“This feels creepy,” Squirrel Girl whispered.
“Chk chukka,” Tippy-Toe whispered back.
“Yeah, there’s a creepy vibe coming from that house for sure, but I meant us, too, watching them here all sneaky-like. And really, we’re the creepier ones, right? I mean, plenty of non-creepy people watch TV in the dark.”
“Chkka chk,” Tippy said.
“It is weird, right? How does anyone hold so still? They haven’t moved at all in, like, the what, fifteen minutes we’ve been here watching. That’s probably unhealthy.”
Squirrel Girl’s hero phone buzzed, and she pulled it out from one of her utility belt pouches.
ANA SOFÍA
Find anything? Do not answer if currently battling evil
SQUIRREL GIRL
No evil just couchpotatoing which is kind of evil from a personal health perspective
ANA SOFÍA
Maybe MM just made it look like the account belonged to Mike’s dad
SQUIRREL GIRL
The people watching TV don’t look evil
ANA SOFÍA
That’s the worst kind of evil that masquerades as not evil
SQUIRREL GIRL
But the dog bombs and the squirrel traps seemed so evil I guess I was expecting a volcano lair you know
ANA SOFÍA
No volcanoes in jersey. Yet
Tippy-Toe chittered softly, and Squirrel Girl looked up. The father had stood and was staring out the window.
“Oops,” Squirrel Girl hissed, leaning farther back under the tree’s canopy. “Do you think they saw?”
“Chkka,” Tippy-Toe said.
The probably-Mike’s-dad figure pulled the curtains completely closed. Now even Squirrel Vision was no help.
“Do you have X-ray vision?” Squirrel Girl asked Tippy-Toe.
The squirrel made a clicking noise in the back of her throat in the way that meant, “Of course not. No one does. Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Yeah,” Squirrel Girl said. “Me neither.”
She jumped down from the tree and hopped across the street.
“Chkka chk?”
“I know, I know,” Squirrel Girl said. “I’m not engaging. I promised my mom I wouldn’t. I’m just going to knock. They’re probably not robots really, right? We’ll just make sure and go home and not be Peeping Toms anymore.”
She knocked three times, put her hands on her hips, and smiled. Just like selling Girl Scout cookies back in California.
The door opened, and the dark-haired woman from the parent-teacher conference smiled back at her. Her smell was definitely not normal.
“Hello,” the woman said. “Can I help you?”
“Hi,” Squirrel Girl said. “I’m Squirrel Girl!”
The woman nodded. “Hello, Squirrel Girl,” she said.
This was as far as Squirrel Girl had planned ahead in the conversation, and now she scrambled for reasons to explain why she had knocked.
“I’m…uh…going door-to-door,” she said. “Looking for e…uh…eel. Um. Eels.”
She had been about to say “evil,” but realized that would definitely tip them off if they were evil and freak them out if they weren’t.
The woman tilted her head. “For eels?” she asked.
Squirrel Girl scanned what she could see inside the house beyond the woman, looking for something, anything, that might be evil, or obvious proof of robots masquerading as parents, or Mike in trouble.
“Would you like to come in?” the woman asked.
“Why, yes,” Squirrel Girl said. “Yes, I would, thank you.”
Stay back, do not engage! Good, solid, parental advice. But something about a five-foot squirrel tail waving around behind her gave her so much confidence she just couldn’t remember why she wasn’t supposed to engage.
So when the woman stepped aside, Squirrel Girl walked in.
The living room looked almost irritatingly normal: Brown carpet. White walls. Sofa facing a flat-screen TV. Squirrel Girl’s lip curled.
“Who is it, dear?” came a deep voice from the next room, followed by the very un-evil sound of a kitchen cupboard closing.
“It’s Squirrel Girl, dear,” the woman said. “She is going door-to-door looking for eels.”
A pleasant-looking dark-haired white man appeared in the hallway, holding an empty drinking glass in his hand. “What a noble endeavor,” the man said. “Though I’m afraid we have no eels here.”
The man took a drink from his glass. From his empty glass.
