Rogmasher Rampage Page 2

  “You’ve located the liver and the spleen,” said Mr. Numpler, tugging his mustache in amazement. “I didn’t even ask you to locate the liver and the spleen.”

  “I had time left over,” said Billy. “Didn’t want to waste it.”

  “I don’t know what’s gotten into you this year, Clikk,” said Mr. Numpler, “but I like it. Keep up the good work.” He gave Billy a suspicious squint and turned his attention to the next student: Kaitlyn Bates, who had hacked her poor frog to pieces without pinpointing much of anything.

  Not so long ago Billy was doing well if he could manage Bs and Cs in school. That was before he had discovered that his parents were not pest exterminators (as they had always claimed to be) but agents for AFMEC, the Allied Forces for the Management of Extraterritorial Creatches. It was a top-secret organization whose tireless vigilance protected ordinary men and women from creatches: millions upon millions of horrendous beasts of all shapes and sizes that lurked all over the world, some as vicious and dangerous as murgwods, many much worse. Now that Billy was in on the activities of AFMEC—and even training to be an Affy himself—his Piffling Elementary report card was loaded up with nothing but As. He was being held to a very high standard at AFMEC, and the mental rigors of the job made classes at Piffling El seem like child’s play.

  It was a cool side effect of his new dual identity, but nothing Billy spent too much time thinking about. He would gladly trade all the good grades in school for an improved score on his last round of Affy entrance exams. There were ten levels all together, and he had only barely made it to the third level. Billy’s extreme sports skills had served him well in the “hands-on” tests—those in Introduction to Creatch-Neutralizing Weaponry and Target Practice, and Beginning Transgravitational Propulsion—but he had a long way to go when it came to the written assignments. Even with Ana García’s help, his latest essay for Early Twentieth-Century AFMEC History had scored a pitiful thirty-three on the sixty-point AFMEC scale.

  “Outlandish,” his instructor had written on the first page, just below the title, “Jarrid Glurrik: Alive and Well and Living in Central Europe.” Glurrik was the leader of the creatch supremacist movement, a shadowy network of creatches and demi-creatches that sought to destroy AFMEC and take over the earth. Or he had been the leader, anyway, until he was killed during a failed attack on AFMEC headquarters in the 1930s. Billy’s thesis—that Glurrik’s brain had been preserved by creatch supremacists and transplanted into another man’s body years later—was admittedly not based on very much in the way of facts.

  “Hey, it’s possible, right?” Billy had said to Ana upon getting his graded paper, errors noted on every page in bright orange ink.

  “It’s a history class, Billy,” Ana had said. “Not a course on paranoid conspiracy theories.”

  A sudden clattering on the other side of the room—a fallen frog, scalpels and all—snapped Billy back to the here and now of Piffling Elementary. He yawned and checked the clock on the classroom wall. Eleven-forty-five. Five more minutes until lunchtime. Two classes in the afternoon. Then he could get home and hit the sack. There was no telling when the viddy-fone in his back pocket would go off (he had it set to vibrate so as not to blow his cover), signaling the beginning of a new creatch op. He had learned long ago to get sleep whenever he could.

  “Yo, Clikkmaster Flash,” came an all-too-familiar voice from behind him: Nelson Skubblemeyer, one of the lamest wannabe cool kids in school. With Nelson, everyone was fill-in-the-blank-master Flash. He even called Mr. Numpler “Numpmaster Flash.” Not to his face, of course. “Help me find this frog’s lungs, a’ight? You’re, like, down with the science stuff.”

  “Dude, find your own lungs. I’m not gonna help you cheat.”

  “Yo. It ain’t cheatin’. It’s just spreadin’ the love, man.” Nelson turned his eyes to Billy’s hands and forearms, suddenly fascinated by the alarming number of scars and bruises that had accumulated there over the last few months.

  “I know you’re all freaky into this extreme sports thing, but look at yourself. What is up with all this? You look like you just stepped out of a zombie flick.”

  Billy glanced at the scars, each signifying a different creatch he had dealt with. The wide gash across the knuckles of his left hand had come to him courtesy of a thorn-clawed voskfursker he’d gotten clobbered by in the wilds of Siberia. The purplish bruise on his right wrist was a memento left by a long-legged bliggit he’d wrestled to the ground somewhere in the outback of western Australia.

