The Dead Gentleman (20 page)

Did her mushroom cap just shake? She thought she felt a slight tremble, but that could have just been the fungus tree settling into her added weight.

But there it was again! The whole thing had definitely shifted, as if something big was brushing up against it. Or climbing it.

Jez had just begun to inch away from the edge when a loud groan, a thick-throated grunt, broke the unnatural silence. It was right beneath her. For a second Jez considered jumping for a neighboring toadstool; perhaps she could leap from mushroom cap to mushroom cap. But even as she began to stand, the toadstool shook again, more violently this time, and it was all she could do to hold on and not tumble off the edge. Her grip was shaky at best, and she found herself sliding inch by inch. She struggled to get her footing, but her feet slipped along the spongy surface until they dangled over the side. As her legs disappeared over the lip, the thing beneath her let out another croaking growl. It had seen her.

She pulled with all her might, but the relentless shaking offered her no purchase. A massive snout appeared at the edge of the mushroom cap. She kicked it with her sneakered foot, but she might as well have kicked a boulder. The snout turned up to reveal a giant mouth, which bit down on Jez’s leg just below the knee. It gave a small pull and Jez was yanked off the cap and into the undergrowth below.

She screamed as she was dangled upside down, but after about a minute of panicked thrashing, she realized (to her relief) that her leg had not in fact been bitten off. And, though firm, the creature’s grip was surprisingly gentle. The forest floor loomed some ten or twelve feet beneath her, but she was being held, not eaten.

Her captor blinked at her with beady eyes, her leg clamped between its jaws. The creature’s head was dwarfed by its enormous body, which was covered in thick green hide. Two rows of red, diamond-shaped scales traversed the length of its back like fins and continued down its tail, where they ended in a cluster of fierce-looking spikes.

Stegosaurus
.

She remembered pictures of the small-brained dinosaurs from her biology books, but none of the pictures had prepared her for the creature riding on the reptile’s back. Nestled between two fins was a furry, yellow-eyed mammal. It looked a little like an ape, covered as it was in dull brown fur, but the eyes reminded her of some kind of marsupial. They were large and round, and Jez had seen them before. A trog. It held a long spear in one hand and the dinosaur’s reins in the other and scratched its head with a third.

A third?

Jez shook her head to clear her eyes. She wanted to make sure she was seeing this correctly as the trog’s
third
arm—which was apparently attached to its back squarely between its shoulder blades—gently massaged the top of its head while it studied her.

The dinosaur at least looked familiar, shocking as it was to be chomped on by one in the flesh, but this three-armed trog was absolutely bizarre.

“Well,” Jez said. “If you’re not going to feed me to your pet, then would you mind putting me down? The blood’s all rushing to my head and I’m getting a headache.”

Jezebel was not nearly as confident as she hoped she sounded. She was counting on the fact that she remembered stegosauruses to be herbivores, plant eaters. Plus, if the trog had wanted to kill her, he could have done so already with that spear of his. But then again, perhaps these trogs were the sadistic type, and it was going to just dangle her upside down until her brains exploded out her nose.

The trog leaned forward in its saddle and barked something at her in an alien language. It was mostly gibberish and sounded more like the trog was clearing its throat than talking, but amid
all the noise she thought she could make out two possible English words, repeated again and again:

Tobby Erber
. It sounded a little like a name.

“Tommy Learner?” Jez asked. “Are you trying to say Tommy Learner?”

The trog answered her with another string of unintelligible clicks, excitedly bobbing its head back and forth.

But then all at once it stopped, and the trog’s posture turned rigid as it sat up in its saddle and peered into the surrounding jungle. The stegosaurus lifted its head high and sniffed the air, having apparently forgotten about the girl in its mouth.

Jez felt it, too. Something nearby. Something wrong.

