The Wounded, The Sick, & The Dead

The Catalyst

Milo should have paid better attention in school. It was a common lament, one usually remedied by marriage and children, but he felt it more acutely than most and much, much earlier. If he had read more books, solved more equations, written more papers, completed more labs, worked on more projects, memorized more facts, studied more languages, run for student government, tried out for the tennis team, joined more clubs, perhaps his life would have ended up differently.
But he didn't do those things.
He was what many educationists referred to as a "non-traditional" student, one who demonstrated proficiency in subjects not necessarily part of the standard curriculum: Desk-Sleeping, Plagiarism, Math Homework Transcription, Lap-Texting, Small-Screen Video Games, Social Media Shit Posting, Music Listening (with hand gestures and occasional lyric recitation), Off-Campus Dining Sprints, Back of School Spliffing, and other such specialties. The only thing he really wanted to do, the only thing he felt he was good at, the only thing he felt the need to perfect time and time again, despite setbacks, failure, catastrophe, disaster, debacle, loss, dud, flop, and defeat, was draw.
Comics.
Superheroes, specifically.
He'd even created a series: The Adventures of Holly Huntress, Warrior Woman of the Galaxy, who he modeled after Jennifer Reed, the most beautiful girl in school. Smart and funny, with a GPA in, as far as he knew, the upper twelve hundreds, Jennifer Reed was completely out of Milo's league; drawing her was as close as he'd ever get to actual communication, which was why he did it. His book featured a scantily clad Holly running around in space losing items of clothing, sometimes one piece at a time, sometimes all at once, while fighting aliens. He was currently on volume three.
Milo's favorite thing to do was skip school and work on his book, and his favorite to place to skip school and work on his book was what everybody called The Outdoor Classroom, which was really a little clearing in the woods behind the school with a few rustic benches made out of plywood and two by fours surrounded by tree stumps. Though the student handbook expressly forbade the creation of any kind of flame, be it by lighter, bomb, or tinder, a fire pit squatted in the middle for some reason. He liked to sit on one of the stumps and smoke weed and draw his comics.
One morning in the middle of March, Milo skipped Biology to sit in the outdoor classroom and smoke and try to get Jennif—Holly's—breasts just right. He had posed her so that, while escaping the clutches of the termite men of planet Petrifaction, one of them ripped off her shirt while she was spinning in the air, and since he'd never seen live breasts, let alone live breasts subjected to that kind of g-force, it was difficult for him to achieve the perfect balance, given their weight and size. He imagined there would be a certain warble and lift, and though he was sure it wasn't totally necessary, he wanted to make the bumps on each areola anatomically correct. After a long stretch of drawing and erasing and shading and erasing again, he had just put his sketchbook down to take a break and stand and stretch his back when a yellow tabby appeared at his feet and meowed at him.
"Hey, kitty," he said.
He reached out to pet it and it nosed his fingers and meowed again. Milo scratched it behind its ears and it purred and purred and, taken with its cuteness, he picked it up and held it to his chest. It purred some more and even licked the back of his hand.
"Such a cute little guy," he said, smiling.
As every feline owner knew, there was a switch in cats that turned them from coy and doting to ferocious and savage. One could be scratching a cat behind its ears, and the cat could be purring and pressing itself into the pet, really digging it, when all of the sudden the switch would be flicked, and the cat pounced, aggressive and merciless, and attempt to dismember the fool who dared show it affection.
This was what happened to Milo. One second the cat was purring in his arms, cradled and content, and then the next it lost its mind and bit him on the hand, puncturing the skin, and he found himself standing on a lonesome stretch of broken highway in the middle of the desert.
Milo dropped it, yelling "Ow!", and brought his hand to his lips to suck on the wound. The cat sprinted off into the desert brush, a little trail of dust in its wake.
It was then that he realized that he was no longer in the outdoor classroom, no longer in his dimension or world at all. The sky was strange. The air was strange. His clothes were strange. A leather duster. Cowboy boots. Salmon colored western shirt tucked into black jeans. A backpack seemingly filled with encyclopedias or hunks of iron.
At the sound of his voice, the shuffling dead thing behind him turned around and grabbed him by the shoulder. He spun to see what it was and it fell on him and chomped into his neck and—

