“Little people like the animals,” said J.Lo, nodding and folding his hands. “Is true with the Boov as well.”
“You know what’s weird, though? It’s weird that the ark would be such a kids’ story, you know? I mean, it’s…really a story about death. Every person who isn’t in Noah’s family? They die. Every animal, apart from the two of each on the boat? They die. They all die in the flood. Billions of creatures. It’s the worst tragedy ever,” I finished, my voice tied off by a knot in my chest. I’d been speaking too fast without breathing, and I sucked down air before speaking again.
“What the hell,” I said, “pardon my language, was that doing on my wallpaper?”
J.Lo understood me well enough by now not to answer. So I looked off to the west in silence, and saw a thousand miles of hopeless wasteland before we reached Arizona, with only a terrible new purple god to watch over it
J.Lo’s hand was on my shoulder suddenly, and he said, “Rainbow.”
I looked up. First at him and then at the sky where he was pointing.
“A doubled rainbow,” he said. “These are lucky. I have been missing rainbows. On Boovworld we had them alls the time.”
It was a perfect, bright, unbroken rainbow stretching over the western horizon like a door. It was so beautiful it looked fake. Above it was another, fainter one in reverse, and I exhaled and thought, Of course. Of course there’s a rainbow. ’Bout time. We sat and looked at it for ten minutes. I stared until I couldn’t stand sitting still any longer.
I hopped up. “We should go. Don’t you think? Don’t you think it’s safe to go now?”
J.Lo looked at me funny. He probably wondered why I was smiling.
“Yes. I am thinking it is. Safe. Safe for going.”
“We have a lot of ground to cover, after all,” I said, bounding back to the car. “It’ll be at least a few days before we get to Arizona. And once we’re there, we have to help everyone get rid of the Gorg. Or the Takers. Whatever you want to call them.”
“Get…get rid of—?”
“We’ll do it,” I said, looking J.Lo square in the face. “I think we will. But I’ll…we’ll…y’know—need your help, maybe.”
“Yes. Okay, then.”
The sun was really coming through now, and birds were beginning to test the air. A cool breeze that smelled like pennies brushed my face. We got back in the car, and I hopped it down through the construction, landing again and again on an extra-thick cushion of whatever it was that made Slushious float. Each time we dropped to a lower story, my stomach leaped like I had a rabbit in me. At least once I couldn’t stop myself from laughing. And when we reached the surface of the great big wading pool that was Florida, I turned west, speeding into a beautiful day that seemed more and more like a promise.
“I’m sorry, but it’s still pulling to the left,” I said as I drove Slushious through a really nowhere part of Texas. J.Lo had made a new fin out of the side of a green Dumpster, but it wasn’t adjusted right.
“Yes. I am knowing now what is wrong. Pull it over for fix—MAA!” he said suddenly. “Seventeen!”
He was pointing out the window at another armadillo. He couldn’t get enough of them.
“What is it with you and those things?” I asked.
“Ah. They look like something we had on Boovworld.”
“Not those koobish things you mentioned?”
“No,” said J.Lo. “The long-eared koobish is taller. Withto a short nose. And dark curledy hair.”
“Is there a short-eared koobish, then?”
“Mmmyes…” said J.Lo. “But it is technically not really a koobish. Is more alike a kind of singing pumpkin.”
We had conversations like this all the time, where I just eventually gave up.
I pulled off the road and down a ramp that emptied right next to a MicrocosMart parking lot. So I drove up to the store entrance, which was barricaded by a big security gate. And that was interesting, because I thought it might mean there was still some stuff inside.
“Twenty minutes,” said J.Lo as he opened his toolbox. This could have meant anything. J.Lo was either one of those people with no real concept of time, or else he actually didn’t know how long a minute was. I crouched down to have a look at the lock on the gate.
It was like a bike lock. It needed a cylindrical key, and couldn’t be picked with a hairpin.
I turned back to J.Lo and shouted, “Can you toss me the purple thing?”
“Which one?”
