Alex Reynard
The Library
Alex Reynard's Online Books
PART NINE
Toby was rooted to the spot. A quivering statue. Whoever was behind him had ambushed him in perfect silence. And from the way they were digging that sword tip in, they meant business.
"You've got a foot and a half of steel pointed at you. What are you doing in my house?"
Toby was as much chilled as confused by the voice. It was sung. Like someone had just played a few seconds from an old record album, but without any accompanying music. The voice was the throaty, no-nonsense twang of a female country singer in a smoke-filled bar.
"I- I-I-I..."
"You better speak," it said, and this time it was completely different. The voice was the same, but now it was a pop-star's croon.
Toby's tongue finally unlocked. "I came here because I was told you were fearless and an adventurer and maybe could take me to Anasarca because that's where I need to go and if I'm wrong I'm really sorry and I'll leave immediately you don't have to hurt me!"
The blade at his neck never wavered; steady as if it were held on a tripod. Its owner said nothing.
But the furson in the chair gave a teakettle hiss of a laugh. "You want what? I mean, my ears heard it but I'm havin' trouble believing it. You just waltz into our pad and expect us to drop everything and be your babysitter up the mountain?"
Toby felt himself start to cry, and pinched his thigh as hard as he could to make it stop. He got the feeling these were people not to show weakness in front of.
The magazine came down, and Toby gasped.
He was glad the furson was several feet away because seeing the details would have caused him to panic. This dog's (or coyote or dingo or something) head had been sheared cleanly in half, right at the bridge of the nose. The whole top part of the skull was gone.
In its place was basically a bottlecap. The canine's eyes and ears had been plucked from their natural places and welded back in. They floated approximately where they'd sit on a normal skull, now affixed by thin metal struts. The rest of the head was empty enough to rest a soda can on.
He tossed his magazine aside and hopped down off the throne. His wrench arms 'thunk'ed loudly against the wooden floor. There was a lazy little grin on his muzzle as he walked towards Toby. He maintained eye contact the whole time. Toby realized he even had tiny little metal eyelids. They looked like they were snipped out of tin.
The canine stopped a few feet in front of Toby and put his 'hands' on his hips. "Damn, you're funny," he said.
Up close he wasn't that much older or taller than Toby. But the mouse remembered what Piffle had said about deceptive ages.
The grin widened to show teeth. "Now, don't lemme give the wrong impression. We ain't gonna kill you. That is, assuming you don't make us need to." His accent reminded Toby of old Fifties motorcycle movies. "But y'see, we gotta be careful. We don't know you. Right now, you look like possibly the most pathetic thing I've ever seen in my life. But then I get to thinkin', 'How in the hell is a skinny kid in his damn jammies still alive this far into Phobiopolis? How'd he get past Tinder?' Maybe what I'm seeing isn't what I'm really seeing, y'dig?"
A small jab at the back of Toby's neck told him the sword-holder was in agreement.
"I promise you, I'm exactly what I look like," Toby said. He tried not to look away from those science-lab eyes. He could hear the tiny 'clink' whenever they blinked. He could even see the way the dog's ears had been crudely taxidermied into place with stitches made of wire. 'Doesn't that hurt!?' he wondered.
The frankencanine stared hard at him for a moment.
Then he abruptly burst into a barking laugh and clapped Toby on the shoulder with one of his wrench-hands. "HA! Yeah, you're probably on the level. I'm just screwin' with your head."
Toby visibly sagged as a huge amount of tension lifted. He was deeply relieved, but he also reached up to rub his shoulder. The teeth of that wrench had left little dents in his skin. "Ow..."
The canine tossed a nod past Toby's shoulder. "Let's stop playin' with the poor dink and let him siddown."
"If you say so," the singing-voice trilled.
Toby also started rubbing his neck as soon as the sword left its place there.
The canine jumped onto one of the couches with a FLUMPH and a cloud of snack crumb dust. "I'm Zinc. Just Zinc. You might've seen my handwriting on your way into town. Behind you is the highly-esteemed Miss Junella Brox: the scariest goddamn thing on this whole little planet of ours."
Toby turned around slowly, already bracing himself to come face-to-face with some tentacle-mouthed terror. Maybe a giant bat. Maybe a living suit of armor covered in spikes. Maybe something that'd drive him mad on the spot.
His eyebrows went up.
