King of the Mole People--Rise of the Slugs Page 2

  But then I started doubting his onion roots story.

  Whether I moved away from the Mole hole or not, these Moles were never going to stop pestering me about being King if they didn’t have a replacement. But there was no way anybody was going to follow Ploogoo if he was blubbering like a newborn. I needed him to get his head together so he could take this fifty-pound neck-breaker off my head.

  But what did I know about ladies? I’d heard all mosquitoes that bite are female. That was about it. Girls seemed to like Marco, the theater kid in my class who always wore a scarf. I suggested trying to style it up a little like Marco. Ploogoo wiped his tears and nodded. Maybe I was good with lady advice after all.

  Okay, I thought, everything is in motion. By the end of the week I’d have both the mansion and Ploogoo in shape, and I’d be out. I took one last look at the Big Cavern, because this time was definitely the last time I was ever going to be down here.

  “See you soon,” said the Round Mole.

  I was really not a fan of this guy.

  “All hail King Doug!” the cavern rumbled as I charged off. I checked my watch as I rushed back up the tunnel, pouring out the grubs that had collected in my crown. I gasped at the time.

  I’d met giant worms, slugs with spears, and extraordinarily furious mushrooms. But there was one creature that was even scarier to be on the wrong side of. A creature by the name of Miss Chips.

  3

  SCHOOL BUS

  There was a rumor that Miss Chips once punished a student for chewing gum in class by dousing him with sugar and burying him up to his neck on an anthill. It was probably an exaggeration, but she gave you the feeling that something pretty close to that was possible.

  Miss Chips didn’t actually punish kids very often. It was one of the advantages of having a teacher who didn’t care much about her job or trying to stay awake during class. But every once in a while she did care, and you never knew when it might happen. And when it did, she could level a glare at you that could melt paint off walls and make you believe the anthill rumor was nothing compared to what could go down.

  So I was back to doing more of that thing I can’t stand where you have to move your feet really fast and your heart threatens to explode.

  At nine o’clock on the nose I stumbled into the empty schoolyard. I was in rough shape …

  But at least the running was over.

  Then I heard the school bus starting up in the parking lot. I’d totally forgotten: it was class field trip day!

  The school bus screeched out of the parking lot and took off down the street. My lungs gurgled as I lunged after it, waving my arms wildly.

  I was relieved when two faces in the back window turned and looked out. Then I went back to not being relieved when I saw the faces belonged to Ed and Ted.

  They turned and yelled something to the driver, and for a moment I thought they were trying to help me. But then the bus started going even faster.

  It was putting some serious distance between me and my faltering legs when it suddenly came upon big hole in the road and screeched to a stop.

  I stumbled to the bus, panting madly. A sudden hole in the road? Oh, how timely!

  “I know you did that, Oog!” I yelled at the hole. “I gave you a kingly order to stop helping me in the Up-world! It always backfires and ends up in embarrassment! No more help, do you hear me?”

  I managed to wipe the blinding sweat out of my eyes and realized the hole was just a pothole. Then I saw the faces of my classmates pressed against the window, looking at me like I was a wiener dog with a bucket on its head. See? It always ends up in embarrassment.

  “Not bad, Underbelly!” said Coach Parker as he opened the doors. “Looks like all that water-boy exercise is good for your pencil legs!”

  His laugh met Ed and Ted’s laughs in the middle of the bus and mingled like smoke signals. But all I could focus on at that moment was the fact that I was now officially late.

  I stumbled onto the bus, prepared to meet my doom. The fact that there probably wasn’t sugar and an anthill on board was slim comfort. I had complete faith in the most-fearsome-creature-ever’s ability to innovate some other horrific torture using whatever was at hand. I turned toward the terrifying specter and braced myself for the worst.

  A reprieve. For now. But who knew for how long? Miss Chips could have been in the midst of dreaming up elaborate punishments. Or, with a drool puddle that large, had perhaps been sleeping in that spot all weekend. It was hard to say.

