No Small Bills Page 6

  I did, or tried to. It didn’t want to come off the floor! It was like I was glued there. I finally did manage to raise it about an inch before it got sucked back down again.

  “I’ve magnetized your body,” Ned explained. “We’ll stick to the hull, no problem. And the shields hold in air as well as heat, so we’ll be able to breath just fine, too.”

  “Nice!” I gave him a friendly pat on the back. “Hey, this just might work! Okay, where’s the sunroof? How do we get up there?” Mary and Ned both started to answer, when a sudden flurry of ray gun blasts turned Weepy the Pet Rock into rubble—and blasted a hole through the wall behind him as well. “Never mind.”

  “Everybody out!” Ned tapped Mary and Tall with the clown-celery wand, then himself, and led the way. “Come on!” Mary was right behind him and I quickly followed her, leaving Tall to bring up the rear again. What am I, stupid?

  The dinos were everywhere, shooting everything in sight, but fortunately all the debris from the Teary-eyed Stalagmite made it hard to see anything. Then one of them shot one of the flower-guys by mistake, and they all huddled around sobbing while two of them pulled out what looked like Ceran Wrap and tried to reattach the leaves they’d just shot off. That gave us the distraction we needed, and we beat a hasty retreat for the new side door—if by “hasty” you mean “moving like we’re underwater because we could barely lift our feet from the floor.” We got there without getting shot, anyway, and without anyone shouting, “Hey, there they go!” which already made this different from most of my nights drinking with the guys.

  Ned slipped out through the hole and started climbing up the side, Spider-Man style. Mary was right behind him, and I followed her as closely as I could without getting slapped. Tall was all but breathing down my neck. It was actually pretty easy, thanks to my hands and feet sticking to the surface, and in seconds we were all crouched on the roof.

  “Right,” Ned called over his shoulder. “Let’s go!” And we set off. It only took us a minute to get to the end of the car, and fortunately the next one butted up against it—there was a thin seam marking the break and that was it. I did have a moment of panic while climbing across that seam, with visions of a thousand train-chase action sequences dancing in my head, but nobody showed up to uncouple the cars and laugh maniacally. Must have been the wrong movie. Then I was safely onto the next car.

  One down, four hundred and twenty to go. Or four hundred and nineteen. Whatever.

  Chapter Nine

  Can you get top-forty on this thing?

  “. . . his name is my name, too, and whenever we go out, the people always shout—”

  “Will you shut the hell up?!”

  “Oh, come on! I was just getting to the good part! You can join in—I don’t mind.”

  “This is not summer camp, and we are not ten years old!”

  “Did something horrible happen to you at summer camp when you were ten years old? Because you’re getting awfully upset about one little song.”

  “It’s not one little song! It’s all the little songs! It’s the teapot song and the dreidel song and the cat that never came back song and the man on the MTA song—”

  “I never got that one, really.” I stopped for a second to scratch my head, but started moving again before Tall could get within swatting range. I’d already learned my lesson. “He’s stuck on this train, right? Because he doesn’t have enough money to pay the exit fare? And his wife hands him his lunch every morning as the train goes past? Why doesn’t she include a nickel or whatever it was so he get off the damned train? Does she secretly hate him, and enjoy seeing him trapped in there? And wouldn’t the MTA workers eventually kick him off for riding around and around on one lousy fare?”

  Tall didn’t respond for a second. Not a word. Not even that jaw-grinding he’d been making for the past half hour or more—I was afraid to see the state of his molars when we finally reached our destination. He’d be lucky to manage gumming Jell-O at this rate. But even that sound stopped. Then he spoke, finally.

  “I hate you,” he said softly. “I really, really hate you.”

  “Aw, don’t be like that,” I told him. “I’m just trying to keep us all entertained and distracted while we make this fun-filled trek across a speeding train hurtling through outer space. I bet you forgot all about the risk of explosive decompression while I was singing, didn’t you?” A faint gurgling sound and some more grinding were my only answer.

