Scurvy Goonda Page 8

  VI

  “Sit,” said Dwack. “This will be your crash course in Middlemost.”

  Ted sat and watched as Dwack poked seven dots in the sand—two at the top, three close together in the middle, and two more at the bottom. Looking at the pattern of the dots, Ted instantly recognized what they were.

  “Orion,” said Ted.

  “Very good,” said Dwack. “This is the constellation Orion as seen from Earth, and this”—Dwack circled the center star in Orion’s belt—“is Middlemost.”

  Ted’s mind flashed to the glow-in-the-dark star on his ceiling, and the HERE! message. Oh geez.

  “How did it get that name?” he asked.

  “It is the middle star—or rather, the middle object, because as you can tell, where we are now isn’t exactly a star—in the middle of a famous constellation. You reach it by falling through the vent at the middle of the Earth, and when you’re here, it means you are halfway between being a working abstract companion and just being gone. If you look at this place the way we look at it, it is pretty much the center of everything—Middlemost.”

  “But we don’t know how much longer we’ll be staying,” said Dr. Narwhal.

  “I don’t understand,” said Ted.

  “I’m sorry, but there isn’t time to explain it right now,” said Dwack. “We need to keep moving. Persephone Skeleton has eyes everywhere.”

  “That’s weird. My friend Scurvy Goonda used to have a cockatoo named Persephone Skeleton,” remarked Ted.

  Dwack, Dr. Narwhal, and Vango looked at Ted.

  “Scurvy Gordon?” said Dr. Narwhal.

  “Well, yeah. I mean, I called him Scurvy Goonda because when I was little, I couldn’t say ‘Gordon.’ You know Scurvy?”

  “When Persephone was running for office, all of her profiles mentioned her true love, Scurvy Gordon.”

  “But Persephone is a bird.”

  “Kids request strange friendsss,” said Dr. Narwhal.

  “What does that mean, request?” said Ted. “I thought I created Scurvy.”

  “In a manner of speaking, you did,” said Dwack. “But he still had to go through one of the factories.”

  “What are the factories?” said Ted.

  “Again, there isn’t time to explain that now,” said Dwack.

  “Can you tell me who created you?” said Ted.

  “A little girl,” sighed Dwack, “who spent too much time staring at a box of Count Chocula. The girl’s mother said that Count Chocula was a vampire based on Dracula, but she couldn’t say, ‘Drac,’ so she said, ‘Dwack.’ And here I am.”

  “Who made you?” Ted asked Dr. Narwhal.

  “A boy in Greenland named Nuka whossse brother died because there was no physssician in his village,” said Dr. Narwhal. “He needed a new friend and he got me.”

  “And you?” Ted asked Vango.

  “A Brazilian boy whose parents had a print of one of Van Gogh’s self-portraits hanging on the wall,” said Vango. “Which is why, in a pinch, I can speak some Portuguese. Boa

  vinda!”

  VII

  Aren’t you tired of being kicked around?

  Join the Ab-Com army!

  Do your part for Middlemost!

  The new ad campaign was going fantastically well. The government had employed the best PR company in Middlemost, and the concepts the company was developing were incredible—images of elephant seals and chimeras battling humans, slaying little kids, butchering adults, doing all the things that ab-coms had been thinking about for years but had never had the guts to try. But now everybody was talking about the importance of this vengeful mission, and Persephone Skeleton was hearing them loud and clear.

  And so was Persephone’s boss.

  Each day, new hordes of ab-coms were lining up at the free clinics, receiving shots to cure their bodies of the Greenies. There wasn’t enough room in Middlemost to handle all the refugees, who were building ramshackle cities out of trash and cardboard. Sure, Persephone could give them tents and food, but the overcrowding kept everybody nice and angry. All Persephone had to do was channel that anger.

  “SWAMSTER!” shouted Persephone.

  Swamster ran into her chambers, whiskers twitching.

