Invasion of the Road Weenies (11 page)

F
aster!” Monty screamed. He
leaned out as far as he could, gripping the metal pipe with one hand, squeezing so hard that his fingers grew numb. He thrust his other hand out and let the wind smash against his face and rip at his hair. “Faster!”

Carl grunted as he managed one last burst of speed. Monty felt the merry-go-round respond to the push. Then it slowed as Carl stopped pushing and jumped aboard.

Monty closed his eyes and let the motion carry him.

“Oh boy,” Monty said as he stepped off the ride once it had slowed to a stop. He staggered a bit. The world was still spinning inside his head. “That was great. Want to go again?”

“I've had enough,” Carl said. “If I get any dizzier, I think I'll puke.”

“I wish you hadn't said that,” Monty told him. His stomach had felt fine until then.

“Said what?” Carl asked.

“You know—you said you'd puke.”

“No, I didn't,” Carl said.

“Yes, you did,” Monty insisted. “You just said it right now.”

“Did not.”

Monty sighed. There was no point in arguing. He forgot about it quickly enough. Until the next week, when the thing with the baseball bat happened.

They'd seen it on television. Put a bat on the ground with the handle sticking up. Put your forehead on the bat and run around in a circle five times. Then pick up the bat and try to hit a ball.

Monty watched as Carl went first. Carl turned in a tight circle. Then he straightened up and tossed the ball. He almost fell over when he swung at it. He tried again and missed. By then, he was laughing so hard he didn't have any chance of hitting it.

“My turn,” Monty said, grabbing the bat. He leaned over and put his forehead against the handle, then started going in a circle.

When he stood up, the whole world was spinning. Monty could barely stay on his feet. He'd never been so dizzy before. He tossed the ball, swung, and missed. He leaned over and tried to pick up the ball, but he fell to his knees. Finally, he managed to get back up. “I wish I could hit it right over the fence,” he said.

Monty tossed the ball. He swung hard and whacked it right over the fence.

“Holy cow,” Carl said.

“Wow . . .” Monty, still dizzy, watched the ball drop over the fence at the edge of the playground.

That's when he knew.

All he had to do was get dizzy, and his wishes would come true.

“I wish I had a million dollars,” he said.

Nothing happened.

Monty realized he wasn't very dizzy. He put the bat down and started spinning again.

“Hey,” Carl said. “It's my turn.”

Monty ignored Carl and kept spinning around the bat. Finally, he stopped and said, “I wish I had every video game in the world.”

His wish didn't come true.

“What's going on?” Carl asked.

Monty explained. When he was finished, he realized what the problem was. “I bet I have to get dizzier each time. Otherwise it doesn't work.”

“Hey, let's spin you on the swings. That'll do it.”

“Great idea,” Monty said. He ran to the swings and sat down. Carl grabbed the chains on either side of the swing and started twisting them around, winding Monty tighter and tighter.

“Ready?” he asked when the chains were as tight as they could be.

“Ready,” Monty said.

Carl let go. Monty started to unwind. The swing went faster and faster until Monty felt that the whole world was a blur. When it unwound and started to wrap the other way,
Monty jumped off. He was so dizzy, he could barely think. He was sure he was dizzier than before. He wondered whether he had to make the wish before the dizziness wore off.

“I wish I had a horse,” he said.

“Are you crazy?” Carl asked. “What did you wish that for?”

“I couldn't think of anything else,” Monty said. “I was—”

He stopped at the sound of a whinny. Right behind Carl, there stood a very big horse. “Oh, great. What am I going to do with a horse,” Monty said. He took a step toward the horse. It let out another whinny and ran off.

“What a waste,” Carl said. “You could have gotten something good. Come on. Let's try it again.”

“Okay.” Monty sat on the swing, but he had his doubts. They tried and tried until Monty couldn't stand it anymore. But none of the wishes came true.

“I need to get dizzier,” he said. He looked at Carl and Carl looked back. Monty knew the answer. He could tell that Carl did, too.