And then she heard a scream.
“What was that?” Squirrel Girl asked.
“What was what?” the woman said.
The scream came again, and this time Squirrel Girl could definitely detect the edges of the word “help” in it.
“That,” she said. “That scream.”
“It is not an eel,” the man said.
“We have no eels in the basement,” the woman said.
The two parents shuffled back until they were standing in front of a closed door.
“Help!” the muffled sound echoed again, clearly from behind that basement door.
“Where is Mike?” Squirrel Girl asked. “Is Mike here?”
“Yes,” said the father.
“No,” said the mother, at the same time.
“Okeydoke,” Squirrel Girl said, taking a step forward. “I’m just going to check.”
The parents went rigid, their fingers splaying, arms locking straight at their sides.
“We can’t let you do that,” they said. With a ratcheting sound, blades slid from each of their fingertips, and they raised their hands up in perfect unison.
“Whoa, hold on,” Squirrel Girl said, lifting up her own hands. “Can’t we talk about this?”
Their wrists clicked and then started spinning. What had once been hands had turned into something like four industrial-size blenders.
“So, definitely robots,” Squirrel Girl said. She darted down and leaped underneath the blades, rolling and popping up behind the two killer robot parents.
The robots swiveled around to their target nearly as fast as squirrels, hand blades still spinning. But with the movement the blades clattered into each other. There was a terrible sound of scraping, bending, and snapping metal. The robots pulled at each other, their hands intertwined and locked together by bent metal blades.
“While you guys figure that out,” Squirrel Girl said, reaching for the handle to the basement door, “I’ll just—”
The robots ejected their android hands at the wrists, the mass of twisted metal dropping to the floor. The father kicked the still-twitching hand blades at her. She ducked, just stopping herself from trying to catch the thing and throw it back, because ouch, too many sharp bits.
The robots marched toward her like handless zombies, arms out. Their mouths opened like they were going to speak, but then just kept going, their rubbery cheeks tearing as they gaped much wider than humanly possible. The mouths clamped shut then opened again as they shambled closer, like weird head-mounted versions of Pac-Man.
“Yeah! Definitely creepy!” Squirrel Girl shouted. Her workout video training kicked in, and she instinctively enacted Commander Quiff’s Blow Their Nose Kick.
The force of a leg that could propel a girl onto a rooftop slammed into one head, and then the other. The heads popped off and clonked onto the carpet.
“Gah! I’m so sorry,” Squirrel Girl said. She crouched to the heads. “I normally don’t behead people, really, not even robot people. You just freaked me out.”
The heads chomped at her pointlessly a few more times, and then slowed to a stop, robotic eyes closing.
“Well,” Squirrel Girl said. “That was—”
She was interrupted by a black loafer thumping into her tail. And then another. And then a pair of black pumps. Someone was throwing shoes at her.
She turned. The headless, handless bodies of the robots were twitching with the wincing sound of grinding metal. It w
asn’t someone throwing shoes. It was something. Two things. Two headless handless robot things. They’d expelled the shoes off their legs to reveal nasty pointed spikes instead of feet.
“You’re not actually dead, are you?” Squirrel Girl said. “That makes me feel better about knocking your heads off.”
The robots each bent at the waist, pushing the stumps of their necks together, wires snaking out like little tentacles toward each other. The two bodies joined into one freakish eight-legged spider thing.
“Okaaay,” Squirrel Girl said. “I thought the chomping-head thing was creepy….”
She looked for somewhere to leap, but the room was too small and the spider-bot was too big. It charged her, and Squirrel Girl scampered up the wall and wedged herself in the top corner of the living room. The robot swiveled in her direction.
“How can you see me?” Squirrel Girl asked. “You don’t even have eyes anymore.”
The spider-bot crawled to a spot just below her and stuck two of its spike-tipped legs into the wall. It heaved itself up and stuck the other two in, climbing.
