King of the Mole People--Rise of the Slugs Read online

“They didn’t quite fit the new ‘Scandinavian Shabby’ look I was going for,” I said.

  My dad asked if I was okay, and I wanted to answer, but I was frozen by the sight through the window of the shaking bushes around the grave hole.

  He asked if I really didn’t like living in our house as much as it was starting to seem, and I wanted to answer that too, but I was even more frozen by the sight of a giant Slug head peering through the leaves.

  He asked me if I knew that the only thing that mattered to him was my happiness, and I really, really wanted to answer, but I was frozen rock solid by the sight of three giant Slugs oozing forth into our backyard.

  Then I heard the news crew say the story was a bust, this place wasn’t weird at all, and they should just check the backyard real quick and then split.

  “Hey, you! Newspeople!” I yelled, blocking them in the hallway. “You came here to interview my Dad! Well, here he is! He’s more interesting and has more talent than you can imagine! So ask him about his magnificent book of eel recipes, and do it right now!”

  My dad looked at me proudly. The news crew sighed, pointed recording equipment, and started tossing questions.

  “The secret to preparing eel is thyme,” I heard him saying. “Both the sprig kind and the clock kind.” And he laughed. Cooking joke, I guessed. But I was already down the stairs and into the backyard.

  I wasn’t far into the yard before I was on my butt. My feet had shot out from under me. The whole yard was completely covered in slime. I tried to stand, but it was impossible. Everything was as slippery as … I can’t even think of anything as slippery as this was.

  The yard was destroyed. Every surface was slimed. All the leaves we’d taped on branches were stripped off and the trees and bushes looked dead in all-new shining and glistening ways.

  And then I was surrounded by Slugs. Slimy, revolting, terrifying Slugs. With hundreds of pieces of tape stuck to their butts.

  “Do you think we’re a joke?” said the Slug I’d met by the egg chamber, who I now realized was Ambassador Gurge.

  “I can’t believe the three of you managed to slime my whole backyard in five minutes!” I said.

  “Compliments won’t help you,” said Gurge. “You humans are just like Moles! You think we’re beneath you just because … well, we’re beneath you. But we’re not!”

  “I understand what it’s like to be on a lower rung,” I said. “I was once ecstatic over getting the part of a shrub in a school play.”

  “You think we’re gross and repugnant!” he said, oozing his gross and repugnant body forward and pointing an appendage at me. Slugs could elongate an appendage from the side of their body whenever they needed it. It was horrifying.

  “No I don’t!” I gagged. “You guys are adorable! I’d cuddle you and pet you if I could!”

  “You think you can just come in and take one of our eggs? Well, now we’ve taken your ambassador. How do you like that?”

  “No!” I yelled. I tried to stand up, but kept slipping and falling down again. “As King of the Moles, I demand her release immediately!” It was hard to be demanding when lying in slime.

  “King of the Mole People,” he said. “You disrespect us by sending a subordinate! You ignore our demands! You steal our eggs! Ambassador Sputz and the Common Slugs may have put up with this kind of contempt, but the Bull Slugs are here now! We’ll take the Mole level by force, if necessary! And if you don’t give us the egg back, we’ll take over this human level as well! Return our egg! You have twelve slime parsecs of time to do it.”

  “I have no idea how long that is.”

  “Just do it quick! Or we’ll slime the human girl permanently!”

  “Leave her alone!” I yelled, shimmying around in the slop and tape and leaves. But the Slugs had squeezed their bulbous, malleable bodies into the grave hole and were gone.

  “I knew it! I knew we’d find weirdness!” I heard the reporter lady yell, and turned my head to see the newspeople running toward me from the side of the house, their camera pointing enthusiastically at a backyard dripping two inches deep in slime. “My journalist instincts never fail to—”

  And then they were all sprawled in the slippery goo. Still, they never stopped smiling as they writhed about, filming, capturing the story of the weirdest house in town.