“The Spinulator!” Carl said, naming the most awesome, brain-scrambling, twisting, turning, spinning ride on the planet.

“Let's go.” Monty went home and broke into his savings bank. It didn't matter how much he spent. When he got off the Spinulator, he was going to wish for a million dollars.

They caught the bus to the next town, then walked to the entrance to Action World. The two admissions took almost all Monty's money. He didn't mind.

“Here goes,” he said when he and Carl were strapped into the ride.

It was wild. Half the time, Monty couldn't even tell whether he was right side up or upside down. He was whipped and spun and twisted and tossed like pizza dough.

Finally, the ride stopped. Monty staggered off, so dizzy he thought his eyes would bounce out of his head.

What was it he was going to ask for? He tried to think. His brain was sloshing inside his head like a bowl of soup. If only he could think clearly for a moment. “I wish the world would stop spinning,” he said.

“No!” Carl shouted as the wish escaped from Monty's lips. “Take it back.”

Too late. The world stopped spinning.

Unfortunately, everything on it kept moving.

As Monty hurtled through the air, he remembered another wish he'd had when he was little. He'd wished he could fly.

Screaming and tumbling, but not tumbling enough to become very dizzy, Monty finally got that wish, too.

J
eremy didn't make it
a habit to stare into toilets. But he couldn't help noticing when the calm surface of the water in the bowl suddenly rippled. He was in the bathroom brushing his teeth, and his eyes just happened to settle on the toilet at the right moment. He watched the water grow calm. A moment later, another ripple spread from the center of the bowl.

Strange
, Jeremy thought as he turned away from the toilet and finished brushing his teeth. He looked back at the water when he was done, but it remained flat and motionless.

That night, as he was lying in bed, Jeremy heard a hollow boom, like someone had hit a gigantic empty oil drum with the side of a clenched fist. The boom seemed far off, and only happened once.
Could be anything
, Jeremy thought.
It's not important
.

He fell asleep soon after, and slept well. In the morning, when he went to the bathroom, he noticed that the water
in the toilet was rocking and settling down, as if it had just splashed up a moment earlier.

That night, when he got in the tub, he could feel something pulsing through the water, beating against the drainpipe. He finished washing as quickly as he could and stepped out.

He heard the boom several times that night. Vaguely, he remembered his parents discussing the drainpipes in the house. There was something different about them. In the morning, Jeremy asked his mom, “Where does the water go when we flush?”

“The septic tank,” his mom said.

“Not the sewer?” Jeremy asked.

His mom shook her head. “We don't have sewers here. The houses are too far apart. Everything goes into a big tank. Then it decomposes, and the water filters out into the ground. There's a special bacteria in there that breaks stuff down.”

Jeremy was listening to her, but in the background, far away, he heard the boom again.
No
, he realized, it wasn't far away. It was up close, but buried underground. That's why it seemed distant.

It was right next to the house.

Jeremy wondered what form of life could possible grow in there—grow large enough to pound with such force. He shuddered as his mind ran through a dozen dark and slimy images. The most awful of them was the most familiar—something shaped just like him. Manlike, but far from human.

His mother was still talking. She'd mentioned something about a pump, but Jeremy hadn't caught it. Now, she was talking about clogged drains. “We can't even use drain cleaner,” she explained. “It would kill the bacteria. I can't have a garbage disposal, either, but that's really not a problem since . . .”

Jeremy tuned her out. He didn't care about pumps or disposals. But drain cleaner—now that was a different story. That was nasty stuff. He wondered where he could find some. “Got it,” he said to himself. Down in the basement there was a bunch of boxes that hadn't been unpacked after the move last year.

His parents never threw anything out. Jeremy could just see his father grabbing the drain cleaner and saying, “Who knows? We might be able to use it some day.” Then he'd throw it in a box along with half-empty cans of hardened paint, parts for a car he no longer owned, and a microphone from a tape recorder that had broken four or five years ago.

