Gremlins (17 page)

“O.K.,” Lynn murmured. “Just be careful . . . I mean, we’ve never spent a Christmas apart.”

“Yeah. How’s everything there?”

Lynn hesitated, but only briefly, deciding in a split second that it would do no good to tell him about the things that were upstairs. He was a terrible driver on snow and ice, and if he were in a hurry . . .

“Fine,” she replied. “Billy went to work and I’m sitting here with Gizmo.”

“See you soon, then.”

“Bye, honey,” Lynn said, and hung up.

“Bye.”

“Hello,” Billy said.

Getting an “urgent” telephone call at work, especially on this day and under his present circumstances, made Billy nervous for several reasons. He was, first of all, concerned that his mother was in some kind of danger; nor was he made comfortable by Gerald Hopkins’s hanging around after he gave him the receiver (expecting, no doubt, at least a death in the family for the call to be legitimate); finally, the dust from the battle with Mrs. Deagle had barely settled and he was still the center of attention of most eyes in the bank. Under the magnifying glass, he found it difficult to compose himself and his hand shook when he lifted the receiver to his mouth.

“It hatched,” the voice at the other end said, startling him with its succinctness.

“What?”

“I said it just hatched,” Roy Hanson said at the other end of the line.

“What . . . what is it?” Billy stammered.

“Hard to say right now. Why don’t you come by and have a look? It’s almost time for you to quit, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Billy replied. “But . . . listen, I’ll have to call home first and find out what’s happened there.”

“Sure. I’ll be here.”

“Listen, Mr. Hanson, you don’t think it’s dangerous, do you?” Billy asked, aware that several sets of eyes were on him.

“Well, it’s no butterfly,” Hanson replied. “I can tell you that.”

“I’m gonna call home first,” Billy said. “And if everything’s all right there, I’ll drop by.”

“Good. See you in a while then, I hope.”

Billy hung up, dialed his home phone number. When his mother answered, he spoke quickly and decisively. “Listen carefully,” he said. “Mr. Hanson at the school just called to tell me the Mogwai came out of its pod. So ours probably aren’t far behind. Can you go upstairs and see what’s happened with them?”

“How can I?” Lynn demanded. “You made me lock the door from the inside.”

Billy had forgotten that.

“Then go up and put your ear to the door. You’ll be able to hear if anything’s moving around.”

“All right. Shall I call you back?”

“I’ll wait,” Billy said. Hopkins and Mr. Corben were staring at him, not to mention Mrs. Deagle, but he was too agitated about the latest Mogwai development to care. A minute later his mother picked up the receiver.

“All quiet,” she said.

“Good. I’ll be home soon. I’m leaving now, but I thought I’d make a pass by school first. Maybe Mr. Hanson will know more by then or be able to give me some advice on how to deal with these new critters.”

“O.K. I’ll be careful.”

“When’s Dad coming home?”

“Not until later. He’s been held up by the snow.”

“Oh . . . well, bye.”

Billy hung up, then went to close his window, and reached for his jacket.

“Sorry, Mr. Corben,” he said to his boss, who watched him with a quizzical expression. “There’s a small emergency at home and I’ve got to take care of it.”

“Wait just a moment,” Mrs. Deagle said, emerging from the background to assert herself. “This man was impertinent and I demand you fire him.”

“Mr. Corben can fire me later,” Billy said.

“And he will,” the voice of Gerald Hopkins called after him as he raced for the front door.

Stripe thought at first, as consciousness started to return, that while sleeping he had slipped his head beneath one of the heavy rugs in Billy’s room. But he soon realized that it wasn’t just his head that was immobilized in some foreign environment; his entire being seemed to be in a state of suspended animation. Try as he might, he could see nothing but a filamentous curtain, as if he were packed past his eyes in heavy soup or grease. Nor could he hear much beyond a murky burble every time he moved what, with his blunted senses, he judged was his head.

