Chapter 7
The Girl in the Snow Globe
The wind blew through my scythe-esque hair until Tak's ship raised the windshield-thingy. I breathed a sigh of relief. My hands, however, were firmly gripped on the joystick that steered the spacecraft. It was too early to get comfortable. Comfort. I winced at the thought of that word, as if it was a feeling I would never experience again.
It wasn't the whole rescuing my sister thing that shocked me the most. I had never felt this emotional over losing someone. Thinking of her lovingly like this was a far, far cry from what I had felt towards her a few days ago- anger and lifelong resentment. How did things change so quickly?
Dammit, why couldn't I stick to what I was doing?
My desire for attention and recognition as the fifteen year-old who brought down the alien had all but faded ever since that night at the bottom of the stairs.
I shuddered, keeping my twitching eyes focused on the horizon. Whatever was going on inside me back in the shadows of my kitchen, I didn't need it. Especially not right now.
Out of the mist I could see, even with my naked eyes, the silhouette of the ferocious beast that was ravaging the city. It was... for lack of any other word, huge. A swarming mass of oozing syrup and restless insects, and what looked from the outside like a reptilian creature squirming at its core.
Great. Locustzilla.
Well, at least I don't have to holler at the top of my lungs to try and convince everyone that he EXISTS.
Further examination showed that in the outer-middle of the creature's torso there was a strange screen-like device, like a big-screen television. Zim's face flickered on and off of the screen- the video feed was messed up. God, that alien sickens me. Ripping off monster ideas from the Telletubbies.
Taking my eyes off of the beast I breathed in deeply, noticing with anxiety the darkness expanding progressively in the morning sky. As I drew nearer and nearer to the beast I found myself echoing the words in the back of my mind...
"Lure in the Dib-monkey..."
I was falling into a trap. And I was doing it practically voluntarily.
Amid the sound of my humming engine, the deafening buzz of the locusts and the screams of the fleeing people below, I discerned his voice booming from a nearby rooftop. Uncontrollable laughter, aware of nothing but itself and its sadistic pleasures. He was daring me to retaliate. Tak's ship was warning not to get to close to the monster. I took no heed of its ranting.
Circling around past the locust-thing, I swerved the ship to slightly above the building to get a better view of whatever it was Zim was doing. The laughter stopped.
"CURSE YOU, inferior Earth projector! The future slaves must WITNESS their master's evil grin! WHY must you disrupt their grin-witnessing?"
He was precariously throttling a digital video camera on a tripod. The fool's own video equipment must have gotten fried when his base exploded.
Zim's frustrated ego allowed me a slight window of opportunity to sneak up on him. I was already picturing my moment of victory, twiddling my thumbs around the laser trigger-button thingy. All I needed was one clean shot...
"THWACK!"
My own Greatest Person That Ever Lived Award had been slammed right into my face. The locust-beast had knocked me out of my flight. I heard one of the thrusters snap off of my fragile craft. Fire erupted in the cockpit soon after I realized I was headed for a long fall. Thinking quickly, I pushed forward a toggle that shot out the ship's robotic claws to either side, steering as close as I could to the little green boy thirty feet below me. He held his ground like a dumb little soldier, a look of mingled surprise and uncertainty in his red eyes.
At the last second I pulled up, aiming to mow over the alien, and hopefully use him as a nice lice-retardant landing cushion. Instead Zim ducked his head. He got lucky, I thought, bracing myself for impact.
My life flashed before my eyes. Nothing I wasn't used to.
Offering Tak a piece of meat as we sat on a picket fence...
Watching Zim eating waffles in his kitchen from my computer screen... It still baffles me how he does that...
Scrubbing the shadow pig-thingy overlord's toilet...
That woke me up. I picked my dazed self up from the rooftop quickly, noting that this was the first time in years I've been knocked out twice in one day. I never found out how long I was out, but it couldn't have been for longer than a few seconds, because the first thing I saw upon waking was Zim's shadow flickering as I stood up, effectively blocking the light beaming from the burning engine of my ship. The nearly-veiled sun opposite my side of the building illuminated his shadowy presence before my blurry eyes. He was turning around to face me.
I heard the alien sneering at my face from his little camera perch a few meters away. Ignoring my aching limb, I spread my legs into a fighter stance, putting on my meanest cowboy face as if this was the showdown of the century.
"All right, Zim! Where's my sister?" I said, my voice rising to a surprisingly high pitch as my trembling mouth blurted out the words.
