The Orphan of Awkward Falls (18 page)

Josephine dashed through the kitchen door, feeling the blessed warmth of her own house envelop her as she skidded inside. How could it have been only a few hours ago that she walked out of this same door? It seemed like years.

For a moment, she was thrown off by the contrast between the cozy, peaceful world of her house and the bizarre place she had escaped from just minutes ago. She almost let herself believe that it was all going to be fine, that she was safe now. She could have a nice plate of pancakes with her mom and dad, and things would be normal again.

But things were not fine, and none of the people she cared about were safe, including her parents. The gruesome creatures from the lab were undoubtedly still after her and could easily track her to this very spot.

Josephine tore through the living room and up the stairs, yelling, “Mom! Dad! Wake up, wake up!”

She knew she had to tell her parents everything, immediately. She prayed they would believe her. At this point, it would be a good thing if they did call the police, since her family alone was no match for those monsters. She would figure out how to keep Thaddeus out of the orphanage later. First she had to keep him alive.

Howard, his hair all pointing northwest, appeared at the top of the stairs in his pajamas. “What is it, Jo? What’s going on?”

“You guys have to get up!” she called. “It’s a major emergency! We have to get in the car and get out of here, now. Hurry!”

Howard rubbed his eyes. “What on earth are you talking about?”

“I’ll explain in the car while we’re driving to the police station!” She ran back into the kitchen and picked up the phone. She quickly punched in 911 and waited impatiently for an operator. It took her a moment to realize there was no dial tone. The line was dead.

Howard came in and repeated, “What’s going on, Jo?”

It was all so complicated, she didn’t know where to start. All she could think of was Thaddeus and Felix and Norman back there, possibly dead or dying, and the raging horde of mutant creatures that would soon be attacking her family.

“Get the car started, Dad!” She jerked the keys off the hook by the door and slapped them into his hand. “We have to get help, right now! Where’s Mom? Mom!” she yelled. “Come on!”

Howard grabbed Josephine’s shoulders and made her stop for a second. “Now, hold on just a minute,” he said, in his patient, fatherly way. “First, I want you to calm down and tell me what’s wrong.”

Josephine grimaced and pulled away from him when he touched her wounded shoulder. “Ouch!”

“Jo! You’re hurt!” Howard saw the tear in her shirt and the red stain around it. “What happened?”

“Dad, it really is a long story, and I swear I’ll tell you the whole thing as soon as we’re in the car. We’re in so much danger right now, my bite wound is the least of our problems. You have to believe me!”

“Bite wound? You have a bite wound?”

She heard her mother’s footsteps coming down the stairs. “Howard? Is everything okay?” Barbara shuffled into the kitchen and yawned.

“Jo has just been telling me that we’re in some kind of serious danger,” Howard said. “And that she has a bite wound on her shoulder.”

“Listen to me, you guys! We have to get out of here, now!”

“I believe you, Jo, but before we go speeding off to the police station at six o’clock in the morning—”

“Police station?” Barbara looked at them as if they were nuts.

“—in three feet of snow, you have to get me in the ballpark here,” Howard went on. “Why are we in danger? What’s so urgent?”

“Danger?” Barbara’s voice rose an octave. “Oh, my gosh, Josephine, is that blood on your pj’s? Are you hurt?” She immediately reached for Josephine’s shoulder, but the girl pushed her hands away.

“No, Mom, it’s nothing! I mean, it is, but we don’t have time!” Josephine bit her lip and glanced anxiously out the window at the
side yard. If the creatures followed her footprints, that’s where they’d be coming from. A cardinal flitted in the trees, but she saw nothing else.

Josephine saw that she’d never get her parents out the door unless she told them the whole crazy story now. “Okay, here goes, and I swear this is all totally true.” She took a deep breath and went for it, trying to tell only the important parts, as fast as possible. “There’s this cloned kid named Thaddeus, who lives in the house next door with a cat and a robot, the one the librarian told us about. And Fetid Stenchley, the crazy murderer who escaped from the asylum, is over there too, but I think he’s unconscious now, and all of them are in this weird lab, which is where I was too, until a few minutes ago when I escaped, and actually I was there all night, and the night before, and I’m really sorry I didn’t tell you about it before, but anyway, the kid and the robot and the cat didn’t escape, and they might be hurt, and we have to get the police or the army or somebody over there to help them, because there are these…things…with big teeth and claws and stuff you wouldn’t believe, and they’re after me, and they’re probably going to show up right here any second now and try to kill us, because of all the stupid footprints I left in the snow, so can we get in the car and go get help now, please?”