Well. She didn't actually look all that terrifying.
She was clearly a skunk, but stripelessly black all over. No older than Zinc, and fairly normal in appearance at first glance. But from the way Toby could see the light gleaming off her body, he realized she wasn't covered in fur, but grooves.
Head to toe, she was plastic. No, vinyl! Suddenly it made sense. She was a living record album! Without needing to be told, Toby put two and two together: this girl spoke by singing.
She was also completely naked except for a thick white aviator's scarf she wore around her neck. Though her nudity hardly mattered, as she was as smoothly featureless as a plastic doll all over. Even her toes looked like a single piece. Toby blushed and looked away from her musteline body up to her eyes. They were probably the most normal pair he'd seen in Phobiopolis so far, apart from being a blazing orange color with surprisingly tiny pupils.
Her muzzle seemed sculpted permanently in a tight little scowl. Not anger, just a lack of amusement. Toby got the feeling Junella did not smile much.
She looked him up and down briefly. She held up her sword: a cutlass. Perfect for a pirate. (Toby wondered if it had come with the ship). Junella turned it at him in such a way as to let him know that she in no way trusted him yet, and she could still use this whenever she felt she needed to.
He gulped and nodded.
She nodded back in acknowledgment. "Keep your hands in sight and you'll be fine." This time it was the basso warning of a nightclub ingenue.
Toby was stunned twice by what she'd just done with her hands. Her sword hand had tucked the blade into the scabbard at her hip. Except she wasn't wearing a scabbard. Or pants. Somehow, she'd stored her sword in her actual hip, and the flesh had closed around the metal like it belonged there.
But it was with her other hand that she spoke. Her mouth never opened, but slightly changed expression in time with the words. Instead, her voice had come from from where she traced a claw along a specific place on her chest. Toby saw that all her claws were metal. Literally needle-sharp. 'She plays herself to speak,' he marveled. He wondered if every sentence she would ever say was somewhere imprinted on her body, or if she could scratch the same area and the song would change.
Toby realized this was his first time meeting someone in Phobiopolis who he found more fascinating than frightening.
She strolled across the floor to her throne, lightly kicking Zinc's magazine aside. Her hips bounced rhythmically. Like most skunks, she was quite curvy in the posterior region, though far from fat. From her movements and figure, Toby guessed Junella was extremely limber. She radiated combat experience. Plus, her tail ended in a garden of jagged broken record shards. Getting smacked with them would probably eviscerate a person on the spot and leave their legs still standing.
Zinc had by now dug a bag of corn chips out of the couch cushions and was pouring them into his mouth. He chewed loudly. He thumped the seat beside him to indicate Toby should come sit down. With a wincing smile, Toby indicated he'd rather sit on the other couch, a little farther away from those wrenches.
"Suitcher'self," Zinc mumbled, finishing off the last crumbs in the bag.
Toby took in Zinc's details as well. The patchwork teen's species was unguessable. Canine for sure, but any possible mix of varieties. His fur was patterned in rust, sand and mud. In addition to his black jeans, he had on a blue t-shirt and a leather motorcycle jacket the color of dark chocolate. It was thin and deeply creased: signs of heavy use and little maintenance. Zinc was also barefoot, and looked like he had drill-holes in the sides of his soles. Toby didn't want to know what those were for.
"T'be honest," Zinc started, after licking his lips, "I think I speak for Junella and myself when I say we're really not all that bothered by you coming here and asking us to be guides. I mean, it's what we do. Because what else are we gonna do? But two things you hafta understand, amigo mio. One: Anasarca is the holy grail of destinations. It's as far away and hard to get to as anything you could imagine. And two: we don't do jack shit without payment."
Junella on her throne nodded agreement. She was keeping a close eye on the conversation below, but also filing her nails on a whetstone.
Toby's heart sank. "Oh. I... understand." He realized suddenly how monumentally selfish it was to have come here expecting these people to help him simply because he asked them to. As if they didn't have lives and priorities of their own. "I didn't bring any money though. I don't even know what money is in Phobiopolis. I've been here maybe a week. All I want is to get home."
Zinc was nodding. "...And you heard the legends about how Daddy Aldridge is the only way to do that," he finished.
Toby thought for a moment that Zinc was about to call that idea horseshit. But Toby was surprised.
