“We gotta get out of here, Willie.” Mick the Mick said, his voice high-pitched and uncomfortably girlish.
“Feel that wind, Mick? It’s hot. I bet that thing is going a hundred miles an hour. Do you feel it?”
“I feel it! I feel it!”
“Do you smell fish, Mick? Hey, look! Those pink flowers that look like—”
Willie screamed. Mick the Mick glanced over and saw his lifelong friend was playing tug of war with one of those toothy prehistoric plants, using a long red rope.
No. Not a red rope. Those were Willie’s intestines.
“Help me, Mick!”
Without thinking, Mick the Mick reached out a hand and grabbed Willie’s duodenum. He squeezed, tight as he could, and Willie farted.
“It hurts, Mick! Being disemboweled hurts!”
A bone-shaking roar, from behind them. The T-Rex had lost interest in the asteroid and was sniffing at the newly spilled blood, his sofa-sized head only a few meters away and getting closer. Mick the Mick could smell its breath, reeking of rotten meat and bad oral hygiene and dooky.
No, the dooky was coming from Willie. Pouring out like brown shaving cream.
Mick the Mick released his friend’s innards and wiped his hand on Willie’s shirt. The pink flower made a
“I gotta put this stuff back in.” Willie began scooping up guts and twigs and rocks and shoving them into the gaping hole in his belly.
Mick the Mick figured Willie was in shock, or perhaps even stupider than he’d originally surmised. He considered warning Willie about the infection he’d get from filling himself with dirt, but there were other, more pressing, matters at hand.
The asteroid now took up most of the horizon, and the heat from it turned the sweat on Mick the Mick’s body into steam. They needed to get out of here, and fast. If only there was someplace to hide.
Something scurried over Mick the Mick’s foot and he flinched, stomping down. Crushed under his heel was something that looked like a beaver. The animal kind. Another proto-beaver beelined around its dead companion, heading through the underbrush into…
“It’s a hole, Willie! I think it’s a cave!”
Mick the Mick pushed aside a large fern branch and squatted down. The hole led to a diagonalish path, dark and rocky, deep down into the earth.
“You said that, Mick!”
“That’s an echo, Willie! Hole must go down deep.”
Mick the Mick watched as two more lizards, a giant mosquito, and more beaver things poured into the cave, escaping the certain extinction the asteroid promised.
“You’re repeating yourself, Mick!”
“I’m not repeating myself!” Mick yelled.
“Yes you are!”
“No I’m not!”
“Yes you are!”
“You just did!”
“I’m not, Willie!”
“I’m hurt bad, Mick!”
“I said
Mick the Mick decided not to pursue this line of conversation anymore. Instead, he focused on moving the big outcropping of rock partially obscuring the cave’s entrance. If he could budge it just a foot or two, he could fit into the cave and maybe save himself.
Mick the Mick put his shoulder to the boulder, grunting with effort. Slowly, antagonizingly slowly, it began to move.
“You got your cell phone, Mick? You should maybe call 911 for me. Tell them to bring some stitches.”
“I think my stomach just fell out. What’s a stomach look like, Mick? This looks like a kidney bean.”
Finally, the rock broke away from the base with a satisfying crack. But rather than rolling to the side, it teetered, and then dropped down over the hole, sealing it like a manhole cover.
Mick the Mick began to cry.
“Do kidneys look like kidney beans, Mick?” Willie made a smacking sound. “Doesn’t taste like beans. Or kidneys. Hey, the T-Rex is back. He doesn’t look distracted no more. You think he took is medication?”
The T-Rex opened its mouth and reared up over Mick the Mick’s head, blotting out the sky. All Mick the Mick could see was teeth and tongue and that big dangly thing that hangs in the back of the throat like a punching bag.
“Read to him, Mick. When Nana reads to me, I go to sleep.”
The book. They needed to escape this time period. Maybe go into the future, to before Nana baked the cake so they could stop her.
Mick the Mick lifted the
Another near-turd experience and then they were excreted into a room with a television and a couch and a picture window. But the television screen was embedded—or growing out of?—a toadstoollike thing that was in turn growing out of the floor. The couch looked funny, like who’d sit on that? And the picture window looked out on some kind of nightmare jungle.
And then again, maybe not so weird.
No, Mick the Mick thought. Weird. Very weird.
He looked at Willie.
And screamed.
Or at least tried to. What came out was more like a croak.
Because it wasn’t Willie. Not unless Willie had grown four extra eyes—two of them on stalks—and sprouted a fringe of tentacles around where he used to have a neck and shoulders. He now looked like a conical turkey croquette that had been rolled in seasoned breadcrumbs before baking and garnished with live worms after.
The thing made noises that sounded like, “Mick, is that you?” but spoken by a turkey croquette with a mouth full of linguini.
Stranger still, it sounded a little like Willie. Mick the Mick raised a tentacle to scratch his—
Whoa!
Well, of course a tentacle. What did he expect?
He looked down and was surprised to see that he was encased in a breadcrumbed, worm-garnished turkey croquette. No, wait, he
Why did everything seem wrong, and yet simultaneously at the same time seem not wrong too?
Just then another six-eyed, tentacle-fringed croquette glided into the room. The Willie-sounding croquette said, “Hi, Nana.” His words were much clearer now.
Nana? Was this Willie’s Nana?
Of course it was. Mick the Mick had known her for years.
“There’s an unpleasant man at the door who wants to talk to you. Or else.”
“Or else what?”