  “Hey Ned,” I called ahead, “what car are we on now?”

  “Four hundred and twenty,” he shouted back. “Only three left and we’re at the head car!”

  “Nice!” I glanced back at Tall. “See? Doesn’t it feel like we only just started crawling?” He glared at me.

  “The DAE have been remarkably quiet these past few cars,” Mary pointed out. “We must be especially careful. They may have realized we are no longer within the bus proper.”

  I knew what she meant. For the first hundred or so cars we could hear those crazy little dinos running around shooting at everything—more than once their wild shots pierced the bus roof and we had a peek at the chaos within as we crawled quietly past. We’d also seen plenty of things—and people—get shoved or kicked or shot out the sides. Most of them hit the shields and bounced back in. Some were too big or too heavy or simply going too fast, and slid right through the shields. They were whipped away before I could even really register their shapes. It was like riding in a really quiet car with a really smooth ride going really fast—you completely forgot you were doing two hundred-plus miles an hour until you saw some idiot hitchhiker on the side of the road and they blurred by even before your brain told you they were there. I was trying really hard not to think about just how fast we were going, or what would happen to us if we stuck our heads up too high, which was why I’d started singing. It’d helped calm me down. And hey, it really had distracted Tall. Whether he wanted to admit it or not.

  But after a while the shooting had lessened, and recently we hadn’t heard any shooting at all. Maybe the dinos had gotten bored, decided I must have jumped or been vaporized by a stray ray gun blast, and gone home. But I doubted it. They still seemed really pissed off about that stupid flower.

  “So what do we do?” I asked.

  “We keep moving,” Mary replied. “There is little else we can do. Just stay alert.”

  No problem there—the crawl hadn’t been hard, though it was tedious and my neck muscles were straining from holding my head above the hull but below the shields. I wasn’t likely to lie down and take a nap just now.

  Zap! Pow!

  “What the hell—?” I shouted, glancing back over my shoulder as Tall cursed and fumbled for his gun. Two streams of colored light or plasma or silly string or whatever the hell they were had just gone past us. And behind Tall I could see the reason why. “Two dinos! They’ve found us!”

  The cold-blooded little bastards—that’s a fact, not just an insult, at least not the cold-blooded part—must have found or cut a hole in the last car we’d passed, and they’d pulled themselves out and onto the roof. Now they were laying on their stomachs, their ray guns held in front of them with both hands, and they were shooting at us.

  Fortunately, though they had evolved a long way from their big T-rex ancestors, they still had some design flaws to work out. Namely, though their arms were now roughly the right size for their bodies, their heads were still several times too big. I can totally relate. But what it meant was that, laying down like that with their arms in front of them, their own snouts kept interfering with their aim. Which was definitely a positive as far as I was concerned.

  Still, they were bound to get lucky sooner or later. And we didn’t exactly have anything to hide behind.

  Ned had apparently realized that too, though. “Follow me!” he shouted back at us. Then he began crawling at an angle, still going forward but also veering off to the left. Mary swerved after him and I was right behind her. The view hadn’t gotten any less appe
aling for my staring at it repeatedly. I was sure Tall was following us too, and I could hear the bang as he fired his gun back at the dinos.

  We cut a spiral path around the train, like a big loose corkscrew, and if I could have reached him I’d have kissed Ned on his little green head. He was a genius! We were magnetized, so our hands and feet—and other parts too, I’d discovered to my discomfort—clung to the hull. The dinos didn’t have that going for them. They cursed and whined and roared as we slid around the train’s side and out of sight, but there was no way they could follow us. Safe!

  At least until, halfway down the car, several more dinos cut a hole in the train floor, stuck their arms through, and began firing wildly in all directions.

  “Back up!” Ned hollered, and we hurriedly curved back out a bit. Now we were on the side of the train, which seemed like a good plan to me—too low for the roof-climbers and too high up for the floor-gunners.