Milo appeared on the highway again. Strange sky. Strange air. Strange clothes. Did that just happen? His hand flew up to his neck but it was fine. The cat wiggled in his grasp and scratched him and he cried "Ow!" but the second he did, his eyes went wide and he spun around and the zombie was on him, it's teeth chomping into his—

Milo appeared on the highway again. Stiff wind. Sulphur. Duster. Jeans. Cat. He tossed it away before it could scratch him and spun around, already backing away. There wasn't just one zombie on the road but a horde of them. Horde. Was that the right word? According to his video games, a horde was . . . a horde? Big? Bigger than what he was looking at. This was more like a group, but 'group' sounded too harmless. So did 'bunch' and 'clump'. 'Assortment' sounded like flowers or candy. Maybe it was a knot. Or a cluster. Assemblage didn't work. He snorted. Who used that word, anyway? Screw it. This was a . . . a . . . a pack! Yes! A pack! A pack of zombies!
As he was determining this, his foot got stuck in a deep crack in the highway, and he fell backwards and broke his ankle. The pack of the dead heard his cries and turned for him as one . . .

Wind. Duster. Jeans. Throw the cat away and run. Run as far and as fast as you can. The road is cracked there. Watch out for that pothole. When you've made it far enough, when your pot-saturated lungs can take no more (how far did you run? A mile? Less?), toss a panicked look over your shoulder and take a step out into thin air where the bridge that crossed the canyon below used to be. The momentary joy of flying will be wiped out by the terror of the spiked concrete pylons toward which you're rapidly falling.

Wind. Duster. Jeans. Cat. Run forward five steps and stop. Immediately. Take special care to avoid the cracks in the road and the clumps of erupted asphalt. Turn.
The zombies were still there, but they hadn't heard or seen him yet. He could breathe. He could finally breathe. He knew that he shouldn't move too quickly or rashly. He knew he should try to stay as quiet as possible. He needed a weapon. The backpack! Of course! The backpack! It must have something he could use.
It clinked as he lowered it to the pavement, and he froze and looked hard at the creatures down the road. They swayed dumbly in the breeze, but they didn't turn. He forced himself to count to sixty before moving again. The bag had a leather flap fastened to the canvas with buckles and buttons, and he carefully undid them and opened it up to have a look. One by one, he withdrew the objects inside: three wires with looped ends, a roll of duct tape, oven mitts, and . . . what was that? He carefully slid a contraption out. It rang metallically as he did so.
Pause.
The zombie nearest to him jerked its head to the right and seemed to sniff the air, listening. Count to sixty. Count to sixty again. Okay. Back to the backpack. The thing he pulled out looked like a braced crutch, the kind people with cerebral palsy used, only shorter and with a machete substituted for a cane. He put it on his forearm. Perfect.
Something to his left caught his attention. It was the cat, scrambling around in the bush. That didn't seem odd. Cats scrambled. Often for no reason. But this one seemed to be trying to get away from something. It leaped and yowled, finally backing up against a boulder and flattening its ears and hissing. Milo gripped the forearm machete, tense, waiting, and as he watched, a little girl with an enormous head popped out of a hole in the ground and snatched the cat up, giggling.
"Hey!" Milo yelled.
The zombies turned as one and lurched for him, but he was already off the road, running toward the mutant molesting the cat. He didn't particularly care for it (it had bitten him after all. And scratched him), but it was the only thing that connected him to his world, and he felt an odd kinship with it. The mutant shot him an irritated look, her smile fading. She was the most disgusting thing he'd ever seen, with tumors and growths pulsing out of her head, and large, misshapen teeth. She clutched the hissing cat to her chest, tight, too tight, making sure to clamp a knotted hand over its face, and jumped back down into the hole from which she came.
Milo had just started to run when another mutant jumped out of a different hole to his left. It was decidedly larger than the one that stole the cat, with larger tumors deforming its face, neck, and torso. Its muscles bulged with tense sinew as it wound up and sent a devastating blow to his neck, cracking his skull and severing his head from his body.