"The legends are probably right. At least, far as we know. Aldridge is real. I even seen him once, flying overhead like a comet. But he don't socialize. You want to see him, you gotta go to his pad. And anyone who ever tries either ends up crawling home crying how they didn't make it, or no one ever hears from 'em again. Now, maybe this means they get wizarded into a crisp, but nothing I've ever heard of Aldridge suggests he's the type. He seems to be a genuine source for pure good in the world. He flies around fixing stuff. In the old days, and I mean centuries ago, he'd actually fight alongside us against some of the worst nasties. If the stories are true, Phobiopolis used to be WAY less safe than it is now."
Toby found that hard to imagine.
Zinc put on a shit-eating grin. "Can you tell that Juney usually lets me do the talking?"
Toby chuckled a tiny bit, but was still too nervous to say anything else.
Zinc steepled his fingertips (well, wrenchtips). "Anyway. You, pal, wanna get home. This is understandable. You've figured out that Aldridge is your only hope. This is smart. You've somehow deduced that someone like us is your ticket to Aldridge. This... is a problem."
Toby leaned forward. "Why?"
"Because we've never actually done it. Get all the way there I mean. We want to, don't get me wrong! Are you even kidding? It's the literal mountaintop. How can you call yourselves number one if you've never won the big prize? But dig this; you can't just walk there. There are places between here and there that exist to get you lost. As in, foreverlost. If you're going to make a try for Anasarca, that takes supplies and gear and, if you're not stupid, weapons. Thankfully, both of us have that partly covered just by being ourselves." He clanked his wrenches together, then pointed to Toby. "You on the other hand, look as easy to pop as a jelly donut."
Toby fidgeted a little in his seat (and could feel crumbs underneath him), but certainly didn't deny the observation.
Zinc nodded to Junella. "We've never been to Anasarca because we've never had a need to, understand? We don't care about asking The Wiz if we can please go home. This, right here, is our home as far as we're concerned."
"Are you...?" Toby made a kissy motion with his fingers.
Zinc laughed so hard he tore a hole in the couch. "Jeeziss! Naw!"
"He's more like my familiar than anything," Junella added.
Zinc agreed with a chortle. "Our relationship is professional. We supplement each other. She's finesse; I'm blunt force. She has thumbs; I don't. At most you could call us friends. Otherwise, we're mutually not each other's type."
Junella's muzzle curled up in the tiniest of smiles. She scratched a dozen places on her body to speak a full paragraph, patchworked from a dozen singing styles: "I'll let him kiss me on the cheek when he's good, but otherwise I keep him around like a pet. He's so tough it's stupid, but he's lazy. He hangs around me so I can find him good trouble to get into."
Through all this mixed praise, Zinc was grinning his ass off and wagging his tail. "Every word true."
'What an interesting relationship these two have,' Toby thought.
"Back to you," Zinc said, indicating Toby, and belched. "The fact is, Anasarca would be a major notch in our belt. But we know how impossible it is to get there. So we need a reason that makes it worthwhile. And, no offense, I am just being practical when I say this... sending you home isn't good enough."
Toby nodded sadly. Zinc's reasoning was perfectly sensible. He accepted it. He would not beg.
Zinc noticed the mouse kid's quiet despondence. He clinked his wrench-jaws together, similar to snapping. "Ey! Ey, what's-your-name! Aren't you gonna try any harder than that!?"
"Toby. And what do you mean?"
"Well you must not want to get back to home sweet home very badly if you'd give up that easy! I've seen this before: people like you either cry and plead and we kick 'em out, or they do like you do and just hang their heads like, 'Oh well'."
Toby felt a small bit of anger. "So what am I supposed to do?"
Zinc threw his arms up. "Think of somethin'!! I already told you, we wanna go where you're trying to get to. Dragging you along wouldn't be that hard. C'mon! There's gotta be something you can offer us in payment! Just looking at you, I know you couldn't fill a willwell, but don't you have anything to trade?"
Toby was about to start crying. "I don't! All I have is just these pajamas I'm wearing! I don't even have pockets! I'm barely holding onto my own name and I don't know how much of my memory I've forgotten already! I'm completely alone here and-"
'No you're not,' his brain reminded him.
And then Toby went completely silent. A look of sheer awe came over his face.
Because, hot damn, he actually did have something that might appeal a lot to these two.
"I've got an undead nightmare horse!!" he blurted out.
"You WHAT!?" Junella squawked.
*****