  “It’s this new street luge I’m working on,” Billy lied. “Wheels keep coming off.”

  “Whatevah,” said Nelson, rolling his beady eyes. “Now come on, Clikkmaster. Show me the lungs. I know you know where they are.”

  “Look, Nelson, I told you—”

  Suddenly, a different voice from behind: “Clikk, you heard the man.” Without turning Billy knew who it was: Jake Langley. Jake was, if anything, an even worse wannabe cool kid than Nelson. He wore nothing but black T-shirts day after day and had allowed his curly orange hair to grow into a bushy frizz large and thick enough to house a good-sized rodent. Unlike Nelson, though, Jake was not the sort of kid you could make fun of. A freakish growth spurt had pushed him somewhere near six feet tall, and a steady diet of fast food had him tipping the scales at well over two hundred pounds. Even the toughest jocks in school steered clear of Jake Langley. And it wasn’t just his imposing height and weight. It was the crazed look in his eyes.

  “Show us the lungs, dude.” Billy could smell the barbecue potato chips on Jake’s breath. “My boy Nel here is askin’ you all polite. What’s your problem?”

  Nelson Skubblemeyer folded his arms smugly, like a man whose pit bull had just shown up for duty.

  Billy wasn’t scared of Jake Langley. The hand-to-hand-combat training he’d learned in AFMECopolis was more than enough to leave a thug like Jake unconscious on the science room floor within a matter of seconds. But Billy was under strict orders not to misuse his newly acquired skills. Jake Langley was irritating and offensive and possessed a body odor that bordered on lethal. He wasn’t a creatch, though, and as such was off limits.

  “Hey, Jake,” whispered Billy, “if you’re gonna eat potato chips for breakfast, do us all a favor and pop in a few Tic Tacs afterward, will ya?”

  Nelson laughed in spite of himself.

  Jake Langley’s crazed eyes got even crazier. He bared his teeth and stabbed a stubby finger into Billy’s chest. “You dissin’ me, Clikk? ’Cause I’ll beat the snot out of you if you are, you know I will.”

  “He will beat the snot out of you, Clikkmaster,” said Nelson, as if acknowledging a sad fact of nature.

  Billy tried to stay calm. It would be so easy to challenge Jake, to tell him they could work this all out, man to man, after school behind the gym. For the sake of his Affy-in-training status, though, he had to defuse the situation. He smiled and raised his hands in a peacemaking gesture. “I’m just messin’ with you, Jake. Take it easy.”

  Jake Langley glared at Billy for a moment, then leaned back in his chair, mercifully taking his body odor with him. “Yeah, well, I ain’t messin’ with you, Clikk: you got five seconds to show us where those lungs are. And if you don’t …”

  BRREHHHHHHHN!

  The blaring school buzzer echoed down the corridors, and in an instant all the students were on their feet, scuffling out of the classroom.

  Jake Langley clamped one of his fat hands down on Billy’s shoulder, stopping him from getting up. Nelson looked on, a smirk on his face.

  “You’re a lucky man, Clikk,” said Jake. “Next time you’ll do what I tell you to do when I tell you to do it. You got that?”

  Next time, thought Billy, I’ll treat you to a McKensian neck jab and you’ll be unconscious before you even hit the ground. He knew he’d never do it for real. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t imagine how good it would feel.

  “Whatever you say, Jake,” Billy said finally.

&
nbsp; “That’s better.” Jake turned and left the room with Nelson, who looked slightly disappointed that the confrontation hadn’t resulted in better fireworks.

  Billy reached down to grab his book bag and suddenly felt a pulsing sensation coming from his back pocket. It was his viddy-fone, alerting him to an incoming call from AFMEC.

  Another creatch op? Already?

  CHAPTER 3

  The speed of the viddy-fone’s pulse meant the call was urgent. Billy would have to find a way of taking it immediately. He dashed between the rows of half-dissected frogs, flew out the door, and sprinted toward the bathroom.

  He got there in record time, but as soon as he pulled the door open, he could hear the voices of at least three boys in the middle of a heated debate about who was the hottest girl in school. It didn’t sound like they’d be leaving anytime soon.

