Note: As of 5/30/19, I removed characters and their associated scenes from this story in order to cut down the length. If you're interested, they will appear in their own separate story/chapter at the end of this `book'.

[0000]


Josh and Kamara looked anxious, as if they still cared about me in some way, but not enough to jump in and help. The look on Josh's face made me think that he didn't know about the magic tricks in the car.

Charon had abandoned her seat, to where I wasn't sure. Her fishing rods, I supposed.

Although I didn't completely trust Willie or Lovelace, I decided they deserved to be let free, and at least try to defend themselves.

I climbed their poles, melting through their chains with my blood and saliva. Speaking of saliva, I reflected that kissing anyone at my stage of maturity would probably be fatal.

Since I knew I didn't have that much time, I didn't do such an elaborate job on freeing them. I just got them down from their posts and ran to help the strangers.

Lacethanny and Julia assisted me with this, speeding up the process. Unable to stop those speeding cars, they seemed to be glad to offer help.

Mark had not been of much help, either. He couldn't even do anything about the chains. He at least kept himself from getting underfoot as I freed the others.

An eyeless glowing blue and white thing stood statue-like behind one of the closed gates, silently observing me. It was unnerving.

I thought it may have been that thing I'd seen in a hospital building earlier, but it didn't matter much. It didn't look friendly.

As I freed the short lady, I introduced myself.

"My name's Camille," she said.

"What did you do to end up here?"

The woman sighed. "My son turned into a...fuzzy mutant. They're called Abreyas. My nephew released a video of him and his alien wife having sex, and it went viral."

I stared at her. "Seriously?"

"Guep. I mean, yes."

"What's your son's name?"

"Matt Gannon. Why? Have you seen him?"

My mouth dropped open in surprise. "Y-yeah. I mean, not in person. I was in a spaceship. There was a device. We used it to communicate."

"Is he okay? I heard some things about him running into trouble with some aliens..." She was glancing at Julia.

"I caught him getting his freak on with another Abreya, so I think he's just peachy."

Seeing as her chains had at least been removed, I hurried to the last captive.

"Help me," the woman said in Ss'sik'chtokiwij.

I gawked in astonishment. "How did you learn to speak that?"

"This is my natural tongue."

"You're human. How could that possibly be your natural tongue?"

"This isn't my natural body."

I climbed the pillar, working on her chains. "You're part of that cult, aren't you?"

"What cult?"

I pointed to Tido. "That's your friend, isn't he?"

"I've never seen him before in my life...But he would make a good host for larvae."

The more I talked to this stranger, the more disturbed I became. "How did you get here?"

"That I do not know. One moment I was inserting my ssujmarrux, my mind worms into this thing..." She pointed to her body. "The next I found I could not get out. I was stuck with a sharp thing that made me sleep. Now I am here."

"Are you saying you traded bodies with a Ss'sik'chtokiwij?"

"No. That would be far less unpleasant. This body is frail and inefficient. I detest the cold."

A pair of motorcycles roared out an open portcullis, their armor suited riders twirling thick chains in their studded gauntlets.

A Thracian gladiator helmet turned toward a cult member with a dragon tattooed on his forehead, knocking the boy facefirst into the sand. The other kids opened fire.

The man fell from his bike, but his jacket was made of Kevlar. He had no difficulty getting back up.

Our guns all clicked empty. We'd have to fight these thugs some other way.

Willie, now unshackled, limped behind a pillar, hiding from the attackers.

Lovelace had adopted a similar strategy, searching Rudy's pockets as she huddled beside his corpse.

As a bike came after me, I dodged.

Moe continued to lug Caitlyn around, to protect her, but I wasn't sure how long he could keep it up. I took her out of his hands for awhile.

Unfortunately, this made me an easier target. The bike rumbled my way.

Moe shoved the muzzle of an empty assault rifle into the spokes of the front wheel, throwing the rider. When my assailant staggered to his feet, Lacethanny pounced on the man's back, shredding him open from spine to stomach.

Big Bird knocked the other rider off his bike with a night stick I had seen hanging from her belt.

The moment we'd stepped into this arena, the android had proven herself a valuable asset, scooping kids away from the vehicles, darting back and forth in front of them to provide a distraction. Although she hadn't actually stopped the cars, I doubted any children would have survived without her help. She even rescued Caitlyn and Moe a couple times.

Big Bird swung her nightstick at the biker's helmet, attempting to dislodge it, but the man just shoved her to the ground and kicked her.

That's when Sharad, perched on one of the pillars, sprang upon him with a loud yell.

The moment the Abreya landed on his back, the man hurled the little alien down, drawing a switchblade.

