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“Not Mafia. Nafia,” Mack said.
“Ah,” Jarrah said, as though that clarified the situation for her. (It didn’t.)
Mack looked for his bag. There were plenty of bags going by slowly on the carousel, but none were his. Annoying, because if the bag were there, he’d have time to pick it up, place it on the luggage cart along with Jarrah’s backpack and Stefan’s bag, and leave at a leisurely pace.
Paddy “Nine Iron” Trout? Not a fast-moving guy.
But Mack knew about the sword in Nine Iron’s walking stick. So although Nine Iron was probably almost a hundred years old and therefore slow, slow, sloooow, you didn’t necessarily want to hang around and wait for him. If you stood still long enough, he would absolutely stab you.
“You want me to go beat him up?” Stefan asked, with the kind of hopeful expression you might see on the face of an eager puppy who thinks you have Pup-Peroni.
“Not unless he starts something,” Mack said. “How would you explain it to the cops? You can’t just beat up a hundred-year-old guy.”
Nine Iron made his way to the far side of the carousel. He stood there like any other person waiting for a bag. Except that as he stood there, he stared with sunken, bleary, borderline-crazy eyes at Mack.
Mack almost felt he should wave.
Apparently Nine Iron spotted the bag he was waiting for. It had a jaunty plaid pattern. Nine Iron leaned over and struggled to grab it. Except no, no, he wasn’t really trying to grab it. He was…
Mack heard the sound of a zipper.
Nine Iron smiled, revealing teeth like those of an unhealthy horse. He laughed, a creaky sound filled with malice.
“I warned you not to—” he said, but then held up a finger, indicating he needed a moment. He reached inside his green blazer and pulled out a clear plastic tube and mouthpiece.
Nine Iron sucked oxygen once, twice, three times.
“—defy me!” Nine Iron finished.
The plaid bag came around the carousel. Unzipped.
It popped open! The top was pushed back by a tiny, scabby hand that appeared to be missing a couple of fingers.
As Mack saw the contents of the suitcase, he squealed. So did Jarrah. So, actually, did Stefan. Not squeals of delight. More like squeals of “Eeew!”
“Ah-ha-ha!” Nine Iron cackled. “Arise, my Lepercons! Arise and—”
He paused to take several more deep breaths from his oxygen tank while everyone – Mack, Jarrah, Stefan, and the Lepercons – waited.
“—kill! Kill for the Pale Queen!”
The suitcase was full of what were definitely living things, but not like any living things Mack had ever seen before. They were about the size of fat house cats. They were more or less human shaped, but with legs too long for their bodies. They didn’t wear clothing, but their torsos were discreetly covered by black-on-white spotted fur.
They looked a little like dalmatian puppies. Except not cute. The Lepercons didn’t make you want to say “Aaaw”; they made you want to say “Aaah!” Largely because they had leprous, disfigured faces that reminded Mack of wadded-up gym socks with downturned doll mouths.
They appeared to have started life with the usual number of fingers and toes and noses, but the bare flesh visible beyond the fur was all eaten at, chewed up, and missing things that ought to be there.
“Did he say leprechauns?” Jarrah asked.
“Lepercons, you stupid—” Nine Iron squinted. He growled. “Who are you, anyway?”
“Jarrah Major,” she answered. “Pleased to… Well, maybe not.”
There looked to be about a dozen of the Lepercons packed into the suitcase like sardines. Diseased, unhealthy sardines.
They unpacked themselves very quickly.
And Nine Iron laughed again as he unzipped a second plaid suitcase.
Lepercons leaped from both suitcases.
They leaped, and paused there for a moment on the carousel to unzip an outer pocket on each suitcase. From which they extracted bundles of sharp implements like knitting needles, handed them around, and then, armed, they launched themselves at Mack, Jarrah and Stefan.
ack did the smart thing, the thing anyone would do when attacked by a dozen knitting-needle-wielding, diseased minipeople who looked like dalmatian puppies with mismatched fingers and deformed legs.