  “I’m sorry, President Skeleton,” said Swamster. “I was just chewing up some cardboard from a roll of toilet paper. My teeth have been getting so long and I—”

  “Enough!” said Persephone. “How long until my darling, dearest Scurvy arrives?”

  “I’ve only been told he is en route, President Skeleton,” said Swamster, still a bit flustered. He had really enjoyed chewing that cardboard roll, feeling his teeth getting shorter, knowing that his smile would be improved.

  “Excellent,” said Persephone. “When he gets here, be sure to bring my boyfriend to my quarters.”

  “Of course,” said Swamster. “Oh. And I learned something else that you might like to know.”

  “Yes?” said Persephone.

  “It seems that, well, one of our lookouts spotted a group of deserters running through the woods.”

  “There are hundreds of deserters.”

  “Thousands, actually. We’re estimating.”

  “I don’t care about one tiny group,” said Persephone.

  “Of course not, Madam President,” said Swamster. “But our lookout thought that one of them might be a boy rather than an ab-com.”

  Persephone thought about this.

  “A boy boy?” she asked.

  “A boy boy.”

  “How would the lookout know?” said Persephone.

  “Well, as you of course know, very few kids have teenage boys as their ab-coms. Little girls are absolutely loath to dream up teenage males as friends, and young boys are more prone to think about ninjas or lions or—”

  “—or pirates,” said Persephone.

  “Right. And with all the yelling this boy was apparently doing, which is what males his age in the other world seem to do, our lookout thought that perhaps he might be … real.”

  Persephone paused, rolling this over in her brain.

  “How did he get here?” she said.

  “He must have fallen through the ThereYouGo Gate,” said Swamster.

  “Well then,” said Persephone. “In the interest of national security, I’d like to make two decrees.”

  “I have my notepad out.”

  “Seal up all the vents leading to the ThereYouGo Gate aside from the one we’ll be using to make our attack.”

  “Seal up the vents! Very good, President Skeleton. And your second request?”

  “Eradicate the boy. I can’t have a human finding out about our plan.”

  Swamster wrote eradicate boy in his notepad. He looked down at the command.

  “May I say something?” said Swamster.

  “If it’s brief.”

  “It’s just that getting rid of the boy in the way you seem to be suggesting seems a bit callous, President Skeleton. Couldn’t we capture him but let him go? I do it all the time with moths and fireflies, though they always yell at me afterward.”

  Persephone stared at Swamster.

  “You think I’m being harsh?” said Persephone.

  “We could just as easily send him back to where he came from. No doubt he simply got lost.”

  “Hmm. Since those are your feelings,” said Persephone, “I’d like you to track the boy down. And kill him yourself.”

  Swamster’s blood went cold.

  “But, President Skeleton, I couldn’t.”

  “You’re either with me,” Persephone explained, “or you are against me.”

  “Of course I’m with you,” said Swamster. “You know how I feel about the plan. I love working here. It’s just—”

  “There’s a war coming. Do your part. Find the boy. Goodbye.”

  “But—”

  “Don’t you want a promotion?”

  More than anything else in the world, Swamster wanted a promotion. It was why he’d taken the job so
many years ago.

  “President Skeleton,” he said. “Of course I would like a promotion.”

  “Then do your duty for our glorious cause.”

  Swamster nodded quickly and exited the room. He would do anything for a promotion.

  VIII

  Vango and Dr. Narwhal were walking ahead of Ted and Dwack, checking to make sure that the road was clear. The group had exited the forest moments before and was now making its way into an odd landscape of towering red-rock mesas, boulders piled on top of boulders, and Joshua trees that seemed to be twisting painfully as they reached toward the sky.

  Dwack, paying the scenery no mind, was explaining important things to Ted:

  “President Skeleton got into office on an antihuman campaign,” said Dwack. “There were a lot of sad ab-coms in Middlemost, and she played to their emotions.”

  “What were they sad about?”

  Dwack shook his head. “You’re lucky I’m a good vampire, because many undead I know would drink your blood and throw away your husk for a comment like that.”