He planted a boot on her chest, leaned over with the blade.

His head exploded.

The shot had come from above.

I glanced up and saw the people in pastel ganging up on Ippi, yanking the blaster weapon from her hands.

A moment later, a pack of big feral dogs came rushing into the arena.

The creatures had no armor or special enhancements, so me, Mark and the two Ss'sik'chtokiwij had no trouble dispatching several. Sharad, Moe, the cult members, and surprisingly the weird Ss'sik'chtokiwij speaking black woman I rescued cut down the ones we didn't get.

Caitlyn caught me chowing down on Leg of Mutt. I quickly tossed it aside, but I couldn't quite get all the blood off my face.

An army of shadowy witch-like wraiths followed the canine onslaught, blowing cold vapors in all our faces.

I found myself becoming unconscious without really meaning to.

A wraith that looked like Baron Sembedi shoved its cold blade into my chest, a strange ghostly blade that did not particularly hurt, but still sent a freezing chill radiating from the point it speared me.

It breathed noxious fumes in my face, and I watched in amazement, and horror, as my body turned to stone.

I tried to scream, but couldn't move or make a sound.

The phantom breathed a swarm of strange smelling bees in my face, and everything went dark.

I awoke in a coffin, staring at a silk lined lid.

I thought I heard bells ringing somewhere, but the sound, of course, was so muffled by the coffin, its lining, and tons of dirt, that I thought I had imagined it.

I pounded and kicked on the lid, but it would not budge, like someone had already piled six feet of dirt on top.

The trouble with a modern steel coffin is not getting the lid open, though latches do present a problem.

At funerals, it's easy enough to view the body. Some have latches to prevent the body from spilling out, but even if this were not the case, it's really the weight of the dirt that's the problem...plus other factors, such as if a heavy weight has been placed on top of the six foot mound of dirt, or if it is exactly six feet, or twice that amount, or if it's pure humus and not something loaded with rocks and gravel.

Trying not to think about Hitchcock's Final Exit, I clawed through the silken lining, only to encounter a thick layer of foam padding.

Why do people make coffins like this? I wondered as I tore the lining away from the viewing half of the box. Do the dead really care that their bodies are encased in an impenetrable steel tube? It's unheard of for normal people, after the burial, to ever dig up the contents of a coffin again, so why not let corpses biodegrade naturally?

I frowned at the exposed aluminum shell. This was going to be a bitch to open. I couldn't even rely on my legs for additional force. This essentially would be the world's most powerful pushup, and I'd have to melt the side opposite the hinge to make sure a latch didn't thwart my efforts.

Lucky for me, I still had one of those cult members' knives on my person. I cut my hand, pressed it against the far edge of the lid, let it sizzle.

Embalming fluid, I thought. I'd heard that formaldehyde was bad for plants and animals, and I guessed an impenetrable box was a fair exchange for not generally having people clawing the insides of coffin lids. Well, when assholes don't intentionally bury you without said embalming fluid.

By the time I had made sufficient progress in my escape, I had become dizzy and lightheaded, though due to blood loss or lack of air, I couldn't tell.

Still, I gave it my all, screaming at the top of my lungs as I shoved my full weight against the lid.

Dirt showered around me as I pushed upward, awkwardly contorting my legs to get more support. It was hot with my hood pulled over my head, but I didn't want all that topsoil and bugs and dirt in my hair during my last few minutes of life, so I kept it on.

Somehow I got into a standing position.

I wanted to use the lid like Captain America's shield, kinda fighting the current of soil with it, but the last thing I wanted to do was increase my surface area to fight against, so I instead used it like a shovel until it got buried in the avalanche.

I felt like a grain of sand fighting to reach the top of an hourglass. The dirt got into my eyes, my mouth, my nostrils. It poured into the coffin.

I didn't know I had fainted until I felt a shovel jabbing me.

My weak hands clamped around the base of the shovel head, but I didn't have the strength to do much more than that.

"My God," I heard a voice saying. "How the fuck did you get up here?"

I could only moan in response.

I was only dimly aware of what happened after this, except for the familiar female voice that complained, "C'mon, don't force me to do this" and the lips puffing air into my lungs.

My eyes focused on a mousey bucktoothed face. Ippi Snarken.

"So what did you do? Punch your way out like that lady in Kill Bill? That's not exactly a pine box..."

I coughed several times and sat up.

The alien winced. "Ow! I feel like I've just taken a mouthful of boiling coffee!"

"I'm sorry. Thanks for saving my life."

