Katie Mulligan and Lily Gefelty were reassembled fifteen hundred light-years from home.
They were in a big booth.
There was no air.
Frantic, holding their breath, they tried to struggle into the space suits Katie had pulled out of Jasper’s closet. They were a tangle of arms and legs.
Lily stuck her feet in her suit and then her arm, and then Katie’s glove whapped her in the face.
“Sorry!” Katie coughed out quickly, giving up precious air.
Lily’s elbow accidentally knocked Katie’s skull—“Sorry!” Lily croaked—and Katie’s helmet whammed into Lily’s shoulder—“Sorry!”—and then they were both hopping on one leg trying to get the boots to fit.
Lily bounced onto Katie’s foot.
“Ow!”
“Sorry!”
Their lungs were almost empty. Their eyes were bulging. They forced the helmets onto their heads. They were shaking, fighting with the clasps.
Lily turned around. Her forearm nailed Katie in the back. Katie stumbled and kicked her in the leg. “Sorry!”
“Sorry!”
“Sorry!”
“Sorr—” Lily did not finish the word. She couldn’t. She was out of air.
There was no oxygen whatsoever in her lungs. She gagged. She started to see stars. She gripped onto the wall of the teleporter booth. She grabbed at her throat and slid down to her knees. She panicked on the metal floor.
She had been too polite for her own good.
Katie reached over and held her friend’s helmet firmly and flipped the locks into place.
Lily heard the hissing of her air hoses. She gulped.
She could breathe.
She drew a big breath. Again and again.
And gratefully, she sighed, “—rry.”
* * *
“There’s something wrong with this,” said Katie, looking around the dead Welcome Home party. “This doesn’t feel right to me.”
“Jasper was here,” said Lily. “Look at all the scuffs in the dust.” She ran her suit’s fingers over the cardboard hats and the limp balloons.
Katie said, “I don’t like it. This party doesn’t feel good. And remember, I’m someone who’s been at parties with nail-toothed, carnivorous dolls.”I
Lily walked over to the drooping WELCOME HOME. She picked up the trailing JASPER off the floor and tried to stick it back up. The tape was too old and dry. “Poor Jasper,” she said.
“Something is not right,” Katie said again. She walked forward with her hands spread out. “It’s—It’s—I’ve got it!”
She rushed over to the table where the cake sat, sunken in its own cracked frosting. She grabbed a lump of it with her space-suited fingers and cried, in wild disgust, “Fruit-and-nut cake! It looks like chocolate, but they made him FRUIT AND NUT!” She threw the cake blotch down on the ground as if it had burned her. She backed away, scrubbing her hand off on her hip. “His favorite is chocolate with chocolate frosting. What kind of a person . . .” Katie shook her head in shock.
Lily said quietly, “It might not be a person at all.”
That made them both fall silent.
“We gotta find him,” said Katie. She walked over to the door. “He’s out there somewhere.”
And suddenly the whole chamber was wailing with sirens and blaring with lights.
Lily and Katie reeled backward as the walls screamed.
I Horror Hollow #27: Sleepover of Doom.