This time, Milo ducked when the second mutant appeared, feeling the whoosh as the beast's massive paw parted the air above him. He was so ecstatic (and surprised) at his success that he didn't see the thing's other fist until a microsecond before it caved his entire face in.

Count the steps. Duck at twenty-seven. Spin at twenty-eight. There's a pit of bone spikes at thirty-three. Another mutie shoots a poisoned dart at forty-one (that's the toughest). Roll under the decapitator at forty-seven. And then . . . nothing. He'd reached the end of the mutie warren. He'd never done it before. In front of him was a bleak desert. Behind him, a family of psychopathic murder mutants. And behind them, a pack of zombies. What now?
A little creature stuck its head out of a hole a few feet away, and Milo prepared for the worst. First, he saw its whiskers, then its nose, then its beady little eyes and floppy ears and . . . a rabbit? A rabbit. What was a rabbit doing out there? While he was watching, something crawled up under his pants toward his crotch. Screaming, he slapped at it, felt a sting in his thigh, a painful sting that radiated up into his belly. His leg began to swell.

Milo was sitting on the ground sealing both pant legs with the duct tape when he heard the voice crying out.
"Yoo-hoo!"
A figure in the brush on the side of the road opposite the mutie warren waved at him. When he didn't respond, it whistled.
"Hi! Hey! You! Come on! Come here!"
Milo's eyes shifted toward the zombies. They heard the call, too, and they moaned and turned and stumbled off the road, heading toward the sound.
"Hurry! They're coming!"
Milo looked at the mutie warren. He turned around and looked at where the road ended at the canyon.
"I have food! And water!"
Sighing, he ripped the tape and patted it down on his ankle, making sure the seal was as tight as possible. Then he picked up the backpack and ran toward the figure on the horizon.
It was a woman, though he couldn't tell at first. She was covered in dust and dirt, and she was wearing so many layers—dark green cargo pants, brown bomber's jacket, darkly tinted goggles, and a leather helmet and chin strap. It reminded Milo of something he saw on a documentary on WWI, one of the few times he paid attention in class. And her teeth, oh my, her teeth, they were . . . disgusting.
"Come on! Come on!" she urged. "They're coming. Follow me!"
She led him through the desert, sometimes jogging, sometimes speed-walking, a never-ending stream of chatter flowing from her mouth, alternating from gushing over his presence to warnings about the landscape.
"I'm Suzy. What's your handle?"
"What?"
"Your handle! Your honorific, title, tag, moniker, appellation! Your handle!"
"My . . . what?"
"Your name, you idiot! What's your name!"
"Oh, I'm Milo."
"Milo, Milo, rhymes with Fido, dogs are good food, good meat, good God, let's eat!"
"Um—"
"Haha! Haha! Don't mind me. I'm just a crazy old hag. I've been out here for too long, too long. Ever since that damn cat disappeared."
"Cat? Was it a yellow tabby?"
"So nice to get visitors. So nice. And one so accomplished! I've been watching you, I have—watch that spot there—you've learned so fast! So fast! So much faster than—mind that nest. That's a stinger! So much faster than—oh, gotta turn here, that's a bone spike. And it's so nice to—don't ever eat the flowers off of those bushes. They're poison—so nice to have company!"
Suzy led him to a butte, a sheer wall of colorfully striped rock, a natural fortress standing tall and sure in the middle of the inhospitable desert. A rope ladder with steps made out of thick branches hung from a ledge fifty feet above.
"You first, you first," she said. She reached for his pack and he struck her hands away. The woman's face fell from fawning to flat.
"Don't touch me," he said.
She stared at him, or he thought she did; he couldn't see what her eyes were doing behind the dark goggles. For a moment, a very short moment, he felt as though that was the real creature. Then, as if she sensed his realization, a smile flinched across her face, meek and brief, and she said, "Of course, sir. Of course." She performed an elaborate bow. "After you."

