Crap Kingdom Read online

Page 2


  “Oh man,” Tom said, attempting to lighten the mood, “your tastes sure have changed.”

  Tom’s dad didn’t laugh or say anything at all. Tom looked over to see what the deal was and saw that his father’s face was melting.

  Tom screamed.

  “Sorry! Sorry!” his dad said. “It’s wearing off! I could barely keep it going for that long!”

  Tom kept screaming. His melting-faced dad kept driving. He reached up with one hand and wiped most of the face-melt off, revealing the non-melted face of an entirely different guy.

  “I need to tell you something, and—” the entirely different guy said in Tom’s dad’s voice. “Hold on a second.” He swallowed hard.

  “I need to tell you something,” he said in an entirely different voice, “and the thing I have to tell you, it’s that there’s this other world, right? And in it—in it”—the guy grimaced, choked, and went on—“in it, you’re the Chosen One, so I need you to come with—I need you to come with—” and before finishing the sentence, he threw up on the windshield of the van. It came out in a spray that made Tom finally understand the phrase “projectile vomit.” It was like a laser beam of vomit, Tom thought. The thought made him stop screaming.

  “Oh, man. Ohhhhhh, man,” the entirely different guy said. “You’re never supposed to swallow a voice changer. That was really dumb of me.” He reached down with both hands and activated the windshield wipers. They moaned as they scraped the windshield, doing nothing to the vomit spray, because the windshield wipers were on the outside, and the vomit was on the inside.

  “That’s dumb too,” the driver said. “Those things should be on the inside.”

  Tom didn’t know exactly what would happen next. He hoped the guy would say, “Check this out,” and he’d reach over and hit a switch on the dashboard that Tom hadn’t noticed before, and that switch would cause everything in the van to reveal its true, magical nature. The sliding passenger doors would fold out and become dragon’s wings, the stereo would pour forth the chanting of a million wizards, and this magical supervan would rocket upward into the stratosphere toward a portal in the middle of a thundercloud.

  But the guy with the melting face didn’t hit any other switches after the one to activate the windshield wipers. Minutes after he’d turned them on, they were still scraping ineffectively over the dry exterior surface of the windshield.

  Scrape.

  Pause.

  Scrape.

  Pause.

  Scrape.

  A pause that Tom could’ve sworn was longer than all the other pauses.

  Scrape.

  Tom reached over and flicked off the wipers with just one hand.

  “Thanks,” the driver said. “There’s lots of other stuff about the world, the world I’m from, that I think you’ll be pretty excited about, but I think it’s better if you actually see it. Then you’ll believe me.”

  “I believe you,” Tom said, hoping this would prompt the driver to say something dramatic like, “Would you believe . . . this?” and then he’d snap his fingers and transport them to an endless, swaying grove of fifty-foot-tall neon palm trees. He didn’t. They just kept driving.

  “What’s your name?” Tom said.

  “Gark,” said the driver.

  “Oh,” Tom said. “It’s, uhm, nice to meet you, Gark. I’m—”

  “Oh, I know your name,” Gark said. “I know it very well indeed.”

  Tom got excited. He just knew this would be the part where Gark told him that in this other world, his name rang out in the realms of legend and frightened the enemies Tom was destined to defeat. “Your name,” Gark said, “is Tim.”

  “Tom,” Tom said.

  “Tom,” Gark said, almost before Tom finished saying it, as though he could make Tom forget he’d ever said Tim. “Tom. Tom. Of course.”

  They stopped at a red light. The light turned green, and the van didn’t move. Tom scanned the traffic light for any sign of secret magical properties. Maybe it had a fourth unknown color of light besides the standard red, green, and yellow, and if you drove through the intersection when this fourth color was illuminated, you would hit hyperspeed, and enter the land where Tim, or Tom, or whoever, was destined for destiny. But it was the same boring traffic light that had always hung over this intersection. They were just sitting there.

  “I’m sorry, I think I’ve got the directions screwed up,” Gark said. “Do you know how to get to Kmart from here?”

