I gulped and began to feel faint.
“This is superconcentrated Purple Pow carrot juice. One taste and you’ve saved your uncle. Say no, and he takes a deadly swim.”
I looked at Rain in the cage. I don’t mean to be rude, but would it have killed him to break out of his cage right then and stop the mayor from making me take a drink?
“Time’s ticking,” the mayor said impatiently. “It’s now or never.”
“And you promise that if I drink it you won’t hurt him?” I said, still trying to buy some more time for Juliet to arrive.
“I promise,” Mayor Lapin said.
I walked slowly toward the fountain.
I could feel the crowd holding their collective cute breath and watching my every move. I stopped a couple of feet from the mayor, and he reached out and offered me the juice.
I knew there was an antidote on the way, but I still wasn’t thrilled about drinking concentrated carrot juice or becoming a rabbit.
“Take a drink.”
I lifted the bottle toward my mouth slowly. The smell of egg filled my nostrils, and my throat began to constrict. I felt nauseous, but I had no other choice.
“Tell me again about your plan?” I tried.
“Stop stalling,” he ordered. “Drink!”
“Hold your sea horses.”
I put the bottle to my lips and took a swig. My eyes went wide, and the hair on the back of my neck and tentacles stood up. Rain was right—it tasted like supercheesy pizza, nachos, and doughnuts mixed together. Maybe I had vegetables all wrong.
I quickly took another drink.
“Wow,” Mayor Lapin said, bothered. “Don’t drink so much. That stuff is strong. Two drops can instantly . . .”
My head grew light, and my vision went gray. I felt my body rocking back and forth, and then, like an elevator dropping, I fell straight to the floor. I shook my head and felt my long ears swinging back and forth. My nose twitched, and my teeth grew while making a sort of creaking noise. My arms and legs shook like the static on an old TV.
Pop!
I stumbled out of my clothes and onto the ground. Looking left I saw a paw—my paw! There was no doubt about it—I was bunnified.
My arms tingled and my legs thumped. I looked around, but it was difficult to see very well because my mask was still wrapped around my head.
Glancing up, I could see Mayor Lapin. He was reaching down toward me! I shook the mask from my head to see better, but it came off a little too late. The mayor grabbed my furry torso and picked me up. He lifted me in front of his face, so close I could have touched his long, crooked tooth, and looked directly into my eyes.
“I must admit, Perry, you are much more appealing in rabbit form.”
I twitched my nose and wriggled my whiskers.
“I also must admit that I don’t feel like keeping my word today. Let’s finish you off. Maybe I’ll make a nice furry hat out of you and a pair of gloves out of your uncle.”
This was not the way I thought I would die. I always thought I would go out in a blaze of glory, fighting crime in the Galapagos Galaxy with Admiral Uli. Instead, I was going to become some sort of fuzzy hat. My life flashed before my eyes. Thanks to my time on Bunny Island, it was finally starting to look like the adventures I’d always read about. Things were just getting good for me. I couldn’t let it end now.
As the mayor held me up, I twisted my head to the left and sunk my teeth into his tan hand.
I bit down like a shark chomping on eel jerky.
Mayor Lapin’s dark eyes bulged, and he screamed in pain, dropping me. I felt the wind rush out of my lungs as I hit the floor. I stood on my hind legs and tried to shake off the dizziness clouding my brain.
Looking over my shoulder, I saw the mayor still clutching his injured hand and yelling. After shouting a few words that no squid cadet would ever repeat, he screamed,
“Get that rabbit!”
Being so low to the ground, it was hard for me to see clearly. I noticed flashes of red T-shirts to my left and right, and I knew that his staffers were near. I scrambled over piles of clothes as one of the red shirts dove for me and missed by an inch. I knew where I needed to go. I only hoped Juliet had things in place.
I scrambled to the right, zigged left, and then full-on sprint-hopped as fast as I could toward the propped-open metal door. I scampered through it and up onto the boxes. I could hear at least two men behind me.
