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Peppermint Twist Page 4
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Lucy shrugged. Savage was Mr. Tolberg’s gray tabby, and was anything but savage. He was pretty much the friendliest cat in the whole neighborhood and could always be found napping in the rocker.
After his sister rang the bell again, Don went and peeked into a front window.
“Do you see him?” Lucy asked.
Don didn’t reply.
“Well?”
“Uh. I don’t know. Maybe.”
“What do you mean, maybe? He’s either in there or he isn’t.”
Stepping back, Don said, “See for yourself.”
Groaning, Lucy pushed passed her brother and peered inside. The window offered a perfect view into Mr. Tolberg’s living room. She could clearly see his couch, which faced the window. She could also clearly see the gingerbread man seated on the couch, a newspaper clutched in its mitten-shaped hands, wire-rimmed reading glasses baked into its face.
“Oh, man!”
“I guess he’s home,” Don said. “But I doubt he knows everything.”
Lucy shot him a dirty look. “Funny, Don.”
“What do we do now?”
She thought about it. “Let’s check on Sammy and Kelly Jones.”
Sammy and Kelly Jones were also neighbors--kids a couple years younger than the twins who lived a few houses down the street.
As Don and Lucy turned to leave the porch, they heard a cat’s meow.
“Savage!” Don said. He rushed down the steps and over to some shrubs. “You in there, Savage? Come on out.”
The shrubs rustled as the cat cried again, then it pushed itself free and rubbed against Don’s leg.
Don stood frozen, staring down at the chocolate cat in amazement. A smear of chocolate rubbed against his jeans as the candy cat purred and twisted between the boy’s legs.
“Holy crap,” Lucy said, as she joined her brother. “Is that Savage?”
A funny, squeaky sound escaped Don’s throat, before he cleared it. “I guess so.”
“Why does he look all…waffly?” Lucy crouched down to examine the cat. She held out a hand to let Savage sniff it, which he did after another meow. She touched his rear flank as he resumed circling Don’s legs.
The cat moved somewhat stiffly and after touching it, Lucy knew why. She stood up and said, “He’s a Kit Kat.”
“What?” Don balked.
“Beneath the chocolate, he’s made of a waffle cookie. Probably has some sort of cream beneath that, I bet.”
As if to prove her right, Savage cracked the tip of his tail off against Don’s leg. Don screamed, horrified, which startled the cat, who darted back into the bushes.
Lucy picked up the broken piece of tail. “See? Kit Kat.”
“I want to get out of here.”
She nodded and absently popped the bit of tail into her mouth, chewing and swallowing without even realizing she’d done it.
“You just ate Savage,” Don said, making a disgusted face.
“I…huh? Oh, yeah. I guess I did. Whoops.” She crinkled her nose, then added, “Tasted pretty good though.”
“Let’s just go find Sammy and Kelly.”
Lucy nodded again and they went off to do just that.
Unfortunately, what they discovered was that even Sammy and Kelly had turned into gingerbread men. Well, in this case, gingerbread children.
In fact, every single person they came across had been magically transformed into gingerbread.
It was eerie to say the least.
In the corner store up the street, the cashier was a gingerbread woman, and there were several gingerbread customers scattered throughout, frozen in the act of picking up juice or cereal or chips.
Since everything was so screwy, Don decided to help himself to a can of root beer, which he wedged into his front pocket, promising to pay the store back later.
They passed a gingerbread postal worker, the mailbag baked into its cookie shoulder.
Cars on the street held gingerbread drivers. There had been a few fender benders as a result, but nothing too serious as far as the kids could see.
After a while, they noticed Savage trailing along behind them, his tail miraculously grown back to full length.
They hurried in the direction of their grandmother’s house, trying to remain as calm as possible, but nevertheless freaking out more and more.
16.
“I’m thirsty,” Don said as they neared the park. “Dad is getting heavy. Let’s rest on that bench over there.”