  The Slugs had it all wrong. Your worth has nothing to do with what level you’re on. I was on the surface, but lying there in the Slug ooze I couldn’t have felt lower. I’d used my dad. Abused my role as King. Put my friends at risk. And got Magda captured by giant Slugs. And despite all this, my list of things to do—a mere two items long—was in shambles. Sell the house? My scheme to display it to the world looking palatable had failed completely. Stop being King of the Moles? I now had no choice but to find that Slug egg, grab the crown, and head back into the earth to try to fix a problem that was spiraling out of control because of me, even though all I’d ever tried to do was stay out of it.

  It’s like being Mole King was quicksand. The more I struggled to get free, the more it pulled me under. And now I had a ticking slime-parsec clock under me.

  9

  SLUG EGG

  Did you know that slug slime doesn’t wash off? Well, it doesn’t, no matter how much you scrub it. It’s resistant to water. I’d squirted squirts from every bottle in the bathroom, but still a thin layer of it remained everywhere ooze had touched skin.

  After dragging myself through globs of the stuff back to my house and wasting time with an unproductive shower, I found Ploogoo and Lindoog still in my closet, where they were still busy complimenting each other on what a great job they’d each done on the house. At least I could claim one success. After flowers, poetry, and scarves, it turns out going through an ordeal together is the trick to bringing two people close.

  I asked them what a slime parsec of time was, and Ploogoo asked if I was using a dry-mulch clock or a wet-mulch clock, and I said never mind. I gave them my backpack with the Mole crown inside it and told them to slide on their stomachs through the yard back to the grave hole and do whatever they could to stall the angry Bull Slugs while I went for the egg.

  Annnnnnnd I was running again.

  Finding the egg was easy. Like I expected, Pennyworth had stored it in the science portable, and I found it sitting in there on the counter. Unlike I expected, it turned out Pennyworth really had convinced a scientist to come examine it.

  Okay, it wasn’t a real scientist, it was just a science teacher from the nearby high school. But I suppose he probably studied some kind of science if he was teaching it, and he had those thick-framed glasses they must hand out to all the graduates at science school. He may not have been the kind of scientist who could call in troops of men with machines and weapons when they found a weird new life-form, but maybe he knew a scientist who knew a scientist who could.

  I heard them approaching the portable, Pennyworth building up the “copious” amounts that life as we knew it would be changed by his discovery, and the science teacher grunting with the tone of one who’d been worn down. I was trapped!

  I picked up the egg and felt little vibrations running through it. There was definitely something going on inside. As the door opened I had no choice but to resort to the most serious ninja stealth tactics.

  Pennyworth shrieked when he saw that the egg was missing and started running around the room knocking things over. In the mayhem I stealth-ninja-ed out the door. When you’re in full stealth-ninja mode, it helps to be covered in a thin layer of residual slime (I don’t actually know if that’s true, but for whatever reason I got away with it, so I decided not to overanalyze).

  But whether the slime helped my stealth or not, one thing it definitely did was make holding on to things difficult. And dropping the foot-long oval removed once and for all any doubt about whether it was a rock or an egg.

  The sound it made when it hit the ground was distinctly a CRACK.

  I tucked it under my shirt and looked around. The last pla
ce I wanted to go was into the school. The school was where I’d recently failed to show up to Miss Chips’s class, and left an Eiffel Tower embedded in the gymnasium ceiling. But there was no way I could get across the open field without risking Pennyworth exiting the portable and spotting me. The ruckus in the portable came to an abrupt halt, and I heard the sound of the portable door being kicked open by a tiny foot as I rushed into the school.

  As I hurried down the hallway there were more cracking sounds from under my shirt, and a piece of eggshell fell to the floor. I heard the school door open behind me and I dove into the Principal’s office.

  From a stealth-ninja position in another garbage can (you don’t realize how many garbage cans are around till you start hiding in them) I heard Miss Chips and Principal Wiggins butting heads over the abysmal state of the dance preparation, before they found a happy common ground in the conclusion that everything was all my fault. Because of me, Principal Wiggins was going to have to pay for a new gymnasium ceiling, a new gymnasium window, and a new lawn tractor. And because of me, Miss Chips was going to have to come in during the day on Saturday to oversee the completion of the dance prep.