I hopped into the air duct.
The men reached into the vent. I pawed and jumped my way up a slanted section of the vent that took me even higher.
One of the big men had squeezed through the opening and was trying to pull himself in to get at me.
“Stay there, you dumb bunny!” he hissed.
I scrambled higher.
I moved up into a larger air duct that ran horizontally. After a few hops, the metal tunnel opened into a cavernous space above the ceiling of the food court. Air ducts ran in all directions, and I was now sitting on a vent directly above the angel bunny fountain.
The light coming through the slats of the vent cover allowed me to see my reflection on the glossy side of the air duct. I blinked my big blue eyes and tossed my long brown fur. I hate to say it, but I was adorable. If all of this went wrong and I had to spend the rest of my life as a rabbit, I’d probably have a ton of admirers.
Peering down through the slats, I could see the whole food court. Mayor Lapin had wrapped the hand that I had bitten and was forcing pens into all the mutant bunnies’ paws.
“You will sign, or you will be sorry,” he shouted.
We had failed. I was worried about Juliet, but I was just as worried about my uncle and Rain and Flower and the other Bunny Islanders that were now being forced to give up everything they had.
I couldn’t think of anything else to try or any comic that might help me. Admiral Uli had never been turned into a handsome rabbit before. The closest he had ever been to my situation was when Figgy Newton had turned his water heater’s dial up to boiling, so that when Uli went to take a bath the water was way too hot. Sure, all he had to do was turn off the faucet, but for a moment he had been in hot water.
Now I was in some hot water of my own.
Just then, something to my right squeaked at me. When I turned to see what it was, I saw all the lost bunnies sitting in the vent and looking at me. Each one had a bag of chips in its mouth—all my favorite brands. Juliet had come through beautifully.
I raised my right paw and said, “Weerrt, weeert, berp berp?”
Even I didn’t understand the bunny gibberish I was saying. I think I was attempting to say, “What are you waiting for? Let’s do this.”
“Weerrt, weeert, berp berp?” I tried again.
I hopped up, squealing and waving at the others, and pointed toward the big central vent on which I was standing. Like an army of well-trained stuffed animals, the bunnies all began moving toward the vent and tearing at their chip bags.
I turned to the lost bunnies and yelled, “Errrreeet!”
We all pounded our legs and kicked up a cloud of pure salt, additives, oil, and sugar. The cloud dropped through the vent like junk food rain. Some lost bunnies, stationed by other air vents, released their own bags of chips, and in a few seconds the entire food court looked like it was in the middle of a salty sandstorm. The rabbits below wasted no time munching at the air and getting a taste of the antidote. The falling chips filled the fountain, and immediately, there were splashes of yellow chip water flying everywhere.
“What’s happening?!” I heard the mayor yelling from beneath me.
I kept stomping.
The pounding of paws on chips was so loud, I considered trying to plug my ears. But I didn’t want to miss a second of what was happening below. The food court was alive with the noise of popping and hissing, as every mutant bunny began to change back into their human forms. There was also an excessive amount of belching and gasping and slipping and falling. On top of the wet antidote,
there seemed to be a thick layer of gross goo coating the floor in the areas where bunnies were turning into people.
“Stop this!” the mayor screamed.
As he screeched, more and more bunnies returned to their former selves. People began yelling and hollering at him. Some smart-thinking folks grabbed a bunch of towels from a store called Bubba’s Big Towels and threw them into the crowd. Mayor Lapin took one look at the angry gathering, flipped his slicked-back hair, and cried, “Retreat!”
The entire Bunny Island Remodeling Project committee slipped and stumbled as they fought to run away. After some awkward falls and a few hits and kicks from the crowd, they took off, splashing through the yellow chip water with towel-clad locals chasing after them.
The food court exploded with shouts of happiness and relief as the final stragglers returned to their previous shapes. Through the vent, everything looked like a yellow mess or the aftermath of a newt-nado. It was probably good that everyone was covered in wet chip pulp and big towels because everybunny—I mean everybody—still needed to find their clothes.