  The viddy-fone was now pulsing even more insistently. Can’t take the call here. The gym? No. Someone’s bound to see me.

  Then it hit him: the janitor’s closet. Perfect!

  Billy tore through the corridors (past two teachers who reminded him not to run in the halls) until he found the dimly lit alcove that housed the janitor’s closet. He threw the door open and jumped inside. He flicked on the light switch, pulled the viddy-fone out of his back pocket, and popped it open.

  The silver-blue screen crackled to life, snapping into an image of Billy’s father, Jim Clikk.

  “Hey, Billy. Sorry to call you at school like this but …” He stopped midsentence and squinted. “What is that behind your head, a mop?”

  “I’m in the janitor’s closet.”

  “Oh. Nice choice.”

  “What’s this about, Dad?”

  “The usual, Billy,” said Jim Clikk. “Mr. Vriffnee says he’s got another creatch op with your name on it.”

  Vriffnee. The prime magistrate of AFMEC. He was tough on all Affys-in-training but had been sending Billy on some especially demanding creatch ops. Billy had wondered why Vriffnee was making things hard for him and could come to only one conclusion: Vriffnee had serious doubts about whether Billy had what it took to be a real Affy, and wanted to see if he was worth the trouble—and considerable expense—of training.

  Indeed, it was almost as if he wanted Billy to fail and get it over with. In the last month alone Vriffnee had sent Billy up against an array of beasts that seemed calculated to scare him into bailing on his training altogether: a skeletal munkbazzer, a quill-shooting noss lizard, two mammoth sea gribbs (one in the Arctic Circle, another in the Gulf of Bengal), and one saber-clawed desert hurf in an extremely bad mood.

  Each creatch op was more difficult and dangerous than the last. Which was just the way Billy liked it. As exhausted as he was from his battle with the murgwod the day before, he was looking forward to whatever Mr. Vriffnee threw at him.

  “But, Dad, what about my afternoon classes? You want me to just play hookey?”

  “Hookey?” said Jim Clikk with mock horror. Then, smiling: “Basically, yeah. Don’t get used to it, though. We don’t do things this way very often. Your mother’s put a phone call in to the principal’s office telling him there’s a family emergency.”

  Billy couldn’t help chuckling. In the Clikk family, the word emergency took on a whole new meaning.

  “What’d you tell them?”

  Jim Clikk turned his head to one side and asked someone offscreen a question. “What emergency did you come up with, honey?”

  “Aunt Lilly’s funeral,” said the voice of Linda Clikk.

  Billy laughed out loud. “So I have an aunt Lilly now, eh?”

  “Had an aunt Lilly,” said Jim. “So here’s the deal. Luigi Bonaducci, an Affy friend of mine, is going to come by the school in about five minutes, claiming to be a cousin of yours. Just sit tight in the cafeteria until they call you to the office.”

  “Don’t leave me hanging here, Dad. What kind of creatch op is this?”

  “What, you want me to spoil the surprise? I’ll say this: I sure hope you like kung pao chicken.”

  China, thought Billy. Yes! It was the one country Billy had always wanted to see. And not just for the kung fu and nunchucks either. There was something about China that really captured Billy’s imagination. Years earlier there had been a Chinese exchange student at Piffling Elementary, a boy named Shan Ling. Billy had seen a photo album of his and marveled at the temples, the masses of people whizzing around on bicycles, the shop window lettering so complicated it was mind-boggling that anyone was capable of reading it.

  “All right, Billy, I’m signing off. Your mother and I are in the middle of something pretty nasty here in Madagascar—dagdoolian wasp-lizards—so we won’t be along for the ride.” Jim Clikk tried to sound casual as he delivered this news, but Billy knew this was a very big deal. He had never been sent on a creatch op without his parents before.

  No way. They’re sending me on my first solo creatch op.

  “Do us proud, Billy. We’ll catch up with you when you get back.”

  Billy snapped the viddy-fone shut and pumped his fist in the air. “Solo! They’re sending me solo! Unbelievable. I must really be advancing through the ranks or something.… ”

  Billy threw the door open and prepared for a mad dash to the cafeteria but found his path neatly blocked by Mr. Coles, the janitor. He was standing there, arms folded over his considerable paunch, a look of suspicion on his puffy red face. Billy stopped dead in his tracks.