  Too bad the dinos weren’t stupid. And too bad they clearly talked amongst themselves. Holes started appearing all down the car at random intervals and random heights. Some were in the ceiling, some in the floor, and some along the walls. And each hole quickly sprouted one or more arms, all wielding ray guns. Bigger holes even had whole dinos popping up to take shots at us. This had quickly become one of my least favorite duck-references ever—those little tin ducks at a shooting arcade.

  “We need some kind of cover!” Tall bellowed. He took a few more shots before putting his gun away again. It hadn’t helped much.

  “Maybe we should climb back inside,” I suggested, but Mary shook her head.

  “That is what they are hoping,” she explained. “Out here they cannot reach us. Inside they would mob us. We would have no way to escape.”

  “Well, can we find some way to cover those holes?” I asked. “Or some way to force their hands back inside? Something that makes their guns stop working? Anything?”

  Ned paused for a second and scratched his double chin. “There might be a way,” he commented, “but it’s dangerous, for us as well as them.”

  “We’re not exactly danger-free as it is,” I pointed out. “What’s the plan?”

  “Well,” he fiddled with one of his tools, “I can adjust the shields somewhat.”

  “Okay, and what’ll that get us?”

  “I can’t turn them off, but I can reshape them slightly. Focus them all on one side or another—and pull them right up to the hull everywhere else.”

  I thought about that one for a second, well aware that Mary and Ned were waiting patiently and Tall was smirking. “So anything stuck out of the train on those other sides would get ripped right off. Which would mean they could only attack us along one side.”

  “Exactly!”

  “It’s gotta be better than playing Dodgeball with ray guns. I say we try it!” Mary nodded, and so did Tall.

  “Okay,” Ned agreed. “The question is, which side?”

  “Top,” I said right away.

  “Why the top?” Tall asked.

  “Did you get a good look at those guys?” I asked him. “They’re short. Really short. Like four feet or less. And the train’s at least, what, ten feet high? So climbing up that high’s gotta be tough for them. Actually,” I glanced at Ned, “in space up and down don’t matter much, right? I mean, we’re on the side of the train but it feels like what’s beneath us is a floor because it’s below us.”

  “Sure,” Ned agreed. “What about it?”

  “So instead of the top, could you do the upper right corner? You know, curve the shield around a bit so we’re actually at an angle rather than straight up and down?”

  “Not a problem.” Ned grinned. “And that’ll make it even harder for them to hold themselves up to shoot! Brilliant!”

  I don’t know that anyone’s ever called me brilliant before. That was kind of cool. I enjoyed it while I could—I was sure it wouldn’t last.

  Ned didn’t waste any time, either. Mary took the lead and guided us up a little higher than we were while Ned tapped and twisted and even bit first one and then a second tool. “Got it!” he said after a minute of muttering and spitting out little bits. “We’re all set. Don’t stray off this path, whatever you do—it’s only about six feet wide. Everybody ready?” We all nodded. “Here it goes!” He jabbed one of his tools down against the train and it was like somebody took the world off mute.

  Ever open the window of a car when you’re going really fast, and then close it again because the sound of the wind rushing by was deafening? That’s exactly what happened here. There was a tremendous rushing sound, so loud I thought it was going to tear my head off. There were screams, too, and things flying past, but I tried not to notice those. Then the sound suddenly faded again—I could still hear it whooshing by but it wasn’t as close or as loud.

  “Come on,” Ned said. “We’ve only got two cars left.”

  He took the front again and we followed him quietly. I wasn’t in a singing mood anymore. Besides I’d run out of camp songs and would have had to start on the drinking songs next. And those are no fun at all when the nearest alcohol is a couple hundred light-years away.

