.”

“Okay, Addie,” said Ted. “I promise. Get on the bus, and we’ll talk more about this later.”

Adeline disappeared up the steps and the bus pulled away, leaving Ted holding his backpack, wishing that he hadn’t just made an impossible promise. There was no way a problem of this magnitude could be his responsibility, no matter what Scurvy might or might not have told Adeline before stomping
away in the middle of the night. Somewhere, there had to be a team of scientists examining data from beeping machines and poring over data readouts, pegging the moment that the disappearances had taken place and working on a quick solution to put everything back the way it was supposed to be. It was ridiculous to think that someone like him could resolve this crisis.

Still, his doctor wouldn’t be pleased with what he was about to do.

It was almost eleven o’clock, and Ted was glad to have the night alone to himself. It had been an odd day, yet one that was, shockingly, not as awkward as he had anticipated. Many of his classmates must have had younger siblings missing imaginary friends, because the eyes he felt looking at him as he made his way through the hallways weren’t of the usual
you’re a freak!
variety, but instead were sympathetic, as if his fellow students might finally be considering that his pirate was, or had been, real.

Ted approached Stop to Shop from the road behind the supermarket. He knew that the rear door was always open, and he didn’t want to alert Jed to his presence. He pulled the door open just enough so that he could slide inside without risking a squeaking hinge, and bounded behind a water fountain. From there, shuffling close to the ground, he made his way behind the deli display case. It wasn’t the best hiding spot because all the food that was usually inside the case had been removed for the night, but it offered an excellent view of his old stomping ground, the meat aisle.

The new meat attendant was a guy Ted had never seen before. He had thin yellow hair and bone-white skin, and he was in the middle of singing to himself. Ted didn’t recognize the lyrics to the ditty, which might have been in a foreign
language. Before he had been fired, he had heard a rumor that the store might be bringing in a few Czech employees, and this could be one of them.

The possible Czech was drinking steadily from a liter bottle of blue Gatorade. It wouldn’t be long before he needed to use the restroom. As expected, once the bottle was empty, the Czech walked toward the break area, leaving the meat aisle unattended.

Something was going to happen.

And then … ever so slowly … the gray swinging doors that led to the back of the store were pushed open from the inside. A dirty hand emerged and landed with a slap on the tile floor. Then came another hand, and then the rest of a dirty, hairy, ragged body.

“Scurvy,” whispered Ted.

Except this Scurvy was gaunt and sick and
covered
in green bumps. He crawled to the base of the meat section, where he paused and slowly removed his sword from its scabbard. With great effort, he swooshed the blade through a row of premium bacon. Plastic packaging erupted into the air, and slabs of raw meat spilled all over the floor.

“Ha-HAR!” said Scurvy, who again attacked the row of bacon. The packaged cold cuts and honey-baked hams now looked like they had been through a war. Ted winced, knowing how irritating it was going to be for the new meat guy to clean up the mess.

“Rarr!” said Scurvy.

Scurvy swung his sword again and again, blade always cutting cleanly through the meats, making small squishing sounds.

“THAT’S fer abandoning me!” said Scurvy, sending more pig wedges cascading to the floor.

“And THAT’S fer gettin’ everybody else sick with yer stupid patches!” said Scurvy, and more juices burst in every direction. “Patient ZERO, ya are! Tha great infector!”

Ted was impressed with how accurate Scurvy’s assaults were, considering the pirate’s weakened condition—in all the years that they had been together, Ted had never seen Scurvy simply go
nuts
with his sword.

“Typhoid Ted! Tha scourge of tha abstract! That’s what they should call ya!” said Scurvy, and Ted realized that Scurvy was picturing
him
as he attacked the meat.

“Ho-HO!” said Scurvy, with a final lunge that slit the last remaining undamaged package of bacon in half.

The pirate placed his sword back in its sheath, and then stood quietly for a moment, shoulders heaving, trying to catch his breath. He got down on his knees and began gathering bits of bacon from the floor, shoving as much meat into his pockets as he possibly could, muttering “Oooh, that’s a good one” and “Nope, that’s turkey bacon” until the
clop clop
sound of approaching footsteps sent him shuffling for the back of the store, pieces of bacon dropping from his greatcoat the entire way.

With one push through the swinging gray doors, Scurvy Goonda was once again gone from Ted’s life.

The meat attendant came back from the bathroom just as the doors stopped moving. He stood stock-still in front of the aisle, taking in the scope of the carnage.

“Hlupák!”
he said.

Had Ted spoken Czech, he would have realized that the
meat guy was shouting “Idiot!”—though whether he was shouting it at himself or the meat marauder wasn’t altogether clear.