The ladder led to a ledge, and in front of the ledge was the opening to a cave. Suzy scrambled up after him, swinging her fat legs over the edge and rolling over once to lie on her back, spreading her limbs as if making an angel in the dirt.
"Home at last! Milo, Milo! Home at last!"
She popped up and trotted past him into the cave, and Milo followed, gripping the handle of this forearm machete. The first oven mitt he duct-taped to it was starting to wear, and he reminded himself to wrap the other one around it when he was done with . . . whatever this was.
It was dark at first, but soon his eyes adjusted, and he saw that the cave was deeper than he first thought, that the opening served as a kind of vestibule that ended with a natural bend. Suzy had hung torches on the walls which flickered in the darkness, lighting the way back.
"He's here! He's here!" she cried. "Milo, Milo rhymes with Fido!"
The air grew cold and sharp, though he felt moisture. He rounded the bend and stepped into a larger chamber. A fire burned in the middle. Huge metal stakes formed a scaffold around it, something to hold up the wood and tinder, he supposed. Suzy ran around the edge of the cave, lighting torches, singing "He's here! He's here! Milo's here!" She stopped now and then to pat various white busts she had stored in little recessions carved out of the stone.
"Oh yes, Millicent, he is a big one!"
Milo took another step into the room, wondering what the bust named Millicent looked like, and stopped short. Suzy had stored piles and piles of roots at one end. Potatoes. Shallots. Carrots. Ginger. Turnips. Yams.
"Joseph! How dare you imply . . . why, no I don't think he's infected. Are you, Milo"
"Who, me? No."
"See, there, Joseph. Don't you feel foolish?"
Milo leaned over to inspect the pile of food, and his stomach growled involuntarily.
"Hungry, hungry, hungry! Milo's very hungry!"
The roots were piled high enough to cover another bust. Milo was curious to see what kind of face his host chose to immortalize. He started to clear a path, potatoes and yams fell away, and then he saw it. And he gasped.
The bust wasn't made out of marble. It wasn't a bust at all. It was a skull. A human skull. A noise from behind him, the edge of a whisper, and he turned just in time to see Suzy rushing him, wielding a pickaxe.
"Tut, tut, your time is up," she said.

"He's here! He's here! Milo's here!"
Milo gripped his forearm machete as Suzy scuttled around the room, talking to the skulls of her victims.
"Oh yes, Millicent, he is a big one!"
Wander over to the roots. Pretend to look.
"Joseph! How dare you imply . . ."
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her pick up the pickaxe.
"No, of course not," he said.
"Tut-tut—"
Milo turned and swept his arm back like a pitcher winding up for a fastball. He saw Suzy's axe swinging through the air, the gems in the ceiling of the cave glinting in the fire. He'd never killed a woman before. He'd never killed anybody before. He wondered what it would feel like, to watch her eyes as his weapon sank deep into her body, to see the life drain from them. He flexed his bicep and shoulder, twisted his torso, putting every last ounce of effort and energy into the blow that he meant to deliver. Then his machete chocked into the stone wall behind him and wedged into a tight crevice. It stuck only for a second, but a second was all Suzy needed to finish her own arc and bury her axe in his brain.

