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Page 8

 

  While Johnnie-O and the Ripper played their little cat and mouse, Nick took a moment to gauge the situation. The Ripper seemed about thirteen. He wore a gray Confederate Army uniform, complete with that odd little hat. There were weapons strewn around the flight deck that the Ripper kept reaching for, but Johnnie-O kept kicking them out of reach. None of those weapons were Civil War issue. There were very modern, very efficient automatic rifles, pistols, and even a submachine gun, along with countless bullets and loaded magazines. This kid may have died during the Civil War, but now he had an entire arsenal of modern military ordinance.

  "Leave me be!" the kid shouted, "or Ill ecto-rip yer arms right outta their sockets!"

  "Id like to see you try!" yelled Johnnie-O, finally getting a grip on him. The ripper tried to pull on Johnnie-Os arms, but they were too muscular. So instead the Ripper did something else--something Nick would not have believed if he hadnt seen it with his own eyes. The Ripper reached right through Johnnie-Os face . . . and pulled out his brain.

  Johnnie-O froze with the sudden shock of it, and Nick could only stare in disbelief.

  A brain.

  Right there in the Rippers hands.

  It was just like Isaiah had said.

  It didnt look like a real brain; it looked more like a plastic model, with the various lobes labeled in bold lettering-- perhaps something Johnnie-O once saw in a classroom somewhere. This was Johnnie-Os memory of a brain, and the ripper now held it in his hand like an oversize walnut.

  "Aaaaaaah!" wailed Johnnie-O in the kind of abject terror that can only come from seeing your brain held out before you. "Give it back! Give it back!" Painless though it was, there was something fundamentally disturbing about this--not just the fact of seeing ones own brain held up for observation, but to suddenly have ones very consciousness separate and apart from ones body, and yet still tethered as if by some weird wireless connection. For Johnnie-O, the sensation was far worse than pain.

  "AAAAAH!" he screamed. "Put it back in! I swear I wont touch you, just put it back in!"

  "Maybe Ill just squish it beneath my feet! Squish, squish!"

  "Noooo!"

  It infuriated Nick to see Johnnie-O helpless and humiliated, so Nick reached for something that might give them a brief balance of power. He found a hand grenade, and held it up to the Ripper.

  "Give him back his brain, or Ill pull the pin, and shove this thing in your mouth. "

  The Ripper laughed at that. "Wont matter!" he said. "If I gets blowed up, Ill just pull back together again, like it was nuthin!"

  "Yes," Nick said with a grin. "In theory . . . "

  The wider Nicks grin got, the more worried the Ripper became. "Whadaya mean, theory?"

  "I mean that bullets and cuts are one thing. They heal in seconds, sure . . . but if youre blown to smithereens, how do you know all those smithereens are gonna find one another again?"

  Clearly the Ripper had never thought of this.

  "You have till the count of three. " Nick reached for the pin, ready to pull it. "One . . . two . . . " "Fine!" The Ripper went over to Johnnie-O, who was now whimpering in a corner, clutching his intensely empty head. "Who needs it?" said the Ripper. "Probably got worms anyway. " Then he pushed Johnnie-Os brain right back inside him.

  The Ripper then scrambled over the vertically mounted chairs and reached up toward the spacecrafts control panel--then hit a button.

  A hatch popped open like a trapdoor right beneath poor Johnnie-O, who was still just recovering from his brain-ripping ordeal, and he plunged through the open hatch into darkness. Nick could hear him tumbling down a tunnel, and crashing into whatever filled the cargo hold of the shuttle.

  "Was that really necessary?" shouted Nick.

  "Youre next!" threatened the Ripper.

  Nick was angry enough to pull the pin on the grenade and blow them both to smithereens, but he fought the urge, found a foothold, and climbed toward the Ripper.

  "Were just here to talk! Why cant you calm down long enough to listen!"

  "I warned you!" said the Ripper, and he reached in through Nicks chest, gripped his grubby hands around Nicks memory of a heart, and tugged.

  To the amazement of them both, the Ripper did not get Nicks heart at all. Instead his hand came out covered in chocolate.

  It surprised Nick as much as the Ripper, but he tried not to show it.

  The Ripper stared at his hand, then at Nick, and for the first time the cranky Confederate Afterlight was truly frightened. "What . . . are you . . . ?"

  And although Nick never, ever used the words himself, seeing the Rippers cocoa-coated hand brought home a growing reality he could no longer deny.

  "I am the Chocolate Ogre," Nick said. "And youve made me very . . . VERY . . . MAD!"

  The look of terror on the Rippers face was the most satisfying thing Nick had seen for a very long time. The Rippers eyes were locked by Nicks angry gaze, and all the fight drained out of him. There was something about the Rippers eyes--something about his face that wasnt quite right. Nick wasnt sure what it was, so he filed it away in his mind.

  "What are you going to do to me?" the Ripper asked.

  "Nothing. If you let my friend go. "

  Despite his fear of the Chocolate Ogre, the Ripper hesitated . . . but he did quickly glance to a particular green button on the console--a button covered by a clear plastic flap to prevent it from being pressed accidentally.

  This, Nick knew, was a "tell. " The Rippers eyes had just given away exactly which button to push that would free Johnnie-O. All Nick had to do was press it. Nick reached up and flipped open the clear plastic cover.

