Crap Kingdom (11 page)

14

KYLE WAS A JOCK.
He never hadn’t been.

Tom met Kyle in fourth grade. Kyle had spent his elementary school years in all these sports leagues Tom knew about but never realized everyone took so seriously. Kyle’s parents had put him in soccer leagues and hockey leagues, and rather than complain about it, the way Tom would have, he’d actually seemed to enjoy it. Kyle would say, “I can’t come over and watch
Lost
, I have soccer practice that night,” and Tom would say, “That sucks,” and Kyle wouldn’t immediately agree. It was like watching a good TV show and running around a field getting all sweaty were the same thing to him.

And it was in this world of people who enjoyed running and sweating that Kyle had picked up these positive clichés. Tom was sure of it. The “think positives” and the “give a hundred and ten percents.” Only in the boneheaded world of youth sports could these phrases hold any water. While Tom had always thought of Kyle as a reformed jock, as having traded in the post-practice juice boxes of his youth for the mature black hoodies and graphic novels of adulthood, he now realized, as Kyle repeated all the platitudes the king thought were so genius but apparently wouldn’t have been if Tom had said them, the jock had been in there waiting for the right time to pop out and stab their friendship in the back, or kick it in the back with cleats on, or whatever.

Kyle was the new Chosen One, and he had magical powers. This was all Tom could think about as he lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling. Tom would have done everything differently if he’d been given magical powers. He would have even considered that job in the Rat-Snottery if he’d been allowed to clean out the rat’s noses with jets of magical flame. Maybe Kyle hadn’t even been given the powers, maybe he’d just had them when he’d crossed over. That was almost worse. It meant that Kyle was just better. It meant Tom had no cause to be upset. There was no injustice, there was no one to blame. Kyle was just more qualified for the position Tom had been dreaming of his entire life.

“Come on,” Kyle said when Tom met him in the courtyard outside the Performing Arts wing the next day after school like they’d agreed. They trudged around the side of the auditorium to a gravel depression in the ground that was mostly shrouded from view by bushes.

“This is going to be quick, right? I have rehearsal in like, twenty minutes.” Tom no longer had any way of telling time since he didn’t have a phone, so he just estimated how long it had been since the last bell of the day.

“Don’t worry about it,” Kyle said.

“I’m just saying, I don’t have time to go all the way to Kmart,” Tom said.

“No Kmart,” Kyle said. He held out his hand. “Grab it.”

“What are we doing here, again?”

“Just trust me.” Kyle grabbed Tom’s right hand in his left and then stood shoulder-to-shoulder with him. “How it works is, we fall backward. I’ve never done it while trying to bring someone else but it’s supposed to work. Like when you were a kid, did you ever try to fall backward just to see if you could do it? Your body won’t let you. But if you’re with me, at the moment when your body would normally catch you, you’ll go. On the count of three,” Kyle said. “One . . . two . . .
three!
”

Kyle fell backward, and Tom tried to as well. The moment came, the moment where normally his brain would say “nope” and one of his legs would involuntarily shoot back to catch him, but it didn’t happen. He fell for real.

Something ripped open behind him, like he’d fallen through an extra-thick sheet of construction paper, and he was in blackness for a second, still falling backward, his right hand still in Kyle’s left, and he could tell by the momentum of his body that he should be hitting the ground, but there was no ground. They didn’t fall straight down, either. They kept swinging on the same trajectory, all the way around, as though their feet were attached to a bar and they could only swing around it, and they swung past where the ground should’ve been again and came all the way up and when they once again reached a standing position they ripped through another sheet of thick time-and-space construction paper and they were somewhere else entirely.

They were still standing. The momentum of the fall, or the spin, or whatever it was, made them stumble forward a few paces.

“Awesome, right?” Kyle said.

Tom looked around. They were standing at the bottom of what looked like a crater. Kyle began to run up the dirt incline toward the crater’s rim. “Come on!”