I stopped crushing chips and raced back through the air ducts and climbed down the boxes. I then joined the crowd near the fountain and happily lapped up bits of chips that had mixed with the water and created a pool of antidote.
It was the tastiest transformation of my life.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
UNCLE
I stumbled out of the mall looking like a mess but feeling like a million clams. In a rush to cover ourselves, all of us former bunnies had grabbed whatever clothing we could find. So we were dressed in ill-fitting and embarrassing outfits. I had on a purple shirt and some big pants. All of us were coated in wet potato chip crumbs. My heart hurt at the loss of so many good chips, but the sacrifice seemed well worth it. Mayor Erwin Lapin had been served justice, salty squid–style.
I don’t want to be mean, but while it was great to see everyone as humans again, the locals weren’t quite as adorable as they had been in bunny form.
I couldn’t find Juliet or Rain, but as I pushed past a group of locals who were standing there, marveling over how trippy their day had been, I ran into a man rushing back toward the mall. We bumped shoulders, and when I turned to look at him I gasped.
“Uncle Zeke?”
He stepped back and looked at me with surprise.
“Perry!”
We both stood there with wide eyes and open mouths. He was covered in chip dust and wrapped in a Finding Nemo beach towel, which I remembered was an almost-identical outfit to the one he had worn when he last came to Ohio and took me swimming. Yes, his hair was a mess and his mustache was crumb filled, but his eyes were as happy and alive as they had always been. I didn’t know what to do, so I stuck out my hands and made a V with my two main fingers on each one.
My uncle did the same.
I crossed my arms at the wrist and our fingers connected so we could link pinkies and swing our arms from side to side: the Uli salute of pride and victory.
We dropped our hands, and he gave me a hug similar to the one Admiral Uli had given Figgy after the Great Barrier Reef robbery. Of course, Admiral Uli was trying to squeeze the life out of Figgy, and my uncle was making me glad to be alive instead. People walked around us, talking excitedly and cheering about being human again. I pretended that they were cheering for me and my uncle.
The hug ended, and Zeke stepped back to look at me, his hand still on my shoulder.
“You did it,” he said.
“We made a promise,” I reminded him.
“I’m a lucky uncle.”
“Perry!”
I heard Juliet call my name and turned around to find her. Before I could say anything, she had her arms around me and was hugging me like Zeke had. “Perry, your plan worked!”
She had run to my uncle’s house, gotten my suitcase, and brought the chips to the lost bunnies—who had done just what she asked them to do. My plan had worked. But I have to admit that even though the celebratory hug wasn’t part of the plan, it was my favorite bit.
“Thank you, Juliet,” I said, embarrassed. “I couldn’t have done it without you.”
“You’re welcome, Perry.”
She let go of me to fuss over Zeke and told us that she had seen Rain, who was back to his old self, helping people who were still in the mall.
“You guys did an amazing thing.” Zeke grinned.
“How did this even happen?” I asked. “I thought it was newts.”
“It definitely seems like a plot Figgy would hatch, but it was Erwin. A short while back, I received some mysterious seeds in the mail. I planted them, and they grew really fast. As I was pulling the first one from the ground, Mayor Lapin showed up in my backyard, asking to help. The mayor said he was familiar with that type of carrot, and he went into the kitchen, where he made a special recipe for carrot pie. It was so good that I ate the whole thing. The next thing I knew, I was a rabbit.
“Erwin ransacked my house looking for any seeds I hadn’t used and then left. That’s when I saw the orange envelope on the floor. I had already put your package together—I just hadn’t sealed it. So I scratched out some cards as best I could and nudged them into the envelope. Then I licked the flap and sealed it with a few dozen thumps from my back foot. I pushed the package out the door and over to the mailbox. I got it to lean up against the post, hoping the mail carrier would see it. I guess he did.”
“Wow,” I exclaimed.
