Quite Contrary Read Free

hate filled corpses of the wrongfully murdered. Rats, of the people eating kind rather than the unwanted advice kind. Lots and lots of spiders. Treasure. Cursed treasure, with booby traps.” This wasn’t working. I could hear my voice quiver, because the rat had been right about one thing already. I was as lost as it gets, and none of those things seemed unlikely.
    “Or that,” I added, my voice rasping and my throat dry. Someone was crawling up the tunnel the other way. If it weren’t for the circumstances, she wouldn’t look very threatening. Curly red hair, wild colored makeup with stripes on her face for Halloween, mismatched neon blouse and skirt, striped stockings. She couldn’t have been more than twelve. She looked a lot like me.
    She looked exactly like me.
    “It’s your fetch!” screeched the rat, little claws digging in as it leaped up onto my back. “Run! Down the other way, run! Don’t argue, and don’t let it touch you!”
    The hallway that branched off to the side looked exactly the same as this one, although it had the major advantage that a clone of me wasn’t crawling awkwardly up it with her head down and her face hidden. But you know what? Forget that. I turned and kicked the other wall. The wood was as rotten as I thought it had been. I didn’t know where we were, but we were somewhere. I kicked again, and again, and desperation gave me strength because with every kick the copy crawled a couple of feet closer. Then, a really hard kick broke down the wall. When it gave way, I fell forward into the hole. Rather than try to stop myself, I pushed myself along. When I hit the ground, I splashed.
    Oh, yuck. I was standing in a basement, some kind of industrial basement with lots of generators or boilers or something. It had been flooded, and ‘water’ was too generous a word for the bad smelling slime I’d landed in and now had all over me. The basement was huge, and a single electrical light shone dimly by a door at the far end, up a set of stone steps. I ran. Whatever a fetch was, I didn’t want it climbing in here after me. Then, I let out a little whine and ran faster, because something moved.
    It wasn’t just the splashing of the slime. As I passed, things lurched clumsily up out of the water. This was exactly where you found man-eating zombies, and as foul as my sneakers felt filled with this stuff, they kept me from slipping as I charged down the row towards that distant door. It was getting closer too slowly. How fast were the things behind me?
    The rat might have heard my thoughts. He crawled up onto my shoulder and squeaked, “Don’t look back, mistress. Keep running, and whatever you do, don’t look back!” Then, as my head turned, the little bastard threw himself over my eyes. I couldn’t see anything but rat belly, and pain spiked through me as my foot hit the first stair, and my shin hit the second. I crawled up the stairway blind. I could either pull the rat off my face or find the door handle, and I chose to do the latter. Wonderfully, it came open the moment I pulled on it, and I launched myself out into fresh night air and slammed the door behind me. Even better, I felt a bolt and I shoved that home. I didn’t have to pull the rat off my face, because he slid back down onto my shoulder on his own, panting as if he’d done all the running himself.
    “You seem to know what’s going on. Where are we, is it safe, and where can I wash off all this gunk?” I wheezed.
    Recovering from his unearned stupor, the rat jumped off my shoulder, latching onto the cement block wall and sliding down it with his claws. Gee, he didn’t want to climb through the goo splattering my clothes. What a surprise. He hopped up the steps to ground level, and I trudged up after him with much heavier legs.
    “Abandoned industrial park, I’d say,” he concluded, “We should be safe. Nothing from down there will want to chase you up here, and if anything horrible happens in old factory yards,