Kyle was looking up over the rim when Tom caught up with him. “Aw, crap,” Kyle said. Tom looked up over the edge. On the horizon was Crap Kingdom, a collection of shacks and forts behind a shimmering, curved wall of light. Between them and the kingdom was an expanse of brush, and between them and the brush were a whole pack of the dragon-dogs Gark had called Elggs. The closest one turned its head toward Tom and Kyle. It blinked, its green eyelid coming from the bottom of its eye, and then pulling up from the bottom again like a window shade. It barked its six-lunged bark. All of its brothers looked over and saw the boys.

The wave started from the back. A single rippling band of light passed over, or under, the creatures’ skins, like eight TVs all programmed to show different parts of the same image, and when it reached the one closest to Tom and Kyle, passing over the final Elgg’s body until it finally winked out at the tip of its nose, they charged.

Tom backed away as fast as he could while trying not to trip. Kyle stood fast.

“
Kyle!
” Tom yelled.

Tom saw the dragon-dogs at the head of the pack leap right at his friend’s neck, their sleek faces split in two by wide pink mouths lined with hundreds of jagged teeth. They were feet from Kyle’s face, then inches, then
KROOOOOSSSSSSSSSSHHHH
: they were blown backward by a ball of light that came from Kyle and flew out in every direction. Tom winced when he was about to be hit by it, but right before it got to him, a hole in the shape of his silhouette appeared in the ball’s surface and it passed harmlessly around him.

Kyle turned to him. “We gotta go now.” He put one sneaker on the rim. “Stay ahead of me, okay?”

Tom ran up and hopped over the edge. He found himself looking out over the sandy, scrubby plain, a seemingly infinite expanse of land that looked like the not-so-good part of the beach you had to walk over before you got to the actual beach. On the horizon, the Wall encircling the kingdom looked like it was made of the same light that Kyle had just emitted except it was static, thick on the ground and then dissipating as it sloped off toward its domed peak in the gray sky.

“Run straight!” Kyle said.

Tom did. In his peripheral vision, he saw a flash of purple from behind a stand of brush on his left. Then there was a blue light behind a decaying sand dune. The Elggs were getting up and giving chase.

Tom wished he’d paid more attention in PE. Then he realized there was really nothing in PE that he could’ve paid attention to that would make him better at running. Being good at running was just a matter of running every day no matter what, and that was exactly why he wasn’t good at it.

He looked back over his shoulder. The Elggs were gaining on them. Then he noticed Kyle’s footsteps in the sand. As soon as his foot left an imprint, the imprint started to glow with the same light as Kyle’s energy ball, the same light that made up the Wall ahead of them that seemed farther away the more they had to run. Footprint-shaped columns of light grew from them. Every few seconds Kyle’s neck was in serious danger once again, and then the attacking Elgg would be snapped back as the columns of light whipped around like solid vines and ensnared its back legs. Tom looked forward again. The Wall drew closer, but not close enough. Not close enough at all.

The path they were running had worked its way between two rows of dunes, a little canyon. The sounds of the pursuing Elggs had faded. Ahead of them, the Wall became more and more translucent, the way mist does when you get closer to it and the things inside the mist become clearer.

Then the view was blocked when something came streaking across the canyon. It looked a lightning bolt with a protective casing, a protective casing with arms and legs and teeth. It was an Elgg that had somehow evaded Kyle’s energy tendrils. It leapt in from one side, bounced off the opposite dune, and came to a rest in front of them before they could even slow down.

Kyle shoved Tom aside. He hit a dune just in time to see Kyle barreling ahead, gathering a head of magical light like the glowing heat-shield of a spacecraft upon reentry. This thunderhead of magic hit the Elgg, knocking it off its feet and then driving it forward as Kyle kept running. It tumbled end over end, its innards a whirlwind of sparks, its face angry and panicked and bewildered and, in its helplessness, kind of cute.