"Oh, and, um... Deal with the huge monster, too." I added as an afterthought, my thumbs jerked towards the direction of the locust-beast, which was apparently taking a bite out of a huge Mac Meaties sign.
I didn't need to see it. Years of hatred taught me that Zim's retaliating gaze was so wicked it seemed to pierce my flesh. "Ah... Dib. I was expecting you." He needlessly knocked over the camera he was toying with and began twiddling his gloved fingers.
I wasn't going to be intimidated by this clown. "WHERE IS SHE?"
The subtle sound of bird droppings falling onto my trench coat permeated the silence following my exasperated scream. At least nobody was here to laugh at it this time.
Zim just raised an eyebrow, closed his eyes and shook his head, sighing mockingly.
"Dib, Dib, Dib... Can you not see I am busy doing... doing really HORRIBLE things to people?"
"I'm SERIOUS, ZIM!!!"
Sweat poured down my face as the heat from the smoldering ship warmed my backside. I dared a brief look backwards and realized that I had crashed the ship pretty close to the building's edge. I was expecting a trap to enrapture me at any moment, but I didn't flinch at all. As far as I was concerned, I was saving the world, and that always gives me strength.
"Fine, fine," he murmured, shrugging his shoulders while rolling his eyes. It was clear he had rehearsed this little charade and could barely contain his giddy fantasies of whatever form of pain he was preparing to inflict upon me.
"GIR!!! Bring forth the Dib-monkey's sister!"
A small ice cream stand in the corner of the rooftop that I only seemed to notice at the mention of those words exploded as a familiar SIR unit burst out of it giggling, covered in rocky road and cookie dough.
"YAY! We all gonna have a naked burrito campfire dance!"
As GIR leaped off the building to bring up my sister, my stomach churned. My already-wide eyes widened even more in horror as a vision of a tied up, crying, horse-whipped Gaz strewn about on the floor of a tiny portable jail cell entered my mind.
Nah. Just those nightmarish hallucinations again that Miss Bitters calls "the real world".
Instead I saw the explosive little android fly up the side of the building, humming a strangely familiar tune. He was carrying an enormous glass snow globe... with my Gaz in it. She was wearing an astronaut suit and looking almost bored as she sat down on the broken-off head of what I assumed was once a snowman anchored inside the globe with her. GIR dropped the globe right in the middle of the roof, shaking up all the artificial snow inside it. Gaz, however, didn't move a muscle.
In fact, she didn't stand up when she saw me; indeed, she didn't even seem to notice I was there. I tried to talk, and for once in my talkative life, I couldn't. I didn't know what to say. My heart, which took a quantum leap at the sight of her beautifully pale face, sank back down into my stomach. Not wanting to lose hope at a pivotal moment like this, I told myself that she just couldn't see me, and left it at that.
I mentally kicked myself. Why was I being so selfish again? I should have been elated that she wasn't hurt. My first instinct was to run over and check up on her, but before I knew what I really wanted to do, Zim cleared his throat and piped up again.
"Now, Dib, at least you will have an audience to behold your tortured screams of AGONY!"
With that, the Irken leaped into the air and struck a little pose. Blurred diagonal lines and operatic male choir music overwhelmed my senses as Zim summoned forth powerful cybernetic limbs to his frail body.
Before I knew it my four-foot tall archenemy was clad in a robotic suit of doom, complete with concussion missiles, war paint and evil giant squids as hands. He now stood about a hulking eight feet in the air.
Lesson: don't mess with an insecure, mentally unstable short guy.
During his period of inevitable psychotic laughter, I made a quick mental inventory search for something I could throw at Zim. I had a cut-out tabloid picture of the Loch Ness Monster, a 7-stick pack of chewing gum and my busted wrist communicator scattered around in my pockets. Damn. No muffins.
I rolled over just in time to dodge a fully-charged laser cannon. Thankfully I landed on my good leg. A familiar voice called out weakly from behind me.
"Distract him, HUMAN! I'll divert all power to my weapons systems!"
My face beamed. After the crash I doubted that Tak's ship would ever be working again- after all, she built it herself out of scrap metal from planet Dirt. I assumed that Zim didn't hear her voice, because he charged towards me recklessly inside his robot suit.
I quivered at the sight of the giant squids, but bravely stood up to the menacing green bully, picking up a fallen piece of the ship's metal from the rooftop and discus-throwing it right at the vulnerable heart of Zim's mech, where the alien himself was perched.