This time, Milo extended his arm to make sure there was enough space between the tip of his machete and the wall.
"He's here! He's here! Milo's here!"
"No," Milo replied. "Of course not."
"What?"
Milo paused. Crap. Had she even asked yet?
"You asked me if I was infected, right?"
He peeked at her from the corner of his eye. Nope. She wasn't even close to Joseph. She clasped her hands behind her back and skipped along the row of skulls, whistling. Then she started to sing.
"Millicent, my dear, what do you hear? I hear a mouse a'scrabbling! It sneaks and it snakes and our precious food takes, but we won't allow it will we?"
Milo kept his back to her. He tapped his foot in time with her song. Eight beats per line.
"Joseph my sonny, will he try a'running? Will he try a'running away?"
Twenty-four.
"I'm sure he won't like it his skull when I spike it, and then we'll have meat and potatoes for lunch!"
Forty.
He turned around. Suzy was standing there, the pickaxe over her head.
"Tut tut—"
Milo turned and sliced her across the belly, making sure to cut as deep as possible. Suzy grunted. Her entrails splattered on the ground.
In all of the fight scenes in all of the movies Milo had ever seen, when the hero disemboweled an enemy, said enemy was usually rendered immobile, and, after a grunt and a groan, keeled over and died. Then the hero would recite some ironic catchphrase and swagger away. Perhaps a fetching young lady would appear out of nowhere and assail him with an aggressive kiss.
But that was not the way it happened in real life. In real life, Suzy, while momentarily stunned, followed through with her attack, and the pickaxe, rather than burying itself in his head, thunked into his neck and severed his carotid artery. They both fell to the ground, Milo on his side, hands trying to stop the spurting blood, Suzy to her knees, arms covering her eviscerated middle.
"Ahh! Ahh! Milly! Joseph! I'm killed! He's killed me!"
Milo's sight grew dim and gray, and he found it impossible to keep his eyes open. He was vaguely aware of something wet gathering beneath him.

"Joseph my sonny, will he try a'running? Will he try a'running away?"
Twenty-four.
He adjusted his grip and tensed for action.
"I'm sure he won't like it his skull when I spike it, and then we'll have meat and potatoes for lunch!"
Forty.
Spin, strike, roll. That was the plan, and he executed it perfectly. Suzy went down to her knees, just as before, her guts splattering on the cave's stone floor. But Milo didn't account for the speed with which he threw himself into his roll, and when he jumped out of it, the momentum carried him one step too far, and he tripped backward into the fire and impaled himself on one of the metal stakes.

How many variations of death by zombie could he accrue? The best was a throat tear. The worst, dismemberment. How many different stinging creatures existed? He studied the effects of their poison. This one acted fast. His body swelled, his throat swelled, and he died clawing at his neck. That one took its time, and he could watch the toxins creep through his body, red and purple stripes extending out from the mortifying wound, leaving him first weak and feverish, then writing in pain, then paralyzed.
Then there were the muties. He got to know them very well. Boil Lips and Ooze, Mushroom Head and Pedo, Big Daddy and Mama Squidface. They clobbered and pummeled and decapitated. More than once, they knocked him unconscious and dragged him by the foot back to their underground lair and performed unspeakable acts upon his body before his heart finally gave out.
He jumped off the bridge. Repeatedly. He loved the feeling of flying, however brief. He swaned. He cannonballed. He triple flipped. He triple flipped with a twist. He triple flipped with a twist and a backward inverse pike tuck.
It was after just such a dive that, rather than regenerate on the highway, he found himself unconscious and floating in a void. Voices glided through the ether, familiar and unfamiliar. The void turned into a lecture hall with a lectern at the front and a projector screen hanging in the back. Faceless shadows occupied the seats all around him, their voices rustling. A figure walked out onto the stage and cleared his throat, eyeing the crowd as if they were children who had been caught doing something nasty.
"There is no grounds or intent! There is no cause, no effect! It is what it is! Now, some of my opponents may object to this line of reasoning, but what they lack is proper context; what they own is a tendency toward Gordian thinking. The reason for this kind of work is simple: to redeem the narrator. Without the cycle, he would continue his abysmal existence, incurious, insouciant, and ultimately indifferent to himself and all those around him who, either by choice or happenstance, are sucked into his gravitational pull."
Milo was then sucked in a different direction, tumbling end over end, finally landing in a movie theater watching a series of images flash in an endless loop across a screen:

A beautiful girl being slaughtered again and again.
A woman with red hair sprinting down a city street.
A middle-aged man shoving pastries in his mouth.
A muscular criminal covered in homemade tattoos, words, addresses, memories misguided and muddy.
A pair of aristocrats pouncing on a sheep that had wandered into a private library.
A child in a tuxedo chopping a water pipe in half with an axe.
The lecturer continued his notes, his voice thundering over the speakers:
". . . conditions deteriorate. Trapped and resentful, he has a choice: grow violent and vengeful, revel in his worst tendencies, or find the path to inner peace. A choice that is reflected in the discomfort of charity."
And then Milo was jerked away again, falling through space and time. He witnessed his birth, the triumph of first steps and first words. Elementary school. Sports. Middle school. The death of his grandmother, his grandfather. A first kiss. And finally Jennifer Reed, her hair lush and full, flying toward him in one of the outfits he'd drawn for her, and she was smiling at him, beckoning to him. She was five feet away, then two, then one, their lips were inches apart. Then she was yanked backwards, and all of his milestones reversed, and he wasn't speaking, wasn't walking, simply wasn't until . . .
. . . he became aware again on the cracked pavement of the long, desert highway. A pack of zombies milled about behind him. The cat in his arms hissed and bit his hand and he dropped it and it scurried out into the desert, a trail of dust in its wake.
He jogged forward with mechanical precision, stopping after a few feet to stare out at the bleak landscape, seemingly preoccupied, like a lonely man contemplating failure at the edge of the ocean. He thought about the zombies. He thought about the muties. He thought about the cat. He thought about the rabbit. He thought about Suzy. He thought about Jennifer, her face, her body, her voice, her laugh. He made a pedestal of his palm and held her in it, examining her in every light and from every angle. He thought and thought and thought. The backpack was heavy, the items inside weighing him down, and he shifted his shoulders to alleviate the pain.
Then it hit him.
The images from the movies.
". . . the discomfort of charity."
The wire with the looped ends. The rabbits. The machete. The zombies. And the cat. The cat. Something was happening to him. Connections in the long-unused part of his mind. He felt the synapses fire.
A stiff wind blew in from the desert, sending up grains of sand that stung his face, and he automatically turned his back to it. The cat jumped atop a rock and sat there, staring at him like an Egyptian goddess, blinking its green eyes. He saw the trap door in the desert floor shift as Mushroom Head pushed it open to peek out at her prey.
As if reading his thoughts, a rabbit hopped out of its hole and right up to the edge of the road where, suddenly seeing him, it stopped.
"Yoo-hoo!" Suzy called.
The zombie closest to him turned its head.
"Yoo-hoo! Over here!"
Wire, rabbit, machete, zombie.
"Yoo-hoo! Over here! Hurry!"
Wire, rabbit, machete, zombie.
"Yoo-hoo! Over here!"
Wire, rabbit, machete, zombie.
"Yoo—"
A zombie fell into him and took a chunk out of his neck.

Milo got to work as soon as he materialized. He threw the cat. He ran through the mutie compound—count the steps, duck, count the steps, stab. The rabbit warren started where the compound ended. He duct-taped his pants. He stomped on the stingers. He found three different rabbit holes, outside of which he placed the snares. Then he fell back twenty paces and sat down, cross-legged, the machete resting on his knees. When one of the strange-looking scorpions came near, he spiked its stinger.
It didn't take long before the first rabbit poked its head out. Milo sat up. His entire life, anytime he wanted to eat, he went to the refrigerator and took something out that his mother had bought at the supermarket. Processed meat from an animal slaughtered in Montana. Apples shipped from an orchard in Maine. Chicken breasts culled from a farm in Virginia. He'd never snared a rabbit before. He'd never hunted for food before. Never fished. Never farmed. And, barring a field trip once when he was in fourth grade, and one time after Thanksgiving dinner when he and his sisters picked wild blackberries in a patch behind his Great Uncle's vacation home in the Poconos, he'd never gathered.
The rabbit sniffed the air, wiggled its cute little whiskers. Seeing and smelling nothing that could possibly harm it, it hopped out of the hole and snared itself in the wire.
"Yes!" Milo cried.
He hopped to his feet and scrambled over. It was a big one, fully as large as a small dog, and he chopped off its head and put the body in his backpack.
"Yoo-hoo!"
Suzy was waving to him from the other side of the desert, and Milo ran to her.
"Here!" he cried. "I have it! I have it!"
"Hurry! Hurry! They're coming!"
Still running, he threw a look over his shoulder. The zombies had indeed begun to shuffle in his direction, but they were hardly near. Then his foot got caught in one of the snares he set up and he fell and hit the ground hard, smacking his head on a rock so hard that his neck broke.