His first emotion was curiosity; the second—panic—followed quickly. It came with the sudden surety that he and his cohorts had been drugged and packed in crates or some other strong containers and were now awaiting destruction. We waited too long, he thought angrily; we knew how to multiply but didn’t. I, their leader, was tricked by that mealy-mouthed, smooth-talking minority Mogwai into delaying reproduction until the secret of greater size and strength was revealed. Now, too late, Stripe saw the fiendish logic of his adversary’s strategy. With only four majority Mogwai, they were not only manageable but could be trapped at some opportune moment and eliminated. But how could Gizmo and his human allies have drugged and imprisoned dozens, scores, perhaps hundreds of them? It would have been impossible. In waiting for greater power, as opposed to numbers, Stripe had failed. Nearly deaf and blind, immobile, physically and mentally helpless, his main emotion was self-loathing at what his stupidity had cost them.

As the shock waves generated by his thoughts coursed through him, Stripe thought for a moment that his physical presence shifted. Was there not a soft white, out-of-focus area ahead of him where only gray had been before? Struggling to move toward it but being unable to do so, he experienced new pulsations of frustration and anger. If only he could be free a minute! Just a single minute of time so that he could place one claw on the lower jaw of the creature called Gizmo, another on his upper, pause to enjoy the look of anguish and panic, and then pull, tear, and twist downward.

The mental image brought Stripe pleasure, but it was nothing compared to the joy he experienced a moment later. That was generated by the flash of knowledge that
he could kill Gizmo
. . . Countless times before, he had tried to envision doing violence to him, but something inside his brain had invariably denied him even the pleasure of imaginary retribution. It was as if that thought was automatically short-circuited out of existence before it could be implemented. Now he remembered. Mogturmen, that bungling do-gooder, had programmed his precious Mogwai creations so that they could not kill one another, or, for that matter, even think seriously of it.

Why then could Stripe now not only picture himself killing Gizmo, but know deep down that what he saw would not be just a mental image but a certainty if they met again? There was only one answer.
He was no longer a Mogwai!

If he could have leaped for joy, Stripe would have done so at that moment of recognition.

Now his thoughts and intuitions were crystallizing even as new developments were taking place in the physical realm. The white area he could see ahead was definitely closer and brighter. Stripe became more conscious of having a body as opposed to being a helpless blob suspended in liquid Styrofoam. If he concentrated very hard, it seemed a possibility for him to actually propel himself toward the mouth of the cave—toward the light. Though its intensity tortured him, he knew this was the painful portal through which he must pass—he was moving more perceptibly now, definitely moving—through which he must pass—a rushing sound grew so rapidly it was deafening, competing with the growing light to control his agony—must pass to be—

Reborn!

Suddenly, through a thick haze at first and then with startling clarity, Stripe saw the room again. The bed . . . drawing table . . . drawn window shades . . . all the familiar things.

And some unfamiliar ones. Notably three huge pods surrounding him. Staring at them curiously, it took Stripe nearly a minute to realize that he himself was projecting from the top of a fourth huge wad. With the realization came a new rush of panic. Could the four objects be carnivorous plants of some sort, plants that even now were in the process of devouring him? Could it be that his “rebirth” was nothing more than a momentary escape from the jaws of this hungry plant?

Struggling fiercely, he pulled his arms upward, twisting his shoulders like a cork being screwed out of a wine bottle, pounding rhythmically with his fists, sideways and down, up and sideways, until—

Splat.

Stripe’s right arm shot like a rocket through the pulpy mass, rose high into his field of vision in a dripping wet salute of triumph.

But what an arm! Surely it wasn’t his. And yet it was. It moved, rotated, pointed according to the dictates of his mind. Looking at it, like a person slowly returning to complete consciousness after a long sleep. Stripe knew. The final piece of the puzzle was in place. The power and strength had come.

He took a moment to survey the imposing appendage raised above him. No longer ending in a soft furry paw, the arm was nearly two feet long, rippling with muscles beneath a scaly skin ringed with white, green, and brown stripes. His arm seemed more an instrument of destruction than a commonplace tool for lifting and manipulating objects. A combination maul and trident, the heavily boned fist ended in three giant claws, each sharpened to a glistening point.

I am no longer a Mogwai, Stripe thought.

I am a Gremlin.

