I was supposed to be shadowing my new boss today.
It's hard to do that if she's dead.
I was still in shock over it. My head was hurting less than before, which was good, because it felt like it was melting just a few minutes ago. My eye sockets were still sore, however, and my scalp was smarting where I'd tried to yank off my own ears.
Not my human ears. My cat ones. The cat ears that I apparently now had. I had four ears.
I'm going insane...
That was certainly one possibility. I didn't know how to be sure of that; how does one tell when they're out of their tree? I'd read a lot of psychological horror where a character's delusions seem so real that it's impossible to distinguish reality from fantasy. How was I supposed to know where the transition between the sanity and insanity was? How much of the normal part of this morning had been me being delusional? Everything seemed fine when I'd entered the Magic Kingdom tunnels this morning. I mean, the Animal Kingdom tunnels. Animal Kingdom had tunnels. Didn't it? Didn't it? I... I wasn't sure anymore.
Another was that I was having a nightmare, which was the nicest possibility, because it would mean eventually I'd be back in my bedroom, snuggled in nice, soft bedsheets and hugging my stuffed animals. I was pretty sure you weren't supposed to feel blindingly hot pain in your dreams, though. That was unfortunate. Or, well, for me at least; probably fortunate for my stuffed bulbasaur, Bilbosaur, because surely I would be strangling him in a death grip during a dream like this.
I flinched at the poor word choice, trying not to think of my boss's bulging eyes. Moving on.
Considering how much my head had been hurting recently, this could be one of those sci-fi deals where my brain was making up a bunch of crap to keep it safe from a horrible injury. In which case, was it better to sit here and wait it out, or go along with it? In real life, did hallucinations give you a specific goal to actually help you save your brain, or was that just Star Trek nonsense?
A few leaves from the bush I was hiding in tickled the inside of my new ears. Instinctively, I flicked them, brushing the leaves away. Oh, great. I had instincts for my cat ears, now. That meant my brain was making new neuron pathways that were never meant to exist, and that was something I did not want to think about.
Doing that made brought me back into reality(?) a bit, though, and I became more aware of my senses. My legs were mad at me for pushing myself so hard through the tunnels. I told them to get over it. Branches were poking into my bruised sides where I'd hit the desk earlier, but more uncomfortably, they were prickling at my back where the Big Bad Wolf clawed me.
Oh, crap, right, I might have been wounded. I scooted a branch aside to reach an arm around, wincing when I felt my spine sting, and my fingers came back red. Yep, definitely wounded.
This was my favorite shirt, too.
Priorities.
Well, if I was bleeding, the bush was probably not helping the wound any. That meant I had to get out of the bush. But, I still didn't know if there were any other monsters nearby, and I could still hear the odd noises coming from the Bug's Life theater. Although, now that I thought about it, the noises didn't sound like whirring and clicking anymore. They hadn't since the Big Bad Wolf had turned from a robot into a toon. I still didn't know how to wrap my head around that, but the shift in noises meant that there had been something real(?) about it. Now, it sounded more like the shuffling of actual feet, some sort of insectoid buzzing and fluttering, and the occasional annoyed voice. I did not want to be seen by the voice's owner.
The part of the queue I was hiding on was hidden from view, though, if one was looking from the theater's entrance. The Tree of Life's giant, cement roots made plenty of alcoves and barriers between me and the sounds, so if I was careful, nobody would see me.
I hesitated. I really needed to check on the wound.
Slowly, trying to be as quiet as possible, I pushed a few branches away and slid out of the shrubbery. I probably had dirt stains on my jeans, but that really didn't matter right now. As I moved, my back stung worse. I stifled a hiss of pain and gingerly straightened up, reaching a hand to my back again. Then I froze, the shock fading to be replaced by yet more terror.
There was something sticking out of my spine.
My fingers slid over the lump, repulsion rising as I registered that the invader was soft. It was also sticky with blood, and seemed to bunch up around my lower back, making a disgusting wad of pain. I kept prodding it, which hurt, but I couldn't figure out its shape. Then my brain kicked in, and I remembered that I had a phone.
I immediately felt like slapping myself. How could I have forgotten my phone? I mean, it wasn't like it would have worked in the tunnels; the layers of cement and wiring blocked all signals, and nobody could even call emergency numbers down there. That's why they used their special walkie-talkies to communicate. I would have to get my hands on one.
At the moment, though, I could call the police. I pried the phone out of my pocket with the hand that wasn't bloodstained and flicked the emergency option on the lock screen. 9-1-1. I held the phone to my ear and waited for the ring. And waited. And waited.
The call never went through.
I looked back down at the screen. It said there was no signal. That wasn't right. I was out of the tunnels and there wasn't even a roof over my head at the moment. The signal should have been fine, but it wasn't. It couldn't get through.