It burst out of the trees then, mouth open in a silent roar. Blunt, car-shaped head and long, razor-sharp teeth. Massive clawed feet cut gashes in the ground as it dragged itself toward them. Patches of bone had torn through rotting white skin, and something wet and sticky had started to ooze through the cracks.

Tyrannosaurus rex
. Dead. Stinking and decomposing in front of her eyes, but still walking. And it was upon them.

Instinctively, the stegosaurus whipped its body around to put its spiked tail between itself and the predator. It opened its mouth and gave out a low bellow of challenge, dropping Jezebel onto the ground below.

Stunned, Jez barely managed to look up in time to see the trog loose its spear at the T. rex, the blade sinking deep into the creature’s left flank. The stegosaurus backed up, swinging its spike in a wild arc to defend against the unnatural beast. But the attack never came. The undead monster, heedless of the spear in its side, lowered its snout to the earth and breathed in deeply. Jez felt her legs go weak as she saw the creature’s dead black eyes settle on
her. It didn’t care about the trog or his mount—Jezebel was its prey.

Its maw opened wide—the stench of death and decay was unbearable—and it lunged for her. It was not fast; it moved in a jerking, halting sort of way, but nevertheless it took only a couple of steps and it was on top of her, bearing down with its teeth.

Had it not been so focused on Jez, it might have seen the blow coming from its side—not that the mindless monster would have cared. The stegosaurus threw its weight into the T. rex, knocking it backward off its feet. In the charge the stegosaurus barely missed trampling Jez underfoot, but she could see the trog deftly manipulating the reins, steering its mount safely away from her.

The stegosaurus and its rider didn’t hesitate. As the T. rex struggled to regain its footing, the stegosaurus swung its mighty spiked tail in a great sideways arc, impaling the T. rex through its chest.

But what should have surely been a killing blow did not stop this undead thing, and now that the stegosaurus’s spiked tail was stuck in the T. rex’s hide, it couldn’t retreat. Jez covered her eyes as the T. rex opened its rotted, toothy mouth and reached for the stegosaurus’s unarmored neck. She heard a horrible howl and the sound of two great bodies smashing together and tumbling to the ground.

When she opened her eyes the fight was over. The stegosaurus’s body lay unmoving and bloody atop the carcass of the T. rex. In its death throes, the poor creature had rolled over the T. rex’s legs, crushing the brittle, rotten bones. Everywhere the air was thick with dust and grit kicked up during their battle, and Jez found it hard to breathe without choking on it.

She got to her feet and rubbed her head. Slightly dizzy, she
listened. She thought she heard a low moan. Following the sound, she found the trog lying in a heap near the foot of a toadstool. He was alive, but he’d apparently hit his head much harder than Jez had hit hers. His eyes blinked up at her, unfocused and dazed.

A sudden stirring caused Jez to whip around in time to see the T. rex, its legs crushed, its chest impaled on the body of its enemy, twist its head to face her. With its tiny fore claws it scraped at the dirt, trying to pull its ruined body free, trying to finish the hunt. Jez jumped back as it snapped its jaws uselessly at the air.

She thought about Tommy, wherever he was, and desperately wanted to know if he was all right. Then she looked down at the trog who’d just saved her life. The trog who knew Tommy’s name.

“C’mon,” she said as she pulled the trog to his feet. “We can’t stay here.”

The trog had short, stubby legs, nearly half as long as his arms. Jez wrapped one of those arms around her shoulder and pulled. The trog used the other two to steady himself and lope along with her as Jez led them back into the forest, away from the monstrous tyrannosaurus and toward the pillar of smoke.

She just hoped that for once she was headed in the right direction.

Jezebel found the smoke, but there was no fire. It drifted out of some kind of giant, oddly symmetrical fungus with a squat chimney of piled rocks on the top. This chimney hole produced the dark tendril of smoke that had drawn Jezebel down out of the hills and into the dangerous jungle. And now that she was here, she didn’t have a clue what she should do next.