“I know, we have good mail carriers here,” Zeke said proudly.
“I meant, wow about the whole story,” I clarified.
“Right,” Zeke said. “After that, my best guess is that Lapin started feeding the carrots to certain people on the island to test out the quickest way to make them transform. That’s why the lost bunnies were changed first. Then when Flower began using the carrots in the juice that the locals loved, he made his move. He must have discovered that superconcentrated juice can mutate people instantly. He put the superconcentrate into those muffins, and POW, the locals that were slowly changing were transformed instantly, so he could put his plan into action all the more quickly.”
“And the slime on the back porch and other places?” I asked. “What was that?”
“You might have noticed that when you make the final transformation, there’s a popping noise. Not only do you turn into a rabbit, but it generates a lot of goo.”
“That’s not so sweet,” Juliet said.
“I have an idea,” Zeke said. “This place is going to be a mess for a while. How about we get out of here and clean ourselves up. Then we can go do something really fun. It’s not every day that you’re here on my island, and I think what you three pulled off calls for a celebration. We could take a boat out onto the ocean with Flower and Rain.”
“I’m not drinking any smoothies,” I said.
“Of course not. We’ll bring the other snacks you brought and gorge ourselves on things that are bad for us.”
Juliet and I both agreed to my uncle’s plan as quickly and as loudly as we could.
CHAPTER TWENTY
FROM STINKY TO INKY
Amazingly, life returned to normal on Bunny Island. All the people who had once been somebunny were now their former selves. The rest of the Purple Pow carrots and concentrate were collected and put away someplace safe. Zeke wouldn’t tell me where that safe place was. The only clue he gave me was that I would “dig the hiding space.”
So I’m pretty certain the carrots were buried somewhere.
All the locals were happy about me helping to make things right. And the Bunny Mooners were also happy with me because with the mayor out, Bunny Island was still a really health-foodie place, but now there were more things to eat. Things that actually tasted good. Flower added a chocolate chip smoothie to her menu. One vending machine even had caramel-covered cookie dough balls in it.
Well, it did until I got to it.
Mayor Erwin Lapin and his staff were arrested and held in Bunny Island
’s tiny jail until they could be moved off the island and prosecuted in Florida.
Now, however, my stay on Bunny Island had come to an end. It had been a squidtastic couple of weeks, but it was time to return home to Ohio. Juliet and Rain came over to help me pack.
“This is a lot different from how I packed to come here,” I told them as I gathered things to put into my suitcase.
My snacks were long gone, and this time I was filling my bags with things that really mattered. I wrapped up the seashells my uncle and I had found on the beach while searching the sand for newt-tail tracks. I packed the cool blue rock I had found in the clearing when all of us had gone there for a celebratory squid-fest. I put in the piece of driftwood that was shaped like an ink blaster. I had discovered it on the other side of the island, when we were hiking through the jungle and searching for newt nests.
“Here,” Rain said. “Don’t forget this.”
Rain handed me my own Rain Train tank top. It was green and exactly like the ones he wore all the time.
“It’s to remind you of your first day here.”
“I’m glad I survived that.”
I put the shirt into my suitcase, along with some shorts my uncle had bought me, and a couple of souvenirs I had bought for my dad.
“And this is from me,” Juliet said.
She handed me her headphones.
“But these are yours.”
“I know, but maybe you can put them on when you’re in Ohio and think of us. Besides, I owe you.”
“I’ll wear them all the time.”
I put the headphones around my neck and plugged the loose end into one of my pockets.
“Thanks, you guys. I don’t think I’ll ever forget you.”
“I’m pretty memorable,” Rain admitted.
“I think Admiral Uli put it best in Ocean Blasterzoids Issue #35 when he had to go to the town of Dorsal to catch the Mahi-Mob. He said, ‘Today might be sad, but tomorrow is always salty.’”
Juliet and Rain nodded like they understood. Uncle Zeke came into the house smiling and holding something behind his back.