No Small Bills Page 5

  “The dragonflies? Really? Those pretty little bugs with the glossy wings? Why, they’re bad here?”

  “Oh, very.” He shuddered. Shuddered! A T-rex or Allosaurus or whatever the hell he was, one of the baddest creatures ever, and he was shuddering like a little girly-man over the mention of some dragonflies. Next he’d start shrieking and run off in tears.

  “Right, I’ll keep an eye out for ’em. Thanks.”

  “Certainly, happy to help. Ooh, is that a misticulia beautifica? It is!” I left it squealing with delight over some little yellow flower and started walking. I had no idea where, but anywhere away from Little Miss Sunshine the Thunder Lizard was a good start.

  I walked for a while. This place was huge! I mean, everything in it was enormous—I know it was a whole world and those are big, I’m not an idiot no matter what my high school guidance counselor claimed. I was pushing past ferns taller than most apartment buildings, sidestepping spiders the size of compact cars, and watching out for skyscraper-sized dinos thundering across the plains. It was like SuperSize Me Land, and I was the outsider, the tiny little duckman that didn’t belong. If this was some children’s fable I wasn’t sure I wanted to see how it ended.

  I found a nice flat, open plain, no vegetation taller than my waist, with a few small boulders scattered around to break the monotony, and clambered up onto one of them. Ah! It felt good to take the weight off my poor bruised feet for a minute, and from here I could see anything coming a mile away. I leaned back and took a deep breath—

  —and yelped as something socked me in the head.

  “Hey!” I spun around but there wasn’t anybody there and I almost fell off the rock in the process. Checked the other side but still nothing. What the hell? After a second I lay back again—

  —and something banged my temple again.

  “Knock it off!” I shouted, leaping to my feet. The coast was clear in all directions, but then a shadow flickered past and I glanced up—

  —and dove off the boulder to cower behind it.

  Okay, for the record? When a big-ass dinosaur—even a flower-sniffing sissy one—tells you to watch out for dragonflies? You should listen. Because that’s exactly what was hovering just above my head right now. A dragonfly. Just as pretty as I remember them, too, with iridescent wings and a long slender body and big glittering faceted eyes.

  Only this one? Had a wingspan like a plane. And not a tiny cropduster, either. No, we’re talking 747 here. The thing had to be at least twenty feet long! Its eyes were bigger than my head!

  And, as I stared up at it, my bill hanging open, it spat a basketball-sized hunk of rock at me. Only a quick stagger backward kept the thing from putting my eye out.

  “What’s the big idea?” I yelled, brushing myself off and trying to look like I wasn’t scared of some gaudy giant-sized insect. I don’t think I fooled it. “Why’re you spitting rocks at me? Please tell me those are rocks and not eggs or partially digested food or something else equally gross.”

  It spit another rock but this time I was ready and it missed me completely. “Why not?” it taunted. “What’re you gonna do about it?”

  Oh great. I’d met the rebellious teens of this prehistoric park. And they were giant dragonflies.

  I bent to scoop up two of the rocks it had fired at me, one in each hand, and then straightened. “Oh yeah? Well, two can play at that game!” And I hurled one, then the other at him. They both missed, of course—the dragonfly just darted gracefully back out of range. Then it divebombed me, firing rock after rock after rock. Damn, it must have a lot of room in its mouth!

  Crouching behind the boulder wasn’t working. I grabbed up a few more rocks and threw them up, not really trying to hit him but hoping they’d distract him long enough for me to find better cover.

  Of course, I had selected a nice flat, open plain. Stupid me.

  But I guess it ran out of rocks because after pelting me for a few more minutes it flew away. I swear that sucker was laughing as it took off.

  I kept going until I’d reached a small stand of bushes and plants. I didn’t want it to come back once it’d reloaded. Then I considered my options.

  Okay, this world officially sucked. Giant everything, nasty rock-throwing bugs, wacky hippy dinosaurs—I didn’t want to find out what the spiders and grubs and worms were like. I needed to get the hell out of here, and fast.