Though she didn’t care for the idea, Lucy knew that she wasn’t the one lugging around the big gingerbread man, and so reluctantly agreed.
Don sat gingerbread dad on the bench and then sat himself beside it, pulling the stolen soda out of his pocket. The moment he popped the can open, the soda exploded from the can in a brown sticky spray and Don jumped up, suitably drenched.
“Guess I shook it too much,” he said, eyeing the can with exasperation.
“YAY AY AY!” A loud voice sang from inside the can.
“What the…” Don peered more closely at it.
Alarmed, Lucy cried, “Don! Watch out!”
Root beer shot out of the can, as if being pushed through a powerful hose aimed directly at Don’s face. Much, much more than the can should have contained came out.
Don screamed, falling back onto the bench as the can fell from his hand, pumping more and more root beer onto the powdered sugar ground.
In addition to the spouting soda, that strange disembodied voice continued to sing from inside the can: “ROUND AND ROUND AND UP AND DOWN! YAY AY AY!”
Soda dripping from his face and hair, Don pulled his feet onto the bench and away from the spreading puddle. Lucy backed up several steps, also wanting away from the can.
The can voice shouted, “DO THE PEPPERMINT TWIST! ONE! TWO! THREE! SPIT!”
Abruptly, the growing puddle began to rise up from the ground, forming the rough shape of a liquid man.
“Oh, crap,” Lucy whispered.
“YAY AY AY!” the soda man replied, whirling and spitting soda at her.
“Double crap!” she yelled.
Like a blur, Savage raced by, yowling over his chocolate shoulder as he headed deeper into the park. Lucy was pretty sure she knew what that yowl meant. It meant, Run, you stupid kids! Run!
“Come on,” she shouted at Don, who was already grabbing gingerbread dad by the waist.
Together, they ran after the cat as the soda man continued attempting to spit soda at them.
“This totally sucks!” Don yelled, struggling to carry his load and keep up with his sister. “That thing is chasing us!”
“Follow Savage!” Lucy shouted back.
The cat was fast, flying up the park’s center walkway, and probably would have disappeared from sight had he not stopped at a row of drinking fountains and leapt atop one, turning to meow urgently at the kids.
“What’s he doing?” Don panted. He was already getting winded.
Savage lapped the inside of the drinking fountain, then glanced up meaningfully at the kids.
“He wants us to drink, I think,” Lucy said, as a stitch in her side made itself known.
“What for?”
“How should I know?”
They reached the drinking fountains and stopped, turning to see how far behind the soda man was. Not far enough, it turned out.
“DO THE PEPPERMINT TWIST!” it sang maniacally as it glided towards them.
Savage meowed loudly, pawing at the fountain’s basin.
“Read the manual!” Don yelled.
Lucy had the manual in her back pocket, but shook her head. “No time! Just drink!”
“This is lame,” Don said, dropping gingerbread dad to the ground and bending his head to a fountain as Lucy did the same. “It’ll never work.”
In unison, they hit the taps and began to drink.
“ONE! TWO! THREE! SPIT!” The soda man cried as it drew closer, spitting a stream of soda at Don.
Yelping in pain
, Don jumped away from his fountain and stared in horror and amazement at the hole in his upper arm where the soda had hit him.
“SPIT!” The monster spit again, this time hitting Don in the chest. Another hole appeared, boring straight through his body to the other side. It was as though the spitted soda was more like a bullet, though there was no blood and the pain was not nearly as excruciating.
“OW!” Don clutched his chest with one hand while raising the other protectively to his face.
Lucy lifted her head from the fountain and did her best to spit water at the soda man. Her spurt hit the thing’s liquid leg and a hole, exactly like Don’s, blossomed there.
The soda man cried out, turning his attention to Lucy and letting loose another stream. She dodged and quickly returned to the fountain for another mouthful.
Despite his shock, Don caught on and attempted to reach his fountain once more, but was hit in the head by a gush of soda. He collapsed to the ground, and Lucy knew just by the way he’d fallen that he was dead.