He yelled, “Yaa-ah-aaah!” And ran.
The Lepercons were quick. At least, the ones who still had both feet were. Some were chasing him on stumps. Or on one stump and one regular foot. Or on one whole leg and a partial leg.
These were slower.
Mack felt a needle jab the back of his left calf. It didn’t penetrate his jeans, but it hurt and he yelled, “Hey, cut it out!”
Because normally that works.
A second jab caught him in the right butt cheek.
Mack spotted a small woman hauling a large wheeled suitcase. He snatched the bag, yelled, “Sorry!” then executed a running pivot and flung the suitcase at the charging Lepercons.
Three of them went down like bowling pins and let out howls of outrage.
“Agara! Agara! Agara!” Which is probably the traditional Lepercon howl of outrage.
But the others leaped clear of the bag and were all over Mack in a heartbeat.
Knitting needles jabbed at jeans and T-shirt without much effect, but one caught him in the palm of his left hand, and that drew blood.
A particularly persistent Lepercon climbed on to Mack’s shoulders from behind. He felt the tip of the needle enter his ear. He jerked away, but the needle jabbed, jabbed, jabbed again.
“Hey! That hurts!”
Mack reached around, grabbed a handful of spotted fur, and yanked the creature up over his head. He held him by one leg and swung the little monster like a club, beating at the others.
Thumpf!
Mack nailed one of the Lepercons pretty well, but then the leg he was holding came off – just detached. He stared stupidly at it. There was no blood, no hanging arteries or gore.
In fact, the detached end of the leg looked like a piece of well-aged blue cheese. Possibly Stilton.
Although it may have been Gorgonzola.
Mack wanted to throw up. It wasn’t a good thing to see. Or smell. And if it was blue cheese… No. No, it couldn’t be! He hated blue cheese. Worse yet: he had a deep and awful terror of blue cheese.
“Jasnafar’s been legged!” one of the Lepercons screeched.
“Avenge Jasnafar!”
“Agara! Agara!” the now one-legged Jasnafar cried. He hopped on his remaining leg, oozing gooey blue cheeselike product from his stump, and stabbed busily at Mack’s foot.
“Get off me, get off me!” Mack cried. “Noooo, nooooo! Get it off me! Nooooo, it’s Roquefort!”
Jarrah and Stefan were both busy with their own Lepercon problems. Mack caught a flash of Jarrah tossing a Lepercon so hard it went spinning across the floor and smacked into a Chinese boy, who kicked it away with a reflexive soccer kick.
Stefan had one of the Lepercons in his teeth. He chomped down hard and spat out a Lepercon hand. Stefan also had a knitting needle either stuck into his head or his hair – hopefully his hair – and was too busy to run to Mack’s rescue.
“You fools!” Nine Iron cried. “Go for the boy! The boy!”
The old man had to sit down after that and inhale more oxygen from the tube. He sat on the carousel and was swept slowly away, wedged in between a large black garment bag and a grey duffel bag.
Mack punched one of the Lepercons. Right in the face.
Pumpf!
Blue cheese product shot from the creature’s nose, mouth and ears.
Mack felt a sharp pain. The knitting needle just sat there, sticking out of his neck. “Hey!” he yelled.
He snatched the needle out and stared at the single drop of his own blood.
Now Mack was mad as well as terrified. “OK, that’s enough!”
In one fluid movement he jammed the needle into the nearest Lepercon. It went easily all the way through. Goo squeezed out around the puncture.
Mack kicked, punched and generally flailed away like a panicky kid in the midst of a phobia meltdown – although it was all very Mortal Kombat in his head. But flailing didn’t help much, and now more of the Lepercons were heeding Nine Iron’s fading, wheezing shouts and leaving Jarrah and Stefan in order to come after Mack. They were all over him. The sheer weight of them made him stagger.
But worse was the morbid terror of the goo oozing from the Lepercons’ many wounds.