  But how? I didn’t have a nifty time-travel device to send me back—where was a snazzy gull-wing car when you needed one?—or any way to signal Mary and Ned. I had my cell phone and I went ahead and checked it but, no surprise, it was out of service. I didn’t have any weapons, or any body armor, nor did I have any food. And spaceship? Right out.

  I leaned against a daisy—at least I think it was a daisy, I couldn’t actually see the flower because it was above my head—to think. A few insects fluttered past me and I waved them away. At least they weren’t super-sized! One of them was a butterfly, all delicate purples and pinks, and it circled my bill twice before drifting away to check out some big green and gold flower a little away from the other blooms. I watched it idly, and something nagged at the back of my head.

  Butterfly. Butterfly. Why did that mean something to me? Something to do with time travel.

  Wait a second! I’d read or heard or seen a movie once about something called the Butterfly Effect—something about how everything was connected and if you went back in time and stepped on a butterfly you’d change the course of history.

  Well, here I was back in time. And there was a butterfly. And this was the temporal raiders’ homeworld, in their past. So if I stepped on that butterfly I might change their history. And maybe if I changed it enough they’d never exist, which means they’d never attack the bus and send me back here. Which means I wouldn’t be here.

  Wa-hoo!

  It was worth a try, anyway. I walked slowly toward that flower, trying not to scare the butterfly off. No worries there—it was glued to the thing, dancing around the lacy little petals. I’m pretty sure I could hear butterflies this one would have been tittering out of sheer happiness.

  “Sorry about this, little guy,” I whispered once I was right up by the flower. “But you’re my ticket out of here. And I’m apparently the only one who can save the universe. So, in a way, your sacrifice will save the universe. That’s not so bad, right?”

  The butterfly circled my face, almost like it understood me. Then it fluttered back down and settled on the flower, alighting gently on one of those delicate petals—

  —and I stomped on it. Hard. With my enormous webbed feet—size 15 triple-wide, thank you very much. Never mind pontoons—put a few support columns on it and one of my shoes could be used as one of those oilrigs you see out in the ocean. It’d probably leak less, too.

  “Noooo!!!” I glanced up to see one of the dinos standing there, tiny arms waving, slack-jawed, eyes wide with shock. “Not the millennium lotus! It only blossoms once an epoch! How could you? You, you—you barbarian, you!”

  Then everything got all hazy. It was like the world around me was on a dry erase board and somebody was swiping at it with a damp cloth—the dino faded a bit, and parts of him disappeared completely. I could see right through him—

  —to the inside of the galactic bus. It’d worked! I’d never scoff at crappy low-budget sci-fi films again!

  The Land of the Lost continued to disappear, and finally I was back on the bus completely. I breathed a sigh of relief. Mary was right next to me, which made me feel even better. Ned and Tall were there too, but you can’t have everything.

  “Hey guys, didya miss me?” I asked. “You won’t believe what just—”

  “Keep down!” Tall yanked me down by the arm as I tried to stand up, which is when I finally realized we were all crouched behind what I can only charitably refer to as a bus seat. “Do you want to get your head blown off?”

  “What?” I looked around, suddenly noticing the loud crackling sounds and the smell of burning dog
hair. “What the hell’s going on here?”

  “I told you already,” Ned snapped behind me, using me as a shield. “We’re under attack!”

  “By the temporal raiders, I know. But I already dealt with that. See, I—”

  “The what?” Mary frowned at me, her eyes roaming my impressive forehead—I think she was checking if I’d cracked my noggin, actually. “No, the dinotropic aesthetic elite. Extremely dangerous, particularly to anyone of an avian persuasion. You see, they believe that—”

  Just then something crashed through the side of the bus only a few feet ahead of us. It was a spaceship, exactly the kind you imagine when you have nightmares about an alien attack—narrow and sleek and needle-nosed. Okay, maybe the kind you imagine after playing a marathon of Space Invader. It was also really pretty, like one of those high-end exotic sports cars rich men buy to forget about their expanding waistlines and receding hairlines. It had a glassy bubble across the top, tinted dark, and that somehow melted back into the body, exposing a small but neatly arranged cockpit—and the pilot within.