Her mind screamed obscenities as she whirled, face rage red. She spit furiously at the monster, striking it in the chest, and was already drinking more water before it had even recovered.
She hit it again and again, each time a new hole disintegrating its liquid form and making it weaker until the entire thing exploded like a water balloon, without the balloon.
Tears welling up in her eyes, Lucy turned to examine her dead twin only to find him standing there behind her, a baffled expression on his face.
“Don!” she yelled, hugging him fiercely. “You’re alive! How are you alive? That thing killed you!”
He pulled away. “I don’t know. I guess I had another guy. Nice spitting, Tex.”
She blushed. “Thank God for Savage. We never would have figured that out if it weren’t for him.”
“Yeah.” Don nodded, looking around for the cat.
Savage was up ahead, sitting in the middle of the path, licking chocolate off his front paw. When he sensed the kids looking at him, he returned their stare and meowed loudly before trotting off again around a bend.
The twins exchanged a glance then gave chase, gingerbread dad once more riding piggyback on Don.
17.
Keeping up with Savage was not easy, especially once they left the park and he led them into a junk yard.
“I don’t remember this place being here before,” Don said as they slowed their pace a bit.
“Even if it had been here,” Lucy replied. “I doubt everything in it would have been glazed before.” She rapped her knuckles against the hard, candy-coated blue surface of an old refrigerator as they passed by.
“True,” Don agreed. “Makes it prettier though.”
“Yeah, but I don’t trust it. Something bad is gonna happen.”
“As long as it doesn’t have anything to do with root beer, I’ll be happy. I swear, I’m never drinking soda again.”
A loud, jangly sound came out of nowhere, and Don grew to twice his normal size, clothes and all. He dropped gingerbread dad and yelped in surprise. Lucy stopped dead in her tracks, looking up at her brother in shock.
“Whoa,” she whispered.
After studying his huge hands for a moment, Don grinned. “Bonus!”
“But you didn’t even do anything.” Lucy checked the ground where Don had been walking, searching for a trigger of some kind. She saw nothing.
“Wooo!” he yelled happily and began bounding around, jumping much higher than should have been possible. “This is awesome!”
Lucy let her brother have his fun for a minute. “We need to keep going. Come on. Savage is waiting.”
She picked up gingerbread dad and started after the cat, eyeing their surroundings warily. Don leapt over piles of trash, discarded appliances and broken furniture, hooting and hollering, having a grand old time.
Although she wanted to stop and consult the game manual, keeping up with her brother seemed more important, and was proving to be a difficult task in itself.
Don rounded a bend, vanishing from sight, and Lucy was forced to jog. When she caught up with him, however, it was because he had no choice but to stop.
The path was blocked by a small mountain of garbage-they’d reached a dead end.
“Don’t tell me we have to go through a maze,” Lucy said, disheartened.
“I don’t think so,” Don replied. “At least, Savage doesn’t think so.” He pointed to the cat, who sat atop a garbage can, eyeing them with curiosity. “He wouldn’t have led us the wrong way. Maybe we have to climb that trash heap or something.”
Without waiting for his sister’s reply, Don took a running leap at the garbage mountain, lost his footing and fell, rolling back and colliding with the trash can, knocking it over with a loud clatter. Savage screeched and ran off to hide under a ratty old couch and the voice boomed out of the can.
“DO THE PEPPERMINT TWIST!”
“Oh no!” Lucy cried. “What now?”
Don rose and scrambled away from the can, obviously expecting some threat to emerge from it, so when things started shooting out of the top of the massive garbage mountain, both twins were more than a bit surprised.
Empty soda cans, chip bags, candy wrappers, moldy old newspapers and magazines, dirty diapers, coffee grounds, rotten slabs of meat and animals bones and every other kind of garbage imaginable began to rain down on the kids and the area around them.
“Ewww!” Lucy threw her arms over her head. “Gross!”