  The coach hit the gas and I lurched toward the seats.

  And fell right on top of Magda.

  Magda is the girl with the licorice hair and ping-pong eyes who helped me stop a war in the lower realms and prevent the eradication of everything we know. She’s the only other human who knows about the Moles and all the other underground creatures. She lives next door to me in a cute little house that she rebels against by dressing like someone who communes with the dead.

  She’s been a real friend to me. But she’s super weird. And with weirdness starting to circle like a dangerous vortex of destruction, I had to stay as far away from her as possible.

  “You’re the one who fell on me!” she screamed when I said this to her.

  “It’s happening, just like I warned you!” I screamed back. “I played with fire for too long! I’ve got to eliminate weird from my life before everything blows sky high!”

  “Well, maybe you should start by not standing in the street yelling at potholes,” she said, brushing stray grubs off me nonchalantly. “This weirdness-is-going-to-swarm-around-you-and-destroy-everything theory of yours is total bunk, Underbelly.”

  “Oh really?” I said. “Have you forgotten what happened last time weirdness spiraled out of control around me?” I pretended my arms were giant worms thrusting out of the ground and crashing onto the seats.

  “You’re just using this as an excuse because you don’t want to be King of the Mole People!”

  “Shhhh! Keep it down!”

  “Relax, Underbelly,” said Magda. “Nobody’s interested in us.”

  I looked up to see a Binkette standing in front of us.

  She was holding a clipboard, taking some kind of survey. Then, as if to prove Magda’s point, she decided we weren’t worth it and moved to the next row.

  The Binkettes are the group of popular girls that orbit the head popular girl, Becky Binkey. Part of my big experiment to fit in—along with signing up for groups and offering people gum—had been developing a crush on Becky. Everyone else had one, so it seemed like a matter of routine. Not as routine was announcing it publicly, which got me heaped with ridicule and scorn.

  “I guess you’re done with the Mole King thing anyway,” said Magda. “The Royal Guard told me about your spectacular resignation. I heard the crown smacked you right in the head!”

  “That’s not the takeaway from that announcement!”

  Magda had no doubt learned of my quitting through her official role as the Human Ambassador to the Moles. The former King Zog (the guy who had sixteen Os in his name) had become a big fan of humans and had visions of Mole/human unity. Unlike me, Magda embraces weirdness and loves associating with Moles. So when Zog needed a Human Ambassador (before he abdicated off on a bicycle), she got the gig. I warned them that any human/Mole interaction was ill-advised. If movies had taught us anything, it’s that if humans find out about creatures, they get really relentless about trying to capture them to perform experiments on and stuff.

  I told “Ambassador Magda” that her news was out of date, and that I’d decided to be their King again for four more days so I could get my subjects to help fix up Dreadsville Manor for selling. She said that was “grossly irresponsible.”

  “You’re the one who’s always saying Moles can’t risk being seen by humans!” she yelled.

  “I’m a ticking time bomb!” I yelled back. “The forces of weirdness are descending! A dead bird fell out of the clear blue sky!”

  There was
a collective sucking in of breath from everyone on the bus. For a moment I thought it was because they were all in agreement with me about the seriousness of the dead bird. But then I remembered that nobody was paying any attention to us bottom dwellers, and that everyone was responding to a massive blunder. For a nice change of pace, the blunder had been made by somebody other than me.

  The survey Binkette had finished polling the bus with her question—“What should the color scheme be for the dance: black and white, or spring pastels?”—and rejoined her cluster of Binkettes. The Binkettes were chirping about the upcoming school dance, the theme of which was “Springtime in Paris,” and were engaging in some tonal acrobatics as they spoke to their glorious leader, Becky. They were doing their best to sound cheery, while at the same time casually hinting that the dance was this Saturday, and that some things that needed to be done weren’t getting done, without implying that the things not getting done were in any way the fault of Becky, the one in charge of getting them done.