  “What did I say?”

  “Don’t you have a best friend?”

  Ted thought about this.

  “I haven’t had a real friend since Scurvy left,” he said. It was strange to admit it out loud. “Aside from maybe Kettil. But he doesn’t understand English.”

  “Did this Scurvy leave, or did you get rid of him?”

  “I used a medicine patch that made Scurvy sick,” said Ted, quietly. “He broke out in all these green bumps.”

  “The Greenies. Of course. President Skeleton is giving away shots of the antidote to the virus as a recruiting tool for her army. Vango, Dr. Narwhal, and I were only spared the infection because we left Earth years ago. Let me ask you a question: how many years were you and Scurvy together?”

  “Seven.”

  “Seven years, and then—poof!—goodbye. If you were Scurvy, how would you feel about that?”

  “The doctor said he was just a figment in my head.”

  “And now, being here, you know that isn’t true,” said Dwack. “The girl who discarded me also took medication. I remember it clearly—it was an antidepressant her parents put her on because she spent all her time talking to me.”

  “What happened?”

  “She turned her attention to other things, and after being ignored for a few weeks, I got the point. I left, and came here. We had spent two years together, and she didn’t even say goodbye.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “But that’s just the thing—it’s not terrible. It’s normal. Or perhaps it’s both. Every ab-com who lives here in Middlemost was tossed aside. Needless to say, some friends are quite bitter. Understandably so, no?”

  “Okay.”

  “President Skeleton tapped into that bitterness. Her campaign focused on the terrible things humans had done to ab-coms, and the general population lapped it up. The rallies were huge, and some of the slogans—my word, if humans knew what was being said about them. But as Persephone Skeleton’s popularity increased, all of a sudden her message became Let’s get BACK at the humans. Of course, not everybody here wants violence, but those of us who don’t have to stick together, because we’re seen as antigovernment and antipatriotic.”

  “Which is what you, Dr. Narwhal, and Vango are.”

  “Dissenters, yes. That’s why we’re looking for ACORN.”

  “What’s ACORN?”

  “The Abstract Companion Organization for Resistance Now—A.C.O.R.N. Up until now, abstract companions have never been allowed to physically touch humans other than the people to whom they were assigned. But at the moment, President Skeleton is in the process of changing that law.”

  “Dwack?”

  “Yes?”

  “Where are Dr. Narwhal and Vango?”

  Dwack stopped and looked around, scanning the rocky landscape. Dr. Narwhal and Vango had disappeared.

  “Don’t yell for them,” said Dwack. “If there are unsavory characters out there, the last thing we want to do is let them know where we are….”

  “They might already know where we are,” said Ted.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Look up.”

  Dwack looked up.

  Dozens of ab-coms were standing on the colossal boulders surrounding them, but Dwack could only make out their silhouettes, because he was staring into the sun. In the middle of the silhouettes, he could see a large squiggling bag, which, if he had to guess, probably had Dr. Narwhal inside. Next to the large bag was a smaller bag that wasn’t moving much at all. Vango wasn’t struggling.

  “A well-planned ambush,” whispered Dwack. “I can probably fight off five of them. How many do you think you can take?”

  “None,” whispered Ted. “I’m a terrible fighter.”

  “Well,” said Dwack, “perhaps we should surrender, then.”

  IX

  “Ladies, gentlemen, and creatures—all you giant slugs and snails and the like—of the Senate!” said a proboscis monkey wearing a sequined jacket. “If you’ve got hands, please put them together and welcome the beautiful, newly elected PRESIDENT PERSEPHONE SKELETON, BECAUSE SHE IS HERE TONIGHT!”

  The Senate chamber erupted into applause as Persephone entered and walked to the raised podium where the president traditionally addressed the Senate. A freshly painted portrait of her hung on the wall behind her head, and in front of her, the hall was filled with 750 senators hailing from all over Middlemost. They had come together to welcome their new leader. And to cast today’s crucial vote.