  They bumped into Pennyworth at the doorway, and I scrunched deeper into the garbage contents. I felt the egg cracking to pieces under my shirt, and the slickness of oozy Slug skin slithering against mine. I tried to stifle shudders of revulsion as Pennyworth and Wiggins and Chips all cursed my name before parting ways—three Underbelly-seeking missiles all armed and locked on me.

  I climbed out of the trash can and hurried down the hall, then ducked into the gym. I knew there was an exit door on the opposite side of the gym, and there was nothing between it and me besides a huge Eiffel Tower crushed into the ceiling. Oh, and the Underbelly-seeking missile Miss Chips.

  She was entering from the other door. I ninja-ed into a bin of basketballs.

  Peering through the balls, I watched Miss Chips as she gazed at the mangled Paris decorations—the torn streamers, the bashed papier-mâché croissant, the crunched Eiffel Tower. Sure, a bashed papier-mâché croissant is pretty sad, but Miss Chips seemed gripped with a wistfulness and melancholy that went beyond ruined decorations.

  She sat down in a chair beside the tower and began softly singing an out-of-tune song in French.

  I felt some squirming around under my shirt and had to stifle a squeal.

  The creature was doubtlessly trying to figure out what kind of bizarre shirt-world it had hatched itself into. I shuddered some more, hoping the basketballs weren’t vibrating visibly. I was already starting to wonder how much more Slug I could handle, when an eye-stalk poked out of my shirt collar.

  The familiar sound of Miss Chips’s snoring came as some relief. The gym acoustics amplified the guttural noises nicely, and she followed each one with some mumbling about driving through the French countryside in a sports car with the wind in her hair.

  I pushed the eye-stalk back down and pulled my collar tight. Then I felt the eye-stalks tickling around my neck and had to keep from giggling. I was going to have to secure this thing somehow if I was going to make it all the way back to the backyard grave hole without anyone seeing it. I crawled from the basketballs into a nearby door marked “showers.”

  There, I removed my shirt to behold the miracle of a brand-new life.

  The shower room was a mess, dirty towels everywhere, and no other doors or windows.

  I peeled the Slug off my skin and tried to clean it in the sink with some hand soap, but it started contorting and making unhappy noises. It seemed to have a sensitivity to chemicals of any kind, even soap.

  “There, there,” I said, trying to calm it down, wiping it with a towel and cuddling it. It relaxed and burrowed its “face” into my armpit.

  I wondered if maybe it was hungry. I tried giving it a piece of Juicy Fruit gum, which it seemed to like. I guess Slugs are attracted to fruit. But I was pretty sure the gum didn’t have any real fruit in it. I chewed a piece myself and blew a bubble, which popped all over my face. I was terrible at bubbles.

  Its eyeless eye-stalks patted the gum stuck around my mouth, then continued to probe around my neck and face, like it was trying to get a read on what I looked like. I stared at the mushy pulsating gastropod, all gooey and full of promise. Slugs were still the grossest and most repulsive things ever. But if I looked at the little thing just right, and sort of squinted, I couldn’t deny there was just a tiny bit of cute.

  I found some old watermelon rinds in the trash and it slurped on those for a bit, but it really seemed like it just wanted to be held. I rocked it and hummed it a song. I guess Miss Chips inspired me, and I hummed “Ooo-la-la fromage,” a catchy advertising jingle I’d once heard for cream cheese. The baby Slug seemed to like it.

  “I will call you Cream Cheese,” I said.

  With Cream Cheese squished against my body, I felt a momentary peacefulness. To fill up the space, I started talking.

  I starting telling it about my action figure collection. But I couldn’t keep my mind off what I was really thinking about. So I spoke about how they kept putting me in charge of things. And about how I kept telling them I didn’t want to do it, because weirdness was turning me into a ticking time bomb. But that I knew this excuse was ridiculous. The truth, I told Cream Cheese, was that I wasn’t worried about the danger of weirdness. I was worried about myself. The last time there was a crisis, everything came within a mucus drop of getting destroyed by giant worms. Now things were heating up with the Slugs, and the Moles were trying to push me into leading them again. What if this time I blew it entirely? I couldn’t handle it. I was too scared.