  Becky spoke little, yet somehow still managed to convey that she was bored of having to always be in charge, and that nobody appreciated how hard it was to be in charge all the time, and that she wanted to quit and let somebody else do it.

  The Binkettes, like everyone else on the bus, smelled a trap, and the loaded notion hung in the air untouched. Any reply, or any noise at all, would be treachery. Anybody with any sense could see that.

  “I could be in charge,” said a boy. And that’s when everyone sucked in their breath.

  It was Pennyworth. One of the Brainers. Seemingly not the brainiest one.

  “I could be head of the dance committee,” he said, gathering nothing from all the breath-sucking.

  The Binkettes let him know the magnitude of his blunder by way of a series of hyper-sharp barbs containing phrases like “living joke,” “nature’s greatest mistake,” and “Penny-barf,” accompanied by the most unmirthful laughs ever pushed through raspberry lip gloss.

  I think Pennyworth had a crush on Becky—a real one, like most Becky crushes—and his comment had been spurred by a momentary delusion that she might actually appreciate him for rushing to her aid.

  But all it got him was a barrage of remarks about how he didn’t have anything close to the taste, social skills, or understanding of what it was like to even dance with a girl, let alone be the organizer of a dance, and that it was possible he didn’t even know how to properly put on his pants.

  I was almost starting to feel sorry for him, when he decided he needed a place to dispense all the bile he’d just been soaked with.

  As a Brainer, Pennyworth was one of my fellow rocket-club mates. But that was something he wanted fixed.

  “You’re a disgrace to the rocket club, Underbelly!” he yelled. “You’ve amassed a copious number of violations!”

  Pennyworth said “copious” a lot. It’s a really annoying word. Or maybe it got annoying because he used it all the time. It’s a chicken-and-egg thing, I’m not sure which came first.

  “Your grades are abysmal! And you don’t even know how to spell ‘wick’! I demand your immediate expulsion from the Accelerators! By show of hands, all those in favor—”

  “I quit,” I said.

  “What?” roared Pennyworth. “You can’t quit! We’re kicking you out!”

  “Too slow, Pennyworth! He beat you to it!” said Magda.

  “Ha ha, the lame-oids are fighting!” laughed Ed and Ted.

  “I quit the soccer team too,” I said, and it was Ed and Ted’s turn to roar “What?” and get laughed at. This was probably going to cost me, but I was on a roll and wanted to wipe clean all my mistakes at once.

  “And I quit the theater group too! And I don’t really have a crush on Becky Binky!”

  That last one went too far. It was possible not everybody had a crush on Becky, but nobody’d ever been so bold as to state it. Everyone quickly pivoted back to their more comfortable berating target—me.

  Pennyworth, trying to regain some lost ground with Becky, pulled me to my feet and told me to look at her, this vision of perfection, and then to stop looking at her, because my eyes didn’t deserve to look at her, and my brain didn’t deserve to have a crush on her. I pointed out that I’d said I didn’t have a crush on her, which brought forth more insults and jeers, and contact with at least one half-full juice box.

  Becky herself didn’t look at me. When you’re that popular you don’t need to cast disparaging looks—you have others to do it for you. Pennyworth scowled at me. The Binkettes scowled at me. Marco scowled at me and flipped his scarf. Coach Parker asked what was going on and Ed and Ted told him I’d quit being the soccer team water boy, and Coach Parker scowled at me.

  I slumped in the seat, wiping juice-box juice from my shirt.

  “Risking the Moles getting seen by having them work on your house is irresponsible and dangerous,” said Magda, joining the scowl parade. “I’m going to tell them not to do it.”

  “It’ll only be at night!” I said. “Besides, I’m still King, and King outranks ambassador! So I order you to stay quiet.”

  “You sure give a lot of orders for someone who wants to quit being King.”

  “I’m quitting! In fact, I can promise absolutely and completely, I am never going below ground again!”

  The bus screeched to a halt and Coach Parker opened the doors.