It took a half hour of searching, but Jeremy knew the bottle as soon as he saw it.
CAUTION
—
KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN,
it read in big red letters.
WARNING
—
CAUSES IRREVERSIBLE EYE DAMAGE. HARMFUL OR FATAL IF SWALLOWED
. Best of all, the bottle felt nearly full.

Jeremy took the drain cleaner over to the sink in the laundry room. He started to open it, then looked again at the words on the label. “No point in me getting hurt,” he said. He grabbed his mother's gardening gloves. Then he found the safety glasses his father used when he sprayed bug killer on the trees.

As Jeremy opened the cap, he paused for a moment. The part of him that had been told to be kind and thoughtful, to avoid being mean or cruel, that part of him whispered thoughts of peace and mercy. The whispers were drowned out by a thudding, pounding pulse from outside. Jeremy shook his head. There would be no mercy.

“Have a nice bath.” Jeremy dumped the entire bottle of drain cleaner into the sink. As it swirled down the drain, the fumes burned his nose.

Jeremy turned on the water to wash all the drain cleaner into the septic tank. “There,” he said. “That should take care of you.”

As he walked away from the laundry room, he heard one loud thud echo through the pipes. Then, faintly, a roar of pain.

Then silence.

Jeremy went upstairs, knowing he'd beaten whatever beast lived in the tank. There was no more pounding that day, or the next.

But there was a faint odor drifting through the house, as if someone across the room had unpeeled a hard-boiled egg. Jeremy noticed his father sniffing the air. His parents talked about the problem. Then his father searched through the phone book and made a call.

The next day, Jeremy looked out his bedroom window and saw a large truck drive to the side of the house. He heard a man talking to his parents.

After he got dressed, Jeremy wandered into the backyard. There was a fresh hole near the rear corner of the house on
the side away from the road. The man had a long, thick hose running from the truck to the hole.

“What are you doing?” Jeremy asked.

“Pumping the septic tank,” the man said.

Jeremy moved next to the man and looked down. About a foot beneath the ground, he saw a large opening. The cover for the opening—a round slab of concrete, shaped like a manhole cover—was off to the side.

A deep, rotting smell rose from the hole. Jeremy wondered what would be revealed when the tank was pumped. He wanted to see the creature he'd destroyed.

“Do you pump out everything?” he asked.

“As much as we can,” the man said, “but if—” He stopped talking as the hose jerked. “What in the world . . . ?” he said, picking up the hose from the ground.

The man looked at the hose, then back at the truck. “It can't be clogged. No way . . .” He looked back down toward the hole and wiggled the hose back and forth.

The hose jerked again. This time it was yanked forward. The man stumbled against the pull. He bumped into Jeremy.

Jeremy staggered and took a step that ended in emptiness.

Jeremy fell.

Unimaginably, unbearably, he plunged into the half-empty pit of decomposing sewage.

He grabbed for the hose, his eyes squeezed tightly shut against the stench that washed around him, his stomach churning in disgust beyond anything he had ever imagined.

He wanted to scream, but he didn't dare open his mouth.

His hand met the hose. He grabbed on and started to pull himself up to the world of clean air and pure water.

It was easy. Like climbing a rope in gym class.

The roar, unmuffled by the cushion of soil and cement and pipes, was deafening in the chamber of the septic tank. The roar was followed by a splash as something massive burst from beneath the surface behind him. Jeremy froze as a huge arm wrapped around his chest and yanked him from the hose.

In an instant, he was dragged down and swallowed by the murk. He clawed at the slimy arm, but it was far too strong. There was no chance of escape.

Just as Jeremy was about to give up all hope, the arm loosened for a moment, as if the creature was considering mercy. Jeremy nearly cried out in relief. He remembered his own brief pause, his hesitation before pouring the drain cleaner.

Then the grip tightened again.

No sign of mercy from below.

No sign of Jeremy from above.

I
f I'd found the
bottle, I'd be sitting on a mountain of chocolate right now. I'd be counting my billion dollars right now. That's right—I'd be counting my billion dollars, eating my chocolate, and flying around the world with the aid of my superpowers.