I lay sprawled by an open grave in a cemetery, with a crumbling old stone church and mausoleum. Weeds as tall as a man's head grew rampant beyond the graveyard's fences, but inside, the grounds were well trimmed, even around the Virgin Mary grotto in the hard-to-reach corner.

Not counting mine, I spotted fifteen fresh graves, each with a casket bell built into the headstone, like people used to make in the old days before embalming fluid.

The dirt mounds all had the same dimensions, so it was impossible to tell which graves held children, except by reading the headstones.

Our names had already been engraved on these monuments. The sounds of ringing bells filled the air.

Big Bird shoveled a ringing grave next to me while Sharad excavated another.

"Ellie!" Moe said from the edge of my grave. "Thank God you're all right!"

I took a deep breath of clean fresh air. "Yeah. I thought I was going to die down there."

Moe's face was covered in white paint, with a cross shaped smear of dried blood across the forehead. I did a double take when I noticed it. "It's a little early for Halloween, isn't it?"

"Look in the mirror, when you find one."

I touched my face and discovered he was right. They'd put some sort of white `cake' on me.

I jumped to my feet. "Caitlyn!"

We rushed to a mound with my daughter's name on the engraved marble. I was tired, but I grabbed a shovel and put ever ounce of effort into the dig.

A Virgin Mary statue turned her head, its slow, deliberate movements and cut across the neck suggesting that this was something mechanical, like a camera, rather than anything supernatural. Someone was watching.

Caitlyn had been buried in a splintery pine box. The `dead ringer' had been made so inelegantly that the girl's lips and face had a blue tinge by the time we pried off the coffin lid.

The grave had been shallower than mine, the lid held on only by a couple nails, as if the impossible challenges were somehow proportionate to the person buried. I pulled my daughter out, gave her CPR. Thankfully it worked, and I didn't melt her face off or anything.

Her eyes bugged out when she got a good look at me. "Mommy, why are you wearing that scary makeup?"

Someone had put the makeup on her face as well, but of course she couldn't see it.

"I...don't know."

"Serpent and the Rainbow shit," Moe grunted. "Either someone's fucking with us, or there's a Voodoo witchdoctor in the head office poking pins in dolls."

Caitlyn sobbed into my chest. "I thought I was going to die! There wasn't any air!"

I hugged her. "You lived. That's what's important."

Disturbed by the chorus of ringing bells, I said, "C'mon. Let's dig up the rest of these zombies before they actually become zombies."

Big Bird and Sharad had already uncovered and resuscitated Willie and Lovelace (the strong, tireless android obviously doing most of the work) and now worked on the graves of two children.

I didn't know most of the survivors' names. I hadn't had time for full introductions. For this reason, I took a shovel to a grave labeled Tiara Reese at random.

"If I die," Caitlyn whimpered as she watched me. "What happens then? Do I go into a doll like your mommy and daddy?"

I shook my head. "If you know Jesus, you can go to heaven."

She was curious, so I explained Jesus and heaven to her as I shoveled.

The coffin proved to be larger than a child's body, but by the time I'd figured that out, I was already at the lid.

I cracked the nails with the shovel and found the Ss'sik'chtokiwij speaking woman calmly staring back at me, as if she had only been resting in bed. "That was dizzying but warm. I seem to have a memory of this being an old death custom. Why was I placed in this container alive?"

"I don't know. But I'm glad you were so calm about it. It conserves air."

She smiled.

At the headstone marked Fiat Dickenson, Big Bird puffed air into the lungs of the boy with the dragon tattoo. She did this with the expert precision of an ambulance technician who had been doing this for centuries, on account of her programming.

A narrow pixie-like girl named Guessica Fishbaum sobbed prayers to the alien as she dug beneath a headstone labeled Grita Alvarado with her fingers. Moe and I took shovels over there, and soon we had a third kid unearthed, a feminine looking Latin boy, multiple piercings.

Guessica gave us both hugs. "Thank you, Great Lady," she said to me.

Another kid, a fat Korean boy with a tombstone reading Absolute Li stood staring at the Virgin Mary camera.

Tido's real name was Shep Swisher. It explained a lot. His casket ringer chimed to the tune of Jingle Bells.

With a cocky attitude like that, I was tempted to leave him down there, but in desperate situations, people sometimes resort to humor, so we dug him up.

As with Tiara, his calmness conserved his air supply. "I knew Shasharmazorb would not abandon her faithful servant! And now I know you are truly sent by her! Ours has been the path of misery and suffering, the path of wickedness! But the path you declared to us, it is the way of life and peace!"

"I don't know about that...My life has been pretty horrible. But I do know who to trust, and if you've had a change of heart, I'm glad for it." I paused. "That rattlesnake venom didn't hurt you at all?"