  3

  ONCE A YEAR, Tom’s mom made him go through all his clothes and pick out things that no longer fit and box them all up so they could be given to charity. The last time they’d done this, after Tom had gathered up just about every T-shirt that he’d outgrown, a few shirts he used to wear in spite of them being way too big for him because he liked the anime characters that were depicted on the front, and a couple sweatshirts he’d received as Christmas gifts from an uncle who mistakenly thought he liked baseball, or more specifically, the Kansas City Royals, Tom’s mom said, “Great, go put them in the washer.” She told Tom to do this every year, but he’d never really thought about it before.

  “Why?” Tom had asked. “They wash them at the place, right?”

  In what Tom felt was a tremendous act of maturity, he had recently decided he would no longer wear a shirt that was too big for him just because he liked the artwork on it. It was an important personal milestone brought on by a mean girl in his history class calling his favorite shirt “a dress” one day. Now Tom was mostly wearing ironic shirts he and other drama kids had gotten from thrift stores. His newfound thrift-store expertise assured him that not only was everything washed before it was put on the rack, but it was washed in some special thrift-store-only solution that gave every piece of clothing the same smell, which was like cigarettes and a recently flooded church basement.

  “That isn’t the point,” his mom said. “The point is to take the time to do it so we’re not just giving these people our unwashed junk.”

  “But . . . they wash it.”

  “You still need to make the effort.”

  She gave him eight quarters, and he trudged down the stairs of their apartment complex to the laundry room in the sulkiest way possible. The sulking was going pretty well until his foot slid off the second-to-last step, and he had to stop sulking to keep himself from falling.

  They ended up taking the clothes to a big metal drop box in the Kmart parking lot. The box had the logo of the charity painted on the side along with all kinds of rules about what kinds of clothes could and could not be donated. After they got out of the car, his mom tapped a long fingernail on the rule that said CLEAN CLOTHES ONLY PLEASE. Tom wanted to say, Yeah, yeah, yeah, but he’d gotten in trouble before for saying it in the tone he wanted to say it in. He tried to put his donations in the chute on the side of the box in the sulkiest way possible. He made sure not to trip on anything.

  This was the same metal donation box Gark and Tom ended up parking in front of fifteen minutes after Gark had snatched Tom from the (possibly) loving gaze of Lindsy Kopec. Gark shifted the car into park with both hands and took the keys from the ignition.

  “Why do you do everything with two hands?” Tom said.

  “I’m unfamiliar with this apparatus,” Gark said. “It’s extremely different from our modes of transportation. Anyway, this is it!”

  “What?” Tom said.

  “The portal!” Gark said.

  Tom looked at the empty parking lot. He looked at the glowing red Kmart sign. Nothing about this parking lot screamed portal to another dimension. Nothing about it screamed anything. It was a parking lot. If it spoke, it whispered, and the word it whispered was boring. But there was still the chance that Gark would utter a single mystical phrase, and a lightning bolt would shoot out of the cloudless sky, hit the pavement, and open a
shining space-time rift right between them and the closest shopping-cart return stall.

  Gark got out of the van, and Tom did the same. Then Gark said, “Oh!” and opened the driver’s side door again. He leaned in and reemerged holding Tom’s empty water bottle. He crushed the bottle lengthwise and shoved it in the waistband of his pants without offering any explanation. He shut the door again and walked toward Tom.

  “Do you need to lock the doors?” Tom said.

  “Yes,” Gark said, and then did nothing to lock the doors. “C’mon! I’ve got so much to show you!” He ran right up to the donation box. He opened the rusty metal chute, and it gave off a yawning screech.

  A blinding light did not shine out of the chute. No winged beast flew out to carry them away to wherever they were going. There was only the black rectangle of the open chute and Gark looking at Tom.

  “Hop in!” Gark said.

  In movies and books, Tom thought, portals were sometimes pretty inconspicuous. It seemed the more inconspicuous a portal was, the more magical the world on the other side. If that was true, the world on the other side of this donation box would be wall-to-wall wizards.