Zim cringed, causing his robot to lose balance in mid-run. I ducked down, and felt him trip over me almost instantly. I turned around to see him land in a heap right in front of Tak's ship.
I must have hit him right in the squeedly skooch.
Before I could get myself up from the floor, Tak's ship had blown away the right arm of Zim's robot, and was using its claws to maneuver itself, skillfully dodging the deadly squid tentacles on Zim's left arm.
While the two battled on the building's edge, my head spun at everything that was going on. I could hear attack choppers in the distance, no doubt combating the locust-creature- after all, it wasn't half as cute as Pipi the Hamster. Larger transport helicopters with huge speakers were ordering the city to be evacuated. I saw the mutated beast extend one long arm, seize a chopper and drop bare human skeletons seconds later, all metal and flesh within consumed by the rabid mutant insects. Air force jets whizzed overhead to take the place of the fallen copters, firing waves of missiles at it unsuccessfully. I turned my head back to the snow globe. GIR was rolling around on top of it, screaming things about mashed potatoes that I can't bring myself to remember. But Gaz... Why was she still just sitting there?
Robo-Zim and Tak's ship were still going at it. I limped my way over to Zim with whatever willpower I had left, unsure of what I could do to help my badly damaged ship out.
"We meet again, Zim! When I bring back your nearly lifeless body to my Tallest, you shall suffer! SUFFER in ways that have not been suffered through... until, uh... you suffer in those aforementioned ways!"
"TAK!!! Do not hoard any more of my precious time, you... You wicked hoarder of time, you!"
Sounds like a typical Irken conversation, doesn't it?
In frustration, Zim broke free of Tak's ship's binding tentacles and leaped into the air. Tak's ship fired fiercely at him, but Zim landed right in front of it with a huge stomp and a burst of electricity, emitting a paralyzing shockwave that knocked it right off of the rooftop and knocked me off of my good leg and onto my back. Just as the ship came sputtering back towards Zim, he launched a missile at it, sending my only ally careening towards a nearby skyscraper.
I resisted the urge to scream "NOOO!!!" and bit my bottom lip, despair finally sinking into my consciousness. Zim closed the gap between us, and I pulled myself up to face him, knees shaking and all. He kicked me down as if I was a rag doll, and anchored me to the rooftop with his other robotic leg. I tried to catch my breath, but I couldn't see any reason to. The pain was too unbearable. Finally, Zim raised his remaining squid-arm to suck God-knows-what out of me with its suction cups. I winced.
"YEEESSS!!! This will be TOO easy!" Zim said. He stopped to pause for a second. He repeated those last two words to himself again, his blood-red eyes with a hint of suspicion in them.
"Dib..."
"What?"
"Tell me, my humongous-headed worm-baby friend, what do you have up your sleeve this time?"
"Nothing."
"NONSENSE! You're lying!"
Oh, come on. This was just stupid. I dared to look him directly in the eye. Not like I could focus on his ugly visage without my glasses anyway. My defiant frown seemed to quell his fury.
I could tell he was a little surprised how easily this had come- Zim had been looking forward to ending my life for years, even more so since the rubber piggy space-time object replacement incident. Again, from years of hateful knowing, I read the obvious twitch in his eye as a sign that he had reluctantly accepted that being torn apart by tentacles was a just end for me, his mortal enemy.
This was the inevitable doom I was fearing. Flames everywhere and a wild- eyed maniac hovering above me. I was still afraid. But at least this time I knew why. Please, I prayed to whatever Paranormal Science Gods were up there, please let me speak to Gaz one last time.
My nemesis must have read my mind as easily as I read his.
"Humph! I only wish I could have enjoyed it more. I had a Megadoomer 2 in storage somewhere... Aw, well. It's a shame you have to die so easily." Zim snorted, cocking his squid tentacle thing like a shotgun in a Hollywood movie. "Any last words, Dib-monkey?"
With this Zim withdrew his foot from my chest to give me some breathing and speaking room. But I wasn't looking at him.
Gaz discreetly drew her eyes up from the white Styrofoam-covered floor of the snow globe to hear me out. GIR had his aqua-colored eyes stuck onto the glass, hoping to catch my sister's attention with his mindless ranting.
I was ready. Ready to say what I've been needing to say all along. I opened my mouth to speak, not knowing for sure what was going to burst out of it.
Words were no weapons. Words wouldn't stop him from doing what he was going to do. But words could make everything seem right for once, even if it was too late for me.
