Both of the debuffs zapped away.
“What? Where am I? Is the race over?” Corky asked. His voice was identical to that of Porky. His lower hand shot down to the hole in his suit. He tried to sit up, and Porky gently pushed him down.
“Don’t move,” Porky said. “I’m here. It’s time to get back together.”
“What?” Corky asked again, still confused.
“Corky! Corky!” Dong cried.
“Snitches get their throats slit,” a new voice said. This was a heavily tattooed action figure. He appeared in the open back of the truck, peering in upside down from the roof. He had a brown headband and sunglasses that dripped as they melted. His name wasEl Asesino de la Melaza.
“Dong? Where am I?” Corky cried.
I pulled the back doors closed, which severed the action figure in half. He started to pull himself toward me, smearing brown goo across the floor. I stomped down with my foot, and the figure squished.
Warning: Race ends in 20 minutes.
“Go! Go!” I called. We’d already been stopped for far too long.
The truck lurched forward. “We must remove the suits. Quickly now,” Grigori said. “Oh gods. Do we have to be moving while we do this?”
Prepotente: I have retrieved Bianca and we are proceeding forward.
“Carl, Carl, I can see the entrance of the next room!” Donut yelled.
“I do not know how to engage the controls to drive on the ceiling!” Dong yelled.
“Damnit,” I said. “Sorry, guys,” I called. “I gotta go over. Watch out.” I climbed atop the two mantaurs, squeezing over them. But the moment I did that, the temporary table I’d hastily fashioned with a piece of wood snapped, and we all fell into the three chairs. Corky cried out in pain, and his suit ripped further, guts leaking everywhere.
“Dong, out of the seat!” I yelled. “Let me drive! Help your friend!”
Dong was already up and out, letting the truck drift, squeezing past me as I returned to the driver’s seat.
“Hold on!” I cried as we rocketed toward the next room.
[ 65 ]
The path ahead swerved.I turned, but the maze of boxes had all broken and shattered. A dozen of the action figures were on the hood of the truck, holding on, occasionally flying off. They all army-crawled toward the windshield. The entrance to the next room loomed, but it appeared that it was just a balcony with a drop. We were on the third floor, and this next big room, which just seemed to go on and on, dropped all the way to the first. It glowed red within, and I knew the entirety of this room was just molten metal. I activated the spider legs as we approached.
“We’re gonna have to go sideways before we turn upside down,” I called.
“This interior is not conducive to proper procedure,” Grigori was saying in between coughs. Donut was not in her chair, but sitting atop the oven burner. Both the tall half-mantaurs were standing, both rapidly pulling at the zippers to their suits. Both were taller than the interior, and they were half hunched over, each with a single arm on the ceiling, bracing themselves. “We’ll have to do it while standing, and only once we are inverted.”
“Will that work?” Donut asked as we took a sharp turn to avoid another hole in the floor. From within, dozens of the female dolls were climbing out, screaming as they melted.
“It should, but we must do it. Blahhhh.” Grigori turned and dry-vomited. “My gods, this is horrible. We must do it fast.”
“Dong, are you unwell?” Corky, who’d finally caught up to what was happening, asked. “Dong, you’re sick!”
“Do not worry about me, my love,” Dong called. He had a roll of plastic wrap in his hands. We’d gotten it from Dekoki the kappa, and he was wrapping it around Corky’s head. He turned to Porky, whose half-head was now also exposed and started to do the same. The fleshmancer had said it was fine if the guts spilled out a little, but the brain needed to remain sealed. “We must do this quickly. Let me help you with this zipper after I do this.”
“Oh gods,” Porky said, reaching up to touch the plastic wrap on his head. He started to pull down the same zipper I’d earlier helped him fix.
“Ew, ew, ew,” Donut cried as Porky’s suit popped open and the guts slopped everywhere, like a jack-in-the-box filled with noodles.
Grigori cast something, and the guts, dangling from Porky’s exposed double torsos, floated by his side. The mess of guts was only on his lower torso, though strange and foreign organs and tubes also bulged from his upper side. He had beating half-hearts in both the top and bottom torsos. Both hearts glowed, kept working by a spell from either Donut or Grigori.
I finally saw both of their faces and half-mullets. They looked just like any other mantaur, only just cut in half. Their plastic-wrapped half brains sat firmly in their skulls, pulsing, their exposed sinuses nausea-inducing.