What did that mean? Was someone jamming it somehow? I knew that there were some businesses that actually had electronic phone jammers to prevent staff from being on their phones at work. Disney didn't have anything like that, because there were thousands of park guests who actually needed their phones, so it would have to have come from an outside source. That, or the phone tower itself was down.
That was a foreboding thought. How far did this attack reach? Was it just this park, or all of the parks? Was there a band of killers on the highways, too, destroying means of communication and keeping us isolated? That sounded like something out of a movie, but then, I had just been chased by a killer robot. And I had cat ears. Anything was possible.
Heart heavy, I exited the call function and turned on the camera, doing what I'd meant to do in the first place. I used my bloody hand to lift the shreds of my shirt out of the way and took a picture of my back. Then I looked at the picture and froze again. Why couldn't anything ever be simple? Why did everything today have to be a stupid mindscrew?
The lump on my back wasn't a lump. It was a tuft of pink fur protruding from my skin, coming from a rip that had definitely been made by a claw. It looked like the Big Bad Wolf had torn it out of my spine. I grit my teeth and decided to forgo gentle prodding, grabbing the tuft with my fingers and pulling.
Immediately, the pain in my back burned brighter, then lessened, like my spine had been curled in a knot and finally loosened. I kept pulling, the bloody fur unraveling from my lower spine and into the back of my pants-crap, that meant I had a bloodstain on the back of my pants, that was just great. Finally, it was all out, the pain and the fur, and dangling loosely on the ground. I pulled the end of it around and twisted to see.
Just as I thought, it was a gross looking, bloody, pink-striped Cheshire Cat tail. That figured. Why not add more insanity to the list?
A hysterical noise tried to escape my throat. I didn't know if it would be a laugh or a sob, but either way, I couldn't afford to make noise right now. I clapped a hand over my mouth, realized it was the bloody hand, put my phone away and used my clean hand instead. I must have looked like an anime serial killer. Yandere Simulator had nothing on this. I had to choke on another fevered laugh.
I had cat ears and a tail. What was happening to me? Was I making a transformation like the Big Bad Wolf had? The thought brought bile up to the back of my mouth, and I hastily swallowed it back down. I couldn't afford to think about that right now. I didn't know what to do about it, so therefore, there was no point. What should I do, then? Find someone to help, maybe, if anyone was around. Find a walkie-talkie, definitely, because somebody had to be out there. Someone had to be.
The hair on the back of my neck rose, and I felt the fur on my new tail spike up. I was being watched.
When I looked around, though, I saw no one. I was still backed against the edge of the queue, so there was no one behind me. No one was in front of me, either, and all that was to the sides were the giant roots.
The giant roots covered in animals.
The thing about the Tree of Life, if you've never been there, is that the entire thing is made to look like animals have been carved into the cement "wood." There are huge ones towards the top of the tree, like a lion and a giant eagle, so that people walking around the park can see it from further away. In the roots, there were smaller ones, like insects and little rhinos and antelope, so that people in the Bug's Life queue could have stuff to look at.
At the moment, every single carving was looking at me.
All of them. The beetles going up the curve of the root, the giraffe standing in the corner, the crane on the wider face of it. They were twitching, scooting around the rough "bark," peeking around each other to get a look at me. Their eyes were wide in... anger? Fear? I didn't know. They weren't blinking. They weren't looking away.
My mouth opened and closed a couple times, still covered by my hand, and it was all I could do to keep from screaming. But, what was the point? It wasn't like being quiet would make them see me any less. These things could tell whatever was nearby that I was here. I needed to leave. Now.
I rose unsteadily to my feet, swaying a little and almost falling backwards into the bush. One hand started to reach for the cement root to brace against, but I snatched it away and hugged myself instead. In my haste and fear, I didn't think about where I was going, only that I wanted to go away, and my feet stumbled down the path. The carvings' eyes followed me as I went. It wasn't until I'd turned the corner that I realized I was walking towards the theater.
It. Was. Covered. In. Bugs.
Small ones. Big ones. Flying ones, crawling ones, squirming ones. They were slimy and covered in eyes and they chittered and gross gross gross gross-
My arms flapped in panic, like I could shake off the heebie-jeebies coating my skin. It was a scene straight out of A Plague Tale: Innocence, except with insects instead of bubonic rats. They covered every surface of the theater entrance, swarming up around the roots and the sidewalk in a writhing mass.
Some of them looked like the ones from the attraction; I recognized the butterfly wings from the bug-curtain at the start of the show. There were a few face-sized spiders like the ones that dropped from the ceiling. However, many of the bugs looked random, though still cartoonish and brightly colored. Purple beetles and giant flies and orange, fuzzy caterpillars. None of them could hold a candle to the one at the top, though.