Tido rolled up his sleeve, showing me a row of scars. "I was raised Pentecostal."

Moe chewed on his lip. "He built up a tolerance for the venom, in other words."

We continued to dig, but time had run out.

When we opened Camille's grave, we found her dead face frozen in horror, her hands stiffened in the pose of scratching at the coffin lid.

We'd lost a child in a similar way.

"Heart failure," the robot declared when she examined the woman. "I am so sorry."

I gave her a dirty look, but then realized `being heartfelt' was a little difficult for a droid to do convincingly.

"Oh no," I moaned as I stared at the body. "That was the guy's mother..."

"What guy?" Moe asked.

"Matt Gannon. I spoke to him on a device in David's ship."

"How do you know that's his mother?"

"She told me."

"Did it occur to you what she might be lying?"

"No! Why would you lie about something like that?"

"Let me see," said Sharad.

She leaned over the hole, then whimpered, "That's her, all right. I recognize her from the calls."

I shook my head sadly.

The dead child saddened me too, but I didn't know her that well.

Rudolph Flint also had a grave. I would have left it alone, out of respect, but then the coffin's emergency bell started ringing.

"What the hell?" I cried.

"Someone's down there!" Sharad said.

Moe scowled. "I wouldn't do it. You might dig up a zombie or a demonic ghost or something."

"Seriously? That's what you're going with?"

"When you hear hoofbeats," Big Bird said. "Think horses, not zebras."

"She's right." I picked up a shovel and scooped out dirt. "There could be a kid down there."

I found only animal bones.

I didn't even see what had caused the bell to ring. The wind hadn't been strong enough to make that kind of noise.

I felt a cold chill run down my back. "We all heard it ring. How is that possible?"

Moe shrugged. "The man's spirit isn't at rest?"

"Many allegedly true stories about ghosts and the paranormal are clever deceptions by human beings," said the android. "A medium may employ special devices to cause rapping sounds, powerful electromagnets to move furniture, pulleys to open and close windows. Candles may be cut in half and carefully reassembled with weak adhesives to give the illusion of a ghostly knife attack.

"The bell may therefore have been operated by some mechanical means."

As if in response, the bell to Rudy's coffin, the church bell, and all the other fresh graves tolled all at once.

"It tolls for thee," I quoted.

"Gang, it looks like we've got another mystery on our hands!" The android mouthed the words, but she was actually playing a recording of Fred from Scooby Doo.

"Hocus pocus," Moe said. "I'm guessing your alien pals were too much of a handful to bury, or they'd be here too."

"You're right," I said. "Those are all the fresh graves."

Hesitant to be overheard or recorded by the cameras, I gestured for Big Bird to join me in my grave.

"What will we be doing down there?"

I pointed at the Virgin, shook my head, pantomimed zipping my lips.

Oh.

She did as I asked.

"Any progress on scrambling or removing our trackers?" I whispered.

"The equipment I have access to is substandard, and we are being monitored. I will wink at you when the opportunity presents itself."

"Okay," I sighed. "On an unrelated note, do you have any idea how Charon, Josh and Kamara got up into those stands so quickly? They were just on the boat."

She froze in thought for a moment. "An old tram station can be accessed one mile from the dock. The tram leads directly beneath what is now the arena."

"So that long walk was some kind of psychological intimidation tactic."

"It appears so. Yes."

I clambered back out, deciding to leave.

Tido called the surviving four children from the cult, commanding them to sit around a tombstone as he shared with them his religious revelations. The kids were like sheep, soaking it all in.

I turned my back in disgust, putting some distance between myself and they. I wasn't certain that little ragtag bunch would be of much aid to us anymore, so I decided to leave them there, let them catch up when they got their act in gear.

Willie limped over to me. "Would you mind if I lean on you for support?"

In the spirit of forgiveness, I shrugged, giving him my human shoulder while Caitlyn gripped my claw.

"What did you see in that shed?" Willie asked me. "In that other town?"

I told him what I found, and the unfortunate events that occurred.

"Gee, I'm sorry to hear that! I didn't know there was going to be danger!"

I just sighed and kept going.

Sharad and Ippi separated themselves from the group, speaking to each other in Wava.

The headstones of the other graves had little statues on them. These statues turned as we walked past. I could see the black buttons where their camera eyes were.

Cherubs, angels, birds, busts of peoples' heads, all turning to observe our every move.

"Hey," I called to the brown woman with the crooked bird nose. "Tiara!"

When she didn't respond to this, I called, "Sripasde!" which translates into "Hey you."

"I am Hosea, not Tiara," she said.