The wind blew through my scythe-esque hair until Tak's ship raised the windshield-thingy. I breathed a sigh of relief. My hands, however, were firmly gripped on the joystick that steered the spacecraft. It was too early to get comfortable. Comfort. I winced at the thought of that word, as if it was a feeling I would never experience again.
It wasn't the whole rescuing my sister thing that shocked me the most. I had never felt this emotional over losing someone. Thinking of her lovingly like this was a far, far cry from what I had felt towards her a few days ago- anger and lifelong resentment. How did things change so quickly?
Dammit, why couldn't I stick to what I was doing?
My desire for attention and recognition as the fifteen year-old who brought down the alien had all but faded ever since that night at the bottom of the stairs.
I shuddered, keeping my twitching eyes focused on the horizon. Whatever was going on inside me back in the shadows of my kitchen, I didn't need it. Especially not right now.
Out of the mist I could see, even with my naked eyes, the silhouette of the ferocious beast that was ravaging the city. It was... for lack of any other word, huge. A swarming mass of oozing syrup and restless insects, and what looked from the outside like a reptilian creature squirming at its core.
Great. Locustzilla.
Well, at least I don't have to holler at the top of my lungs to try and convince everyone that he EXISTS.
Further examination showed that in the outer-middle of the creature's torso there was a strange screen-like device, like a big-screen television. Zim's face flickered on and off of the screen- the video feed was messed up. God, that alien sickens me. Ripping off monster ideas from the Telletubbies.
Taking my eyes off of the beast I breathed in deeply, noticing with anxiety the darkness expanding progressively in the morning sky. As I drew nearer and nearer to the beast I found myself echoing the words in the back of my mind...
"Lure in the Dib-monkey..."
I was falling into a trap. And I was doing it practically voluntarily.
Amid the sound of my humming engine, the deafening buzz of the locusts and the screams of the fleeing people below, I discerned his voice booming from a nearby rooftop. Uncontrollable laughter, aware of nothing but itself and its sadistic pleasures. He was daring me to retaliate. Tak's ship was warning not to get to close to the monster. I took no heed of its ranting.
Circling around past the locust-thing, I swerved the ship to slightly above the building to get a better view of whatever it was Zim was doing. The laughter stopped.
"CURSE YOU, inferior Earth projector! The future slaves must WITNESS their master's evil grin! WHY must you disrupt their grin-witnessing?"
He was precariously throttling a digital video camera on a tripod. The fool's own video equipment must have gotten fried when his base exploded.
Zim's frustrated ego allowed me a slight window of opportunity to sneak up on him. I was already picturing my moment of victory, twiddling my thumbs around the laser trigger-button thingy. All I needed was one clean shot...
"THWACK!"
My own Greatest Person That Ever Lived Award had been slammed right into my face. The locust-beast had knocked me out of my flight. I heard one of the thrusters snap off of my fragile craft. Fire erupted in the cockpit soon after I realized I was headed for a long fall. Thinking quickly, I pushed forward a toggle that shot out the ship's robotic claws to either side, steering as close as I could to the little green boy thirty feet below me. He held his ground like a dumb little soldier, a look of mingled surprise and uncertainty in his red eyes.
At the last second I pulled up, aiming to mow over the alien, and hopefully use him as a nice lice-retardant landing cushion. Instead Zim ducked his head. He got lucky, I thought, bracing myself for impact.
My life flashed before my eyes. Nothing I wasn't used to.
Offering Tak a piece of meat as we sat on a picket fence...
Watching Zim eating waffles in his kitchen from my computer screen... It still baffles me how he does that...
Scrubbing the shadow pig-thingy overlord's toilet...
That woke me up. I picked my dazed self up from the rooftop quickly, noting that this was the first time in years I've been knocked out twice in one day. I never found out how long I was out, but it couldn't have been for longer than a few seconds, because the first thing I saw upon waking was Zim's shadow flickering as I stood up, effectively blocking the light beaming from the burning engine of my ship. The nearly-veiled sun opposite my side of the building illuminated his shadowy presence before my blurry eyes. He was turning around to face me.
I heard the alien sneering at my face from his little camera perch a few meters away. Ignoring my aching limb, I spread my legs into a fighter stance, putting on my meanest cowboy face as if this was the showdown of the century.
"All right, Zim! Where's my sister?" I said, my voice rising to a surprisingly high pitch as my trembling mouth blurted out the words.