Howard and Barbara’s foreheads formed interesting wrinkles as they tried to digest what Josephine had just told them. They stared at her, then at each other, then back at her again.

Howard tapped his fingertips on his palm as if he were calling a time-out in a basketball game. “I’m sorry, dear, that’s an awful lot of surprising information to swallow in one bite. Let’s take it a little at a time. You say you’ve been in the old house next door all night?”

“Yes.”

“And the night before?” Barbara asked, incredulously.

“Yes.”

“And there’s an injured boy in there?” continued Howard. “And he’s a clone?”

“Right.”

“And the escaped killer is there, too?” Barbara asked. “Are you sure?”

“I’m positive. It’s all true!” Josephine pulled her torn sleeve up and showed them her wound. “See this? That’s where the crazy guy bit me!”

Her parents gasped simultaneously. The madman’s ugly teeth marks showed clearly on her shoulder.

“Oh, Jo!” cried Barb. “We have to get you to a doctor.”

“I’ll get the car started.” Howard threw on his coat and ran out the door.

Barbara wanted to clean the wound before leaving the house, but Josephine refused, insisting that there wasn’t time. They grabbed coats, hats, and gloves and hurried out the front door. The car was completely coated in a layer of ice topped with snow. It looked like an ice sculpture. When they cracked open the door and crawled inside
with Howard, Josephine realized something was wrong. Her father was turning the key, but the engine wasn’t making a sound.

“The engine block is frozen,” Howard said. “It must be below zero out here.”

“Maybe we can find a neighbor to drive us,” Josephine suggested.

“Okay, we’ll make a run for it.” Howard pulled his Packers hat down as low as possible. “Let’s move quickly, though. In this weather, it won’t take long for frostbite to set in.”

But before they could open their doors, a small animal fell onto the car’s ice-caked windshield.

“What the heck is that?” Barbara said.

Howard wiped at the inside of the frozen windshield. “Looks like a squirrel.”

But Josephine knew immediately that the animal was no squirrel.

“Felix!” She jumped out of the car and took the cat in her arms. “Oh, Felix, I’m so glad to see you! Are you all right?”

“P-p-peachy,” he stammered, his teeth chattering in the frosty air.

“How did you get away? I was afraid they’d gotten you.”

“N-n-no way,” he bragged. “I s-s-still got a few m-moves.”

“You’re half frozen. Here, let’s get you warmed up.” Felix let Josephine tuck him inside her overcoat, with only his face peeking out between the top two buttons. “What about Thaddeus?” she asked hopefully.

The cat shook his head. “Couldn’t get to him. Too many teeth snapping at me. But don’t you worry, we’ll get him out. We gotta get help fast, though. No tellin’ what’s goin’ on over there.”

The confidence in Felix’s voice was comforting. Josephine wanted to believe him.

“Those are your folks, I presume?” He nodded at the two adults inside the Volvo.

“Yes, they are. Mom, Dad!” Josephine called to her parents as they got out of the car. “This is Felix, Thaddeus’s cat I told you about!”

“Oh, how nice,” said Barbara. “What an interesting-looking fellow he is!”

The cat’s appearance was strange enough to make Howard and Barbara do a double take, with its mismatched parts stitched together like a crazy quilt. But their jaws dropped open in disbelief when it spoke to them in a gruff, manly voice that came straight from the streets of Brooklyn.

“Glad ta meetcha. You people got any weapons?”

Barbara and Howard looked at each other incredulously, too stunned by the talking cat to answer.

“You know,” the cat continued, “flamethrowers, harpoons, bazookas, anything like that?”

“We were just going to get the police,” Josephine said to Felix. “The car’s dead, but we’re going to try to make a run to the neighbor’s house.”

Felix shook his head. “You’ll never make it. The bad guys are right on my tail.”

Josephine turned toward Hibble Manor. Through the swirling clouds of snow, dark shapes were moving among the trunks of the hemlock trees.

“Oh, my God!” cried Barbara. “What are those things?”

Howard couldn’t take his eyes off Felix. “Did that cat just speak? Or am I losing it?”

“We have to get back inside the house!” Josephine said. “If they catch us out here, we’re dead!”

