The spot I was sitting in very quickly became a hole. I fell right into it, with rows of sharp teeth all around me. Picture a whirlpool of slime, pulling me down into a sea of Snerb.
“heeeeeelp!” I screamed.
The loudspeaker sputtered back to life, and Vexler’s voice returned. It was maddeningly calm.
“Sending mechanical claw. Hold, please.”
All I could do at that point was hang onto a giant slimy tooth and hope the mouth I was dangling inside of wouldn’t slam shut. Something tightened around my feet and my hands started to slide down a slippery Snerb tooth. Gurgling, burping, slimy sounds roared all around me, but I could hear something mechanical happening over my head. I looked up and a metal claw was lowering toward me.
“You gotta be kidding me,” I said.
The metal claw opened its jaws, lowered into the mouth of the Snerb, and clamped around my waist.
“Not so tight!” I screamed, because the claw felt like a belt notched four sizes too small.
“Begin extraction,” Vexler said over the loudspeaker.
I felt like a cork stuck in a bottle as the claw lifted me and the Snerb tightened its grip around my feet. When I was halfway out of the mouth the teeth started to close more quickly.
“Pull harder!” I shouted.
There was a loud pop sound as my feet came free and I pulled my feet up to my chest just in time for the mouth to slam shut.
“Extraction complete,” Vexler said. “Please use passenger window to enter vehicle.”
The claw was attached to the roof of the truck and it swung me to the passenger side, where the window rolled down. This actually made sense to me even if it wasn’t going to be easy climbing through the window. I couldn’t go through the door because it would close onto the hose stuck to my armpit, and that was sure to send the Snerb into a rage.
“You’re okay?!” Fen said, slack-jawed. He sounded more surprised than relieved. Not that I could blame him. I was hanging from a giant mechanical claw like a slime-covered bag of potatoes.
Without warning, the claw opened and dropped me on the dirt road, but I was only three feet of the ground, so I survived. “Proceeding to destination,” Vexler said.
“Get in here,” Barker commanded from inside the truck. The engine revved and the wheels started spinning.
In a flash, I dove for the door and grabbed the edge of the open window just as the truck took off like a funny car on a drag racing strip. This time I was too scared to scream. My legs flopped around like the Snerb’s tentacles while Fen and Barker grabbed my arms and tried to haul me inside.
“Hang on, Jen-Jen,” Fen grunted,. “We got you!”
There was a huge bang from inside the truck bed and we swerved hard to the left and nearly hit a tree. Another bang and we swerved to the right, went up on two wheels, and somehow managed to make the turn onto the main road.
“The Snerb is trying to escape,” Barker yelled. He was maddeningly calm.
Fen and Barker pulled on my arms at the same time and I tumbled into the truck, landing in a heap on the floor.
“All parties accounted for,” Vexler said. “Arrival in six minutes.”
“Where are we going?” I asked, climbing up into the seat between Barker and Fen.
“Don’t look at me,” Barker said. “I barely know what’s going on.”
Fen squinted out the window. “Vexler can see us, wherever she is. So she must be able to hear us too. She’s in control.”
I wondered if he’d finally gone insane, but then I realized he was right. After all, we were in a speeding van with nobody at the wheel. Vexler was controlling the truck from somewhere, and she was the only person who might have any idea what was going on. It was time for her to answer my one all-important question.
“Vexler!” I yelled over the roar of the truck engine. “Tell me what’s growing out of my armpit!”
So she did. And since you’re my new bestie, I’ll spare you her three-minute answer, because Vexler can make even the worst disaster sound like a total yawn-fest. Let’s just say, my mind was blown. Some details I already knew, some I didn’t, but hearing it from the scientist herself made me queasy. It didn’t help that we were in a driverless truck, careening around sharp corners, speeding toward whatever lay in store for us. I learned three basic facts:
fact number one: Colossal Chemistry made hundreds of Snerbs and they’re all still alive.
fact number two: Snerbs were created to eat garbage and pollution. The more garbage and air pollution they eat, the bigger they get and the faster they grow.
fact number three: Colossal Chemistry dug a massive system of underground tunnels to hold all the failed Snerb experiments. Vexler is quite sure there are at least a hundred Snerbs in the underground tunnels. The system of tunnels is called the Dungeons of Snerbville.
“You can’t be serious,” I said when she was finished. “Snerbville?! That sounds like a happy place where kids go on rides and eat candy.”
“I have to agree with you there, Jenster,” Fen said. “You’d think a bunch of scientists could come up with a better name. Like . . . Smash Town! No wait—the Dungeon of Danger!”
Barker Mifflin was clearly fascinated by Vexler’s information. I could see by the look on his face, glazed over and half smiling, that he wasn’t as scared as he was fascinated by everything Vexler had said. He was imagining himself in go-time survival mode deep in the Dungeons of Snerbville. He’d been waiting for something like this his entire life. Neat for him, but I only had one thing on my mind.
“How do I get this thing off my armpit?!” I demanded.
There was no answer, just a crackling sound from the speaker, followed by dead air. A moment later, Vexler was back, though sounding more sheepish than she had before.
“I’m sorry to say, if you touch a Snerb it will make you a host. You can remove the Snerb during the first two hours, when it’s small, although it is quite painful. Beyond the two-hour mark lies only danger and destruction.”
I opened my mouth, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to ask.
“I think Jen-Jen needs you to be more specific,” Fen said into the silence. “What kind of danger and destruction?”
“The Snerb will always eat the host in the end.” She said.
Static filled the loudspeaker.
“Hey!” I barked. “You made this thing! You can’t just let it eat people!”
We took a sharp turn and all leaned hard to the right. Fen got the worst of it, squished into the door.
The static cleared. “There is one way to safely remove a mature Snerb from an armpit,” Vexler said after a long silence. “But it has to be done at the right time, in the right way.”
Before she could get to exactly how to stop hosting the terror that grew out of my armpit, a gigantic noise came from the back of the truck. It sounded like a semitruck driving over a washing machine.
“What was that?” Barker said. For some reason, he now had a flyswatter in each hand, as if that could protect him. He was always “commando-ready if things went pear-shaped.” His words.
Fen leaned out the window and stared back at the Snerb. He looked a little greenish when he ducked back inside.
“We might have a small problem,” he said.
The truck shook with a sickening jolt. We rocked one way and then the other, swerved onto someone’s lawn, and clobbered a mailbox on our way back to the street.
“Give us the intel, Fen,” Barker said. “What’s happening back there?”
Fen Stenson finally spilled the beans, and it seemed to me that we should have expected it all along.
“The Snerb is eating the truck.”