"Oh, and, um... Deal with the huge monster, too." I added as an afterthought, my thumbs jerked towards the direction of the locust-beast, which was apparently taking a bite out of a huge Mac Meaties sign.
I didn't need to see it. Years of hatred taught me that Zim's retaliating gaze was so wicked it seemed to pierce my flesh. "Ah... Dib. I was expecting you." He needlessly knocked over the camera he was toying with and began twiddling his gloved fingers.
I wasn't going to be intimidated by this clown. "WHERE IS SHE?"
The subtle sound of bird droppings falling onto my trench coat permeated the silence following my exasperated scream. At least nobody was here to laugh at it this time.
Zim just raised an eyebrow, closed his eyes and shook his head, sighing mockingly.
"Dib, Dib, Dib... Can you not see I am busy doing... doing really HORRIBLE things to people?"
"I'm SERIOUS, ZIM!!!"
Sweat poured down my face as the heat from the smoldering ship warmed my backside. I dared a brief look backwards and realized that I had crashed the ship pretty close to the building's edge. I was expecting a trap to enrapture me at any moment, but I didn't flinch at all. As far as I was concerned, I was saving the world, and that always gives me strength.
"Fine, fine," he murmured, shrugging his shoulders while rolling his eyes. It was clear he had rehearsed this little charade and could barely contain his giddy fantasies of whatever form of pain he was preparing to inflict upon me.
"GIR!!! Bring forth the Dib-monkey's sister!"
A small ice cream stand in the corner of the rooftop that I only seemed to notice at the mention of those words exploded as a familiar SIR unit burst out of it giggling, covered in rocky road and cookie dough.
"YAY! We all gonna have a naked burrito campfire dance!"
As GIR leaped off the building to bring up my sister, my stomach churned. My already-wide eyes widened even more in horror as a vision of a tied up, crying, horse-whipped Gaz strewn about on the floor of a tiny portable jail cell entered my mind.
Nah. Just those nightmarish hallucinations again that Miss Bitters calls "the real world".
Instead I saw the explosive little android fly up the side of the building, humming a strangely familiar tune. He was carrying an enormous glass snow globe... with my Gaz in it. She was wearing an astronaut suit and looking almost bored as she sat down on the broken-off head of what I assumed was once a snowman anchored inside the globe with her. GIR dropped the globe right in the middle of the roof, shaking up all the artificial snow inside it. Gaz, however, didn't move a muscle.
In fact, she didn't stand up when she saw me; indeed, she didn't even seem to notice I was there. I tried to talk, and for once in my talkative life, I couldn't. I didn't know what to say. My heart, which took a quantum leap at the sight of her beautifully pale face, sank back down into my stomach. Not wanting to lose hope at a pivotal moment like this, I told myself that she just couldn't see me, and left it at that.
I mentally kicked myself. Why was I being so selfish again? I should have been elated that she wasn't hurt. My first instinct was to run over and check up on her, but before I knew what I really wanted to do, Zim cleared his throat and piped up again.
"Now, Dib, at least you will have an audience to behold your tortured screams of AGONY!"
With that, the Irken leaped into the air and struck a little pose. Blurred diagonal lines and operatic male choir music overwhelmed my senses as Zim summoned forth powerful cybernetic limbs to his frail body.
Before I knew it my four-foot tall archenemy was clad in a robotic suit of doom, complete with concussion missiles, war paint and evil giant squids as hands. He now stood about a hulking eight feet in the air.
Lesson: don't mess with an insecure, mentally unstable short guy.
During his period of inevitable psychotic laughter, I made a quick mental inventory search for something I could throw at Zim. I had a cut-out tabloid picture of the Loch Ness Monster, a 7-stick pack of chewing gum and my busted wrist communicator scattered around in my pockets. Damn. No muffins.
I rolled over just in time to dodge a fully-charged laser cannon. Thankfully I landed on my good leg. A familiar voice called out weakly from behind me.
"Distract him, HUMAN! I'll divert all power to my weapons systems!"
My face beamed. After the crash I doubted that Tak's ship would ever be working again- after all, she built it herself out of scrap metal from planet Dirt. I assumed that Zim didn't hear her voice, because he charged towards me recklessly inside his robot suit.
I quivered at the sight of the giant squids, but bravely stood up to the menacing green bully, picking up a fallen piece of the ship's metal from the rooftop and discus-throwing it right at the vulnerable heart of Zim's mech, where the alien himself was perched.
