The Chaos (23 page)

Mryss’s jaw dropped. “Lord Jesus. Stay right there,” she said. “I going to call for help.” She dashed out of the kitchen, probably to the land line in the living room. The Horseless Head Men followed her, wittering.

I stared at my arm in horror. The spread of the blemish had slowed a little, but I could still see it creeping along my skin, feel the itch as it spread. I felt the moment when it reached and merged with the one on my elbow.

There was a hissing sound at my feet. I looked down. The kitten was no longer a cute, three-legged ball of fluff. It was now the size of a raccoon. One ear was missing. The rolling calf bristled. It absorbed its tail. “Auntie!”

The links of its delicate collar swelled back into heavy-duty chain. Its body filled out, became spherical, its surface undulating and puffing out until all that was left of its face were red eyes, a damp snout, and that black, gummy mouth, working and growling, sinking back into the body of the skittering thing and reappearing to face me, no matter how I dodged about the kitchen. “Auntie!”

With a clink of its chains, the rolling calf advanced upon me. I backed away. It kept coming. My back hit the kitchen door. The rolling calf kept coming. I reached behind me, turned the knob, opened the door, and edged outside. Spot, if it was Spot,
slammed into the door as I closed it. I heard the door crack. I shrieked. I turned tail and ran for my life, right onto Mryss’s backyard lawn. In the dark and in my panic, I couldn’t make out where I was going. My foot sank ankle-deep into something soft that I prayed was a pile of leaves. A few steps later, my other foot crashed into something else that felt like an open paint can. My toes jammed painfully hard into it, and the metal mouth of it cracked against my ankle. “Ow! Damn it!”

Another crash came from Auntie’s back door, and then the whirring thump of the rolling calf in its spinning stride. Something plopped onto the ground near me. Spot was flinging more of its gooey stuff at me. I shook my foot free of whatever I’d stepped in and ran a few paces more, straight into the chain-link fence between Mryss’s yard and the neighbor’s. I’d never been good at climbing those. I practically sailed over this one, never mind what might have been leafy grape vines entwining it. I jumped down into the other yard. A dog started barking. “Oh, bite me,” I muttered. Perhaps not the best thing to say under the circumstances. Next thing I knew, I was being rushed by a big white poodle, fully groomed and shaved with its fur in those goofy pompons. Full-sized dog, though. With full-sized teeth. It leapt at me. There was nothing I could do. Then a shadow blacker than nighttime leapt between me and the dog. With a yelp, the dog tumbled sideways. And was swallowed up by blackness darker than the night. The rolling calf faced me down.

“Sojourner! Where you?” It was Auntie Mryss.

“Auntie, stay away! Run to the neighbors and hide there!” Crap. Suppose the rolling calf understood me and went after Auntie Mryss? “Go away,” I said to it. “I hate you!”

It growled. It gathered itself and leapt at me. I screamed and threw my hands up in front of my face. So it was my bare hands that took the first impact.

It was like gum. Wet, spit-sticky, nasty gum that had been chewed for so long it was stringy, stretching on and on forever and never breaking. It hit my hands with a warm splat. My hands were too small to hold back the hurtling mass of it. The rest landed on my face and neck. I tried to inhale for a scream, but the gunk was stretched like a membrane between my lips and across my nostrils, and I got no air. I clawed at it with hands so covered in gunk that they were useless mittens. I couldn’t even open my eyes. I couldn’t see or hear, but I could feel. Quick as thought, more of the tarry stuff slipped under my collar and spread down my torso, while the gunk on my hands spread up my arms to meet it. I fell to my knees. Green stars crawled across the universe of blackness behind my eyelids. My ears were ringing. I was suffocating. I clawed and clawed at my face, but couldn’t get the stuff off.

And then my mouth was clear. I sucked in air, coughed as I took in too big a breath. My eyelids could open, although they stuck a little on the first blink, pulling hair-thin taffy strands of the black stuff across my eyes. I blinked them clear, struggled to my feet. The lights were coming on in the house of the yard I was in. They apparently had electricity. “Magellan?” called a man’s voice. “Where are you? Come here, boy!”

The rolling calf was still in front of me. It seemed a little smaller. I backed up. It followed, but it didn’t attack.

“Magellan?”

“Shoo!” I said to the rolling calf. “Nasty, ugly thing.” It whimpered.

The back door of the house opened a crack. A man’s head appeared around it. “Magellan?”