  It saw me the same time I saw it, and we were close enough that I could see its eyes widen.

  “It’s him!” The space invader squawked. “It’s him! The Destroyer of Beauty! The Millennium Lotus Murderer! He Who Hates All Things Lovely! He’s here!”

  I stared back. The guy shouting all this looked exactly like those big purple dinosaurs I’d seen in the Land of the Lost, not two minutes and millions of years before—at least if one of those things was shrunk down to the size of a kindergartner, except for his arms which were now proportionate to the rest, and outfitted in a really snazzy silvery jumpsuit-spacesuit thing. Those teeth were still mighty impressive, though.

  “Oh, come on!” I shouted back. “You’ve got to be kidding me! It was one lousy flower! And a butterfly!” The dino pulled a nifty-looking ray gun from somewhere and pointed it at me, all while clambering out of his ship. Tall yanked me back just in time, as the ray gun’s beam disintegrated the chair and part of the wall behind me. Then, clearly deciding discretion was the better part of valor, he tossed me over his shoulder and ran for the door, Mary and Ned right behind him.

  “I was aiming for the butterfly!” I hollered as the door opened and we charged through. My last glimpse of the dino was him barreling toward us—and four more just like him appearing at his back.

  Great. I’m never watching another crappy sci-fi film again. All they do is get you in trouble.

  Chapter Eight

  Why I hate taking the bus

  “We’ve got to get off this bus!” Tall shouted as he dragged me down what looked to be another train car. It was almost exactly the same as the last one: crazy-looking furniture, crazy-looking passengers, no way to tell the two apart. And, oh yeah, a bunch of small, smartly dressed purple dino-people shooting at everyone. Well, almost everyone—I noticed what looked like a group of flower people huddled in one corner, petals all a-quiver, and the raiders were leaving them well alone. Swell. Where was that daisy costume Ms. Trey made me wear in first grade when I needed it?

  “We cannot!” Mary replied from a row or two ahead of us. She’d ducked behind what looked like a rock with pipe-cleaner arms and inflatable-raft legs, though it was blubbering so much I think she was at much at risk of drowning as of getting shot. She motioned us over and we huddled beside her, Tall dropping me to the floor in a heap. Ned was nowhere in sight.

  “The bus only makes scheduled stops throughout the galaxy,” she explained in a quieter voice. “That is why we were forced to effect such a violent means of entry. The nearest stop to Earth is two-point-nine-five million light-years away.”

  “And how long does that take without stopping for the lights?” I asked, pulling myself up and dusting myself off. Man, don’t they ever clean those floors? Then again, for all I knew those little flecks were paying customers. Or bits from Mr. Sensitive Boulder. Eew.

  “One hour, Earth-standard time.”

  “One hour?” I shook my head. “My time-sense is all out of whack and my cell phone isn’t working—how long ago did we crash this party?”

  Mary consulted a watch on her wrist—I was amused to see it was a plastic kid’s watch with a picture of Betty Boop on it. Good to know she wasn’t all business all the time. “Twelve minutes.”

  “Twelve minutes? So we’ve got to ride it out for another thirty-eight minutes without getting shot before we can ditch this crazy ride?”

  “Forty-eight,” Tall corrected.

  I glared at him. “Oh great, just add another ten minutes to our death sentence, why don’t you? As if thirty-eight minutes wasn’t tough enough!” Yeah, math isn’t my strong suit. Neither are spelling, grammar, history, geography, science . . . well. Let’s just say my strong suits are more . . . recreational in nature. I rock at Foozball, for example.

  “Isn’t there an emergency cord?” I asked Mary. I barely even noticed how hot she looked, which tells you how scared I was. “Can’t we make an unscheduled stop?”

  She shook her head. “The train is automated, and only the controllers can force it to deviate from its normal schedule.”

  “Great. How do we get in touch with them?”

  She frowned. “There should be an emergency communications device in the front car,” she said finally.

  “The front car. Right.” I glanced out from behind the Weepy Rock. There was still a lot of shooting and screaming going on all around us. “How many cars does this thing have?”

  “Four hundred and twenty-four.”

  “And which one are we in now?”