  What the heck, Tom thought. He’d come this far. Even though the only magical thing he’d seen so far, the face-melting fiasco, was also the grossest and most disturbing thing he’d ever seen, it was still magic.

  Tom took a running start at the chute. He wanted to remember this feeling for when he finally returned to this world and claimed Lindsy Kopec as his one true love: the feeling of not thinking and just doing something. Cutting the small talk and just asking her out to the movies. Just leaning over and kissing her in the moonlight after the movie while they waited for their parents to pick them up. He would do it all the way he did this. He took a dead run at a rusty metal clothing donation box, the chute held open by a guy he thought half an hour ago was his estranged dad, but who turned out to be an emissary from a fantastic universe where Tom was special, where Tom was needed, where Tom would prove the heroism he’d always suspected he had inside of him even though he had no good reason for suspecting it. He reached the box and dived.

  He was sure he would land in another world. Instead he landed at the bottom of the donation box, and it really hurt because the box was metal and there were exactly no clothes in it.

  Then Tom was sure he knew what was really going on. He had fallen prey to a serial killer whose MO was convincing people to climb into a metal donation box where they then suffocated. The guy had just killed his dad and worn his face like a mask. Tom had merely imagined his face melting away magically because he wanted his story to be true. It was selection bias, the theory Mrs. McEllary had talked about in her psychology elective, how sometimes wanting to see something a certain way will make you see it that way.

  Tom thought, A good serial killer name for this guy would be the Donator.

  Then he thought: It’s unfair that the victims of a serial killer don’t get to come up with their killer’s nickname. They know best, after all.

  Tom was mad at his adrenaline. It was supposed to kick in and allow him to fight back. But he didn’t feel adrenalized: he felt scared and tired and above all, dumb. Maybe if he pretended he had become superstrong from an adrenaline rush, Tom thought, he might actually become superstrong from an adrenaline rush. He stood up. He banged his head on the metal ceiling. Okay, so he couldn’t stand up. Still, he remembered where the chute was. He pushed with all his might in that direction. The chute slid open easily and cool air rushed in. Now all he had to do was climb out, physically overpower his would-be murderer, and make his daring escape. Or maybe his would-be murderer had left already and he wouldn’t have to physically overpower him. That would be nice.

  Then the Donator’s face filled the rectangle of the open chute. He was back to finish the job.

  “Here I come!” he said cheerfully.

  The Donator leapt into the chute. His head hit Tom’s head, causing that horrible head-on-head collision pain that always made Tom wonder how soccer players could stand to head-butt anyone when it clearly hurt them just as much as it hurt their target. Tom’s best friend, Kyle, had played soccer throughout middle school. If Tom left this parking lot alive, he would have to remember to ask Kyle how they did it.

  Again Tom landed on the floor of the box, this time on his back, this time with a full-grown human on top of him. The wind had been knocked out of him, and he couldn’t get it back while he was being crushed by a person. He wondered if this was what it felt like when your lungs collapsed. He hoped the Donator would not be mad that Tom had damaged two of his precious organs before he’d had a chance to surgically remove them. If the Donator cut out people’s organs, it would make the name twice as clever.

  “Sorry!” the Donator said, and rolled off of Tom.

  “Listen,” Tom panted. The long-awaited adrenaline was giving him just enough diaphragm strength to beg for his life, which, if he was honest, was a way more Tom thing to do than making some last great physical effort. “I’m not gonna say that I’ve got like, rich parents or anything. We’re not rich. But . . . but . . . anything we have . . . I mean . . . my mom would . . .”

  “What are you talking about?” the Donator said.

  “Just please don’t kill me.”

  The Donator burst out laughing. “Kill you? You’re the Chosen One! If I killed you everyone would hate me. Even more then they already do,” the Donator said. “The portal’s timed. Give it a couple of minutes.”

  “Okay,” Tom said.