  "No! Dont!"

  Nick savored the look of terrified helplessness on the Rippers face for a moment. Then he pressed the green button.

  Upon taking up residence in the shuttle many years ago, the Afterlight known as Zach the Ripper had gotten rid of the crafts original payload--a bunch of satellites and experiments that werent doing anyone in Everlost any good. Besides, the massive cargo hold was the perfect place for the Ripper to store Everlosts finest weapon collection.

  The Ripper had weapons and artillery of all kinds. Having developed an intimate knowledge of every military base within a hundred miles, the Ripper knew exactly where to find the best arms, and was highly skilled at ripping items--even heavy, awkward ones--from the living world, and into Everlost.

  Living-world news reports regularly told of weapons disappearing. "Military mismanagement," the reports would say, because the rational world demanded rational explanations. The one time an unlucky marine dared to tell the truth of what he saw (a hand that reached in through a hole in space, waved to him, then disappeared with an AK-47 rifle), nobody believed it. The man was sent for psychological evaluation, and then promptly discharged from military service.

  The Ripper did not know or care about such consequences. All that mattered was the collection, which filled two thirds of the cargo hold . . . until the day Nick opened the cargo hold doors.

  To Johnnie-O, it began as a loud mechanical grinding, echoing in the massive hold around him. He had come down on the piles of weapons, but, still reeling from his brief empty-headed ordeal, he hadnt yet realized the nature of the Rippers "collection. " The cargo hold door opened like a parting curtain, revealing a million-dollar view of the Atlantic Ocean. Then the pile beneath him began to shift, and thats when he realized he was sitting atop a nasty rats nest of guns and explosives.

  In the flight deck, Nick had, for one crazy instant, thought the cargo door motor was the boosters igniting, and that by hitting the button, he had just blasted them all off into orbit.

  "Now you done it!" said the Ripper, hitting the button again and again, but the opening sequence couldnt stop once it started. "Those doorsll swing open wide--and its all your stupid fault!" He peeked down into the hold, groaning, then ran for the entry hatch. Nick followed. They scurried down the unwieldy scaffold as the crafts huge
cargo doors slowly, slowly opened. Once they reached the bottom, and Nick had a view of the cargo hold, he could see that it held a tottering haystack in shades of khaki and gunmetal gray. Gun muzzles and rifle butts stuck out every which way, but far worse than those were the rounded tips and tail fins randomly poking out of the weapon pile.

  "Are those . . . bombs?"

  "Mortar shells, surface-to-air missiles, smart bombs," the Ripper said, with a hint of pride. "You know--the good stuff. "

  The pile shifted as the doors continued to swing open. Several rifles fell out and toppled to the earth hundreds of feet below. Kudzu jumped out of the way, barking madly. And on top of the pile of weapons sat Johnnie-O, looking a little bit worried.

  "Dont move!" screamed Nick.

  "Kudzu!" screamed the Ripper. "Cmere, boy!" The dog came running to the Ripper, its chain clanking on the deadspot tarmac. The Ripper knelt down and tried to unhook the dog from his chain, while up above, the pile swayed precariously in the wide-open cargo bay of the mystically suspended spacecraft.

  "Its okay," Johnnie-O shouted down to Nick. "Its okay, its not gonna fall. "

  But he didnt have the view Nick did. Nick could see the shifting of gun muzzles and rifle butts. Everything was starting to slide.

  Then Nick thought of something.

  "Your coin!" Nick shouted.

  Johnnie-O should have had it in his back pocket. So it would be there when he finally felt the urge to move on. Right now would be a good moment to feel that urge-- because just as Nick told the Ripper, Everlost physics was not an exact science, and not even Mary had written about what happens to an Afterlight that gets blown up.

  "Take your coin!" Nick said. "Hurry!"

  "I dont got it! I put it back in the bucket. "

  "What? Why did you do that?"

  "For safekeeping!"

  Meanwhile the Ripper was in a panic as he struggled to free Kudzu. Nick went up to him, and the Ripper looked at Nick wild-eyed. "You stay away from my dog!"

  Nick ignored him, knelt down, and quickly unhooked the chain from the dogs collar. "Now run!" ordered Nick.

  The Ripper didnt need a second invitation. He took off sprinting, putting distance between himself and the tottering stockpile of artillery, with Kudzu at his heels. "Just jump!" Nick called up to Johnnie-O, but instead of jumping Johnnie-O leaped from the stockpile to the wall of the cargo hold, and found a metal ridge to cling to--but the force of his jump set the mound of guns and explosives toppling. It all began a long cascade, out of the shuttle, to the ground below.

  Now Nick was the one in danger, and he ran for cover-- afraid to dive into the underbrush of the living world, for fear that diving would take him into the ground, where hed begin the long, slow sink to the center of the earth. And so he ran as fast as his legs could carry him.

  He was barely twenty yards away when the first bomb hit the ground.

  One of the basic natural laws that one learns early in Everlost is that things that cross over always do what they were meant to do. Boats float, airships fly, and appliances run even if theyre not plugged in. Unfortunately the same thing goes for bombs. They explode--especially bombs that were ecto-ripped, and had no good reason to be in Everlost in the first place.