  “Well, well,” said Mr. Coles. “Looks like I found my thief.”

  Billy watched as Mr. Coles’s eyes darted to the closed viddy-fone in Billy’s fist, its silver casing too large to hide no matter how tightly Billy closed his fingers around it.

  “Th-thief?”

  “Somebody made off with my calendar from Mike’s Muffler Shop a couple months back, an’ now I guess I know just who that someone is.”

  “It wasn’t me,” said Billy, somehow sounding guilty in spite of his innocence.

  “Oh it wasn’t, was it?” Mr. Coles took a step forward, forcing Billy to edge back into the alcove. “Then what is it brings you to my closet here? Lookin’ to help me wax the floors after school?”

  “I, uh …” Billy was at a total loss. Why would he be inside the janitor’s closet? There had to be some explanation that sounded reasonable.

  “Best confess, boy,” said Mr. Coles. His eyes kept darting back to the viddy-fone. “Don’t make me drag ya down to the principal’s office and name ya as my prime suspect.”

  “I … I needed, um …” He shot a glance back at the contents of the closet shelves. There were jugs of detergent, huge cans of floor wax. “… I needed to see, uh …”

  “Needed to see what?”

  “Needed to see … what … what kind of rat poison you’re using.”

  Mr. Coles looked genuinely startled. Whatever excuse he’d been expecting, it hadn’t been this one. “Rat poison?”

  “Yeah,” said Billy, gaining confidence. “For the rats.”

  “Get outta here. There ain’t no rats in this school.”

  “Sure there are. In the boys’ changing room, just off the gym.” Billy had noticed droppings there behind one of the lockers. “I can’t believe you let yourself run out of rat poison, Mr. Coles,” said Billy, certain that there had never been any rat poison to run out of.

  “In the changing room?” Mr. Coles scratched his head, disheveling his thinning gray hair. “You’re kidding me.”

  Billy raised his viddy-fone into plain view and pushed the button that allowed it to double as a business card case.

  K’CHIK

  He pulled out one of his parents’ BUGZ-B-GON business cards and handed it to a now moderately panicked Mr. Coles. “I’d give my folks a call if I were you, Mr. Coles. They deal with rats all the time. And sometimes,” Billy added with solemn seriousness, “even things bigger than rats.”

  “Rats in the changing room,” said Mr. Coles as Billy dashed off for the cafeteria. “I can’t believe
it.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Minutes later Billy was called from the cafeteria to the office, where he met for the very first time his “cousin Ralph.” Luigi Bonaducci was a huge, hairy guy with hands the size of baseball gloves. He was dressed in a black suit with a black necktie but somehow looked more like a member of a heavy metal band than someone who was heading to a funeral. He had a jagged scar running the length of his neck, which Billy recognized as the handiwork of an iron-tusked moxboarer (one that Billy assumed—judging from Luigi’s imposing figure—did not live very long after leaving the scar). He was also pretty old to pass for Billy’s cousin, but Penny Hefnik, the school secretary, had clearly bought the story.

  “I’m so sorry, Billy,” she said from behind her desk, her eyebrows crimped in sympathy. “Your mother told me that you were very close to your aunt Lilly.”

  Billy nodded and put one hand over his mouth, hoping that it would be seen as an expression of grief and not what it really was: an effort to keep himself from cracking up.

  “Come on, Billy,” said Ralph/Luigi, a trace of an accent in his voice that revealed a childhood somewhere very far from Piffling, Indiana. “We don’t want to be late.”

  Luigi Bonaducci threw an arm around Billy and lumbered out of the office, nearly lifting him off the ground in the process. Billy shot a farewell glance at Penny, showing how relieved he was to have such a big, protective cousin helping him through these trying times.

  “Okay, let’s-a pick up the pace here,” said Luigi once they stepped out the front door of Piffling Elementary, his words now rolling out in a thick Sicilian accent. “We got to really break the sound barrier if I’m gonna have you in China by tomorrow morning. Old Maria here is gonna have all her trans-gravitational cylinders working overtime.” Luigi pointed at a battered old pickup truck, two wheels on the curb, its body touched up so many times it was anyone’s guess as to whether the original color was red or green. “She don’t-a look like much, but she’s a real spitfire, believe me.”