If Magellan was his poodle, he wasn’t ever going to see it again. And if he came outside, that might be the end of him, too. Oh, God. “All right, fine,” I said to the rolling calf,
“is catch you want to play? Come then, nuh?” I was already running around the side of the house, heading for the front. Behind me, I could hear the splotch and whir of the rolling calf in pursuit. I sped down the front driveway of the house. I leapt over an overturned recycling bin that had spilled crushed plastic bottles and cereal boxes into the road. Then I was out onto Dufferin Street, pelting down it as quickly as I could with my blemish-coated legs straining against the seams of my jeans and shortening my stride.

In the dance movies, people can dance their way out of any trouble. If some bad guy’s coming at you, just take him out with a flying roundhouse kick, right? After all, aren’t you a capoeirista along with being able to get buck with the best of them and pick up the tango after watching someone do it for, like, five seconds? Oh, yeah, and let’s just pretend that standing on one foot while you fling one leg up in the air and swing it in a circle doesn’t leave you unbalanced with your crotch open to attack from someone who has the sense to just throw a quick jab at you and get out of the way. If this was a dance movie, I’d have done a flying leap and tumbled over that crumpled motorbike, instead of bashing my shins into it, tripping over it, and scrambling up into a run again. I’d have done a quadruple somersault right over the discarded condoms and broken glass in that alleyway, instead of scurrying through the dreck like a frightened mouse.

But this wasn’t a dance movie. I was tiring, and Spot was gaining on me. I dove under an SUV, sliding on my elbows and thighs on the asphalt to get under it as quickly as I could. Those were going to hurt. At the moment, I wasn’t paying them any mind. I concentrated on not gasping too loudly for breath. Yeah, so this wasn’t a dance movie. But you know what? Being in great fucking shape and flexible with it doesn’t hurt, either. So long as you don’t try the dumb, flashy moves when you should
be throwing down a head butt and a swift kick to the nuts and then running like hell. Spot whirled right past me and kept going till I couldn’t see her anymore. But because this wasn’t a dance movie, I didn’t leap right out from under that SUV the second the bad guy was gone and get on with my life. I stayed under there with tears rolling down my face.

At least, I knew I was crying, but I couldn’t feel the tears tracking down my skin. I lifted my arm to put my hand to my face. My palm was covered with gunk from Spot. The dust from the road was sticking to it. The gunk was covering both my hands, all the way up my wrists and probably farther. I didn’t want to roll my sleeves up to check. Sobbing, I scraped the dirt off one palm as best I could with my other hand. I couldn’t feel where the blemish ended and my skin began. I put my hand to my face to feel the tears. It was like I was wearing vinyl gloves; you know, those thin ones that doctors use? And my face. Oh, God, my face. It was completely covered. I tried to feel my hair. My beautiful hair! It had become lumpy strings of rubber, so heavy that my hair hung down for the first time ever in my life.

The gunk covered my neck. It had slid down underneath the collar of my blouse. I checked out the skin on my chest and my front. I couldn’t tell for sure with my muffled hands, but it looked as though I was entirely covered. I tried plucking the stuff off me, but my skin just lifted with it. I would hurt myself if I kept it up, so I stopped. And the worst of it? I was beginning to think that the stuff that Spot had glopped all over me was the same as the blemishes that had been blossoming on my skin for a couple of months now. Horror filled me, rose up my gullet, as strong in the back of my mouth as the taste of rot. “Oh, no,” I moaned. I started pulling on the skin on my arms, my neck, my chest. I couldn’t help it. All I could think was getitoffgetitoff. I raked my fingers down the side of my face.
“No, no. Oh, God, please.” There wasn’t enough room to move under the SUV. I rolled out from under there. I stood up. About halfway down the block was a bank with a big mirrored window. I headed over there, using parked cars for cover when I could. A little boy walking hand in hand with his mother saw me. He made a face. “Euw. Mum, look!”

“Not right now, Sam.” Sam’s mum was red-eyed and red-nosed, her voice tired. She was struggling one-handed with about six plastic shopping bags. I could see a few liter bottles of water sticking out of one, and a jumbo package of toilet paper out of another. She had yellow roses growing from her shoulders.

“But, Mum!” He pointed at me. “Is that the Incredible Hulk?