"So, in addition to thinking you're an alien, you've also got gender issues."

"Mother named me. The `Scient-Tests' allowed us to share minds as a `Demon-Station'. I learned much about Jesus, and the valuation of human beings."

"Ernie, you mean? You spoke with Ernie?"

Hosea let out a weird mewling cry. "They destroyed my body! They killed me, and sent my Latsaph into this! They wished to test the extent of the ssujmarrux!"

"I don't understand. Who did they kill? Wouldn't you be in a Ss'sik'chtokiwij body?"

"They killed my Ss'sik'chtokiwij form!" Hosea sobbed. "They killed it right when I was in the hooman's brain!"

My jaw dropped in horror. "They did what?"

"It was your voice! You told me to show her my secret tongue!"

"They must have recorded me," I stammered. "It's not my fault. They forced me into it."

This only made her whimper.

"You sure know how to pick them," Moe said.

Hosea distanced herself from me.

Tido, following his obsession, did not delay as much as I would have liked. I soon noticed his gang trailing me, pixie-like Guessica running up ahead.

Unlike the other places we've turned up, the other Learning Towns, this place had a theme park-like appearance. Off to my left stood the small coliseum we'd fought in, a computer cafe, a softball park, and a castle tower. The latter was not a castle proper, but a stone fort, reminding me of pictures of that building that inspired Bram Stoker's fictitious vampire castle.

To my right lay a water tower, an office building, a bowling alley, a columned government building...and, bizarrely, what seemed to be a used car lot.

I would have gone down to that lot at once, but there was a giant pink doll house directly across the road from me. A doll house with both a Christian and a Star Wars Rebel Alliance flag hanging from its windows.

The whole building was so artificial looking that it made me wonder if someone had kidnapped a Disney architect. Vinyl siding, plastic roofing tiles, PVC guttering. Even the windows looked plastic.

"What is that?" Moe asked. "Barbie's dream house?"

Hearing footsteps, I glanced back and found Tido and his kids had already caught up with us. We crossed the dirt road together.

The moment we came up the front walk, Lovelace took a cel phone out of her dress and told someone "We're here."

Before I could properly react to this, the plastic front door swung open, and Jen-Jen, dressed in a frumpy striped shirt and khakis, stepped out on the porch, cradling a half human Abreya child. "See? I knew you could make it!"

The Bishop android and a camo suited version of me accompanied the woman, both armed with guns. The cult members, upon seeing my twin, murmured about angelic tests and a "deceiver in angel's garb."

"So this is the Purple Zone," I said.

Jen-Jen swelled with pride. "So it is."

We got led inside an immense foyer that had all the trappings of wealth, without the actual substance. The giant marble pillars were actually plastic (the children poked and prodded them, making hollow sounds), and so were the swan sculptures that towered above us to form a gate.

A fountain stood in the center of the chamber, but it too was plastic - you could tell my the cheap tinkling sound the water made when it splashed against its surfaces.

The `wall tapestries' were industrial sized flexo decals, the kind you'd put on the side of a McDonald's truck to advertise food. They appeared to be expensive French tapestries from the era of Louis XIV or something, but of course they lay flat against the phony brickwork like a scratch and sniff sticker.

"So this is where He-Man's girlfriend lives," Moe remarked. "Who built this place? Mattel?"

"It's a recycling project," Jen-Jen said. "The company that made it went bankrupt. The shipping costs were amazingly cheap."

"What happens in a tornado or a hurricane?" I said. "Does the whole thing just blow away into the ocean?"

Jen-Jen laughed. "I think the investors had the same objection. Not to worry, though. We have a basement, and the whole thing is bolted down in concrete."

The Purple Rat marched into the room with a squad of armed girls. "Are you absolutely certain you can handle this, Jen-Jen?"

The chunky blonde laughed. "You're cute." She gave the girl a dismissive wave.

Purple Rat looked offended, but she still spun on her heels and goose stepped out, tailed by her guards.

Jen-Jen led us through a fancy looking plastic archway, into a lounge area that appeared to be a remodeled version of some little girl's throne room playset, actual furniture, framed pictures and objects de art juxtaposed against plastic thrones, repurposed soda bottle suits of armor, and faux alabaster equestrian statues.

Guessica carved a religious symbol into a wall with a ripped up soda can she'd found.

David's wife sat on a chaise lounge, clad in a chintzy gold-orange dress, the sort of outfit a doll wears. She nursed an Abreya child on one breast.

"This is what happens when they no longer need your medical expertise."

Jen-Jen handed the baby to its mother and clapped her hands. "So! Who wants cake?"