“Um…shoot. You know, the purple thing. With the things?”
J.Lo reached into his toolbox and threw me what I wanted.
“Thanks.”
“Do not even mention it.”
I pressed the narrow end of the purple thing against the keyhole and pushed one of the things. A black fluid oozed into the hole, filling every nook. After a few seconds it had hardened, and I turned the new key and pulled up the gate.
“I’m going inside,” I said.
J.Lo didn’t look up. “See if they have shaving cream,” he said.
“What flavor?”
“Mountain Freshness.”
I entered the store and saw I was right: there was still a lot of merchandise on the shelves. I could have filled the car with all kinds of stuff. Instead I just filled a basket with the things we really needed—food, water, a toothbrush for J.Lo so he wouldn’t keep using mine, a new toothbrush for me for roughly the same reason, and so forth.
This time twenty minutes must have meant about a minute and a half, because I ran into J.Lo in the stationery section. He was carrying armfuls of junk we didn’t need.
“What is all this?” I said. “Is that a hockey stick? What are we going to do with a hockey stick?”
“I do not know,” said J.Lo. “I like it.”
“It’s because you’re a boy,” I said. “Boys always want to carry sticks around. It’s like a sickness with you. What about all this?”
I was looking at a heap of paper, ink pens, pencils, and a sparkly pencil sharpener shaped like a frog’s head.
“Is for drawing. I have not drawed in a long time.”
I could see this was a big deal to him. “Fine. But not all this other stuff.”
“You have stuffs.”
“I have stuff we really need,” I said. “Look, I know I kinda just grabbed everything I could get my hands on before, but that was different.”
“Whyfor?”
“That was before I decided we were going to get rid of the Gorg…before I knew that people would be returning to their homes, hoping their stuff was still there. Now it’s stealing. We can only take what we really need.”
“Ooh,” said J.Lo. “We need this.” He was holding up a baseball cap with a little battery-powered fan hanging down from the bill.
“That wouldn’t even fit on your head.”
J.Lo frowned at it.
“It goes on your head?”
“C’mon,” I said. “We should get going.”
“But we will be needing the tiny fan head for the Arizona hotness. Your car has not any air conditions.”
“It doesn’t have air-conditioning,” I said, “because you drank all the Freon.”
J.Lo set the hat down. “We should gets going.”
We stepped back outside, blinking in the sunshine, and I locked the security gate.
“You know,” I said as we got back into Slushious, “you could always just clone some more Freon.”
We drove up the ramp to the highway.
“Neh,” said J.Lo with a wave. “It never tastes as good when I make it. MAA! Eighteen!”
“That’s the same one.”
“Oh.”
It was nighttime when we made the decision to change course.
We were riding off into the sunset. You really can do that in the west. The sunsets do something there that they don’t do in Pennsylvania. The sun holds on a little tighter to the day, and has to be dragged down screaming, with a kind of angry beauty that makes
the sky burn away into pinks and oranges and violets. It’s unrealistic. You see the day flame out through a car windshield like you were watching it on TV, with thick trails of clouds like party streamers, and blazing light, and you can’t help but think that that’s really a bit much, isn’t it? Let’s not overdo it. Then the next night it all happens again, but brighter.
So on this night the sun went down, fighting as usual, and J.Lo started to make sort of obvious yawning noises, and I was ignoring him because The Trip Was Taking Too Long. Texas was all there had ever been and all there ever would be, and I was getting panicky. I’ve since heard about deep-sea scuba divers going nuts just thinking about all of the water above them and below them and all around, so that some have been known to suddenly freak out, rip their tanks off their backs, and kick hard for the surface. I was going through a similar sort of thing, where I had to fight the urge to halt the car, leap out the door, and make a run for it.
I mean, who ever thought a state that big was a good idea? It’s just arrogant.