His mum started a fit of sneezing. She put the bags down, rummaged around in them, tore into something inside, and pulled out a handful of tissues. She blew into them before she glanced my way. She looked me up and down, shrugged. “Cry me a river,” she said to me. She gestured at the roses. “I’m allergic.”

She sneezed again, picked her bags up, took Sam’s hand, and trudged on. Sam kept staring back at me, even when he practically had to turn his head all the way around to do so. Actually, he might really have turned it all the way around.

I approached the bank window slowly, from the side. Closed my eyes. Went and stood in front of the window. Opened my eyes.

Oh. My. God.

I was gross. I looked like a lumpy asphalt snowman that had outgrown its clothes. My cute pink blouse had smears of Spot on it, and was grimy from all the sweating and rolling around in the dirt that I’d been doing. It was ruined. I’d paid a week’s salary for that blouse! My jeans were torn out at the knees. Lumpy black Spot skin showed through the holes. The jeans had become so
tight that they were cutting into my tummy. My head was just this big, round ball with reddened eyes in it. Spot gunk had filled in the curves of my nose so that only my nostril holes showed. I couldn’t even see my mouth unless I opened it, and then it was just a slit with teeth and a tongue behind it. My hair was all lumpy black strands. My head looked like a badly made Koosh ball. My hands were thick-fingered, slightly sticky mittens. As I turned them over to look at my palms, a piece of broken glass that had stuck to one palm came loose and fell off. My palms were powdery with dust that was clinging to them. My feet, squished into boots that were now a good two sizes too small, felt like someone had put them in a vise and was tightening it.

Every kid who’d ever read a comic knew how this was supposed to go; if you got covered in the black skin, you would be evil and have scary teeth, but you’d have bitchin’ powers, like super strength. And you would be even hotter and sexier than before. You weren’t supposed to end up looking like a five-eight pile of walking rubber doo-doo.

When I cried, the tears were black.

An old lady came around the corner of the bank. She screamed when she saw me. Her hair was turquoise and glowing, upswept into a cage that rose about a foot above her head. Pink and green butterflies fluttered around inside.

“I’m sorry,” I said, taking a step closer to her. “I just need to get all this crap off me.” The giant bird had had to have this stuff burned off. What was I going to do? “Somebody needs to find Spot,” I told her. “Like, the animal control people, or something.”

The old lady backed away as I came closer. “Please don’t hurt me,” she said.

She was whispering, but I could hear her just fine. I could see her clearly, too. “Lady, I’m not going to hurt you.
I’m just a teenager, okay? I mean, a girl. A girl teenager. And I need help. Something attacked me and—”

Something hard thumped onto my chest and fell off. Had Spot come back? “You leave her alone!” cried a girl’s voice. She was black, about my age, wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Her feet weren’t touching the ground. She had come up beside the old lady, and her arm was cocked back to throw another rock. She’d thrown a rock at me!

“Hey! Stop that! You could have hurt me!”

“I said, get away!” She threw another rock. It went wide. The recoil pushed her backward a little. “Don’t have the hang of this yet,” she muttered to herself as she floated back to the old woman’s side. It was a weird float. She was striding, as though she were walking on the air. A guy ran up to join the girl. His ears were little white wings.

“Clarissa, be careful!” He stopped and gaped at me. “God. What is that thing?”

“It jumped out from under that car at me!” the old lady told him.

My blood was pounding so loudly in my ears that I couldn’t hear anything else. I grabbed the old woman by the collar. She gave a little scream. “Don’t tell lies about me! I didn’t do anything like that! I’m not like that!”

The girl yelled, “Go on! Scram!” She threw another rock. It didn’t hit me. The one her friend picked up and pelted me with did, though. Hard, on the shoulder. So I got out of there.

Once more, I wandered the city on foot for hours. But this time I kept to alleyways and hidden places. For a while I’d seriously freaked out. I’d tried clawing the black rind off me. I only ended up gouging my own skin. There were lines of blood on my face, even though the gouges underneath had healed. I began to avoid any kind of reflective surface. I couldn’t stand looking at myself. Suppose this change was permanent? What kind of life would I have? No boy would look twice at me. I wouldn’t be able to take part in the battle next week. I mean, imagine this body in that short skirt? The audience would either guffaw or puke. I probably couldn’t work at the fast-food joint anymore; George, my manager, would never let these hands near the burger patties. And what if this stuff dripped when it got hot, like asphalt in the summer? I was a freak. At school, people would whisper behind my back. I was going to live with my parents forever.