  Dinos were still blasting through the train’s hull to try shooting at us, but they quickly realized it wasn’t safe to stick their hands out so they contented themselves with glaring at us and trying to zap us as we crawled past. Having a few hundred little purple dinosaur-men all giving you the hairy eyeball isn’t a lot of fun, believe me. It was a good thing we didn’t have to do much more than crawl in a straight line, because just knowing they were all there, and seeing them every time we passed a hole, made it hard to concentrate properly.

  Then something beeped quietly and Ned said the scariest word in the English language:

  “Uh-oh.”

  Actually, is that even English? Or really a word? Is it two words, “uh” and “oh”? Is this why no one ever wants to play me at Scrabble? I thought it was because every time I lean over to see the board clearly my bill knocks all the pieces off.

  Regardless, his muttering made my blood turn cold.

  Though not as cold as it would if I were on the wrong side of the shields, in the sub-zero of outer space.

  Because that would be cold. Really cold. This wasn’t like that. I mean, my blood was still flowing normally, but I had one of those little chills that makes your whole body shiver.

  You know what I mean.

  “What’s wrong?” Mary, Tall, and I all asked at the same time. If we’d had one more we could have been a barbershop quartet of queries and concern.

  “They’ve figured out how we’re staying out here,” Ned muttered. “They’re demagnetizing the hull!” I suddenly felt a static charge wash past me along the train’s surface—and then my hands and feet started drifting loose. “Hang on!”

  “Hang on?” I shouted, scrabbling at the way-too-smooth surface below me. “Hang on to what? There’s nothing here to grip! It wouldn’t have killed them to put a few little decorative bits along this thing, like door moldings and windowsills and flying buttresses?”

  “Just relax!” Ned hollered back.

  “Relax? We’re on an outer-space train speeding along at millions of miles an hour, inches from instant death by decompression and überfrostbite, being shot at by the dinosaur midgets from Crayolaland, and you want me to relax?”

  “Go limp!” Ned corrected. He spread-eagled himself, arms and legs out wide, and let his whole body relax as he floated up off the train’s surface, into the shield—and bumped up against it gently before drifting back down.

  “Oh. Why didn’t you say so?” Limp I could do—I’d had lots of practice at limp. Who knew all those late nights drinking would actually be good for something besides making my credit card company dance for joy?

  I let my body go limp, and struggled not to panic as I wafted up off the train. But it worked—I’d seen before that the shields kept things in as long as there wasn’t too much velocity involved, and with us completely unresis
ting we touched it light as a feather, then our own momentum carried us back to the hull. Of course we still couldn’t grip it, so we just floated there, touching it but not actually secure.

  “Now what?” I yelled up at him.

  “I’m working on remagnetizing the hull,” Ned assured us. His fingers were a blur as he worked on those devices of his. I bet he was great with a remote, and could flip back and forth between several games without missing a beat. I made a mental note to invite him to my next Superbowl party—assuming we lived that long.

  Suddenly a giant hand slammed into my back, flattening me against the train. It was crushing me down onto the flat cool surface, so hard I couldn’t breathe. Lights swam before my eyes.

  “Too . . . much . . .” I heard Mary gasp ahead of me.

  “I . . . know . . .” Ned managed to reply. A second later the pressure eased enough for me to lift my head and gasp for air. “Sorry about that. The initial burst to restore its magnetic charge was a little strong. We’d better hurry before they figure out what I did and erase it again.”

  We clambered after him as quickly as we could, checking our hands and feet every second to make sure they hadn’t started drifting loose again. Halfway down the last car they did exactly that, and again we went limp, bounced, settled back down, and groaned as the new charge slammed us into the train a second time. At least this time we knew enough to take deep breaths first.

  Then we were crossing the seam between that car and the front car. We’d made it!

  There was only one problem. This car was as featureless as all the others we’d passed. And it looked like the dinos hadn’t gotten this far yet, so there weren’t any holes.

  “How do we get inside?” I asked.

  I could see by the panicked look in Ned’s eyes—and the matching stares from Mary and even Tall—that they didn’t have a clue either.