So I was trying to get as far across as possible before we had to stop for the night. Then the car suddenly shook, and I thought the sun was going down again, as a glowing ball soared over us and toward the horizon, fast. Then there was another one, and I saw it was trailing hoses. Boovish ships. The big kind, like huge fishbowls of light. There was a third and fourth, tearing toward the Gorg. This was hard to see, because at this time of night the Gorg ship was only visible as a great disk of blackness where it blocked out the stars.
I looked over at J.Lo. He was alert, no more fake yawns and heavy eyes.
“They are probably to shooting at them,” he said.
I looked back at the horizon. “The Gorg, you mean? They’re shooting?”
“The Boov,” he answered. “They are probably to shooting at the Gorg. We will not be ables to see.”
I realized what he meant. The Boov guns didn’t make any light, and the Gorg ship was too dark to see any damage. But then I saw a flash of light in the big circle of darkness.
“Ha! There,” I said. “Your guys got ’em there! You could see the—”
“No,” said J.Lo.
Then a Boov ship, barely visible in the distance, burst like a flashbulb. It exploded too close to another ship, and that one bled light as it sank as slow as a soap bubble toward the earth. You couldn’t hear the Gorg fire their guns from here, but the destruction of each Boov ship was loud like a firework in your skull. Suddenly the Boovish weapons, which had always seemed so sneaky and sinister, seemed almost like a gentle way to kill.
“J.Lo…I…”
There was another flash from the Gorg, and two seconds later a third ship went down. The fourth turned fast and headed back toward us, but it wasn’t any use. Another flash, and the glass bowl was full of fire that crawled down each hoseleg like they were cigarettes.
I had come to a stop without meaning to.
“I would like to keep driving,” said J.Lo.
Before I could answer, there was another flash in the darkness.
“That’s weird,” I said. “They fired again, but there aren’t—”
The blast punched hard into the ground, about fifty yards from Slushious, and pushed up a tidal wave of dirt and weeds that rained down as we rolled from the shock. Pig screeched and tumbled around the cabin. A moment later we were right-side up again, with a broken back window and a missing fin. The new one, of course.
“AAAAAAAAA!” J.Lo shouted. “DriveDriveDriveDriveDrive!”
I turned off the road and into the desert. Slushious started off slowly, too slowly, but then we got a push as another Gorg barrage exploded behind us.
“They…they aren’t really shooting at us, right?” I said. I couldn’t believe it.
“Oh, no,” said J.Lo, “they are probably just playing a little jokeYES THEY ARE SHOOTING AT US!”
The Gorg backed J.Lo up by way of destroying a small mountain just to our left. I swerved and hit the gas.
“But…from there? They’re shooting at us from, like, Mexico?”
A convenience store ahead of us erupted in a mushroom cloud of flame and old magazines. J.Lo gestured at it impatiently.
“Okay! Okay!” I shouted. “They’re shooting at us! I just thought maybe it was a coincidence.”
“Oh, yes. You are always having to be right about everything. If Gratuity says it is a coincidence—”
Another explosion sent Slushious into a tailspin and spared me from the rest of J.Lo’s point.
“Superfuel?” I asked, feeling sick.
“Alls gone! Nothing even to clone.”
“What do I do?”
“Just keep to driving! They will lose us soon.” There was another blast, but farther away. “We are wicked lucky to be small and hard to hit. The Gorg probably only were noticing us because the Boov flied so close.”
The blasts had stopped. But I kept driving farther into the desert, herding a pack of terrified coyotes ahead of me. I looked back to check on Pig, who was cleaning herself spitefully on a floor mat. Then I looked at J.Lo.
“I’m sorry,” I said. It was such a useless thing to say.
“Yes,” said J.Lo. “We should not always try to fight them in this way. It has not ever worked.”
“We couldn’t see the Gorg ship. Maybe you Boov did a lot of damage.”
J.Lo didn’t answer.
“We’ll figure out something new,” I said. “Maybe your people and my people will figure out some new way together.”
J.Lo smiled a little, quickly, then faced forward again. “We haveto drive more north. We are having to put more space between us and the Nimrogs.”
“Right,” I said. “What?”
