My first feeling was . . . WHATAMIGONNADO? I’m locked in a tiny cell with my own lethal kick-boxing nemesis!!! I thought I was safe, when what I really am is Dead-in-Two-Minutes.
My second feeling was Unexpected Disappointment. I’d been enjoying the idea that I was the only green person in the world, so I felt a bit like Santa Claus coming down the chimney and finding another bloke dressed in red with a big white beard putting presents under the tree.
I could practically hear Grim’s brain beeping as he tried to figure out what I was doing there. ‘Is that . . . no, it can’t be . . . so who . . . Permanent fatal error, please quit your brain and restart.’
‘You’re bright green,’ he said.
I was too scared to say, ‘So are you.’
In the end he figured it out. I could tell from the way he hurled himself across the room towards me.
I dived under the bed.
He grabbed the bed and pulled it towards him so that I couldn’t hide underneath it.
But . . .
I had somehow already had the brilliant idea of grabbing the bedsprings and clinging on underneath.
So when Grim looked at the space where the bed had been there was no me. It looked as if I’d vanished. Ninety per cent of Grim’s brain was so confused it shut down.
The other ten per cent of Grim’s brain is pure fury. That carried on working fine. When pulling the bed didn’t work, he shoved, dragged, spun and banged it all around the room. Maybe he thought it was all the bed’s fault.
All the time I clung on underneath, the wires digging into my fingers and grating against my toes. The bed screeched and skidded over the polished floors. It was like surfing but upside down.
While I was upside-down surfing, I had time to think . . .
And this is what I thought . . .
Yes.
Just like the Hulk and Swamp Thing, I have undergone a strange mutation.
Unlike them, I have no superpowers.
I’m as small and weak as ever, but now I look weird too.