  Persephone looked over her audience with her empty eye sockets, at the adoring faces of her government colleagues as they waited for her to speak, and at the few individuals who seemed dismayed by her new leadership role. She stared at these dissenters.

  Mental note: Have all the non-adorers killed.

  Another mental note: As soon as possible.

  “Senators of Middlemost!” shrieked Persephone. “Today we write a new page in the history of Middlemost. Too long have we allowed ourselves to be pushed around and tossed aside by the humans who claimed to be our friends!”

  Cheers from the Senate!

  “My human pushed me down the laundry chute!” said a senator.

  “Mine tried to eat me!” said an admittedly delicious-looking turkey senator.

  “You’re my only friend now, President Skeleton!”

  “I am your friend, and I hear you loud and very clear!” said Persephone. “Too long have we been stuck with a self-imposed nonviolence law that has denied us the right to strike back against those who would exile and discard us! And that is why I ask you to vote today to repeal that law, and to join me on the first step toward a world in which there will be no more humans to banish us at will!”

  Roars of agreement!

  “Humans are so two thousand years ago!” said a senator.

  “It’s all been downhill since the ancient Greeks!” said another.

  “Allow me to be candid and practical for a moment,” said Persephone. “There’s no more space in Middlemost. We’re running out of food. We’re running out of materials to build cities. Billions of ab-coms have come here since humans first figured out how to walk upright, and because of the call to arms, there are billions more of us here as we speak.

  “Now think about Earth. What’s going on there? Wars. Global warming. Climate change. Droughts. Famine. The humans don’t deserve what’s left of the world they have. They’re heading for a meltdown. Disease! Species extinction! The melting of the ice caps! But we could save the Earth, friends. We have lived there, and we know how precious it is. We could restore balance! The Earth needs us, we need a new home, and all that is standing in our way are the humans who threw each and every one of us away like garbage!”

  Cries of “Hear! Hear!” and “Garbage, indeed!” rang out from the senators.

  “Southern California is mine!”

  “I get the Croatian coastline!”

 
; “I’ll take all of England, except for Essex!”

  “Now, now, let’s not divide up the world before it is ours,” said Persephone. “First things first—as you know, an eighty-five-percent vote is necessary to overturn the nonviolence law. I propose that we make a statement today, and overturn it with one hundred percent of the vote. A vote for a fight is a vote for the future—”

  “HAVE YOU LOST YOUR MIND, PERSEPHONE?” boomed a voice from the back of the chamber.

  Persephone paused, astounded.

  “Who? Said? That?” she asked.

  “I did,” said the voice, which was now getting closer. Persephone saw an ancient double-pouched kangaroo bouncing ponderously down the red-carpeted center aisle of the chamber, his multicolored tail dragging behind.

  “Senator Thip-Thap,” said Persephone. He was her old mentor.

  “You’ve disappointed me, Persephone,” said Senator Thip-Thap.

  When Persephone had first arrived in Middlemost, she’d had a difficult time adjusting to her new environment. She was lonely. Senator Thip-Thap took her in and gave her a home and friendship during her first couple of centuries there. She served as a clerk in his office, learning the basics of government, before starting her political career in earnest. She knew that she owed much of her success to Senator Thip-Thap—who was now staring at her, shaking angrily.

  “You should be ashamed of yourself!” said Senator Thip-Thap. “Spewing a message of violence. It got you into office because you earned the votes of fools, but it must stop here.”

  Nervous chattering from the audience.

  “Your colleagues seem to disagree,” said Persephone.

  “Yes, you were cast aside,” said Senator Thip-Thap, turning to the Senate chamber. “All of you were cast aside! But we’ve seen what violence does to humans, and we know that it is always a mistake! And now you want to take up arms against them? You want to eradicate them from their own world?”

  Senator Thip-Thap slammed his cane into the ground.

  “The humans who abandoned you were CHILDREN!” he exploded. “Children who didn’t know any better because they were young. I implore you—forget this madness, and find another way to preserve Middlemost without violence.”