The laboratory was quiet when Fetid Stenchley regained consciousness after being walloped by the paw of the buffalo-headed beast. His head throbbed in time with his pulse as he surveyed the wreckage around him. Although much of the lab’s equipment had been destroyed during the mayhem he had caused as he freed the mutants from their enclosures, he was happy to see that the cell-transfer machine was still intact. The Friend was still sealed inside the sarcophagus, anesthetized and ready for the transforming operation.

Most importantly, his master was there, too. The revived corpse of Professor Celsius Hibble loomed crookedly nearby, watching his former assistant and murderer with one eye while the other looked elsewhere.

When Stenchley tried to get to his feet, a bolt of pain shot through his leg, reminding him that the troublesome robot’s steel claw was still locked onto his ankle. After a half hour of frantic
banging, wrenching, and filing, he finally resorted to a blowtorch to free himself.

The madman flung the robotic appendage aside and returned to his work, excitedly making final preparations for the operation. Nothing could stop him now. Stenchley took the dead man’s hand and kissed it admiringly. “It won’t be long now, Master. I will soon be a handsome Friend, and we will leave here forever.”

Very soon, Stenchley and his Master would finally be the father- and-son team the hunchback had always dreamed of.

It was a tribute to the professor’s ingenious design that the cell-transfer machine could compensate for certain mistakes made by its operator. Thousands of things could have gone wrong during the procedure Stenchley undertook to transform himself into Thaddeus, yet only a few dozen actually did. As he turned the knobs to set the voltage levels, plugged wires into receptors, fixed the intricate settings on the synchro-pump, activated the automatic timer switches, and crawled inside the tube, he luckily guessed correctly more than he guessed incorrectly. When the machine reached full power, it sounded like a swarm of football-sized bumblebees, shook like a paint mixer, and belched smoke like an eighteen-wheeler, but nothing exploded; no fires broke out.

At lightning speed, the machine scanned the ten trillion or so cells that made up Thaddeus’s body to locate its control cells, or CCs.
These were cells whose job it was to organize the accurate rejuvenation of skin, hair, organs, bones, and so forth, ensuring that a transformed person would look the same as the original. Every time the machine found CC clusters, the synchro-pump sucked them from the Friend’s body and sent them into Stenchley’s, routing them to the correct areas, where they picked up working right where they had left off. The only difference was, now they were working in the wrong body.

The madman’s body vibrated inside the coffinlike tube as the imported CCs rapidly began building the Friend’s features in place of Stenchley’s. Without anesthesia, the process would have been unbearably painful for any normal person. But for Stenchley, whose nervous system was nearly prehistoric, it was no more than an annoyance. Even if he had been in excruciating pain, however, he would have been more than happy to bear it in exchange for the makeover he hoped to achieve.

In the flashing red light of the sarcophagus, the hunchback rolled his eyes down and watched as his crooked nose slowly changed shape. First it straightened, then became bulbous and round, with the distinctive wart and single protruding hair finally sprouting at the far end. He felt his flesh become plumper and softer, less leathery. His scalp tingled as cottony white hair sprouted on his head, overtaking the sparse, greasy stuff that had previously populated his pate. Even the hunchback’s black eyes lightened and took on a bluish tinge.

It was working, at least on the surface. Bit by bit, Stenchley was beginning to look like the professor’s favorite Friend.

In the adjacent tube, where Thaddeus lay unconscious, things were not going so swimmingly. Parts of the boy were beginning to look like Stenchley, but the changes were unstable. As clumps of the boy’s own control cells left his body, some of Stenchley’s did arrive to replace them. The problem was that not enough of the madman’s cells were making the journey. Stenchley had erroneously set up the process to transfer cells mostly in one direction: from the Friend’s body into his own. That was a big mistake.

If Stenchley had been a microbiophysicist instead of a deranged lunatic, he would have realized that he had just created a war zone inside Thaddeus’s body. The two cellular armies, one composed of invaders from Stenchley’s body, one of defenders from Thaddeus’s, were evenly matched. The madman’s cells were winning the battle for the moment, causing many of the boy’s body parts to take on the ugly shape of Stenchley’s. But the invading army would need reinforcements to hold the ground they had gained, reinforcements that were not coming. Even as Thaddeus’s defeated cells retreated, their microscopic generals were planning a counterattack.

This was war, and like all other wars, it wouldn’t be pretty.