Mack suffered from twenty-one known phobias – unreasonable fears. We don’t have time to list them all, but they ran the gamut from fear of puppets to a fear of fear itself, which is called phobophobia.
The thing with phobias is that they aren’t reasonable fears, such as a fear of clowns or brussels sprouts or reality shows. Phobias are at a whole different level. The phobia panic builds and builds until pretty soon a person just loses it altogether.
And that’s what was happening to Mack. The grossness of the blue cheese goo – the unbelievable disgustingness of it, the football player’s armpit smell of it – was working on the scared little monkey brain buried deep down inside Mack’s otherwise pretty cool human brain.
Of course the phobia thing wouldn’t be a problem if he were dead. In minutes, if not seconds, one of the needles would hit an artery or an eyeball or go in through Mack’s ear. He realised then that this wasn’t just a fight: it was life and death.
There were words Mack could use, Vargran words, that could freeze time and let him escape. But it was hard to think of them when a dozen evil midgets were jabbing you with needles and when a sick fear was dumping all sorts of panic chemicals into your system.
Then it came to him! He knew the Vargran command. It was ret click-ur.
Not that hard to say, except that just as he was forming the words, a needle jabbed him in the gum. It wasn’t that hard a hit; it just scraped his gum. It didn’t knock out a tooth or anything, but the Lepercon wasn’t backing away. He had hold of Mack’s shirt with one hand and had hauled himself up on to Mack’s chest, and with his free hand he was trying to shove the knitting needle right down Mack’s throat.
Mack bit down hard on the needle. He held it tight with his going-to-need-braces-in-a-few-years teeth.
He tried to pull the Lepercon away, but the thing was swarming him. At least six of the things were on his body, hauling at him, grabbing handfuls of shirt and hair, using belt, nose and ears as climbing grips.
And smelling like a hobo’s sneakers.
The needle scraped against Mack’s teeth. If he opened his mouth to say the spell, he would die.
“Esk-ma belast!”
But it wasn’t Mack who said this; it was Jarrah.
She was a mess, hair all askew, and somewhat covered in Lepercon goo. She looked scared, wild and furious.
Stefan stomped a heel on to one of the Lepercons, which popped like a noxious water balloon. He yanked the needle out of his hair, laughed happily – this was Stefan’s idea of a party – and ran (finally!) to help Mack.
But Mack didn’t need as much help any more. The Lepercon on his shoulder fell heavily to the ground. The one on his chest – the one trying to jab a knitting needle down his throat – was changing. The small, wrinkled ShamWow face was becoming smoother, bigger, fuller. The wrinkles were filling in. Plumping.
Mack felt the weight of the creature grow. He felt his shirt stretch further and further until the Lepercon lost his grip and slid, moaning (“Agara… agara…”), to the floor.
Mack glanced wildly around. All the Lepercons were growing. Larger. Heavier. They were no longer the size of fat cats; they were the size of moderately full garbage bags. And still growing.
They were not moving much.
The needles looked tiny now in their bratwurst-sized fingers.
Mack spat the needle out of his mouth and said, “Whoa.”
“Huh,” Stefan remarked. He seemed disappointed.
Jarrah, looking shell-shocked, came to them. The Lepercons were now the size of cows. Stunned bystanders stared in awe and horror. Some took pictures with their cell phones. YouTube would be getting some very odd uploads. Thumbs flew across touch screens: Twitter was getting the news out.
Other folks stolidly wheeled their luggage past as though the problem of rapidly enlarging, leprous, cheese-stuffed monsters was just another obstacle to be overcome by the weary travelling public.
“What did you do?” Mack asked Jarrah, panting.
“It was all I could think of. I don’t know that much Vargran,” Jarrah said. “I was trying to say ‘follow’. I was going to lead them away.”
“They would have killed you,” Mack said.
“Eh,” Jarrah said. “They might have tried.”
Mack intercepted an admiring look from Stefan. Jarrah was his kind of girl.
“I think what I actually said must have been ‘grow’, not ‘follow’, ‘Grow monster’.”
“‘Grow monster’?”