  “Okay, we’re here! Who’s ready to explore some deep underground caves?”

  4

  CAVES

  Needless to say, the fact that the field trip was exploring underground caves came as a surprise to me. Apparently it came as a surprise to Miss Chips too, as she forgot to bring any equipment for us to go into caves with. Coach Parker wondered if maybe they should cancel the outing if they didn’t have equipment, but Miss Chips said there was no way she was coming back on another day, and to proceed with the exploration.

  Coach Parker led us to this humongous hole in the side of a rocky mound that disappeared into darkness.

  “Caves sure are smaller than when I was a kid,” he said. “When I was young we had serious caves. Well, get on in there, get an education.”

  “But we need ropes and lights and provisions!” said Pennyworth.

  “For a dinky cave like that?” said Coach Parker. “Here, here’s a provision.” And he hurled a PowerBar into the hole. “First kid who brings that back to me gets an A.”

  One of the Brainers doubted the coach’s ability to grant A’s for a field trip.

  We headed off into the tunnels. The deep, underground tunnels. Sigh.

  The kids started making “scary” sounds that echoed off the cave walls, but they tapered away as we went deeper. I don’t know why they were getting unnerved. They’d put lights with arrows every so often to let you know you were on the right track. Mole tunnels never came with anything so accommodating.

  Eventually the kids’ voices had fallen to whispers, and I realized I was leading the way. I heard a few comments wondering why I seemed so strangely at ease down here.

  “Uh, hey, why am I going first?” I stammered. “It’s not like I’m comfortable in caves or anything.”

  Then Ed and Ted pushed past me, saying, “Look at big man Underbelly!” and “Not good enough to be our water boy!”

  Pennyworth saw an opportunity to piggyback on the jocks’ bravado, and pushed past saying I was also not good enough for the rocket club, and Marco pushed past saying I was also not good enough for the theater (tossing his scarf over his shoulder, which slapped me in the face). But Ed and Ted out-bravado-ed the others and rushed ahead. We found them waiting at a fork in the caves, where a lit arrow pointed right.

  I might have taken a moment to scan my co-bullies’ comments for legitimacy, but I just wanted to get this over with. So I started down the right shaft with the others following behind me. But the tunnel soon became narrow and rocky and dark, and filled with the echoes of Ed and Ted’s distant snickers.

  “Those soccer jerks moved
the arrow!” said Pennyworth.

  “We heard that, water boy!” Ed’s voice reverberated through the darkness.

  “That wasn’t me—” I began to say, but Ed and Ted started throwing rocks and yelling that it was a cave-in and to run, and everybody started screaming and pressing farther into the darkness. Magda was yelling for everyone to stop, but they kept flailing their arms and pushing into a pile and suddenly the ground below us gave way and I felt myself tumbling through space.

  I landed with a “splat” on some rocks, and heard the grunts of other kids landing around me. Everyone’s “Owwwww!”s turned to “Ewwwww!”s when we realized the cave we’d dropped into was completely covered in slime.

  Although we’d fallen deeper, we could see better because everything was covered in luminescent clay, like Mole tunnels. I wondered if this was perhaps some old part of the Mole realm, but I didn’t see any evidence of Mole life. Just a big cavern piled with foot-long oval rocks.

  A grab bag of my classmates had fallen in, some Brainers, some Binkettes, Marco, Magda, and Pennyworth.

  “Becky! Where are you? Stand by me!” said Pennyworth, before realizing she wasn’t with us. Looks like popularity protects you from misfortune. But I guess Pennyworth thought he might still get some good press from the Binkettes. He stood up next to them in a rough approximation of a chivalrous pose. “Don’t fret, ladies! I’ll protect you!” But his feet slipped on the oozy rocks and his legs shot out from under him into a painful split.

  “Gee thanks, ‘protector,’” said Magda. “But us poor defenseless girls don’t need saving, especially from a puny-foot like you.”

  It was true, that guy had surprisingly tiny feet.