He had no idea how he knew the word, just as he had no knowledge how or why the physical metamorphosis had occurred. Those details were not important at the moment. What mattered now was the feeling of power about to be fulfilled. Worming free of the pod, he stood next to it momentarily, looking down at the rest of his new body. Bouncing lightly on the tips of his enormous clawed feet, he savored the realization that finally, freed from the puny Mogwai body, he would be able to satisfy the urges that had tormented him so long.

Best of all, he had not only been reborn, but in the process had redeemed himself and his strategy. Shaking with anticipation, he looked intensely at the other pods.

“Hurry, hurry, hurry!” he hissed gleefully at them. “We’ve got work to do, great fun to enjoy!”

A green mist was hanging gently over the broken pod, as if someone had sprayed a wintergreen aerosol there. No one actually had, but it could have used it, in Roy Hanson’s opinion. Whatever it was that had just come into the world had brought an unpleasant smell with it, acrid, hot, faintly redolent of material scorched by an iron.

He stood at the doorway to the lab, returning after having made certain no students remained in or near his classroom. At least no immediate explanation was needed and now there was privacy to study what had been produced.

Looking across the lab at the green glow, he hesitated. In the tub directly below the cloud of fallout material was the new product and the remains of its pod. He had taken only a few seconds to look at it before calling Billy; that was all he’d needed to realize this was indeed no butterfly but a potentially dangerous animal. The flash of teeth—fangs was a better description—had told him that. He could still see them in his mind’s eye—two rows of widely spaced, finely sharpened teeth framing the entrance to a huge, wide, blood-red mouth, the same color as the malevolent eyes that had flashed at him during his brief look at the beast.

It was getting ready to make its first foray into the world. Bits of the pod were already on the floor and were being joined by others as the creature—whatever it was—churned restlessly in the smooth metal tub. The basin wouldn’t hold it very long, Hanson knew, suddenly realizing he had no idea how to handle the animal or protect himself.

Standing still, he looked around the room. The shades, which he had drawn in order to keep the Mogwai from crying out in pain, gave him an idea. If the creature was afraid of light, Hanson would use this aversion as a means of protecting himself. At the moment the lab was quite dark. If it got free, the animal would be at ease regardless of where it went.

“Which is not a good idea,” Hanson said.

He went to the light panel and one by one flipped on the lights of the room’s perimeter. When the outer rim was illuminated, he added lights to the adjacent interior areas until he had created an island of relative darkness in the very middle of the lab. Surveying the scene, he felt more at ease. The safety of bright lights was less than ten feet away in every direction.

“Maybe I’m gettin’ chicken in my old age,” Hanson muttered to himself. “But it’s better to be safe than sorry.”

He had already decided that he needed a blood sample to compare with the others he had taken of the parent creature, so he wheeled the cart containing his equipment to the edge of the light. In the case was a sterile container with dozens of samples and already-sterilized hypodermic needles. After checking to make sure he had a pair of heavy gloves, Hanson paused again.

“This baby won’t be so easy to handle,” he said. “Maybe I better get a bribe.”

Walking briskly out of the lab, through his classroom, and into the hall outside the canteen, he bought a Snickers bar from one of the vending machines and started unwrapping it as he returned to the lab.

Then, pausing once again at the rim of darkness, he smiled. “Hey, man,” he said. “Let’s go. What are you, scared or something?”

Pushing the cart to the tub, he looked inside.

The animal was lying on its side, obviously still cleaning itself of debris from the pod before exploring further. When it spotted Roy, it fixed him with a cold stare.

“Hello, boy.” Hanson smiled. “How was your trip to Pupa-land?”

The animal regarded him with neither friendliness nor open hostility.

“I figured you might be hungry after all you’ve been through,” Hanson continued, “so I got you a candy bar.”

He held out the bar but the animal didn’t reach for it.

As he waited for it to make up its mind, Hanson studied the creature closely. He estimated that it was about two and a half feet tall, a biped with incredibly long arms. The brown soft fur of the Mogwai had been replaced by dark, rippled armor plating that looked rock-hard. Its paws and feet were now three-toed claws and along its back ran a ridge of armor, not unlike that of a prehistoric reptile. The only feature that remained in any way similar to the old Mogwai was its nose, which remained pug and cute in the midst of a face that was notable for its malevolence.