"Here!" he cried, picking his way carefully through the rabbit holes. "Here!"
"Come on! Come on!" Suzy cried as he approached. "They're coming. Follow me!"
"No. Stop."
"What?"
"I'm not coming with you. I'm not doing that again."
"Again?"
"Look. I know you're trying to kill and eat me—"
"Oh, sir, I—"
". . . but that's not going to happen." He held up the rabbit. "Here. I brought you this."
Suzy opened and closed her mouth. Her eyes shuddered over to the zombies.
"But . . . they're—"
"They're not coming. They're barely able to move. Look."
The lead zombie tripped over a rock and broke its leg in half. Several others fell over its prone body.
"See?" He held up the rabbit. "This is so much better to eat. No tricks. No murder. Just meat."
She reached for it, but he pulled it back.
"Uh uh uh. I need your help first."

It proceeded very quickly after that. The two of them sliced through the pack of zombies with relative ease. The muties were next. They cut down Boil Lips, Ooze, Mushroom Head, Pedo, and Big Daddy and all their sister/cousins, reaching the cat moments before Mama Squidface was about to slit its throat. It bit him when he snatched it off the butcher's block, and an electric zing buzzed throughout his body, from the center of his belly, then emanating in circles into his chest and his head, and then he was no longer in the desert, he was standing in the woods outside his school, and the cat was in his arms and it bit his hand again and he said, "Ow!" and he dropped it and it ran off, sending up dead leaves in its wake.
Milo fell to his knees, weeping with relief. He did it. He made it back.
"Where did you come from?"
He whipped his head around.
It was her. The goddess. Jennifer Reed. What was she doing out here in the middle of the day? Girls like Jennifer Reed didn't skip class. They arrived two minutes early, already had their notebooks out before the teacher started to teach. She pointed at his sketchbook, the one in which he'd drawn a very detailed picture of her, topless and fighting off squads of frog-faced aliens.
"Is that me?"
Milo snatched the book up, hugging it to his chest.
"No. No. Just a comic I draw."
"Of me."
"It wasn't you."
"It looked like me."
"No, it's . . . Holly Huntress."
He winced. She stared at him.
"Holly Huntress."
"Warrior Woman of the Galaxy."
"Oh, I see. And does Holly Huntress always fight topless?"
"She was escaping from the frog-men of planet Swamp and they ripped off her . . . Hey, what are you doing out here, anyway? Shouldn't you be in AP Brain Surgery?"
"Haha."
"Seriously, though. Aren't you worried about getting caught?"
"It's lunchtime, dork."
"What?"
"Lunch. Time."
She mimed eating.
"You know, eat?"
Lunchtime?
"What day is it?"
"What?"
"What day is it?"
Jennifer sighed.
"The Ides of March."
"What's the Ides of March?"
She sighed again.
"March 15th."
March 15th? Only two days had passed. He'd spent months trying to get out of that hell hole. He stared at the trees, trying to comprehend everything that had befallen him. Then Jennifer said, "Oh, look at the cute little kitty!"
The yellow tabby meowed as it stepped into the clearing. Milo turned, horrified at the sound. Jennifer was already leaning over, arm outstretched.
"Don't!" he cried, and he grabbed her hand right as the cat bit it.