“Right,” Squirrel-Girl said. “Spider-bot. I guess climbing walls is a thing you do.” She scampered aside, but not quick enough. One of the handless limbs whacked her leg, and she lost her grip. As she struggled to grab hold again, one of the spike-pointed limbs reared up to strike.
“Oh no, you don’t,” Squirrel Girl said, dropping just as the spike struck. She grabbed hold of the leg and, remembering when she told Ana Sofía that a squirrel’s bite is fifty times more powerful than a human’s, bit down. She cleared easily through chunks of rubber robot skin and found the thick metal skeleton. It began to bend between her teeth.
The leg shook, not like it was breaking, but like it was a wet dog trying to get dry. Squirrel Girl held tight, but the ride was the kind that made you regret everything you’d eaten that day. Hoping she timed it right, Squirrel Girl let go of the leg on an out-shake. She flew away from the spider-bot, spinning into the curtains of the big picture window and right through the glass. She tumbled across the front yard, her claws shredding the curtains wrapped around her as she rolled. She hit the trunk of the sturdy maple, tore herself free of the shredded curtains, and leaped to her feet.
“Chkka?” Tippy-Toe asked.
Squirrel Girl checked all her parts. “I’m okay.”
The spider-bot crawled out of the Squirrel Girl—size hole in the window and twitched two stumpy forelegs at her.
“Ha!” Squirrel Girl shouted. “Sucka! You should have kept me caged inside! Outside is my world!”
She stood in front of the tree, put her hands up to her head like antlers and stuck out her tongue. “Nanna-nanna boo-boo, you can’t get me! I’m freakin’ Squirrel Girl, you trash heap. If the place has a tree in it, I own it!”
From the branches, Tippy-Toe chittered in alarm.
“Don’t worry, Tip,” she whispered. “I’m taunting it. I have a plan.”
The robot charged. Squirrel Girl stayed where she was, faking a frightened expression that probably wouldn’t win any Oscars. Just before the robot reached her, she jumped, tucking and spinning over the evil-robot-parent-spider-thing as it slammed headlong into the tree trunk. The shudder of branches and cracking of wood woke the night.
The robot twitched, momentarily stunned, and then began lashing out at the tree as if the maple had attacked it. Branches flew and the tree creaked.
“Not the tree!” Squirrel Girl leaped to stop it, but already it was too late. The tree was tipping. The wrong way.
She gave it a hard push in the direction of the robot.
“TIMBERRR!” she shouted. The tree fell hard, bouncing down upon the robot, and then up and over onto a car parked in the driveway next door. A car alarm shouted a BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, BEEP.
All over the street, people were peering out windows and cracking open their doors.
“Oops,” Squirrel Girl said. “Sorry!”
The robot twitched where it had been smashed and then pushed itself up again. Two of its legs were hanging limp, but it turned quickly enough and shuddered toward Squirrel Girl again.
“Sheesh! What does it take to turn you off?”
Sparks popped from the few exposed wires where the parent-bot’s necks had joined. Squirrel Girl pounced. She landed hard on the robot’s back and began tearing at the sparking spot, getting little jolts of electricity with every swipe. It was like licking a battery with her hands. A big battery. On the back of a runaway bull. And it wasn’t working. She could see more wires through the crack, but her fingers were too short and her hands too big to get at them.
The robot ran wild, trying at turns to buck her off or reach onto its own back with one of its flailing limbs. It scampered onto the fallen tree and began to frantically smash its body against it and the car the tree was lying on. The car’s windows shattered and at least one of the tires popped. A face in the house window was staring openmouthed at the destruction.
“Sorry,” Squirrel Girl said again. “Robots, right?”
The robot scampered off the car on its three remaining spike-tipped feet, stamping holes in the driveway concrete, and then the sidewalk, and then the road.
“Tippy!” Squirrel Girl shouted from the robot’s back. “Where are you?”
She heard a chitter and saw a flash of pink. Tippy-Toe was in a tree with a handful of other squirrels watching the robot as it tore into another yard, destroying what was once beautiful shrubbery.108 At her call, Tippy scampered closer.