Her situation wasn’t made any easier by the wounded and apparently delirious trog she’d just hauled through half a mile of dense fungoid forest. The strange three-armed creature was still groggy—Jez had made a makeshift bandage out of her sweatshirt and tied that around the red gash in his forehead. Despite the bloody, matted fur, the cut itself didn’t appear to be too deep, but he still blinked confusedly at Jez every now and again, all the while muttering in that click language of his. He made no protest; all his earlier bluster and shouting disappeared. Now he leaned
on her gratefully while she helped him steer his way through the jungle.

She had half a plan to trade the hurt trog for Tommy. They did that sort of thing all the time in cop movies, swapped one hostage for another. But in order to do that she needed to actually find the trogs first, and this mushroom house did not look much like a trog home. Trogs were rock shapers, Tommy had said, underground dwellers. And while, technically, this whole world was underground, she kind of pictured them living in tunnels like the one Tommy had accidentally trespassed in. A cozy mushroom house just didn’t seem very troglike.

“Hey!” she shouted, pounding her fist on the wall. “Hello? Is anybody home? We need help!”

She pressed her ear against the side, but she could hear nothing. She pounded some more and shouted some increasingly less polite pleas for help. But there was no answer from within. Nothing stirred.

“All right, trog, my friend,” she said, turning back around. “Where are your buddies …”

Jezebel’s voice trailed off as she set eyes on the five trogs that hadn’t been there before. Each one stood next to a newly appeared hole in the rock floor, and two of them held a net strung between their six arms. Another was tending to her trog, talking to him in their clicking language and examining the melon-sized lump on his head and Jez’s bandage.

Apparently trogs did live in mushroom houses. Or, at least, under them.

“Oh, hey,” said Jez. “Boy, you guys sure are sneaky when you want to be. You see I brought your friend to you. Fixed him up the best I could. And um … I’m here to trade your trog—who I took
very good care of, thank you very much—for Tommy Learner. You know, the short kid? Human, like me?”

The two trogs holding the net stepped closer. Jezebel started backing away, keeping distance between them.

“Whoa, now no need for that! Tell you what—keep your buddy
and
Tommy. He’s been nothing but a pain since I first … hey!”

The trogs tossed the net. It looked almost lazy the way they lobbed it at her, but it somehow managed to twist around her with enough force to pull her off her feet.

The next thing she knew she was being dragged toward a fresh hole in the ground, five trog voices chattering excitedly all the way down.

She was hoisted up between two trogs and bounced along in the net as they scurried through dark tunnels and along teetering rope bridges spanning vast underground caverns. Patches of wet-looking, incandescent cave mold gave barely enough light to see by—the kingdom of the trogs was lit by glow-in-the-dark slime.

But what a kingdom it was. A long network of tunnels served as the superhighways between trog towns, and the trogs managed to traverse these tunnels with surprising speed, using their three arms to pull themselves through—their feet rarely touching the ground. They made their homes in the larger caverns, in huts suspended above underground lakes and heated by burning the cave moss that grew on the surface of the waters. The smoke from these fires was thick and black, and the trogs had apparently developed a complicated venting system that began in the caverns and terminated in giant, hollowed-out mushrooms like the one that Jez had discovered above.

All of which Jezebel saw in snatches and glimpses as she was jostled back and forth between her captors. They traveled a great distance, past the cavern villages and through stranger and darker landscapes where there were no light-giving plants and the blackness was absolute. Even the trogs’ eyes, normally a shining yellow, went dark in the total absence of light.

Eventually they emerged again into the open, Jez’s eyes hurting in the sudden brightness of the reddish day. The heat of the molten sun felt like a furnace compared with the chill of the trogs’ underground world. When her eyes had finally adjusted to the light, Jez looked up to see, looming above her, the underside of a great black ship. All she could do was struggle and plead in vain as the trogs scaled the giant anchored chain and delivered her to the Dead Gentleman’s crew.