Scurvy Goonda (18 page)

“Come on!” said Scurvy, talking to his gut.

Don’t expect too much of me
, his gut replied.

“I
expect
ya tah suck up and squeeze me through this window,” said Scurvy.

Do you know how much meat you put in me every day?
said his gut.
Where am I supposed to put it all?

“Scurvy?” came Persephone’s voice from the other room.

“Coming, me fancy fiancée,” Scurvy said before turning his attention back to his belly.

“Please help me out here,” he whispered to his midsection. “You know I can’t take her anymore.”

You’ll be nicer to me?
asked his stomach.

“I promise I’ll treat ya good from now on.”

Against its better judgment, Scurvy’s belly decided to believe him and sucked up into his torso, allowing him to squeeze out the small window. He tumbled to the hard ground outside, climbed to his feet, and started to run—anywhere.

He hadn’t even made it out of the yard when he felt a knife at his throat.

“You have no place to go, Mr. Goonda,” said a voice in the dark.

“Marriage is a sacred commitment,” said another voice. “Them vows, they’re not to be taken lightly.”

A horde of Presidential Guards stepped out of the night. Scurvy was completely surrounded.

“Might be less embarrassing for you if you went back the way you came,” said a third voice.

Scurvy let the guards walk him back to the lodge.

“Give an old pirate a boost, then?” said Scurvy, and the guards helped him up to the window and shoved him through.

“You almost done in there, Scurvy-Lurvy?” said Persephone through the door. “I can’t wait to see you in your bootee jam-jams!”

“Yer Scurvy-Lurvy is going tah sleep in tha bathtub,” said Scurvy, removing his boots. “Better for me back tah sleep on a slightly curved surface.”

“But our tea.”

“I’m not much in tha mood fer tea.”

“You never used to sleep in the bathtub.”

“Over tha centuries, people change.”

There was silence from the bedroom.

“Fine,” said Persephone, pouting. “I’m going to have my tea all by myself. I’ll see you in the morning. And every morning.”

“Of course ya will, me dove,” said Scurvy, lowering his body into the tub. Through the door, he heard Persephone’s bones rattle as she tossed and turned. It was going to be an uncomfortable night.

Ted volunteered to enter the quarantine area first. Because he wasn’t an abstract companion, he wasn’t afraid of the Greenies—and besides, if he was the one who started the plague with his Ab-Com Patch, it was his responsibility to end it. He carried five boxes of antidote in his arms and a camel pack of antidote on his back.

Once ACORN had made it safely back to the caves, Dr. Narwhal conducted an experiment on a rugby player afflicted with the Greenies. After dosing himself with antidote just to be safe, Dr. Narwhal gave the rugby player a tenth of a drop to see if that was enough to provide a cure, but when that didn’t work, he increased the dosage to half a drop. Still nothing. Another four-tenths of a drop added up to a full drop, at which point the antidote started to have a noticeable effect—the green bumps faded, and the rugby player rumbled away happily.

“One drop each,” Dr. Narwhal told Ted after the experiment.

As Ted prepared to enter the quarantine area, he felt the eyes of ACORN on his back. Word of his birthmark had apparently spread, and his fellow ACORN fighters suddenly seemed to have a strange respect for him. They listened to him intently when he spoke, held doors for him, and in general treated him like … a leader?

“I’m not sure what you’ll see in there,” said Joelle-Michelle. “Cure as many as you can.”

“I will. But later you have to tell me what the heck is going on.”

Ted entered the quarantine area.

The room was bigger than it looked from the other side of the door, and the air inside was hazy and stale. Through the vapor, Ted could see figures moving at half speed and shapes lying on the ground.

“Hello,” said Ted. “I’m Ted.”

Ted felt everything and everyone in the cavernous room turn toward him.

“I have the antidote for all of you,” said Ted, opening the first box of bottles. “Everything is going to be okay.”

The first wave of sick ab-coms made their way over to Ted.

A man-sized piranha wearing a knitted scarf walked up to Ted and opened its gaping, tooth-filled mouth. Ted reached forward with an eyedropper of antidote and
drip!