Zim cringed, causing his robot to lose balance in mid-run. I ducked down, and felt him trip over me almost instantly. I turned around to see him land in a heap right in front of Tak's ship.
I must have hit him right in the squeedly skooch.
Before I could get myself up from the floor, Tak's ship had blown away the right arm of Zim's robot, and was using its claws to maneuver itself, skillfully dodging the deadly squid tentacles on Zim's left arm.
While the two battled on the building's edge, my head spun at everything that was going on. I could hear attack choppers in the distance, no doubt combating the locust-creature- after all, it wasn't half as cute as Pipi the Hamster. Larger transport helicopters with huge speakers were ordering the city to be evacuated. I saw the mutated beast extend one long arm, seize a chopper and drop bare human skeletons seconds later, all metal and flesh within consumed by the rabid mutant insects. Air force jets whizzed overhead to take the place of the fallen copters, firing waves of missiles at it unsuccessfully. I turned my head back to the snow globe. GIR was rolling around on top of it, screaming things about mashed potatoes that I can't bring myself to remember. But Gaz... Why was she still just sitting there?
Robo-Zim and Tak's ship were still going at it. I limped my way over to Zim with whatever willpower I had left, unsure of what I could do to help my badly damaged ship out.
"We meet again, Zim! When I bring back your nearly lifeless body to my Tallest, you shall suffer! SUFFER in ways that have not been suffered through... until, uh... you suffer in those aforementioned ways!"
"TAK!!! Do not hoard any more of my precious time, you... You wicked hoarder of time, you!"
Sounds like a typical Irken conversation, doesn't it?
In frustration, Zim broke free of Tak's ship's binding tentacles and leaped into the air. Tak's ship fired fiercely at him, but Zim landed right in front of it with a huge stomp and a burst of electricity, emitting a paralyzing shockwave that knocked it right off of the rooftop and knocked me off of my good leg and onto my back. Just as the ship came sputtering back towards Zim, he launched a missile at it, sending my only ally careening towards a nearby skyscraper.
I resisted the urge to scream "NOOO!!!" and bit my bottom lip, despair finally sinking into my consciousness. Zim closed the gap between us, and I pulled myself up to face him, knees shaking and all. He kicked me down as if I was a rag doll, and anchored me to the rooftop with his other robotic leg. I tried to catch my breath, but I couldn't see any reason to. The pain was too unbearable. Finally, Zim raised his remaining squid-arm to suck God-knows-what out of me with its suction cups. I winced.
"YEEESSS!!! This will be TOO easy!" Zim said. He stopped to pause for a second. He repeated those last two words to himself again, his blood-red eyes with a hint of suspicion in them.
"Dib..."
"What?"
"Tell me, my humongous-headed worm-baby friend, what do you have up your sleeve this time?"
"Nothing."
"NONSENSE! You're lying!"
Oh, come on. This was just stupid. I dared to look him directly in the eye. Not like I could focus on his ugly visage without my glasses anyway. My defiant frown seemed to quell his fury.
I could tell he was a little surprised how easily this had come- Zim had been looking forward to ending my life for years, even more so since the rubber piggy space-time object replacement incident. Again, from years of hateful knowing, I read the obvious twitch in his eye as a sign that he had reluctantly accepted that being torn apart by tentacles was a just end for me, his mortal enemy.
This was the inevitable doom I was fearing. Flames everywhere and a wild- eyed maniac hovering above me. I was still afraid. But at least this time I knew why. Please, I prayed to whatever Paranormal Science Gods were up there, please let me speak to Gaz one last time.
My nemesis must have read my mind as easily as I read his.
"Humph! I only wish I could have enjoyed it more. I had a Megadoomer 2 in storage somewhere... Aw, well. It's a shame you have to die so easily." Zim snorted, cocking his squid tentacle thing like a shotgun in a Hollywood movie. "Any last words, Dib-monkey?"
With this Zim withdrew his foot from my chest to give me some breathing and speaking room. But I wasn't looking at him.
Gaz discreetly drew her eyes up from the white Styrofoam-covered floor of the snow globe to hear me out. GIR had his aqua-colored eyes stuck onto the glass, hoping to catch my sister's attention with his mindless ranting.
I was ready. Ready to say what I've been needing to say all along. I opened my mouth to speak, not knowing for sure what was going to burst out of it.
Words were no weapons. Words wouldn't stop him from doing what he was going to do. But words could make everything seem right for once, even if it was too late for me.