Chapter 7: School Smells Funny

I landed in the middle of the air. Well, I guess landed is the wrong word. I emerged. From a tree. Five feet, three inches above the ground. I knew exactly how high I was because in the infinitesimally short instant after I emerged from the tree, the mathematical formulas dancing in my head measured the height based on the known size of a leaf on the ground and the angle of my eyesight to both the tip and stem of the leaf. It was pretty incredible.

Then I went ahead and landed on my face. I gave a good holler of pain and rolled over onto my back just in time to see Xander dive out of the same tree at the same height and fall to the same spot on the earth. Of course, his fall was about six inches shorter than mine had been because he got to land on me.

I gave another holler.

“Sorry about that, Zack.” He bounced to his feet, none the worse for wear.

I raised myself up to my elbows and threw a massive dose of word vomit at him. “Ohmygodohmygodwhatjusthappenedi’monfirewherearewewhoareyouiwantogohome!” If you sort through all that, you’ll find an “I’m on fire” in there. Just to be clear, I wasn’t actually on fire, but when you’re yanked through roaring flames, it’s hard to immediately convince yourself that you’re not, in fact, on fire.

“You’re not on fire,” said Xander. “Where’s the spleen?”

“Spleenwhatspleenwhatisthatthing?” I spurted, calming down.

Xander spotted the spleen lying a few feet away and bounded over to it. “This spleen, which as I said earlier isn’t really a spleen, is a piece of a very special machine.”

“Machinewhatdoyoumean? Itdoesn’tlooklikeamachinetome.”

“It’s not an ordinary machine,” he said. He opened his pack and thrust his hand way too far inside before pulling out a Ziplock baggie. “And this is only one part of many.” He picked up the spleen, dropped it in the bag, and zipped the bag shut.

“Thereare otherparts?”

“13. 13 other parts. Other Pieces. 14 Pieces in all,” he muttered, standing and turning to me. “Are you going to be alright?”

I nodded, then shook my head. Then nodded again. It seemed to satisfy him.

“Good. Good. Listen, Zack, I know you’ve seen a lot tonight, done a lot tonight, learned a lot tonight, nearly died a lot tonight. I want to thank you. Your sacrifice may well have saved the world from a terrible fate. Now go home and forget any of this ever happened.”

“OK?” I answered, having finally caught my breath.

“Unfortunately, you will never be the same again and will spend the rest of your life on edge, uneasy, and in fear. I’m really sorry about that.” He gave me a friendly two-fingered salute, picked up his discarded crow bar, and walked away.

“Hey!” I called out. “You can’t just leave me here! How am I going to get home? Where are we?”

He turned back to me. “Back where we started.” He nodded off to my right then continued on his way.

Confused, I looked to my right to find my bat and glove lying on the ground not four feet away from me.

When I looked up, Xander was gone.

***

I went home. I grabbed the mail out of the mailbox as usual, leafed through it as I walked up the driveway as usual, discovered that there was nothing in there for me as usual, then walked inside. Right away, Mom and Larry were on me. I'm pretty sure they'd been hovering just inside the doorway waiting to pounce. They gave me all kinds of hassle for being out late, for walking through the woods, for not going home with Gary, for not calling, and basically for being a fourteen year-old. I let them get it off their chest; after all, they only knew the half of it. It was hard to keep a straight face, however, since my newfound visual handicap kept measuring the circumference of their faces.

I was dying to ask Mom about Dad, but wasn't comfortable bringing up the subject with Larry around, so after the lecture I retreated to my room, where my little sister Veronica waited for her turn to basically ask me the same questions, except from her point of view. She just wanted to know what had happened because whatever I had done had pissed off Mom and Larry and she wanted to take notes. She was only twelve, and was just starting to get the hang of the whole ‘parents are the root of all evil’ concept, so this was an excellent opportunity for her to study cause and effect. She eagerly wrote down her conclusions in the little red notebook she always carried around. She claimed it was the color of blood, which supposedly went with the whole mini-goth look she had been cultivating for the past few months, but it was really more the color of red velvet cake. She had a mad thirst for details and I humored her as best I could, dispensing life lessons on the basic unfairness of parents without mentioning any of the dead guy/ancient tomb/our father smelled dead people/magical spleen/geometric fetish bits until her hunger was satiated and she scurried off to her own room to text all her friends.

Alone at last, I did my homework, logged on, considered updating my status to something like ‘Stole a map from a dead guy and nearly got burnt to a crisp in an ancient tomb’ but I thought better of it. How did I even begin to explain what I’d just gone through? Should I tell people about it, or would they all think I’d gone nuts? What, exactly, had I just gone through? And what happened now?

Too many questions. I gave up and went to bed with visions of unwelcome geometric patterns dancing in my head.

When I awoke the next morning, nothing had changed. I was still Zack Thornwood. I still played second base. I was still hung up on Zoe Francis.

But, also, everything had changed.

I saw rhomboids and hexagons everywhere, but it wasn’t until I schlepped myself to school that I fully understood just how different life was going to be from now on.

I walked in the door of the school, ready to put the previous night’s hallucinogenic nightmare behind me, when a wave of nausea accosted me with all the tenderness of a cheese grater. My bowels lurched, my eyes watered, my olfactory glands were brutalized. You probably think your high school smells bad, and maybe it does, but no amount of Homecoming-induced urinating in lockers or alcohol poisoning-inspired puking in corridors could hold a candle to the foulness that permeated my school. The place stank.

I immediately dropped my book bag and threw my arm across my face in a desperate attempt to spare my sinuses from permanent damage. “Christ!” I exclaimed to the wider high school populace. “What is that stench?”

Around me, my fellow teenagers walked past as though there were nothing wrong. None of them seemed to think anything smelled bad. A few of them looked at me funny, wondering why I was wigging out and all, but mostly they did what teenagers everywhere do - they ignored me. As the realization that I was apparently the only one with a working nose dawned on me, my back was forcefully pounded by the familiar fist of Danny Zucker, a guy I’d known since middle school.

“You got zit on your nose or something, Zack?” I peered over the crook of my arm, and he caught the weird vibe I was giving off. “Zack?”

Slowly, I lowered my arm, choking down the bile rising in my throat and breathing through my mouth. It didn’t help much. “I’m... do you smell anything?”

“No. Why? Do you?”

I did. I most certainly did. I smelled something unholy and fetid. My stomach quenched and I almost hurled right there on top of him. Not trusting myself to actually open my mouth, I just nodded.

“Huh. Maybe you stepped in something. See you in Algebra.” He ran off, melting into the flow of hormone-driven, pimple-laden humanity.

Since I couldn’t just stand in the front door of the school all morning, I put my head down, continued breathing through my mouth, and walked towards my locker. Every step was an effort. Whatever I was smelling, it was everywhere. The scent clung to the walls, the bannisters, the lockers. It was as if someone had covered every square inch of surface area in the school with invisible Vomit, Diarrhea, and Rotting Meat-scented paint. I reached my locker, put my bag away, grabbed the books I’d need for first period, and trudged on with my day.

What in God’s name was going on? I had never felt like this before in my life. Never smelled anything like this before in my life. Actually, that wasn’t entirely true. I had smelled something similar to this. Last night. In the tomb.

Oh my God...

I realized then what it was I was smelling.

I was smelling death.