  “Number four hundred and twenty-one.”

  “So we have four hundred and twenty cars between us and the panic button?”

  “Four hundred and nineteen,” Tall corrected. “The front car itself doesn’t count.”

  “What are you, a retired Mathlete?” I scowled at him. “Well, at least your math skills are coming in handy this time—you just got us one car closer.” He started to say something, stopped, frowned, and shook his head. I have that effect on people a lot. “Okay, so what we waiting for?” I started to pull myself up, using Mr. Sobby Stone for handholds.

  “We cannot traverse that many cars without being seen and destroyed by the DAE,” Mary warned me. She had a weird expression on her face—if I had to guess I’d say it was a mix of shock, terror . . . and admiration. I didn’t see that last one a whole lot, though, so I might have been wrong. It could have been constipation instead. “The distance is too great.”

  “Not if we go someplace they won’t expect us!” Ned slid in beside us. Little beads of purple sweat—at least I hoped it was sweat—stood out all over his face and head, and he mopped them up with a big pink paisley handkerchief while he grinned at us. I can honestly say I was happy to see him, broccoli-hair and all.

  “Where the hell have you been?” I demanded. It’s a time-honored tradition, mostly used by parents—cover worry and relief with irritation.

  “Scouting ahead,” he replied. “I needed to know what we were up against.”

  “And?”

  “And there are over three hundred DAE members on this train, all of them converging on us.” He glanced at me. “What’d you do to piss them off so much?”

  “Stepped on a butterfly. Oh, and a flower. A big flower.” They were all looking at me like I was crazy. Maybe I was. Though if so, I had to give myself props—I had no idea I was this creative. “Never mind. So where can we go?”

  Ned grinned. His teeth were perfect, tiny like a baby’s and a gleaming white. Except for one that had a little ladybug carved into it. I stared at the tiny design and it winked at me. Then he opened his mouth, mercifully hiding the flirtatious bug ornament, and said one word:

  “Outside.”

  “Outside? Outside outside? You mean out in space?” Now I wondered if he was nuts, or if my imagination was just sadistic. Which would explain all those dreams about the IRS showing up in my bedroom, along with my mother and my fourt
h-grade science teacher. “How the hell are we gonna manage that? Wouldn’t we blow up or something?” Tall started to open his mouth, no doubt to correct me again on something. “Not a word out of you, Science Boy,” I warned him, “or I’ll bite your nose off. I’ll do it, too!” That shut him up, anyway. Not that I’d really bite his nose off. Can you imagine how disgusting that would taste? Yuck!

  Mary was considering Ned’s suggestion, which told me either it wasn’t as crazy as it sounded or we were in even worse danger than I’d thought. “The shields extend far enough to protect us?” she asked.

  “Seventy-five centimeters, all the way around,” Ned confirmed. “It’ll be a tight squeeze but we should be able to manage it. And they won’t think to look for us out there.”

  I was trying to do the math in my head and failing horribly. “Alright, Mr. Wizard,” I turned to Tall, “go ahead and impress me. Seventy-five centimeters is how much to us normal joes?”

  “Twenty-nine-point-five inches.” He took the opportunity to smirk at me, of course. “That’s just under two-and-a-half feet.”

  “Yeah, that part I got. So we’ve got two-and-a-half feet of clearance on the roof?” Ned nodded. “And what happens if we go beyond that?”

  “Any part that extends past the shields will be instantly exposed to the full rigors of outer space,” Mary answered. “Sub-zero temperatures, explosive decompression . . .”

  “Don’t worry about it, though,” Ned assured me. “This train’s moving at ridiculous speeds and the shields are all that keeps us from feeling the velocity, so if you do stick your bill out past the shields it’ll be ripped away long before it freezes or blows up!” He slapped me on the back.

  “Great. Thanks. And is there anything to hold on to out there, or are we supposed to slide our way down?”

  “Already taken care of that part,” Ned assured me. “Come here.” He pulled out one of his weird little vegetable gadgets—this one looked like a wilted piece of celery with circuits in it and a big red clown nose at the bottom—and tapped me with it. “Lift your right foot,” he ordered.