He put a single drop on the piranha’s tongue.

“It will take a second to start working,” said Ted.

“Obrigado,”
said the piranha, which meant “thank you” in Portuguese.

An elegantly dressed woman stepped up to Ted. Her posture was ramrod straight, and she held a parasol over her shoulder.

“Young man,” the woman said. It was clearly an effort for her to speak. “I am Czarina Tallow. Vat do I do?”

“Hello, Czarina. Just open your mouth, please.”

Drip
. Ted placed a drop of antidote on her tongue.

“You’ll feel it working in a moment,” said Ted.

“Thank you zo much. Is zere anything I can do to help you?” said Czarina.

“Please take a few bottles of the antidote and give it to anybody who is too weak to stand in line,” said Ted. “Just a drop each.”

The Czarina got to work. Each time Ted cured somebody, he gave the ab-com a dropper of antidote, and soon everybody was curing everybody else. As the ill regained their strength, Ted realized how many members of ACORN there might be.

When he ran out of antidote, he knocked on the quarantine door. Hordes of healthy ab-coms followed Ted through it, hugging ACORN friends they hadn’t thought they’d see again. Joelle-Michelle looked around at her new troops and smiled.

“Need more antidote?” said Joelle-Michelle.

“As much as you have,” said Ted.

“We have tanks of it,” said Joelle-Michelle. “Our scientists reverse-engineered the formula.”

“Does that mean this might almost be a fair fight?”

“
Je ne sais pas
. We’re outnumbered ten thousand to one, so it will be difficult,” said Joelle-Michelle. “But we might be able to win.”

“How?”

“We have you,” Joelle-Michelle said. She picked up several boxes of antidote. “Tonight you and I will talk in private about everything.”

Ted watched her pirouette into the quarantine room. He felt a bit like pirouetting himself.

“Faster!” yelled the plaid weirdo. “We’ve got three more vents to do today, and you are slacking!”

Carolina was standing at the top of a twenty-story scaffolding tower, stretching to reach an enormous vent. But even standing on her toes and holding the blowtorch high above her head, Carolina couldn’t quite reach the vent. It didn’t help that the work crew had attached a long, thick chain to her ankle so she couldn’t escape.

“I can’t reach it,” she yelled down to the ground.

The members of the work crew grumbled and looked back and forth at each other. They had been eating and drinking while watching Carolina do all the work, and nobody wanted to climb the towering scaffolding.

“Sure you can!” said a tango dancer. “Just, uh, stand on those end posts.”

“If I stand on one of the end posts, I’ll fall,” said Carolina.

“I’ll catch ya!” said a tiny pixie.

“Even if I
could
balance on the end post,” said Carolina, “I couldn’t hold the steel plate
and
keep my balance.
Somebody
needs to help me.”

The members of the work crew shuffled around and shook their heads, irritated that they actually had to
do
something. And then, all at once, each crew member brought his hand—or
whatever he used for a hand—to his nose, or whatever he used for a nose.

It was an abstract-companion version of “Not It.”

The plaid one looked around and saw that the other crew members were holding something against their noses. He was it.

“AW, COME ON!” said the weirdo—whose name was Whamburt—as he threw his fedora to the ground. Unsteadily, he began to ascend the scaffolding, hiccuping and cursing. When he reached the top, Carolina gave him instructions.

“Since you’re taller than me, I’m going to give you the steel plate. Then I’m going to weld the bottom part shut, give you the blowtorch, and you’ll weld the top.”

“Let’s just do it and get back to the ground,” said Whamburt. “I hate heights.”

A few moments later, Carolina was soldering the bottom of the vent shut while Whamburt held the steel plate with his shaking hands.

“So,” said Carolina, “why are you covering all these vents?”

“To make sure nothing comes in and nothing goes out,” said the weirdo. “President Skeleton only wants one vent open for the attack.”

“What attack?”

“Er. Nothing you need to worry about. Though your friends back home might. Here, give me that blowtorch. You’re not doing it right.”