  I sighed and squeezed the baby Slug. It felt good to open up to somebody. Even if it was a gelatinous blob who couldn’t possibly understand a word I was saying.

  Speaking of saying, I was suddenly aware that the sound of Miss Chips’s log-sawing had been replaced by voices. I went to put the Slug down to go have a peek, but it started making noises again and tried to wrap itself around me, and I realized it didn’t want me to leave it alone.

  I picked it up and said “Shhh,” and told it that I was going to teach it its first valuable skill for life in this world: spying. I put my shirt back on and carried it stealthily to the door. Even though its little eye-stalks were still unopened and blind, it poked them super quietly around the door frame. It had taken to spying like a pro. I was so proud.

  The voices belonged to the dance committee. The Binkettes and Marco were complaining animatedly about having to come in tomorrow before the dance to clean up the colossal decorating disaster I’d caused. Although you could tell they were only acting like they were upset. Any inconvenience they felt about coming in on a Saturday was offset by their clear enjoyment of how much trouble I was in.

  Miss Chips stood projecting ire in all directions. I guess her imaginary trip to the French countryside was over. “Fix. Tomorrow noon. Don’t be late,” was all she said before turning and slumping out the door.

  The committee members were already in great moods when they were given the bonus gift of a very hyped-up Pennyworth. He charged into the gym demanding to know if anyone had seen me, as he was sure he’d spotted me running into the building and suspected that I’d stolen his greatest scientific discovery of the century.

  This provoked a round of mocking from Marco and the Binkettes about his ridiculous “egg.” But Becky, being in a triumphant mood, humored him, and said that if this was indeed a huge discovery, she might go so far as to be impressed. But what she was more likely expecting was that Pennyworth was full of hot air and would very soon be popping, like a balloon, filled with pig barf, sitting in a dumpster. These last visual add-ons had been provided by Marco and the Binkettes, and everyone laughed even though they really stretched the logic of the metaphor.

  At that moment the science teacher came in and told Pennyworth that he’d had enough of whatever stunt Pennyworth was trying to pull and was leaving. Pennyworth tried to get him to wait because they w
ere sure to find his discovery soon, and just look at the pieces of egg they’d found in the hallway. And when the science guy didn’t seem impressed with that, Pennyworth tried threatening him that once he’d achieved fame and fortune he’d make the teacher pay copiously for his narrow-mindedness in the presence of greatness. And when that didn’t work, he tried the only tactic he had left.

  The science teacher departed.

  And the Binkettes all made popping sounds, and Marco, using his theater training, did a pretty good rendition of a pig barfing.

  Pennyworth lost it. He called everyone a bunch of four-syllable names and vowed that the science teacher and Becky and the rest of “you pathetic wretches” would soon be eating their words and praising Pennyworth’s discovery as the most copiously important thing ever. Then, realizing he’d included Becky in this fire-bombing, he tried to pull a quick edit.

  “Except you, Becky. You’re still smart and cool and not a wretch at all.”

  “Pop,” said Becky.

  For someone who’d just become a megalomaniac recently, Pennyworth had got up to speed quick. His fists shook and he got all red and veins started popping out in his forehead. He vowed that he wasn’t going to be humiliated like this, and swore he was going to get that scientist to return and validate his discovery, and we’d all be sorry when he did.

  It was a pretty impressive pose. Some backlight came from somewhere. Too bad for him I was the only one to see it. The dance committee had already left, chuckling gleefully.

  But for all his amazing pose-work, I wondered what he was doing swearing he’d have his discovery validated, since I had his little discovery tucked safely under my arm, the two of us as quiet as super-spy ninjas on a windless night. That is, until the Slug started nuzzling up against my face.

  Pennyworth’s head spun our way, and I ducked back into the shower room.