  “Kind of creepy here in the dark, though, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I think I have something for that.”

  The guy Tom thought of as the Donator snapped the fingers of his right hand, and it was like someone had switched on a light inside the donation box.

  At first Tom wished this hadn’t happened, because the only thing worse than being inside a dark metal box you could just assume was filled with grime and roaches and a crazy guy was being in a well-lit metal box where you could see the exact location of the grime and the roaches and the crazy guy. Then Tom saw where the light was coming from. It wasn’t a flashlight or any kind of bulb. It was a flame, but not a flame given off by a lighter or a match. It was a purple flame rising from the palm of the crazy guy’s right hand. It was unlike anything Tom had ever seen. It didn’t burn like a normal flame. It poured upward from his box companion’s hand. It was a tiny upside-down waterfall of purple light and mild heat. The man held it close to his face. He looked excited but not entirely confident in his mastery of it, like a kid holding a hamster.

  “The Tame Flame,” he said. “Not my people’s native magic but still, pretty cool, right?”

  Tom nodded. So, he thought, the guy actually was Gark. The most negative thing Tom could imagine—that he was about to be serial killed—turned out to be fake, and the most fantastic thing—that this guy was actually from some other universe—might actually be true.

  “You guys have roaches too?” Gark said, noticing some of the box’s amenities. “We have roaches where I’m from, so you won’t miss them.”

  “That’s good,” Tom said.

  “Shouldn’t be long now,” Gark said, “which is good because—c’mon, c’mon, don’t be like that, hey . . .”

  The fire in Gark’s hand was becoming more firelike, the orderly droplets of purple light becoming tongues and curls of standard fire. It grew wilder and crawled up Gark’s arm. In its tame form it had burned silently. Now it popped and hissed, seeming to want to make up for all the time it had spent pretending not to be a dangerous fire.

  “Don’t worry,” Gark said, “I can . . . Hey, flame! Hey! Let’s—HEY! OW! OWWWWW!”

  Gark started whipping his flaming right arm around what little space there was inside the box.

  “Roll!” Tom said. “Roll on it!”
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  “Okay!” Gark said. He threw himself onto the floor of the box. Tom huddled as far away from the burning as possible while Gark rolled, banging repeatedly into the far side of the box, howling in pain.

  The light went out. Tom could hear Gark panting as he finally lay still.

  “Good idea,” Gark said.

  One second later, it was brighter than ever in the box, because every piece of Gark’s clothing burst into flame.

  Tom lunged toward Gark to try and help him beat down the fire, but he didn’t land on Gark. He didn’t land anywhere. He had been flying through the tiny space in the box and then, instantly, he was underwater.

  It wasn’t like he’d dived into a pool. It was like he’d just appeared, submerged, in the deep end. He was confused and panicked until he realized he was underwater, and then he was thrilled even though he still had no idea what was going on. The water felt glorious after being in a metal box that was insufferably hot even before it became filled with fire. It would put out Gark’s full-body inferno. Best of all, it meant that they were through the portal, in another world. Tom hoped this entire world wasn’t underwater, but hey, he was the Chosen One: he probably had gills.

  4

  TOM OPENED HIS eyes. They immediately started to burn. Then they really started to burn, and he really started to panic, and in his panic his mouth sprang open and foul-tasting liquid rushed in: soap. His mouth was full of soap. He hadn’t gotten in trouble for swearing as a kid and even if he had, his parents weren’t from the 1950s, so he’d never had a mouthful of soap. It was not the kind of new experience Tom was excited to have, and he wanted it to be over.

  He saw Gark a few feet away, floundering in the soapy water, little charred bits of his clothing floating all around him. Gark saw Tom, gave him a double thumbs-up, and smiled, showing all his teeth. He seemed to immediately regret the decision to open his mouth.

  Tom swam upward. There was intermittent light from above, like they were underneath a layer of lily pads. As he got closer to the surface, he realized it wasn’t lily pads or any other kind of aquatic plant. It was clothes.