“I need,” said Squirrel Girl, between the hard bucks of the spiderbot, “someone to…crawl in there…and chew wire!”
Tippy-Toe chittered something, but over the sound of the robot’s rampage and the fire hydrant it just destroyed, Squirrel Girl could not make it out. Water shot out like from a cannon, soaking her hoodie. Sopping, it flapped low over her eyes.
“Can you—whoa!” The robot bucked hard as it trampled a mailbox, and Squirrel Girl almost lost her grip. “Can you do that?” she asked. “Chew wire? It might take…smaller ones….”
Tippy-Toe looked back at a gathered group of her clan, among them Sour Cream and her wee triplets, the Chives.109 On the sidewalk, the human neighbors had gathered. Among them a baby began to cry. Tippy sighed, gave Squirrel Girl a thumbs-up, and ran off to the other squirrels.
A few spider-bot bucks later, the Chives joined Squirrel Girl on the back of the robot. The tiny squirrels’ claws slid around on the metal of the robot so Squirrel Girl had to hand-feed them, one by one, into the exposed electrical hole. They scampered in, and then, almost as if they had tripped a do-as-much-harm-as-possible switch, the robot turned directly toward the human crowd and began to charge.
“Aaah!” Squirrel Girl shouted. “Hurry, fuzzy friends!”
The robot continued its charge.
“Okay, okay,” Squirrel Girl muttered. “I can stop this, I can stop this.”
She took a huge leap in front of the charging spider, propelled by her own legs and the momentum of the robot, skidding to a landing just in front of the gathered crowd. She had about two seconds before the robot reached her. It was actually pretty scary on this end. She could understand now why everyone was screaming. It’d been much more fun riding the thing.
She planted her feet, putting her arms up like she was just going to try to stop a charging football player and not an out-of-control robot spider. She clenched her teeth, closed her eyes…and the robot stopped. It clattered to a halt a foot in front of her, completely immobile.
“YEAH!” she shouted, turning to the crowd behind her, fists up. She expected a cheer, but they all just sort of stared.
“You’re in shock,” she said. “I get it.”
Three fuzzy little forms emerged from the wreckage. Their hair, what was left of it, was standing on end.
“You did it, little friends!” Squirrel Girl said. “You saved the day!”
One of the Chives gave her a soft chitter. Tippy-Toe gathered them up and leaped
away, taking them back to Sour Cream.
The gathered neighbors were talking to one another in low, urgent voices. Some were making phone calls—to the police, no doubt. Squirrel Girl looked back at the path of destruction the robot had made. Yards were torn up, at least two cars were totaled, and the road would have to be completely resurfaced. Not to mention the unforgivable destruction of that sturdy maple. Evil robots were bad news.
“Omigosh,” she said. “Mike! I completely forgot!”
She ran back to the Romanger house and leaped through the big broken window. In her excitement she tore the basement door right off its hinges.
“Whoops,” she said. “Squirrel adrenaline, I guess.”
“What?” a weak voice sounded from below.
She jumped from the top step straight to the basement floor.
Tied up in a wooden chair in the middle of the room was Mike. Squirrel Girl tightened her damp hood and swished her identity-distracting tail.
“I said,” Squirrel Girl said in a voice she hoped sounded older and rougher than Doreen’s, “I am here to save you.”
“Oh,” Mike said. “That’s good.”
Yay! Squirrel Girl was saving a real human person! Didn’t that mean she was closer than ever to becoming a Super Hero? She cut Mike’s bindings easily with her claws. He wasn’t tied with ropes or chains, but with what looked to her like a bunch of shoelaces. She felt a little sad for Mike, who didn’t have enough squirrel strength to break shoelaces.110
“You are safe now, citizen,” she said, putting her hands on her hips.
“Thank you, Squirrel Girl,” Mike said, standing. He didn’t rub his wrists the way people did in movies after getting untied, so maybe he was tougher than she’d thought.
“Now to the task of finding your real parents,” she said.
“My real parents?” Mike asked. “Oh, don’t worry about them. They’re gone.”