“Behind me!” Kyle barked.

They kept running, the Elgg bouncing ahead of them against the canyon walls and Kyle’s energy shield, constantly scratching to try to regain its footing, and failing. Columns of light were still growing from Kyle’s footsteps, and the longer Tom ran behind him, the closer they came to whipping him off his feet.

“Kyle??!” Tom yelled.

Kyle looked back and saw the vines of energy snapping at Tom’s heels.

“Right, sorry,” Kyle said. The vines began to shrink and fade until only normal, size-11 sneaker prints were left in the sand.

The dunes on either side of them grew smaller until they tapered off at last, and the boys were running through the open field that bordered Crap Kingdom. With nothing to bounce off of, the confused and probably nauseated Elgg fell off to their left.

Tom could feel something else whipping at his ankles, something much smaller than Kyle’s footprint-generated energy vines. He looked down: his right shoe had come untied. Ugh. Well, they were almost there, and the Wall was almost entirely invisible now. Besides, Tom knew he could handle the untied shoelace. He’d basically spent his entire life with one shoelace untied. It seemed like he’d either learned the wrong way to tie his shoes all those years ago or he’d learned the exact right way to tie your shoes if you wanted at least one of your shoes to come untied every day at the worst possible moment. Anyway, they were almost there. It seemed like the Elggs were off their scent, finally. Plus he was getting into kind of a groove with the running thing. He was actually pretty good at it, he thought, for someone who—

The second he started feeling cool and competent, he tripped and fell facedown in the sand. He heard Kyle’s footsteps ahead of him, growing fainter, and then he heard a high-pitched squeaking. He looked up to see a creature staring at him. It was like a mouse, if someone took a mouse’s eyes and placed them all the way down on either side of its neck, so its head was just a place for a nose and whiskers and ears, and if it wanted to look at you, like this one was looking at Tom, it had to move its body back and forth rapidly, hoping to catch a three-dimensional glimpse of you with both eyes at once, and failing, and squeaking all the while. This must have been one of the indigenous snot-filled rats. Tom wondered if it was laughing at him. It had no right to laugh, he thought. Not when it couldn’t even grow to full size without another species blowing its nose for it.

Then, above the squeak, and above Kyle’s receding footsteps, there were louder footsteps, behind Tom. The Elgg that Kyle had battered all the way through the canyon must have conquered its nausea. Tom looked up and to his left and saw it bounding off dunes, headed right for him.

Tom struggled to his feet, but something deep and primal inside him told him he would not make it up in time, and if even if he did, he would not run fast enough. His hand jutted out and grabbed the indigenous weird-eyed rat thing. He flung it side-armed at the approaching monster. He missed, and it flew off to the right. The Elgg’s head turned that way, though, and the beast made a detour to wherever the rat thing had landed.

Tom stood up and started galloping, trying to keep his feet as far apart as possible so he wouldn’t trip again on his still-untied shoelace. He heard a panicked final squeak and a chomping noise. He leapt off a sand embankment. Kyle glanced behind him and saw Tom was there. He seemed unaware of the whole shoelace/rodent-toss fiasco. Tom looked back just in time to see the Elgg leaping off the embankment after them. Apparently it was still hungry.

“
Slowwave truepants!
” Kyle yelled. He spun around, stopped, waited for Tom to reach him, and yelled, “
Close!
” Just inches away from them, the Elgg bounced off the Wall, hard. It had spent the whole afternoon bouncing off things that hadn’t been there a second ago, and it was pissed. It scrabbled to its feet, its green eyelid bands scrolling rapidly over its eyes, and it sneezed, or scoffed, or something, ejecting blue fire and rodent blood all over the transparent Wall right in front of Tom and Kyle’s faces. Then it turned and wandered away.

“
Woo!
That was fun. Good job, man,” Kyle said. He wasn’t out of breath or anything.

“Thank you,” Tom said. “How do you know how to do all this stuff?”