Carolina handed him the blowtorch.

“C’mon, what did you mean, attack? Where is this vent?”

Whamburt flinched. He knew that he had said too much.

“Never mind. You’ll see it when we get there. OH NO! AGH!”

Whamburt had somehow set himself on fire and was batting himself wildly, trying to put out the flames. “HELP! I’M SMOLDERING!” he yelled.

“Stop, drop, and roll!” said Carolina.

“HELP!”

“Stop!” said Carolina.

“WHAT NEXT?” said Whamburt, flames leaping high off his head.

“Drop!” said Carolina.

Whamburt collapsed onto his side.

“WHAT NOW?”

“Roll!” said Carolina. “Roll until the flames go out!”

Carolina watched as Whamburt, following her instructions, rolled off the platform and plummeted to the ground. She hadn’t been entirely wrong: the fall did put out the flames, but it also resulted in the weirdo splatting in front of the rest of the work crew.

Everybody looked up at her.

“Murderer!” said the tango dancer.

“No, no, no!” said Carolina. “He accidentally set him-self on—”

“Murderer!” yelled another worker. “
She
set Whamburt on fire and pushed him!”

“No, I
swear
I didn’t do anything like that,” said Carolina. “He was—”

“MURDERER!” yelled the crew, and a sharp pull on her chain sent Carolina tumbling off the platform. She felt her body picking up speed and saw the strange sky whirling above her. Her final thoughts ran through her brain—flashes of her family, and a sharp pang of regret about Ted Merritt.

And then she fell into the arms of the tiny pixie. He was much stronger than he looked.

“Murderer!” said the pixie.

The other workers descended upon Carolina angrily, winding the chain around her body and heaving her into the back of a dark, tool-filled cart.
I am having
, thought Carolina,
a really odd day
.

There was an energy coursing through the ACORN tree caves. Hundreds of newly cured abstract companions were in the midst of turning the quarantine cavern into barracks. Others were in the boiler room melting bad video games into VIDGA solution and dipping their armaments in it. Meanwhile, Ted sat around a small fire with Dwack, Vango, and Dr. Narwhal, eating baked beans—ACORN had amassed storerooms of canned goods for fighters who needed to eat. Dwack had found a few bags of blood in the first-aid room. He was sucking on them while everybody else gobbled up dinner.

“What comes next?” said Vango.

“I have a feeling that we’ll know soon,” said Dwack, wiping some blood off his chin.

Nearby, Ted noticed a female golfer flipping through a crumpled newspaper. He thought he saw the word
Scurvy
in a headline.

“Excuse me,” said Ted. “Could I take a look at that when you’re done?”

“Sure,” said the golfer, handing over most of the newspaper but keeping the funny pages for herself.

Ted looked at the name of the paper:

The front page contained a pair of stories about vents being sealed up throughout Middlemost and a raid made on a processing factory by ACORN “terrorists.” Ted flipped past advertisements and long articles detailing the might of President Skeleton’s army and the sheer number of troops it would be sending to Earth. From the newspaper’s perspective, victory was already assured.

Finally, in the Lifestyle section, Ted found the headline he was looking for.

Underneath the headline was a full-color picture of Scurvy sitting on a white couch next to a heavily accessorized bird skeleton. He wore a smile that Ted had never seen him use before. It was a sheepish, forced, creepy grin, as though Scurvy had been given several different instructions on how to smile and had just combined them all together in the most awkward possible way.

Ted was glad to see that Scurvy looked healthy and robust—indeed, he looked fatter than Ted had ever seen him before—but all that was left of the old Scurvy were his boots and his tricorne hat. The rest of him had been groomed, trimmed,
plucked, styled, and moisturized. His greatcoat had been replaced with a gauzy, preppy button-down shirt, and instead of his normal striped trousers, he was wearing slacks embroidered with pictures of happy little whales.

“That’s
your pirate?” said Vango.

“Looksss like they’re in love,” said Dr. Narwhal.

Ted looked at Scurvy’s eyes in the photograph and knew they were pleading for help. He scanned the article.