It was a spider the size of a trailer. It was greenish and fat, toxic-looking grime dripping from its body. Unlike the other bugs, it didn't have a toon face. It had a very realistic-bile rose in my throat again-face, with four great fangs hanging below its eyes. I didn't recognize it from any Disney film. That could have been because it wasn't in one, or it could have been because I was trying so hard not to puke that I couldn't think of it.
Thankfully, the spider wasn't looking my way. It was concentrating on crawling up the base of the tree, weaving a thick web around the roots as it went. The web wasn't catching any of the other bugs in it; they continued to swarm unhindered around the threads. The spider seemed less focused on catching anything in the web, and more on making it climb higher and higher up the tree. The threads were silvery gray, and almost seemed to pulse, which was definitely not like a normal spider web.
I couldn't even begin to puzzle the purpose of this. I couldn't push my nausea aside enough to think past gross gross gross gross-
"What do you think you're doing?"
This time, I couldn't hold back the scream. It jumped out of my mouth with the exuberance of a child freed from detention and flew away. I spun around and saw a seven foot grasshopper glaring at me. In sharp contrast to the spider, this one was very recognizable and very Pixar, with his large head, round eyes, and deep sneer. It was Hopper, the villain from the Bug's Life movie and the animatronic from the Bug's Life theater.
From this close, I could see the layers of leathery chitin on his face. They creased his scowl deeper, turning it from mere irritation into a death glare. What made for a neat character design in animation and on paper was far more disturbing in real life. Every joint, every limb was coated in insect shell. There were no bolts, wires, or pipes poking out from the seams; he wasn't mechanical. He was really and truly a giant bug. Goosebumps danced up and down my skin, feeling like so many mites determined to make my heebie-jeebies permanent fixtures.
I gaped at him, wondering if my time had come. I'd gotten lucky when the wolf left, but there was no way Hopper would make the same mistake.
He crossed one set of arms and glowered. "Well?" I couldn't reply, the scream stole my voice and now I was as mute as Ariel. "Look, some of us have a job to do, here! We can't all stand and stare at people like little freaks!" He jabbed a finger against my head. The digit felt leathery and scratchy from his exoskeleton, and I jerked away, trying to pull myself together.
"Come on, give her a break." Behind Hopper, an ant stood at about my height, rolling his eyes in exasperation. Like Hopper, his chitin was disturbingly real, though the shiny smoothness made it a bit more tolerable than the semi-translucent leather texture. "Yelling at her isn't going to make this go faster."
The grasshopper shifted his glare towards the ant, and it was a wonder he didn't burst into flames then and there. "I don't give people breaks, Flik." He spoke with that grinding slowness that meant he was trying not to kill someone. "We don't have time for breaks. If this twerp doesn't have a job to do, and doesn't get out of my sight in the next ten seconds, I'm going to give her a job to do, and she is not going to like it."
That finally got me to snap my jaw shut. I was flabbergasted that he wasn't killing me outright, but ten seconds wasn't exactly a lot of time to make my getaway. I didn't give Hopper a chance to make good on his promise, backing up and running back down the path. I didn't stop running until the chittering of bugs was far behind me, though the sound was loud and clear in my imagination.
That was the second time I'd run into monsters here, and a whole lot of them at once, and not a single one had attacked me. Why? Every other park guest nearby was gone, as evidenced by the dropped personal items I kept tripping over. The wolf hadn't hesitated to strangle my boss to death. But, when he saw my ears, he walked away.
They were acting like... like I was one of them.
I slowed to a stop in the open square. The Tree of Life's roots had given way to a small plaza of buildings, and aside from one or two lost items on the ground, there was no sign of life. My back still stung where the wound bled, and the stupid tail was catching on the hem of my pants, bending upwards in an uncomfortable way against my tailbone. It was probably also smearing more blood on the jeans, too. I needed to get cleaned up. I needed to find a walkie-talkie, and I needed to get help.
I really, really wanted to add, "and avoid all freaky living Disney characters," to the list, but given how Hopper, Flik, and the Big Bad Wolf had acted... maybe I didn't necessarily need to. At least, as long as I didn't annoy anyone like Hopper, or get visibly in their way. This could be something I could take advantage of, somehow; a way to limit my movement a little less, or... to get some information without getting killed, maybe.
I still thought of them as the enemy. One killed my boss, and I still didn't know what happened to all the other people in the park. If Flik knew I was human, would he have tried to talk Hopper down, or would he have joined in tearing me to pieces? The Flik from the movie wouldn't hurt someone like that, but this was not the Flik from the movie. Was it?
There were so many questions I wanted to ask. Why were they here? How were they here? Why and how had I mutated so suddenly? What was I?
The toon... things thought I was one of them. I knew I wasn't. But, the wolf... he'd known I wasn't, either, until he saw me change. He'd watched it, and then he'd left.
I still remembered his words; I was terrified to find out what they meant.
"Guess I don't need to get you to join the party. You're already here."