Fen and I threw the tarp over the wheelbarrow and strapped it down with bungee cords so the only thing anyone would be able to see was a hose coming from under my arm.
“How am I going to hide this hideous extra limb coming out of my armpit?” I asked Fen. It looked like a third arm covered in orange fur.
Fen darted over by the front door and came back holding a bag. “I was thinking the same thing when I was getting all this stuff in the garage. How about this?”
Fen was holding an orange plastic rain poncho.
“Same color as the Snerb and everything,” Fen said. “What a score.”
“But it’s not raining!” I complained. “Why would I be wearing a rain poncho?”
“Because the Jenster is always prepared for bad weather,” Fen said. “Just go with it.”
I rolled my eyes and one of the vacuum hose arms slid out from under the tarp and flopped on the front yard.
“Can you fix that?” I asked. “I have to get this poncho on.”
Fen tucked the hose back into the wheelbarrow while I put the orange rain poncho on and looked down at myself.
“I look like a total McDoofus, but it does cover the hose surprisingly well,” I said. “Let’s boogie!”
Fen pushed the wheelbarrow down the sidewalk and I walked alongside him. The town of Nevermind isn’t very big—only a few hundred houses tucked into small streets, a charming little downtown with an ice cream shack and a burger hut, and a lot of secrets. I hoped the coordinates Vexler had sent over would lead us somewhere close by. Which reminded me of something important.
“We don’t know where we’re going,” I said. “Barker hasn’t texted us the address yet.”
“Oh yeah,” Fen said. He stopped pushing the wheelbarrow. Unfortunately, at that moment, Naddy Burns appeared on her bicycle. The downside of living in a town as small as Nevermind is the good chance that you’ll see people like Naddy Burns more than once in the same day.
She rolled up and skidded to a stop.
“What’s up, traffic cone?” Naddy said. I had to give her credit; I did look like a traffic cone in my orange poncho. After she stopped laughing, she kept talking. “You’ve been burned! Because you look like a traffic cone.”
“Yeah, I got it,” I groaned. “What can we do for you, Naddy?”
“What’s in the wheelbarrow?” she asked. “All your failures?” For a few seconds, she laughed hysterically, but then she was all business. “No seriously. What’s in the wheelbarrow?”
“None of your business,” Fen said.
“Zip it, yard gnome,” Naddy said, and she turned back to me and stared.
She got off her bike and flicked the kickstand, then walked right up to the wheelbarrow and tried to move the tarp out of the way.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Fen said.
“Oh reeeeally?” Naddy said in her snarkiest voice.
She bent down for a closer look and came face-to-face with a furry hose at full vacuum power. Unfortunately, Naddy didn’t move fast enough, and the hose stuck to her forehead.
The Snerb was trying to eat Naddy Burns. She got both hands around the hose and tried to pull it off, but this thing was stuck like a nuclear magnet. Naturally, Naddy started screaming. Now I felt bad for her. Plus, it was turning into a spectacle that was sure to draw the attention of half the neighborhood. She fell over and started rolling around on someone’s front yard, pulling on the hose as hard as she could.
I had to do something. Think fast, Jenny!
On instinct, I grabbed the fuzzy orange hose stuck to my armpit and yanked it as hard as I could. This seemed to distract the Snerb just long enough to lower the sucking power on the hose, and Naddy Burns broke free. The hose flopped around like a snake, then recoiled under the tarp.
When Naddy Burns sat up, she had a giant red circle on her forehead. On the plus side, she was speechless for once in her life, and that gave me just enough time to explain what was going on. And by that, I mean I made up a story.
“So sorry, Naddy,” I said. “We tried to warn you. Fen and I started our own business. We run a car vacuuming service and we’re going around offering our latest special. So, yeah . . . that’s what’s under the tarp. A giant vacuum cleaner. I have no idea how that thing got turned on.”
Naddy stood up and wobbled back and forth a couple of times. “What is wrong with you two?!”
“You’ve got some yard in your hair,” Fen said.
Naddy Burns looked at the wheelbarrow and sidestepped nervously toward her bike. She didn’t even bother glaring at us. She just rode away without another word. I got the feeling she wasn’t going to be bothering us anymore—at least not today.
“That actually went better than I would have expected,” Fen said.
“I think you might be right,” I agreed.
“Burns got burned,” Fen agreed.
That was actually sort of funny. I laughed. Then he laughed. Before we knew it, we were both cracking up hysterically—so much so that the Snerb hoses came out and joined the fun, twirling in the air right along with us. Unfortunately, that’s when things took a turn for the worse.
One of the hoses locked onto a mailbox and pulled it right out of the sidewalk.
“It ate the mail!” Fen yelled.
The hoses were getting bigger before our very eyes, and they were also getting longer. One of them attached itself to the exhaust pipe of a pickup truck sitting in a driveway, another one was guzzling dirty water out of a bird bath.
“Um, Jenster?” Fen said. “We have a problem.”
I spun toward the wheelbarrow and my jaw dropped.
The tarp was expanding.
Have you ever had one of those popcorn containers with the foil top? You know, the ones that expand as the popcorn pops until it’s like an alien head sitting on your stovetop? That’s what was happening to the tarp covering the wheelbarrow.
The Snerb was also starting to leak out the sides of the tarp, orange fuzzy layers of goop reaching for the sidewalk.
“The bungee cords aren’t going to hold for much longer,” Fen said.
My phone dinged and I pulled it out.
“Barker sent the address!”
“Where to?!” Fen asked as he tried to pick up the wheelbarrow by the handles. Before I could answer, he grunted, “You’re going to have to take one side—it’s getting too heavy!”
In case you were wondering, if he’d given me a chance, I would have said: Alleyway in the Old Park. Point is, I knew exactly where we were going, and it was only two blocks away. But could we make it there before the wheelbarrow blew its top?
“Grab your side,” I yelled, then I pulled on the orange fuzzy hose attached to my armpit as hard as I could, and all the arms extending out of the Snerb recoiled into the darkness under the tarp.
At least the terror that came from my armpit was still obeying me, but how much longer would that last? With each new command I felt less certain the Snerb would listen to me.
We each took one of the handles and lifted the wheelbarrow onto its wheel.
Then we looked at each other and yelled the same word.
“run!”