“We haveto drive more—”
“There are Nimrogs now, too?” I asked. “Who are they?”
J.Lo fiddled with the tape player to tilt his seat back. “All Gorg are Nimrogs. All Nimrogs are now Gorg, also, but they did not always used to be.”
“I can’t even imagine what we’re talking about.”
“We are talking about the Nimrog race. Tip says she is going to get rid of them.”
“Yeah,” I breathed. I suddenly felt like I’d promised to lift a horse over my head. “But…what is Gorg…like, a nickname?”
“Oh, no. Gorg is their real name. Gratuity is Tip’s real name,” he said, then he made a noise like a drowning yodeler—“OOOlahluhlaaharlHEEdoo is J.Lo’s real name. Taker is their nickname. They have many other nicknames; they are given them alls the time. Some people call them poomps, pardon my languages.”
I tried to stay calm. “So all the Nimrogs…all of them…are named Gorg?”
“Yes.”
“All of them?”
“Alls of them, yes.”
“How…how many are there?” I asked.
“How many Nimrogs?”
“How many Gorg.”
“They are the same thing.”
“Then why did you ask?”
“There are many, manys Nimrogs. As many as they are wanting. They can always make more.”
“I swear I will crash the car into a coyote if you don’t start making sense.”
“Ah,” said J.Lo. “Hm. Ahhh…long ago, before perhaps Tip was born…How many years are you?”
“Eleven and a half.”
J.Lo wheezed and sat upright. “Eleven! You have only eleven years? When I was eleven I was barely out of my inflatable training clothes.”
“Back to the Nimrogs,” I said.
“Yes. The Nimrogs had once many names. Like the Boov. Like the humans. But the Nimrogs, these are so awful they can not to even get along with themselfs. They fight each other—over land, over ideas. When alls the land belongs to one group of Nimrogs who think the same ideas, they find reasons for fighting one another. The right-handers fight the left-handers. Then the left-handers who enjoy musical theater fight at the left-handers who do not enjoy musical theater. And sos on. One day only two Nimrogs remain, named Aarfux and Gorg. A
arfux falls for the old your-shoelace-is-untied trick, and then there is only Gorg.”
“Gorg,” I repeated. “There was only one Nimrog named Gorg.”
“By this time, yes. Beforethen there were many Nimrogs named Gorg. Gorg was a popular boy name, like Ethel.”
I was aching to mention that Ethel was neither popular nor a boy’s name, but I felt we were really getting somewhere.
“But then…did the Gorg…did the Nimrogs always…” I trailed off. “How did Gorg make more Gorg?”
“He cloned. With teleclone machines, likewith I make the gasoline.”
“But you said that was impossible.”
“Impossible for the Boov,” sighed J.Lo. “The Nimrogs found a way. They took the Boovish telecloners and changed them up.”
“How did they get Boovish telecloners?”
“We…gave them.”
“J.Lo!”
“I know, I know.”
J.Lo explained that it was good strategy at the time. A lot of the early Nimrog wars were over resources like fuel. It was common for the Nimrogs on the losing side of battle to destroy their food and fuel and whatever so it wouldn’t fall into enemy hands. The Nimrogs eliminated everything good on their planet this way. So different groups started raiding other planets, stealing what they could. The Boov thought teleclone machines could stop all that—if the Nimrogs could clone what they needed, they wouldn’t need to leave home. So the Nimrogs got the machines by promising to stay in their own neighborhood. It worked for a while, but somehow they managed to start cloning and teleporting complicated things. No one knows how they did it.
“At firsts they cloned and teleported only dead things, like food. No one Nimrog wanted to be the first to try. But when Gorg was left onto the planet by himself, he had not anything to lose,” said J.Lo. “Gorg became the worst kind of enemy. He had outlived all other Nimrogs. He was the most tough and strong. He could not get sick, and would not ever tire. And he had only to set one teleclone booth onto your planet, and soon there could there be a thousand Gorg, or a million. They could have Gorg everywheres. They could even cover their ships with them.”