“It’s a trash volcano!” Don shouted. “Let’s get out of here!”
They turned to flee, but an avalanche of debris from both sides of the junk yard abruptly fell, effectively blocking their escape route.
“Jeez.” Don dodged a falling turkey carcass that exploded with putrefied stuffing when it landed a foot in front of him.
“We’re not supposed to leave,” Lucy said. “We have to defeat it somehow. It’s a game, remember?”
“Yeah, but how?”
Ducking, Lucy glanced around. The only thing that seemed out of place was the trash barrel. After all, why was it necessary in a junk yard? “That!” she pointed and hurried over to stand it up again. She bent and picked up a bouquet of dead roses and dropped it in.
From inside the barrel, the singing voice boomed. “ONE! TWO! THREE! BOOM!”
The junk shot out of the garbage mountain even faster, pummeling the kids with all kinds of disgusting waste and Lucy shouted, “Hurry! We’re supposed to clean up!”
Don obeyed, but was clearly not happy about it. “This is retarded!”
“Shut up and do it!”
“YAY AY AY!” The voice responded, sounding tinny and far away, growing more muffled as they piled more trash into the barrel, despite the fact that whatever they put in there seemed to disappear entirely. The barrel, evidently, was a bottomless pit.
Scrambling around, frantically grabbing whatever they could and disposing of it, the kids soon discovered they were competing in a race against time. Whenever one of them missed the barrel, even more disgusting things were flung into the air and at a more rapid speed. Don’s extra size helped quite a bit; he was able to cover more ground than Lucy and far quicker, but they still had a hard time keeping up with the volcano.
Dodging the items, they learned, was also imperative. When they were struck with anything, they moved slower for a minute, causing the other one to have to pick up their slack, and when Don was hit for the third time with a huge moldy pizza, he returned to his normal size.
Lucy, on the other hand, lost a life when hit for the third time.
18.
Dying, she discovered, didn’t bring you to Heaven, as she’d always been told. Instead, she was thrust into a world of pure thought and emotion
s, spinning and twirling, with no sense of body, pain or pleasure.
And then she was back at the beginning of the junk yard again, puzzled for a moment, but quickly recovering and racing through to try to defeat the spewing junk
volcano again.
Some of the items they were trying to retrieve disappeared entirely if they didn’t get to them fast enough, but there was always more.
Exhausted, Lucy shouted, “This isn’t working! Maybe we’re supposed to do something else!”
Don got pelted with a soggy clump of pasta and groaned in misery. “But what? I don’t see anything else to do!”
Lucy looked around helplessly. Nothing around them seemed important enough to be of any use to them.
Then she remembered the manual and pulled it from her back pocket. Reading quickly, the only hint she ascertained was that they were supposed to have retrieved something from when they’d first entered the junk yard. But that was blocked now. Wasn’t it?
She thought back. What had seemed important? What had they noticed? The only thing she could recall was the old refrigerator with its hard candy coating.
That must be it!
But how did she-
Smiling, she stopped flinching whenever garbage was about to hit her. Instead, she looked up and waited for the huge disgusting pizzas and then, three times in a row, intentionally ran into them.
When she came back from the dead the next time, Lucy stopped once more at the blue refrigerator and yanked open the door. What she found inside came as a surprise: another trash can, this one clearly labeled in white letters with the word COMPOST.
She peered in and saw hundreds of gummi worms squirming around at the bottom of the can, but knew she didn’t have time to worry about that. She hauled it out and ran back to where Don was still frantically trying to chuck everything into the first barrel.
“Biodegradables in here!” she shouted triumphantly.
Don paused, amazed. “Where did you get that?”
“Doesn’t matter! Just do it!”
It seemed ridiculous, but this time they were more successful at cleaning up. The volcano spewed slower, and soon they were able to catch up until it eventually stopped spitting garbage onto them all together.
When they were done, they both collapsed to the ground, completely beat, their pulses racing.