The Czech stomped away muttering under his breath—no doubt heading off to find the night manager—and Ted knew that he didn’t have much time if he was going to have a chance to talk to Scurvy. He crawled out from behind the deli cabinet and followed Scurvy’s exit path, pushing his way through the gray doors into the back of the store.

A trail of bacon morsels lined the ground where they had fallen from Scurvy’s pockets. The more Ted followed the meat, the sicker he felt about where the scraps might be leading him.

It can’t be
, thought Ted.

At the end of the trail, he leaned over and picked a final glob of quivering pink bacon up from the floor.

Ted was standing in front of the Crusher.

“Scurvy?” said Ted.

He looked down into the guts of the Crusher, where sat twenty or so boxes, fully intact, just waiting for somebody to hit the switch and put them out of their misery. Because the machine wasn’t as full as usual, for the first time Ted was able to see just how
deep
the inside chamber really was. Taking in the Crusher’s awesome depth, he noticed something peculiar. The places that weren’t covered by cardboard seemed to be leaking a bizarre white light. The light looked almost like sunlight, but that didn’t make sense, considering it was past midnight and the storage room floor was made of cold cement.

In addition to the light, something else made Ted nervous: several boxes had been splattered with meat juice and bacon gloops, meaning that Scurvy Goonda had likely been
inside the Crusher—which was such an act of insanity that Ted could barely wrap his mind around the idea.

“All right, Scurvy,” said Ted. “Let’s go, olly-olly oxen free. Come on out! I know you’re angry at me, but I have a question I need to ask.”

Nothing.

“I don’t want to come down there!” said Ted, and he really didn’t.

He was beginning to think that Scurvy might be hiding in the back right corner of the chamber, where there seemed to be the greatest concentration of bacon gobbets, so he grabbed a mop leaning against a nearby wall, flipped it around, and began poking the boxes with its blunt end.

“C’mon, Scurvy! Come out!”

Ted’s mop-poking caused some of the boxes to slide over each other, and more strange light leaked up from the bottom. But still, he didn’t see any sign of Scurvy Goonda.

Then, from somewhere else in the storage room, he heard a voice.

“I THINK HE’S BACK HERE,” said Jed, who sounded like he was approaching from Ted’s left. But when Ted turned to run in the opposite direction, he saw movement and a flash of blue uniforms:

Cops!

Ted scanned the storeroom for a place to hide, but he didn’t have any decent choices. He couldn’t jump in a trash can because it was full, and the pallets of jumbo soda bottles were too tightly packed to squeeze behind. If he made a dash to hide behind one of the large boxes of diapers or paper towels, the cops were going to spot him and arrest him.

He only had one option.

“If you’re down there, Scurvy,” whispered Ted to himself, “I’m going to kill you.”

With that, Ted climbed into the Crusher’s central chamber, lowering himself into the heap of cardboard boxes as quietly as he could.

In one way, he felt like he was five years old again and swimming around inside one of those plastic ball pits at the Barnstable County Fair. But he also felt abject terror, because looking up, he could see the inner gears and teeth of the Crusher.

He dug down into the boxes until he thought he was entirely covered. There was more of the light down here than there was above, and he thought he could see where it was coming from—a rectangular sliding panel at the bottom of the bin that had somehow become dislodged, leaving a half-foot gap between the wall and the edge of the steel plate.

Voices filtered down to him from above:

“See anything?” said Jed.

“Nope,” said a deep voice, probably a cop. “Thought I heard something, but it might just have been you.”

“Whoever did it couldn’t have gone far. There are bits of bacon all over the place.”

Covered with cardboard as he was, Ted couldn’t see that Jed was looking down into the machine. Ted also couldn’t see that Jed, having realized that something strange might be going on inside the Crusher, had quickly formed a simple, wicked plan to flush Ted out of the machine.

“WELL, PLENTY OF CARDBOARD THAT NEEDS CRUSHING!” shouted Jed. “BETTER TAKE CARE OF IT!”

And with that, Jed threw the switch.

Ted felt the initial vibrations below his body before he heard the roar of the machine coming to life. He was shocked at how quickly everything happened after that. The bin began rattling furiously, followed by a hydraulic whoosh as the walls started moving in, pressing the cardboard boxes together.

Ted’s first instinct was to get out. The obvious way of doing so was to leave the way he’d come in—from above—but an enormous amount of crushing metal was quickly descending upon him from that direction. He could feel the power of the Crusher and all its parts, and he was afraid that if he tried to leap over the wall of the bin, the rapidly lowering metal press might cut him in half.

Which meant, essentially, that there was no way to escape.

Then the survival part of his brain made a decision for him. Instead of warning him to escape by going up, it ordered him to head down. He grabbed the loose panel that was letting in the light, and pulled with the full weight of his body.